Cabin Fever

What is it about this time of year anyway? I feel like I'm pulling teeth. Everyone is spent, and going all non co-op on me. Things that should take ten minutes, are taking an hour or more, and to make matters worse, my allergies have made me crabby. I find myself just about to snap at someone, only to be unceremoniously interrupted by a dozen or so sneezes. I'm no real winner here either, as my efficiency levels have been gradually waning since about two weeks into winter, so a fair amount of my crabbiness is directed at myself. But I'm finding that even the tiniest things can set me off lately, like this new "thing" about naming every single winter storm. Apparently, winter storm Virgil is now brewing. I mean, what is the criteria for naming these things anyway? Names only make them seem more ominous. Maybe that's what they're after...making everyone paranoid, fearing power outages as extreme as those we had during Sandy. Once a storm is forecasted, it's like everyone goes into survivalist mode. Stores are wiped clean of water, milk, bread, and duct tape. My mother is always the first to call, pleading with me to stock up on water and toilet paper (???) for the kids' sakes. I don't know how best to stock up anyway. I've got a twelve year old son, and his appetite has reached astronomical proportions. There is nary an item I can buy in bulk that isn't consumed or devoured in a day or two, rendering us all completely unprepared by storm day two or three.

So anyway, yes, we've had cabin fever for weeks now. I thought that we could remedy a bit of the frustration we were all feeling by starting up my husband's Netflix gift subscription. What would work better to distract us from this abysmal weather than streaming movies over the net? We were so proud of ourselves for having thought to give him a three month trial subscription for Christmas, but he held onto the codes for a lot longer than we had hoped. His reasoning was that he wanted to have a list handy of all of the films he wanted to watch. I figured I'd write my own list, too. Finally, the pressure was too great, so he succumbed to starting it up a couple of weeks ago. And let me tell you, I was completely and utterly uninformed about what Netflix was really like. I naively thought that I could watch just about everything on it. As I used the search function to check for the films on my list, I was met with one disappointment after another. Not one of the films I wanted to watch was even on there. Mind you, we just have the Instant Watch part of the package. So there was no watching A Man For All Seasons, Bella, Some Kind of Wonderful, Neverending Story, Grosse Pointe Blank, and a number of other titles I had been itching to watch. I felt like a big dope. It just really never occurred to me that 1) these wouldn't be on there, and 2) that the current shows and films on there would eventually expire and be replaced. That said, I did manage to watch some stuff I've enjoyed, namely season one of Downton Abbey. Of course, Netflix doesn't have season two, nor are they like to. Apparently, Amazon has an exclusive deal on Downton going forward. So of course, now I'm coveting Amazon Prime.

Off to rally the troops, and pull some more teeth. 

So We Went to See The Avengers…

…and I didn’t like it.

No, I’m not a film snob. My proof? I enjoyed Nacho Libre and have watched it at least a dozen times. Really.

I was disappointed with The Avengers despite already being predisposed to liking it. For starters, I tend to enjoy just about anything Joss Whedon touches, my favorite being his Firefly series and then his subsequent Serenity film. And lest it be assumed, I’m also not averse to superhero flicks. I didn’t watch all of the individual films leading up to it, but I did watch a few. Iron Man (the first one) and Captain America were awesome. Thor I skipped, because frankly, Norse mythological figures don’t seem to translate well on film. Okay, the truth is that I haven’t seen many film depictions of Thor and Loki, and to be fair, the films depicting them that I have watched have had them visiting modern day America, and that automatically introduces the cheese factor (The Son of the Mask is one such atrocity). Frankly, I think these gods fare better in Asgaard and should stay there. And yes, I know, I know…these characters were a Marvel interpretation of these figures, but still. I guess this is where I admit that I have never been a comics fangirl. I did enjoy reading a few of the Archie comics as a kid, but that’s the extent of it. Oh, and I didn’t see a single trailer for The Avengers, nor did I read a single review, for fear that it would sabotage my film-going experience. I wanted to go in as fresh as possible, and without ridiculously high expectations.

So what didn’t I like about it?

Honestly, I felt it dragged. Most of the film involved just gathering all of the Avengers together.

I still don’t like Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Didn’t like him much as Mace Windu either come to think of it.

Wait, were there aliens in this movie? I was all excited about the aliens, but then there weren’t any aliens, i.e., until the very end. I realize that there wasn’t time to go into the backstory here on the Chitauri (this particular race of aliens), but that didn’t really matter to me. In the film, they kind of reminded me of the army of clone troopers in Attack of the Clones, providing a legion of paper targets for our superheroes to crush. For the record, I really disliked the Star Wars prequels.

The problem with getting this many characters together in one film is that you don’t have much time for character development. Ultimately, I felt that there wasn’t enough heart, and this bothered me most of all.

Loki. ‘Nuff said. Too much camp. I enjoy camp. Sometimes. But I like my baddies to be bad, and menacing. Three-dimensional baddies are best. Loki was just plain silly.

Thor. Every time he was on the screen, I kept thinking “Fabio” and his “I can’t believe it’s not butter,” line. Yeah, that was kind of a bummer.

Dialogue that often felt like a formulaic series of “Insert sarcastic quips here.”  Tony Stark had the best lines, obviously, but I was expecting them, and they fell short. Thankfully, the rest of the audience in the showing I attended wasn’t as jaded as I was and laughed heartily and often. Good for them. Really.

The Tesseract. What? Another cube? Is this Transformers or something? I kid, I kid! Actually, I’m aware that this is like the Cosmic Cube and that this is the sort of powerful object that played a part in the comics. And oddly enough, it didn’t bother me at all in Captain America. Go figure. I guess the connection I felt with the story in that instance, kept me from dwelling on it too much. I guess this may be a silly critique, seeing as I knew it would somehow factor into this film, but again, the story at large didn’t capture my interest this time around, and I was just plain uninterested in the darn thing.

The plot. I didn’t care for or understand Loki’s motivation, and the conflict resolution just wasn’t believable. I mean, it’s fantasy, yes, but even in the world of the movie, I was left unconvinced.

The superheroes. On their own, they’re great. I couldn’t help but feel that they lost so much of their, um, uniqueness (?), working as a team.

The Hulk in particular. I was really looking forward to him. And I liked him. I really did. BUT, he didn’t grow larger the angrier he got. And then all of sudden, later in the movie, it seemed like he could control his anger perfectly well, when just earlier in the film he lost it big time on Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.

There’s more that I didn’t like, but I’ll spare you. Perhaps if I was an avid Avengers comics reader I may have applauded along with the rest of the people at my screening. I am not beyond thinking that perhaps I’m missing something big here. Perhaps I do have to have more of a familiarity with the comics to enjoy this film. Really, the amount of hype and love being strewn about the net with regard to this movie is unreal. But hey, I’m happy for them. There’s nothing worse than alienating diehard fans. Joss Whedon appears to have given the mega-fans exactly what they wanted. I’m obviously in the minority here.

All that said, there were a few bright spots for me. Granted, very few. And here they are:

Mark Ruffalo. I enjoyed him as Bruce Banner. He was infinitely better than Bana and Norton. Infinitely. He was subdued, and funny. Actually, I thought that of all of the superheroes, he was the most likeable.

Jeremy Renner. Okay, I may just like him, period. And I can’t say that I hated him as Hawkeye. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I sort of like the lonely brooder skilled type of superhero. It’s funny though, because after the film, my kids mentioned him as the guy that shot arrows. There wasn’t much time spent on him as superhero Hawkeye, but rather, evil minion Hawkeye. Really, he was kind of the forgotten hero here. Not much screen time, and no story building for him. BUT, I don’t mean to go off on a negative tangent again. I’m just lamenting the fact that there wasn’t more of him. The bits that were in there, I enjoyed though.

Oh, and I liked seeing the Black Widow kicking butt. I love it when women can hold their own.