3:09 p.m. EDT: Darkened skies during the window of totality here in Indy.
First things first: no, we didn’t catch any super awesome photos of the total eclipse itself looking like a cosmic coffee ring or the old Armageddon teaser poster. 600 million Instagram users got you covered. You did check with them first, right?
St. George and his horse prepare to fight an unseen dragon in the middle of EPCOT’s German Pavilion.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year Anne and I take one (1) road trip to a different part of the United States and see attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. One thing we rarely do is fly. We’d much rather drive than be flown unless we absolutely have to…or are given some pretty sweet incentives to do so. Fast-forward to December 2022 and a most unexpected opportunity: The Powers That Be at Anne’s rather large place of employment recognized her and several other employees nationwide for outstanding achievements in the field of excellence. Their grand prize was a Disney World vacation! We could at last announce to friends and family, “THE GOLDENS ARE GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!”
For Anne it was officially, legally a business trip. Much of the time, she’d have to work. Not ME, baby…
My tour of the southern end of EPCOT kept going and going as the walkways took me through one simulated country after another in their World Showcase — more exhibits, more gift shops, and more flashy architecture that’s either iconic or stereotypical depending on your emotional relationship to the subjects at hand.
Bad beasts, bad beasts, whatcha gonna do?
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: the MonsterVerse is a thing! Once enough time had passed since Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the blockbuster peddlers at Legendary Pictures decided America was ready once again for rude giant animals to crush everything in their paths and possibly dominate theaters. Their Avengers-style interconnected saga began with 2014’s recycle-titled Godzilla, which delivered one truly mighty monster melee after two hours of ordinary humans reminding us what we didn’t like about the previous five decades’ predecessors. Pop culture’s most popular overtall simian returned in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, a period-piece prequel that shamelessly embraced kaiju camp, OD’d on steroids and let its creatures run amuck through Apocalypse Now backdrops and chase some of the best character actors in the biz. The humans were suspiciously more entertaining and having way more fun than usual, as monster toe-jam ingredients go.
Japan’s share of the World Showcase Lagoon shore.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year Anne and I take one (1) road trip to a different part of the United States and see attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. One thing we rarely do is fly. We’d much rather drive than be flown unless we absolutely have to…or are given some pretty sweet incentives to do so. Fast-forward to December 2022 and a most unexpected opportunity: The Powers That Be at Anne’s rather large place of employment recognized her and several other employees nationwide for outstanding achievements in the field of excellence. Their grand prize was a Disney World vacation! We could at last announce to friends and family, “THE GOLDENS ARE GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!”
For Anne it was officially, legally a business trip. Much of the time, she’d have to work. Not ME, baby…
Most of my EPCOT experience was spent dawdling in the World Showcase, a combination outdoor international shopping mall and museum complex, subdivided into eleven nation simulations across four of the seven continents. Guests can learn about their cultures, sample their cuisine, buy their merchandise, and decide for themselves which bits are authentic carryovers and which are fun stereotypes. All the artifacts, curios, and souvenirs were doubtlessly vetted by multiple committees, but opinions will nonetheless vary among subscribers to the “Death of the Curator” interpretive theory.
Fun trivia; English citizens use Shakespeare busts in their gardens the same way we Americans use scarecrows.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year Anne and I take one (1) road trip to a different part of the United States and see attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. One thing we rarely do is fly. We’d much rather drive than be flown unless we absolutely have to…or are given some pretty sweet incentives to do so. Fast-forward to December 2022 and a most unexpected opportunity: The Powers That Be at Anne’s rather large place of employment recognized her and several other employees nationwide for outstanding achievements in the field of excellence. Their grand prize was a Disney World vacation! We could at last announce to friends and family, “THE GOLDENS ARE GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!”
For Anne it was officially, legally a business trip. Much of the time, she’d have to work. Not ME, baby…
Most of my EPCOT experience was spent dawdling in the World Showcase, a combination outdoor international shopping mall and museum complex, subdivided into eleven nation simulations across four of the seven continents. Guests can learn about their cultures, sample their cuisine, buy their merchandise, and decide for themselves which bits are authentic carryovers and which are fun stereotypes. All the artifacts, curios, and souvenirs were doubtlessly vetted by multiple committees, but opinions will nonetheless vary among subscribers to the “Death of the Curator” interpretive theory.
Us hanging out with the rather tall Anakin Skywalker. This time he had the high ground.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the tenth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. They’ve stopped calling themselves “Indiana Comic Con” on paper for tiresome legal reasons that aren’t their fault, but to us they’ll always be Indiana Comic Con. This year the showrunners reserved more than twice as much space as they did for last year’s edition, a noticeable attempt to scale back up to their pre-pandemic size. Geek life had more space to thrive, but we still had no elbow space in the aisles on Saturday…
…which we could’ve dealt with as we normally do, if anything about this weekend had come to pass exactly as we’d hoped or imagined. To be fair, I can’t blame all our travails on the show. Adulting obligations overruled our original plan to attend Friday, which we thought would be a great day to speed through most of our to-do list amid smaller crowds. We were later told by a fellow attendee that Friday was in fact not a desolate cakewalk. The Indiana Convention Center had anticipated 30,000 attendees this year, but apparently a much greater number showed up on Day One than usual.
Our primary objectives centered on special guest Hayden Christensen, an unsurprising choice to longtime MCC followers or anyone who searches this very site and sees how many times “Star Wars” comes up. We ended up moving all our other wants and photo-op appointments to Saturday and Sunday, trying our best to work around his narrow Saturday-only schedule and gritting our teeth a little because we almost never do cons on Sundays. ICC 2024 joined our short list of exceptions. Given how Saturday ultimately flew off the rails, there’s absolutely no way we could’ve done it all in a single day.
The Mad Hatter hangs out with the Frozen cast — Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, and li’l Olaf.
It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the tenth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. They’ve stopped calling themselves “Indiana Comic Con” on paper for tiresome legal reasons that aren’t their fault, but to us they’ll always be Indiana Comic Con.
ICC 2024 was another opportunity for fans to look at walls covered with old comics, build lightsabers, buy 3D-printed knickknacks, overstock on Funko Pops, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, and navigate those vast crowds. This year the showrunners reserved more than twice as much space as they did for last year’s edition, a noticeable attempt to scale back up to their pre-pandemic size. Geek life had more space to thrive, but we still had no elbow space in the aisles on Saturday.
While we recuperate and wait for our feet to forgive us for their punishment, please enjoy this modest collection of cosplayers who brightened our two days around the show floor. The jazz-hands photo ops and other obligatory details will be shared in the other chapter. We regret we can only represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total cosplay wonderment that was on display this weekend. We’re just an aging couple doing what we can for happy sharing fun. Enjoy! Corrections welcome for those we misidentified!
In the Edible Flower Garden, purple is a vegetable!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year Anne and I take one (1) road trip to a different part of the United States and see attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. One thing we rarely do is fly. We’d much rather drive than be flown unless we absolutely have to…or are given some pretty sweet incentives to do so. Fast-forward to December 2022 and a most unexpected opportunity: The Powers That Be at Anne’s rather large place of employment recognized her and several other employees nationwide for outstanding achievements in the field of excellence. Their grand prize was a Disney World vacation! We could at last announce to friends and family, “THE GOLDENS ARE GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!”
For Anne it was officially, legally a business trip. Much of the time, she’d have to work. Not ME, baby…
One billion Disney-branded blogs out there in the monetized social-media spheres are more than happy to tell you the details of their thrill-ride experiences and boast about the joy of living large without fear of motion sickness. Sure, EPCOT has its share of astronaut training modules for civilians, but I was content to explore its other identity as an outdoor international shopping mall and museum complex, like a smaller Washington DC minus the politicians. I’ve already recounted my initial EPCOT escapades on Spaceship Earth and the more jolting, more IP-forward Ratatouille ride. But at a certain stage in adulthood, sometimes you just want an easy comfort ride that barely counts as a “ride”.
Fresh off Oscar Quest ’24, we bring you a sneak peek at Oscar Quest ’25.
Previously on Dune: director Denis Villeneuve brought his gloriously ponderous, A/V-intoxicating, starkly symmetrical majesty to Frank Herbert’s universe, the quintessential American “Chosen One on Planet Sahara” space opera, and helped me heal from the childhood trauma of sitting through David Lynch’s compromised beach-ball of confusion. Villeneuve gambled on a dissatisfying To Be Continued ending for Part One with no guarantee he’d be permitted to keep going. Dune: Part Two ties up a thread or two, but to viewers who never pored over the sacred Herbertian texts (or who, like me, tried and failed to slog through), it was perhaps a surprise to find To Be Continued shall apparently be the saga’s status quo evermore, for as long as capricious Warner Bros. execs permit.
Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Chip and Dale welcome you to springtime, Disney style!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year Anne and I take one (1) road trip to a different part of the United States and see attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. One thing we rarely do is fly. We’d much rather drive than be flown unless we absolutely have to…or are given some pretty sweet incentives to do so. Fast-forward to December 2022 and a most unexpected opportunity: The Powers That Be at Anne’s rather large place of employment recognized her and several other employees nationwide for outstanding achievements in the field of excellence. Their grand prize was a Disney World vacation! We could at last announce to friends and family, “THE GOLDENS ARE GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!”
For Anne it was officially, legally a business trip. Much of the time, she’d have to work. Not ME, baby…
One of the highlights of my EPCOT solo tour was their International Flower & Garden Festival. Each springtime since 1994 artisanal crews have bedecked the park with topiary sculptures of various characters from all throughout the Disney multiverse. I have no idea whether or not I stumbled across all of them, but I felt I captured a lot, as those shapely leaves were everywhere I turned.
Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie gives a lost Jimmy Kimmel directions to the Oscars, in ABC’s extended trailer.
Oscar season is over at last! Tonight ABC aired the 96th Academy Awards, once again held at ye olde Dolby Theatre and hosted for a fourth time by ABC’s favorite trooper Jimmy Kimmel. This year’s soiree clocked in at 144 minutes, a surprising 14 minutes shorter than last year’s telecast. That’s after starting six minutes late and keeping the stopwatch running till the very end of the end credits, up to the final boilerplate disclaimer read by announcer David Alan Grier. Kimmel and his writing staff made only a single overtime joke in the monologue, then dropped that annual running gag for the rest of the night. It’s refreshing whenever a tired joke is crossed off the setlist.
Jon Batiste playing Carnegie Hall between awards ceremonies.
I am so, so tired. It’s been a loooong six weeks.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’24 has dominated my head space and made me neglect numerous other overdue blogging projects. I’m pleased to report I’m at long last finished: I’ve seen all 38 nominated features and all 15 shorts, marking my first-ever 100% achievement of completing my OQ24 scorecard before the big ABC ceremony. I don’t watch sports, so the Oscars are my Super Bowl, which makes me look weird to most folks in my circles. Nevertheless, once again my traditional hobby-journey was spellbinding, enlightening, maddening, exhausting fun.
When you wish upon a star…
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’24 is in the home stretch! We do our best to see how many freshly nominated works we can catch before ABC’s big, indulgent Academy Awards ceremony ends the viewing season.
Our final theatrical release on the list is the Best International Feature nominee Io Capitano. It opened in Chicago and Cincinnati at least a week before its distributor deigned to grace Indianapolis with its presence on the very last weekend of this Oscar season. Its local “Coming Soon” status had been in limbo for weeks, leaving me to seriously consider road-tripping to Cincy for the sake 100% completion of this annual hobby-project. My patience paid off, and some time and gas money were saved.
If you love pointing at ’80s stuff or iconic NYC places, have we got a film for you!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’24 continues! We do our best to see how many freshly nominated works we can catch before ABC’s big, indulgent Academy Awards ceremony ends the viewing season.
Each year there’s at least one nominee for Best Animated Feature that’s completely unknown to mainstream audiences because they don’t come with a massive corporate brand stamped on the front. This year is no exception: Pablo Berger’s li’l Spanish dramedy Robot Dreams kept me waiting for any kind of release, whether streaming or in theaters. My patience finally paid off: Indianapolis’ own Kan-Kan Cinema was among the few theaters holding exclusive, one-night-only screenings the Wednesday before the Oscars. I showed up alongside three or four dozen other folks at various stages of their own Oscar Quests. Oscar Quest is often such a solitary activity for me that it was nice not to be alone for a little while.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this cleaner from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest continues! We do our best to see how many freshly nominated works we can catch before ABC’s big, indulgent Academy Awards ceremony ends the viewing season. As is often the case, candidates in Best International Feature endure the slowest rollout of any category due to the complexities of overseas finances and/or struggles to get Stateside studios to pay attention to them and give them turns at our box offices, especially cities outside NYC and L.A.
So far in the BIF competition we’ve caught Spain’s Society of the Snow set in South America, the U.K.’s The Zone of Interest set in Nazi Germany, and Germany’s The Teachers’ Lounge, whose protagonist is from Poland and whose director is of Turkish descent. Our next nominee for your Oscar consideration is Japan’s Perfect Days, from German director Wim Wenders. Thus the mixing-and-matching of nationalities among creators and works continues, apropos of its main character’s aesthetic tastes.
In my day, teachers could rest easy knowing Encyclopedia Brown would solve all their mysteries for them.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: our fourth annual Oscar Quest continues! We do our best to see how many freshly nominated works we can catch before ABC’s big, indulgent Academy Awards ceremony ends the viewing season. Every year the most challenging category for attaining a 5-for-5 viewing score is Best International Feature. Every single year, three-to-five out of five honored films haven’t even been released in the U.S. before their nominations are announced, so I have to contain myself as they slowly enter the national art-house circuit. Weeks can pass before they reach our Indianapolis theaters. Sometimes my patience pays off; sometimes a straggler or two misses the deadline.
Of this year’s lineup, I watched Society of the Snow on Netflix in early January, and The Zone of Interest arrived here a month ago. Whereas Society was a Spanish film about an Uruguayan ensemble and Zone was a U.K. film entirely about German characters, our next nominee The Teachers’ Lounge (oder “Das Lehrerzimmer” auf Deutsch) was Germany’s official submission for the category, but its main character is Polish and she’s fluent in German and English. ‘Tis truly a solid year for cosmopolitan cinema.
…is apparently a rarer specimen in India than unicorns.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: our fourth annual Oscar Quest continues! We do our best to see how many freshly nominated works we can catch before ABC’s big, indulgent Academy Awards ceremony ends the viewing season. Oscar Quest means seeking out every studio feature we didn’t already watch for fun on our own, every art-house film we underestimated the first time around, every short we’d never heard of, and each and every last-minute procrastinator released on New Year’s Eve in New York or L.A., America’s only two cities. I understand a recent rule change will negate the latter cheaters in the future, a limitation I wholly approve.
Relevant to this entry, the Quest of course also covers the documentaries — long or short, foreign or domestic, cheerfully uplifting or fatally dreary. (Uplift was in short supply worldwide this year. I blame humanity.) Most years, the Best Documentary Feature category divides two ways: those readily available to stream versus those frustratingly sat-upon until after the season ends and my Oscarmania has subsided. This is the first year I’ve caught all five nominees on time, though one of them required a little extra effort.
Note the use of classic spider elements, such as webbing, multiple unmatched eyes, and someone falling down a waterspout.
We interrupt our annual Oscar Quest for this breaking announcement:
“If you take on the responsibility, then will come great power.”
Is your mind blown yet? Your life irrevocably changed? Your latent Spider-powers activated? Your craving for scrambled Marvel Easter eggs whetted?
Some pigs are nice, like Wilbur or Arnold Ziffel. Some pigs are made of rage.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my annual Oscar Quest continues! I’m still trying to catch all the Academy Award nominees I can before the big ceremony regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family will care in the least bit.
Each year since 2009 (except for 2021’s pandemic lockdown marathon) I’ve ventured out to the few Indianapolis theaters carrying the big-screen releases of the Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film. Results vary each time and aren’t always for all audiences, but I appreciate the opportunities to sample such works and see what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of celebrating, whether I agree with their collective opinions or not. My wife and adult son usually accompany me on the journey and we make a family outing of it, even though Oscar Quest is not their problem. Since 2019 I’ve also given myself extra credit for catching as many nominees for Best Documentary Short Film as possible, depending on their availability online, for the most complete shorts experience possible.
At last I would see the world’s largest golf ball for myself.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year Anne and I take one (1) road trip to a different part of the United States and see attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. One thing we rarely do is fly. We’d much rather drive than be flown unless we absolutely have to…or are given some pretty sweet incentives to do so. Fast-forward to December 2022 and a most unexpected opportunity: The Powers That Be at Anne’s rather large place of employment recognized her and several other employees nationwide for outstanding achievements in the field of excellence. Their grand prize was a Disney World vacation! We could at last announce to friends and family, “THE GOLDENS ARE GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!”
For Anne it was officially, legally a business trip. Much of the time, she’d have to work. Not ME, baby…
Lo, there shall come at long last an actual Disney Theme Park in this saga! Well, for one of us, anyway.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 