Naps are evil.
Mostly cloudy today, as rain and cold spell bear down on us. The high today was 62F.
This afternoon, watching television I fell asleep for something like 35 minutes, and now I feel awful. I do not take naps. Ever. They are foul, foul things.
Anyway...
Warning. Spoilers.
Last night we watched Greta Gerwig's Barbie. Now, I went into this with as open a mind as I could possibly be expected to approach a film about a line of toys. I'd been warned it was very weird. But...weird, it turned out, wasn't the problem. The first fifteen minutes or so are fairly enjoyable and often funny - except for a long "girl's night" disco scene. Kate McKinnon is great as "weird Barbie." Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, both of whom I adore (and really they're why I even bothered), were perfectly cast. That feels like an insult, but there you go. But about the time that Barbie heads off to "the Real World" and the Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine" starts playing, the whole thing goes off the rails. This is where you should stop watching. I wish I had. By the time the film reaches Los Angeles and Mattel and the insufferable Will Ferrell and that awful chase scene through the toy company's headquarters...well, fuck. From there on it was merely a matter of stuff happening. There was no sense to it. Stuff just happened, so there would be more film. Lots and lots and lots of incoherent, dumbfounding stuff. Here and there were confused, meandering, at times contradictory Möbius strips of political stuff - but in the end I am entirely unclear what the hell the film was trying to say about sex and gender and capitalism and horses...yeah, so I'm not even gonna go there. As I had to explain earlier on Facebook, I did not hate this film because of politics. I hated it for being stupid and incoherent. And dull. How so much utter chaos can be so incredibly dull is a bit of a mystery. But I have already said more about the film than I think it deserves. I watched it. I wished I hadn't.
Also, what I just wrote would be clearer if I hadn't taken that nap. Maybe naps were mandatory on the set of Barbie.
This afternoon, I watched the first three episodes of the Spielberg-produced Netflix series Life on Our Planet. I cannot possibly avoid comparing the series to Apple's Prehistoric Planet and PBS' Ancient Earth, and while Life on Our Planet isn't exactly bad, it definitely comes in a distant third. There's some wonky science in Morgan Freeman's narrative, for example. Anyway, not a total waste, and I'll watch the rest, but I wish it were better.
Man, I fucking hate naps. I leave you with a photo I took while repairing the Camarasaurus skull, after it took some bumps in the shelf incident.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
3:19 p.m.
This afternoon, watching television I fell asleep for something like 35 minutes, and now I feel awful. I do not take naps. Ever. They are foul, foul things.
Anyway...
Warning. Spoilers.
Last night we watched Greta Gerwig's Barbie. Now, I went into this with as open a mind as I could possibly be expected to approach a film about a line of toys. I'd been warned it was very weird. But...weird, it turned out, wasn't the problem. The first fifteen minutes or so are fairly enjoyable and often funny - except for a long "girl's night" disco scene. Kate McKinnon is great as "weird Barbie." Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, both of whom I adore (and really they're why I even bothered), were perfectly cast. That feels like an insult, but there you go. But about the time that Barbie heads off to "the Real World" and the Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine" starts playing, the whole thing goes off the rails. This is where you should stop watching. I wish I had. By the time the film reaches Los Angeles and Mattel and the insufferable Will Ferrell and that awful chase scene through the toy company's headquarters...well, fuck. From there on it was merely a matter of stuff happening. There was no sense to it. Stuff just happened, so there would be more film. Lots and lots and lots of incoherent, dumbfounding stuff. Here and there were confused, meandering, at times contradictory Möbius strips of political stuff - but in the end I am entirely unclear what the hell the film was trying to say about sex and gender and capitalism and horses...yeah, so I'm not even gonna go there. As I had to explain earlier on Facebook, I did not hate this film because of politics. I hated it for being stupid and incoherent. And dull. How so much utter chaos can be so incredibly dull is a bit of a mystery. But I have already said more about the film than I think it deserves. I watched it. I wished I hadn't.
Also, what I just wrote would be clearer if I hadn't taken that nap. Maybe naps were mandatory on the set of Barbie.
This afternoon, I watched the first three episodes of the Spielberg-produced Netflix series Life on Our Planet. I cannot possibly avoid comparing the series to Apple's Prehistoric Planet and PBS' Ancient Earth, and while Life on Our Planet isn't exactly bad, it definitely comes in a distant third. There's some wonky science in Morgan Freeman's narrative, for example. Anyway, not a total waste, and I'll watch the rest, but I wish it were better.
Man, I fucking hate naps. I leave you with a photo I took while repairing the Camarasaurus skull, after it took some bumps in the shelf incident.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
3:19 p.m.