There’s no unified theme for today’s blog post, simply because it’s the middle of a relatively stressful week and I’ve not been thinking about much besides Gilmore Girls and Chrono Cross (and let’s be honest, those are both relatively esoteric topics, so I won’t stick you with yet another post about them–yet).
So, very quickly, here’s a smattering of things that I’ve seen or thought about in the past few days.
1. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a very good movie, but it seems to me to be a movie that improves on a second viewing, simply because after you do a trial run you’ll feel like you actually understand everything that’s going on (also, for a period movie set in the 1970s, it seems relatively respectful of its few women characters; one of them is even depicted as being an analyst for British Intelligence; on the other hand, another one is killed without ceremony as a way of torturing a guy who’s being interrogated by the Soviets). Go watch it on Netflix when you have a couple hours and you can give it your undivided attention.
2. I just heard about this podcast, and I’m totally going to check it out, because it purports to do what the Batman franchise has needed for a long time: psychoanalyze its characters.
3. Sony had a big sale on indie games last weekend, so I blew the last of my birthday money buying up things that I’ve been wanting to play, but didn’t feel justified paying ten or fifteen dollars for (three dollars, on the other hand, is a wonderful price for an indie game). I’ve spent the last couple nights fiddling around with Fez. It’s good; I managed to go all of twenty-four hours before I broke down and started looking up solutions to all the obscure puzzles in the game. As someone who grew up playing games with a walkthrough almost always in hand, I feel no shame over this decision.
4. So the new Fantastic Four trailer dropped yesterday, apparently. It… does not look like a superhero movie. I suppose it could be good (if nothing else, it’s daring to cast a black man as Johnny Storm, which I’ve wholeheartedly approved of ever since I heard that was the direction the filmmakers were taking), but it doesn’t seem to be going for the attitude that I’ve always thought Fantastic Four was supposed to evoke (that is, bright, optimistic, and brimming with a retro-idealism that’s supposed to call back to the series’ heyday of the ’60s). We’ll see if this different direction is any good in the summer.
5. I’m slowly but surely making my way through the last book of Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series. I will write up thoughts about it once I’m done. I just don’t know how long that will be.
That’s all. There will be Chrono Cross on Friday. Have a happy middle of the week.
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