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I'll be the first to admit this is a good documentary about what drove Schumacher during his career, always the perfectionist. From various interviews and disclosure we learn Michael did not ever consider himself to be responsible for (racing/collision) mistakes, we see he is almost fearless on the track, but insecure about what is expected from him. Other than that, the documentary implores the viewer to believe he was a very nice guy when (if) you got to know him, and a great family guy. Great, but also boring and to put it bluntly "fairly common". I think I was not the target audience here, because I don't care much about all this. I wanted to see legendary race moments summarised, the genius he displayed as a driver, the perfection when it was in a actuality faultless (and not just from his perspective). The almost 2 hours is frankly quite a chore to watch, it's not exciting, and it left me cold almost completely, except around the period when Schumacher started to near Senna, and eventually surpassed him, the tragedy that followed and the emotional moment when Michael reaches the milestone of equal F1 GP victories as his former idol. The Benneton period was when I myself started to really get into F1 so I remember it most fondly, and then there was Ferrari. The early period of failure at the Scuderia was amply covered, as was his ability to upgrade the car and motivate the team, but as soon as the leading man became unbeatable in the red car, it became apparently uninteresting to cover in detail for a story about the man, not the myth. The agenda of this documentary then seems more to underscore that Schumacher was really a human after all, a family man even, a nice guy to befriend privately, a flawed person like all of us, but one with an exceptional talent for racing. It doesn't, however, adequately, or edge of your seat excitingly, do his racing legacy justice. For that, it would need to scrap 45 minutes of (appraising) professional and (emotional) family talk, and replace it by a very carefully selected series of footage that shows him at his best as we all knew him: dualling on the track, battling for victory sometimes against the odds, sometimes at all costs. After watching it, I immediately YouTubed some footage of Schumacher, Hill, Senna, Häkkinen, and then some highlights of Verstappen VS Hamilton. If you simply love racing, I recommend you do the same. This story tells, but doesn't show.

This is a strange beast, it was marketed as a quirky comedy by Netflix in my region, and given the trailer I was up for it. The scenes used for said trailer as seen in the context of the movie itself are far from comedy, in fact they're mostly painful, satirical and overlong awkward moments. I watched this for 35 minutes at first, then switched it off, utterly frustrated. Reading about the plot, and the satirical nature I gave it another shot the next day, sometimes skimming through the most drawn out scenes. One things for sure, the run time of this feature is far too long. After seeing the credits roll I changed my rating from a 4/10 to a 7/10, because I think the story has redeeming qualities as a societal reflection. At the time of writing this review, 3 days after watching, I changed it again, to a 5/10, here's why. The comedy part doesn't work for me, because the situation is far to painful and frustrating to watch, being only a slight exaggeration of the truth. The satire doesn't work either, because either the viewer already knows and agrees with the state of humanity at this point, or doesn't, and alas this movie won't convince them otherwise. The message is muddled then; of course it's not about a comet, but about humanity's inability as a mass to act decisively upon a global threat, as mentioned by others to be climate change. We're the frog that stays put in the pan of water set to slowly heat until boiled alive, oblivious to its fate. That message won't hit home for climate change sceptics, and for the rest of us who "got it", well, this amounts to almost 2,5 hours of utter frustration and agony to sit through, because that part of the audience is left feeling even more helpless and miserable. Finally then, as entertainment, only the predictable last scenes have merit. Start watching from BASH's efforts to stop the comet and you're fine. As a side note, I thought every actor was excellent in this picture, probably exactly demonstrating the kind of person and character the director was going for. Mark Rylance stole the show for me, as a corporate evil version of Ready Player One's Halliday, but every man and woman in the cast demonstrated the ability to play a stereotype of some sort with obvious enthusiasm.

Recently I've been rewatching the G1 Transformers cartoons with my kids and while it didn't age quite as well as I imagined, it's still fun to watch, and my kids love it. Jump to 2020/2021 in cartoon land, or "animated series" and we have to make do with seasons consisting of 6 episodes each. Let's be honest here, these are basically expended commercials for the (admittedly wonderful) new WFC toy line. Going into Siege I was expected there would be a lot of action and story packed into the episodes, considering 6x24 minutes isn't a lot to work with time-wise. I was wrong. Characters seem half asleep, nothing much happens, even when Siege transitions into Earthrise. During both current seasons my kids asked me when the Transformers would stop talking (slooooooowly, so full of pretentious "meaning") and would actually transform. But no, the al forms are almost never seen, they're just robots, talking, depressingly talking, and running. It struck me that Bumblebee thinks it's a better idea to run away from a big threat in Earthrise rather than transform into a car and drive like hell. Then we see Sky Lynx and its alt form is never even shown. To make matters worse is that the voice acting seems to be done by actual robots; there's no emotion or any life in any of the dialogue. It's tiresome and weak. Even the blast effects during fighting are a miss; "plip plip" sounds without any oomph. It's just a boring show for adults that has no real feeling of stakes, doesn't reward investment, and offers no hook beyond seeing the original transformers combined in a few bare bones episodes, but they're not in disguise, and we hardly see them in action.