roughly in the middle

📽️ Way back when, I watched My Wife Is a Gangster. I enjoyed it enough to watch the sequel but ended up not finishing it because the humor wasn’t my cup of tea/squicked me out. I read that My Wife Is a Gangster 3 was unrelated to the first two installments in the franchise and decided to give it a shot. It’s fine. I’m neutral towards the misunderstandings/miscommunication trope, but the language barrier was too much for me. I don’t know how they’re supposed to have caught feelings enough to want to get married if one character can’t get the other one to understand they have a beer moustache. On the plus side, very much enjoyed Aryong’s action sequences.

📽️ Rewatched Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths! (Please enjoy these random screenshots on my Bluesky.) I spotted a couple of things that I think are plotholes, but I’m ready and willing to ignore them in favor of enjoying the 10/10 fight animation and Batman not-so-secretly caring about Flash. (They joked about it at the start and it was proven true at the end! My heart!!) Experienced the teensiest urge after the movie to revisit that Batman/Owlman WIP I have buried somewhere in my files. It won’t happen any time soon but at least the interest is still there 😆

📽️ The Old Guard 2 felt more like a generic action movie than its predecessor. Don't get me wrong! I love my action movies, generic or not. And the aforementioned action was certainly slicker and more visually appealing than the first movie. But there were too many moments where the plot points or dialogue choices took me out of the moment. This was in a weird spot between, "Not dumb enough for me to enjoy this mindlessly," and "What the hell are they doing?" All that said, I'd still watch a third installment to see Uma Thurman and Charlize Theron fighting to the death 😆

📚 Something about Makoto (the top/alpha) from Omega no Mukotori lit up all my neurons in the best way 👀 I guess I just have a soft spot for dark-haired burly dudes. I also very much enjoyed the fact that Yoshiharu (the bottom/omega) was the much more aggressive character and did most of the pursuing. I will gladly consume A/B/O content, even the non-traditional stuff.

⚠️ Mild spoilers

The Fantastic 4: First Steps (7/10)

I saw the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic 4 movies in theaters when they first came out but wasn't particularly interested in seeing the 2015 remake when it was released. Wasn't particularly interested in seeing this one either, though I also wasn't against seeing it with the family when someone floated the idea.

I found this much more interesting than the early 2000s versions, mostly because of the retro-futuristic aesthetic. (Though to be fair, I don't really remember much about the earlier versions.) I hadn't seen any trailers beforehand so it took me a moment to process what I was seeing. Very cool! The sisters and I were also all so enamored with Sue's maternity uniform. So, so cute!!

Two things I felt strongly about in this movie:

( Cut for mild spoilers. )

Random stuff:

• I was hoping for more Ben/Rachel. I thought they were very cute!
• Very much enjoyed the banter between Ben and Johnny.
• Cackled that Sue would rather have a dude with literal rocks for skin catch her delicate newborn baby rather than her own brother. Is that supposed to imply that Johnny's super clumsy?
• No strong feelings about Johnny/Shalla-Bal but wouldn't be opposed to seeing their relationship explored in a sequel (if we get one).

Random stuff that I've read/watched lately that I don't have to say much about, but still wanted to mention!

📚 Read a couple of BL manga; Boku no Mii-chan and Hugpai (⚠️ the Hugpai cover is suggestive, in case there might be smol bebe eyes in the room). Both have NSFW chapters, though Boku no Mii-chan is more serious and story focused while Hugpai is more comedic and pretty NSFW throughout. The couples were both cute! (Sidenote: Thanks to Hugpai for giving me the motivation to dust off and finish writing Malleable.)

📽️ I haven't seen a Jurassic Park movie since Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (which I can barely remember), so I wasn't sure what to expect for Jurassic World Rebirth. It was fine; straightforward plot, forgettable but likable characters, cool dinosaurs. I thought the (budding) friendship between Zora Bennett and Dr. Henry Loomis was nice. This was the first time I saw ScarJo starting to look older (the neck will always betray you). This isn't a dig; just something I noticed.

The Substance (9/10)

Watched this in theaters a while back with Doctor Cousin and completely forgot to write about it! I was cleaning up the file I use for entry drafts and saw my notes for the movie, so I took that as a sign to make a post.

I’d actually never heard of this movie until Doctor Cousin asked me if I was interested in catching it while it was still showing. A quick internet search later—a horror movie! Yay!—and I was coordinating schedules with her. I miss watching horror movies on the big screen, y’all. Truly a different experience.

The movie is, to quote from Wikipedia, about the “societal pressures on women’s bodies and aging” with the associated fear and anxiety cranked up to 100 then mixed with a lot of blood and grotesque imagery. Definitely skip it if you’re not a fan of gore or needles. I’ve got a high-ish tolerance for gore thanks to Saw, but the needles stressed me out.

( Cut for length and mild spoilers. )

Random stuff:

• Both surprised and unsurprised to find out that the director for this—Coralie Fargeat—was also behind Revenge. Fargeat has a very distinct visual flair, I think.
• Dennis Quaid’s extreme close-ups while he pissed and while he annihilated shrimp were far more disturbing to me than any of the gore scenes.

Godzilla -1.0 (7/10)

Normally, I don't care about humans in kaiju movies—"I'm here for the kaiju, not the people," is what I say—but this movie actually had me feeling bad about what happened to the protagonists. I actually cared about what happened to Kouichi and Noriko. I was moved by Kouichi's struggles and was happy for him that he'd made peace with his past and seems to be on the road to healing.

The Godzilla here is definitely more a metaphor of something else rather than a character in their own right who just so happens to also be a metaphor of something. (I haven't watched enough Japanese-made Godzilla movies to say that this is a trend I can see across all of them versus the MonsterVerse!Godzilla, but I've read a couple of reviews comparing Japanese and American versions in general that point this out.) Godzilla in -1.0 is an unfathomable creature whose purpose is to destroy. MonsterVerse!Godzilla is a cranky prehistoric creature who sometimes helps humanity but is mostly just annoyed by anything challenging his rule as King of the Monsters.

Surprising things (for me):

• I thought the way Godzilla moved looked kind of goofy in some of the scenes (for example, when it's destroying a building and news reporters on an adjacent rooftop were filming it) but it apparently won an Oscar for best visual effects. I am a random civilian with almost no knowledge of filmmaking, so I suppose I'm missing something. They had a relatively tiny budget and team for VFX so maybe that's why they won the award? "Looking this nice despite just having these resources," sort of thing.

• After I finished the movie, I read the relevant Wikipedia page and found out that some Japanese authors thought that Godzilla -1.0 was a "dangerous movie". Partly because they view most of director Yamazaki Takashi's work as "nationalistic if not outright jingoistic." Godzilla -1.0 came across, to me, as more of a criticism of how governments treat peoples' lives as expendable. I tried to look for the original sources cited in The Japan Times article to get a better idea of the context, but couldn't find them.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (8/10)

I liked Mad Max: Fury Road more, mostly because I felt like the story was more edited in the "less is more" sense. For example, that nighttime scene where the camera zooms in on the History Man delivering some kind of monologue felt overlong and slowly inched into awkward near the end.

But that's my biggest complaint. I very much enjoyed this movie as a look into what made Furiosa the badass woman she is in Fury Road while it also built up the world and lore we saw.

It also really drove home just how full of grit, determination, and smarts Furiosa is even as a child. (I would like to think that I would've at least gone down swinging if I were in her shoes, but I probably would've laid down and let the desert take me.) I wondered at multiple points how she was going to get out of the situation she was in and she! Just kept doing it! Love her!!

( Cut for length and spoilers. )

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (7/10)

After all of the other MonsterVerse movies we've had to date, I guess a team-up movie was the only next step that made sense 😂

Was this movie entertaining? Yes. Was it as good as the other movies in the MonsterVerse universe to date? None of the entries so far has beat King of the Monsters. Is this movie worth watching? Depends on what you're after in a movie, I guess? GxK has a lot of fighting kaiju, a reluctant team-up between King Kong and Godzilla, some comedy relief that falls flat a couple of times, and what I thought was a surprisingly touching parent–child moment between Ilene and Jia.

Godzilla is cemented as kind of a dick in this movie (Tiamat didn't deserve that!) while King Kong is made out to be the nicer kaiju who's just lonely and wants a family. I don't know any hardcore Godzilla or King Kong fans, so I'm not sure how this portrayal fits in with the broader characterizations in fandom.

Again, I think I would've liked this more if the focus was less on the humans and more on the kaiju. If Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron could make a movie with very little human dialogue and still make you care about their non-human protagonist, MonsterVerse can do it too!

Shake, Rattle & Roll Extreme

Shake, Rattle & Roll is a local horror film anthology franchise that's been around since 1984. I've been aware of its existence since maybe high school and I know some of the stories via cultural osmosis, but this is the first time I've actually sat down and watched an entire installment.

The three vignettes included in this movie were Glitch, Mukbang, and Rage. I think Glitch was the creepiest, by the usual horror standards. Mukbang was more horror comedy and/or satire while Rage was more zombie survival. I didn't really have a favorite among them, but I do think Glitch had a lot of potential to be ... more. It had the makings of a movie that I could have easily added to my, "There's so many things happening here and I LOVE IT" list, sitting beside media like Ninja Batman and KILL la KILL.

Glitch's premise is that there's a woman (Ingrid) who lives with her 2 kids (older son Patrick and younger daughter Lyka) plus their nanny Hasmine. Ingrid is currently separated from her husband and is very busy with work to the point that she doesn't pay much attention to her kids. This creates an opportunity for a demon/evil spirit—which is pretending to be a goat mascot from a kids' show—to convince Lyka to invite them into their home.

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📽️ Coworkers and I watched Anaconda on Netflix. What a blast from the past! I have vague memories of watching snippets of this on AXN as a kid. People online say that it's so bad it's good, but despite laughing throughout a significant chunk of it, I wouldn't call it good. Definitely entertaining, though. Especially Serone's campy portrayal.

💼 Today's workday was so slow. On the plus side, I learned how to use what I think is SQL(???) in the data analysis platform we use. I spent most of the afternoon fiddling around with my team's data trying to set up automations and whatnot to make my life easier down the line. Work smart, not hard, etc.

💪🏽 I only went to the gym once this week (sorry, Coach) because work stuff has been keeping me "BLECH" after shift. I seem to have hit a plateau in terms of my progress, so Coach has started me on pyramid weight training plus incorporating more HIIT stuff into our sessions. He said that he would "stop feeling sorry" for me whenever it looks like I'm struggling with the exercises, which ... is fine. Sir, I got you specifically so you would push me because deep down I'm a big baby and will not do it myself.