Tag: Movies

Oppie

We just completed the Barbenheimer film festival. We watched the Barbie Movie yesterday and we watched Oppenheimer today.

Wow. What a movie.

I had a really hard time with some of it. When I was a kid I was terrified of nuclear weapons to a degree that I am nearly embarrassed by. I know we all were. It was the early 80’s and the end of the Soviet Union was unimaginably far away, but something about nuclear weapons both fascinated me and terrified me and left me confused and scared and basically a mess throughout my teen years.

Watching this movie brought all of that back to me and hammered me right in the face with it. 

Yeah… Oppenheimer was hard for me to watch. I am very glad I did though. Let that be your spoiler free review. Go see it.

Barbie

My wife and I just used our under-the-weather-stay-at-home weekend to finally watch The Barbie Movie. 

I did not need a movie to tell me that women are treated poorly in our society. I’m married to a woman who works in tech. I see evidence of the double standards every day. It’s disgusting.

To my wife and my step daughter I say that I am sorry the world we’ve given you doesn’t value you enough.

And if you’re one of those incel motherfuckers who thinks that the movie was an attack on you and America and whatever, you are the problem with our society, not the other way around. To you, incel motherfuckers, I say: Fuck you, slime.

My movie review? Great movie. Great fucking movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, get on with it. See it.

New Years Eve

It’s New Years Eve again. Wasn’t it just New Years Eve a few weeks ago? 2023 is ending? How the hell did that happen?

We don’t have any solid plans for today apart from picking up some take-out Chinese food. Maybe some board games? Maybe another round of Yahtzee?

I watched Rebel Moon on Netflix. I was conflicted. I wanted to watch it but I also did not want to watch it. See the conflict? My spoiler free review is to recommend that you wait until part two comes out in April. This movie feels like two hours worth of a four hour heist movie, where generally the first half of a heist movie is assembling the team. That means the movie that is out now is really just the assembling of the team. That’s why it doesn’t have a coherent story. It’s more like a bunch of mini-movies introducing all of the characters. Hopefully part two will make sense on it’s own. So if you wait for part two to come out and then watch them both together, maybe it will be a decent movie as a whole. For now though… eh.

I have to play guitar today. I have two songs in progress for this month’s Record Every Month challenge. They both need lead guitar parts. I need to record them today and then mix the two songs and then I will have my first R.E.M. win since September. It’s a must.

Speaking of guitar, I went down a rabbit hole last week that I find myself visiting once every couple of years. If you read this page you might have noticed that I have been obsessed with the band Rush since 1981. Back then there were two bands that I was obsessed with. The other was Led Zeppelin. As I got older though, the whole unending adolescence vibe that Zeppelin had sort of got tiring for me and I moved away from them. Also, Jimmy Page is one of my guitar heroes, and he is definitely one of the reasons I NEEDED to learn to play guitar when I was a kid. When I look at my own playing objectively though (if that’s even possible) I don’t hear a lot of his style in my playing. I think as I moved away from the debauchery that Zeppelin represented, I sort of moved away from Page too.

Every once in a while though, I feel the need to really dig into the catalog and try to remind myself that there is a lot of value there. That comes up once every couple of years, and it came up for me on Thursday. I put together a playlist with all of their studio records and over the course of the work day I plowed through all of it. Did the old musical feelings I used to get when I listened to Led Zeppelin as a teenager come back? Yes. Not exactly the same, as I am no longer that kid that I used to be, but it was close enough that I felt good about the whole experience. Now I can move on to other things again until the next time I feel cosmically compelled to examine the Zeppelin again. Probably some time in 2025, I think.

Okay then, it’s almost 11:00am. I have not had anything to eat for about three hours. It’s time to have a snack to keep my stomach happy. Gastric Bypass for the win!

Happy New Years Eve, everyone. HoHoHo.

Owen Wilson Night

We didn’t plan on making it Owen Wilson Night in our house tonight, but that’s the way it turned out.

First we watched the new episode of Loki. Season two, episode one came out yesterday. Jen and I watched it together. Owen Wilson plays Mobius and he might be the best part of the series.

A few hours later we were sitting down to dinner in the living room and Jen was hunting around looking for something to watch. Disney+ has The Haunted Mansion. Rottentomatoes.com has a high score for viewer reviews and a really low score for critic reviews. The cast does include Owen Wilson though… so…

We are hoping it will partially make up for our missing our Magic Kingdom day last month. It won’t, but maybe. Right?

I Want an X-Wing

If I could have any ship from Star Wars as a personal ride, I would probably chose an X-Wing. Only because I am not a gear head and I think Millennium Falcon maintenance would likely be beyond me.

X-Wing on film:

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X-Wing on digital (with a cameo from BB-8):

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This post is just an excuse to post another film shot because I am anxiously awaiting an email saying that the two rolls of film I shipped to the lab last week are done. That’s all this is. Also, X-Wings are cool.

Cornetto Trilogy

I mentioned the other day that I finally found a streaming service that carries the show Spaced. I’m almost finished watching it (there are only 14 episodes) and last night I found myself home alone for a while and decided to roll Spaced into a mini film festival where I watched Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright/Nick Frost movies.

I started with Shaun of the Dead for two reasons. One, it’s possibly the funniest movie ever (not to mention the greatest zombie movie ever). Two, I remembered it being short. It isn’t really short. It’s an hour and 40 minutes or so. That’s short compared to Godfather II, but not compared to reality. Regardless, it is one of my favorite movies and I haven’t watched it in ages. When it was done you would expect me to have moved on to movie number two in the Cornetto Trilogy, Hot Fuzz, but instead I jumped ahead to number three, The World’s End. Why? Because I had only watched it once before (despite the clear fact that it is genius) and, unlike Shaun and Hot Fuzz, I don’t know the whole thing word for word. I was definitely due for a viewing.

That’s all I got to last night. I might try to watch Hot Fuzz before bed tonight, thus completing the trilogy. I don’t know. I might try to stick to a couple more episodes of Spaced instead. I only have four left to go, I think. It might be three… or five… something like that. I’m in season two. Then again, I might just go to sleep. I am beat after this very weird day.

Marvel

I watched Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania last night. I had seen a lot of bad reviews and people calling it the harbinger of Marvel’s doom. Was it really that bad?

No. It was entertaining. It also wasn’t that good. It was just kinda there. I think my biggest beef with it was that, unlike the first two Ant Man movies, it wasn’t funny. It tried. It had Bill Murray for crying out loud. None of the jokes landed for me. I didn’t laugh once.

My other complaint wasn’t a complaint about the movie, it was a complaint about how people can suck. Jonathan Majors was awesome as the bad guy. He’s supposed to be the bad guy running through the entire next phase of Marvel. Unfortunately, it looks like he may have beaten up a woman and that make me not want anything to do with him anymore. I don’t want to pay money to watch someone who would act that way. It’s my money and I can do whatever I want with it, and if I want to not use it to support the career of someone who would beat up a woman then I will do exactly that. It just sucks that such a fantastic actor has to trigger such an action from my wallet. If he is innocent of the charges then I will happily spend money on his work. If he’s guilty then recast his ass, just make sure you cast someone as good or better… and I don’t know that there is anyone better. Damn it.

Now that I have seen this flick I am back to being just one Marvel movie behind. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 came out a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t seen it. That’s the only one left now. Maybe I’ll try to go to a theater and see it this weekend. Maybe?

Show Episode IX Some Love

After all of the Star Wars Celebration announcements and a couple of killer episodes of The Mandalorian (and one not-so killer episode) I’ve found myself spending a little time on various Star Wars subreddits. I knew that there was a vocal sect of the fandom that doesn’t like episode IX The Rise of Skywalker. I have found the levels of hate pretty staggering though. It goes so far as people who like the movie getting abuse heaped onto them. Verbal attacks… over a friggin’ movie.

In subtle response to such hate, I have decided that I would watch the movie today, and as with all viewings of this particular flick, I am loving every friggin’ second of it. It’s awesome. The movie is awesome, Rey is awesome, Poe is awesome, Fin is awesome, Rose is awesome, Kylo Ren is awesome, hell even Hux is awesome.

All of those folks who spew such hate can kiss my butt. I love this movie.

Long Day

Today has been a long day. Not sure why, it’s just felt stressful.

Tomorrow is going to be rough too. Tomorrow is in the office and, as I mentioned in a post the other day, I want to do a lot of Disney+ TV watching before I head out. I want to have everything packed up and ready, including my lunch, tonight so that I can save time in the morning. I am such a nerd.

Food has been okay today. I had a little stuck stomach feeling while taking my pre-lunch time calcium citrate pills. It cleared after about 10 minutes, but it was uncomfortable. Breakfast and lunch themselves both went off without a hitch. After having three issue-free meals on Sunday, I had two bad experiences on Monday. Lunch was a smidge on the bad side so I just stopped eating before I was finished. I had already eaten all of the protein I had planned so it was okay. Dinner was bad, but it mostly came down to me overcooking the chicken. It was too tough to chew enough and I just got tired. Then I ate a few chunks of potato and I think the skins weren’t breaking down enough and got stuck. We’re having fish and some green veggies tonight. I am sure things will go better. If so, I could have another three good meals day. That would be nice.

I am hoping to mix a song or two tonight in between packing for work tomorrow sessions. I would like to be done with REM (Record Every Month) for March before I sleep tonight. We’ll see how it goes.

Speaking of dinner tonight, we’re giving Hello Fresh another try. We’ve used it a few times before and it’s always been a good experience. The hang up we have is planning meals, ordering the meals, putting the shipment into the fridge and freezer, and then when it comes time to cook we change our mind and do something else. We want to get away from that and stick to the schedule. If we can do that then Hello Fresh is a great option. It’s so much better than me cooking the same thing every night, or ordering out all the time. I foresee success. Just with the added caveat that I have to avoid sugar, so anything we order that has sugar in it, I will have to take a pass on. We can still cook it, and Jen can have it. I’ll just skip that item on the menu. Let’s keep this house a No Dumping Syndrome zone, shall we?

Okay. Time to finish off the work day. The only question I have for the universe is when does Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania come to Disney+? I am not happy about the existence of a Marvel movie that I haven’t seen.