It’s true, and I have no idea why.
Anyway, for anyone with access to netflix and looking for something Christmas-themed and low-stress, might I recommend ‘Yes Virginia.’ It’s short! It’s cute! It has a happy ending!
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Eh. I don’t really want to spend the last third of any movie viewing in tears, so it wasn’t my favorite.
I would describe it as ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ meets ‘Space Cowboys.’ (aka: Classic disaster movie premise that sounds like it could be fun actually turns out to be taken super seriously, and there is crying.)
My issue when movies start taking things like ‘giant asteroid hurtling towards us’ seriously, is that then I start questioning things. What about the nuclear reactors? Was Morgan Freeman just a total liar? (I get the feeling saying ‘pretty sure none of these plans will work and we’re all gonna die’ wouldn’t have gone over too well, but it could have made a really interesting movie.)
Anyway, Deep Impact: not my favorite movie. But I’d been meaning to watch it for a while, so there’s that checked off the list.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Watched it last weekend — overall, it was okay. I remember seeing previews when it was in theaters and thinking it looked interesting. Which it was, just not in an overwhelmingly likable way.
It felt a little like the writers really wanted a certain set of scenes, and then everything else was written to try to make them work, with varying levels of success. Some parts were really fun to watch, others I just turned the sound down and clicked to another tab for a few minutes.
(I had a lot of trouble with the whole ‘hey kids, you can’t tell your parents about this’ part especially. It was like every Stranger Danger lesson ever rolled into one scene, and it kind of wigged me out that all the kids just went right along with it.)
Anyway, School of Rock! Some fun music, not a lot of well-developed characters.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
I’m signed up for the 2 dvds per month plan on netflix. Sounds simple, right? It would be, except netflix sometimes sends a third dvd FOR NO APPARENT REASON.
I mean, on the one hand it feels crazy to get fired up about this, because hey — extra dvd! Yay!
But on the other hand, I like knowing what I can expect. (Not great with surprises.) The queue is ordered on the expectation that dvds will arrive two per month; there’s a plan!
[But wait, it gets better! So I went googling to see if I could find the actual text that netflix gave me yesterday in the ‘wondering why you have an extra disc?’ answer, and apparently this MYSTERY DISC issue is one that people have VERY STRONG FEELINGS about. I thought it was a somewhat humorous way to highlight my own difficulties handling the unexpected, but people have actually called netflix customer service over this. Repeatedly.]
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
*April fic: kinda sorta? I need to re-read it to see if it’s actually done, or if I just got tired of writing.
*turtle door art: SUCCESS
[Note: I totally couldn’t figure out the first set of instructions. I wound up using these instead, but I think it came out well!]
*vacuuming: achieved!
*prepared for the week ahead? well, more than yesterday, at least
*also, just watched ‘Stardust,’ thanks to a particularly funny ‘the new Daredevil vs Superman movie looks great’ post on my tumblr dash, and I thought it was surprisingly adorable!
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
So I watched the pilot episode for the Daredevil netflix series. It was okay. Kind of bleak, I thought.
(It is possible I am overly influenced by Dardevil’s appearance(s) in Spiderman: The Animated Series, which I watched an awful lot of in the 1990s. He was somewhat less than charming towards Spiderman.)
The new series is supposed to be part of the official MCU, and references the Battle of New York and everything, but focused heavily on all the bad stuff — sinister criminals, really seriously villainous villain-types. And I’m not really sure what Daredevil’s whole deal is in the show.
Lawyer by day, vigilante by night, I get it (although, when does he sleep? he seems to have more than 24 hours in his day). But why? I’m not convinced that one person can take on a crime syndicate (even one person who’s pretending to be two people). And why the solo act? There’s like a billion powered-up individuals floating around New York who’d be happy to help serve up some justice.
(He kind of just seems like a very angry person to me, but I’m not sure that viciously beating up low-level thugs actually makes anything better, and I don’t think it makes him a hero.)
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
I’ve been meaning to watch it, and finally remembered I had the dvd from Netflix. (My dad watched it first; he said it was sad, so I didn’t want to watch it right *before* Christmas just in case.)
I actually didn’t think it was sad? But I had some knowledge of what was going to happen, so I pretty much just fast forwarded any time men were on screen. (Except for Diaval.) A surprisingly good technique for making the movie more awesome.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Whoops, it’s already Sunday.
Goals for the day:
1. do not be tempted by sale flyers and email offers!
2. watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!
3. write some words!
Yeah, and the stuff I was planning to do yesterday that somehow didn’t happen.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Since there are so many awesome Christmas movies (Die Hard 2, I’m not counting you!), I figured I’d better start early. The list as it currently stands in my netflix queue:
*Rise of the Guardians (sure, technically it’s an Easter movie, but Santa’s in it!)
*Scrooged (this one was recommended to me last year, and I never got to it)
*Iron Man 3 (oh yeah!)
*Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (I haven’t seen this in years, but I have a couple of the songs in my Christmas playlist)
*Die Hard
*A Charlie Brown Christmas (I think netflix should send multiple movies when they’re really short)
*The Holiday
*Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the awesome one, not the creepy one)
Question for the season: Why does netflix not offer ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’? That movie is awesome, and also basically the only reason my family still owns a VCR.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
First, anyone who ever told you that this was a terrible movie was absolutely 100% correct. But if you go into it with that expectation, and watch with a ready finger over the fast-forward key, it can be quite enjoyable!
There are life lessons!
“One – never walk into a house made of candy.”
There is a surprise!troll!
There is a lol-tastic shoutout to sleeveless Hawkeye!
(The guy on the right might need sleeves, but not J.Renner!)
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
That’s right — Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is on its way to my door at this very moment. I think I may need to watch large portions of this movie with the sound off, or in fast forward. But it’s been sitting at the top of my queue for so long, it feels like a badge of honor or something to actually view the movie.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Now that I’m back at work, it must be time to reflect upon my vacation accomplishments. My top five!
1. Dropped my average Sudoku time to below 10 minutes per game.
2. Watched four movies. (If you count Mulan 2 as a movie, which maybe you shouldn’t. I did watch it, but I’m sad to say I cannot recommend it.)
3. Took three naps. A key element of any vacation.
4. Read a book. (It was ‘No Plot, No Problem’ by Chris Baty. A re-read, but still excellent.)
5. Utterly failed to prepare myself for the frustration of finding myself back at work today. (I found myself staring at a display today, thinking, ‘Someone made this, and they must have had a theme in mind, but what could it POSSIBLY be?’ And all I could come up with was ‘random stuff.’)
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
The music helps, but this picture pretty much sets the scene. They’re back! Jack even brought Lucy a present! (Maybe. It’s sort of hard to tell what’s in his hand, actually, but I like to imagine that she knew all along that he was in the CIA, and the gifting is their post-mission tradition.)
Not sure who this guy is, but I like him. First he’s all, ‘Yeah, this is totally awesome.’
Then he switches to, ‘Play it cool, there’s three McClane’s together on the tarmac, anything could happen.’
And then hugs! Hugging is awesome.
Basically the movie.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Since Netflix seems utterly confused by how a queue is supposed to work, I wound up with Good Day to Die Hard instead of any of the 4 movies ahead of it. It’s short — one hour and 37 minutes — and I still ended up fast forwarding over most of the ridiculously long car chase near the beginning. (And then I had to rewind to hear John’s phone conversation with Lucy.) Basically, there was a movie I enjoyed watching within this movie, but my movie was only about 20 minutes long.
In some semblance of order, my thoughts:
1. The premise was… what? John finds out his son just got arrested in Russia and goes to… see him? Bust him out? This is unclear. Also, despite the fact that he got this information through obviously police channels, it doesn’t seem to ping on any CIA radar (yeah, turns out Jack is actually working for the CIA, I guess, and is prison on purpose — this part is also never really clarified). You’d think after all the trouble John McClane gets in that he’d pretty much be on every flight watchlist in the world, but apparently not.
2. So Lucy drives John to the airport, which is awesome.
3. John winds up in Russia. (All of the lead-in to the massive car chase takes place within less than a day, which is hard to fathom, but if you can’t suspend disbelief about *that,* you might as well stop watching Die Hard movies.) He finds Jack! Who has just busted out of the courtroom on his own with a political prisoner.
4. RIDICULOUSLY LONG CAR CHASE, ESPECIALLY SINCE WE DON’T REALLY HAVE ANY REASON TO CARE ABOUT ANY OF THESE PEOPLE AT THIS POINT
5. For some reason, the CIA was going to blow something up, but Jack missed the window? I was v.confused about what, exactly, Plan A was in this scenario.
6. Plan B rapidly goes to pieces, along with plans C through whatever. Both McClanes receive a truly improbable number of wounds and continue to fight on, interspersed with moments of actually talking to each other (rare).
7. In a random and unnecessary plot twist, the final battle is at Chernobyl. Not cool. In an extremely predictable plot twist, it turns out to all be about money! (It’s like this is a Die Hard movie, or something.) Basically everyone dies except the McClanes.
8. And then the final plane flight home, which basically makes sitting through the movie worth it. There’s no dialogue, which means you can really make up anything you want about it, though it does have an oddly Folgers Crystals feel to it. (Yeah, you know what I mean.)
9. Overall: worth watching on dvd for the McClane family interaction.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
According to wikipedia, the movie was almost called Die Hard 4.0, which admittedly makes more sense with the actual content of the film. But as a New Hampshire resident, I love the title ‘Live Free or Die Hard,’ which is shamelessly yanked from our state motto.
It makes a good movie to rewatch, although I did skip through some of the fight scenes. I think Bruce Willis should join Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson in the Fast/Furious franchise. (How awesome would that be?) And of course, it’s very quotable!
“No, it’s not supposed to do that. But it’s a lot more valuable when it’s broken, so thanks for that.”
-Matt
“Really? This is you being scared? Because you seem — really calm.”
-Matt
“Why would they want to kill me?”
“You tell me, kid, you’re the criminal.”
-Matt, John
“It’s *old* rock, that doesn’t make it classic.”
-Matt
“You just killed that helicopter with a car.”
“Well, I was out of bullets.”
-Matt, John
“When do we start winning?”
-Matt
“That’s what makes you that guy.”
-John (and Matt, earlier)
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Netflix refuses to send me “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.” Crazy, right? It’s listed as “Very Long Wait,” and Netflix keeps sending me random selections from my queue instead (I never pay attention to what order things are in past the first one or two dvds, so I have been perpetually surprised by the arrivals recently.)
I believe I have temporarily solved the problem by front-loading the queue with 4th of July movies (Live Free or Die Hard, woohoo!), but seriously. Even *I* don’t really want to see “Witch Hunters.” (I’ll admit to a certain sense of morbid curiosity, but now it’s mostly the sense of competition with Netflix. You *will* send me the movie I request, darn it!)
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
It turns out bluemeridian and I both watched ‘Rise of the Guardians’ yesterday, and apparently we’ve also both spent time since them reading fanfic.
Here’s one grabbed from bluemeridian’s pinboard:
Bunnymund visits grown-up Sofie, by anonymous (kink!meme fill, but totally gen)
“This one’s new.” Bunny settles on the bench next to her and drops a basket of chocolate between them. “What’s her name?”
And this is one I stayed up way longer than planned reading:
188 Hugs, by Icka M Chif (mischif)
Sandy snapped his fingers, a disappointed look on his face as an image of Bunny doing ‘I’m a little teapot’ swirled above his head. Bunny growled in return, narrowing his eyes and the image quickly disappeared, Sandy suddenly looking highly angelic and innocent of any possible teasing.
[Read ALL the fanfic? YES!]
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
For reasons somewhat beyond my understanding, I have been watching some episodes of Iron Man: Armored Adventures. (It’s the Marvel-approved animated high school AU.)
And it seems like every time I watch an episode, I want to re-read this story:
Living In The Future, by Closer
“It’s not like a guy who’s been in the ice for seventy years and is now in SHIELD top-secret custody has a lot of chips on the table. Did he threaten to hold his breath?”
[Note: I liked this story before I'd seen any Armored Adventures eps, but the voices and everything are even more enjoyable post-viewing.]
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
Well, almost movie time. Netflix just confirmed that they are sending ‘Aaron Cross: Alaska Adventure,’ with a predicted arrival of Saturday.
(As I looked for a picture, I remembered that vast sections of the movie made no sense at all. Still looking forward to a rewatch!)
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
1. There is now a general consensus at my workplace that we are being hounded by some sort of karmic bad energy. Flooding in December, third time in two weeks; I cannot even express how much I did not want to walk into work this morning and see water ALL OVER THE FLOOR. I nearly cried.
2. 152 displays of lights on my way home this evening! Also, my boss did not fire all of us and shut down the store out of sheer, unreasoning frustration, so that’s something.
3. I have not yet received my secret snowflake gift, but so far the giving has been quite enjoyable. (And since I’m the one who drew names for everyone, not exactly a secret, which is just the way I like it.)
4. Apparently Die Hard 2 also takes place on Christmas Eve. Next in the queue!
5. Queue is an awesome word.
Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.
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