Green green green
May. 10th, 2019 02:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaThink I figured out why I hadn't seen most baby vegetables for sale yet - I completely misremembered the local last-frost date. Whoops. It's not gotten back to freezing temperatures yet, but it has gotten close at night sometimes, so my basil has stayed inside. But outside it is greener every day, except where it is yellow and white and blue with flowers.
I have been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes on the way to and from skating. The Sign of the Four in some ways seemed like a slight improvement over the first novel, except that a) the romance between Watson and his future wife was very shallow and b) so much 19th century racism. So much. I cringed through the whole thing.
I prefer the short stories. I like how Doyle does action and description, though sometimes he clips scenes a bit too short, and I'm still not a fan of the long monologues (but at least they can't be so long in a short story). Sometimes I can guess how the mystery will play out, but they're still fun to read. Will be interesting to see if some of the recurring bits will drop off as I get through more of the stories (like Watson's vague musings to place the time of the story, or 'this is my friend Watson you can trust him' for every other client) or if they'll stay.
Later, I want to go re-read "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" - Doyle did a good job at making the Americans' dialogue 'feel' American even in text without the accents. (I wonder if we were meant to feel sorrier for the guy who lost his new wife, or the new wife who want him to accept her apology after she ditched him for the old husband who she had just found out was alive.) I'm also still curious about why on Earth he put milk-drinking snakes into "The Speckled Band" - is that also weird 19th century science? - but I will forgive it because it has cute Holmes/Watson friendship moments. Watson will fling himself into danger for Holmes! Holmes grabs Watson's hand when they get frightened in the dark!
Z bugged me into seeing Captain Marvel a couple weekends ago, and then the next day, we and his friends saw Avengers Endgame. One of my ears still ached the day afterward, hopefully just from having my earplugs in (I can't stand loud noises and movie theaters are almost always too loud nowadays).
I enjoyed Captain Marvel more than I expected. I had some problems with it, but they're mostly the usual MCU movie type annoyances.
-Carol's hair keeps falling in her face when she's standing still. Why is it not pulled back when she fights? (I read that this is a problem with the lack of stuntwomen, but still.)
-I liked her costume, though. Could have done with a less boring color scheme at the end, but I want clothes where I can change the colors just like that.
-The teal and orange coloring in the first half of the film was so strong that it was distracting.
-The kitty was cute.
-Neither I nor Z understood why she flipped sides so easily. That part needed to be a lot more compelling.
-Her best friend could have used more personality - I completely missed what her name was - but their dynamic had potential. (I've seen people building it up too much, though. Yeah, I kind of shipped them, but they are not 'canonically raising a child together'.)
-It was fun to see her beating everyone up at the end and blowing up space ships. Still don't like the obligatory MCU shakycam because I can never tell what's going on.
I enjoyed Endgame less, even having gone into it with not that much in the way of high hopes. It was one of those films where I mostly enjoyed it in the moment, and then the more I thought about it afterward, the less I liked it as a whole.
A couple of caveats: I am not terrible with faces, but I'm not great with them, either. Also, I haven't seen some of the MCU films. So there were a couple of scenes where I had trouble telling which white guy was on the screen and what he was supposed to be doing.
-IIRC, the Japanese dialogue in that one scene was... bad.
-I liked most of the jokes, though.
-Black Widow getting killed was bullshit. I was sitting there in disbelief that they were really going to throw a woman off the cliff a second time, and their foremost female character, too. And then Hawkeye goes back and it's a sad bunch of men (+one woman) being sad about their woman friend died inevitably For The Cause and it was so bad.
-I was very tired of the heterosexual marriage ever after as the happy ending for so many of the characters by the time the film was done. Even Steve got one. I guess all his current friends don't count for anything? As a casual watcher of these films, it seemed weird that a couple of movies ago, he was willing to break up the hero party for his best friend, but here he barely seemed to care about him or his other friends in favor of a woman he kind of knew years ago.
-Even the writers apparently don't understand what kind of time travel they wrote, and my party was confused about it when we were talking afterward. So either it's alternate universes, or Steve... sat around doing nothing heroic for decades?
-That one scene where all of the women just so happen to assemble in one shot? I know some people liked it, but for me that made me think 'oh, that's all the women they have' and underlined the lack of balance in the MCU, and in this movie in particular. It was the opposite of a fanservice moment for me.
-Captain Marvel's new haircut is great. Can she destroy more evil alien spaceships, please?
-The scene of the armies assembling was cool.
-I still didn't like Thor's new dialogue style, or how his character was written here.
-Goose did not appear again :(
-Tony got such a heroic death (after the marriage and babies happy ending! the writers were so nice to him) that it reminded me of that Bartimaeus line about how it doesn't matter how heroic of a death you have, you're still dead in the end, and now I kind of want to write a fic from his daughter's POV about it.
I would have enjoyed watching a movie about society struggling to adapt to having half of all humans (I'm ignoring the 'all lifeforms' line because that should cause SERIOUS ecosystem problems) wiped out in a snap, and then getting them all back at once five years later. Surprise! You now have to house, feed, and find jobs for at least twice as many people again, have fun :D A shot of a memorial and some empty houses didn't really do it for me.
Anyway, I felt like 'thank goodness, I don't have to care about MCU anymore' when it was done. Even though there will be another million movies, and no doubt Z will want me to go to some of them with him. (That's fine, I dragged him to Stars on Ice.) I am far less excited about a Black Widow movie than I was five years ago, but... at least they're finally making it?
I have been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes on the way to and from skating. The Sign of the Four in some ways seemed like a slight improvement over the first novel, except that a) the romance between Watson and his future wife was very shallow and b) so much 19th century racism. So much. I cringed through the whole thing.
I prefer the short stories. I like how Doyle does action and description, though sometimes he clips scenes a bit too short, and I'm still not a fan of the long monologues (but at least they can't be so long in a short story). Sometimes I can guess how the mystery will play out, but they're still fun to read. Will be interesting to see if some of the recurring bits will drop off as I get through more of the stories (like Watson's vague musings to place the time of the story, or 'this is my friend Watson you can trust him' for every other client) or if they'll stay.
Later, I want to go re-read "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" - Doyle did a good job at making the Americans' dialogue 'feel' American even in text without the accents. (I wonder if we were meant to feel sorrier for the guy who lost his new wife, or the new wife who want him to accept her apology after she ditched him for the old husband who she had just found out was alive.) I'm also still curious about why on Earth he put milk-drinking snakes into "The Speckled Band" - is that also weird 19th century science? - but I will forgive it because it has cute Holmes/Watson friendship moments. Watson will fling himself into danger for Holmes! Holmes grabs Watson's hand when they get frightened in the dark!
Z bugged me into seeing Captain Marvel a couple weekends ago, and then the next day, we and his friends saw Avengers Endgame. One of my ears still ached the day afterward, hopefully just from having my earplugs in (I can't stand loud noises and movie theaters are almost always too loud nowadays).
I enjoyed Captain Marvel more than I expected. I had some problems with it, but they're mostly the usual MCU movie type annoyances.
-Carol's hair keeps falling in her face when she's standing still. Why is it not pulled back when she fights? (I read that this is a problem with the lack of stuntwomen, but still.)
-I liked her costume, though. Could have done with a less boring color scheme at the end, but I want clothes where I can change the colors just like that.
-The teal and orange coloring in the first half of the film was so strong that it was distracting.
-The kitty was cute.
-Neither I nor Z understood why she flipped sides so easily. That part needed to be a lot more compelling.
-Her best friend could have used more personality - I completely missed what her name was - but their dynamic had potential. (I've seen people building it up too much, though. Yeah, I kind of shipped them, but they are not 'canonically raising a child together'.)
-It was fun to see her beating everyone up at the end and blowing up space ships. Still don't like the obligatory MCU shakycam because I can never tell what's going on.
I enjoyed Endgame less, even having gone into it with not that much in the way of high hopes. It was one of those films where I mostly enjoyed it in the moment, and then the more I thought about it afterward, the less I liked it as a whole.
A couple of caveats: I am not terrible with faces, but I'm not great with them, either. Also, I haven't seen some of the MCU films. So there were a couple of scenes where I had trouble telling which white guy was on the screen and what he was supposed to be doing.
-IIRC, the Japanese dialogue in that one scene was... bad.
-I liked most of the jokes, though.
-Black Widow getting killed was bullshit. I was sitting there in disbelief that they were really going to throw a woman off the cliff a second time, and their foremost female character, too. And then Hawkeye goes back and it's a sad bunch of men (+one woman) being sad about their woman friend died inevitably For The Cause and it was so bad.
-I was very tired of the heterosexual marriage ever after as the happy ending for so many of the characters by the time the film was done. Even Steve got one. I guess all his current friends don't count for anything? As a casual watcher of these films, it seemed weird that a couple of movies ago, he was willing to break up the hero party for his best friend, but here he barely seemed to care about him or his other friends in favor of a woman he kind of knew years ago.
-Even the writers apparently don't understand what kind of time travel they wrote, and my party was confused about it when we were talking afterward. So either it's alternate universes, or Steve... sat around doing nothing heroic for decades?
-That one scene where all of the women just so happen to assemble in one shot? I know some people liked it, but for me that made me think 'oh, that's all the women they have' and underlined the lack of balance in the MCU, and in this movie in particular. It was the opposite of a fanservice moment for me.
-Captain Marvel's new haircut is great. Can she destroy more evil alien spaceships, please?
-The scene of the armies assembling was cool.
-I still didn't like Thor's new dialogue style, or how his character was written here.
-Goose did not appear again :(
-Tony got such a heroic death (after the marriage and babies happy ending! the writers were so nice to him) that it reminded me of that Bartimaeus line about how it doesn't matter how heroic of a death you have, you're still dead in the end, and now I kind of want to write a fic from his daughter's POV about it.
I would have enjoyed watching a movie about society struggling to adapt to having half of all humans (I'm ignoring the 'all lifeforms' line because that should cause SERIOUS ecosystem problems) wiped out in a snap, and then getting them all back at once five years later. Surprise! You now have to house, feed, and find jobs for at least twice as many people again, have fun :D A shot of a memorial and some empty houses didn't really do it for me.
Anyway, I felt like 'thank goodness, I don't have to care about MCU anymore' when it was done. Even though there will be another million movies, and no doubt Z will want me to go to some of them with him. (That's fine, I dragged him to Stars on Ice.) I am far less excited about a Black Widow movie than I was five years ago, but... at least they're finally making it?
