Entertainment Rex: Stewart’s May 2021 Entertainment Ratings

Welcome back to Entertainment Rex, your twice monthly article series where I let you know what fun is out there to be had.

Twice monthly is a good schedule. It’s my favorite way to schedule. Podcasts? Twice a month. Entertainment Rex? Twice a month? Stew’s Reviews? Twice a month! Everything is two times per month. It’s very symmetrical that way.

I don’t really have an EATING category here because, and that’s a damn shame. I should totally add that going forward. ANYWAY, I recently discovered that Dairy Queen has introduced an Orange Dreamsicle Dipped Cone. And while I am doing okay-ish on my No More Sugar policy, the reason I am only doing -ISH is because I keep ordering these dipped cones.

I typically play it as up to fate when I leave the office on my non-Work-From-Home days. “Okay,” I say to myself, “I will just check the drive thru at Dairy Queen. If the line is long, I’ll leave and not have ice cream like an adult. If the line is short, I will get a dipped cone, also like an adult”.

It’s edging out to be about 66%/33% in favor of the short lines, so what can I say? God WANTS me to have a dipped cone from Dairy Queen most of the time.

Can we talk for a second about Creamsicles and other “Orange Dreamsicle” flavored things, though? Because that is objectively the best flavor. Sheetz used to have an Orange Dreamsicle drink, but they discontinued it; I have yet to fully forgive them for that. If any place anywhere offers an Orange Dreamsicle flavored anything, that’s what I’ll order.

Orange Dreamsicle Cheeseburgers, world. Get on it!

The moral of this intro is that, uh, I might talk about food more often?

GAMING

I’ve actually played a lot of games recently, which has been fun. Probably around two years ago, I downloaded the Batman TellTale game on my PS4, but I never got around to playing it. This week I remembered it existed and gave it a spin.

As I figured, I really liked it. The Walking Dead TellTale games were a big hit with me, and other such Adventure games like Until Dawn were also right up my alley. I like telling a video game what to do and then not really having to do anything from there.

I enjoy that the game gives you statistics because it let me see how horny other players are! There is a moment in the game where it seems like Catwoman wants to sleep with you. I declined because OBVIOUSLY Batman is asexual and doesn’t have any interest in that. When I got to the summary at the end, I saw that I was in the NINE PERCENT of players who denied her advances. Lotta thirsty Batmen out there.

If the game had a problem, it’s that their iteration of Bruce Wayne is clearly just Sterling Archer, and every time he spoke and it wasn’t Archer’s voice, I was terribly disappointed. Clearly the animation style helped nothing, but man, now I want H. Jon Benjamin as Batman.

It’s also interesting because in this universe, Thomas Wayne was a heel. You start getting rumors early on that he was into some nefarious deeds, and you figure part of the story will be clearing his name, but… nope! He was crooked. Neat take!

I enjoyed it well enough that I saw the sequel was on sale (from $15 to $3.74!) so I grabbed that up.

We had a game night with friends where one of the games we played Poetry For Neanderthals, a title which makes a mockery of the spirit of the game itself. You see, in the game, you must get your team to guess a word or phrase, but you can not use words that make more than one sound each. Just like I did in that sentence! Multisyllabic words are OUT, and if someone uses them by mistake, you get to whack them with an inflatable club.

I was really good at this game due to practice playing a crossed-up version of Taboo and Scrabble (where you draw a letter and then can’t use any words that contain that letter). I’ve gotten good at thinking of clues on my feet. So this was a lot of fun! I never got NO-whapped. I am the best caveman.

I will say of the two Oatmeal games I know I’ve played, Poetry is a lot more fun than Exploding Kittens.

We also played Monikers, which we’d all played before (Poetry was a new game by us) and have had fun with. It’s another Get Your Team To Guess Something game, but it has three rounds of progressing difficulty. Sad to say my team lost at Monikers 2-1 after having won Poetry For Neanderthals.

And while it’s hardly worth mentioning, I got about twenty minutes into another PS4 game I’ve had for a while (since Christmas) but hadn’t started yet: 428 Shibuya Scramble. It’s a picture book so far! I’ll keep you updated if I stick with it.

I subsequentlyhad another game night with some other friends (I missed game nights so hard during Covid, guys) who brought over this game, Cash N Guns. It was decent enough and has some interesting strategy to it. I feel like it’s a game you could never really master because as you develop a strategy, the people you play with will figure out your tendencies and plan against you.

Mostly I spent the game thinking “How could it ever benefit me to point the gun at MYSELF”. I never figured out a way. Maybe next time! I really want to just confuse people.

We also played Uno that night because UpUpDownDown has had me wanting to play Uno for a solid god damn year now. My wife was NOT a fan of the 7’s And 0’s rule–and the one game we played last for-bloody-ever, but I don’t care: I still love Uno.

EDIT: I did not end up keeping on with 428 Shibuya Scramble. That just got really boring really quickly. I felt like 95% of the game was just pressing “Next” until the game gave me one choice then told me I failed. It seemed like it was going to get convoluted quickly with its premise of Play Until You Lose, Then Make A Difference Decision Somewhere. I greatly enjoy choices-based adventure games, but this was too hands-off even for me.

MOVIES

A real pedestrian couple of weeks of movie viewing here. Our average score for the month is 2.67. I think that was my college GPA, actually…

I swear to god I had only heard good things about MacGruber, and while the movie was okay for a brief while, it got old and became grating QUICKLY. I’m not sure how you could salvage the movie other than making it, say, 55 minutes long, total? And even then I still don’t see it as more than a two-and-a-half out of five.

Death to Smoochy was a movie I remember adoring the one time I watched it in college, so it’s weird that it took me so many years to come back to it. The movie has some amazingly hilarious and memorable lines (I’d always remembered “I’m kind of fucked up in general, so it’s hard to gauge”, but had completely forgotten “Cops won’t do the balls thing; it’s against procedure”). It’s not brilliant or anything, but I had a few extended laughs.

Daniel Radcliffe’s strange and indieriffic post-Harry Potter career continues with Guns Akimbo, which was another movie like Death to Smoochy that had some glorious highs, but felt like the overall product just wasn’t as well-executed as it could have been. But the opening hour or so is tremendously subversive and enjoyable.

Besides having a release year in common, Ginger Snaps and Bedazzled are both movies where quality performances are let down by the lazy tropes of the era from which they were made.

Nine movies to wrap up the back half of the month isn’t bad, and it brings me to 80 on the year! Eighty in the first five months is a pretty decent pace, and I’m kind of proud of myself. Because sitting on my ass for two hours at a time is… an accomplishment? I don’t know, man. I DO strive to watch more movies, so it feels like I’m meeting a goal regardless.

I SHOULD be putting that effort into writing, but… I don’t. So… Movies.

I mean, I write movie reviews on my Letterboxd, so that’s something, right?

It’s always a bit sad when the batch starts off as strong as it’s ever going to get, but I hadn’t watched The Truman Show since it was in theaters, and it was far better than I remembered! Just a fantastic movie that, thematically, was ahead of its time, even if some of the jokes and conventions feel somewhat relic-y. But you have a movie that is basically a philosophical thought experiment, wrapped in a horror movie, covered in a comedy. I loved it.

I continue to find Quentin Tarantino to be the most uneven and inconsistent filmmaker in Hollywood, as I watched Death Proof, a movie that manages to make plot of Kurt Russell Murders Hot Chicks With His Car tedious and boring. Imagine having that as a plot and then thinking “And now I’m going to do nothing with this!”.

I had a Zack Snyder mini-spree that earned a grand total of 3.5 stars out of 10, and honestly? At this point, I worry if I rewatch Dawn of the Dead or 300 or Watchmen that I won’t like them any more because I’m so over his tricks and his fanbase. Army of the Dead was a two and a half hour movie that had no business being more than 100 minutes; Batman Vs Superman (Ultimate Edition) is the plots of four different movies crammed into one, and none of them is given time to matter.

BvS actually went down on this go around. I previously had it as 2/5, but on this watch (my third overall and second of the Ultimate Edition), I found even less joy in it. What’s weird is that the movie has two truly spectacular scenes (Bruce Wayne in Metropolis during the Man of Steel fight; all of the tension and boiling over build up right before the scene with Superman in front of Congress), but the rest of the movie works so hard to undo that good will.

Army of the Dead… look, I’m sure you’ve heard all about the massive plot holes, unresolved teases, and unfocused writing. But also… it’s just bland. It’s not scary. It’s not funny. The action is good, not great. It really had no idea what it wanted to be.

I probably overrated Horrible Bosses based on how funny and charming the three leads are, but the writing was pretty archaic (homophobic humor and jokes about being raped in prison). I wish they’d been given a better screenplay to work with.

The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot was neither as bad as people will tell you nor as good as others wanted it to be. It’s just an OK movie. It struggles with some really lame attempts at humor for a while, but Leslie Jones basically saves most of that as well as she can, and the story is interesting. But it DRAGS for chunks at a time; the first act is basically unwatchable.

Along the lines of the “I Laughed, But Was It GOOD?” feeling I had for both Ghostbusters and Horrible Bosses… Psycho Goreman was a cute movie with some good wit, but it felt like it was just trying SO HARD.

TELEVISION

Not too much to note here, but I did start rewatching my favorite television show of the 2010’s, The Good Place. Having finished up Schitt’s Creek over the last few months, I wanted to dive back into this gem and see how they stack up. It’s a really hard call; they are both so damn good.

Just as a little sneak preview: I’m reworking my Top Ten Sitcoms of all time list for this rewatch and my recent viewing of Schitt’s (and the fact that when I last made that list, I had not watched Community yet, either). They will both place… highly.

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And that’s about it for May, though I did also contribute to a video discussion of the best fast food restaurants!

Oh, AND… my wife waxed my back an hour ago as I write this. She was VERY excited when I offered to let her. Honestly? Kind of overrated. It’s not super pleasant, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not anywhere near as painful as I have been lead to believe. The worst part was the hot wax and that she kept inadvertently tickling me when she was trying to pull the wax up. I told her before we go to Cancun in July, she can probable do much more of me.

Like… my chest. Stay focused.

Not that I’m a very hairy dude, but having a smooth back feels weird. There’s no comfortable fur buffer between my skin and my T-shirt. This will take some getting used to!

Until next time… take care!