![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingQuick weekend report:
The bus trip was uneventful, though it began oddly. See, the bus station bathrooms were closed (though at least the men's room was apparently functional??? some dude ignored the chunk of plywood blocking off that area and used it, anyway) so I had to go across the street to GreenStar, the local organic coop grocery store, to use their restroom before the bus arrived. But aside from that, everything went as scheduled.
The dinner party was very enjoyable. Susan was able to stay long enough to actually get some dinner rather than just hors d'oeuvres, and it was good to catch up on what Mr. and Mrs. M, and Mr. and Mrs. G (...I guess actually Rev. and Mrs. G, now?) have been doing.
On Saturday Susan and I met downtown to have lunch at Romanelli's pizzeria, and then saw a 1pm showing of Age of Ultron. I enjoyed the movie. It wasn't terribly deep, but I went in expecting two solid hours of entertainment and that is what I got.
Susan and I agreed that the Natasha/Bruce thing came out of nowhere. It's not a ridiculous ship in and of itself -- there are reasons for both characters to like each other -- but there was no setup for it in any prior MCU films so jumping straight in like this felt structurally odd. And while I'm pretty sure what Natasha was trying to say in the scene at Clint's house was that she was a monster because she was trained and shaped to be a perfect assassin with no distractions and she then WAS an assassin for many years, and she only brought up the "I can't have children either" thing as A) a counter to Bruce's own "wahhh, no kids for me" angst and B) a way of emphasizing how totally her life used to revolve around killing whereas he's only destructive by accident... but because sentences generally refer to what came immediately before them rather than to something from further back in a conversation, it came across as sounding like she was saying she was a monster because she couldn't have children. Which is both stupidly clumsy writing and extremely insulting in its implications.
Ultron himself was very inconsistently written. I think, if I understood the movie correctly, that he started as a copy of the intelligence inside the Mind Gem? Mixed with Tony's general "protect the earth" protocols? And these clashed badly, resulting in a cleanse-the-world plan? Which also seems sort of related to the Mind Gem's awareness that somebody is trying to gather all the singularities to create the Infinity Gauntlet, and that since Earth has inadvertently gotten involved in that mess, because of holding the Tesseract for a while, Thanos is going to attack and kill everyone... so maybe Ultron was going for a plan along the lines of, "In order to protect the Earth from that coming catastrophe, I either have to make everyone a lot stronger, or I should preemptively kill them since that will be kinder than what Thanos will do"? Also maybe some of Tony's daddy issues got in there, because apparently Tony's daddy issues get into everything?
I dunno, it was all very unclear. And I think it was unclear largely because Ultron was, as previously stated, inconsistently written. He should have been a lot more alien. Besides, giving him a clearly stated motive of trying to combine "oh shit Thanos is coming" with "Tony says protect the world" with "the Mind Gem is inherently malicious; let's show you its possession trick as a reminder of that" would have tied Thor's vision quest more tightly to the rest of the film, not to mention been better setup for the upcoming Infinity War storyline and served as at least a handwave toward a vaguely defensible justification for recreating SHIELD despite the events of The Winter Soldier.
Also, I really think Steve's nightmare vision thing should have been about not being able to find/save Bucky rather than about man-out-of-time angst. I mean, he does have that whole "what am I doing with my life?" issue, which he was mostly avoiding rather than solving by working for SHIELD, but I don't think that's his main source of angst. Or if it is, it would probably manifest more as him realizing he likes being constantly at war/fighting and wondering if that makes him a monster. *cough cough thematic resonance with Bruce and Natasha, and Tony, and even Thor a little cough cough* So that was also very clunky and not explicated well.
And Wanda and Tony really needed a scene together to talk about the whole "your weapons destroyed my family, so I screwed with your head and accidentally made you create Ultron" thing. Hopefully that's in the extras that got cut from the final version and will be on the DVD.
All this sounds like I didn't enjoy the movie, doesn't it? But no, I nitpick because I did enjoy it and just wanted it to be better.
I very much liked the sense of the Avengers as people who've been working together for a while and have gotten comfortable in the field and begun to get along outside of it as well. I was extremely amused at the deliberate and extensive torpedoing of both the Clint/Coulson ship and the general adoption of 616 canon regarding Hawkeye. I never got the sense of MCU Clint as that type of sad-sack hobo hard-luck case, and I think him treating SHIELD and the Avengers as an ordinary (albeit, you know, hard and dangerous) day job -- an extension of his likely military service -- makes a lot more sense with what little had previously been shown on-screen. And I like the focus on saving civilians all through the movie, starting with Tony's robots in the opening battle sequence and climaxing with the evacuation of the floating city at the end. (This is shakier during the Johannesburg sequence. Tony does make sure he can pay to replace the building under construction, and he does try a little bit to get Hulk out of the middle of the city, but I think he could have tried a lot harder. I mean, he could obviously throw Hulk around. So why not throw Hulk up in a giant parabola, then catch him while he's still in the air and repeat until you're out of any built-up areas? Then work on knocking him out. Logistics! Not actually that hard!)
In summary, I think Age of Ultron may end up being the Iron Man 2 of Avengers movies: a bit of a hot mess, partly because of middle-volume slump and partly because it's trying to cram in too much setup for other story threads, but still highly entertaining.
Anyway, moving on! I had an early-ish dinner at home with my parents, and then went on a slight adventure, otherwise known as "finding a church in Mendham," and then "finding parking." I was successful at both quests, though not without a couple setbacks. (In other words, one road had no street sign, and the church had no parking lot.) Then I listened to Susan's concert, which was a joint thing between the church choir she sings in and a subsection of a local chorus called the Masterwork Camerata. It was all sacred Christian music: a Gloria by Vivaldi; then three shorter pieces performed only by the Camerata group; then selections from The Messiah by Handel. The performances were good, and the church acoustics were wonderful.
On Sunday I went to church with my parents. It turned out to be the Coming of Age group's week to run the service -- that always leads to interesting results. In this case, we got a slideshow of a trip to Boston, several teens presenting short statements of their beliefs and general outlook on the world, teens presenting the results of trying to live out one of their beliefs for two weeks, and a lot of musical performances. Also bubble machines, because who doesn't love bubble machines?
And then I drove back to Ithaca, stopping several times en route to give Dottie a brief walk. The end. :-)
The bus trip was uneventful, though it began oddly. See, the bus station bathrooms were closed (though at least the men's room was apparently functional??? some dude ignored the chunk of plywood blocking off that area and used it, anyway) so I had to go across the street to GreenStar, the local organic coop grocery store, to use their restroom before the bus arrived. But aside from that, everything went as scheduled.
The dinner party was very enjoyable. Susan was able to stay long enough to actually get some dinner rather than just hors d'oeuvres, and it was good to catch up on what Mr. and Mrs. M, and Mr. and Mrs. G (...I guess actually Rev. and Mrs. G, now?) have been doing.
On Saturday Susan and I met downtown to have lunch at Romanelli's pizzeria, and then saw a 1pm showing of Age of Ultron. I enjoyed the movie. It wasn't terribly deep, but I went in expecting two solid hours of entertainment and that is what I got.
Susan and I agreed that the Natasha/Bruce thing came out of nowhere. It's not a ridiculous ship in and of itself -- there are reasons for both characters to like each other -- but there was no setup for it in any prior MCU films so jumping straight in like this felt structurally odd. And while I'm pretty sure what Natasha was trying to say in the scene at Clint's house was that she was a monster because she was trained and shaped to be a perfect assassin with no distractions and she then WAS an assassin for many years, and she only brought up the "I can't have children either" thing as A) a counter to Bruce's own "wahhh, no kids for me" angst and B) a way of emphasizing how totally her life used to revolve around killing whereas he's only destructive by accident... but because sentences generally refer to what came immediately before them rather than to something from further back in a conversation, it came across as sounding like she was saying she was a monster because she couldn't have children. Which is both stupidly clumsy writing and extremely insulting in its implications.
Ultron himself was very inconsistently written. I think, if I understood the movie correctly, that he started as a copy of the intelligence inside the Mind Gem? Mixed with Tony's general "protect the earth" protocols? And these clashed badly, resulting in a cleanse-the-world plan? Which also seems sort of related to the Mind Gem's awareness that somebody is trying to gather all the singularities to create the Infinity Gauntlet, and that since Earth has inadvertently gotten involved in that mess, because of holding the Tesseract for a while, Thanos is going to attack and kill everyone... so maybe Ultron was going for a plan along the lines of, "In order to protect the Earth from that coming catastrophe, I either have to make everyone a lot stronger, or I should preemptively kill them since that will be kinder than what Thanos will do"? Also maybe some of Tony's daddy issues got in there, because apparently Tony's daddy issues get into everything?
I dunno, it was all very unclear. And I think it was unclear largely because Ultron was, as previously stated, inconsistently written. He should have been a lot more alien. Besides, giving him a clearly stated motive of trying to combine "oh shit Thanos is coming" with "Tony says protect the world" with "the Mind Gem is inherently malicious; let's show you its possession trick as a reminder of that" would have tied Thor's vision quest more tightly to the rest of the film, not to mention been better setup for the upcoming Infinity War storyline and served as at least a handwave toward a vaguely defensible justification for recreating SHIELD despite the events of The Winter Soldier.
Also, I really think Steve's nightmare vision thing should have been about not being able to find/save Bucky rather than about man-out-of-time angst. I mean, he does have that whole "what am I doing with my life?" issue, which he was mostly avoiding rather than solving by working for SHIELD, but I don't think that's his main source of angst. Or if it is, it would probably manifest more as him realizing he likes being constantly at war/fighting and wondering if that makes him a monster. *cough cough thematic resonance with Bruce and Natasha, and Tony, and even Thor a little cough cough* So that was also very clunky and not explicated well.
And Wanda and Tony really needed a scene together to talk about the whole "your weapons destroyed my family, so I screwed with your head and accidentally made you create Ultron" thing. Hopefully that's in the extras that got cut from the final version and will be on the DVD.
All this sounds like I didn't enjoy the movie, doesn't it? But no, I nitpick because I did enjoy it and just wanted it to be better.
I very much liked the sense of the Avengers as people who've been working together for a while and have gotten comfortable in the field and begun to get along outside of it as well. I was extremely amused at the deliberate and extensive torpedoing of both the Clint/Coulson ship and the general adoption of 616 canon regarding Hawkeye. I never got the sense of MCU Clint as that type of sad-sack hobo hard-luck case, and I think him treating SHIELD and the Avengers as an ordinary (albeit, you know, hard and dangerous) day job -- an extension of his likely military service -- makes a lot more sense with what little had previously been shown on-screen. And I like the focus on saving civilians all through the movie, starting with Tony's robots in the opening battle sequence and climaxing with the evacuation of the floating city at the end. (This is shakier during the Johannesburg sequence. Tony does make sure he can pay to replace the building under construction, and he does try a little bit to get Hulk out of the middle of the city, but I think he could have tried a lot harder. I mean, he could obviously throw Hulk around. So why not throw Hulk up in a giant parabola, then catch him while he's still in the air and repeat until you're out of any built-up areas? Then work on knocking him out. Logistics! Not actually that hard!)
In summary, I think Age of Ultron may end up being the Iron Man 2 of Avengers movies: a bit of a hot mess, partly because of middle-volume slump and partly because it's trying to cram in too much setup for other story threads, but still highly entertaining.
Anyway, moving on! I had an early-ish dinner at home with my parents, and then went on a slight adventure, otherwise known as "finding a church in Mendham," and then "finding parking." I was successful at both quests, though not without a couple setbacks. (In other words, one road had no street sign, and the church had no parking lot.) Then I listened to Susan's concert, which was a joint thing between the church choir she sings in and a subsection of a local chorus called the Masterwork Camerata. It was all sacred Christian music: a Gloria by Vivaldi; then three shorter pieces performed only by the Camerata group; then selections from The Messiah by Handel. The performances were good, and the church acoustics were wonderful.
On Sunday I went to church with my parents. It turned out to be the Coming of Age group's week to run the service -- that always leads to interesting results. In this case, we got a slideshow of a trip to Boston, several teens presenting short statements of their beliefs and general outlook on the world, teens presenting the results of trying to live out one of their beliefs for two weeks, and a lot of musical performances. Also bubble machines, because who doesn't love bubble machines?
And then I drove back to Ithaca, stopping several times en route to give Dottie a brief walk. The end. :-)
