Teaser image of Rattata from Eli Roth’s next horror film I Catch Pokemon on Your Grave.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: while waiting at Indianapolis International Airport for our (delayed) flight to Manhattan, I downloaded Pokemon Go as an amusing experiment just to see what would happen. Three weeks later, I’m still toying around, curious to see how much longer it’ll take me to get bored with it and move on. Yep, that should happen any week now.
That precious sight everyone treasures whenever they find it in Manhattan: a real live tree.
Because every tourist is required to check in at King Kong’s favorite scratching post, pretend old-fashioned romance awaits us on the observation deck, and then run like crazy before Roland Emmerich finds six more ways to destroy it while we’re in striking distance.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
The Farm Bureau Lawn stage at Indianapolis’ White River State Park, at sunset and between bands.
Dateline: July 26, 2016 — Tuesday night marked the first time I ever attended two concerts in the same calendar year. MCC followers may recall my previous outing to see Bloc Party and the Vaccines back in May, an enjoyable experience for this old man as long as he didn’t dwell on the negatives of being alone in a crowd.
Once again I found myself out of the house for an evening, surrounded by youngsters, and beset by mammoth rhythmic sound waves, some of which belonged to songs I liked. Full disclosure, though: this show wasn’t a first-choice activity. In fact, I forgot I even had the tickets till a few days prior.
Right this way for photos, set lists, and ticket-wrangling fun!
“MUFASA WELCOMES YOU AND REMINDS YOU TO TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONES.”
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
After plumbing the depths of Grant’s Tomb we had an afternoon appointment for our very first Broadway show: The Lion King. But first we had to get there. The trip down from 122nd Street to 45th Street wasn’t a short one.
New character Jaylah (Sofia Boutella from Kingsman: The Secret Service) promises she’s not a rebooted character, her name isn’t Ms. Khan, and she isn’t a radically reimagined Mugatu.
Thirteenth time’s nearly the charm for the long-running film series, which needed to make up for the ground lost by JJ Abrams’ 2013 superfluous Wrath of Khan remake. This time around the Powers That Be went with a different style of director — Justin Lin, mastermind behind four Fast and the Furious entries, including the one where nearly all the heroes teamed up and became the AAA Avengers with their very own Fast and Furious Cinematic Speedway. Lin knows a little about diving into established universes, and a lot about spectacularly timed whiz-bang action sequences. I assumed sight unseen that Star Trek Beyond would therefore have some of the best starship battle sequences in all of Trekdom (or at least it had better), but would he be capable of the kind of cerebral depth that the old-time fans demand from their Enterprise crew?
Literally the closest we’ve ever been to Harlem, which was a few blocks northeast of here.
There’s that wife of mine, once again on her quest to catch ALL the dead Presidents. It would require our longest subway ride of the week, but a special treat was waiting for us at the end of the line.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
It’s rare to open the garage first thing in the morning and walk right into a sign that says, “It’s okay to leave the house today.” And yet there I was, face to face with this surprise rainbow. Perfect timing. I needed a rainbow this week.
Lin Ze Xu welcomes you to the south end of Chinatown, but not your opium. His 19th-century version of the War on Drugs happened long before Nancy Reagan taught us all to just say no.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Chinatown was like nothing we’d ever stepped into before — block after block of overpacked mom-‘n’-pop shops, restaurants with all-paper signage, dingy dives with no English names out front, and respectable businesses stacked atop businesses with even more businesses crammed under and between them, their streets teeming with life and bootleg lady-shopper bait (useless against my wife, who’s not into fashion shopping) and the worst smells we hope we’ll ever know, whether from the deadliest spices known to man or from all the endless displays of fresh-slaughtered seafood, some of it still writhing. My son wanted to see every single block of it, even the blocks ruled by Vietnamese or Thai shopkeepers instead of Chinese.
The writer with his primary collaborator, his #1 fan, and his most vocal fact-checker.
Usually we’re out of town on one of our road trips when our anniversary passes, but today was the first time in years that we were in-state for the occasion. We appreciate the inventors of the calendar finally working out the timing in our favor. It was nice to mark the occasion with a nice meal and greeting cards exchanged on our own turf for a change.
Some movie posters want to sell you happy fun times using all the colors of the rainbow. In terrible times like these, not everyone wants to embrace the dark side. Sometimes even our creepiest antiheroes are redrawn to radiate with kaleidoscopic pop-art joy in hopes of convincing tourists and natives alike that our next trips to the theater will leave us smiling and cheering while murderers and other malcontents save the day. Apparently that’s why the Suicide Squad now stands tall above Times Square looking as far removed from murky Zack Snyder dystopia as possible.
Meanwhile in other universes, other antiheroes couldn’t care less whether you smile or shudder.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 