Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Day 295: More of the same. I did rally enough to go to work (from home) today, and will for the rest of the week. I am extremely fortunate in that I have a job where I can easily take sick days when I need, and am also able to work from home on days when I’m not sick enough to take a sick day but still sick enough to not want to risk bringing this into the office. Too many people don’t have those options.
Day 294: Day four of this head cold, and very over it…but it’s obviously not over me just yet. Watching two Marvel movies in one day maybe was a bit much inanity, but it was also right about the level of braining I could manage. Apparently other people at work have been hit with this bug, and it’s nothing more than a doozy of a cold, possibly exacerbated because it’s the first cold I’ve had in around four or five years at this point.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Amusing and weird, and a decent way to wrap up the GotG trilogy, but man, do I feel like I just watched two and a half hours of MidJourney AI images. (And why is it so hard for anyone to make a nice, tightly edited, 90-minute movie anymore, anyway?)
The Marvels (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mostly suffers from the same problem that just about all of Marvel’s recent efforts are suffering from: too much required backstory. There’s simply no way to really understand everything if you haven’t already devoted hours upon hours to watching all the various series and movies that lay the groundwork for whatever is happening here (or even if you have, but don’t have an encyclopedic memory for it all and perfect recall).
The movie is at its best when it’s just the three primary women interacting with each other, whether the strained relationship between Danvers and Rambeau, or Khan fangirling over meeting Captain Marvel, or the three of them experimenting with their entangled powers. Iman Vellani in particular continues to be a delight as Kamala Khan. And the space station evacuation scene was an unexpected bit of hilarity.
But the action scenes are overly frenetic and difficult to follow, there’s yet another generic and barely fleshed out villain, and a whole lot of flashy effects that are pretty, but not much more than that.
On the whole, not as bad as some have said, but not as good as either the Ms. Marvel series or the Captain Marvel film.
Day 293: Still sick; another day of doing as little as possible. Read a bunch of my current book (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars), finished season four of For All Mankind (very good), and watched The Last Voyage of the Demeter (not very good). At this point, unless a miracle occurs overnight, I think tomorrow’s going to be a sick day instead of heading back to work.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023): ⭐️⭐️
A clever concept that’s poorly executed. Not creepy, not scary, no real suspense because we know the end result, really needed about half an hour edited out (it dragged rather than being suspenseful), and then a ridiculous ending that seems like they’re trying to set up a sequel, which makes no sense. Very glad we didn’t spring for this one in the theater.
Day 292: Well, it’s official. I’m sick. This sucks. It’s a cold (or, at least, I haven’t popped positive on my COVID tests), and I don’t like it one bit.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This one took long enough to hit reasonable rental prices that we’d lost track of what the reviews said, so we weren’t sure what to expect, and after other recent attempts to resurrect old franchises that didn’t work out so well, weren’t terribly optimistic. Happily, we enjoyed this more than we expected to. It was amusing, the kids weren’t annoying, the effects nicely called back to the originals, and we appreciated that the plot picked up on a lot of the original film (for us, it wasn’t “too much fan service”, it was continuing the story). Glad we finally got around to giving it a shot.
(That said, I will continue to be annoyed that the whiny, racist, sexist, childish backlash against the 2016 film means we don’t get to continue that storyline. That I enjoyed this one and am now looking forward to the next one doesn’t mean I wouldn’t happily swap them out for a timeline where the 2016 film got continued instead.)
17/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
More of the same, and so far, my overall opinion remains unchanged. Entertaining enough adventures, just not anything particularly amazing. On the one hand, friends have told me this is where the series really starts to pick up steam; on the other hand, when after three books I’m still just saying, “well, it’s okay…”, this may be the last of these I dive into for now. Maybe curiosity will bring me back later on? We’ll see.
Day 291: Woke up this morning with a bit of a scratchy throat and cough. While it was minor, we didn’t want it to become anything major, and since we didn’t have any real plans for the day, we just decided to “not”. Stayed in bed, read books (I got through most of a Dresden Files novel), watched TV (just one episode of the latest season of For All Mankind to go), napped, and let my body do what it needed to to, hopefully, not develop into anything worse. At the end of the day, I’m still kinda horky and mildly gross, but I’m not any worse, so we’ll just see how tomorrow goes.