mellicious: Narnia witch in a carriage pulled by polar bears, captioned "OMGWTFPOLARBEAR!" (polar bear & witch - m15m)
So I have now been to see "Wicked" twice - last week with Rob and this afternoon with my sister and her best-friend-since-childhood (who I hadn't seen in years and years, so that part was fun too). I enjoyed the movie as much the second time as I did the first, 2 hr 40 min running time and all. I dunno, it just works. (Hollywood Reporter says it's starting to get Oscar buzz, and I think it ought to, really.) My companions both loved it, too. The theater was pretty full for a matinee show, and it was almost all women around our age group, although there were younger people there too. Apparently Monday is Senior Day at Cinemark, which I didn't know because I almost always go on weekends with Rob.

We did actually watch "The Wizard of Oz" on Disney+ (I think that's where it was) over the weekend. We hadn't seen it in ages. I've been watching Disney a good bit lately - we are watching the series version of "What We Do in the Shadows" (and we watched the movie too, but we had to pay a few dollars for that one) and I've watched "Deadpool and Wolverine" at least twice since it's been on D+ and there's an Assembled (making-of) episode for it, too. Plus a month or so ago I went on a Disney Sing-Along tear with Encanto and Little Mermaid and maybe something else that I've forgotten. So yeah, lotsa Disney, and none of it Star Wars, amazingly. (Isn't Andor season 2 supposed to finally be along in the spring?)



mellicious: Yoda: "Post every day you will" (yoda - nablopomo)
It's that time again, the time when I actually try to journal online for a month. (I do have paper journals and I try to write at least a paragraph or two in those daily, and I do pretty good about that. So it's not like I'm completely out of practice! It's only the habit of saying everything online that I've gotten out of.)


I'm writing this a day ahead - it's very early Wednesday morning. I have just been watching Willow (the new TV series, not the old movie) and I'm kind of unimpressed. Or maybe it's just that it pales in comparison to Andor, which just ended and which I loved so, so much. I kind of feel like Willow belongs in a different time-slot - although I'm sure most people don't watch TV in the middle of the night as much as I do, and aren't likely to watch streaming shows at any particular time, anyway. (Caring about time-slots just shows my age, I suspect.) But going back to three years ago when The Mandalorian first came out, I've been in the habit of watching the Disney - mostly meaning Star Wars & Marvel - shows at 2am Wednesday mornings, which is usually when they put up the new stuff in my time-zone (presumably because that's midnight Pacific).

Willow feels more like a kids' show, is what I'm trying to get at. Really, it always did - I remember rolling my eyes when we first saw the movie at all those reaction shots of the baby - and then there were the brownies. The baby is grown up now - and in fact I got spoiled regarding who she had grown up to be, so watch out for that! - and the brownies are nowhere in evidence in the first two episodes, which is what's up on D+ currently. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they make an appearance at some point, though.

Willow the movie certainly grew on me - I'm hoping the series will too.


(I was going to add a movie update, but I'll save that for tomorrow.)


mellicious: blinky holiday lights (holiday lights gif)
It's still Christmas Eve my time as I'm writing this, but it'll be Christmas Day by the time I post it, no doubt, so merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it - and I guess, happy Saturday to the rest of you!

(I'm totally going to have my sense of the days of the week messed up until after 2022 starts, I can tell already. Normally I work on Fridays but I'm off, and next week I'm working different days than I normally do, so I'm just accepting in advance that I'm gonna be confused.)

So even though we're not actually religious, we still celebrate Christmas at least in sort of a half-assed way - not as much as a way of avoiding the religious bits as just to make it less stressful. So today (meaning Christmas Eve) we stayed home, but tomorrow we're going over to my sister & bro-in-law's, but we're just having subs and stuff like that. (Rob seemed slightly put-out by this, and he got us a lasagne to have today at home - but I know he doesn't really want to be the one who cooks any more than P & I do!) And we're only doing sort of token gifts tomorrow. I have a bunch of FabFitFun leftovers I'm giving my sister, because I got several of those boxes this past year, and we got chocolates for the b-i-l, something we know he likes. Rob found a Mandalorian pillow somewhere! that was one of my surprise gifts, and there was a big bag of something heavy that's meant for tomorrow, he said. (I'm guessing it's Dollar Tree finds.) I have a Black Friday find for him - an electric wine-bottle opener - and his main gift is some gigantic (and literally ridiculously heavy) comic-book anthologies that he had asked for. (My main gift was getting my hair professionally cut and colored, because I said when I stopped working full-time that I wasn't going to have it colored any more. So making it my Christmas gift absolves me of having to feel guilty about going back on that.)

Rob had never seen Mean Girls, and I thought of it because of that one scene with the Christmas pageant, and so we watched that, earlier. I think he enjoyed it pretty well. I said it's really something you need to see anyway just to understand those "fetch" jokes, etc. (Then we watched part of Willow, also - and there was a little promo with Warwick Davis up about the new Willow show which apparently is going to be out sometime next year. I knew they were doing it but I didn't know what the ETA on it was.)

Sunday we think we're going to go see Licorice Pizza, and we are agreed we both want to see Spider-man again at some point. I guess that will probably have to be next weekend, since I'm working during the week. Rob is off all next week, so he may go see Nightmare Alley one of those days when I'm working, since I can't work up too much interest in that one.
mellicious: "I have nothing significant to say" (in a thought bubble) (nothing significant - quote)
Y'all, I had had a whole subject I was going to write about when I got home from work, and then I got home from work and found out that Disney bombed us with, I don't even know, TEN Star Wars series or something, and some unknown number of Marvel announcements (and as near as I can tell, they completely slid by the fact that they moved the Marvel movie dates all around again!) and omg, Willow and Indy and maybe Aliens(???) and my brain is just on overload, and the Mandalorian episode is on in like half an hour and AIEEEE!

(So, uh, no real post today, not in any organized way. Maybe tomorrow. Luckily I think I did write down whatever the hell it was I thought I was going to talk about, because right now, I have no idea.)
mellicious: Yoda: "Post every day you will" (yoda - nablopomo)
Re spoilers: let's say this may have spoilers up through Chapter 13. I'm still processing the latest one.

But, Ahsoka!! That I'm ready to talk more about. You should know that I had never watched much of Clone Wars or Rebels until lately. (I think I had seen the Clone Wars movie, and most of season 1 of Rebels.) But now that I've had Disney+, for the last year, I've been - well, not so much bingeing my way through it as taking my time and enjoying it, honestly. I'm still not done. I got through season 6 of Clone Wars and then switched to Rebels, and I figure I'll wait and do season 7 last, since it came out the most recently. I'm on... I've lost track, I'm well  into season 3 of Rebels, I think? I need to get back to that, it's been a couple of weeks. Anyway, so I've seen a LOT of Ahsoka recently. Teen Ahsoka in Clone Wars, adult Ahsoka in Rebels. And now, almost-middle-aged Ahsoka in The Mandalorian. I enjoyed that. Oh! and just the week before this came out, I read the Ahsoka book, which I'm glad I did. It was good and it talked about where she went while she was offscreen.

And hey, Baby Yoda has a name, finally! (A name that a lot of people had trouble with, including me, I admit. It kind of feels like it came out of a blender, but that's ok, we'll all get used to it - I wrote down "Grogo" at first. I've also seen other people say "Gorgu" a bunch. But no, it's Grogu.) Actually I guess I can talk about the beginning of episode 14, because it's not a spoiler - I loved the way Din kept saying the name over and over, like he might be having a little trouble with it too. Or maybe he was enjoying watching Grogu react to his name.

The other episode that I especially enjoyed was the one where Din meets other Mandalorians, ones who were apparently raised somewhat differently. And including the famous Bo-Katan. (I've seen some of the younger Bo-Katan, but I'm pretty sure there's more in the parts of Clone Wars and Rebels I still haven't gotten to.)

It's not that I didn't like the other new episodes. I enjoyed Timothy Olyphant and the Sandpeople and the Krayt Dragon in the first ep of the season. The second one had way way too many spiders for my taste but was pretty interesting just the same. And "The Siege" had some good action, and the return of the blue dude from the very first episode - who I think still doesn't have a name, does he? IMDb just says "Mythrol" and as I understand it that's his species, right? Or do they just not have individual names?

(I'm trying hard to be coherent here, but it's difficult, there are just too many topics. But I'm not sure most of you want to talk about Star Wars as much as I do. So I'll stop here for now.)

mellicious: blinky holiday lights (holiday lights gif)
 I made a list of what I've been reading lately, and I was going to talk about several different series that I've been reading. But I'm in the middle of the latest Shadowhunters book, and I seem to have Feelings about it. So I don't figure I'll get much further than this tonight.

I used to say "I'm reading a Cassie Clare book" or "I'm reading a Mortal Instruments book" but Shadowhunters is the name of the TV series (on Disney, switching to Netflix, I hear) so I figure they're all Shadowhunters books now. I'm sure not everybody has read these books and not everybody even knows about that series, either. (it's on Disney, after all - if you don't have kids you don't necessarily follow what's on Disney channels, at least I don't.)

"The Mortal Instruments" was the name of the first six books - or was it only the first three? I forget. I can't keep all the series names straight, anyway, which is why I'm perfectly happy to switch to a nice simple(-ish) name like Shadowhunters. I can remember The Mortal Instruments for some reason but I can't ever remember the name of the series that was set in the 1800s or the one I'm reading now. It's "The Dark Artifices" but I only know that because I looked earlier today, and who knows if I'll remember by tomorrow. Maybe I will, because I was thinking about why it's called that. This is the set of books that's set (generally) in California - although really only the first book stayed put in California, and since then they have bopped around and large parts of it have taken place in Europe and some in Faerie, too. I decided that Dark Artifices makes sense because it has running plot-lines about necromancy and there's a physical Book of the Dead that everybody keeps looking for. (And also a xeroxed copy of it, which I was amused to find that the Fairy Queen doesn't know what to make of.)

(I just took a detour of an hour or so over to my old Livejournal because I was pretty sure I remembered talking about Shadowhunters, and I found it. It was at the time - almost three years ago - when the Shadowhunters series was starting up, and I went on at some length about the casting with reference to the book and also the very bad feature film (City of Bones) from a few years back. That's here, and also a little bit in the entry before that, here.)

Well, so anyway, the third book of the fourth trilogy about Shadowhunters has just come out (Queen of Air and Darkness). So there's an actual dozen books - not even counting the short story collections about Magnus and Simon and the one reference book. I'm about a third of the way through, I think, so nobody tell me any spoilers. (I was thinking that the one thing I really miss about reading physical books is that you can look at where you are and make a good ballpark estimate of how much is left and how long it might take you to finish. "34%" tells you that you're a third of the way through but not how long the damn thing is.) I re-read the two previous books plus the last Jace-and-Clary book (City of Heavenly Fire) because that's where these characters were introduced. I realized that I found the previous book (Lord of Shadows) a long slog, in particular. It's very talky. I enjoy the plot, when it finally happens, and it's not that I hate the rest of it, but I think it could have stood some editing down. I'm kind of impatient generally with the whole Emma-and-Julian doomed lovers business. Maybe it's partly because Cassie Clare has kind of worn that trope out, really. We were in the car the other day and for some reason I started trying to explain the whole thing to Rob about how Jace has had about three or four different last names and he was Clary's brother - no, he's not! - and all of that stuff. (I never believed that he would turn out to be Clary's brother for a minute.) Anyway, I like the characters of Emma and Julian aside from the whole romance thing but man, is that one plot that I'm bored with. (The romance that I'm really feeling is the whole Mark-and-Christina-and-hot-fairy-prince threesome thing.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (m15m - polarbear)
Let's just start right out with this: no, Beauty and the Beast didn't really need to be remade. I adored the old cartoon version. What I read about that was that Disney is apparently making tons of money overseas on all these live-action remakes of the old cartoons, so these movies aren't really being made for American audiences at all. It's the best explanation I've heard, anyway.

I guess this one was the first of those remakes I've seen - what else is there so far, just Cinderella and Jungle Book? but there was nothing else we wanted to see last weekend, and I thought if we were going to see it, seeing it while it's still in the big theater seemed like a good idea. Rob hadn't been dying to see it but he liked the old one too so he didn't gripe.

(My mother and I also went to see the Broadway-bound musical way back in 1993, I guess that was. See here. I know I saw it but it didn't make a big impact, to tell you the truth. The most famous person in it, at least then, was Tom Bosley, and I remember being slightly impressed by that part. And it had pretty impressive staging but that's really about all I remember.)

And I have to say that I liked the new movie more than I expected to. I didn't love love love it like I did the older one, but it was still pretty good. The love story works, and a lot of the changes worked at least reasonably well, and... it was pretty good. I do have a tendency to compare it to all those retellings I've read in the interim, like both of Robin McKinley's versions, in one of which the Beast does stay a Beast at the end. But I don't really feel like that would have worked here. This Beast wanted to be a boy again.

I ended up watching a bunch of interviews and stuff on YouTube when I got home, and a bunch of interviews with Dan Stevens (I didn't watch Downton Abbey so I didn't particularly know who he was) and the upshot of that was, that I watched the beginning of Legion - he stars in that also, in case you're not getting the connection there - and I liked it. So then I made Rob watch part of the first episode also, and I'm not sure if he saw enough of it to get hooked but I definitely did. It's interestingly trippy and not at all like what I'd think "Uncanny X-men" would be like even though that's what it's based on. (I haven't read any of those comics but I guess I would expect something more like Doctor Strange, to the extent that I'd thought about it at all.)

(But we also are still watching Daredevil Season 2 and Iron Fist, etc, so we are getting more and more backed up with the TV stuff, and now baseball season has started so there's another thing to compete for our time. So I don't know when we'll get around to that.)

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mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Default)
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