"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
So if you guessed I was going to spend the day watching the first season of Better Off Ted on Netflix, doing crossword puzzles, and reading the last of Kaleidotrope submissions (until January), then you would have guessed right.
I also made some changes to a couple of work documents and sent them around with an invite for a meeting next Tuesday. I figured that was better than waiting until next Monday to do it.
Oh, and I also went and bought my monthly train ticket.
And that was my Thursday.
The weekend went by pretty quick, but it was pretty decent, the rain notwithstanding.
Last night, for reasons that seemed perfectly sensible at the time, I watched the first Tomb Raider movie for the first time. (It was on Netflix.) The movie was…I hesitate to say bad, because there were things to enjoy about it. I like Angelina Jolie, and she at least seems to be having fun throughout most of it. And I’ve also grown to like Iain Glen’s work on Game of Thrones (which I’m close-ish to being caught up on). But the film is maybe one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen. I thought I knew from silly movies, but this is something else. Let’s just say that Daniel Craig’s American accent is one of the least ridiculous things about the movie and leave it at that.
After that, I watched the…I guess we’ll call it “season finale” of Doctor Who. I liked a lot of it in the moment, not least of all because I think it explained a lot about what I guess we’ll also call “the Clara era.” But out of the moment, actually taking a look at what I’d just watched…well, I think Alasdair Wilkins of the AV Club gets at a lot of what I think does and doesn’t work, about the episode, the season, Steven Moffat’s writing in general. I’m a lot more forgiving of the episode that Wilkins is, because I did genuinely like it, and it played to classic Who in some fun ways, though I do agree with him on its weaknesses and missed opportunities. (Seriously, casting Paul McGann in a cameo would have been inspired, if only because it would have meant a weird Withnail & I reunion on screen.)
So while I liked the episode, more or less, I kind of hope that next season, Moffat goes smaller.
Oh, and in between those two, I watched Hannibal. So it’s altogether possible my brain was in a really weird place by the end of the evening’s entertainment.
Today, I went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?) I think the movie is a lot of things, like shiny and fast-paced and entertaining. But like its predecessor, there are a lot of things that it’s probably not, like smart and consistent and, ultimately, Star Trek.
Wading into spoiler territory here, I think the movie does some interesting things in the way that it quotes from the original series, Wrath of Khan in particular, but in the end that’s all those feel like: quotes. As I watched a pivotal, climactic scene, I kept thinking, “well, yeah, but Wrath of Khan did this first, and better. There’s no great accomplishment in proving that you’ve seen that movie, too.” The movie’s fun, I won’t deny that. It’s well acted, looks great, and Benedict Cumberbatch owns basically every scene he’s in just through voice and glower alone.
But there are things about it… For one, Felicia Day’s not wrong in asking “Where are the women?” But even beyond that, looking deeper into the movie, the philosophy of Star Trek — those tenets and deeper questions that made it something special, if sometimes a little hokey — that really does seem to be missing. I realize, as I did after the first movie, that while this is the future of the franchise, it doesn’t really feel like the future of Star Trek. There are more interesting places for it to go, I think, than a shiny, lens-flare-filled re-imagining of its past.
Oh, and before the movie, I wrote this with my writing group:
[deleted]
So it was a pretty decent weekend.
Yesterday was my company’s third annual midtown Manhattan scavenger hunt. I’ve written about this a couple of times before, since this is the third time I’ve participated. It’s all silly and in good fun. You get to leave work early, and the money goes to charity. And this year, I was even on the winning team.
Except I lost my team after the second of what were apparently seven clues, getting separated in the run from Grand Central. After about ten or fifteen minutes of watching other teams — recognizable in our bright yellow banana-themed shirts — pass through but not my own, I walked over to the bar where I knew the scavenger hunt was going to end.
I hung around for another hour or so, basically just standing around outside. Finally, after a number of other people started to arrive, I wandered inside to get a drink. Most of the people there were HR, the folks from three different offices who were running the event, but there was another group that arrived after I did, whose story I didn’t quite catch, but who I think decided somewhere along the way not to continue. These are people from another office, a different company, who I’ll likely never see again…but they did buy me a beer, so that was nice of them. Then I got a free drink when my team arrived — because that’s what the winning team won — full of apologies to me and tales of tired and aching muscles. Apparently, by accidentally bowing out early, I lucked out as well. I got less of a workout, but I also didn’t steered clear of having a heart attack. (I know this may be hard to believe, looking at me, but I am not exactly a long-distance runner.)
I was still a little tired when I got home — two beers on top of twenty minutes running isn’t two beers on top of ninety minutes, but it’s not nothing — so I mostly just watched some television.
I noted this on Twitter, but if you’d told me just a few weeks ago that Hannibal would be one of my favorite shows this year and Community would be my least favorite, I would not have believed you. I should have known I was in trouble when the AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff, who I feel has been something of an apologist for this not very good fourth season, gave this season finale a D. It was a really dreadful half hour of television, at the end of a pretty lousy season, largely for the reasons that Todd gives. And yet the show has been renewed for a fifth season. I honestly don’t know how to feel about that.
Hannibal, meanwhile, is still on the bubble, though I really hope it comes back. It’s a dark and sometimes very difficult show, definitely not something to watch on a queasy stomach. But it’s also kind of terrific, which is not something I expected from a Hannibal Lecter TV show.
I wrote this today:
“Are you going to finish that?†she says. His coffee has grown cold while she’s kept him waiting, and for that she apologizes, but they really do need to be going. She takes the cup and places it next to her own untouched coffee on the desk. She’s spoken with his direct superior on the phone and confirmed his credentials — she’s sure he can understand her precaution — but now they only have a limited window in which to talk with the prisoner.
“I’m not completely sure what you hope to accomplish here,†she says, staring at him. Young, eager to please, no doubt exceptionally bright, but also obviously naive. They always are, the ones they dispatch here to investigate these things. She has seen his sort all too often. She doesn’t know exactly what his bosses at the Bureau have told him, but it will almost certainly not have been enough.
“You can’t tell who he is just by looking at him,†she says. “You could stand right next to him, have a long conversation. You could invite him into your home, and you still wouldn’t be able to tell. And I still don’t know if that’s because he’s so good at hiding it or because we’re simply so eager not to look.â€
â€I’ve seen his kind before,†he tells her. He is impatient to begin what she thinks he will foolishly call in his notes after this is done an interrogation.
“No,†she says. “Not like this. You’ve seen remnants, the broken armies of the Shard. Those were echoes, whispers in a distant room, compared to this. This is darkness. This is evil.â€
“I didn’t take you for the superstitious sort, Doctor,†he says.
“I just want you to understand,†she says, “that the man in there isn’t a man. Whatever he may tell you, whatever lies he may spout, you need to understand that much. But he also isn’t like the animals that you’ve rounded up and killed.â€
“They’re extra-terrestrials, Doctor. Not demons or ghosts…or whatever it is the fanatics are believing these days. The Shard came to Earth to conquer it. And they failed. If this man is what you say he is — if he’s committed the crimes you say he has — then he’s just another one of their fallen army that we need to quarrantine and eliminate. There’s nothing special or mysterious about that.â€
“He isn’t one of the Shard,†the doctor says. “This is what I have been trying to tell you. The thing in there is much, much more dangerous. He’s one of their gods.â€
There’s definitely a little bit of the influence of Hannibal running around in there, the sfnal elements notwithstanding. I watched this week’s episode this morning, after the Sunday crossword puzzle kicked my brain’s ass, and it really disturbed me. I say that as a good thing, as the show has thoroughly surprised me with just how good it is, but these folks are not kidding with their “viewer discretion advised” warnings.
The silliness of Iron Man 3 helped, I think. It’s pretty slow to start, and probably more silly than intelligent, but the second half (or last third) at least is genuinely entertaining.
And that was Sunday. I haven’t looked at my work e-mail once since Friday.
Last night, my mom and I went to the simulcast of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!‘s live show from New York. It was maybe a little odd seeing the show live on a big movie screen, but I’ve seen it live before — once in Chicago, and then at Carnegie Hall — and it was a lot of fun.
Today I didn’t do a whole lot, mostly just took advantage of my day off by sleeping late and lounging about. I watched a little TV — Community‘s episode was kind of dire; Supernatural was okay, but they’re maybe going to the Felicia Day well a little too often — and read some Kaleidotrope submissions. (I think I’m finally moving into stories submitted in February!) And played a little Bioshock. I glanced at my work e-mail, but I didn’t once turn on the laptop I brought home with me.
It’s altogether possible I’ll regret that come Monday morning, but right now I’m in three-day-weekend mode.
Oh, and lest I forget, my music mix from April. It’s just this thing I do: