#2,410: Lady Bird

Bad Genius - ★★★★☆
Mostly great high school heist. The last act drags a little.

The test taking scenes are so much more engaging and suspenseful than anything I’ve seen lately. This would be a great double feature with Justice League for people who are always shouting about the importance of Stakes.

Coco - ★★★½☆
Certainly it fits into my top 50% of Pixar movies. Very glad it wasn’t another sequel. Outstanding third act. Interesting choice to just kill the dog.

FWIW, I saw the version that didn’t have Frozen on Ice at the beginning. Shame that a Pixar short didn’t get made instead.

Lady Bird - ★★★☆☆
In much the same way that a lot of things in the current cultural moment are not about me, I am happy that this exists but I didn't connect with it as well as I did with some other recent high school movies. This isn't how I happened to grow up. Still, I sure liked some of Lady Bird's decisions and definitely disliked others, and I could probably say the same about my high school aged self.

I do feel like I probably need a rewatch to pick up everything Lady Bird was putting down, but also that I'm probably not going to give it one very soon. Alas.

However, this was the best movie I saw this year that was directed by a woman. Of the 90-ish films I’ve logged so far this year, not limited to 2017 releases, I’ve seen 7 directed by women. and 4 of those were documentaries.

Gangbusters! keeps turning 3!

This week, join Gangbusters! for our third and final 3rd anniversary show, so named for its position as our 156th installment.

Gangbusters! happens every Friday night at 11pm in the upstairs theater of The Clubhouse.

I think the visual reference of this image might depend on how old you are.

Escape Room Reviews: Dracula

Company: 60Out
Room: Dracula
Date Played: 11/26/17
Player Count: 5. 3-4 would probably be best.
Success:  Success!

Premise: You know how sometimes your village gets a dracula, and you hope it’s just going to go away, but you start running out of eligible young people after a while, and then you’ve got to send a posse to vanquish the demon? That.

Immersion: As expected with 60Out, this is a room with lovely production design. It’s the high end of game show-esque design. 

Highlights: This was a cool room to showcase what room escapes can be like for the new players joining us for their first game. There’s an action sequence unlike anything I’ve seen in a room before.

Lowlights:  As usual, wear and tear on magical objects can make them finicky.  Also, our GM chimed in a lot - some GMs get trigger happy with the PA system, especially since a few times he was actually trying to talk to players in a different game.

And Finally:   I think you could probably sequence break this game. We didn’t, because the technically optional parts were easily accessible and listed in order in our dracula journal / walkthrough manual, but since we ignored the clues they produced, we might as well not have bothered with them. This was a fun game, but probably mid-tier as far as 60Out goes. Out of 39 games played, I’m ranking this one at #17. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/los-angeles/rooms/dracula

Kickstarter Monday: The Arts

Let’s kickstart this month’s blogging with some more kickstarter projects in review!

221B Baker St - I have a little bit more art than I have the wall space to tastefully display it at the moment. (Lucky me!) I like screen prints of images that I believe are subtle in their geekiness. A beautiful wintery landscape, for instance, with just one little clue that it’s actually about Star Wars. This project was for a not-that-subtle Sherlock Holmes piece by an artist who did some other work I already own. It’s lovely, but it’s mostly just sitting in a tube right now. Alas. 

HERTZFELDT ON BLU-RAY - The collected works of Don Hertzfeldt, as seen previously in: a) his touring Animation Show, b) his DVDs, and c) the collections of internet pirates, all on a brand new disc! This was the disc of It’s Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow, the first films in a new, longer, even sadder direction. All of the old films are ‘bonus features.’ I feel good about supporting this guy and his work. It’s lovely, and it mostly sits on the shelf all day. 

Bring Back MST3K - Price is Right rules don’t really work out great on Kickstarter, but I gave this project exactly $1. I didn’t feel like I needed any more MST merch in my apartment, I guess. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted any more MST episodes. Not all of the shows come back to life gracefully, you know? On top of that, I wasn’t totally sure that I wouldn’t end up working on it in some way. I’ve worked with Joel before, and in another weird turn I found that I know the new cast.

In the end, I got a lot of email updates and watched around half of the new season, which probably right about average for me. It wasn’t as weird as I thought it was going to be, or at least, not for the reasons I was expecting. I think the industrialized nature of production on the new season hurt the quality somewhat, but the end product was probably a best-case scenario. It sits around on Netflix all day. 

Not Art Issue 5 on sale now!

Just under the wire (pictured), my subscribers have been sent their November issues of Not Art. Non subscribers will have to rely on finding one of the copies I've put aside for dropping off in Los Angeles comedy theaters or selling as back issues. 

New subscribers have the opportunity to join at the following levels of interest:

• $3 - a hand-numbered copy of each new issue delivered to your home by the US Postal Service.
• $4 - a hand-numbered copy of each issue, delivered to your home by the US Postal Service, except you start at issue #1! Relive the whole thrilling experience of our first few months!
• $5 - a hand-numbered edition of your choosing of each new issue delivered to your home by the US Postal Service.
• $XX - a hand-numbered copy of each new issue delivered to your home by the US Postal Service, and your first delivery includes a copy of every back issue! (This becomes more expensive each month!)
• $26 - eBook edition. You receive an electronic copy of my physical chapbook / zine project each month, and also one physical copy is destroyed each month. 

There's a real struggle between adding dozens of mildly amusing subscriber tiers and making the whole page too complicated for anyone to care about. I suspect that on the battleground of this internal conflict, I am losing. 

(Also, there is no cover sketch video this month because I used a different method to create this month's cover.)