It’s the halfway point of the year, and you know what that means. It’s time for Mildly Pleased to share what movies, music, TV, and video games we’ve been enjoying this year, while making no claims that we’ve caught up with everything worthwhile. After all, we have ’til the end of the year to do that. Although this year’s end should be extra busy due to “end of the decade” lists. Anyways… we’re halfway through 2019! We saw/played/listened to some stuff! Here’s that stuff!
As much as any other year I can recall, 2019 made the case that Spring may be the most crowded time of year for anticipated album releases. It feels a bit like how late December is when all the prestige movies get dumped on audiences just in time for Oscar season. Maybe everyone’s just vying for summer jam status? Whatever the case is, this Spring there were a lot of album’s coming out that I wanted to listen to as well as write about. For the albums contained in this post, that didn’t happen (obviously). But now that Summer is officially here, maybe I can put some perspective on this Spring’s many music releases. Continue reading
How popular are toys with kids these days, anyway? Now that we have smartphones and tablets, children are more interested in imitating their favorite Twitch streamers and YouTubers and building towers in Minecraft and/or Fortnite than playing with their Batman action figures, right? And if that’s true, doesn’t it beg an even more disturbing question: is the limitless potential of digital entertainment actually stunting the development of creativity in our youth? After all, if you can play out the fantasies of a team of adult developers, why work on your own imagination? Well, if these hack writing prompts actually are interesting to you, I’ve got some bad news! The filmmakers of Toy Story 4 couldn’t care less about such modern issues. They just wanted to put a button on this saga that started back in 1995.
It has almost become common knowledge that if you’re a music fan these days, there’s just a lot of fucking music out there to keep track of. So even for someone like me, who tries to keep a handle on every notable new album coming out, you can’t always spend that much time listening to every little thing that comes out. Furthermore, you can’t always get around to writing about every little thing that comes out.
Since we’re at about the halfway point of 2019, I’ll be offering some shortened reviews of albums that I listened to during the first half of this year, but still haven’t written about. Some of them will be albums I gave a few listens and gave up on, while some will be ones I got pretty into for a while. I’ll be breaking up this mid-year catch-up into two parts, while the first half will mostly comprise of music releases from late winter and into early Spring. Continue reading
This is part 3 in a 300 part series of Fangoria Magazine’s “Top 300 Horror Movies”.
A week ago, cult cinema distributor Arrow Video announced the release of a special Alice Sweet Alice Blu-Ray August 2019. Why am I excited? Not only does this mean a proper release for the cult classic slasher film, but it’s also another opportunity for people to see one of the most underrated horror movies of the ‘70s. By all means Alice Sweet Alice should be a classic with merchandise and fan art and a shitty 2006-ish era remake. Instead, it’s an often forgotten slasher that launched Brooke Shields and did little else. Which is a shame. This movie is atmospheric with great characters and an even better mystery. That mystery including the question, “Why didn’t this make a bigger impact on the genre?”
As you may have noticed, I got all excited about returning to The People’s Albums after a two-year hiatus in my last entry, and then failed to write a follow-up. This is mainly due to the fact that this entry was not an album I was particularly excited to write about, since it’s not only an album I’m all-too-familiar with, but is also one that is, quite frankly, boring. Not because the album itself is boring, but more because it’s such an unimpeachably classic and influential album that it’s going to be hard to say anything new or insightful about it. But hey, it’s worth a try…
Album: The Dark Side of The Moon
Artist: Pink Floyd
Release Date: March 1, 1973
Copies Sold In The U.S: 15 million
