tracker7 | Entries tagged with movies

Unsurprisingly the Gran Turismo movie is just chock full of beauty shots of Nissan GT-Rs tear-assing around race tracks. Kaz shows up in some shots. This is, so far, thoroughly enjoyable.

Had some excitement at work last week. A client had gone off his meds and showed up at the center. Started causing trouble with the front office staff. Made some threats, said he was coming back with a gun. Since I was the staffer lucky enough to have been there and with the willingness to do so, I got to swear out a MIW on him. Dude was arrested when he showed up the next morning.

More revisiting of long-idle projects on Sunday during a couple of races. Dug into some of the Mars stuff that I'd written for Shadow of the Beanstalk years ago. Cut some of the extraneous meandering ideas out, made it a tighter, leaner scenario.

Big day for Mars in gaming today. The crowdfunding campaign for the Terraforming Mars RPG launched today, and of course I went in on it. Reasonable pledge level, the core book and the campaign guide. There's a ton of digital content added on thanks to stretch goals and the like. I love the board game - and its iOS adaptation - and will at least get this on a table at some Nerd Louisville event or another.

Also launching today, the new edition of Cold City/Hot War. Tight, brilliant horror games set in postwar Berlin and post-nuclear London. I had the originals and sadly sold them off in one of my bookshelf purges, and I've regretted doing that for a long time. And now, future me gets a present!

There was even one more campaign that I'd been interested in - books of maps for modern/near-future games. I talked myself out of that one - I use maps and minis rarely enough, and I'm waiting for Loke to deliver on the set that I helped crowdfund last year.

Saw some interesting things today. A Rumpke garbage truck caught fire on 64 this morning - thankfully he was eastbound and it didn't affect my commute and the crew got out safely. In the afternoon, on my way back from a client visit, I saw an unusual locomotive on a bridge over 9th Street. More interesting were the cars it had in tow - a track inspection train! I got a decent short video of it and dug into railpictures.net and found a picture of the very same train during a run through Georgia.

Saw Captain America: Brave New World last night. Did not like it - there's some great talent on the screen with so very little material to work with.

Got the Buick back yesterday. No cooling issues and with the hub replaced, it is so quiet at speed. I probably would still be using the Impala, but the shift cable started going out, so I rigged it well enough to get it to Liberty and dropped it off.

Had a couple of those moments during the round-trip yesterday when I thought Holy cow, I am driving through what's left of a hurricane. Helene has done a number southeast of here. Asheville is isolated, only reachable by air. NCDOT said to consider all roads in the western third of the state to be closed - I-40 washed out at the Tennessee-NC line. I don't know if this will directly affect my nebulous plans to go to Spencer in November, but I'm looking at a visit to Roanoke instead.

The Dodgers locked up the NL West again, and have home field advantage throughout the National League playoffs. Hopefully that'll mean more than it did last year, when the NLCS started and they just forgot how to play baseball. On the other end of the spectrum, the White Sox are finishing the season with 121 losses, maybe 122 depending on how today's season closer goes.

Gave Alien: Romulus another viewing. My complaints stand, but it's a much better movie than I gave it credit for on the first watch.

Our DCC GM is in the process of moving, so the game's on hold for a couple of weeks. So, this past weekend, after Friday night's get-together, I had no demands on my time. That felt really good. I slept late Saturday, spent most of the day on the couch listening to music and reading. It was glorious.

Got up Sunday morning for an early showing of Alien: Romulus, which I didn't like very much. It's gorgeous, has the proper cassette futurism look that I love, but the movie just didn't work for me.

Fallout's pretty good, though, two episodes in.

Not much of an entry. Nothing really on my mind, nothing worth recording, at least.

I ran through the final season of Star Trek: Picard. Not bad, but it was a heavy nostalgia trip. Most of the TNG regulars got screen time, but one notable recurring guest showed up in one episode only to die, and I wasn't in love with that decision.

Netflix's Beverly Hills Cop movie was enjoyable enough. There's a chase scene that doesn't quite work for me, but the rest is fun. A few years ago, I rewatched the first movie, and was surprised that, wow, that was a genuinely good movie.

Less than six weeks until I can start looking for another position within the agency. I've been watching the postings off and on, and there are some good options. There are parts of my job that I do like, but they're heavily outweighed by the parts that I very much don't.

It sure is July 4. Every doofus around is setting off the fireworks they bought at whatever tent set up in whatever parking lot. I figure there'll be a few rounds of that hit new guessing game Fireworks or Gunshots tonight, and the news tomorrow morning should be good for a few uncomfortable chuckles.

Charcon's coming up. Still waiting for the GM discount code to arrive. I'm comfortable enough with the adventures I schedule, and should be more so after the test session Tuesday evening. I'm looking forward to this trip - looking forward to seeing some people and getting some breakfast at Tudor's.

I gotta wonder how things are going to be when I read this entry in a year. I figure that things are going to go pear-shaped and that orange bastard will get re-elected and ... the republic ends.

Something else I liked about Civil War - seeing a big ol' Ford Excursion doing what it was built for. Carrying a number of people and their gear on a lengthy trip through sometimes rough country.

Catching up with Donna was good. Don't know when we'll get to see each other again - the rest of May is busy for me, and June and July are going to be busy for us both. She's working towards a move to New Orleans in about a year and a half, and has extracted promises from me that I'll come see her when she's settled in down there.

GenCon badges got sorted out, and I have a three-event wish list ready for tomorrow's registration. Listen closely, friends, around noon Eastern, and you just might hear the servers groan. I've GMed all of the games on my list - Trail of Cthulhu, Shadow of the Beanstalk, and Old Gods of Appalachia - and I'm looking forward to being on the other side of the screen.

Dad's surgery went very well. He texted me yesterday, marveling at how nice it was to have clear vision back in his left eye. The right is getting another evaluation next month - it has some cataracts as well, but that eye's retina has some damage, and the docs are concerned that cataract surgery may further damage the retina.

The repainted mini came out well. The colors aren't quite what I had in mind, but they're good, and I have no desire to strip and paint it again. Next up is one for my Old School Essentials character - a skull-splitting herb-gathering barbarian.

Mucked around with my client schedule this afternoon to finally catch Civil War. It is, as the kids say, a banger of a movie. Kirsten Dunst is very good, and her supporting cast is, too. It's a damned intense movie, and uncomfortable in turns. Alex Garland hasn't yet let me down - on the directorial side, Ex Machina and Annihilation are gorgeous movies, and he's written some great stuff, too - 28 Days Later and Dredd, among others. And A24's made some good stuff, so this was just a good work all around.

Surprisingly, we got a red-band trailer for Maxxxine, another A24 release and the sequel to the pretty darn good X.

Found a little gem while looking for something to eat before the movie. Was going to get something from Raising Cane's, but their dining room was closed for repairs and I have a nearly pathological hate of drive-thrus, and something told me to try the grocery store in the little mall housing the theater. Found out that they have a very good deli, and very good prices there. So, since I'm trying to see more movies at Baxter Avenue, I think I'll patronize Valu Market as well.

I tried Army Painter's Speed Paint on a mini last week, and results were mixed at best. Colors didn't really show up like I wanted. I wound up stripping the figure last night, and I'm going to repaint it this afternoon while watching the IMSA race at Laguna Seca (swoon) this afternoon.

Roger Corman died yesterday. 98 years old, FOUR-HUNDRED NINETY-ONE production credits. I've rarely, if ever, seen a Corman film I'd call good, but I've never not been entertained by them. He launched many many careers, including James Cameron's, and that ain't nothing.

Dad has surgery to remove cataracts from one of his eyes on Tuesday. He can't drive home after the surgery, of course, so I'm taking care of things on that end. And it's going to make for a busy couple of days for me. Work tomorrow, date with Donna tomorrow evening, drive to Liberty after that. Get up at 4:00AM to get ready to leave Liberty for Lexington at 5AM so we can be at the VA at 7AM. And then I camp out wherever I can find somewhere comfortable during the procedure. Then I take him back to Liberty and myself back to Louisville. Maybe I'll get back in time to play Dragonbane, and maybe I'll just take myself to a movie instead.

Going back to the western end of the state in late June. We decided on Kentucky Dam State Park for the annual Hex gathering. I think I'm going to stay off-site again - costs and membership rewards influencing that decision - and just drive the couple of miles from the east side of Paducah the park. If I even go. My trip to Charleston is three weeks after.

I got a call from the local district health department a couple of hours after getting the offer letter from Seven Counties. Not too long ago, I would have said that the LCDHD posting was my dream job - communications and information director for a public health department. And, if they'd called me a week before, things would have been different.

I declined. I'd gone through enough interviews and application processes and tests and everything else that ... well, Seven Counties got me first. I start the new job with them on Monday the 5th.

A new radiator is being installed in the Escape this afternoon, so there's my transportation back online. Still needs some other work, and that'll come soon.

Saw I.S.S. last night. I'm willing to forgive factual and technical errors if there's good drama and story; I'm not forgiving this movie's errors. There are good performances, and a good seed of an idea, and the movie looks great, but it's not a good movie. Clocks in at 96 minutes, and I was still checking my watch far too often. Not recommended.

The Cyberpunk Red demo went really well. Three players, and they got into things quickly. Had a funny moment when a customer passed by and asked about the big battle map I had out on the table. He asked if the characters were low-level, and seemed just gobsmacked when I told him that the game didn't have levels.

The week's been uneventful, notable only for the heat. Heat indices have gone over 100F; at 7:35PM, we're sitting at 86F, indexed to 97. The two window units have struggled, and I haven't slept all that well. Stormy weather is forecast for tomorrow evening, and that'll help. For a little while.

As I'm writing this, an ex-POTUS is being processed at a jail in Fulton County, Georgia. Lots to, well, process here. In my interested layman's opinion, Georgia has a solid case against the miserable bastard - state-level charges, a stack of evidence, and what looks like some co-defendants flipping. Gods, I hope the fucker faces real consequences.

Got around to watching Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Pretty good, and a solid sendoff for much of the cast. Great soundtrack, unsurprisingly, and it's put In the Meantime on repeat in my head, and I am fine with that.

Even better - the first two episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka. It, so far, feels very much like a continuation of Rebels - Hera and Chopper and Sabine are front-and-center, and Clancy Brown put in an appearance. I have the feeling that Sabine is going to just going to steal the show out from under everyone.

Took a day for myself Friday. Drove to Lexington to see Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1, which was unsurprisingly spectacular. I don't know how they do it, but every movie in this franchise continues to improve on its predecessor. DR1 brings Hayley Atwell into the cast, and she's just wonderful, of course, and Kittridge's return was a real surprise, and there's Esai Morales, who should always get more work, and Pom Klementieff was pretty terrific in her barely-speaking-but-much-fighting role. A fast 163 minutes.

Had some time to kill, so I stopped by the new-to-me game store in (ugh) Fayette Mall and found some suitable minis. Went over to Southland Drive and another shop ... and found another two-pack of minis. And then things got weird for me. I went to Joseph-Beth, and felt out-of-place. No titles jumped out at me. I got bored browsing. So damned strange.

Having been reminded of how much I dislike driving in Lexington, I headed south on US27 as the afternoon commuter crawl was starting. Stopped in Nicholasville for a tasty brisket sandwich, then headed to Somerset for the Delta Green game.

Refueled the Escape, bought drinks, went to the store. Good session, good talk after, and headed home. Really not in love with driving KY910 late at night anymore. And the past couple of times I've driven home from Somerset, I've caught myself thinking about the beautiful crazy girl from Indy.

Saturday was downtime, Sunday was a lunch meeting in Louisville. Bought another set of paints at Miso's, and got home in time for most of the NASCAR race at IMS - a road course race! Good watch, lots of shots of downtown Indy for that hey-I-was-just-there vibe. Downloaded a book, read the first chapter, called it a weekend.

Really rough mental health day Monday, much improved yesterday and today. Dad and Kaiser went on the road yesterday afternoon, heading to Florida. We joked about being extra careful going through Fulton County, Georgia, but it was that Southern gallows humor, and with a grand jury getting death threats from that orange bastard's cultists, well, I'm glad Dad knows plenty of alternate routes home.

Here it is, 9:15PM and I should start winding down for the night. But there's this little plastic figure glued to a base for painting and hey Tubi has served up the last Matrix movie, so I think I'll stay up a little while longer and try to get a little creative energy going.

Dad's been on the road for a week. Kaiser went bugnuts for the first couple of days, and he's been either needy or indifferent towards me since - except for when it's feeding time, of course.

Dad borrowed the micro refrigerator I bought a few months ago, and unsurprisingly he wants one of his own. So, ordered one for him and it's waiting for his return home.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was good. Some surprises, a disappointment or two, and some emotional beats that hit me pretty hard.

I'm trying to find time to see the new Mission: Impossible. I figured that it would have had a longer theatrical run, but I guess out here in the wilds, the smaller theaters have to have faster turnover. If I have to stream it, so be it, but with luck, tomorrow will work out.

I'm watching War for the Planet of the Apes this evening, and I'm thinking about how it's one of the last things I'll watch on DVD via my Netflix subscription. They're eliminating the DVD option, and really, that deep library of physical media is the biggest reason to keep the sub. Netflix's streaming fare is hit-and-miss, especially their original stuff, and not matter how good the show is, there's no metric anyone can see to determine if a show will continue beyond a single season, or two if it's lucky. Prime's got a better library of originals, Tubi continues to surprise me with its rotating offerings, and Hulu and Disney aren't the best, but they are much cheaper than anyone else.

The movie itself is pretty good. Matt Reeves is a solid director. The Apes prequels have been worth my time; I'll always have a place in my heart for Planet and Beneath from the first series of movies.

Dad's going on the road tomorrow, a long haul out to the West Coast. I'll have the place to myself for a while. Kinda looking forward to that.

It's the first day of summer. Not all that hot, and driving home this evening was pleasant, really. The rain we've enjoyed for the last few days has gone away (darnit) and good ol' Sol was seen as a dull disc through a thick cloud cover. Proper cyberpunk skies.

I finally got over to a theater and saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It is good. Really truly very good. Maybe more visually striking as Into, and every bit as bonkers. Roughly three hojillion Spider-People and so very very many of them in their own animation style. Lots to do with family and identity. Indian Spider-Man pointing out the giant museum in his city of Mumbattan and describing it as something like "that's where the British put all of our stuff" got a big laugh from me.

Hey, do you know why the pyramids are in Egypt? They were too heavy to haul back to London.

Anyway, heck of a movie, and I'd like to give it another viewing just to look for all the little things tucked into the animation. So good.

In other media news, YouTube just served up the video for The Midnight's "Vampires," and it is assembled from clips from Wicked City, and boy that was porny as anything. Whole movie is on Tubi, if you're interested. Not really recommended.

Got a couple of quiet days coming up, then Saturday ... it's going to be a good mental health day, starting with running trains in Jeffersonville, then Free RPG Day at Miso's, then a L5R game at Bryan J's. I know I'll be tired as anything when I finally get home, but it should be that good tired.

I've had some decent days lately. Rode around with Dad on a clumsy but ultimately successful attempt to find a boat repair place someone had suggested to him. I'm continuing to burn through the Netflix DVD queue before that service sadly comes to an end in a few months - Tubi has helped with that, too.

Got a lead on a Delta Green game, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that shakes out. I thought that last night was going to be the session, but I misread the store's calendar. Saved myself a drive when I checked again before heading out and saw that last night was D&D night, and, no thanks. So, I ordered a pizza and settled in for some reading ... and that became some writing, and hokie-smokes did that feel good.

Today started pretty well. Dad needed a few things for some baking wanted to do for the reunion today, so off we went to the grocery. After that, I felt the need for some tea and the Escape needed fuel, so stopped at the large convenience store/small truckstop for such. On the way out of the store, my clumsiness reared its head - I smacked my left wrist against a doorframe and popped the screen right off my smartwatch. Its battery had started to swell up (it's six years old, after all) and had pushed the screen up a little bit, so it was probably just going to happen eventually. Anyway, it wasn't reparable by my hands, so I just replaced it this afternoon. It's currently syncing with the phone, and I have a shipping label ready for sending the old one off for recycling.

The reunion was okay. I had pie. That was about it.

It's Memorial Day weekend. Somewhere along the line, it became a thing here in the South(ish) to add flowers and decorations and whatnot to the graves of any and all relatives. I'm not much for that, but since I failed to do so for Mother's Day, I got a nice simple bouquet for Mom's grave. It's pretty, quite colorful, and she would have loved it.

Goshdarn it, Mom, I miss you today.

The Indy 500's tomorrow, and coverage of the Monaco Grand Prix, too, so there's my afternoon soundtrack sorted out. Dad's already promised to not ask me to go to church with him.

Monday's the holiday itself, and the Honor Guard Dad's part of will have a part in the town's observance. That, I will definitely attend. He's proud of this continued service and universe knows it does my heart good to see him enjoying this.

The phone and new watch are still syncing, so I think I'm going to get some reading in (Magician: Master, by Raymond Feist, for the record).

The LFPL J-town branch had a Blu-Ray copy of Zach Snyder's Justice League available, so I went that route. The bad, right off the bat (not The Batman) - it's in 4:3 instead of 16:9 or something civilized. And there is entirely too much slo-mo. Aside from those quibbles, it is a darned entertaining movie. Better than the theatrical release. A big ol' superhero actioner.

Oh - the SFX people should probably have worked a little harder to make Steppenwolf not look so much like the Devastator from Thor.

After a couple of not-so-great weeks, I had a terrific mental health day yesterday. Got up early-ish and loaded up the Escape and headed over to Jeffersonville to run some trains. Got in a couple of hours of very relaxing train time. Feeling darned good about the start of the day, I headed back across the river, looking for lunch before gaming. Decided to swing by Chicken King for the first time in months, and damned if those spicy fried wings and potato wedges weren't the very thing I wanted. And then it was on to Heroes for a DCC demo game. Four players, one known to me. Had a blast - short, straightforward adventure, two PC deaths (and that's why I whip up plenty of spares), tons of laughs. Went home, took a nap, read, napped again. I felt so damned good.

Today should be pretty good, too. Went out to Meijer earlier. I have a gallon of soup going in the slow cooker, and I'm going to bake some cornbread when the soup's about done. Probably get a little nap before the OSE game at noon, then another nap before the Super Bowl. And work is going to get whatever version of me manages to drag itself in tonight, and they'll like it.

Had a good visit with Dad. Didn't see the comet, and it was really too cold to do very much, but I enjoyed the brief getaway.

Podcasts and my streaming queues have led me to watching and rewatching a slate of supers movies. Spider-Man 2 remains one of the best of the mix, and I put it at the top of the live-action Spider-movies. Alfred Molina just shines as Doctor Octopus. Superman 2 is also stellar, forty years on. I will still defend Man of Steel, on the whole - Cavill is good! Diane Lane and Kevin Costner are very good! I would pay full-price for a Russell Crowe-as-Jor-El, Action Scientist movie. To balance things out, Morbius is really that bad. It's clumsy and wastes a lot of talent.

One of the shows responsible for all of this is the fantastic How Did This Get Made. It's easily one of my favorite listens, and among the very funny rips on bad movie, I find myself learning more about the filmmaking process. Anyway, a couple of nights ago, I listened to the lengthy episode they did on the Snyder cut of Justice League. I expected it to be pretty vicious, and the episode did start out with bad notes, but ultimately, the podcasters declared the Snyder cut better than the theatrical release. And now I'm looking at throwing a few bucks at HBO Max to watch the Snyder cut. And probably Black Adam, too.

The distributor finally got my copy of Tales of the Red (CP Red) to the LGS. There is some absolute gold in this book. The first two missions give two very different takes on cyberpsychosis. One is a straightforward killing spree with a strong horror element; the other is a twisted and a little bit sad story of delusional love. There's a technothriller op, relics of the old Net, old allies from the Forlorn Hope. There are a couple of clunkers, at least to my tastes, but the good far far outweighs the less-than-good.

I've taken a dive into Alien novels this week. Colony War was a good quick read, plenty of action and horror. I'm about halfway through Pat Cadigan's novelization of William Gibson's screenplay for Alien 3 - the unproduced screenplay. It's far from perfect, but it's a better Alien story than what we got all those years ago.

I really don't like Alien 3. It's a well-made movie, but I don't think it's a good Alien movie/story at all. For a long time, my dislike of it led to a dislike of the director, and I wasn't fond of Fancher's other movies, either - I think Seven is just misery porn with good performances and great cinematography. But then, I saw Zodiac, and thought it was just brilliant coming and going.

I feel like I made good use of my time off. Got a few resumes out, saw Top Gun: Maverick, spent a couple hours playing with trains over at the Southern Indiana club.

Still warm, but it's seasonably so now, whatever that means.

I’ve gotten a lot of reading done lately. A couple of trips to Mars with Andy Weir and Richard K. Morgan, Louisiana with James Lee Burke, Area X with Jeff VanderMeer. Some others, too - and it looks like my plan to read all of the post-Fleming James Bond novels has just evaporated.

The Martian was just a joy to read - good science and great fiction. Thin Air was Morgan’s default - the super-rich versus the super-capable; enjoyable, but I don’t know if I’ll remember it in a year. It’s been a while since I read anything by Burke, so I rolled way back to the first Dave Robicheaux novel, The Neon Rain. Annihilation was very good and very strange - it made me think of Station Eleven, with a pastoral feel to its writing, and it hit one of my favorite types of horror, a corruption of the self.

In other media consumption, I finally watched Deadpool. I get why people liked it, and I have to admit it gave me a pretty good Colossus, but overall I didn’t care for it and felt vindicated in not seeing it in a theater. Let’s see, what else. I liked Hawkeye quite a bit. Moon Knight isn’t doing much for me.

The Old Gods of Appalachia RPG Kickstarter took off like a rocket. Funded almost immediately, and is sitting at better than $1.1 million as I write this. I didn’t go all-in on this one like I had expected to, and that’s probably for the best, as Free League launches their Blade Runner KS in a couple of weeks, and while I’m an easy mark for the Old Gods, I LOVE Blade Runner. Plus there are the ones I’ve pledged that are still outstanding - Scientific Barbarian and the Dying Earth boxed set.

The Kentucky Derby Festival kicks off this weekend. Thunder Over Louisville, back on the riverfront. Woo.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Roadside Picnic

Bright Ideas, Dark Futures

Brand New Life

Highway 61 Revisited

About Time

Birds of a Feather

You Wanted More

Down to Memphis

Reasons Leading to a Flameout

Feels Like Rain

Out on the Weekend

Looking Through Patient Eyes

Sentimental Heart

Any Random Kindness

What Makes You Happy

Nemesis

Love Lies Bleeding

Let's Face the Music and Dance

Love is the Way

Into My Arms

Smooth Sailin'

In the Wake of Your Leave

Profile

June 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags