Catchy Name Needed

1. Rogue One (a third time, I'd already seen it twice)
2. Hidden Figures
3. Lego Batman
4. Get Out
5. Logan
6. Beauty & the Beast
7. Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2
8. Wonder Woman (twice)
9. Spider Man Homecoming
10. Dunkirk (twice)
11. Valerian & the City of 1000 Planets
12. Logan Lucky
13. Blade Runner 2049
14. Spirited Away (first time I'd seen it on a big screen)
15. Thor Ragnarok (twice)
16. Murder on the Orient Express
17. Coco
18. The Last Jedi
19. Jumanji

I've seen two repeats this January, too, for the record, The Last Jedi and Dunkirk. I said this on Twitter but I'll say it here, too: I highly recommend seeing Dunkirk on a big screen if you're interested in seeing it at all. (IMAX would probably be even better.) Since it's Oscar-nominated it's making the rounds again so we decided to go one more time.

Again, I haven't posted about movies in ages - since I said the same thing several months ago. The only movie I'm sure I saw in August or September is Logan Lucky, which I really liked. I kept saying the best way to explain it was as a redneck Ocean's Eleven. But I think that doesn't do it justice. It's funny and it has great actors and there's very little car racing even though a lot of it takes place at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Definitely worth catching somewhere when you get a chance.

I can't remember anything else. I refused to go see IT - Rob went twice. I did actually read most of the book once (it's 1100 pages long) but I quit before I got to the very end because it was just sort of dragging on and it was giving me nightmares. Horror is just not my thing, in general. (Apparently King wrote it during the period when he was doing drugs, which explains a lot. I didn't know about that 25 years or so ago when I read it.)

And then this weekend we went to see Blade Runner 2049, which I also really liked. Or maybe I should say loved. I always loved the old movie as well, but in recent years I quit rewatching it because the way that Decker treats Rachael now seems very sexist. In 1982 it didn't bother me at all - in fact I thought it was very romantic. I grant that the new one does seems nearly as male-gaze-ish in some ways but I still liked it. It built on the old one and yet was different. And it was so beautiful. I didn't even think it seemed particularly long. (Rob got up and went to the bathroom twice but I never did, partly just because I didn't want to miss anything.)

I was thinking about seeing the first one in 1982, when it first came out, over the weekend. I think I saw it at Dobie Mall first, and then later I went to see it on a double-bill (which was not common even then) with The Wrath of Khan, which came out the same year. That was the big theater, I think the Hancock Theater in Austin. It was the only place (other than the Paramount, and this was before the Paramount was refurbished, I think) that hadn't been carved up into multiplexes. One of the people I went with was a male friend whose brother had recently died, and it didn't occur to me to warn him that death was a big theme in Blade Runner. I remember sitting next to him and he sat through the part with Rutger Hauer's big speech with tears just streaming down his face, and you know, that was in the macho era, it just wasn't done for men to cry, even in a movie theater. I've never forgotten that.

Neither of the movies I talk about above made any money to speak of. Logan Lucky cost something under $30 million and had almost broken even, the last I saw. I imagine Blade Runner will also break even in the end but it started out very badly, didn't it?


I noticed that I did the post about Hurricane Carla but I never said anything here about Harvey. That's probably mostly because I was posting everywhere else about it because everybody kept popping up and saying they were worried about us - until then I was just kind of saying random things because I was just sitting at home twiddling my thumbs. I can't say I was "unaffected" by Harvey because I was physically right in the middle of it, but other than missing some work (my boss tried to get me paid but since I am part-time it didn't fly - and I work for a state university so nobody's allowed to cheat on things like that) all that happened was that we were stranded, effectively, for several days. The water stopped down at the end of the block, but it didn't actually even come close to us. Where we live is in the middle of several creeks and that's why we were stranded. "Behind" us (at my back as I sit at the computer, but also further away from the main road) was where the some of worst flooding was in this area, but the feeder creeks of course also flooded so there were flooded roads in every direction. I don't know how much rain we actually got but it was a lot. I saw a NWS list that had a crossing that's only a couple of miles from us getting a total of 52" of rain. It might have been somewhat less than that here. But anyway, our power only went out for about an hour the first day and then stayed on after that, so we had a/c and computers and TV and we had plenty of food, so all things considered we were a-ok. (It started raining on Friday, the worst of it was on Saturday night/Sunday morning but it kept raining off and on until Tuesday, I think, and the sun didn't come out until maybe the end of the day Tuesday, and then only briefly. Rob got to the grocery store on Wednesday but we didn't have to go back to work until Friday. So I had an unexpected week off, in the end.)

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.)