![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: It was fine. That's pretty much my overall impression. Not a bad movie per se, but definitely a brainless summer blockbuster that was inexplicably released in February. The visuals are beautiful. The aesthetic is pretty much Farscape 2.0 (and made me want to go rewatch that series.) You'll want to turn your brain completely off for the "plot," because it is too full of holes to withstand anything more than glancing scrutiny. Michelle Pfeiffer steals the show. The rest of the cast is fine: Evangeline Lilly is great but criminally underused, Paul Rudd is fine as the Everyman White Dude who steps up to save the day, Bill Murray is there to phone in his cameo, and Jonathan Majors' Kang is great, except I wish TPTB had given him more time to be the creepy, enigmatic villain before introducing his explanatory backstory. The most intriguing part of the movie is at the beginning, when it seems poised to dig into all sorts of juicy intrafamilial dynamics that the scriptwriters studiously ignore from there on out.
There's also some We Are Very Aware of and Concerned About Societal Inequality dialogue shoehorned into the opening scenes. Part of me feels like movies acknowledging these things is better than their not; but on the other hand, I really doubt Marvel, disney, or anyone else involved with this movie will spend one cent more of their profits to actually do anything about the issues they're so eagerly informing viewers they Really Care About (beyond whatever gets them out of paying the most taxes, that is), which just makes pandering and gross, and better not to have been raised at all.
Bush & Candlebox: Being my first live show of 2023. Surprisingly, I liked Candlebox both more than I thought I would, and more than Bush.
The Legend of Vox Machina Season Two: I wish there were a middle ground somewhere between the original web series (which proved far too much of a time commitment for me) and this Cliff's Notes animated series, which is far too abbreviated. Season One didn't do much for me for precisely that reason. I enjoyed Season Two much more because it could focus more on the plot having already established who the characters are.
And some really cool things happen in the plot, things that I wish had had more time to unfold than a handful of 30-minute episodes allow because the abbreviated format lessens the dramatic punch. The format also makes everything a bit cookie-cutter predictable: there's always going to be a fight scene, there's always going to be X many shit and sex jokes. (These were funny enough in the web series eps I watched, when there was plenty of exploration, dialogue, combat, and worldbuilding to dilute them. But you can tell the Vox Machina scriptwriters thing scatological humor is just the greatest, but it's really just pretty boring.)
There's also some We Are Very Aware of and Concerned About Societal Inequality dialogue shoehorned into the opening scenes. Part of me feels like movies acknowledging these things is better than their not; but on the other hand, I really doubt Marvel, disney, or anyone else involved with this movie will spend one cent more of their profits to actually do anything about the issues they're so eagerly informing viewers they Really Care About (beyond whatever gets them out of paying the most taxes, that is), which just makes pandering and gross, and better not to have been raised at all.
Bush & Candlebox: Being my first live show of 2023. Surprisingly, I liked Candlebox both more than I thought I would, and more than Bush.
The Legend of Vox Machina Season Two: I wish there were a middle ground somewhere between the original web series (which proved far too much of a time commitment for me) and this Cliff's Notes animated series, which is far too abbreviated. Season One didn't do much for me for precisely that reason. I enjoyed Season Two much more because it could focus more on the plot having already established who the characters are.
And some really cool things happen in the plot, things that I wish had had more time to unfold than a handful of 30-minute episodes allow because the abbreviated format lessens the dramatic punch. The format also makes everything a bit cookie-cutter predictable: there's always going to be a fight scene, there's always going to be X many shit and sex jokes. (These were funny enough in the web series eps I watched, when there was plenty of exploration, dialogue, combat, and worldbuilding to dilute them. But you can tell the Vox Machina scriptwriters thing scatological humor is just the greatest, but it's really just pretty boring.)