Catchy Name Needed

(I was the first person to post on Holidailies this year, not because I was dying to be first but because I wrote my post ahead of time, as I said, so at midnight I was like, well, might as well post it!!)

OK, so, movies. The last movie we've seen is She Said, which is practically the same movie as Spotlight, except here the it's the Times instead of the Globe and the evildoer is Harvey Weinstein rather than priests. (OK, not exactly the same....) I really liked it, but then I always like these movies about newspapers (Spotlight, The Post, All the President's Men...). One thing - we noticed that Rob was possibly the only man in the theater, and there were quite a few people there. I read that this movie was basically considered to be a bomb - the reviews are good, but it's not making money. My guess about that is that the subject is something a lot of men don't want to go to a movie about. (I developed that theory even before we went to see it, but I still suspect I'm basically correct.)

(I would also like to point out, in case the very thought of him puts you off, that Mr Weinstein himself barely appears in the movie. You hear his voice a couple of times and there's one scene toward the end where he - or rather an actor who looks vaguely like him - comes in and yells briefly at the editors before stomping out, as I recall.)

Before that, the last movie *I* saw, anyway - because, y'know, my husband and his horror movies, more on which below - was Wakanda Forever. It wasn't as good as the first one, because how could it possibly be? but it was still pretty good. I think we'll probably go back to that one sometime this month.


Every movie I saw in a theater in fall 2022:

1. She Said
   
2. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
   
3. The Woman King

Honestly, this just tells you the state of the movie industry (i.e., still recovering from covid, I guess?) that I couldn't find a damn thing I wanted to see for over a month at a time in here. (But on the bright side, look at how female-focused all three of those movies are! You used to be lucky if you got one movie like that a year.)

And I said it before: horror movies got made during the pandemic, at least the low-budget ones (Terrifier 2) did, when not much else did. Although that particular one was released on such a microscopic number of screens that if I hadn't poked around the movie release list and said, "hey, this sounds like something you'd like" and then got online and found a place where it was actually showing, Rob might have never seen that one. But that's an outlier, really. (It was unrated and I think they said it cost $300,000 to make, or something absurdly low like that.) Things like X  - still small-budget but not that small - are more like the norm, I think. But I'm not an expert on this subject, I'm just married to a really big fan.

Anyway... in addition to the movies I saw above, Rob also saw:

• Bones and All
• The Menu
• Terrifier 2
  
• Halloween Ends (twice)

Sometimes getting Rob's opinions is a chore. I know he liked Terrifier 2 and he seemed to like Bones and All pretty well. The Menu, I'm not so sure about, although he did try to explain the plot to me at more length than I was really interested in hearing. And he said Halloween Ends was not that great, but he still liked it enough to go see it twice!




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In case you really want to know, here's the whole list:

Movies I saw in a theater so far in 2022, newest to oldest:

1. She Said
   
2. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
   
3. The Woman King
4. Nope
5. Kiki's Delivery Service (Ghiblifest)
   
6. Thor: Love & Thunder
7. Dr Strange & the Multiverse of Madness
8. The Northman
9. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
10. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
11. Everything Everywhere All At Once
12. The Batman (twice)
13. Cyrano
14. Belfast
15. Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
16. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it)

And Rob also saw:

• Bones and All
• The Menu
• Terrifier 2
  
• Halloween Ends (twice)
  
• Smile
• Pearl (which is a prequel to X, below - and is also super-low-budget)
• Barbarian
• Orphan: First Kill (twice)
• Beast
• Nope (without me, then later on with me!)
• The Black Phone
• The Thing (40th anniversary re-release)
• Men
• X
• The Cursed
• Scream

I counted, and I had some thirty-five messages with titles obviously referring to Roe v Wade in my inbox today (and even more that were not so obvious, I found when I started looking further). I suppose this mostly reflects how much e-mail I l allow various Democratic/liberal-leaning groups to send me, but still, that's a lot. I don't even want to get into the politics of the whole thing, I'd probably end up making myself ill and probably delete the whole thing in the end anyway. Let's just say I'm profoundly grateful to be past menopause. I always feel for the people who have to make that decision, and it's about to get much much worse, of course.

Hmm, is Yoda here really the only Star Wars icon I brought over from Livejournal? Apparently so. I usually only use that one during November or December, since I manifestly don't post every day for most of the year. I'm doing good to post a couple of times a month, usually. (In the geek realm, I have icons here for Marvel (Black Widow), DC (Wonder Woman), two Buffy quotes, Narnia, and Star Trek, in addition to Yoda.)

Yesterday was our 35th wedding anniversary. We didn't exactly do anything fantastically celebratory - we went out to eat Saturday (Mexican), went to a movie Sunday (The Northman), and dawdled around at home yesterday and picked out an old-favorite movie to watch in the evening. (I suppose it says a lot about us that this was Terminator 2, and.we enjoyed it tremendously. It had been quite a long time since I'd seen it.)

The Northman will not be on my list of favorite movies I've seen this year, but I'm sort of glad I saw it just the same. It was...weirdly old-fashioned. It wasn't actually as violent as I expected - although I'd say that it's still pretty violent unless you watch a lot of that kind of thing. "Well-made but incredibly gloomy" might be the short version of my review.

(And the movie we saw the previous weekend, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, was a hoot. I really enjoyed it. I'm not a huge Nick Cage fan, but Pedro Pascal made up for that, and they were great as a duo.)




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Movies seen in a theater in 2022:

1. The Northman
2. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
3. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
4. Everything Everywhere All At Once
5. The Batman (twice)
6. Cyrano
7. Belfast
8. Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
9. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it) 

...and Rob also saw:

• X
• The Cursed
• Scream

Maybe nobody cares but me, but I was pretty happy to see the MLB players and management come to an agreement this week. I was starting to prepare myself for a long drought. Baseball's really the only sport I follow any more. So spring training games starting like, Friday, woo!

Last weekend Rob went to Ohio (without me, because I won't fly any more) so there was no movie night last week, and we're a week behind seeing The Batman. (Actually in my head I call it "THE Batman", with a huge overemphasis on the "the", because that whole thing where they distinguish it from the others by "the" is kind of weird.) SO we went to see it yesterday and I actually really liked it. I had tried to avoid spoilers and so all I really knew was who played Batman and Alfred and Catwoman, and that it was 3 hours long and "dark" - I completely wasn't sure what to expect and maybe that helped, I don't know. I'm old enough that I'm pretty sure I remember going to see the old Adam West Batman movie in a theater - I would have been 7, maybe? - and so I have a long history with Batman movies. I've seen pretty much all of them, even Batman and Robin. And I think this one totally worked.

The only other movie that we've seen since the last time I posted was Cyrano, which I also liked a lot, except that I cried through about the last third of it and came home with a headache. And then I got that song stuck in my head for days, but hey, at least it pushed the Encanto soundtrack out of my brain for a couple of days!

(I saw somebody say online somewhere that The Batman made them cry, but I didn't have that reaction to it, thank goodness. My allergies are acting up and I've had plenty of headaches lately as it is!)


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Movies seen in a theater in 2022

• The Batman
• Cyrano
• Belfast
• Spider-Man: No Way Home (twice in 2022 and once in 2021)
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife (also one we'd seen in 2021, because nothing much came out in January!)           

...and Rob also saw:

• The Cursed
• Scream

My friend nonelvis posted this on Tumblr, and hey, I can never resist these things. Plus it's nice and short!

favorite color palette: cool colors - blue/green/purple

last song: Ophelia, The Lumineers (I was listening to some of the new album yesterday, and then I drifted to the old stuff)

currently reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and taking notes. I've been in sort of a reading slump - I can't seem to settle on one thing - and apparently reading an old favorite and taking notes on it is my way out of that. (This time last year I did Lord of the Rings, so at least this isn't quite as long as that one!) -- I think one of the reasons this works is because I get to the point eventually where reading anything else starts to look incredibly good!!

last movie: on TV: Infinity War In a theater: Spiderman: NWH (yeah, I know, I'm all about the Marvel)

sweet/savory/spicy: savory I guess?

currently working on: the above note-taking project, mostly (and trying to be organized, generally, which is a really long-term project for me!)

We went to see Licorice Pizza (me and Rob and my sister and her husband, too) and I honestly don't quite know what to make of it. It was interesting but I didn't love it. My sister thought dating a 15-year-old boy made you a pedophile, and while I don't feel like that's quite true, for a 25-year-old girl to date a 15-year-old boy is pretty damn weird. (And presumably illegal, these days. I guess it wasn't, back then?) Anyway, it's a coming-of-age movie set in the 70s, in case you don't know this part already, and it's well-made - it's Paul Thomas Anderson, of course it is - and the boy is Phillip Seymour Hoffman's son (who was apparently 17 at the time they filmed this) and the girl is Alana Haim, the musician. The rest of the Haim sisters are in it too, playing (guess!) her sisters, and her parents are played by their actual parents. I guess that makes casting easier! The first half of it just rambles and the second half has a bit more plot but it's still hard to figure out where it's meant to be going. I read that Anderson based it at least partly on some stories he'd been told by a guy who had been a child actor (as Hoffman's character is), so maybe it rambles because that's what real life does, I don't know. My brother-in-law hated it so he's going to be pissed if it wins all the Oscars, which they seem to think it might.

(Meanwhile, we're going to go see the Spiderman movie again this weekend.)

I had kind of a trying time at work this week, most everybody is off and our cranky computer system went down again, and every time that happens, our IT department and the vendor that makes the software have difficulty talking to each other - and so this week when everybody is understaffed in the first place it's even worse. I'll be surprised if it gets fixed before Monday. Plus we're on covid protocols again and that made everything a little more difficult - not with the vendor, but with everybody else! But I'm done for the week so it's all somebody else's problem.

Oh, that book I was reading (or not-reading, actually) before, called In a Holidaze, turned out to be a Groundhog Day thing, which didn't really grab me at first, either, but I kept going this time and it was actually pretty good. I won't tell you spoilers other than that, though.

I'm not really managing the daily thing here, but at least I'm posting, right?

(possible spoilers below, although I'm trying to be relatively careful)

Let's see, well, since I stay up really really late, I got to watch Hawkeye twice before I went to bed. I really liked the conversation between Kate & Yelena, that was funny. (That's not really a spoiler, as I see it, since if you're watching you already know Yelena's there from last week. And it was pretty much common knowledge that she was going to appear at some point, if you've been paying attention to Marvel fandom generally.)

I did kind of emit a little squeak, at least, about that picture at the end.

I've liked all the Marvel series this year, but I like Hawkeye enough that I'm thinking about whether I like it better than WandaVision. Maybe not, I liked WandaVision a lot, but I like Hawkeye a lot, too. Loki still reigns supreme, though. - And I guess Falcon & the Winter Soldier is at the bottom, although I liked it quite a bit, too. (I actually watched most of it a few days ago, as a matter of fact. I can't remember exactly what prompted me to do that.) What If...? kind of seems like a different class of thing because it's episodic (well, mostly) and animated. I can't think where I'd put it with the live-action ones, But I liked it a lot too.

Spider-man has never been my favorite Marvel thing, but we still have tickets to see No Way Home this weekend. (I don't dislike Spider-man, I just don't identify with him that much. Except Miles Morales, he's the exception there. In fact I think I've watched Into the Spider-verse like three times lately.) Even if I hated Spider-man, I'd probably still go see NWH because it's Marvel, and we know there's all kind of crossovers. You miss too much if you miss anything Avengers-related.

Hi Dreamwidth! Hi Holidailies!

I'm doing the easy thing today and talking about movies. I've been keeping a running list of what we've seen in theaters this year, and there's mostly been things to see, unlike last year. Rob's list, which is the things he went to see and I didn't, is especially long, since horror movies were still coming out for the most part all during the pandemic, where the regular middle-of-the-road movies didn't really get going full-tilt until summer.

We never really avoided going to the theater once they opened. Last year I believe I said the theaters were ghost towns - there were never many people there at all. This year attendance increased but it was still never to the point that I felt uncomfortable. I don't think I've once had anybody other than Rob sitting next to me. (The Ghostbusters movie this past weekend was about the most crowded one I'd been to, but that was in a very small theater.)

Since I last posted in September, Rob and I have seen four movies:
Ghostbusters Afterlife
Eternals
Dune (twice)
Spirited Away

And then Rob also went to these:
Antlers
Halloween Kills (twice)
Lamb

I enjoyed the Ghostbusters movie. I really don't want to say much more because everything I can think of to say about it gets into spoiler territory, and I think some people might still be interested in seeing it.

Eternals... is sort of problematic, but I still enjoyed it. It's a bit different than your average Marvel movie, for sure. (You know, for all there hadn't been a Marvel movie in, what, a year and a half or more, hey, they got four of them out this year, counting Spiderman coming in a couple of weeks. I keep forgetting about that last one!)

I liked Dune a lot, and I wasn't at all sure I would. I had just re-read the book right before I saw it, too. I gather a lot of people weren't prepared for that hidden "part 1" in the title - they sure didn't advertise it - and maybe people were taken by surprise about that, although I had heard that a long time ago. (I don't exactly read the trades regularly or anything like that, but I do kind of try to follow movie news, so maybe that's why I knew that when other people didn't.)

Earlier in the year I said that Judas and the Black Messiah and Promising Young Woman were the best movies I'd seen this year (both of which got nominated and then roundly snubbed for Best Picture). I don't know, I liked Nomadland, too (which is what actually won Best Picture) and I liked, well, a lot of the things I've seen. I really don't bother going to movies I don't think I want to see, that's the way I look at it now.

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Previously in 2021, Rob and I saw:
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (twice)
The Suicide Squad
The Green Knight
Black Widow
Army of the Dead
The Courier
Raya and the Last Dragon
Nomadland
Judas and the Black Messiah
Promising Young Woman
News of the World

Rob saw all of those plus these:
Malignant (twice)
Candyman
The Night House
Don't Breathe 2
Old
Escape Room 2
The Forever Purge
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
A Quiet Place 2
Spiral
Separation
In the Earth
The Unholy
Nobody
The Father

Hey, I have a Black Widow icon! I think I've had it for a couple of years, actually, but still, feels like karma or something, that I came to post for the first time in ages and that's my default icon. (Silly, but there you go.)

Well, I wasn't sure about the Black Widow movie going in, but I liked it, it wasn't great but it was watchable, and entertaining. That's about all I ask. I knew some reviewers didn't like it, so maybe that lowered my expectations a little, which is helpful sometimes.

It was weird to be in a theater with more than a sprinkling of other people. We did go to the occasional movie last year, even, but there was never anybody there to speak of. Sometimes we were the only people in an auditorium.

Anyway, I didn't actually come to post specifically about Black Widow at all - I went through my planner and made a list of what we've seen this year, and I thought I would post that. I've been to eight movies and Rob has been to seventeen, no less. Horror movies were practically the only thing coming out for a while. (Plus he went alone some weeks when I just wasn't in the mood, so his list is not all horror.)

Here's what I've seen:
News of the World (which I think technically came out in 2020 but we saw it in January)
Promising Young Woman
Judas and the Black Messiah
Nomadland
Raya and the Last Dragon
The Courier
Army of the Dead
Black Widow

If I had to pick a favorite, I think I'd pick... hmm, either Promising Young Woman or Judas and the Black Messiah. I liked both of them and they were both depressing as hell in their different ways. (I liked Raya and the Last Dragon a lot, too. All of these were good, even freaking Army of the Dead.)

(I guess Army of the Dead is technically horror, isn't it? For some reason I'll go to a zombie movie occasionally, if it doesn't seem too too creepy. I saw World War Z and both the Zombieland movies and Shaun of the Dead, of course. I'm partial to the funny ones - I love Shaun of the Dead. Although actually I don't think we ever saw it in a theater, come to think of it.)

And then Rob saw all eight above plus these:
The Father
Nobody
The Unholy
In the Earth
Separation
Spiral (the Saw thing)
A Quiet Place 2
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
The Forever Purge

Honestly, he'll go see practically anything horror. You should see the reviews on some of those.