u/katchoo1

I love me some Cary Grant and I had never seen this one before, so I watched it yesterday.

It was a nice bit of 1930s fluff featuring Cary as a rich fella who feels out of sorts, and whose doctor suggests he get and and do some real work for a change. So Cary makes a bet that he can leave his posh life and make it on his own for a year. Along the way he learns a lot, falls in love, and finds out how much he likes helping people.

I hadn’t heard of this movie before and after seeing it, I know why. It isn’t bad but it’s nothing special and the kind of thing to put on if you like golden age Hollywood movies that you can half watch while doing other things.

First, sorry for being MIA for so many days—I got bummed out by how many movies on my “potential future cozy recs” list were expiring at the end of the month and didn’t want to recommend anything that was going to go poof in just a few days. I guess expect me to take a little hiatus at the end of every month til I see how the subtractions and additions shake out.

That said, i made sure this movie was still around today, after the month end apocalypse, because i really want people to be able to see this. It’s a British comedy movie called Murder on the Blackpool Express, and it is a really fun one!

Gemma is the owner of a struggling literary bus tour business, where she organizes excursions hosted by an author taking a group around to locations featured in their books. She and her driver Terry pick up an assorted group of eccentrics and an insufferable mystery author and set off on a tour. Then people start getting killed off. It’s like Agatha Christie crossed with the weirdos from Cold Comfort Farm.

It’s genuinely funny and I laughed out loud multiple times in just the first z20 minutes. My personal favorite characters were the three old ladies from the senior home, closely followed by the nice man with no memory.

As in a Christie novel, there are various suspects and plot twists and it’s all pretty silly by the end, but I had a great time watching it.

I’m also delighted to find that there are 2 more movies featuring the main characters and a several seasons-long tv series so expect that I will definitely be reporting on more of these!

One note, Terry’s accent was very hard to understand for me and in my version at least, the captions were not working. I ended up having to switch over to Prime so I could have captions, so be aware that that is an option if you have access to Prime. I did notice that it got easier to understand him as the movie went on, though.

Also it does have murders in there, obviously, and while two of them are almost silly, one got kind of gruesome so fair warning.

Found a little clip on YouTube shorts that gives you a bit of the flavor.

https://youtube.com/shorts/vMM3LChSV\_8?is=js\_gnjX2W2Vkm7gW

I’m new to this hobby and got a couple of small projects to try it out. One is a set of corner-type bookmarks where the base is (probably) pleather or vinyl-it’s thick and flexes a bit like leather but I’m sure it’s not real leather.

I’m pretty sure the minwax stuff I got will do okay with this but I wanted to see if anyone else had tried it and if there were any tips/recommendations. The intended use for these makes me feel like it’s extra important to secure them with sealing as I don’t want it to start shedding gems at some point.

The second small project is a set of birthday cards which are just paper cards, not particularly heavy cardstock either. I’m more hesitant to seal these because I don’t want to warp the base, and they aren’t meant to last like a painting or useful object anyway, but I do want them to survive the mail if I mail one.

Had anyone made cards and if so did you seal? Also if you don’t seal, is there something you do to get rid of the stickiness around the edges of the design?

Thanks for any advice!

A short (less than 1 hour) documentary about the hidden wildlife in Japan. Worth it just for the images of Hokkaido monkeys spending cold winter days hanging out in hot springs.

Note: there are scenes of animals attempting to stalk other animals but they aren’t successful! The only nature violence was fish on fish. And depending on how you feel about a traditional method of fishing using cormorant birds, may want to skip that bit.

Overall it’s just a basic nature documentary with some interesting images and info, and a nice mellow narrator’s voice.

I have been collecting a massive list of cozy suggestions and then I stumbled over this show today and it immediately jumped to the front of the line! Ladies of Letters is the tv version of a long running BBC radio show. I had bought a couple of seasons on Audible many many years ago and enjoyed them, but I didn’t know it had ever been a tv series!

Ladies of Letters is what you get if you cross the randomness and frequent bitchiness of Absolutely Fabulous with the stodgy village middle class attitudes and manners of Hyacinth Bucket or the locals in Midsommer Murders. Two older ladies meet by accident at a daughter’s wedding and begin a written correspondence filled with gossip, convoluted stories of adventures and mishaps, complaints about family members, neighbors, and often each other. It’s a particular kind of gentle British humor that hits perfectly when I’m needing something light and fun, when AbFab is a little too chaotic and stressful for me to actually enjoy.

Bonus: since it is based on a radio show and consists of the two ladies narrating their letters to each other, you miss almost nothing other than the occasional funny face or gesture, or knowing glance at the camera, if you put this on and listen to it while doing other things. Very entertaining if you are the sort of person who likes all those movies aimed at middle aged ladies with groups of middle aged lady characters and frequently star one or more of the famous Dames (Maggie, Judi, Helen, etc), or Diane Keaton if there is an American angle.

I saw some scenes from this on YouTube shorts and was intrigued, since this came out at a point in my life when I saw almost every movie that came out, and knew about the ones I decided not to see, but I had not heard of this at all. I’m wondering if it was a Hallmark movie—one of those prestige ones they used to do on the networks where they would get big names involved and win Emmy awards.

Anyway I knew it would be a kind of sappy feel good story which is the kind of thing my wife loves, so I suggested it to watc one night and we did.

The story takes place in the 1960s, where Kathy Bates is a single mom struggling to raise her six kids alone—Edward Furlong plays the oldest son and he is frequently upset with their poverty and struggles. After being fired from her factory job, the mom decides that they need to get out of the city and packs up their station wagon and takes off with them. They end up in some rural area where she spots a partially built house, long abandoned. She asks the Asian grocery store owner across the road about the house and it turns out it was his. She makes a deal to fix it up to be livable and and do whatever she could to pay it off.

The best parts are the sequences of the family finding bits and pieces (one kid takes to the local junkyard and has a knack for finding things that can be fixed up and used, swapping part time labor for his salvage) and working on the house together. The mom is far from perfect and there are conflicts with the kids but things come along, despite some frightening setbacks.

This is cozy because things do turn out in the end, but there are some upsetting events and a good bit of tension and arguing within the family at times. My wife and both enjoyed it, the acting was pretty good from the kids, and of course Kathy Bates was excellent. It’s supposedly based on a true story and is narrated by Edward Furlong as though he is telling the story in a memoir.

It’s not an unmissable movie by any stretch, but it was a pleasant enough diversion and suitable for watching with older tweens and up.

Has anyone else seen this one? If it is interesting to you, it is in the expiring soon section so it probably leaves at the end of this month.

After a discussion with the founder of this subreddit, I am offering my own series of recommendations which I’m calling Cozy Tubi.

While Tubi is great for horror and many harder-edged films, with the current state of well, everything, I often find myself looking for more comforting fare, especially when I’m unwinding at the end of the day. So I am going to focus on recommending more relaxing and less challenging movies and tv shows.

People’s ideas of “cozy” can vary and I will be choosing based on my own, but generally I’m steering clear of darker topics, traumatic subjects, and most importantly, if the movie features a cute dog, it does NOT die. There might be some tears involved but generally what I’m looking for are movies that leave you contented and relaxed, like a satisfying comfort food meal.

My recommendations span just about all genres and are not always family friendly. While I enjoy a good kids movie or a Hallmark type romance, too often they are too much—too sugary, or even worse, saccharine, so I pick those carefully. There are also a fair amount of overtly faith-based films which also fall for me into the realm of “too much” so you won’t see many of these among my suggestions, though a few may creep in when they have things going on that do appeal to me (I’m a sucker for any movie with entertaining nuns in them, for example).

And I freely admit that my Gen X nostalgia will be coloring my choices, so I may feel affectionate toward a movie that has aspects that others among us might find problematic or fully distasteful, and I will try to note these. On the other end of things, people who have moral issues or discomfort with LGBTQ+ themes may find movies very uncomfortable that feel like a warm blanket to me as a queer woman. Finally, I find that the older a film, the less disturbing some aspects can be—a shootout or a dramatic argument or even death scenes can seem softer somehow in older movies, or hokey and fun rather than scary in the case of older horror movies, so there might be some old gangster or monster movies turning up where similar themed movies from modern times would not feel cozy at all.

All of which is to say that your mileage may vary widely on whether you consider my suggestions cozy by your own standards but I’ll bet that there will be some recommendations among them that will push your personal cozy button as well. I’ll do my best to explain a little of what I find cozy about a particular suggestion, and give warnings for things which might ruin the cozy vibe for some people.

I won’t promise to post daily, though sometimes I will, or even post more than one in a day. I will promise to aim for a minimum of four posts per week.

I’m hoping this gives people some different suggestions for movies and tv shows to dig for in the big treasure box of Tubi, and will open up some discussions as well. I hope you all find this useful, and feel free to chime in with your own suggestions as well.

To start off, I want to recommend a classic movie that is always on Tubi because it is in the public domain, despite being made in 1963, due to never being properly copyrighted when it was made. This is Charade, starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and is a perfect example of the kind of movie that has some violence and suspense, but still feels cozy because you know everything will be okay and even otherwise gruesome deaths (always of villains) are a bit tongue in cheek. Grant and Hepburn are absolutely perfect, and this is one of the classic “golden age” of Hollywood movies I recommend to people who think that they don’t like anything made before 1970. It was a movie that I found as a teenager and led me to explore “old” movies and I revisit it regularly as a comfort watch. If you have never seen it, definitely give it a chance!

I live in a chosen family of four women and the mother of one of them recently moved in with us so we all got to celebrate her today. I saw a sun hat for $3 at Dollar Tree and had a vision of it as a door decoration for her room. There was burning of fingers with hot glue, poking with wires, and much cussing as I taught myself to make a bow, but I love how it turned out and she seems delighted with it.