Too early for winter

I read that Fresh Off the Boat is cancelled, though they are still trying to do a spinoff about an Indian family. I mean, the ratings have declined, and I've found the plotlines more annoying and tedious lately so I stopped watching this season. The Cattleman's restaurant plots really got dumb once Kenny Rogers bought them, and then I really missed Eddie's older friend Nicole who moved to New York. I suppose Constance Wu and Randall Park have other movies to go make, but I hope there's a proper ending to this season.

I hope The Good Place's finale will be good too, but this first half of the season has been baffling and meandering. I thought they would use Simone for more stuff, but there's been too much Brent. I don't know what they're gonna do when they come back for midseason.

As for movies, Last Christmas is out now, but November still feels far too early to me for a Christmas movie, so I went to see Jojo Rabbit instead. The satire of Nazis was funny, though the darkness of war remains present. We glimpse people left hanging in the town square a couple of times, and there's a big battle scene when the Allies take Berlin. I'm not up on my WWII history, so I didn't realize what the "Free Germany" slogan meant, and I didn't catch that the Russian army was rounding up German prisoners including Jojo at the end. In all the talk of Jojo's sister Inga being dead, I didn't catch that it was from influenza, and thought there was some mystery about that. I'm not sure whether Taika Waititi was implying that Captain K and his assistant Finkel are covertly gay, because they look at each other a certain way and also come up with flamboyantly colored uniforms. That's a little weird that they would continue supporting Germany and don't feel relieved when they're delegated to desk jobs during the remainder of the war. Also, Captain K gets small moments of goodness, such as when he doesn't expose Elsa to the Gestapo and when he saves Jojo's life after the Russians catch them. I mean, I understand that humans are not all good or all bad, but why should this particular Nazi out of all the farcical Nazis in the film get humanized?

SPOILERS BELOW

Anyway, I've never read the book that Jojo Rabbit is based on, but apparently that book was not a comedy, nor did it feature an imaginary Hitler. It was instead about Jojo growing up from a boy into a man while having to care for the Jewish girl Elsa; he also becomes obsessed, abusing her by lying and being manipulative. In that case, I'm glad that Waititi made his film version different, keeping the boy 10 and more innocent. Film Jojo does like Elsa as a girlfriend but is perceptive enough to realize that her feelings for him are platonic. He does lie to her sometimes, but in a childish way, and he regrets it enough to fix it later. (Although it's contradictory whether Elsa believes the lie about Jojo finding letters from Nathan. If Elsa knew all along that Nathan was dead, then why even tell Jojo about Paris or draw all the pages of bad stuff happening to Nathan in the hand-made book?)