Wait, you watched what?

A couple of surprising movies, maybe some odd choices, with no one more surprised than me.

The plan this week was to either post precious little content and replace it with, like, medical potions and liquid poison, or offer up a series of posts on comedy specials. That meant that I’d have to watch all the funny stuff over the weekend, which, according to this pretty obviously brilliant plan, would have taken me away from worrying about the world and allowed me a reprieve, except for the headaches, which are marching forward on all fronts of the battle.

Easy, though, right? Watch something hilarious, write about it, thus sharing it with you and potentially relieving you of whatever existential burdens you might have.

Like a magpie, however, my eye caught a headline in the New York Times about really good action movies, one with so much blood and gore it was majestic, or some such description by whoever wrote the blurbs.

How easily are you distracted? Do you find yourself thinking one thing and doing another just because — the kind of because that has no reason to it? I am that magpie. Always have been. Whether magnified by annoying headaches or increasing electoral anxiety, I told my partner that on Saturday we should pivot from the comedy plan and just burn through a couple of these action movie recommendations and do almost nothing else, which she thought was a fine idea.

That’s how I ended up on a course of not laughing, except for a few times where I paused the movie and, laughing, said “this movie is so ridiculously over the top” and then later, “Holy hell, I think that was the most violent movie I’ve ever seen.” And yes I was laughing in astonishment at the last comment, even though, a couple of days free of the moment, I’ve probably seen more egregious bloodshed.

The movie was “The Shadow Strays,” on Netflix, a 2024 Indonesian movie about (mostly) female assassins and, well, the plot doesn’t really matter. Part of the reason I like watching international movies is because the storytelling impulses are often different, particularly if American movie influences have (one hopes) been ignored. I don’t know much about Indonesia, haven’t seen Jakarta filmed much to my memory, and do not have any passable intelligence about how Indonesians relate to the people from the various countries around them, politically or socially.

All of that was enough to watch.

Plus, duh, badass female assassins. We were both in. The trailer holds back on a lot of the bloodshed, so you’re probably safe taking a peek. And, come on, it does look intriguing.

I will say this about “The Shadow Strays” — we both enjoyed it and were kind of dumbfounded about everything in an intriguing way, but this is not a movie for you if you can’t handle lots of people getting their heads chopped off. I think that’s a pretty fair warning. This is a very stabby movie. That’s not my partner’s preferred violent solution so she had to endure a lot of rapid knife insertions but even she, on some level, thought the speed was pretty impressive.

You might be wondering, “What were you two thinking?” It’s certainly a fair question since literally no one in the world would consider “The Shadow Strays” a comedy.

I don’t know. We got distracted?

It did give us another chance, however much we like movies like this, to put forward our shared peeve: Either go all swords/knives, or all guns. Don’t mix the two because it makes no sense. This is a particularly Asian action-movie issue. And as I think about the Wombats singing “I brought a lemon to a knife fight,” I can’t help but think bringing a knife or sword to a gunfight is a really bad idea.

Maybe we needed a movie like this, though. Just something so ridiculously gory and over the top — but also thrilling in its non-stop action. Director and writer Timo Tjahjanto leaves almost no way to be killed out of this movie, while also making it almost impossible to kill anyone, no matter the ass kicking, the stabbing, the machine gun madness or the high speed automobile they might come in contact with.