Answering the most important question first: no, Elysium is nowhere near as revelatory as writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s previous film, the Oscar-nominated District 9. Constructed with four times the budget and ten times the star power, Blomkamp’s latest Important-Message sci-fi actioner is just as visually accomplished, but delivers a fraction of the impact.
Continuing the trilogy of this year’s captured moments from the event mentioned up there in the title:
One of this year’s feature presentations is “Get Animated”, a traveling exhibit about the animation medium that’s appeared in other states over the last three years before gracing our fair land with its colorful presence.
Longtime fans of the field will appreciate the looks back at the Looney Tunes era, including art samples and souvenirs from notable directors such as Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones.
July 9, 2013: dinner at the Gourmet Dumpling House in Boston’s Chinatown. Most likely my son’s final vacation with us.
[Tonight’s centerpiece is a previous MCC entry dated October 18, 2012. The photo, intro, and epilogue are new additions for follow-up purposes in light of upcoming major events.]
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My wife and I share a goal of hopefully setting foot in each of the forty-eight contiguous United States before we die. We usually aim to visit one or two states each year, but we’ll sometimes digress briefly into other states along the way simply so we can cross them off our to-do list, even if it’s a few hours at a single attraction. It was in that spirit of completism that we broke up the Day Two marathon drive from Dubois, PA, to Boston with our first-ever foray into the state of Connecticut.
After much research and little debate, we nominated this guy as our excuse for a Connecticut stop.
I remember when this tiny baby wasn’t ready for college.
When my wife and I threw caution to the wind and watched Sharknado on Syfy (as previously reported), we were curious to know why the internet wouldn’t shut up about it. By the time the end credits sped by and Ian Ziering was transformed from a 90210 also-ran into a chainsaw-wielding hero soaked in shark fluids, we had learned an important lesson and vowed never to be curious about anything ever again. We also didn’t speak to the internet for three days.
Outside our household, Sharknado-mania is allegedly sweeping the nation. Consider the following recent headline stories:
The Indiana State Fair is a fun annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides and big-ticket concerts by Top-40 or country artists. My wife and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context.
This year’s food theme was the Year of Popcorn. Unlike the food themes in years past (e.g., tomato, soybeans), very few vendors tried to incorporate this ingredient into new dishes. Local artists did their best to work within the inherent limitations.
In my version, only one of these characters survives the first five minutes. Possibly the bearded guy in the white hat. He’s already guaranteed his own action figure. (Photo from our personal Star Wars Celebration III archives, April 2005.)
Every Star Wars fan has their own ideas about what Star Wars: Episode 7 should accomplish. Director J.J. Abrams and screenwriter Michael Arndt should make it all about the Holy Trinity of Luke, Leia, and Han, pretending they’re all still under 35. Or they should make their kids the main characters. Or they should invent all-new, barely related Jedi. Or they should bring back all the dead characters because movie magic. Or it should be a mixture of demographic demands scientifically calculated to please everyone, if everyone loved formulaic sequels. Or it should be a two-hour Jar-Jar roast.
The bulk of Day One was a repeat of our Days One from several previous vacations: barreling through the vast expanse of Ohio with minimal stops so we can reach the states beyond. The only Ohio stop that left an impression was lunch in Dublin at a chain called Jason’s Deli (which we don’t have back home). I liked their heated lunchmeat fare more than my family did, but their mostly teenage staff weren’t quite focused on service. When we needed a box for leftovers, I stood at the counter for a few minutes watching half a dozen employees crowded behind the same counter all chatting, teasing each other, fiddling with supplies, or otherwise too preoccupied to afford me the courtesy of a simple “May I help you?” till I lurched closer to the counter and raised my voice. We’ll be skipping Jason’s on future road trips, then.
Unlike that motley crew, Pennsylvania certainly seemed happy to welcome us, once we were free of Ohio’s clutches.
When I was a kid, Adam West and Burt Ward were the first super-heroes I remember following on TV. Less wooden than the Super-Friends, beset by better villains than Marvel’s 1970s live-action TV offerings, and a few years ahead of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, syndicated reruns of the 1966-1968 Batman TV show were a staple of my afternoon viewing.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover, as begun last April:
[This coming] weekend is the fourth annual Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (that “C2E2″ thing I won’t shut up about) at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, which my wife and I will be attending for our third time. As a tribute to this fascinating city, and an intro to C2E2 newcomers to provide ideas of what else Chicago has to offer while they’re in town, a few of this week’s posts will be dedicated to out experiences in the Windy City when we’re not gleefully clustered indoors with thousands of other comics and sci-fi fans.
As luck would have it, my wife and I will be heading northwest once again in two weeks for this year’s Wizard World Chicago. What began last spring as a short-term miniseries, and then became slightly irrelevant as the event passed, is suddenly relevant once more. Call it the circle of geek-convention life.
With some of our past Chicago experiences, we’ve taken a time-out away from the cons for local sightseeing as a husband/wife quality-time thing. Today’s feature presentation is that shiny attractor of affluent tourists, the Magnificent Mile, the long line of upscale clothing stores and skyscraper-shaped malls dotting both sides of Michigan Avenue northward from Wacker Avenue.
We’ve strolled the Mile a couple of times, but we never buy anything. Any MCC readers with impeccable fashion tastes have surely discerned from our past photos that our clothing budget is far more modest than our convention budget. We have our priorities.
For the first 2½ acts, The Wolverine is an engrossing slow-burn psychological thriller about the crippling effects of grief, powerlessness, sin, rediscovering your life’s purpose, and stranger-in-a-strange-land culture clash, all nestled inside an outlandish but well-oiled martial-arts flick that easily outclasses the previous Wolverine solo film. That being said, this is a rare instance of a Marvel film that would’ve functioned more cohesively if super-villains had been kept out of it altogether.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Before we settled in at our hotel, we detoured for one exploratory stop in the famous li’l town of Punxsutawney, annual Party Central for the American celebration known as Groundhog Day. The town’s most famous resident is Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who supposedly determines America’s winter destiny by crawling out of a hole and letting the sight of his shadow, or lack thereof, foretell whether or not winter would end on schedule. The town is littered with artistic tributes to Mr. Phil himself. Walk twenty feet with your eyes closed and you’re liable to trip over one of Phil’s many simulacra.
I wasn’t kidding by much. In addition to the individual works, Punxsutawney also sports a collection called “Phantastic Phils” — over thirty different fiberglass groundhogs scattered all over town. Each Phil is between four and five feet tall, has its own title, and is painted by different local artists in assorted fashions or practical occupations. My wife captured a fraction of them on camera, as a sort of self-appointed scavenger hunt with a time limit.
Most indulgent on Phil’s part: “The Wizard of Weather”. In this scenario, Phil clearly dreams of controlling the weather so that his forecasts would never, ever be wrong again, even if he had to alter reality and fix the weather to match his predictions. This is a glimpse into our new way of life if Phil ever turned to the dark side.
They’ve worked well together before, but never in live-action. Can two super-heroes share a tentpole film without driving each other crazy?
Despite my previously expressed skepticism, I wouldn’t say the announced Superman sequel with Batman in it — or vice versa — is guaranteed to fail. I’m sure much deliberation and debate will occur behind the scenes as the filmmakers work together for the common goal of creating the best possible superhero moneymaking machine. If it’s bearable to watch more than once, then hey, bonus points.
What could possibly happen? I can imagine several outcomes, not all of them great.
One last Bunheads pic for the road: Bailey Buntain, Kaitlyn Jenkins, Emma Dumont, and Julia Goldani Telles.
It’s never easy when one of your favorite shows ends prematurely without a chance for a tidy series finale.
After months of stalling on a decision, ABC Family finally revealed on Monday that Bunheads has been officially canceled. Despite internet buzz among select circles that now qualify for collective relabeling as a “cult following”, ratings among the Nielsen commoners were never great, especially compared to the performance of the rest of ABC Family’s mostly teen-soap lineup.
As created by Gilmore Girls mastermind Amy Sherman-Palladino and a talented staff working with minimal resources, Bunheads was a literate, tragicomic fusion of ballet, Broadway, a female-majority cast, Sorkin-speed dialogue, showtunes, obscure entertainment punchlines from previous decades, dexterous back-and-forth rhythms, and musical numbers not set to the tune of current Top-40 hits or overplayed ’80s oldies. On a broadcast network, a show containing any two of these elements would’ve been lucky to reach episode three, even on the CW.
The first half of Day One was spent rocketing across the wide expansive of big fat Ohio as quickly as possible so we could spend the evening in Pennsylvania. Before we settled in at our hotel, we detoured for one exploratory stop in the famous li’l town of Punxsutawney, annual Party Central for the American celebration known as Groundhog Day.
Anyone who followed the entertainment news as it flooded out of 2013’s San Diego Comic Con found themselves shocked and surprised by two or more bombshells dropped from above, as the movie and comic book companies kept trying to top each other with the Greatest Announcement of All.
My general impressions follow of what stood out to me most, whether good, bad, or both.
Reynolds. Giamatti. Turbo.
That was my first impression, anyway. It’s rare that Hollywood sets a big-budget motion picture in my hometown. The last film to use us, Eagle Eye for a single action scene, couldn’t be bothered to research our geography on Google Maps and pretended that 72 West 56th Street is a crowded financial district like downtown Boston. Local pro tip for future filmmakers: 72 West 56th puts you in a highly tree-filled residential area between the wooded Butler University campus and the trendy bars of Broad Ripple.
Each year our family embarks on an American road trip in a different direction. My wife and I snap photos of all things pretty and peculiar. I create a travelogue partly for fun and partly for my own future reference when my memory fails in my twilight years. Someone needs to remind future-me of the good ol’ days. It might as well be present-me.
This year’s journey was a nine-day trip from Indianapolis to Boston and back again, with a few stops in each direction. Regular MCC followers were previously privy to photo-a-day highlights while we were on the road. In a series of non-consecutive entries, I’ll be sharing a plethora of photos from each of our major stopovers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, and upstate New York. Our experience wasn’t always sweetness and smiles, but we did our best to capture the sights and souls of our immediate surroundings.
The links to the full series, including the nine on-the-go entries, will be collected on a new main page shortly, same as was done for our 2012 road trip. Anyone who missed a chapter, joins in progress, or Googles their way here a year from now will be more than welcome to hop aboard. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.
[SPECIAL NOTE: The following entry was lightly remastered September 4, 2023, at the request of sculptor Mike Majors, whose works featured prominently in our visit to Springfield, OH.]
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 