Catchy Name Needed

 I'm pretty sure that I've only seen these three movies this month:

1. Spider-man: Homecoming
2. Dunkirk
3. Valerian (& the city of 1000 planets, whatever)

(I even looked at Box Office Mojo's list to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything. I did go see Wonder Woman for a second time but I believe that would probably have been in June.) 

Valerian is the one I just got home from seeing so I'll talk about that first. And I waited awfully late to do this so I'll have to hope I remember to talk about the other two later.

So, we had done some negotiating and we were going to see Valerian last Saturday and Dunkirk last Sunday. Rob wasn't super-happy about putting Valerian first - I was afraid that Dunkirk would have sold out on Saturday, and as it turned out they had it in the smallest of their theaters when we went Sunday so I may have been right about that, go figure. But then I was feeling under the weather on Saturday - allergies, I guess - and I knew Rob wanted to go see the Planet of the Apes movie, so I said "go ahead and see that instead" and he did. So Valerian got put off until this week. Since its box office is said to be terrible I didn't figure it was safe to wait any longer, and anyway next week I'll probably want to go see The Dark Tower (unless the reviews are terrible enough to talk me out of it) and we'd have that problem all over again. And I'm glad we went.

(In case you somehow get this far without seeing the title: there's at least ONE BIG SPOILER below!)

I said to Rob on the way home that the first half of the movie had most of the pretty CGI and the second half had most of the plot. That's oversimplifying but the first half had most of the 1000 kind of aliens stuff and then it sort of settled down to the plot after that. It's not really a great movie overall, but it's pretty and it's funny and I enjoyed it. Col and I were talking before I left (because he had already seen it so he was trying to tell me stuff without being spoilery) and we talked about Valerian (the character, that is, the male lead) being a letdown and whether it was the fault of the actor or if it was something that came from the director - and having seen it now, I'm inclined towards the latter opinion. Mostly that's because I didn't like him at all in the first half of the movie and while it's not really fair to say I had a huge turnaround in how I felt about him, I definitely quit thinking "what an asshole" quite so much in the second half and I wasn't completely unhappy with the fact that he appeared to have gotten the girl at the end. (Or at least he was about to get laid.)