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Well, shit. Tracy got super backlogged with work she needed to do in preparation for a huge presentation she has for private label products today. She was working so late at the office on Wednesday that she texted me she may not have the time to join me for the movie night after all. It was nearly 9 p.m. when she texted me on Wednesday night, saying in part,
Let's see what I get done tomorrow but wanted you to be prepared.
I should have taken that on its own as notification that she was not going to make it. Somewhat foolishly in retrospect, I allowed that last bit to leave me with some hope that she might make it. She had already told me she had some other kind of appointment outside the office yesterday so would not arrive until a bit later. I kind of assumed maybe she would have done other work on her presentation at home in the morning, but who knows?
We had our standard greeting when she arrived at the office yesterday shortly after work, but I waited until 3:00 to turn around and ask her, "Tracy ? So what's the verdict?" She said, "I haven't gotten any work done, it's just been all calls." I replied, "So you aren't going to make it?" Nope. "All right," I said.
Luckily, after I found out Shobhit had the day off yesterday, I already purchased a third ticket for him through the app, so at least I didn't have to go by myself. I did text Alexia to see if she wanted to join us, knowing it was unlikely she could—especially as yesterday was her last day of work before a trip to Long Island in New York to visit some close friends for the next week and a half; I'll be feeding her cat Cassie over the next two weekends. She told me she actually was interested in the movie but couldn't make it.
I met up with Shobhit downtown. I thought I would meet him at Pacific Place but he wanted to look in at Old Navy real quick; he's looking for warm socks for his brother. He always takes gifts back to India for family when he goes, a lot of it clothes—I asked him about this the other day and he said all clothes sold in India are of lower quality than what you can buy at stores in the U.S. Predictably, Old Navy was all out of warm winter socks. Then, walking the block from there to Pacific Place, I told Shobhit I had just submitted for a refund for his ticket and the AMC app accepted it; I should get refunded in the next few days. He said, "You're not going to give the money back to Tracy?" Nope! Consider this the price of her lack of time management.
That's kind of unfair to Tracy, I realize. The accusation that it's about bad time management, I mean. I don't spend every minute of every day with her. I'm still keeping that money. She knew the risks when she went into this! (Also she never asked me for it and is clearly cutting her losses. I don't think it even occurred to her to ask for the money back.)
— पांच हजार एक सौ सत्तर एक —
— पांच हजार एक सौ सत्तर एक —
Anyway, as is quite well known at this point,
The Batman is all of five minutes short of three hours long—if you take out maybe ten minutes for end credits, we sat through two hours and forty-five minutes of run time. And I'll certainly give it a lot of credit: not one minute of it was boring. This movie doesn't exceed, or even meet, either the first two Tim Burton films or even the first two Christopher Nolan films, but it's still better than all of the others and I loved it. Thus, in the grand history of 9 live-action Batman films (13 if you count the four DC movies with Ben Affleck, even though those are much more ensemble films and only one of them,
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice even refers to Batman in its title . . . I haven't seen a single one of those),
The Batman is my fifth-favorite. That puts it either squarely in the middle, or in the top 40%, depending on how you count. I don't think of it as a huge count against it. Suffice it to say that I liked it a lot.
Shobhit didn't like it as much. He overheard another group from the movie (which, at a 4:30 showing, had maybe 20 people in the theater total) complaining about the length of the film, and he agreed: "It could have been half an hour shorter." That still would have left it with a two and a half hour run time (even
The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 was two hours and 45 minutes—also way too long), so even though I loved this movie, I think Shobhit is right about that. He also said it packed in too many characters, another argument that has validity. That said, accepting the large cast of characters, I felt they were integrated well and the movie never felt particularly overstuffed to me. Shobhit said he fell asleep a few times. I never had that problem. But, given that
Batman Returns from 1992 remains my all-time favorite movie, I have a long history of loving Batman far more than Shobhit ever has.
As I predicted, the movie let out at about 8:00. We caught the #11 bus home, hopping on across the street on Pine while it was still headed west before turning around to head back up the hill, to get out of the cold quicker. It took me a while to get
my B+ review written—I had a lot to say about this movie, so the word count exceeded 1,200, a fair amount longer than my average length.
It was around 10:00 by the time I finished, and I still had my exercises and before-bed ritual to do, so that basically accounts for all of my evening last night.
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[posted 12:36 pm]
