Catch up post, let's not lie.

So it's been a rough month-ish for  me blogging-wise. I'll start by apologizing profusely and begging your forgiveness, gentle reader. I started a new job out in the real world which is a huge opportunity that I'm really excited about but it's been a big adjustment schedule-wise. I spend a lot of time in the car now and I have less break time during the day, so keeping up with internet awesome-ness is a bit harder.

I have been hitting up the movies and hopefully tomorrow I'll have a summer movie post covering Jurassic World, Minions and Inside Out. It's been an interesting movie season this summer. I was surprised as how much I liked Jurassic World, in spite of its glaring problem, but I think it had a lot to with nostalgia. I found out I still have my raptor toy from the first one! Inside Out was deep and I cried a lot but not overall as enjoyable as I'd hoped. Minions was a bit of a disappointment and the amount of merchandising and advertising that's gone into its campaign is beyond ridiculous.

In gaming news, I'm deep into my second play though of Dragon Age Inquisition working on leveling up to play Jaws of Haakon and trying to 100% the shards. Also trying to get into Witcher 3 and Lego Jurassic World on 3DS. It's been a while since I played a game on the DS and it's kind of a refreshing change, plus the portability is nice in the summer. Lego games are always so cleverly done and adorable. I thoroughly enjoyed their Star Wars, Marvel Heroes and Indiana Jones games. They are fun to play alone, with somebody else and are family-appropriate, which is nice. An all ages game is great to have in case of family gatherings, ask me how I know.

Other latest obsessions include being ridiculously jealous of friends who attended SDCC last weekend and trying to live vicariously through their Twitter and Instagram posts. In the meantime my cosplay is coming along for Rose City Comic-Con in September. I'm contemplating a few work in progress posts along the way but we'll see. Its been a great reading summer. I finally got around to reading Ready Player One and loved and followed it up with Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. I can heartily recommend both. Also, totally obsessed with Poldark on PBS. The title character Ross Poldark, played by the swoon-worthy Aiden Turner of The Hobbit (I describe him as the sexy dwarf) and BBC's Being Human, is the broody, swashbuckling hero period drama geeks like me adore. He's like Mr. Darcy meets Will Turner *sigh.* I threw myself down the rabbit hole on this one guys and I'm not even a little bit sorry.

Hopefully there will be more regular posts to follow. I've got lots of thoughts and we've got ground to make up. There's also a Lootcrate due next week so look out for that review. Note to the crate fans, I did not manage to get a Comic Con box so there will be no review on that one. *muffled sobbing*

The land of tomorrow (no spoilers)

On the surface, Disney's Tomorrowland seems like little more than a cash-grab, capitalizing on the theme from another part of the Disney parks as inspiration. The thought worked with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise but failed miserably with other films. Remember Haunted Mansion and The Country Bears? Yeah me neither.  I was interested enough to see which side of the fence Tomorrowland fell on that I was willing to sacrifice a few hours to it. It was more than that. Tomorrowland is an entertaining and hopeful movie with a strong message. The advertisements for the movie are cryptic enough that there weren't many expectations going into it, which is a refreshing change from most films these days where you've seen a good percentage of the movie before stepping into the theatre. 

Let me start by saying that Britt Robertson and Raffey Cassidy are the future. They are the two female leads and own a majority of the screen time. Both are expressive, endearing and capable actresses who I'm confident we will be seeing a lot more of in the coming years. Robertson plays Casey Newton, a teenage girl looking to make a difference in the world. Casey is being raised by her NASA engineer father who encourages her to ask questions and dream big. Cassidy is Athena, the android resident of Tomorrowland, who recruits Casey to save the future of our world when the residents of the futuristic utopia have failed. The two have a good chemistry and it is nice to see some more strong, young female characters. Assisting Casey on her journey is Frank Walker, played by George Clooney, a man who has been expelled from Tomorrowland and has lost the enthusiasm for science and inventing that he once had. It is up to Casey to bring the magic back for him and for all of Tomorrowland by reminding them that the future can be anything you want it to be, while it is villian Hugh Laurie's job to stop them.

There is a definite overarching message to the movie. Things are in a bad way in the world right now and all we're doing is accepting them as immutable realities. The movie's answer is to dream big and strive to make a difference, that whatever it is that you do, you should try your hardest to do it well and see what happens. Also science is cool. The whole film has a Wall-E-esque vibe to it and the message seemed hardly lost on the audience. But that's ok too. The film has a clear vision and its nice to see it follow through.

I would have liked to see more of Tomorrowland itself as it was a brilliantly animated and picturesque blending today's modern sleekness so popular in Apple products with the kitschy space-era 60s futurism that Disneyland's Tomorrowland is so famous for. Its definitely the carrot on the string for Casey but it would've been nice to linger there a little longer at some point. Maybe on the Blu-Ray? 

All in all its a fun, feel-good movie with tons of Disney nostalgia. Even if the message is a delivered a little less than subtly and the pacing is a bit off, it is beautifully animated and well-acted and that in itself is worth spending a rainy Saturday on.

Avengers: Age of Ultron or How AI is a Really Bad Idea and Will Probably Kill Us All *Spoilers*

So I finally got a chance to see Avengers: Age of Ultron today and I really enjoyed it. This is the second marvel film I've seen where I didn't have a concrete set of expectations as to what I was going to see. The first being Guardians of the Galaxy, where I had never read any of the comics, wasn't familiar with the characters and was really just expecting to have a good time. Age of Ultron is similar in that I hadn't had a chance to catch up on the Ultron arc so I just had the basis of the rest of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). This film is darker than the other MCU films but still retains the Joss Whedon trademark one-liners that had the audience laughing out loud. There's a lot going on with film. It does a lot of heavy lifting tying the previous installments to the upcoming films and the Infinity Gauntlet and Civil War storylines, introducing new characters Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and Vision, and  still managing to be entertaining. The fight scenes are meticulously crafted and had the audience in my showing gasping aloud. Overall fan service abounds. Heavy spoilers from here on, so be warned.

Okay, now the elephant in the room. I don't really have a problem with the representation of Natasha in this film. I will give you that the romance sub-plot between her and Bruce was unnecessary. We already know that she has above-average skills of persuasion, and if there was an Avenger who could calm the Hulk it would probably be Nat anyway. That said, I don't think it detracted from her character in any way. I feel like her conversation with Bruce about her forced sterilization is more a moment in which they both mourn the loss of the ability to choose the path of their own lives than it is her admission of feeling like less of a woman because she is unable to have children. The whole section of the film at the farm is about each team member dealing with the nightmares the Scarlet Witch gave them and the full weight of what it means to be an Avenger. Each of them mourns the loss of normalcy and a sense of control, and I think Natasha's struggle isn't so different.

This movie also cements the wedge between Tony and Cap that preps for the Civil War arc. Steve is out of his element throughout the movie continuing where we left him after Winter Soldier. He continually struggles to adapt who is he as a hero and as a man to the realities of today's world and the enemies it faces. Steve is the past and Tony is the future, but Steve is learning quickly while Tony becomes increasingly paranoid. Tony Stark seems to long have been the fan favorite in these movies but his creation of Ultron makes him more a villain than he's been since the beginning of Iron Man. Ultron is a great villain and a great foil for both Tony and Vision. Spader was brilliantly cast in the part and is as menacing as he is snarky. He embodies a lot of modern fears about technology and anxieties about artificial intelligence. I love that he takes one brief look at the internet and decides that mankind has to go. Ultron's mining of Vibranium to make the giant floating island seems a little silly but I'm assuming that the Vibranium and the weird weapons dealer guy (played by a non-CG'd Andy Serkis) will feature more heavily in the upcoming Black Panther film. Like I said, there's a lot going on.

I liked the new additions to the MCU cast. In early stills Quicksilver came off super cheesy, but in the finished product he is likable and remarkably powerful. I feel like he was gone too soon. I can't wait to see where Scarlet Witch goes from here. She comes into her own late in the movie and as a new team comes together, she looks to be the most powerful apart from Vision. Oh man, Vision. So cool. Paul Bettany looks amazing as the synthetic human AI and has some of the best lines in the movie. I'm so excited to see what happens to him in upcoming installments although I can't help but wonder how the Infinity Stone makes its way out of his forehead into the Infinity Gauntlet. Overall, the new Avengers team assembling at the end of the movie looks promising as hell. The Iron Patriot, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Captain America and Black Widow. It's a big step forward in terms of representation both of women and people of color in the MCU.

Overall, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a great movie. It's entertaining, well-written and well paced. Is it perfect? No. But it lives up to the first film and creates a valuable bridge between the last phase of films and the next.