Catchy Name Needed

I thought I would have one more movie - Little Women, or something - to add to my 2019 list before the end of the year, but no, I've had a stomach virus and I haven't been out of the house since Saturday, when I had to work. So the list ends with the second time for Star Wars on Christmas Day - which honestly I didn't enjoy as much as the first time.

Most years I have trouble picking a "best movie" but this year was the year of Endgame, totally, for me. I just watched it again the other day. That's my favorite, hands down. There's maybe some doubt about what would be #2, between Knives Out and the "second tier" of superhero movies, all of which were very good. - Captain Marvel, Spiderman: Far From Home, and Shazam! Oh, and I almost left out Ford vs Ferrari, which was really surprisingly good too.

OK, so a top 5:
1. Endgame
2. Captain Marvel
3. Ford vs Ferrari
4. Knives Out
5. Shazam!
(runner-up: Spiderman: Far From Home)

Movies seen at a theater in 2019:6. Shazam!
7. Avengers: Endgame (four times)
8. Field of Dreams (30th anniversary)
9. Spiderman: Far From Home
10. Ad Astra
11. Ghostbusters (35th anniversary)
12. Zombieland: Double Tap
13. Terminator: Dark Fate
14. Ford vs.Ferrari
15. Knives Out (twice)
16. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (twice)

(I read Rob the list of what he saw and I didn't, and he said probably Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was his favorite, and Midsommar second.)

I was leafing through my planner earlier, and I discovered that the list of movies that I've been adding to all year is missing a movie. Actually I thought briefly that it was missing two, but then I decided that no, it was only one.

Movies seen at a theater in 2019:6. Shazam!
7. Avengers: Endgame (four times)
8. Field of Dreams (30th anniversary)
9. Spiderman: Far From Home
10. Ad Astra
11. Ghostbusters (35th anniversary)
12. Zombieland: Double Tap
13. Terminator: Dark Fate
14. Ford vs.Ferrari
15. Knives Out

So the missing movie is Alita: Battle Angel. I think I liked Captain Marvel so much that I just forgot about poor Alita when I went to talk about movies after that. But it actually is a decent movie. It has lovely animation and the story was interesting, if apparently somewhat forgettable. I really don't think it deserved to be ignored as roundly as it was.

The movie I thought was missing but really wasn't was Once Upon a Deadpool, because we did see it, we just didn't see it in a theater. It was in the planner with a time like we actually went, and I knew I had seen it. What I think happened was that we were going to go, and we got there and the theater was incredibly crowded and we just turned around and left and went to dinner, or something. And then we figured out (or maybe we already knew) that Once Upon a Deadpool was available online by that time anyway. (If you don't know, Once Upon a Deadpool is just a PG cut of Deadpool 2 with a funny wrap-around starring Fred Savage - it's a Princess Bride send-up, see. It's cute if those things are in your wheelhouse, but it's not really a must-see.) So we just rented it the next day and watched it at home instead.


While I was writing down a list of movies (and also of TV and books that I'll hopefully get around to talking about later), I also made a list of what Rob went to see without me, because apparently I started writing that down too, at some point. I'm sure I've explained this numerous times: we've always done this, because he likes horror movies and I don't. And especially this year because of my health issues (something I've avoided talking so far this Holidailies but I'll probably get around to eventually) I've sent Rob off to the movies without me a whole lot. So I thought somebody might be interested in seeing the list I came up with. If not, just stop here!

(in chronological order, and I won't swear I'm spelling all these right)

• Escape Room
• Vice
• Glass
• The Prodigy
• Us
• Hotel Mumbai
• Pet Sematery
• The Curse of La Llorona
• Ma
• Midsommar (twice)
• Crawl
• Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
• It Chapter 2 (twice)
• Rambo (Last Blood, I think?)
• The Lighthouse
• Doctor Sleep

It's very possible I'm missing a couple - I just did bullet points instead of numbering but I'm pretty sure that list is already longer than the one above it. You can see that many of these are horror movies but not all. Some of those I just wasn't in the mood to go see, and some of them are because I wasn't feeling good at the time - sometimes a little of both. Luckily he doesn't mind going by himself. Some of the ones I skipped, I will probably watch eventually - pretty definitely with Once Upon a Time... maybe even Midsommar, although I'm still not really sure about that one.

Oh, and I showed him the list and he said that easily the worst of those movies was the new version of Pet Sematery.

 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.")

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.


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.

We went to see The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (I believe that's the correct full title). We liked the first one and we also liked Lego Batman, so this was a no-brainer. It has a very interesting plot and I actually can't talk about the part of it I'd like to talk about without spoiling stuff, so I will just tell you that I saw when I got home that it didn't make nearly as much money as it was predicted to - $35 million or so rather than the $55m or so the studio thought it would make.  (Here's the piece I was reading - it got an A- CinemaScore so it's not that audiences didn't like it.)

I notice that this is actually the first movie I've seen that was released this year. I feel like there just wasn't much released up to now that I was very interested in.




Movies seen in 2019:
1. Bumblebee
2. Into the Spider-verse
3. Lego Movie 2

 1. Bumblebee

I really liked Bumblebee a lot, quite honestly. I'm the wrong age to be nostalgic about Transformers - I was a young adult in the 80s - but they surrounded that with all kinds of other 80s nostalgia, and it's been well-established here that I love me some 80s, so that part made me happy. And it was well-made, so that always helps.

I'm starting to think I might ought to go back and see Aquaman again at some point, and see if I was just being cranky about it. That was right when I started getting really sick, so it's entirely possible. And it was awfully pretty to look at (and I don't just mean Jason Momoa).

But before I can do that I have to go back to work. I don't mind the work itself as much as I mind getting up earlier, darnit.

Does anybody else think 2019 just sounds more futuristic somehow? (I also pointed out to Rob that it's only one year now until we know what to call our decades again!)