2 Last 2 Weekend
I seem to be at an age when time goes by so imperceptibly fast, my brain keeps on telling me that I watched a movie over FaceTime with Gabriel and Lea last night. Like, when I access the memory of it in my brain, it totally feels like something that happened last night. But, it was actually on Saturday. Last night, Shobhit and I watched The Larry Sanders Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
With Gabriel and Lea on Saturday, I had texted them much earlier in the day without a huge hope that it would work out for this weekend, but just as a heads up that I was basically open all weekend for watching the next installment in the Fast and the Furious franchise, but would be unavailable both next weekend (when Shobhit and I go to Portland) and the weekend after (when I go with Dad and Sherri to visit Wallace, Idaho). Even the weekend after that is somewhat iffy, as it's Pride Weekend, although I'm guessing I can make time for a movie that weekend if they can. Either way, it was going to be at least another three weeks before we could see a movie during a weekend again, so if we wanted to see 2 Fast 2 Furious before then, it would have to be this weekend.
And then, to my surprise, they were up for it, kind of late on Saturday evening. Gabriel reminded me that I had said I would be open basically any time, which was true; it's just that he called me when Shobhit and I were barely more than five minutes into an episode of The Larry Sanders Show. So, I told him I'd call them back in fifteen minutes, so Shobhit and I could at least finish what we were watching. Shobhit just went back to his news programs once that was over, and I went to the bedroom for us to start the movie—at around 9:45 p.m.
Shobhit even came to bed during the movie, so I covered the camera on my iPad long enough for him to crawl into bed behind me without being seen. He turned the lamp off at that point so for the last 20 minutes or so of the movie, I was sitting in the dark, within minutes hearing Shobhit snoring behind me. Gabriel could hear it too, and when he first heard it, it was pretty funny, because he started looking around with a confused look on his face, at first wondering if it was Lady (Lea's dog). Once I told him it was Shobhit, we were both pretty amused because by that point Lea had also fallen asleep. She wasn’t audibly snoring, though.
"It's what I sleep to every night," I said. I was just thinking, though, about how used to it I am. It does happen occasionally, but most of the time Shobhit's snoring is not that intrusive, and honestly if it stopped for good I might start wondering if he died. Besides, his snores are nothing compared to what I used to deal with when living at home with my mom, whose snoring could literally keep me awake from separate bedrooms. (I do also have a vivid memory of having to share a room with her when we stayed with her parents in Phoenix over Christmas in 1990, though, and that was one of the worst nights of sleep I had in my entire life. I was 14.)
Anyway. The movie. Gabriel opted against syncing up via TeleParty in Chrome this time, and just coordinated our playbacks. We would count down, and then if the sound seemed off, Gabriel has apparently developed the skill to sync it up just by listening. The problem there is that if it's synced on one end, it isn't on the other (which is the case even in TeleParty), so I just kept my sound down low enough for it not to be audible on their end while theirs was playing. For the most part I couldn't hear theirs either, although occasionally I would hear it, and it was barely delayed, like a quick echo. It was infrequent enough not to be a huge problem, though. The bigger issue is just how often when either of them spoke the sound did not come through on my end at all, and it was like they were on mute. This often happens even when a movie is not playing though, so I don't know if that's their wifi or my wifi or their device or mine or what.
I didn't realize Vin Diesel, who I presume is now considered integral to the franchise, was not in the first sequel. This means he is in neither the second one, or most of the third (though apparently he makes an appearance at the very end); the third otherwise shifts to an entirely new cast. According to Gabriel, the fourth sort of retcons all the disparate casts from the first three movies into the same universe, and they all stay together through the rest of the series—or at least until Paul Walker dies, anyway. In any event, I enjoyed the second one nearly as much as the first, and I still look forward to moving forward in the series. I actually think I'll enjoy it more and more as things get more winkingly preposterous. I've had a very similar experience with the Mission: Impossible franchise, which doesn't do the same kind of winking, but still ups the ante with insane action set pieces each time, and they're always great.
So how about the rest of my weekend? I watched at least two movies for review, both of then streaming at home.
The first was on Friday, which I waited until Shobhit got home from work to watch because I thought he would enjoy it too, the latest Disney Animated Feature which was available at no premium markup on Disney+ as of that day: Raya and the Last Dragon. It was . . . fine.
That movie got surprisingly good reviews, and Karen told me the week before last during our Facebook lunch that Anita and a friend had gone to see it in a theater and they raved about it. I already knew a lot of people were really liking that movie, which was what made me want to see it. I even considered seeing it in theaters, but by the time it was really viable for me to see it there, its June 4 Disney+ release was soon enough that I figured I might as well just wait. Honestly, I'm really glad I did. It has some great animation, but I found the story so weak and lacking in true originality of wit that I think paying to see it in a theater was kind of a waste.
Shobhit even laid it down only about 15 minutes in: "I think this is B or B-minus." I was slightly impatient with him at that moment, because it was like: we haven't seen enough of it to make that judgment yet. But, he was absolutely right. I gave the movie a solid B, and only that high because I really liked a lot of the animation.
Beyond that, I somewhat struggled to find something else to review over the weekend, as I had for a long time had The Tomorrow War on my calendar for Saturday—but that doesn't actually come out until Fourth of July Weekend, and I think I must have just accidentally put it on my calendar on the wrong weekend. I spent a lot of time otherwise over the weekend either captioning photos from my Birth Week (which I remain behind on but would like to finish before these next trips to occur over the next couple of weeks) or watching TV like the new, third, much more downbeat season of Master of None on Netflix. Or The Larry Sanders Show with Shobhit—we are now a couple episodes into the sixth and last season, so sometime soon we'll have to come up with a new series as our default binge for watching whenever we have nothing else to watch.
So anyway, then I went back to my old trick: looking up 2021 releases on MetaCritic, sorting by MetaScore, and trying to find something well-reviewed and recent that I have not yet watched. That's how I landed on the Hulu documentary Changing the Game, which I watched and reviewed yesterday (B+), even though it was always intended as a Hulu original and was never getting a wide or even limited theatrical release—although, as I noted in the review, it did screen at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019.
It's about three transgender teen athletes and is very good; I highly recommend it. The title seems also apropos for where I seem to be going with my movie reviews, at least for now: I am far less strict than I was pre-pandemic about only reviewing movies with a theatrical release, or post-pandemic movies originally intended for theatrical release. I still think I'll move closer to that as time goes on and more movies are back in theaters. But, I think moving forward I will now always also be more open to reviewing a streaming film, if I think it's vital enough to get the word out about. And this movie definitely qualifies.
So anyway, that was my last "chill" weekend for at least another month, given that next weekend is Portland; the weekend after that is Wallace, Idaho; after that is Pride Weekend and after that is Fourth of July Weekend. There won't be another weekend that's not either a trip or a holiday of some sort until July 10. Laney should be back in Washington by then, at least, so I could conceivably see her again by then. Either way, I'm excited about all the stuff coming up—even if it's looking less and less likely that we'll meet the goal of 70% of adults vaccinated by the end of June. For some time we were "on target" for that goal, but only "at current vaccination rates," and they should have seen it coming that the rate of vaccination would steadily decline. We'll still meet the goal, of course, just not as early as predicted. On the upside, it still looks like Washington State is on track to meet the goal before the nationwide rate meets it; and King County is on the verge of meeting it well before the rest of the state does. So I'm, as always, right where I want to be.
Oh, and we also had a quasi-virtual "party" for Noah over Microsoft Teams this morning, to commemorate his 15th anniversary with PCC. Several people in Merchandising attended: Scott (who organized), Lynne, Steven, Mackenzie, Peter, both of the Kevins, myself, and of course Noah. It sure would have been nice to do this in person at the office, but, whatever. As always over the past year and a half: you take what you can get and you make do with what you've got. These things are changing for the better at the moment, anyway. (Although it should be noted that if countries don't work together to get this shit under control the world over, we're still all well and truly fucked.)
Anyway! How did I forget that I've actually worked at PCC even longer than Noah has? He started in 2006. I had been working here nearly four years already. My anniversary, this August, will be 19 years. I guess I can take comfort in the knowledge that I'll almost get an in-person special commemoration next year, when I'll have worked this job for fully twenty years. Which feels sort of nuts now, but I am ever grateful. I never had to look for work in all of that time! Whew.
[posted 12:28 pm]