So my mom and I drove out to Green Bay to visit family for Christmas again. To be technical, it was the week after Christmas, so more like New Years with a side of late Christmas.
Leaving Haslet.
Mom didn't know I took this, but if she did she'd be very upset.
Just inside Oklahoma.
Oklahoma has these cool rock walls from where the roads were cut into the hills.
Eventually it started snowing. We didn't know it at the time, but despite the fact that we were headed to Green Bay, this was the most snow we'd see the whole trip.
This is the 2nd-story back porch view from my Aunt/Uncle/cousins' house. You can kind of tell in the below photo that the bay is frozen over.
The basement is pretty cool.
And these are my cousins. Left-to-right: Rhiannon (Rio) (15), Sierra (19), Colin (17), and Celine (20).
They got a new kitten. He apparently liked my leg.
Celine also got a chameleon recently. I persuaded her to name him Pascal after the chameleon from Tangled.
Rio watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.
Even super nice/fancy restaurants in Green Bay have Packers logos on their cups.
My uncle Mike and Sierra completely dead asleep.
I played a bunch of X-Wing Miniatures with Uncle Mike. As you might imagine, it's a strategy game using miniatures. Uncle Mike really really likes strategy games, so he got really intense with it.
Celine with the cat.
Celine and Sierra after a long day.
Everybody watching Oculus. Which I did not finish because stressful.
I guess in hindsight Celine was on her phone a lot.
There actually wasn't a whole lot that went on during this trip. Most everyone was busy doing their own thing, so I spent most of my time alone playing video games at the house. Not that I'm complaining, exactly. I wasn't sad/angry/disappointed. It just kinda turned out to be a "pretty decent" trip rather than the usual "that was awesome" trip it usually is. Maybe if we'd actually been there on Christmas day it would have been better. I dunno.
Probably not, actually, because most of my cousins are getting older now. Celine and Sierra are both adults, with their own lives. College, working, driving places, seeing friends, et cetera. It's not that they didn't want to spend time with us while we were there, it's just that they have lives now. I kinda always figured it would happen, and I sort of figured I'd be more sad about it when it did. But I think it almost feels normal, really.
On the way back down to Texas, my mom asked me if there was anything I still wanted to do or anywhere I wanted to go. I said the only place I really wanted to go to was Metropolis, Illinois, a tiny town that's famous as "the home of Superman." Stephanie went there on a road trip earlier in 2014, so it was sort of fresh on my mind. But it was way out of our way, so it wasn't really an option.
When I got home, I found a Christmas present package from Stephanie. Inside was a deck of playing cards and some green rock candy... from Metropolis, Illinois.
I can't even explain how awesome that was. It was like finding a piece of a dream in reality. Also, the timing was just too perfect.
So yeah. That was my trip. Pretty uneventful, but nice. Sorry it took me a week to post this, but I've been out of the blogging habit. Oh well. Hopefully that will change.
So the last few weeks have been pretty interesting for me. Not interesting as in important, just a bunch of neat stuff that I'd like to go over in blog form this week. More detailed posts will come later, but for now I'll just summarize.
First of all, I went on Christmas vacation. Sort of. It was the week after Christmas. But it still counts, right? My mom and I drove up to Green Bay yet again to visit family. I'll do up a full post with images and details later.
While on said vacation, I discovered the American-made CG anime series RWBY (Pronounced "Ruby"). It's officially one of my favorite new shows.
Lastly, after combining the powers of several gift cards, I bought a Wii U console. It's pretty epic.
So yeah. More to come on all that later.
*Note: this blog post's title is not, in fact, a reference to T.S. Eliot, but rather the Halo 3 announcement trailer.
At this point, the TV season has returned in full. These are the shows I'm watching and what I think about them so far this season.
Returning Shows
Agents of SHIELD
It's... good. I can't say I'm terribly excited to see it every week, but it's enjoyable enough that I keep going back to it. It's unfortunate that the first season was so bland that most discussion about the show now consists of "well, it's better than the first season" and "I think the show is good now."
Arrow
It's three episodes into season 3 as of tonight and it's really good. Arrow has been doing a great job of walking a comfortable line between silly fun and legitimately good drama, having an over-the-top comic book fight scene one minute (motorcycle archery duel!) and then killing off a main character the next. Whether it's to just have fun or to see where the story's going next, I'm always looking forward to Arrow.
The 100
The 100 started off last season almost as "Lost with teenagers," but it quickly ended up being "Lost and Battlestar Galactica, with all the drama of both." Honestly, it's almost shocking how good the show is. It's not very uplifting, per se, but it's certainly gripping.
The Legend of Korra
This is the last season for Korra, and although it's sad to see it go, these last episodes are among the best.
New Shows
Gotham
I didn't expect to like Gotham as much as I do. That said, I still have a lot of problems with the show, largely because of the premise.
Gotham is really two stories: one focused on Jim Gordon working his way through the corrupt GCPD system, and the other being a neverending series of winks and nods toward the proper Batman storyline. "Oh look, here's Poison Ivy/The Riddler/Catwoman/The Penguin when they were younger." "Oh look, here's ten-year-old Bruce Wayne being weird."
I like the Jim Gordon stuff, but the simple fact is that you really can't "set up" the Gotham super-villains before they're actually supposed to be super-villains. It's almost getting into Smallville territory, where every character had shown up and been important before the main hero ever put on the suit.
So... it's good, I just have reservations about it.
The Flash
This. Show. Is. AWESOME.
Seriously, this is so much fun it's ridiculous. Unlike Gotham, Smallville, and most other modern live-action comic book shows out there, The Flash doesn't hold back on what it's doing. This is a straight-up SUPERHERO show, with no comic book character off-limits. Arrow has been doing a similar thing with the street-level characters like Green Arrow, Deathstroke, and Huntress, but The Flash has... well, the Flash. With plenty more heroes and villains on their way.
What's better is that The Flash is a fun show that's genuinely uplifting. None of that grim/gritty nonsense. But it's not devoid of drama, either. There's a genuine heartfelt element to The Flash that's all-too-rare in superheroes these days.
This is my favorite show on TV right now; I love it.
iTunes Radio has a Disney Princess station. When I discovered this, I was elated. Then I realized that I already own the vast majority of songs in the playlist.
I'm a really big fan of the original animated Sleeping Beauty, so I was really excited to see it brought to live-action. As it happens, it wasn't really the same story at all.
I really liked the movie overall, but I do have some big problems with it. I'm gonna go into crazy spoiler territory here, so if you haven't seen the movie yet (and it is worth seeing), don't read any further.
In Disney's Sleeping Beauty, the baby Princess Aurora is cursed by by Maleficent, "the mistress of all evil," who decrees that on her 16th birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. In order to protect Aurora, the Three Good Fairies are able to slightly alter the curse so that Aurora will not die, but rather fall into a permanent sleep. Additionally, the fairies take Aurora deep into the woods and raise her as their own daughter, hiding her away from Maleficent's gaze. As Aurora's 16th birthday nears, she meets and immediately falls in love with Prince Phillip. Meanwhile, Maleficent finally discovers where Aurora has been hidden, and the curse is finally fulfilled. Prince Phillip, with the aid of the Good Fairies, is able to slay Maleficent. Aurora is still comatose, but awakens when Phillip kisses her.
Maleficent is much more complicated, and I don't want to summarize the entire thing here. But essentially, in this new movie, Maleficent replaces Three Good Fairies and Prince Phillip. Those characters still exist in Maleficent, but they're entirely useless. The Three Fairies completely fail in their task in every conceivable way; they add absolutely nothing to the story. Aurora herself seems to not even care that they exist. Where Prince Phillip's romantic kiss broke the spell in the original movie, Maleficent's change of heart and motherly love broke it in this one. Maleficent takes on the motherly traits of the fairies as well as the heroic traits of Phillip, meaning that those characters are rendered worthless. Even Aurora herself isn't much of a character, though that's not much of a change from the original. And in order to make Maleficent an anti-hero rather than a full villain, there must be someone even more evil than she is. King Stefan takes on that role, being nearly as all-consumingly evil as Maleficent was in the original film.
Where the animated film had somewhat of an ensemble cast, with no single protagonist but a group of heroes united against a villain, Maleficent is singularly focused on Maleficent, giving her every role at once: hero, villain, mother, victim. It actually reaches the point where Maleficent herself doesn't at all resemble the original villain—the single greatest villain in all of Disney history, I might add.
This movie isn't about Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty; it's about a completely different character that merely looks and sounds similar. Such a complete reinvention isn't an intrinsically bad thing, of course, except that the movie itself is clearly a modern commentary on the original. It even ends with a voiceover saying, "this is how the story really happened..."
And that's the thing: if it wanted to be an original story, it shouldn't have bent over backwards to constantly reference the older movie. And on the other hand, if it wanted to caringly revisit that story, why did it effectively crap all over everything that actually worked about it?
Sleeping Beauty had a light-and-dark moral tale, with clearly defined heroes and villains. It's often criticized for being too simplistic, but it works. Maleficent is a story that tries so hard to rework Maleficent into a positive character that every other character in the story is either evil or useless.
Now, I did say that I really liked the movie, and overall I did. I just don't like some of the plot choices that were made. Maleficent's story works on its own, even if it's just odd in comparison to the original.
I think I'm gonna watch the animated movie tonight, and I'll definitely watch Maleficent again when it comes out on blu-ray.
I've had kind of a weird history with the Transformers movies. Every time I've walked out of a Transformers movie, I've been happy with it.
Despite the stupidity of the first movie, getting to see actual photorealistic transformers on the big screen was too much of a dream come true for me to not be happy. Every time I've seen it since, I've liked it less and less. Last time I watched it (which was last week,) I realized that a good 70% of the movie does not matter. Literally, you could cut out most of the movie and the story would still work.
With the second movie, my expectations were so incredibly low (I'd read early reviews) that *anything* good in that movie would have pleasantly surprised me. Also, I walked in thinking, "all I want is to see giant robots smashing each other, and for Optimus Prime to have one awesome fight scene." And both of those things happened on an EXTREME level, so I was incredibly pleased. Then I saw the movie again and thought, "...is this the same movie I saw last week? This is seriously bad..."
The third movie I think is the only one that, on some level, actually succeeds as a Transformers movie. The action works, there's less stupidity, and it focuses primarily on the transformers themselves rather than the humans. Upon repeat viewings I've liked it far less, but I still don't hate the movie. It has some big problems, but I do still like it to a mild degree.
And then we have this new movie. Transformers: Age of Extinction. I'm really not sure why they didn't just title it Trans4mers, or Tr4nsformers, or Transformers: 4ge of Extinction, or T4: Judgment Day, but whatever.
So here's the way T4 is laid out:
After the gigantic battle in Chicago in the last movie, all transformers—including the Autobots—are now pariahs from humanity. A bounty hunter transformer, Lockdown, who is neither Autobot nor Decepticon, is aiding the CIA in hunting down the remaining transformers on Earth. When we find Optimus Prime, he's wounded, barely alive, and rightly pissed at humanity for betraying him. He's seen his allies slaughtered and their bodies used for scrap metal; he's completely done with his mantra of, "we must protect humanity at all costs." That storyline is incredibly cool. It's not dumb, it's done well, and it's a legitimately great new idea for Transformers. But that only goes so far.
At some point in the movie (really it's when the rest of the Autobots are introduced into the story), the story takes a nosedive back into the cartoony, ridiculous nonsense that plagued the first three movies. Now, this movie doesn't have any of the absolutely horrendous things from the old movies. There's nothing in Age of Extinction even approaching the level of racism and stupidity from the Twins in Revenge of the Fallen. There's no robot testicles like in Revenge of the Fallen. While there is a "hot girl" in the movie, she's nowhere near as molested-by-the-camera as Megan Fox or Rosie Huntington-Whitely were. What this movie does have in the negative category, though, is length. This movie is almost three hours long. And it honestly only needed to be maybe an hour and forty minutes. There's so much unnecessary fluff in T4 that it's sickening. It's like no one hired an editor. Toward the end of the movie, I was sitting there wanting to scream at the screen. I wanted all the robots to die, not for story reasons, but just because I wanted the movie to end. Ironically, the lack of goofiness in the movie only hurt it—without the campy nonsense to lighten the mood, a long Transformers movie is a complete chore to get through.
And then there was one last fight scene at the end—not over-the-top, well-choreographed, and all in all very well done. It actually made me a little bit bitter at the movie. It started off with a really great premise, worked well up to a point, then went sour for an hour and a half. And then it ended with a great fight scene that only seemed to remind us how good the movie could have been.
And that's the thing, really. I've seen tons of movies that let me down as a fan of the story: Superman Returns, The Last Airbender, Man of Steel... and this one. I don't put the other Transformers movies on that list primarily because they didn't exactly disappoint me. I've never been 100% certain that a live-action Transformers movie could work the way it does in animation and comics. But here, for the first time, we got a glimpse into a world where Transformers movies were good. And it was squashed in that same movie. Age of Extinction is the Icarus of Transformers movies.
As I write this, I'm sitting in the movie theater about to see X-Men: Days of Future Past. I'm pretty excited. I adored the first two X-Men movies as a kid (both directed by Bryan Singer), and Singer is back to direct this one. It looks good, and I can't wait.
...
IT WAS GOOD! IT WAS GOOD! OH THANK JESUS IT WAS GOOD!
So happy right now. Ever since the day I sat in Grapevine Mills Theater in May of 2003 to see X-Men 2, I've waited for this movie. Actually, lemme back up a bit here.
When I was twelve, I saw a short scene from the first X-Men movie on TV. The film had come out a couple of years prior, but I was ten at the time, so of course I didn't see it then. I'd seen maybe two minutes of the X-Men animated series, but otherwise this was my first exposure to X-Men. It was the scene where Logan and Rogue are in the trailer crash. Logan flies through the windshield, skids across the snow, then slowly stands up as the wounds on his face heal up.
That was about all I saw; I decided I wanted to see the entire thing from the beginning, so I stopped watching then. But what little I saw completely gripped me. It was... dark, but not Batman dark. It was gritty, but not stupidly gritty like so many other movies and comics from the 90s. I'd seen plenty of superhero movies where bullets bounced off Superman or nearly missed Batman, but the idea of a character with a healing factor—someone who would bleed, but heal in seconds—that was fascinating. And it perfectly represented X-Men's appeal. It had both feet firmly planted in the real world, but it was so mesmerizingly... strange.
The following months were very X-Men-heavy for me. After watching the entire first movie, I immediately started watching X-Men: Evolution, the then-current X-Men animated series (which I still love to this day), and got really excited to see X-Men 2 (fully titled X2: X-Men United) in theaters the next year.
I still remember the Sunday afternoon I sat in the movie theater with family and friends to see X2. To this day, it's one of my favorite moviegoing experiences. I'd become a hardcore X-Men fan over the year since seeing the first movie, and I was not disappointed. In fact, I was overjoyed at just how good the movie was. To say that it was satisfying is an understatement. When the DVD came out, I immediately bought it and played the opening title scene over and over again just to hear that awesome theme by John Ottman.
X2 ended with the promise of epic stories yet to come. I spent months and years waiting to see the next chapter. And yet, ultimately, it never really came. I never got to hear that John Ottman X-Men theme again.
As the years passed, lots of things happened with the X-Men. Bryan Singer left the X-franchise to direct Superman Returns (which didn't go so well), and the X-Men movies suffered as a result. The one-two punch of X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were not only bad X-Men movies, but bad X-Men movies that also ruined the storyline of X2, taking it in stupid directions that didn't make any sense. Then there was X-Men: First Class, which wasn't bad, but somehow I didn't like much at all. Something about it just seemed hollow and frustratingly sub-par for something as epic as X-Men. The Wolverine, which only came out last year, was pretty decent. I liked it. But at best, it's a good Wolverine movie, not a good X-Men movie.
Another weird thing happened in all that time: I became aware that apparently, the first X-Men movie is not held in super-high regard. It's still liked more than disliked among geeks, but it's also known as being very flawed and problematic. And yet, X-Men 2 is still regarded as one of the best comic book movies of all time. That's still the X-Men gold standard: the childhood love of mine that's always stayed solid.
Now we have X-Men: Days of Future Past, the triumphant return of Bryan Singer to the franchise he made great. And for the first time since 2003, I feel that same sense of satisfaction. This is, in essence, the true return of X-Men. The true sequel to X2. And I couldn't be happier about it.
Oh, and what's this? Playing over the end credits of Days of Future Past?
