Category: movies

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.

Shin Godzilla

I finally got around to watching Shin Godzilla today. It’s a weird film, but it’s definitely worth watching. I started hearing interesting stuff about it last year, including good reviews from RogerEbert.com and Ars Technica.

It’s not a movie that I think mainstream American audiences would ever enjoy or understand. There are a lot of scenes of politicians and/or scientists sitting around conference room tables, talking. These scenes are well-done, and not at all boring, if you can keep up with the subtitles. (They’re talking really fast, so you do have to pay attention to keep up.)

The CGI effects are good, but not quite up to typical modern “Hollywood blockbuster” standards. Godzilla’s initial form is pretty weird-looking, but the creature evolves into something more closely resembling the typical Godzilla fairly quickly. Overall, I found the “Godzilla destroying Japan” scenes to be well-done and engaging (though occasionally funnier than they were probably supposed to be).

There’s a lot of stuff in the movie related to Japanese politics, particularly post-Fukushima. A lot of the political stuff reminds me of a manga I read years ago, the name of which I can’t remember right now. At any rate, it’s a lot more ambitious thematically than a typical monster movie.

I bought the movie on Blu-ray; I could really have gotten away with just renting it though. I may watch it again at some point, but really seeing it once was enough for me.

The Last Jedi and the tired old nerd

I really want to see Last Jedi this weekend, but I’m kind of sick, so I don’t want to sit through a loud, two and a half hour movie. (Also, it’s snowing out and very cold.) I checked Amazon to see if they had the novelization, thinking that maybe reading that would be a good substitute, but it’s not coming out until March 2018! That seems kind of crazy to me. I know most movies don’t even get novelizations anymore, but if you’re going to do one, it should come out at the same time as the movie.

When I was a kid, I didn’t get out to see a lot of movies, so my first exposure to many popular movies of my youth was through either the novelization, the comic book adaptation, or the Mad magazine parody. You don’t see a lot of novelizations or comic book movie adaptations anymore. (And Mad is only published bimonthly now.) I also remember that my first exposure to the plot of the original Star Wars movie was through an article in Famous Monsters magazine. I remember it being just basically a plot summary, with a bunch of stills from the movie. (They apparently published a Star Wars Spectacular in 1977, which may have been what I read, but I’m not sure.)

Anyway, I feel like I need an illustrated plot summary or a comic book version or something for the new Star Wars movie. The reviews have all been very good, including the NY Times review. (Though I haven’t read it all the way through yet.)

I also noticed that a graphic novel adaptation of the last Star Wars movie, Rogue One, came out just this week. It looks kind of weird. I think it’s supposed to be a “YA” version or something? I guess if I decide that I really need to read a Star Wars comic this weekend, I could buy that one.

Moustache on the Orient Express

From Film Comment’s review of Murder on the Orient Express:

Poirot’s whiskers are more like a moustache within a moustache, or one set of whiskers grafted onto another. It could almost have been designed by H.R. Giger, if he did facial hair. The thing is so huge, and the corridor of the Orient Express so narrow, that it’s a wonder that Poirot doesn’t carve deep grooves along its exquisitely lacquered wooden walls as he passes.

I kind of want to see this movie, since I love both Agatha Christie and Kenneth Branagh, but I’m not sure I can take two hours of that mustache. I want to have an open mind, but it’s not easy for me to accept anyone but David Suchet (and his nice little mustache) as Poirot.

Labor Day

Things I did this weekend:

  1. Watched four bad movies, with RiffTrax commentary.
  2. Finished reading a very nerdy Star Trek novel.
  3. Read a few random comic books.
  4. Backed up my desktop PC with Macrium and my Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner.

And that’s really about it. I didn’t go anywhere, or do anything particularly productive or useful. I’d been running a number of vaguely interesting and variously ambitious plans through my head over the last few weeks, ranging from NYC museum visits to flying to Atlanta for Dragon Con, but I decided to punt and just relax. I made one half-hearted stab at watching a Pluralsight video, but I couldn’t get into it. I feel a little guilty about that, but at least I didn’t just give up completely and binge-watch NCIS all weekend. (That has happened. But not recently…) And I did manage to hit my Apple Watch activity goals every day, I think, so there’s that.

Doctor Strange

One of the nice things that usually happens whenever Marvel or DC release a new superhero movie is that they reprint some old comics featuring that particular hero. Also, Comixology generally runs a sale discounting some old books featuring that hero. I’m a fan of Doctor Strange, so I’ve been keeping an eye on this.

Marvel has recently released a gigantic Doctor Strange Omnibus: impressive, but expensive. It’s a hardcover reprint of the original Lee/Ditko run. Then there’s a new Doctor Strange Epic Collection. This volume collects some of the comics from the late sixties and early seventies, including work by Barry Windsor-Smith. I haven’t bought either of these, but I might pick up the Epic Collection.

The book I’m most excited about, though, is a new collection of P. Craig Russell’s Doctor Strange work, Dr. Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen?. Russell has long been my favorite comic book artist. This book includes the 1996 one-shot that shares the same unwieldy title as this collection. I think I still have a copy of it, but it’s nice to have it in a collection too. It’s a really good story with great art by Russell. It also includes Russell’s 1976 Doctor Strange Annual, which I used to have a copy of, but probably donated when I was getting rid of most of my collection. The 1996 story is basically a reworked version of the 1976 Annual, but really it’s a whole different thing. It started out, I think, as a project to reprint the Annual with some additional pages, but it wound up being a whole new story with completely new art and a new script. So both stories are interesting to read. The rest of the book reprints a hodgepodge of stories that were either penciled or inked by Russell. They’re a mixed bag, but a few of them are interesting, including one with art by Russell and Marshall Rogers, one of my other favorite artists. I bought this book at my local comic shop, for the full $30 cover price, as soon as I saw it. (It turns out that I could have gotten the Comixology version for only $15, but it’s nice to have the hard-copy version.)

Meanwhile, Comixology is running two Doctor Strange sales this weekend, one on single issues and one on collections. I’ll probably pick up two or three of the collections that I don’t already have.

Oh, and hey, the movie seems to be doing well on Rotten Tomatoes, so I should probably go see it. Maybe tomorrow, if I can talk myself into leaving the apartment.

 

Civil War

I went to see Civil War yesterday afternoon. (I took a half-day off from work.) I enjoyed it a lot. I like that the Marvel film universe has matured to the point where they can just throw a bunch of heroes into a movie and not feel like they need to recount everyone’s back story. The film is loosely based on Marvel’s Civil War series from about ten years ago. (I was surprised when I checked that and realized how long ago it was. Time is just flying by…)

I had read that series, and some of the tie-in books, when they came out, and I had mixed feelings about the event as whole, though parts of it are quite good. In particular, I liked J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man tie-in. There’s a really good sequence that’s referenced in the movie, though in a different context and with the dialog coming from a different character. There’s a good article about it here, with the original comic pages included.

Spider-Man is included in the film, on loan from Sony, which is kind of neat but also kind of ridiculous. There’s an article from the LA Times about how this happened, and how hard it was to arrange to “borrow” the character from Sony. Spider-Man’s appearance does actually add something useful to the movie: the perspective of a new, young, hero who hasn’t interacted with all the “big shots” in the Marvel universe, like Cap and Iron Man. And of course some typical light-hearted Spider-Man banter.

The movie is quite long, almost two and a half hours, but it holds up pretty well over that length. I think that’s a little too long for a superhero movie. A tighter two-hour movie would have been better. It will probably work well on home video though, where you can pause it and take a break, or watch it in two or three sittings.

Kurosawa on TCM

Earlier this week, TCM had a little marathon of Akira Kurosawa movies. I caught them all with a WishList search that I set up when I first got my TiVo Bolt. I’m still really liking the Bolt. I don’t think I could go back to the cable company DVR, and I hope I don’t ever have to. TiVo might get acquired by another company soon. If they do, hopefully they’ll keep making new hardware and supporting their existing hardware.