mellicious | Entries tagged with marvel

I realized yesterday that I hadn't gotten my sister anything for Christmas! We do what we call "token" gifts, which mostly just means small gifts, but still I didn't want to just be running to the dollar store at the last minute! ("Small" or "token" gifts still shouldn't just be random junk, either, right?) It's weird nowadays because none of the four of us (including our respective husbands, that is) are really religious or does a lot for Christmas - and we don't have parents or kids to drag us in anyway - but still, it would also be weird not to have gifts at all. We were all raised celebrating Christmas, after all. Rob and I buy each other stuff, but we do that exchange at home - we usually go and eat at their house but we don't haul all of our gifts for each other over there. (I might take something especially cute over there to show off, but a lot of our gifts are usually books and stuff so they're not all that interested.)

But as far as a gift for P, I was poking around on Amazon and they had a lot of things that still said could be delivered by Christmas, so I got her some L'Occitane hand cream, because I know that's something she'd like, and it was reasonably priced. I know a lot of people hate Amazon but I am just addicted to having everything show up at my door, no fuss.* (The BIL likes dark chocolate so his gift is always super-easy - Rob had already taken care of that part.)

*OK, mostly no fuss. I had some trouble lately with a defective Owala bottle that had a loose piece that kept shooting across the room! But we got that taken care of.

Oh, we watched Red One this afternoon. The reviews were terrible, but people who'd seen it seemed to like it ok, and so did we. Hardly a masterpiece, but it had some clever stuff in it. (I said, boy, between this and Deadpool & Wolverine, Chris Evans has been having a ball destroying his "Captain America" image lately!)

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?)

I'm trying to figure out a top 3 movies out of my list below. I said Poor Things was batshit-crazy and somebody took that to mean I didn't like it, but I did. I liked it a lot. I feel like I need to see Barbie again before I can be sure how I feel about it, because I know I liked a lot of its ideas in the moment, but in retrospect I mostly remember all that pink and the sorta girl-power vibe. I think I said before that if pushed I'd pick Oppenheimer but I'm not really sure about that either. Boy and the Heron? Maybe. Wonka? Astonishingly - maybe. Air was good. Across the Spider-verse was good but not as good as the first one, but then again, that's a high bar. I'm still thinking this over, but let's say, tentatively:

Top ~~three~~ four movies of 2023 (in alpha order!)
Across the Spider-verse
Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Wonka

Seen in 2023, in a theater (most recent at the top):
Poor Things
Wonka
The Boy and the Heron
The Marvels
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Creator
A Haunting in Venice
Blue Beetle
Barbie
Oppenheimer
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
The Little Mermaid
The Flash
Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (twice)
Air
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Ant-Man & the Wasp
M3GAN

We went to see "The Boy and the Heron" earlier, and we both enjoyed it, but I have this niggling feeling that I'm missing something. Or maybe I'm not, and you're just supposed to go with the flow and there's no point, per se. (It's structured like a lot of Miyazaki movies, with a big fantasy sequence in the middle, but a bit weirder, somehow. The giant warlike parakeets kind of blew my mind, but really they're no stranger than the heron, which sort of had a person inside?? - never really explained, of course!)

And then the movies below are everything I saw in 2023 before this week. I think I have to go with "Oppenheimer" for a favorite. I also liked "The Creator" a lot. (I even liked parts of "Killers of the Flower Moon" quite a lot. I just wish I didn't get the sense from all Scorsese movies that he likes the bad guys more than the good guys.)

Oh, and there was Barbie. I liked that, too. I also liked watching the women of all ages getting their picture taken inside the giant Barbie box in the lobby.

As far as the superhero movies, I did like "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" enough to go twice, but when I tried to watch it at home it just felt way too violent. I don't know why that was. (All of the GotG movies are violent but it never bothered me before!) Also, I really did like "The Marvels" and I wish they'd quit talking about it as a bomb. "Ant-Man and the Wasp" might be one of my least-favorite Marvel movies, but I didn't hate it, either. (But it's way down the list, I think. Nearly every Marvel movie of the Feige era is at least watchable, so the standards here are relatively high. It's above Hulk & Iron Man 2, for sure, & maybe Age of Ultron, too - past that I'd have to think it over!)

And then there's "Blue Beetle," which I kind of didn't know what to make of. It wasn't bad, either, though.

Seen in 2023, in a theater:
The Marvels
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Creator
A Haunting in Venice
Blue Beetle
Barbie
Oppenheimer
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
The Little Mermaid
The Flash
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (twice)
Air
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Ant-Man & the Wasp
M3GAN

This started out to be a movie update, but I had so little to say about that that I went on to TV and books, too!

So far this year, Rob and I have seen these movies in a theater:

Spider-Man: No Way Home (twice since January 1st, as well as once in December)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (also one we'd seen in 2021)
Belfast

The usual January movie "desert" was especially lean pickings this year - that's mostly why we went to see Spider-Man so many times! I think there were at least two weeks where we just gave up and stayed home, which is unusual for us! At least the only new-to-us one that we saw (Belfast, that is) was quite good.

Rob has also been to see these without me:

Scream
The Cursed

(He seemed to like The Cursed considerably more than Scream, from what I gathered.)

On TV, we enjoyed The Book of Boba Fett a lot, even if it was a bit uneven. I have also watched a whole lot of Marvel, as usual (Black Widow holds up to repeat viewings much better than I would have expected), and also repeat viewings of Encanto (resulting in a semi-permanent "Bruno" earworm). Rob still watches the news a lot but I have cut back because I find it so depressing. (And he watches a ton of horror movies, mostly when I'm asleep.)

(I've come to think one of the secrets of our going-on-35-year marriage is having schedules that vary enough that each of us can do our own thing while the other one is asleep!)

I've been reading the Cinder series (I guess it's officially The Lunar Chronicles, right?) and re-reading a bunch of other things because I've kind of been in a slump where I can't seem to finish much. I think I've finished a dozen books so far this year that were new to me, but they were mostly short, very easy reading. There's another dozen or more that I started but didn't get very far into - and only a couple that I officially called as DNF. The rest I'll hopefully come back to.

Current Mood: weird

We went to see Spider-man:NWH and despite me saying a day or two ago that I don't identify with Peter Parker, I really liked it. I'm not going to say any more about it right now, though. (Tom Holland is pretty much grown-up now, even if Peter Parker's not, quite, so that may have helped.)

I started reading that book I was talking about before, In a Holidaze, and it turns out that it starts on December 26th - so it's really a post-Christmas book -- unless it goes on until the next Christmas, or something (which is possible, I don't know.) Anyway, I decided I would be better served to read the other contemporary holiday romance I bought (Sleigh Bells Ring, I think it was) now and save that other one til later. (And I've got more of those Regency Christmas things to get through, too.)

I finally finished another book I've been reading and that's called A Dance with the Fae Prince. I liked it. I have a definite weakness for stuff about elves and fairies. It's a sequel in an indirect way to a book called A Deal with the Elf King, which I also liked, but I felt like this second one was written with more assurance, somehow. It has a pretty twisty plot and I never quite figured out where it was going until it got there - always nice. (The heroine had a mysterious mother who died long ago, and I was sure that was going to figure into it eventually, but I never quite figured out how it was going to work out until right at the end.)

I had been working on a paper list of all my books, but then I didn't keep very good track of what I sent to Goodwill lately (because we did a big cleaning/de-hoarding project this fall). While that was going on, I also read some books that were paperbacks in bad shape and those I just tore up as I went, so I wouldn't be tempted to keep them. I have a ton of books on the Kindle and I'm trying to shift even more to that, just so I won't be destashing books I really would otherwise want to keep. I have books I've bought three or four times because I threw the previous copy out, or took it to Goodwill. I like reading on the Kindle just as well as paper, or really, even better, and they don't take up any space. (I am not giving up on the paper book-list but I think a spreadsheet is also in order, so it can be re-sorted at need!)

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.

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.)

Current Mood: geeky

I finally started radiation treatments yesterday. I'm kind of fascinated by the equipment - it has all these pieces that move around and paint laser targets on you and stuff. The clinic where I go is brand-new so I'm sure it's the most state of the art equipment - I keep wanting to ask a bunch of questions but they make a big deal about getting you in & out of there in half an hour or so, so you can go about your life. And I grant that that's important, so I can't really demand a full tour or anything. And you're supposed to stay very still - of course - but I keep wanting to look around. (You can't really do that much, either, though.)

So far the main symptom has been a slight sunburn. But I'm only on #2 of 20. We'll see how it goes.

In other news, we had a little fun a couple of weeks ago when Houston got all that rain. We work 'til midnight, remember - and we drove home in pouring rain, and then when we got to the freeway exit everything was flooded. We drove carefully around for a while trying to see if we could get where we needed to go, and basically we couldn't. After some time, the feeder roads cleared up, and we got a little further along. But then the road home was completely flooded - they were fishing cars out of it. They said it was only passable with a very large truck, which we definitely do not have. The emergency people that were out in the road, whoever they were, showed us a place where it was high ground and said we could wait it out if we wanted to. And we tried that for a while. I even fell asleep for a while, and when I woke up it was 2am and Rob was watching the road and it pretty clearly wasn't cleared yet. And Rob had to be back at 1pm on Friday. So I said, "I wonder if we can get back on the freeway," and it turned out we could - and we drove back to Galveston and checked into a hotel. We still didn't get a whole lot of sleep but we got some, and we got a shower and breakfast. And our local city government's e-mail list announced later in the morning that the roads were clear and that (amazingly) no houses had flooded.

And the only other thing I have to say is that I did drag Rob back to Endgame this past weekend, so that's three times now. Actually I noticed a lot of stuff this time that I'd missed in the overload the first two times. (I told Rob, "Thank you for giving this nine hours of your life.")

Movies seen in 2019:

1. Bumblebee

2. Into the Spider-verse (second time at this one)

3. Lego Movie 2

4. Captain Marvel (twice)

5. Shazam!

6. Avengers: Endgame (three times)

I meant to post about Endgame sooner than this, but I've been sick. When I went to see the MDA doc the other day, I had a slight temperature (99-ish) - they seemed slightly alarmed, but I said that I had had a sore throat for a couple of days and they seemed mollified - and then that was followed by coughing and some sneezing, so I imagine it was a virus of some sort. (Oncologists seem a bit jumpy, in my experience so far, but I guess having immunocompromised patients will lead to that.) I was trying to work through it, but finally I called in sick on Friday. I try not to call in sick more than I can help, because somebody has to be there to replace me if I don't come in. Luckily there was somebody willing to cover for me. And I'm still coughing a bit, but I'm finally feeling better now.

Since we're already on the health issues, I will tell you about the other medical updates - I still haven't started the radiation treatments, because they were waiting on the test to come back to see whether they thought I would benefit from chemo. The RadOnc doctor was very firm on having chemo first if I needed it. But the test finally came back and my oncotype was low, my doctor said, which I guess means not as invasive? (i didn't think to question it at the time). Anyway, no chemo, yay! And I have another RadOnc appointment next week and I assume we'll finally get the radiation treatments under way shortly after that.

SPOILERS BELOW...

I liked Endgame a lot. We have actually been twice - on the first day and then again yesterday.

( big spoilers under this cut! )

I'm ready to go a third time. I imagine it will be a couple of weeks before I can talk Rob into it again, though - he's not as big a fan of multiple rewatches as I am.

Movies seen in 2019:

1. Bumblebee

2. Into the Spider-verse (second time at this one)

3. Lego Movie 2

4. Captain Marvel (twice)

5. Shazam!

6. Avengers: Endgame (twice)

We just got back from seeing Shazam! - we didn't go last week because Rob wanted to see Pet Sematary, and I figured there'd be less kids this weekend anyway. It was really quite good - even though I knew the Rotten Tomatoes scores was good and stuff (currently at 90% on RT, I just checked), I was still surprised how much I liked it. Other than Wonder Woman, I can't think of any other DC moves of recent years that I've liked as much. Since we got home I've been watching Easter-Egg-type videos and running periodically into the bedroom to treat Rob to especially good bits of DC trivia.

(Rob likes to spend some time on the laptop before he goes to bed. He watches YouTube stuff about movies, too - mostly not the same movies - and also a bunch of workout stuff, of course.)

Here's the updated list of movies I've seen this year, which I have been chunking into the bottom of my movie posts recently. Here it's getting moved up because I want to talk about it - mostly about why it's not longer.

Movies seen in 2019:

1. Bumblebee

2. Into the Spider-verse (second time at this one)

3. Lego Movie 2

4. Captain Marvel (twice)

5. Shazam!

Actually that's not a terribly slow pace by my recent standards - we're basically 3-1/2 months into 2019 and I've been to a movie at a movie theater six times. I think a couple of movies a month is more or less my normal pace in recent years. Some years less - but further in the past we used to go pretty much every week. In Galveston we lived really close to the movie theater for many years, and I think that made a difference. (Rob used to walk, some of the time. It was maybe a mile and a half, so I don't remember ever actually doing that, but it was a little quick jog down the Seawall in the car, anyway - five minutes, tops. We had it timed where we would leave about the time the schedule said the movie started, and we never missed the beginning of the movie.)

Rob goes to see horror movies without me, because we long ago established that I don't go to those, and sometimes he also goes without me to various other things I don't feel like seeing. I wouldn't go to Hotel Mumbai because it just sounded depressing, and I wouldn't go to Us because I watched the trailer and went, Hell no, that's a horror movie! (I did go see Get Out after being assured that it wasn't *really* a horror movie.). I think I mentioned before that I wouldn't go see Glass because I hadn't seen Split, but actually I don't think I missed anything on that one, anyway.

I used to go to movies alone, too, but I hardly ever do any more. I think partly it's because the window before things come out on video has gotten so short that I don't bother, in general. The only movie I can remember going to alone in recent years is Doctor Strange, and that was mostly because it was on a weekend when Rob was out of town. I mostly care about going to the theater to see superhero movies and other big-spectacle kinds of things - Star Wars, etc - otherwise I just figure I can wait and watch them on TV in a month or two. (On the movies I really like, of course, I do both - I go see them two or three times at the theater and then see them more times at home, as well. I watched Infinity War twice in one night, recently. But then I'm in ramp-up-to-Endgame mode at the moment. Barely more than a week away now! We have our tickets and everything.)

In non-movie news, I was going to do a medical update but really there's not a whole lot new to say, anyway. Quick version: I've had a consult at MDAnderson, and I have another one with the RadOnc doctor in a week or so, so the radiation treatments will get underway before too long, I guess. I can't say I'm feeling a great hurry about that, but I know it needs doing.

Spreaking of which, right now I gotta go do my taxes. Ugh.

Well, the medical update first, which is really that there is no update, since I still haven't started with the radiation. I don't guess there's a tearing hurry about it, really, but I've been bugging various people about it and I'm not going to drop it, don't worry. I'm still healing a bit anyway so actually I wasn't mentally ready to start that yet anyway.

We went to see Captain Marvel and both of us really liked it more than we expected to and we're going to see it again tomorrow since there's really nothing else to see anyway. I don't think I really have anything profound to say about Captain Marvel though. (Except maybe that Brie serving popcorn in uniform was kind of the cutest thing ever.) Now I'm counting down to Endgame on my birthday. (I will be 59, y'all. I'm kinda freaking out about that.)

Movies seen in 2019:

1. Bumblebee

2. Into the Spider-verse

3. Lego Movie 2

4. Captain Marvel

This is part 3 of a series - here is part 1 and part 2.

I've seen three movies since the first of November:

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald - man, I don't know what to say about this movie. I didn't totally hate it. It's not great but it was interesting, you know? I think a lot of the problem is that they tried to pack way too much plot into one movie. It was really hard to follow. I got a lot of it but some of it I had to just kind of let wash over me - some of that was things that just flat didn't make sense, or that I didn't have enough information to follow - probably some of each. I have to say I would rather somebody else was playing Grindelwald - it's distracting, to me. I would like somebody who I can forget for a minute at a time who the actor is. - Anyway, I liked the first movie SO much more, so that sucks. I'm not a good enough script doctor to diagnose exactly what went wrong here, but I do think it's possible they could still get the train back on track with this. And anyway, it didn't make that much money in the US but it was doing well overseas, so I don't think they're going to stop now.

Widows - Great cast, really good movie, but a little on the depressing side! I knew that going in, though. What I've been saying about it is, don't go into it expecting a feel-good heist movie like Ocean's 8. They are both female-led heist movies, yes, and I liked both of them, but they have a very VERY different vibe.

Ralph Breaks The Internet - here we're back to my usual "I liked this a lot" kind of review. A week out, I had to stop and think what the plot was, because I'd already forgotten. (Gal Gadot, that's what made me remember.) It's very cute, if not quite as good as the first one. (I was interested to see that Pamela Ribon co-wrote. Apparently she was the one who came up with the Disney Princess idea.)

We didn't have anything we especially wanted to see this weekend - I couldn't talk Rob into The Favorite, and honestly I didn't try super-hard, I wasn't really in the mood. I'm sure we'll see it eventually. Rob went to see a horror movie (The Possession of... somebody) - he said it wasn't completely terrible. Next week I'm sure we'll see the Spiderverse thing. I'm not a huge Spiderman fan but I gather this is a different kind of Spiderman movie than the other fifteen versions that have come out in recent years. And we already have plans to go see Aquaman right before Christmas with my sister and B-I-L.

Well, the last time I talked about movies here was apparently in May. (Did we go see Infinity War three weeks in a row? Good lord.) I've been keeping a list that I think is more or less complete. So here's a sentence or two about everything we've been to see since that. I feel like I haven't been going to that many movies but this is actually a surprisingly long list, so if I get sleepy before I get through this, it may end up having two parts.

(Also take it as read that Rob is going to almost all the horror movies, meanwhile. I always think I should keep track of that, too, but then I forget.)

Solo - huh, actually, I have written down "Solo x2" so I guess that means we saw it twice. I'd completely forgotten that. We didn't hate it, obviously. I didn't totally love it but I did really like parts of it. I certainly didn't think it was as awful as everybody was making it out to be. (Favorite part: Phoebe Waller-Bridge's robot)

Ocean's 8 - liked it a lot, I'm totally ready to see it again. I wasn't sure ahead of time how much I would like it but I really did. For one thing, I'm a total Met Gala junkie so I loved that part. I loved that Cate and Sandra were quietly a couple. I liked Awkwafina, I liked Rihanna, I liked all of it, really.

Incredibles 2 - really liked this, too, but honestly I don't totally remember it too well, months later. Obviously it's time to see this one again, too.

Ant-Man & the Wasp - I liked this, too. It wasn't as good as the first one but it was pretty good. (I did have a definite gripe with the Infinity-War twist in the credits, but it does make sense. It's just depressing.) I liked the woman who played Ghost, whose name I keep forgetting - and I've already looked it up more than once so I'm not going to go look it up again. (It was Hannah! and something with a hyphen! John-Kamen, something like that, I refuse to go look, seriously. I do know that she was also in Ready Player One.)

(Side note: if you're put off by me repeatedly saying, "I liked this... and I liked this too," then you're probably just never going to like what I have to say. Basically, I only go see movies these days if I'm convinced I'm going to like them decently well. If not, I just don't bother.)

Mission Impossible Fallout - we always go see these movies - at least in recent years - and I always enjoy them and then later I can't remember them at all. I don't particularly like Tom Cruise, and when they started making the MI movies with him (years ago now, I guess!) I was profoundly uninterested, and early on we didn't go see them. But somewhere along the line the reviews started getting better - I think it may have been along about #4, but it's hard to be sure since, as I said, the plots are all pretty interchangeable, and I can't tell them apart except as "the one where they're rappelling up & down the building" and things like that.

OK, I'll pick up with BlackKKlansman (I don't know if I've got the capitalization quite right on that) tomorrow.

I always have good intentions about posting during the "off-season" (meaning, in this case, the rest of the year other than in December) but I don't have a good habit of coming here to read all the time, and so I forget. But here's a movie catch-up post, at least!

I think this is all the movies I've seen in a theater since I last posted:

Black Panther
A Wrinkle in Time
Ready Player One (twice)
Infinity War (3 times)

(mostly unspoilery movie chat below)

I loved Black Panther and I am glad it's out on video because I'm more than ready to see it again. (I really wanted to see it again before Infinity War but somehow we didn't get around to it.)

A Wrinkle in Time was... interesting, I'm tempted to say, and if that isn't damning with faint praise I don't know what is. No, I enjoyed it, but I didn't really love it. I don't think it quite captured whatever magic that is that made me enjoy the book so much. (I've never been sure what made me enjoy the book so much, really, either. When I first read it - as a teenager, I think - the religious aspect went whoosh! right over my head. If you must make your story about a battle between the forces of good and evil, calling it the dark against the light seems to be the way that bothers me least.) But it was well-made and really incredibly beautiful, and the girl who played Meg was awesome and it certainly wasn't a waste of time. Oh, and Rob wanted to go see it - I didn't have to drag him in - but he hadn't read the book and didn't know what to expect and I think was a bit baffled... no, that's the wrong word but I can't really think of a better one. It's not that he didn't understand it. It's more that, well, I'm not sure what he was expecting but what he got wasn't it.

As far as Ready Player One - well, first of all, when we saw the trailer, Rob loved that it was set in Columbus. (Ohio doesn't turn up a lot in movies.) Neither one of us knew anything about the book and I wasn't sure I wanted to see it until the reviews started coming out and since they seemed good overall we decided to go. And both of us really liked it a lot. (You may have guessed that from the fact that we saw it twice.) I went and grabbed the book and read it in between the first time and the second time. I gather not everybody loved the book, but I actually liked it a lot. And it's one of those movies where there's a ton of stuff to look at and those are the ones I'm most keen to see over and over, a lot of the time.

And that leads us into Infinity War, which is equally that way, and it's imperfect and of course there's all that stuff that I won't spoil because I feel like it's been talked to death anyway, but I still loved it. Somewhat to my surprise. We went Sunday for the third time (mostly because there was nothing else Rob wanted to see) and I really wanted to go again, but now I feel like I don't need to see it again for a while. (I'm sure I'll watch both of the above Marvel movies on video over and over, because that's what I always do. I watched Dr Strange in the early hours of this morning, as a matter of fact.)

Oh! and we got our first HD-TV last week (I almost said HGTV), and there was a lot of drama about it (which I did talk about on Twitter but don't have the energy to repeat right now) but we did get it working after several trips to Walmart, etc, for cables, and I love it. We only got a 40" one because we're in an apartment and don't need anything bigger, but boy is the picture beautiful. We've been using my mom's old (decidedly non-HD) TV all this time and it just kept working until finally dying last week. I had suspected it was coming soon and I was ready for that change, more or less. So now we can watch Netflix on the TV and everything (instead of on the computer like we've been doing) and I feel like we have finally entered the 21st century on that score.

I think I intended to talk about baseball tonight. Or about television - I think that was because I talked about movies last night and television seemed like the next progression or something. My brain is kind of pinging all over tonight, though, so I don't know what you're gonna get.

If you read the entry from yesterday, but didn't read the comment that was added late in the day, MissMeliss reminded me that the actual title of the book that I was talking about at the end of that entry (although it's not the original title) is normally And Then There Were None, not Ten Little Indians as I was thinking. I think I just had the name for that poem - as I think I must have learned it - stuck in my head. And I read the Wikipedia entry and she is also correct that there's no Poirot, but I won't say any more than that about the plot. It's summarized at that link if you want to know. I can't believe I forgot, actually, now that I have been reminded, but in my defense I think it was somewhere in the range of 30-40 years ago that I last read it.

What I was going to say about television, really, is that I don't seem to be any good at binge-watching. I can watch maybe two or three episodes of something and that's usually where I'm ready to stop. And then I don't come back to them for weeks or months or sometimes more. (I'm still on season two of Agents of SHIELD, for example.) I'm trying to finish Iron Fist, even though it's not all that good, just to be completist, I guess, so I can eventually watch The Defenders. But I also haven't finished season two of Daredevil so if I'm really being completist I need to go finish that also. (I was watching Daredevil with Rob, but I think he's lost interest and I should give up on that part.)

I had watched one episode of Victoria and one episode of The Crown, and I liked them both a lot, but I had never gotten back to watching either of those. But last month when Rob went to Ohio to see his brother, I went to see my aunt for the weekend - she's always telling me to come visit more and I hardly ever do - and she and I bonded over The Crown. She is apparently a big watcher of Masterpiece Theater, and so she had seen Victoria (season 1, I mean) but she somehow had not heard about The Crown even though she has Netflix and when we looked it popped up on her recommendations. So we watched the first episode - I'd already seen it but I figured I could use reminding anyway - and then went on and watched a couple more. And I did watch some more of Victoria since then and I need to go ahead and watch some more of both of those because they're really good.

I really don't watch much series TV, when it comes down to it. The Netflix Marvel shows are probably the most of anything I've watched in ages. (Rob & I both watched one season of Daredevil and then Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and part of season 2 of Daredevil before we played out on that.) We watch a lot of MSNBC and a lot of baseball for six months a year - or seven, this year. (I'll probably come back to that subject another day. It's all I can do not to start typing about it in all caps, shall we say. If you read my Twitter you've undoubtedly already seen that once or twice.) ...And so those two between them take up a lot of TV time. We both work the evening shift and when we get home we typically watch Rachel Maddow and then Rob goes for a walk and I usually start watching baseball, if it's that time of year. (Sometimes I watch the whole game and sometimes I don't. Since I generally know already whether they won or lost that plays into how much I watch, quite often - if it was a blowout and they lost, for example, I sometimes don't bother at all! But this year that didn't happen much.)

Anyway, Rob watches stuff that I don't - I stay up much later than he does, and he gets up much earlier and watches a lot of TV then, I think. (Our bedroom walls are thick so we don't hear each other doing this unless the TV is turned up very very loud.) Rob also watches The Walking Dead (and now Fear the Walking Dead also) on Sundays but I gave up on that after season 2 - it wasn't really the violence per se, it was the worrying about who was gonna die next - and so now I go in the bedroom and let him watch and come out for Talking Dead afterwards. I can deal with Talking Dead just fine, a nice nerdy show that I know what to do with.

I have some screenshots of one game (Portal Knights) and I'm also still playing Marvel Heroes a bit. In Marvel Heroes (I almost said Marvel Knights - I think that's a comic, right? but it's not the name of either game) June is "birthday" month in MH and is marked with lots of giveaways, so that's always fun, and because of that I've gone back to playing more. I've already used some of those goodies to unlock some of the heroes that still were locked - Doctor Doom, Emma Frost, Cable - and then by coincidence, I got a "enhanced" costume which turns Spider-Man into Spider-Gwen (one of the two female versions), so to use that, I have to finally unlock Spider-Man, which I've avoided doing all this time. You unlock characters using Eternity Splinters, which are falling like rain (more or less) right now, so it won't take me long. Spider-Man has never interested me all that much and he's one of a handful of characters that are more expensive than the rest, which is why I haven't bothered before. (There are something like 62 heroes total right now, and I have over 50 unlocked. In fact the Spider-Gwen costume was not part of the birthday stuff, but rather was a reward for having leveled 50 heroes to maximum. I have a couple unlocked but still not leveled, which means I only have maybe 8 left to unlock after Spider-Man. But with several still to level that's not going to be a priority for a while.)

Switching over to the other game, Portal Knights has been in beta for a while and just came out very recently, and Col has been playing it but I was involved in Marvel Heroes and wasn't paying too much attention. Then it went on sale and Col bought it for me as a gift because he thought I would like it, which was really nice of him! It's sort of like Trove in that it's got the Minecraft-style building component and it's also got some questing/PvE to it - a little more actual story than Trove had, as I recall.

This house was already here in the game, although it required some repairs. It's considerably more elaborate than anything I would have built on my own. There was a lake between the spawn point and the house, so I built a bridge. The lake was originally higher than this, but I think I accidentally drained a lot of the water out! (Then I planted crops all over the former lake bottom.) - If you know what to look for, there's also some creatures at the back of that water area. The orange things are slime creatures and there's probably some turtles and a sort of mobile plant thing. I think they were originally spawning up at the top behind where they are now, and they migrated. (I built a doohickey which I can't remember the proper name of - and you can't see it because it's around on the back side of the house - which keeps anything from spawning near it. I put it up because tired of having angry turtles in my virtual front yard! It covers a pretty big area, so I think those guys are probably spawning right at the edge of its range. They don't come near enough to bother me where they are now.)

Here's a shot inside the house that's really not too interesting. I didn't make much in the way of changes to this floor - I just added some chests and stuff for storage.

That thing on the wall is a trophy - that's the head of one of the mobile plants that I was talking about. This is not a big room, you're seeing most of it. There are stairs which originally just went up, and a fireplace, and there were originally some chairs which I moved.

(I was going to add more pictures to this, but I hit enter by accident (again!) and so I'll do the rest in a separate post later.)

(Sorry, hopefully this is not completely incoherent - certainly it's totally parenthesis-riddled - but I already posted it by accident so I'm going with it as is!!)

The beginning credits of GotG2 are the best thing in the movie. Maybe my favorite movie credits ever, actually. (I'd have to think about that some more, though.)

And apparently there's a reason for that. I read somewhere - one of the umpteen things about this I've read, and I tried to find it again and had no luck with that - that James Gunn has been working on that credits sequence since the original GotG movie came out - three years ago. Maybe he should have worked that hard on the rest of the movie.

Not that it's bad, it's not. But that opening credits really captures the - whatever it is, magic, I guess! - that made the first movie so extraordinary. And the rest of the movie is brilliant off & on but not consistently, and there was a long stretch when they're on Ego's planet (which I guess is just Ego, but that sounds weird) where I was flat-out bored for a while. Anyway, I did like it (and it's been a couple of weeks ago now so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details) and I definitely want to see it again. (Rob doesn't seem to be quite as enthusiastic but he never wants to rewatch stuff as much as I do, that's pretty normal for us.)

We actually have not been to see anything together since then. I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for Alien Covenant so Rob finally went by himself. (He came back laughing, he seemed to think it was pretty ludicrous.) Certainly no Baywatch for us. I was going to mention the Joss Whedon news bit that I just saw - not only is he apparently directing a Batgirl movie but he is doing the reshoots for Justice League since Snyder is not available. (I was watching that Kevin Smith YouTube thing, here. But if you want to know what happened with Zack Snyder, google it, because they didn't talk about it and and it's depressing as hell so I'm not going to either.)

I'm sure we will go to Wonder Woman next week, since (even though actually reviews are still embargoed) the general consensus seems to be positive. I adored Wonder Woman as a kid - I'm talking about 60s comics, not the 70s TV series, although I watched that too. (It comes on METV or someplace and I've seen a couple of those recently - for 70s TV it doesn't hold up all that badly. Although it's still pretty ludicrious.)

Well, the junk first of all: If you went to movies a lot in the '80s, like we did, this is a stupendously easy quiz. (A 50-question quiz that 11% of people get 100% right can't be too difficult, after all.) (I did have to guess on a couple, but they don't even make guessing terribly hard. I am kinda the queen of the educated guess.)

We went to see Rogue One again (still love it) and ate lasagne and watched the first episode of Stranger Things. That was our Christmas Eve. Honestly, it beats most Christmas Eves cold, at least the ones of recent years. Tomorrow we have to do the family stuff. I've washed my hair and I need to do my nails and I'm sure I'll think of ten other highly-important things I have to do before bedtime. I can't much make myself care, though.

Stranger Things was pretty awesome, although more of you probably know much more about it than I do. (Does that sentence make any sense at all? I'm not sure, but I'm leaving it like that anyway.) We finished Jessica Jones yesterday (also awesome) and I told Rob that we could watch Stranger Things next if he wanted before we go on to Luke Cage. I don't know that Rob knew anything at all about it, but *I* knew that he would love Stranger Things, it's totally right up his alley. (Speaking of '80s.) It's very, um, early Steven Spielberg crossed with Stand By Me. Or something like that.

Col and I played Marvel Heroes for a while. He is playing Luke Cage and is surprised that he likes it. I liked Luke too (not to mention that he's stupendously hot in Jessica Jones, but I hadn't seen that yet when I was playing him) so I'm not too surprised. Oh, having seen Jessica Jones TV now, I realized suddenly what she's wearing in the game, the other day - it's the "Jewel" superhero outfit that Trish is seen in the series trying to get her to wear. She's been standing talking to Ben Urich in Avengers Tower since I've been playing, and I always wondered what the hell that was she was wearing. (I believe you can also play Jessica as a team-up but I haven't tried it; I'm pretty sure she's wearing something else in that incarnation. And Ben Urich in this game is a younger-looking white guy, in contrast to the older black guy who's in the first season of Daredevil. Reconciling all this now that I've watched half - exactly half - of the existing Marvel Netflix stuff is kind of weird.)

Also (still on the Marvel Heroes track) I spent some money on costumes last week and I now have the girl version of Thor and a couple of Christmas costumes (Daredevil and Squirrel Girl). I'm probably going to feel like I wasted my money on Christmas costumes later but I really like the female Thor. There are actually two female Thors; the other one is Jane Foster (who I think becomes Thor for a while in the comics?) but the one I'm using is the Earth X version, which I really know nothing at all about. She says something about Loki having tricked her into the new body (but she also says she kind of likes it.) Either I read somewhere or Col told me (I have no idea which) that this version, or maybe both versions, won't let anybody call her Lady Thor or anything like that; she's just Thor, still. That's about all I know about that, although I'm interested that they bothered to do two different female voices for Thor. He has a buttload of costumes, too (although not as many as Iron Man) - some of the male ones might have "enhanced" (aka different, rerecorded) voices, too, for all I know. I haven't paid much attention. But I tried playing regular Thor with the default costume and I stalled out about level 30-something. So I was hoping that the different take on Thor would propel me along, and it has - well, I'm still not all that far along in story progression but she hit level 60 tonight, so that's definitely an improvement. I'm not sure why it makes that much difference, exactly, but apparently it does.

OK, that's enough for tonight. I need to go do my nails. Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas, or other holiday/nonholiday of your choice. Or Christmas Eve Gift, as my grandma used to say. (Family phrase of unknown origin; I think I end up explaining that one pretty much every year.)

Actually, I've been watching stuff on YouTube about Rogue One off and on all night, but the last thing I watched was about The Force Awakens, and it's awfully good.
https://youtu.be/nVZGUV77aRg
It's not a series I was aware of before, I may be watching the Fury Road one next.

I started this one last night and finished it tonight (and Rob watched a good bit of it with me, too) but I still can't believe I sat through the whole thing: an HOUR AND A HALF of Kevin Smith and some guy I've never seen before rhapsodizing about Rogue One (and in case you're not otherwise paying attention, this is WAY SPOILERIFIC).
https://youtu.be/uLljgEUPmRQ
(Obviously I've never seen that series before, either, or I would already know who this other dude is.)

I watched some other stuff: nail polish, more nail polish, music videos (which I won't link to til I get to the next Music Advent post, probably tomorrow), somebody obsessively breaking down the GotG vol.2 trailer, more Rogue One stuff. Way too much YouTube, clearly. Oh well, I'll get over it in a few days, I imagine.

Oh, and I forgot to say that we watched two more episodes of Jessica Jones, before all of this. (Hey, it wasn't on YouTube, at least!) I think we have three or four more hours of that left, I've lost track.

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Entries tagged with marvel

Christmas approacheth!

Are we Wicked?

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