Movie extravaganza

The youngest of my kids is 18. He just left home, for two years, earlier this week, to go do some missionary work. Now, I do have a 23 year old daughter who's living back in the house while working at a vet clinic, but in a sense, this was the domino that made us empty nesters, at a relatively young age. I just turned 50 a few weeks ago, and my wife is a year and a half younger.

Anyway, long story short (too late) my wife wanted to get out of the house instead of sitting around thinking about how empty and quiet it was. And because I'm a nice guy who takes care of my wife, I agreed to go do a bunch of stuff that I might otherwise not have been super inclined to do. Last night, we watched the Wedding Veil trilogy, a kind of "sisterhood of the traveling pants" about a wedding veil that was filmed on the Hallmark Channel. A lot of guys my age (or any other age) might take a dim view of Hallmark Channel movies, and I can't exactly blame them. However, I do think that when you have charismatic enough actors who have some fun chemistry between them, that the execution is sufficient to make up for any other defects or flaws that that specific iteration of the Hollywood machine might spit out. Nothing I ever watch on the Hallmark Channel is likely to be so memorable that I can tell you much about it a few days after I've seen it, and often even less than that if its particularly forgettable, but that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy the better ones.

This one focused on three friends, and each of the three girlfriends was in all three movies, but each had a movie that they were the particular star or focus of. The first one had Lacey Chabert, who I always think of as the little kid from Party of Five (a show that I actually never watched, but back in the early to mid 90s you could hardly escape hearing about what was popular on network TV even if you wanted to. I know quite a bit about Dawson's Creek too, even though I never watched any of that show.) More particularly, she's the voice actress of the girlfriend of the bounty hunter in SWTOR, and the bounty hunter is my favorite storyline. She ended up marrying a good old fashioned American guy who had a lot of money that his father had made, but he wanted to be involved in art, and he had the money to do it, so voila! Classic stuff. And Lacey is still pretty cute, even at her age. Because let's face it; Party of Five was... what, twenty-five years ago now? She turns 40 this year, but she still can pull off the "young enough to be a credibly attractive single girl" thing. To be fair to Lacey, I think part of her charm is that she really is to some degree the good girl that she plays in Hallmark movies. She says she loves working for Hallmark and that they've been very good to her, and she's proud of the message that they promote.

Anyway, I'm not going to talk too much about these movies, because I know this is hardly the target audience for them, but they weren't bad. But the first one was the best. The second one featured a girl who was a little too "spunky" for my taste; she came across as almost pushy and unlikable at times. Plus, she ran off to Italy and married an Italian guy. What; you're telling me that of the millions of American guys in your age set, you couldn't find one that floated your boat? That said, he was a decent Italian guy. And the north Italian Po Valley are Hajnal line people that I can relate to, and Verona in particular and Padua, where the movie mostly takes place, are pretty important to Western Civilization and even English Literature in particular, being the setting of some of Shakespeare's most iconic plays (settings from Romeo and Juliet in particular were prominently mentioned. Funny how they didn't look up settings from The Taming of the Shrew! I guess that may not be a favorite of the heavily middle-aged women demographic that watches that channel...

The third one hit a less than stellar note with me, because it was heavily focused on the immigrants of Ellis Island, and talked about these Fake Americans as if their story were the American story. I understand why mainstream "normies" aren't yet ready to accept that that narrative is a basket of big fat lies, but because I'm on the other side of that divide, my perspective on these things isn't the same. The male love interest in this one was an Italian New Yorker, and his mom and "nonna" or grandmother were both still in the picture, and they were more Italian and less New York than he was. (Actually, although the actor looked dark enough and had a credible Italian look, his real name is Victor Wagner, and he seems to be a pretty bog-standard Canadian of English descent.) Anyway, at one point, his mother and grandmother were having a discussion about his girlfriend, and the grandmother commented that she wasn't Italian. This irked me a bit; you know where Italians can go find other Italians to marry? There actually is a place specifically for Italians. Guess what? It's not New York. It's Italy. Either be a little more grateful and appreciative that Americans have allowed you to live here, or go home.

Anyway, today we saw first The Batman. This was a reasonably good movie, but I didn't love it. I just liked it. A few things brought it down for me. I'll have some minor spoilers in the paragraphs that follow. One of them I've heard almost everyone mention; when Zoe Kravitz says some line to Robert Pattinson about white privilege, the movie came to a screeching halt, the idiotic writers came out and delivered their idiotic message, and then they were lucky that we could get the movie started again fairly seamlessly without that ruining the movie. What a moronic thing to do. It came close to messing the whole thing up, and it certainly took away any chance that it'll displace The Dark Knight as the iconic Batman story on film. The rest of the anti-white hatred was a little more subtle. The race-swapping, for instance. Catwoman has been race-swapped many times before, starting back when Eartha Kitt replaced Julie Newmar in the late 60s, but it still bugs me. Kravitz has this weird mystery meat vibe to her, given that both of her parents, quite curiously, are half black and half Jewish—an unusual mixture for one person, but for a married couple, even more unusual. In any case, I don't really love Catwoman as a character and I'd like to see someone else come forward for once in a Batman production, but I'm not a purist about her either. Her backstory was significantly changed, but I think only serious Batheads will care. I mostly was put off by the fact that I don't think that she's as attractive as Hollywood apparently does. Then again, the Cloud People have spent quite a bit of effort in getting us to accept exotic, mystery meat unattractive women as attractive. Have you seen the pictures in the stores in any given mall lately? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

I was a little less charitably inclined to accept the vandalism done to the backstory of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Bruce's parents, who now have to be saddled with a shady past for no good reason whatsoever other than to make all white people into villains. There's a strong vibe of the idea that People of Color (POCs, or POX—as in "upon our house"), especially women POX will save us from our whiteness. This was, of course, exacerbated by the race-swapping of Jim Gordon into a black man, and the black woman who was supposedly the only virtuous politician ever in the history of Gotham City. Given that fact that it is extremely well documented that POX and minorities in general are much more inclined to criminality than the actual Anglo-Saxon American stock, and that statistics proving this go back generations, that particular slander is especially galling. And then, of course, there's the part near the end when the threat ends up being... nerdy white incel domestic terrorists who spend too much time on the "dark web" or whatever. Blegh. It's curious that Hollywood and the Cloud People generally so fear this imaginary specter of angry white male incels that they continue to demonize them... even as they fail to actually materialize in real life. But SJWs Always Project.

In spite of these obvious and ultimately kind of crippling failings, there are others that are more structural and less meta. For instance, a seawall is threatened and Gotham floods. Except that before that happens, we're never even given even other than a single off-handed reference to even its existence. And I'm not even sure if I accurately remembered that that offhand reference even exists; I may have subconsciously invented it to circumvent the fact that there was no foreshadowing, or anything else to suggest that the seawall was even a thing that existed at all. The whole plot twist came out of nowhere. As long as the movie was, it was a little all over the place, and didn't spend time developing things that it it really needed to develop. And it was long. 176 minutes. Even though I was very careful with drinks before and during the movie, I barely made it through without running for the john. And when I did, there was a flood of men in the bathroom doing the same thing I was.

Then we stuck around and watched Uncharted. My kids are big fans of the video games, and we own all four of them on the PS4, but I'm not a purist there either. I've seen them playing a lot, but I haven't played them myself. So, my kids have purist complaints of sorts about the movie. Not that it's a bad movie, but that it would and could have been better had it been more true to the source material. To me, it was like a somewhat more forgettable but charming enough variation on the National Treasure theme. And it lacks Nicholas Cage. But even so, it had some problems for even a guy like me who's only passingly familiar with the source material. One: Chloe Frasier, who is obviously a white girl, and I happen to know for sure that she's a gray eyed English girl in the second game, was race-swapped into a strangely unattractive, horse-faced Indian girl, although still with a super-white English name. lolwut? Meanwhile, Elena, who's the iconic love interest of the series and literally the first NPC that you meet in the first game, if I remember correctly, was nowhere to be found. Two: Antonio Banderas is set up as the villain and SPOILER ALERT, he's undercut in an extremely dumb and poorly thought out plot twist where one of his much less notable or interesting subordinates murders him and that's that; he's suddenly out of the picture. It's not quite as bad as the Snoke "subverted expectations" because it's only one movie to build him up. Then again, he was built up more than Snoke was in even one movie, so cutting his legs out from under him wasn't a clever plot twist, it was an obnoxious, and arbitrary one, just to be dumb and unexpected. Another mostly entertaining, but also sadly kind of of forgettable effort, I'm afraid. 

The last movie we saw was Marry Me which unless you're an angry, entitled, bitter Hispanic lesbian feminist, I can't imagine you liking. It is so incredibly obnoxious that I only didn't completely and utterly hate every minute of it because Owen Wilson and Jennifer Lopez had more chemistry together than I ever would have expected. In addition to the very non-subtle woke lies about race and feminism, Owen Wilson was also a super cringy simp and beta. Almost as if the message is that white men can be allowed to live, as long as they know their place and defer to anyone and everyone else. And he never even said wow. But seriously; the woke stuff is so exaggeratedly stereotypical that it almost loops back around to being comically absurd rather than merely insultingly hateful. Minority girl math nerds in wheelchairs? Has any such person ever actually existed? Avoid that one at all cost. Watch all three of the Hallmark movies if that means you can avoid this one instead.