Encanto

I finally got around to seeing Disney's Encanto, and I liked it a lot. It's still weird getting used to Stephanie Beatriz's natural voice, but the family story was very good. It takes place in some enchanted hidden village in Colombia but otherwise is very vague about time and place. After getting frequently lost in the Spanish dialogue in West Side Story, I was happy to have subtitles for Encanto. It's not just for Spanish; I use subtitles for English-language shows all the time.

The songs were great, but I loved "Dos Oruguitas" the most; it's sung in Spanish in the film, but later sung in English during the end credits. It's a melancholy ballad about two caterpillars trying to stay together, but the world changes and they have to be separated; it's a metaphor about Abuela losing her husband Pedro and having to hold the family together since then. It's so beautiful.

Meanwhile, I signed up for a trial of Paramount Plus, hoping to be able to access previous seasons of The Equalizer and other CBS shows, but apparently you only get access to the current season. I don't think that upgrading to premium gets you the access either. I think you just get to watch without ads and download episodes offline. Well, at least, their Smithsonian Channel has a lot of historical shows on several topics. I've discovered America in Color, in which they colorize a lot of old news footage and personal home movies to give you a fresh, immediate view on decades past. They even had footage from Greenwood before the massacre. It's very eye-opening. America's Hidden Stories also had a tale of General Casimir Pulaski, who may have been female or intersex. He lived as a man, but his remains found in his tomb looked female, so researchers investigated the DNA, and they had an intersex activist Hida Viloria speaking on the subject too.