Five years ago I read The Rook, an excellent science-fiction-fantasy-comedy-thriller by Daniel O’Malley, and I was captivated. Starz has made it into a series, and I think it looks pretty good. But I can’t watch the whole thing unless I sign up for a 30-day trial or buy a yearly Starz account. I think I miss the days of overpriced cable TV…
We are (slowly) reading our way through The Golden Compass and we’re all enjoying it. HBO is presenting a new film version of the books sometime this fall, and it looks very good:
We also have the earlier film adaptation to consider. I think I agree with the casting from 2007 more than this one (you can’t go wrong with Sam Elliott, ever) but apparently that version is a butchered mess dictated by a doomed studio. I’m intrigued to see how the new version is embraced by a longer serial format.
There have been a lot of takes on the new season of Stranger Things. What It Meant, Was It Woke Enough, Was It As Good As Season X, Was it 80’s Enough, et cetera. These are all entertaining opinions to be sure. My own take on it is that it’s the best season yet, the characters have all grown and changed the way I expect they would in real life—and the writing is better too. Perhaps that’s because we know who these characters are now and we’re so invested in them. While I’m not as happy with some of the individual character choices as I’d like to be (Hopper was a bit more doofus-comical this season than I liked, and Mike was a dick to pretty much everyone) I thought their storylines were interesting, and I was happy to suspend my disbelief as far as possible to enjoy the action. In a cast as sprawling as this it’s hard to give them all something to do that’s integral to the plot but with a few small caveats they pulled it off.
By far the highlight of the series was the interplay between Steve, new character Robin, and our friend Dustin. Screenplayed has a great script-to-film breakdown of easily the best scene in the whole series, Robin and Steve having a heart to heart on the floor of a cinema bathroom after being drugged by Russian agents in a hidden bunker. This is awesome acting and HOLY SHIT THE FEELS. These two are easily the best comedy/drama pairing since Tracy/Hepburn and Ryan/Crystal.
The A/V Club reports that Brian Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls is set to become the next big Netflix streaming series. This is excellent news, because this series is fucking awesome. I have NO idea how they’re going to pull it off however.
I’ve had a film called Columbus in my Netflix account for several months now. I read a glowing review back in 2017 and liked the sound of the movie (synopsis from IMDB):
A Korean-born man finds himself stuck in Columbus, Indiana, where his architect father is in a coma. The man meets a young woman who wants to stay in Columbus with her mother, a recovering addict, instead of pursuing her own dreams.
What that doesn’t say is that the movie takes its time to quietly develop, something I respect in this day of careening storylines. It’s an intensely personal movie about the relationships between parents and children, and respects the personalities and the stories of its characters. The director uses the visual backdrop of Columbus, Indiana, to frame his narrative. The city became a center of modernist architecture through a visionary foundation founded in 1954, and is the home of seven National Historic Landmarks. I highly recommend it.
Meanwhile, I found some cheap DVDs and a game at the thrift store last weekend; three of the seven Harry Potter expanded editions (we lent our box set to the daughter of some friends and haven’t seen it since), and Children of Men. I found an Xbox360 version of Halo: ODST and got it for $1.50. It loads and plays on my Xbox but it’s easy to tell it’s 10 years old. That having been said, I’m enjoying it so far—I’ve been a Bungie fan since the Marathon days, and their studio voice is all over this game.
That’s the shower tile as it stands today. Brian is coming back to finish the area down to the floor and around the bench, and then he’s going to grout the walls. Then he’ll lay the floor in and grout that. We have a rough quote on the glass door, which is not cheap, but it will highlight the interior of the shower perfectly as you walk in the door.
Jen and I spent another weekend almost completely consumed by grading student work. We did get out here and there but it wasn’t at all what I hoped we’d be doing, for the second week in a row. We’ve been trying to line up things for Finn to do while we’re busy but it’s hard to stay focused when there are kids running around—who inevitably come to us to help them find something to do.
I’m at the point where I’m doing twice as much work to teach than I did my first semester; as we’ve gotten more involved in refining the rubric and syllabus and have striven to offer constructive, helpful feedback (going so far as to add a third project into my syllabus to give students an earlier idea of how they’re doing) the workload has quadrupled. Jen and I are conscientious about how we grade our work, so we double-check each other’s grading and notes, which adds more time to the process. And Finn sits idly by, bored out of her mind. Saturday was a mixture of rain and sunshine, and even though it was cold and damp we should have been outside hiking somewhere, not stuck inside.
I turned to Jen Sunday night and told her I’m thinking about quitting teaching. Finn’s life is flashing past me, and I’m not spending enough time with her right now. It’s breaking my heart.
One thing we did do as a family is go to see a matinee of How to Train Your Dragon 3. The three of us have been hooked on the series since Finn was old enough to appreciate it, and it was one of the many things we shared with the Morrises (I can’t hear the phrase “DEPLOY THE YAK” and not think of Rob and Zachary). The final movie in the series was good. It hit all of the main plot points and character beats as a good movie should; there were callbacks to the original movie that old-school fans appreciated, it definitely hit us in the emotional core (my family is pretty heavily invested in these characters, after two movies and three TV series) and it wrapped things up in a solid way that felt right.
But it was lacking the careful pace of the first movie, which took time to slowly show us the wonder of the relationship between a boy and his dragon, and how that in turn affected his relationships, as an outsider, with his community and his father. The first movie (I rewatched a bit of it last night as I cleaned up my desk) moved slower, took time to develop the stakes, and also let us breathe. It showed us how wonderful the world it created was, asked us to notice the details, and gave us time to appreciate them. I felt like the new movie was following a producer’s note that simply read, “MORE DRAGONS”. There was so much going on in every frame that it felt hard to keep up with what was happening. The only time I really felt like it was slow enough to let me appreciate the story was at the very end, and if I hadn’t been so familiar with the characters from my previous experience I wouldn’t have cared half as much.
The IPWhatever is kegged and carbed, and I tapped it on Saturday afternoon. In terms of taste, it’s pretty nondescript. Even after I’d dry-hopped it for much longer than I’d intended, the flavor is still pretty bland. But it’s got a hell of a kick–I never did a final gravity reading on it (because, after I’d fucked it up, what’s the point?) but it definitely hits me when I finish a pint of it. And that’s good timing, too, because the grapefruit IPA is just about kicked.
Our neighbors on the right side, who have been in the house as long as we’ve lived here, recently moved to an assisted living community and put their house up on the market. We were in New York when they held the open house, so we didn’t get to walk through it, but we told a bunch of friends and our brother and sister to check it out. Having walked through the downstairs a few times I didn’t see any huge problems, but everybody we know said it was more work than they were willing to take on. As it turned out there was a bidding war on the first day and it’s going to settlement this Friday. Apparently the buyers have kids a little younger than Finley, and they’ve had several people come by to look at the place, who we can only guess are contractors. I hope they’re normal and we can get along with them.
That’s it. What else can I say?
The Passage debuted on Fox this evening, the first reason Jen and I have had to sit in front of the television and watch network programming together in, oh, I don’t know, 5 years? (Football doesn’t count). Verdict: This version is to the original book as the TV miniseries was to It. The writers jammed so much of the setup into one hour, I didn’t stop to give a shit about any of the characters they introduced. Several rather important characters were removed. The actors did the best with what they had, but the direction is stilted and feels like they shot it all in two days. This would have been a prime candidate for a multi-season Game of Thrones style cable series, instead of boring fuckery like Westworld: season two tanked, in retrospect–where they could have opened things up and slowed them down to tell the story. This is network pap.
Finn made out very well for Christmas. She got a Fuji Instamatic camera (I am insanely jealous), a pike of Pokemon cards, and a programmable LEGO robot. One of the things that didn’t make it to her pile under the tree were any XBOX games, as we limit her devices to weekends, and generally there’s not a lot of time to play with her on weekends anyway. Over the break she tired of the games on her Kindle, and she didn’t get the Nintendo 2DS she asked for, so we leaned on the XBOX.
We have three multiplayer games for our console, Super Lucky’s Tale, LEGO City Detective, and Plants vs. Zombies 2. Super Lucky’s Tale is OK but the mechanics are terrible and the camera doesn’t track with the game well. It’s like jumping on a trampoline with a cardboard box over your head. LEGO City Detective is decent and has a giant open world to explore but the game does a terrible job of teaching the player game mechanics, so often we’re wandering around the same location trying to figure out what we have to do to advance the story. And the story itself is filled with a terrible attempt at humor, so it gets annoying quickly. Plants vs. Zombies 2 is a complete piece of shit that I haven’t been able to get working; it requires an EA login (besides the XBOX login) and continually fails to connect to the EA server, so we’ve never actually seen it running.
Finn and I sat down and made a list of multiplayer games she’d like, and I stuck them in an Amazon list. On the way home from running errands the other day I had a bright idea and stopped at the library, where I checked out three games for us to try: LEGO Star Wars TFA, Portal Knights, and Star Wars Battlefront 2. The first two were on Finn’s list; I was hoping LEGO Star Wars was better than City Detective, and so far it is. We like it much better because even though we’ve been stuck in a few places it’s much easier to track what we’re supposed to do, and YES SHE CAN PLAY AS REY. Portal Knights didn’t load for us because the disc is damaged, so we’ll need to swap that for a better copy.
The third disc was for me: Battlefront 2 is beautiful and addictive and different from what I expected it to be; the original Battlefront on my old XBOX was a simple jump-in-and-shoot title that was actually pretty limited in terms of gameplay (as a single player). This one includes a single-player storyline as well as an AI controlled set of battlefields, as well as online multiplayer, but I’m happy to play it on my own. I think LEGO TFA and Battlefront 2 will be the next games I purchase now that I’ve played Fallout 4 mostly to its end: I got a year out of that game, and it was worth every penny.
Update: I got an XBOX360 copy of Dead Space 2 at the Five Below for $5. It installs and plays on my XBOX One even though it’s 8 years old, and it doesn’t look half bad!
There was some concern that the third season of The Grand Tour was going to be its last, but apparently Clarkson & Co. are signed on for seasons beyond, and even better, they’re ditching the tent! This means there’ll be more specials like the Botswana, Vietnam, and Namibia trips, which are an order of magnitude more entertaining.