#AsForDynamite: Alright. Even *I* Didn't Like That One.

I wrote earlier this week about how AEW is a young man's or woman's company, and then they throw *that* out there.

Let's Reboot Miami Vice!

It took some doing, but I finally convinced my wife to watch the original Miami Vice with me via Amazon’s FreeVee service. We’d just finished The Sopranos, and for as much as we enjoyed The Sopranos, I gotta say we're both enjoying Vice a good bit more. Part of that is undoubtedly down to nostalgia. My wife and I were both 80s kids. Most of it, though, comes from the vibes, which were immaculate at the time and remain unchanged even to modern eyes. I have therefore started wondering what a modern reboot of Miami Vice might look like. 

Here’s my idea.

Greetings from my Social Media Break

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, friends!

I started my social media hiatus on Friday, December 15th, which was about ten days ago. I drove up to the University of Vermont that day to pick up my eldest daughter Hannah, making it easy to leave Facebook and Twitter behind. I'd found myself getting a little too obsessed with seeing reaction to things I'd written, mostly for As For Football, over the previous months. I therefore wanted to break the habit of checking in with the world-at-large. 

Merry Christmas from Casa Cabeza!

It had gotten a little too easy to doom-scroll my way through the day, and with that had come a lot of unfiltered bullshit. Too much of what passes for opinion comes from miserable bastards looking to outsource their own unhappiness. I've missed interacting with AFF's Firstie Club, but the cold turkey approach seemed like the best thing for the moment, and here we are.

I've read quite a bit, I've listened to a few audiobooks from my local library, and I've watched a few movies. The beauty of all of this is that I've gotten to do it in the vacuum of my own space, allowing an easier place from which to form my own opinions.

Quick Thoughts: The Mandalorian Season 3 Finale (Spoilers)

Spoiler alert: this post is totally going to have spoilers for the Mandalorian Season 3 finale.

As For Dynamite: So Many Bad Takes...

I guess I just like this show more than a bunch of the people who actually write about it for a living.  I mean, I don’t know what else to make of it, nor why anyone would dedicate that much time to talking about something they’re lukewarm about.  I read one review this morning where the guy literally said of every match on the card: “I liked it, but…”

What are you doing, guy?  Is this shit really making you that much money?

Okay, so I made a header for the column. I guess we're serious now.

Find another hobby.  This one is making you miserable.

Quick Thoughts: All-Elite Wrestling’s All-Out PPV

I’m gonna keep this quick because there are already a half-million takes on All-Out out there, and I can already tell you that the very last thing anyone needs is another Internet smark’s interpretation of anything.  I watched the show sitting next to my 15-year-old daughter Emma, and if there’s one thing that experience taught me, it’s that some of y’all read too much Internet before you turn on a pay-per-view.  Because Emma’s reactions and some of y’all’s reactions were so diametrically opposed that y’all are clearly wrong.

They say “the economy is not the stock market, and the stock market is not the economy.”  The same is true of Twitter.  It’s not really reflective of popular opinion; it’s reflective of a certain echo-chamber slice of popular opinion.  Hence people getting off Twitter for two weeks and -- consistently -- talking about what a life-changing experience it was.

Some of this stuff was only good or bad because one has a very particular view when one’s head is stuffed that firmly up one’s own ass.

Movie Review: The New Mutants

I took my kids to the Mansfield Drive-In Movie Theater last night to see the New Mutants.  A great experience overall but probably not one that we would repeat on anything like a regular basis, mostly because the theater itself was over an hour’s drive away.  Needless to say, this was my kids’ first experience with a drive-in.  We brought lawn chairs but forgot to bring a boom box and thus learned the hard way that my car’s speakers aren’t as loud as I might’ve hoped when you’re sitting outside.  Volume issues affected our enjoyment of the film, unfortunately.  It was hard to hear at times.  Still, we all enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.  

Elicit Brewing Company & "Meet Me at the Barre"

My beautiful wife Sally did an event at the Elicit Brewing Company in Manchester, Connecticut, yesterday.  She called it "Meet Me at the Barre".  I went with her and took some pictures for her new website HeadSpace.Fit.

The Elicit Brewing Company

5 Things on a Friday: Purple Rain

Hey folks, happy Friday!  Let’s do it.

Six Things on a Saturday: Divining Artistic Pretensions

It feels like the world has gone off the rails.  It wasn’t this week in particular or anything, but…  wow.

Let’s get to it.

TRON Reconsidered

I didn’t love TRON when I first saw it in theaters. Mostly because I’d had enough programming at the time to understand that, “This is not how computers work.”  Partly, too, because the movie is deliberately weird.

Alas, I missed some of the film’s subtler themes.

Quick Thoughts: Ralph Breaks the Internet

Sally, the kids, and I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet over the weekend, and we all liked it.  Most of the reviews I’ve seen talk about the ways in which the movie cleverly captures the quirks of online life, and I agree that they did a nice job with that.  But the movie also went to kind of a lot of trouble to get into issues of toxic masculinity and girl power, and while I think those aspects are great in concept, it’s this that I wanted to talk about.  Bottom line, I didn’t love some of the movie’s basic premise nor the way the plot resolved itself.

*Spoilers Below*

No seriously.  I am gonna get straight into the movie’s climax right after the jump.

Quick Thoughts: A Star Is Born

Sally and I went to see A Star Is Born last night, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in which Cooper is himself making his directorial debut.  I liked the movie a lot, but I had some thoughts about it, too.

Detailed spoilers are below.  Click through at your own risk.

TV Review: Marvel's Cloak & Dagger

My daughter Emma and I finished Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger on Freeform last week, and we both really enjoyed it.  Truthfully, I think I enjoyed it more than she did.  Before watching the show, I’d have guessed that it was aimed squarely at the teen-girl fan-set based on its choice of cable networks.  The reality, though, is that the former ABC Family Channel has more in common with Spike TV than it does with, say, The Disney Channel or even Lifetime.  Where we were expecting something along the lines of the CW’s Arrowverse but starring younger Marvel protagonists, what we got was a decidedly gritty psychological drama that was much more in line with the tone of the original 1980s-era comics than I’d have believed possible.

Thoughts on Solo & the Star Wars Universe

We saw Solo: A Star Wars Story over the weekend.  Everybody liked it okay.  I don’t think it was anyone’s idea of a great movie, and even my kids saw some of those closing double-crosses coming, but it was still entertaining, and that’s fine.

5 Things on a Friday: Praying for a New Plane

I’m back.  I’ve been busier of late, so I don’t know that 5 Things' return is necessarily going to be a regular occurrence, but there’s so much going on that I thought maybe we ought to talk about at least some of it.

Let’s get it on!

Stupid Movie Reviews: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets

Welcome to Stupid Movie Reviews!  This is a new, uh, maybe bi-weekly segment on the blog.  This week, we’re looking at a rather enjoyable stupid movie,Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets.

Quick Thoughts: The Last Jedi

Hannah, Emma, and I finally saw The Last Jedi (TLJ) on Sunday, and for all that it has been hyped up, trashed, and spoiled online, we really liked it.  I’d probably give it four stars out of five, and that’s on first viewing.  I liked The Force Awakens (TFA) much more on second viewing because I noticed a lot of little things that I hadn’t seen the first time through.  I’ll never be the same ten-year-old boy I was when I experienced The Empire Strike Back (ESB) for the first time, but I’ve still really enjoyed both installments of the new trilogy.  I like them more, for example, than I liked Rogue One.  Both movies took us into uncharted territory, but that’s doubly true of TLJ, and that’s something that we badly needed.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

My initial thoughts on the movie are below.  These include detailed spoilers.  You have been warned.

Quick Thoughts: Justice League

Went with my buddy Ben and his son to see Justice League Saturday -- in IMAX -- while Sally and the girls and their friends went to see Wonder.  Right up front, I had two key takeaways:

1. IMAX shows a lot of Justice League.  Like, yo, that League was big, and it was LOUD.

2. Coming off Batman vs. Superman, the movie overall was exponentially better than I thought it would be.  I still don't think that the DCEU has come up to the standard of the MCU, but this one movie at least was a lot more fun than it was grim, gritty, and noir.

*Spoilers Below*

Wonder Woman & Spider-Man vs. the Man of Steel

I finally got to see Wonder Woman this week.  Good flick.  They did a nice job of making Diana fierce but also feminine and of making Steve Trevor both nowhere near as tough as his star but decidedly heroic and masculine nonetheless.

Wonder Woman

Spoilers ahead.