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Avengers: Infinity War - The action sequences are really, really wasted on me. I can see why the movie broke people’s hearts, but it also felt extremely overstuffed with characters and plotlines. I don’t think it would work even a tiny bit for someone who didn’t already know the characters. I had trouble with the second half because the Blu-Ray player doesn’t save the settings for language/captioning between sessions. The player and remote make turning captioning on and switching languages processes that takes several steps (our DVD player has a button on the remote that does it). Scott consistently forgets to turn on captions when he’s starting up a movie.
Batman Ninja - This animated film is very, very much WTF?! I don’t exactly regret watching it, but I’m not entirely sure what the hell it was that I watched. Batman and his allies and a lot of villains get hurled back in time and through space to medieval Japan, and-- Well, the plot made less than zero sense. I lost track of how many Robin-adjacent characters there were, and I had a lot of logistical questions about who did what and why and how they had the resources and technology for it. Being from a future with more complicated technology does not equal being able to reconstruct that technology. I’m pretty sure that those were not the questions I was supposed to ask. Mostly, this was an opportunity for a bunch of Japanese animators to play with Batman.
Big Hero 6 TV season 1 - I expected this to be bad, but I ended up really enjoying all of the episodes. The plots were silly, just the sort of silly with heart and in keeping with the movie. Oh, and funny. Very definitely funny. Cordelia complained about the change in voice actors from the movie, but I didn’t really notice that. All three of us watched all of the episodes and would have been annoyed to miss even one.
The Hollow season 1 - This is a short Netflix cartoon series aimed at kids. I had a lot of fun with it. Three kids wake up in an almost empty room with no memories about who they are or how they got there. They figure out how to escape the room and then start exploring the place they emerge. I think that what’s going on is pretty immediately obvious to anyone with a little genre savvy, but I still enjoyed the kids trying to figure things out. I also kind of wanted the story to go on longer than it did.
The Innocents - I watched 30-40 minutes of this (the Blu-ray player won’t give me a time marker unless I go through an extra menu, so I’m not sure). It was pretty. The acting was good. I was bored and really didn’t care what was actually going on. I suspect it’s just not my genre.
Kong: Skull Island - DNF. I’m probably not supposed to have spent a lot of time wondering about the ecology of the island and how all the macrofauna find enough to eat. Or why the plant life doesn’t look as different from what I’m used to as the animal life. I gave up halfway through. I liked the setup in terms of complicated character motivations, and the actors were generally good, but this wasn’t my sort of movie.
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde - This didn’t have captioning, so I lost part of the dialogue. I still like the main character and the idea that she can use traditionally feminine means to succeed in traditionally masculine arenas.
A Little Romance - DNF. I got halfway through and liked the characters and acting a lot, but I was bored by what they were doing and found myself half-falling asleep. I think Cordelia would enjoy the movie, assuming it doesn’t have Mom-cooties. This is definitely a movie to watch with captioning on because the dialogue goes back and forth between English and French. I got this from the library under the mistaken impression that this was an animated movie and all in French.
Pacific Rim Uprising - Scott and I weren’t rabid fans of the first movie, and this one comes it at pretty much the same level. Decent popcorn flick. Scott laughed at me when I complained about the movie wasting so much time on jaeger-kaiju fights when there were more interesting things to do. I’m just not the audience for that part. There were a couple of deaths that peeved us both, and I did a full body twitch when they talked about the aliens wanting to ‘terraform’ the Earth to destroy the current biosphere. (I know. I know. It’s the word we’ve got and the word people understand. It just… Gah. I reacted the same way when it was used like that during an episode of Supergirl, and Cordelia mocked me.)
RWBY DVD 2-5 - I’m perceiving a plot expansion and upward creep in the number of character threads that makes me think of reading early Wheel of Time books. I have a feeling that this will just keep expanding forever. We’ve been enjoying the story and the world building. I like the lack of focus on romance.
The Shop Around the Corner - I kind of wanted to smack Jimmy Stewart’s character more than once during this after he figured out what was going on. Part of that was that he was exchanging letters with someone who worked for him and then using that to draw her in closer. The story was overall sweet, but that part grated.
Understanding Japan - A four DVD Great Courses lectures series by Professor Mark J. Ravina of Emory University. This was half history (going back to pre-history) and half cultural details.
Velvet Underground - DNF. This had two strikes against it. The first and biggest was having no close captioning. I could understand most of the dialogue if I was giving it my full attention, but I wasn’t interested enough to do that. The second strike against it was that I’m the wrong audience for the music and cultural references. I wasn’t particularly musically adventurous as a high school (early 80s) or university (late 80s) student and have large gaps in what I’m familiar with and appreciate/enjoy. I stopped listening to music on the radio in 1986 and mostly just listened to things I already owned. I just couldn’t make much headway in the movie and stopped 30 minutes in (the 25% mark). There was a third strike, but it was one that I’d have found a way around if I’d been intrigued enough-- The library has one copy of the DVD, and that has a scratch in it (well after where I stopped), so I’d have had to find an alternative source for the last third or so of the movie.
Wonderstruck - DNF. I couldn’t deal with the fact that most of the scenes were so dimly lit that it was easier to see my reflection in the laptop screen than what was happening in the movie. I got ten minutes in then threw up my hands and gave it up.
Batman Ninja - This animated film is very, very much WTF?! I don’t exactly regret watching it, but I’m not entirely sure what the hell it was that I watched. Batman and his allies and a lot of villains get hurled back in time and through space to medieval Japan, and-- Well, the plot made less than zero sense. I lost track of how many Robin-adjacent characters there were, and I had a lot of logistical questions about who did what and why and how they had the resources and technology for it. Being from a future with more complicated technology does not equal being able to reconstruct that technology. I’m pretty sure that those were not the questions I was supposed to ask. Mostly, this was an opportunity for a bunch of Japanese animators to play with Batman.
Big Hero 6 TV season 1 - I expected this to be bad, but I ended up really enjoying all of the episodes. The plots were silly, just the sort of silly with heart and in keeping with the movie. Oh, and funny. Very definitely funny. Cordelia complained about the change in voice actors from the movie, but I didn’t really notice that. All three of us watched all of the episodes and would have been annoyed to miss even one.
The Hollow season 1 - This is a short Netflix cartoon series aimed at kids. I had a lot of fun with it. Three kids wake up in an almost empty room with no memories about who they are or how they got there. They figure out how to escape the room and then start exploring the place they emerge. I think that what’s going on is pretty immediately obvious to anyone with a little genre savvy, but I still enjoyed the kids trying to figure things out. I also kind of wanted the story to go on longer than it did.
The Innocents - I watched 30-40 minutes of this (the Blu-ray player won’t give me a time marker unless I go through an extra menu, so I’m not sure). It was pretty. The acting was good. I was bored and really didn’t care what was actually going on. I suspect it’s just not my genre.
Kong: Skull Island - DNF. I’m probably not supposed to have spent a lot of time wondering about the ecology of the island and how all the macrofauna find enough to eat. Or why the plant life doesn’t look as different from what I’m used to as the animal life. I gave up halfway through. I liked the setup in terms of complicated character motivations, and the actors were generally good, but this wasn’t my sort of movie.
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde - This didn’t have captioning, so I lost part of the dialogue. I still like the main character and the idea that she can use traditionally feminine means to succeed in traditionally masculine arenas.
A Little Romance - DNF. I got halfway through and liked the characters and acting a lot, but I was bored by what they were doing and found myself half-falling asleep. I think Cordelia would enjoy the movie, assuming it doesn’t have Mom-cooties. This is definitely a movie to watch with captioning on because the dialogue goes back and forth between English and French. I got this from the library under the mistaken impression that this was an animated movie and all in French.
Pacific Rim Uprising - Scott and I weren’t rabid fans of the first movie, and this one comes it at pretty much the same level. Decent popcorn flick. Scott laughed at me when I complained about the movie wasting so much time on jaeger-kaiju fights when there were more interesting things to do. I’m just not the audience for that part. There were a couple of deaths that peeved us both, and I did a full body twitch when they talked about the aliens wanting to ‘terraform’ the Earth to destroy the current biosphere. (I know. I know. It’s the word we’ve got and the word people understand. It just… Gah. I reacted the same way when it was used like that during an episode of Supergirl, and Cordelia mocked me.)
RWBY DVD 2-5 - I’m perceiving a plot expansion and upward creep in the number of character threads that makes me think of reading early Wheel of Time books. I have a feeling that this will just keep expanding forever. We’ve been enjoying the story and the world building. I like the lack of focus on romance.
The Shop Around the Corner - I kind of wanted to smack Jimmy Stewart’s character more than once during this after he figured out what was going on. Part of that was that he was exchanging letters with someone who worked for him and then using that to draw her in closer. The story was overall sweet, but that part grated.
Understanding Japan - A four DVD Great Courses lectures series by Professor Mark J. Ravina of Emory University. This was half history (going back to pre-history) and half cultural details.
Velvet Underground - DNF. This had two strikes against it. The first and biggest was having no close captioning. I could understand most of the dialogue if I was giving it my full attention, but I wasn’t interested enough to do that. The second strike against it was that I’m the wrong audience for the music and cultural references. I wasn’t particularly musically adventurous as a high school (early 80s) or university (late 80s) student and have large gaps in what I’m familiar with and appreciate/enjoy. I stopped listening to music on the radio in 1986 and mostly just listened to things I already owned. I just couldn’t make much headway in the movie and stopped 30 minutes in (the 25% mark). There was a third strike, but it was one that I’d have found a way around if I’d been intrigued enough-- The library has one copy of the DVD, and that has a scratch in it (well after where I stopped), so I’d have had to find an alternative source for the last third or so of the movie.
Wonderstruck - DNF. I couldn’t deal with the fact that most of the scenes were so dimly lit that it was easier to see my reflection in the laptop screen than what was happening in the movie. I got ten minutes in then threw up my hands and gave it up.
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