— पांच हजार चार सौ तेरह —
I had a really good time over the weekend. Fun days all three days: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Granted, Saturday was especially fun; I
already shared a lenghty post about it (3,000 words!), as that was the first major Seattle Pride event of the year, Seattle Pride in the Park at Volunteer Park, where I spent fully seven hours with Laney, Shobhit joining us for about two of those hours.
So, thankfully, I don't have to spend time telling you about that day now.
All I do have to catch you up on now are Friday and Sunday, and on Friday, right after work, I took myself to the AMC Pacific Place downtown to see the 5:00 showing of
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and I
really loved it. I could hardly believe I would think maybe the sequel would be even better than the 2018 original (
Into the Spider-Verse), but it just might be. I mean, I still have them both an A-minus, so it wouldn't be by a wide margin, but for a sequel that still pretty significantly exceeds expectations.
I do think too many people didn't know that it would end "to be continued." I've known this for a long time; it used to be officially titled
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part 1, but apparently at the last minute they dropped the "Part 1" and decided they would call the next one
Beyond the Spider-Verse. But, they still ended it on a cliffhanger—which I knew to expect, but many in the audience clearly did not, and neither, apparently, did Gabriel, who also saw it Friday night, with Lea and Tess, at a drive-in theater.
And Gabriel didn't like it that much! He send one message to the text group,
Hot take... I didn't really "like" the film, and he later followed up with,
Matthew, you were ok with [that] bullshit, craven ending last night?
It seemed clear that Gabriel, like the people in the screening I attended, was not expecting it to end on a cliffhanger. I replied,
It was neither bullshit nor craven and I have known all along this was a part 1.
He replied,
Sellout.
So I said,
How 90s of you.
People don't care about sellouts anymore!
But also, in Gabriel's (quasi-) defense, he explained that he has difficultly getting emotionally invested in animated stories and characters. And if that's an unalterable fact of how he processes things, then he's just not going to like it as much. Not that this point has much relevance to his insistence that the ending was "bullshit" or "craven." That's a separate conversation.
Also, this conversation was funny to me, because he loved to say (incorrectly) that I give every movie I review a B+, and I have this one an A-minus, which of course I do much more rarely—and I clearly loved it and he did not.
As I noted in my review, I'm eager to see it again. My week ahead, aside from tonight, is surprisingly free of movies planned; the releases this week are otherwise kind of weak. I may consider seeing
Across the Spider-Verse a second time this week. Or, like I did with the first, I might still wait a month or so. We'll see.
— पांच हजार चार सौ तेरह —
— पांच हजार चार सौ तेरह —
So that bring us to yesterday, when, even after spending seven hours with Laney on Saturday, I then also spent about
five hours with her yesterday—we had our next Braeburn Condos Theater Double Feature.
Or we had a double feature, at least. I had booked the theater from 1:00 to 4:00, because I was too late in making the reservation and someone else had it booked at 4:00 (and then later never even used it! the bastards!). I was excited to be able to play a streaming movie connected from my new MacBook, but I could not get it to work properly.
There is usually a little pastic sign with what wifi network and password to use in the Community Kitchen, and it was nowhere to be found; unfortunately I did not have it noted anywhere else. I went to find the sign in the common area upstairs, and it was for a public wifi network that must be something different from what people at Action Movie Night use, because they never wind up with "buffering" issues, and although I did finally get figured out how to get my computer screen to come up on the movie screen, it buffered and stuck so often that we had to give up, after about forty minutes, and move up to the condo to watch the movies on the TV in there.
Also, even when I got the movie to play on the screen, the sound would not come out of the theater speakers, and would only come out of the laptop. That, I could not figure out how to fix either. What a pain in the ass!
We don't have our next movie-watch planned yet, so I have lots of time: I'll have to ask about this at the next Action Movie Night where people regularly connect their laptops to stream their movie choice without issue, and take down some vital notes for the next time I try to do this on my own.
In the meantime, Laney and I went upstairs, while Shobhit was out, ostensibly to campaign but he wound up mostly just shopping at the Capitol Hill Farmers Market. I didn't have the time to vacuum as planned, because at first the plan was to watch just the first movie in the theater and then the second upstairs. Then Laney spontaneously texted me that she could be ready earlier and maybe we could start in the theater at 11:00 to make time to see both in there. And in the end, we had to watch
both movies upstairs in the condo—and I never had the time to vacuum. I kind of hated that, but Laney didn't care.
The movies we watched were
The Witches of Eastwick (1987, eternally fantastic) and
Wolf (1994, meh). I had known already that both starred Jack Nicholson, but had forgotten that both also starred Michelle Pfeiffer, and both even featured character actor Richard Jenkins! (He kills Veronica Cartwright in
The Witches of Eastwick after she vomits cherries all over their living room.)
Once Laney left, I kind of just hung out for the rest of the evening. I spent a fair amount of time updating my budget. I captioned a few of the photos from Saturday. That was really all of the "big events" until possibly this coming weekend, which isn't even Pride related. Shobhit found a way to ask Laney to volunteer some campaign work for him which I didn't even know to expect, plus he's getting some real kind of data analysis help from his brother all the way over in India, which I think is giving Shobhit at least a moderate amount of release from campaign pressures. But, how any anniversary celebrating we do this weekend works out remains to be seen.
— पांच हजार चार सौ तेरह —
[posted 12:31 pm]
