Movies & TV / News
Entertainment Rex: Stewart’s April 2021 Entertainment Ratings
Image Credit: Warner Bros.
Welcome to the end of April! I hope you guys are ready for all of those May flowers!
That’s actually not fair. It hasn’t rained much here at all. Due to our sewage issues, we recently had a chunk of our back yard dug up. We put down some grass seed, but I’ve been having to water it pretty much every day since. April showers, you have lied to me!
(Although we are supposed to get thunderstorms today, and tomorrow says 100% chance of rain. And that IS technically still April!)
Aside from that, the wife and I started an exciting new craft: decoupaging comic book covers onto our old kitchen table to turn it into a snazzy gaming table! We started last night, and it went… poorly. Her first effort resulted in the covers having a LOT of air bubbles and wrinkles, so we have to scrape it all off and start over. This means I wasted a lot of my favorite covers because I wasn’t clever enough to give her some lesser ones to try first.
Still, when god destroys one door, he puts another on sale. After we tapped out for the night, I saw on Facebook that my comic shop is having a special on Saturday: all dollar books will be fifty cents! So I’ll head in with a twenty spot and find forty awesome new covers to replenish my supply for the rest of the table. Maybe I’ll find another Lobo’s Back #1.
Or at least another 80’s comic with that snazzy Friday The 13th Part 8 ad on the back cover.
Anyway, wish us luck with finding great covers and doing a more crisp job on our second attempt. And yes, it DOES kind of hurt me to rip comics apart like this, but I’m very excited to have vaccinated friends over and play tabletop games on this incredibly busy and distracting table.
Also, since it has been getting nicer out, and I’ve even had more chances to go for walks, which I direly need. We are going to Cancun this summer, and I am CREEPING UP on 200 lbs for the first time in my life. I was depressed when I was 180!
I’m working on cutting sugar from my diet, but it’s REAL touch and go. Also, I already don’t drink alcohol OR caffeine, and I am a somewhat picky eater. The more shit I cut from my life to get “healthy”, the more insufferable I imagine I am to deal with as a houseguest/friend/spouse.
Additionally, eliminating sugar does not mean I’m actually eating healthy. It just means I’m eating more, like, potato chips and meat sticks instead of candy. Come on, Stewart! Get it together!
I try to buy a lot of fruit to snack on, but fruit gives me anxiety, man. It goes bad so quickly! So I buy enough fruit to last a week or so, and then I eat it all in a day or two because I don’t want to waste it if it goes bad.
These are the struggles I face.
Anyway, this is just my Fat Kid’s Lament. Let’s get into my entertainment recommendations!
MOVIES
I’ve already written up an entire review on Godzilla vs Kong, so there’s no great reason to recap that here. It was fun! Go watch it.
What’s NOT pictured here is that on 4/10, I visited friends and we watched Fridays The 13th parts 2 and 3. It turns out I have friends who have never seen any movie in that franchise! How absurd is THAT? To ME, that’s like saying you’ve never drank milk.
So I took it upon myself to educate them on the Multiple Jasons Theory. I will get more into that one day here, I promise. There’s a Friday the 13th in a few months, so that will be a good time for it.
Regardless, I didn’t log them because I just did so for each of them within the past year. I know Letterboxd doesn’t necessarily care about that, but for my purposes, it felt like cheating.
Malibu Express was a wild little flick. Talk about the height of 80’s “cool” and wish fulfillment. The story is off a somewhat eccentric private investigator who lives on a boat and has literally every woman he meets ripping their clothes off and trying to bang him. It is so mundane to him; he thinks it is all so tedious. There’s a murder and a subplot about some Russian spies… it’d would actually be a lot of fun if it toned WAY down on the misogyny and sexism.
Avengers Endgame was also a rewatch. For, like, the tenth time. The only real question is how many times I will rewatch that in my life before I die. Sometimes I put it on just because I have a hankering for certain scenes. Such a good movie.
A big two-week run saw me tear through eleven movies to close out the month, with multiple days of two-fers. And by and large, it was a good run! These flicks averaged out to 3.45 stars, and you have to be happy with that.
Mad Max Fury Road is one of those movies that I gave a very good score to, and yet folks are going to give me crap over it. “Only 3.5!? Are you insane?”. I can already see it. But the thing is, that movie was a solid 20-30 minutes too long for what it was. When Max and Furiosa eventually hit the desert and say “Hey, let’s just turn around and do everything we did over again”, I actually sighed. It made the previous hour feel like a huge waste of time, and even great action sets can get tedious if you do them over and over again. Also, I was weirdly distracted by how much gasoline everyone seemed to have given that it takes place in a world with low gasoline supplies.
Still! It IS a very good movie, and I enjoyed watching it a great deal. I just wish they would have shaved twenty minutes off or ended it with the uncertainty of the heroes journeying into the desert.
Hey, Mortal Kombat 2021! It combines the stilted, terrible acting of Mortal Kombat 1995 with the utter joylessness of some screenwriter who thinks these movies should be serious business! I was unimpressed. Also, I kind of want to take Wonder Woman 1984, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Mortal Kombat all together and force them to watch their HBO Max brethren Godzilla Vs Kong. Then I would tell them “This is how you do special effects! Like this! I don’t know where the hell you learned how, but learn from this!”.
Guardians of the Galaxy is still a 5 star flick, and as I noted elsewhere, it’s inspired my wife to want to watch the entire MCU in chronological order and, pfft, like I’m going to say no to THAT? I still need an idea on how we can incorporate that series into the site or podcast, though.
Let’s wrap up this section with some quick thoughts on a few of the others:
-Eurotrip was ROUGH. I did laugh quite a few times, but the movie would invariably do something immediately after to make me feel bad about it. And it had too many moments that wanted to be funny but weren’t.
-The 1933 Invisible Man is HILARIOUS, and I’m pretty sure it is intentionally so, so I gave it a good grade. I laughed more at this than most straight comedies these days; it was definitely better than Eurotrip. What a subversive horror flick for 1933! It could be higher if it wasn’t so rushed.
-I really wanted to like The Farewell more, but it had a few too many minor subplots that didn’t really matter. The story needed tightening up, but it’s still a quality flick.
TELEVISION
Nothing terribly new here, and there probably won’t be until June when Loki starts.
We did finish up the 19th season of Hell’s Kitchen (my wife took it extremely personally when Mary Lou did not win) and the first (only?) season of The Falcon & The Winter Soldier.
I’ve seen people kind of down on the finale to TFATWS, but I didn’t necessarily have a problem with. The Sharon Carter reveal wasn’t great, but I thought the action was tremendous, and I really appreciated Sam getting a classic “Cap Gives A Speech About Things” moment. It solidified him in his new role. And his new costume is SLEEK. Big fan of that.
As a last TV note, I’m still getting through my first viewing of the entirety of Schitt’s Creek, too. I’m just about at the end of season four, so… two seasons to go! I had no idea this show had that many seasons. And you know? Now that I’m watching it, I can empathize a little harder with the 2020 Emmy’s for the tough choices they had to make when its last season was the same year as The Good Place‘s last outing. Now it’s just baffling to me that both of those shows kept jobbing out to Fleabag or The Marvelous Ms. Maisel in their earlier seasons.
I finished the first season of Resident Alien. I will say the front half of the season was probably a bit better than the back half just because being introduced to “Harry” was so fun, and once we got into his story, it was… a little less so. But that is where the supporting cast started to really shine; especially the sheriff and deputy. I almost want them to have their own show. All in all, I’ll be there day one for the next season.
Still enjoying Invincible, too, but… is the animation on that show getting WORSE with each episode? I kind of hated the look of Battle Beast. The animation has been the biggest weakness from day 1 in a show that is doing everything else right.
GAMING
The same friends with whom I watched the Jason movies were the ones that would also introduce me to Secret Hitler. It’s all very Among Us / Mafia in that everyone has a hidden identity and some players are working to sabotage the game.
Don’t get me wrong; the game is a lot of fun with all the wild accusations. But the title is so weirdly playful; like “I’m Hitler, tee-hee, it’s fun!”. I’m surprised it hasn’t caused more of a stink in general.
I did enjoy it, though, so I am a hypocrite.
I did not get to be Hitler in any of our plays, either! I was just a “good guy” every game. I was accused of being a fascist once by my friend because he was really sus about how I opened my eyes to start the game. That’s what makes the game fun… grabbing at straws like that.
I did decide to see if all of these months after the release of the Crown Tundra DLC there were still a decent amount of people doing Endless Raids in Pokemon Sword and Shield. I am happy to report there are! I tried dropping in on a few raids yesterday and never had a hard time finding a full party to raid with.
That made me pretty happy because those Endless Raids manage to be both challenging and fun. I had fallen out of doing them for a while (because if they go well, you can easily sink well over an hour into ONE), but maybe I’ll start popping in on them more often.
And that is it for April. After two months of making lame jokes about Lions and Sheep or Flowers and Showers, no legends of the month of May immediately spring to mind. I’ll look something up.
Until next time… take care!
