Tag: movies

Thoughts on Solo: A Star Wars Story

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

*SPOILER FREE* If there’s any more indication to how I felt about Solo: A Star Wars Story, is the fact that it’s been just a day since I watched it, and I’ve already forgotten that I’d seen it.

This isn’t to say that it was a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, it’s hardly a film that’s remotely memorable in any real fashion.  On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being bad and ten being excellent, I would rate Solo at a 5, for average, solid mediocrity.  It was far from the excessively fatalistic and pessimistic expectations of the film that the cesspool of the internet and the cancers of social media would lead people to believe, but it was nowhere near the level of quality that was Rogue One, the other Star Wars Story film.  I would still rank it above Episodes 1-3 of the canonical storyline; although that doesn’t say that much, it at least shows that it’s still better than other films and therefore not the worst movie in the history of film.

It’s just not a particularly memorable film that has any sticking power in my opinion.  One of the only sentiments of the film prior to its release that I agree with, is that I questioned the necessity of a standalone Han Solo film in the first place.  I don’t disagree that it’s in all likelihood a money grab, trying to cash in on the familiarity of existing intellectual properties, but after Rogue One, I had hoped that future Star Wars Stories films would be similar, in the sense that they would be widely original characters and storylines independent from the reset of the main canon plot, while existing in the same universe.  But instead, two editions in, and we’re getting an origin story that kind of floats almost independently in the timeline of the canon, that would require some creative shoe-horning in order to make fit adequately in the stream of the story, because they’ve used primary characters.

To me, this implies that there will be a future necessity for Luke and Leia, since the childhoods of either would probably be way too boring to sustain their own films, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of scuttlebutt about a film about Boba Fett, to which I’ll never understand the mass astonishment for a character that really had a total of maybe 7-14 minutes of total screen time within the original trilogy, to have such a devout following, not to mention that his origins were already somewhat explored in the abysmal episodes 1-3.

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The DeVanzo Shift in an actual MLB game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A guilty pleasure of mine is the film, Artie Lange’s Beer League.  It’s more or less a love letter to all things New Jersey, featuring Artie Lange and a bunch of small time New Jersey losers who enjoy beer league softball in their town while going through the motions of their own mundane lives.  It’s by no means good, but to someone who appreciates sophomoric humor, rec league softball, and one of the random things that Ralph Macchio actually performs in, the flick still holds a place in my well as a go-to for a cheap and reliable laugh.

One of the things in the film that I make references to almost regularly is The DeVanzo Shift, a defensive strategy employed by one of the antagonist teams, designed to feast on the fact that Artie Lange is completely incapable of hitting the ball to anywhere but the left side of the field, so the Manganelli Fitness team blatantly positions all fielders on the left, leaving the right side completely open.  Naturally, being the underachiever he is, Artie still hits the ball into the teeth of the defense and is easily rendered out.

Throughout the last decade or so, Major League Baseball has gone in the direction of teams employing radical shifts, in order to capitalize on the tendency of more and more hitters to pull the ball more than anything else, because pulling = power, power = homers, and homers = $$$.  It’s become laughably commonplace these days that every team’s left-handed power bats will see shifts where either a second baseman or a shortstop will position themselves pretty much in shallow right field, and be pitched in manners that will try to get them to hit it directly into the shifts.

Regardless, any team that shifts will almost always still have a guy or two position on the opposite side of the field, in the event that a hitter will drop a bunt to counter the shift, or some fluke of a swing slaps a ball to the opposite side of the field.  After all, these are paid professionals who are supposedly the best in the world at baseball and should be able to read a defense and react accordingly to how the opposition is trying to play them.  So shifts are not uncommon in the big leagues, but it’s like we’d ever see a real DeVanzo Shift in the majors.

That is, until Joey Gallo started playing baseball for the Texas Rangers.  Apparently the book is pretty short and concise on Gallo: strikes out a ton, and if he makes contact with the ball, he’s pulling it.  And the Houston Astros have clearly gotten the message, and have basically deployed the DeVanzo Shift, in Major League Baseball.  The Astros positioned nearly every single fielder on the right side of the field, save for left fielder Marwin Gonzalez, who was the sole left-side safety net in the event that Gallo hit anything remotely to the left.  Needless to say, the Astros were very confident that they were going to get Joey Gallo to hit a ball to the right side of the field.

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Danny’s watch list, winter-spring 2018

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few months, I’ve been watching a lot more television instead of burning every single evening playing League of Legends.  I still enjoy the game, but I’m not going to pretend like my interest in the game is nearly what it was a year or three ago; it’s kind of like how my baseball mania peaked and tempered back down a happy medium, to where I wanted to pursue other interests instead of letting myself get so completely absorbed in it.  I don’t follow professional play anymore, and I don’t even bother reading patch notes, and have gotten blindsided by some new in-game mechanics here and there, but I just don’t care. 

I could easily write more about why I’ve grown distant to the game, but that would be long enough to be another post for another time.

Television, has kind of filled the space in my free time that was so fervently accounted for by playing League.  Every now and then, I feel like I’m falling behind the ever-growing libraries of content being produced at a breakneck pace, and sometimes I just want to sit back and watch something and not be so interactively vested in my entertainment.  Sometimes it’s just nice to have stories told to you, without having to exert any more effort than pulling the tab on my recliner to sit back and enjoy television on my projection screen.

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I’d vote for that

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So it’s been a little bit of time since the rise and fall of Renaissance, Georgia, ironically before it even got to be risen officially.  It’s actually been quiet since then, which means the twisted local government is either plotting their next attempt to deceive the people and roll something out without any of their representation, or perhaps they’re busy watching Netflix instead.  Either way, with the failure that was Renaissance, the name of the area remains the cold and callous sounding “South Fulton.”

And unless you’ve been living under a rock, Black Panther-mania has taken over the world for this hot second, and few people in the world can actually say anything bad about the ground and record-breaking film.  Needless to say, all things Black Panther has been on the tips of everyone’s tongues this week, as just about everyone in the world is still seeking out tickets and trying to go see the film for the first, or third times.

I saw this “joke” pop up on my old neighborhood’s Nextdoor account, and my first thought was “too easy.”  A city in the Metro area that’s like ~80% black wanting to call themselves “Wakanda?”  You don’t say!

But then I thought about how alternatives would have been shit like “Renaissance” or “Atlanta Heights” or something else shitty, and suddenly Wakanda doesn’t seem like such a bad option.  Not only is it ironically funny if it were officially in place, I have to imagine that just about every person who’s seen Black Panther at this point would be completely on board with it, thus eliminating the whole “you can’t change shit without us the people” conflict would be out of the equation.

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Thoughts on Black Panther

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When mythical gf and I got to the theater and took our seats, they happened to be like in the third row and way off to the left.  Granted, theaters have come a long way to where it’s not nearly as bad closer up front than it used to be, and we had seats angled to face the screen that also reclined, so it could easily have been way worse, but there was a brief moment where I thought that it might’ve been preferable had we waited just a little bit and gotten more direct facing seats.

However, the following morning, I kept hearing from every interested movie goer that they couldn’t find a single theater that had any available tickets left for any reasonable showtime of Black Panther.  Showings were being shown as sold out just about everywhere across the Metro Atlanta area, and suddenly getting to see the movie when we saw the movie didn’t seem like such a bad thing after all.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts about Black Panther, and to cut to the chase, none of them are at all bad.  Full disclosure, I’ve never really been a fan of the comic book, and I’ve always held Black Panther on the tier of Marvel superheroes like Thor and Daredevil but still above shit like Iron Fist or Quasar, as properties that I knew existed, I knew their place in the Marvel Universe, but I just didn’t really give a shit about.  I liked X-Men the most, enjoyed singular properties like Iron Man and Spider-Man, and I’d been on and off with properties like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. 

Needless to say, the prospect of a Black Panther film wasn’t something that excited me much when I heard about it, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe had made me capable of enjoying properties I was lukewarm about like Thor and Ant-Man, so it was also safe to be optimistic about a stand-alone Black Panther, especially with the exciting manner in which he was introduced in Captain America: Civil War.

I think it goes without saying that no single Marvel film has had the magnitude of hype that Black Panther has had, and there’s very obvious reasons of why such was the case, given the tumultuous social climate we live in today in the 2010s.  One of the challenges that I had during the hype, arrival, viewing and post-thinking of the film was creating separation between the film itself and everything that the film stood for in modern society.

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Exposing convenient revisionist history

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With Marvel Studio’s Black Panther on the horizon, spouting all sorts of racial rhetoric about it being historic and things other than a comic book movie, Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch drops Mjolnir on the truth of the matter: before Black Panther, there was Blade.

Obviously, Blade happened way before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and long before there was an odd existence of Marvel movies between FOX, Sony, and whomever produced the turds of Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, and the poor Jessica Alba Fantastic Fours that I’m too lazy to expend the few seconds to Google.

But for all intents and purposes, Blade is still a Marvel property, and therefore seeing as how the title of the film is named after him, makes him the first ever Marvel production starring a black person in the titular role.  As much as the internet and the rest of the world really want to claim Black Panther is this evolutionary revolutionary, in the grand spectrum of comic book films, it’s really not.  It’s just another addition to a library that’s way bigger than lots of people want to believe, for the sake of pushing a very expensive agenda in order to expedite the recouping of a gargantuan budget.

I love this article because Bunch does a great job of anticipating arguments to his article, and stomps them out before they can even be made, like pointing out all the other films, as small and as obscure as they may have been, being made in ages prior to the current internet, that have long beaten Black Panther to the punch as far as identifying black directors, black soundtracks, and other black things that are especially under the microscope now that we’ve traversed into February, the vaunted Black History Month. 

I hope he dropped a mic after this piece went to publish.

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Content choice paralysis

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I highly doubt it, but I wonder if I’m the only person who goes through this: I sit down to watch some streaming television, and after I open Netflix/Plex/Hulu/WWE Network, I find myself browsing and searching through these gargantuan catalogues of content, and before I know it, 45 minutes have passed, and the time I earmarked to watch some television is mostly gone.  A 60+ minute episode/movie doesn’t really fit into the schedule, and nothing I want to watch is one of those 22 minute shorts.  Ultimately, I end up watching nothing, but have added ten new things to the watchlist that I’ll inevitably ignore in the future and repeat the process all over again.

To say that there’s a wealth of content out there is an understatement.  The catalogues of crap out there are never ending, and the fact that it’s all over the internet reinforces the notion that it can be cycled in and out of circulation at the drop of a hat at any given time of the day, week, month or year.

This is why shows have such short lifespans, because the pressure to immediately succeed is so high, and failing to get an 11 out of 10 often times means cancellation, or falling by the wayside by the next avalanche of programming that’s waiting in the wings at all time. 

Frankly, it’s mind-boggling just how much stuff is out there, and I’m having a really hard time of keeping track of what’s decent, what’s not worth investing time into, and I’m finding that my standards are kind of molding into modern standards, because I’m not giving shows enough time to mature and develop, because they themselves aren’t giving themselves enough time to do such, and begin to suck, and I’m already thinking of what I could be/could have been watching instead.

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