#2,269: Captain America: Civil War

The Queen of Versailles - ★★½☆☆
I'm not sure what made me want to chase the feeling I had watching this the first time, but on a rewatch it was not as much fun. Revolting, but not the fun kind of revolting. No longer shocking, maybe.

Money Monster - ★★☆☆☆
I think I like the outline of this movie. Like, if you sat me down and told me about all the stuff that happens, I think I'd be on board. But the actual script that someone wrote from that outline? Not so much.

This movie is like if The Big Short were Phone Booth.

The Gambler - ★☆☆☆☆
By random luck, I missed this one in theaters last year. But then, I happened to stream it. Ah well. You win some, you lose some.

Captain America: Civil War - ★★★★☆
I don't think this tops Winter Soldier in my book, but it's probably my favorite entry in the MCU since.

Quick hits:
• All of the guest star characters in this are handled really well, but I felt like the main Cap crew may have been a little underserved.
• The shutter in the opening adventure is crazy. Made me wonder if it was inspired by Mad Max, but since it goes away later on, maybe it's just to show us how fast these guys are compared to the normals.
• This is maybe the first time a movie has made Iron Man do the generic superhero movie thing of standing around in costume sans helmet all the time.
• In the briefing early on, we see the death tolls of previous films' events on screen. If those are right, I don't really think world governments would be pushing for this kind of legislation. An annihilated nation, a diverted terrorist bombing, a weird military / air disaster, and an honest-to-god alien invasion with a combined lower body count than 9/11? Gunmen in the states routinely take out civilians on a scale comparable to the bomb in the opening scene of this movie without triggering sweeping legislation. I can see why non-USA nations want the accords, they don't have a lot of super heroes, but in our world those nations can't even get the USA to fall into step against pollution.

#2,266: The Jungle Book

Spare Parts - ★★½☆☆
This is a cool story, but not a very good movie. It doesn't spend enough time on any of the characters subplots to make them compelling, so it probably would have been better off 30 minutes shorter and with more robots.

The Jungle Book (2016) - ★½☆☆☆
I guess I don't know why you would make this? When I didn't dig last year's Cinderella, I didn't want to believe it was just too "girl movie" for me. This year's model proves that a) the feeling of two movies by different directors stapled together in the middle ("Super serious and gritty retelling!" "No! Songs and magic!") was the intended effect, and that b) I still don't like it.

Some of this one takes place in the Jungle, and some of it takes place in the Uncanny Valley. Mowgli's got amazing hair. The thing with the book under the end credits was neat.

The End of the Tour - ★★★½☆
I'm glad I watched this, but I don't really know the people it's based on, so I didn't bring a lot to the movie. Is it too cute to call it a millennial My Dinner with Andre?

A little while later I read a book by Wallace while I was on jury duty, so maybe that's something.

The Jungle Book (1967) - ★★★☆☆
There are a lot of Disney 'classics' that I suspect I've never really seen, I just think I have because I had the picture book. Or the reused animation tricks me into thinking I've only seen part of the movie. Anyhow it was kind of fun go compare the two. The first hour of the live action movie only takes ten minutes in the cartoon.

How many iPads can I buy?

Hey, let's talk about iPads a little.  

I tried out the 12" Pro in January - drawing on it was fun and reading comics was great, but some of the regular uses of my previous device, the iPad Mini 2, (e.g. reading books) felt silly. It was big and expensive and I wasn't sure how to fit it into my life, so I took it back. Keeping it would have meant choosing between a) accepting that I now own two iPads, or b) having to sell my Mini, which doesn't have much resale value, and it's only selling point is that it does pretty much everything I want. 

I told myself that if only there were a 'regular' size iPad that supported Pencil, that would solve my dilemma. And now there is. And I've got one. And using the Pencil is fun. But in every other way, it doesn't feel any different, any better than my Mini. I mean, I know that officially the Pro is a better machine than this couple-years-old Mini, but in a week of use I haven't found a good way to prove it. 

I've been listening to Cortex episodes on the subject of multiple iPads, where the broad justification is 'it's not weird to own multiple Macs for different uses.' And I do own a couple of Macs, but unlike Myke or Grey or even MacSparky, I don't see myself transitioning away from them because my line of work is in video editing and animating. The tools I need aren't on the iPad, so my use cases are mostly consumptive, and keeping two around that I swap depending on whether the thing I'm reading has pictures feels extravagant at best. (Plus, if I were doing that, it should really be the full Pro and the Mini.)

This might be the foothold for a larger conversation about Apple, but I think what I'm really chasing after is the feeling of unwrapping something new and amazing. After one week with the new Pro, I wanted to feel like it's crazy that I even found the Mini usable before, like it'd be impossible to go back. Like moving from iPad 1 to 3 and saying "oh, that's what that's supposed to be!" Maybe we're at a hardware plateau, but I don't think I've had that little charge of excitement in a while.

The laptop I'm writing this on is circa 2013, (I just plain wouldn't consider an iPad for this. Seems like needless hardship.) as is my Mac Pro, and there are no replacements on the market that feel in any way tempting. Nor does either computer feel slow or lacking in a way that makes me want to seek out a replacement. Even on the iOS front, I think my iPhone 5 was the best phone I've owned, and I maybe would've been happier if I'd stuck it out until the 6SE rolled around.

The path of least resistance is to just keep this 9.7" Pro past the return window, and all week long I've been trying to figure out if it's worthwhile. That probably means that it's not. If it were my first iPad, it would be incredible. 

It's tough to keep demanding more magic.

#2,262: Hardcore Henry

Kind of a rough week for movies...

Welcome to Me - ★★½☆☆
This one slipped by last year. I guess it's like a somewhat better Joy? Lower key, but less absurd.

The Boss - ★★★☆☆
I imagine that I don't like comedies very much, so maybe it's the saving grace of Moviepass that we just go and see everything and more often than not, movies are better than they look. Probably my favorite Melissa McCarthy movie to date? Here's hoping that changes this summer.

The Thread - ★½☆☆☆
Like an unskilled-and-unaware onion.

Hardcore Henry ★☆☆☆☆
I do like movies. Sometimes, like with The Boss for example, they can be intriguingly misrepresented by their own trailers. Sometimes I think it's interesting that the target audience for movie advertising doesn't seem to be people that like movies. Anyway, if you can believe it, Hardcore Henry is not as good as it looks. 

#2,258: The Barkley Marathons

Demolition - ★★½☆☆
I was expecting Nightcrawler II, but that's not this. This character has feelings somewhere. Man, Nightcrawler was good, huh? You guys remember Nightcrawler?

My Big Fat Greek Wedding - ★★☆☆☆
I thought this was a perfectly satisfactory movie, a well made indie, and I can imagine why it was a success, but it wasn't really for me.

Eye in the Sky - ★★★☆☆
This movie is like a visual depiction of an argument, with both sides ever heightening their 'oh yeah? well what if--' examples.
- Oh yeah? Well drones can't see inside!
- Oh yeah? Well what if you looked inside with a separate set of neat little drones?
- Oh yeah? Well what if you just can't ever know it's safe because innocent people could get in the way after launch?
- Oh yeah?

The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young - ★★★★½
As I doc I found this enjoyable because it does a good job of teaching me a lot about a thing I'd never heard of but find interesting. That's the ideal documentary.

As a movie, I found this really refreshing because normally when I watch a movie, I never stop believing that there's some small percent chance that maybe one day I could be some kind of a spy, or an ace detective, or Spider-Man, or whatever, but there's no part of me that thinks that I could ever complete this race. I'm always trying to learn a few things that I can use just in case I get stuck in the past, but there's no part of me in which it even occurs to me that maybe I might try to do this.