My Month in Media: March 2023

movie poster: rebecca (alfred hitchcock, 1940)

Over at my newsletter on Sundays, I’ve been rounding up everything that I read, watched, and listened to over the course of the week, with varying amounts of commentary.

Here are the links to last month’s lists:

March 5: My fave Jimmy Stewart/Hitchcock movies in order: Rear Window, Rope, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much. I actively HATE The Man Who Knew Too Much, like, throw the ENTIRE thing down a well, please. Thumbs up to the 1934 version with Peter Lorre, though. And I know that a lot of folks will regard the Vertigo placement as blasphemy, but we like what we like, right?

March 12: Major thing I noticed from this morning’s influx of wildlife hitting our yard: When male turkeys puff up and fan out to strut around displaying their gloriousness to the hens—who, from what I can see, absolutely could not care less, it’s endlessly hilarious—it happens so fast and so perfectly that they look like a speedy time-lapse of a parade balloon being inflated.

March 19: Next to Taskmaster, Would I Lie to You? is my absolute favorite of the British panel shows that we’ve watched, so when we discovered an as-yet-unwatched season on BritBox, we dropped everything else and have been inhaling them for the last two days. Basic premise: Contestants are given statements to read aloud—sometimes true, sometimes not—and the other team has to figure out if they’re telling the truth or not. Note: Rob Brydon only took over hosting in the third season—I actively disliked the host in the first two seasons, but your mileage may vary.

March 26: Laurence Olivier is so fantastic that he almost made me want to try to like the walking collection of nine billion red flags that is Maxim de Winter. ALMOST. So great.