Good Morning Folks! One of the things that I have been trying to do this year is keep better track of the movies that I end up watching. I remember it was a bit of a challenge when I pulled together my 2025 in review post to figure out what exactly I had seen in a calendar year. Even then I realized that I missed a few phenomenal films like Sinners that I would have definitely talked about. My friend “The Librarian” reminded me that Letterboxd is a thing that exists, and also that I apparently have had an account for a very long time. This should not shock me because I tend to sign up for things as soon as they enter my consciousness, and then often times not use them for several years. See also that I signed up for SpaceHey three years before making a single post on it or even configuring my profile. Anyways part of this is that I am also trying to watch more movies overall and start chipping away at the massive backlog of things that I want to watch. Long gone are the weekends when I would rent 20 movies from Video Giant… but that does not mean that I lack the desire to do this thing.
Queens of the Dead – 2025 – 3 Stars
I think we are going to go with a lowest ranking to highest ranking scenario, and as a result we are beginning with Queens of the Dead which I gave 3 stars. I was honestly fairly disappointed with this… I love Zombies, and I love interesting takes on Zombies. Queens of the Dead gave me neither really… it is effectively a combination of Birdcage and The Return of the Living Dead. The film is way more of an “in joke” about drag culture than it is a cohesive zombie film, and the movie quality feels like this was a student project filmed on phones, and not even in a found footage way that would make it interesting. I specifically relate this to Return of the Living Dead instead of Night of the Living Dead, because this is a film that is way more interested in setting up the next punchline than doing anything interesting with the actual zombies. It could have been a much better film, and in theory it makes attempts at social commentary…. but does so in a hamfisted nature like a student play that has to tell you what its point was at the very end. There were some fun moments, and some humorous punchlines… but cohesively it was a bit of a mess.
The Running Man – 2025 – 3.5 Stars
One of the things that the 80s gave us, was a lot of dystopian action films… in truth a shocking number. The 1987 Movie featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and has gone on to influence so many things from the direct one to one copy via the Smash TV Arcade Cabinet, or more subtle influences like the existence of The Purge and Hunger Games. The remake takes things in a different direction, and instead of prisoners attempting to regain their freedom… we have a man who is just trying to get enough cash so that he can pay for medical treatment for his child. It is not a bad film, but it is not a great film either and I gave it 3.5 Stars. It was a fun dystopian romp, and I think it is probably way better than a lot of the negative buzz surrounding it. If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077… everything is very thematically on point, and given that we find ourselves in a deathmarch towards our own dystopia… there are moments that feel a bit too on the nose. It was worth a watch, but I can’t see returning to watch it a second time.
Predator: Badlands – 2025 – 4 Stars
Another film that I have seen a bunch of negative buzz around is Predator: Badlands. I love the Predator series, and was also a junkie for the various Dark Horse comics adaptations of this shared Aliens/Predator and potentially also Bladerunner universes. I think the big complaint that I have seen is the design of the Yautja from this film, but this seems fine to me especially given that Dek is speccifically described as a “malformed runt”. I am mostly on board with seeing more of this society fleshed out, and I really like the character of Thia. The thing that would have made this movie so much better for me personally is if they did the thing where they shifted from spoken Yautja with subtitles to both characters spending english, and there was a perfect moment to do this transition where Thia applies an “universal translator”. I don’t love spending an entire movie reading subtitles… and for this and this along I docked it a full star so only gave it 4 stars. I had a lot of fun with this movie and would absolutely watch another film with this grouping of characters.
Rental Family – 2025 – 5 Stars
Watch this film if you need a good cry. I am a sucker for Brendan Fraser in pretty much every role he has ever done, and I am so happy to see him back in the active rotation film wise. The premise of this film is so interesting to me, folks being rented to play a role in someone’s life… and the messy rammifications that come from that. Do you actually become that person for them? Does the role ever truly end? I feel for Fraser’s character when the lines start to blur significantly… in part because Fraser also needed people to play a role in his life. This hit me pretty hard because I am someone who has a pretty signficant adopted family, that augments my blood family… and all of them are so much more important to me than just digital folks I will never probably actually meet in the flesh. I have two people that I consider literal siblings… that I have never actually met. I think the whole blending of lines in this film probably hit me harder than it might a lot of people, and I cried… quite a bit at various points during the film. It was such a good cry however… and while I think this will be an emotional sucker punch to most people… I still think it is worth a watch.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – 2026 – 5 Stars
It is rare that you have a film that comes out and so completely gives the previous film a redemption arc. 28 Years Later was an incomplete film, and having watched The Bone Temple… I understand why. These are essentially two parts of the same film, given that Bone Temple takes place literally seconds after the conclusion of 28 Years Later. I would highly suggest watching them back to back and largely thinking of them as a single complete story. Bone Temple ties up the events of 28 Years Later neatly, but more important than that… ties up the loose bits of the entire series in a pretty little bow. There is a massive payoff at the end of this film for anyone who has been watching along as this series wound its way from days, to weeks, to years. I love zombies, but I have always found this particular rage zombies genre to be interesting… and this film does some deeply intersting things surrounding it. When taken collectively 28 Years Later with both parts is one of the better films I have seen in awhile.
So there you have the films that I watched since this weekend. Do you vehemently disagree with anything I said about these? Is there anything that I really have to watch? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! Hopefully yall are surviving Snowmageddon 2026. For the most part I have stayed in out of the mess. I had plenty of food, and so long as power stayed on I was going to be good. We got somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten inches. The snow was so dry that drifts were pretty rampant so it was really hard to tell an actual estimate, but I know when I was clearing my jeep yesterday and making a path so I could get out today for an appointment, it was coming up to mid calf high at times. I cleared the front porch enough that I could start putting food out for the outdoor kitties as well. I’ve not seen Tripod, but in the past when we have had cold snaps like this she has an underground borough system that she crawls down into. For years we had bunnies in our backyard prior to Tripod taking up residence there, and I think she has been using their underground warrens.
Things have mostly been okay… save for the fact that it has been raining in my livingroom. This is a problem that I had hoped we solved about three months ago when the roofers came out to work on the flashing at the top of the roof. My guess is that the snow sitting up there has basically been on top of wherever the leak starts, and then heat rising up through the roof is melting it. Essentially as far as we have been able to guess it runs down under the shingles and then finds a way into the house in the middle of the livingroom, dripping out onto this cross beam, and then down onto the ceiling fan before ultimately hitting the floor. Sadly the leak does not come down in a single spot, so essentially I just have to put towels out. It had stopped mid day yesterday, but then started up again late last night as things started to re-freeze and was still going whenever I went to bed. It stopped at some point over night because it is not going this morning. I’ve called the roofers to be on the list for after this is all over, but for now there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do. I have some IKEA bathmats and some towels down to soak up the water…. which I will run a load in the washer once things have chilled a bit.
My folks I think got it worse north of me. This is their front yard and you can barely make out the wheelchair access ramp. My dad of course had already trudged a path out to his shop, because he spends most of his time there. I think more than anything he was checking on the cats, who stay overnight in there with a heater on. I never knew my Dad was as big of a softie for strays as he is, until later in life. Maybe I get my own attachment to street cats by genes. I got out yesterday and cleared the cars and a path out, and then was wondering why the hell everything hurt today. These are all activities that I do not normally have to do, so I guess it makes sense that everything feels like it aches in my chest and arms. I don’t even have a proper snow shovel, because this happens so infrequently. My old shovel was rusted through so I tossed it, and had not gotten around to getting a new one. I guess I will make that a bigger priority. Essentially I cleared what I cleared with one of those giant plastic yard rakes and a nylon bristled broom.
This weekend I spent a lot of time snuggled with cats and watching movies downstairs on the television. I will probably make a post tomorrow about some of the things that I watched. “The Librarian” reminded me that I have a Letterboxd account so if you do that thing feel free to follow and I will likely give you a follow back. I like keeping track of media consumption and previously my plex server log was the most reliable method up until this point. However that was flawed because when I was pulling together my movies of the year post… I completely somehow missed the existence of Sinners. I figure I will try and keep up with this similar to how I do Storygraph and Bookwyrm. Speaking of those two I really need to get back in the swing of reading, or at least listening to an audiobook while I do other things. I figure on the 29th with the launch of the Phrecia league it might be a good time to get back engaged.
Speaking of gaming… I played a heck of a lot of Destiny Rising this weekend. I was trying to keep all three accounts active, because we were having some bad luck finding strongholds. Yesterday morning we cleared the three that we had access to, but did not find the third until we were already logged in trying to clear the other two. Thanks to Jade Rabbit I have been playing Umeko a lot more on my alt accounts, and apparently doing well enough to regularly get MVP when I run some strikes. Essentially I am trying to get account two high enough so that I can get 3 charges of Iron Commander and can get my 60 Pinnacle done without running any strikes. Account three… at some point I just need to put my head down and push through the campaign because I have not even unlocked the second planet.
Last night I played a bit of Path of Exile II, especially since Kodra has been talking about it quite a bit. I know come the 29th I will be over in Path of Exile and playing the new Legacy of Phrecia event, but in the meantime I am hopping around and making things explode in POE2. For Phrecia I am all over the place on what to play. Right now I am looking at either doing something akin to my Ice Trap of Hollowness build, a Blind Prophet bow traps, or Poison Minions. Pohx is going for a life stacking Righteous Fire build, but it is going to require a lot of gear to make it work. I had fun with RF Scavenger last time but I also needed a mageblood to make it work, and I am not sure if I want to push that hard. It sort of annoys me that there has not been a lot of fresh theorycrafting for builds within the POE community. Everyone seems to be focused on currency strats… which will fucking sort themselves out pending you have a good build.
Anyways! I hope you have fared well during the winter onslaught. I hope my livingroom rain comes to a close finally, and I hope todays tests go well and they don’t find anything else wrong with me. I am deeply scared about everything that is going on right now with cancer diagnosis and still not having much information. I will hopefully make it through this however.
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