Happy Friday! As Oscar-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis once tweeted, it is the weekend, baby, have fun and enjoy it. 

Though, living as I do now in the eastern Smokelands, where the sky is a wretched yellow and charred Loonies and Toonies rain down like hailstones, I’m not sure how much “have fun and enjoy it” I can do. Outside, at least.

In the great indoors, though, entertainment is everywhere! To that end, I have a couple of recommendations for you below. But if you do not live in a place bedeviled by the Degrassi Mists, then by all means go swim in a pool or play catch with your estranged son or trip the light fantastic at some patio bar, hooting and hollering with the rest of the San Diego elite. It’s a free country, after all. 

Before we get to the recommendations, here are a couple of new trailers to look at. I swear I’m not going to put trailers in every letter going forward, but I miss the old days of “apple dot com / trailers” (remember??) so maybe I’m trying to re-create the magic of that somehow. 

Paul Greengrass is a funny director. I mean, he doesn’t make funny movies, but there is something amusing about his toggling between grave docudramas like the excellent Captain Phillips (and the probably wholly unnecessary 22 July) and action movies like his Jason Bourne installments. Now he’s blending the bio-drama with the action and traveling way back in time. The Uprising is about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in which a man whose hair plugs drove him insane and he took up arms against a child king. This looks engaging enough, in a crunching-bone and spurting-blood sort of way. Also in a Katherine Waterston-y way. (She’s in it! And she’s barely in anything these days!) But the film being dumped in early-mid September is not an encouraging indicator of quality. Hair looks great, though!

Here’s a perhaps embarrassing confession: I have never seen a Rocky movie. I mean, I have seen all three Creeds, but I have never watched a regular Rocky film, including the original. I don’t typically like boxing movies, nor do I typically like Sylvester Stallone, and Talia Shire and I haven’t spoken since the incident on the set of Bed & Breakfast. So I’ve just never been that incentivized to see what I know is considered a classic by many.

And yet . . . I am still sort of intrigued by this movie? Mostly because I didn’t realize until watching the trailer (seriously) that Rocky was Stallone’s first legit film role, and that he played such hardball in securing himself the part. That’s interesting! It’s also fun that the lead actor, Anthony Ippolito, has now played Sylvester Stallone and Al Pacino in different projects. (We’ve got to get a making-of-Stardust project going so we can see his De Niro.) Who knows, maybe this movie will compel me to finally watch Rocky. That’s the one where he and Sandra Bullock have cybersex in the future, right?

Okay, enough of that. Here are two things you could watch this weekend.