TV!
I binge-watched all of GLOW over two days and loved it. If you like wrestling, it feels like a fairly accurate, albeit obviously stylised and mined-for-comedy portrayal of a bunch of outsiders being thrust in to this weird, contradictory world of pseudo-sport in the 1980s. It simultaneously acknowledges how absurd professional wrestling is, whilst also respecting the amount of work and sacrifice that goes in to actually making any money doing it. There's plenty of geeky references to wrestling and wrestlers to pick through as well.
If you don't like wrestling, there's still plenty to love about it. Professional wrestling, much like the prison system in Orange Is The New Black, is more of a thematic device than anything else, and is there primarily to provide an excuse for these women to exist in one another's orbit. The show is about their characters and their relationships and the complications that those things breed. And the cast is great. Alison Brie is great (Annie's boobs!), Marc Maron is great, even dodgy mid-00s indie-warbler Kate Nash is good in it.
Movies!
I just watched Our Little Sister and feel so much better for it. It's a truly beautiful film. It's Japanese, so you'll be doing as much reading as watching, but it's well worth the effort. It felt like one of the slice-of-life Ghibli films (one of the more grounded ones, like Our Neighbours The Yamadas, or Only Yesterday) but somehow even more visually appealing. It's about three twentysomething sisters who adopt their teenage half-sister.
There's no major turmoil, no major obstacle to overcome, no dramatic revelations or clearly-outlined journey coming to fruition throughout the two-hour run time. It's more a patchwork of understated scenes - some follow on directly from the last, some are set weeks or even months apart - that form a year in the life of four women, telling their story using snapshots of every-day mundanities - work life, home life, romantic relationships, eating, drinking, funerals (there's a funeral towards the end that I knew was coming but just about fucking wrecked me), school life, family squabbles, and so on. But it's all so warmly shot and well-acted that it's impossible not to be endeared and spiritually-enriched by it all.
