Yesterday’s Mexico match was crazy tense. One of my coworkers is the most football obsessed person I’ve ever met, and he seemed close to a goddamn heart attack. The memes about Saint Memo of the Goal were the best part though.

There’s now a second dog at work now! DOGGIES. They spend their days rough housing and chasing each other and rolling around in dirt and puddles. It’s so awesome.

Currently reading The Song of Achilles. I swear, this woman has to be writing fic somewhere out there. Probably about her own book. AWESOME. Seriously though, it does have the same sort of cadence as good fic in current fandom does, and I would not be surprised at all to find out she’s somewhere out there on the AO3. So, yeah, the book is all right so far. I do wish it was less coy with the sex scenes though…

Even though I don’t usually do the meme, it’s Wednesday, so:
What I just read: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which was pretty good, though it had some rough patches, and it had the potential to be great, which wasn’t quite fulfilled. Basically, it had such a cool plot, tarnished by the boring white dudes chosen to be narrator and villain.

Went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel on Friday and it was absolutely charming and adorable and funny and amazing. So recommended.
On Saturday I saw Godzilla, which was… ok. Mostly it made me wanna watch Pacific Rim again, so I did. Ah, Pacific Rim. So awesome. So exciting. ♥

Anyway, so, Godzilla - the monster bits were cool enough that i didn’t feel cheated (that first glimpse at Godzilla was so rad), but all of the human bits were so boring. Also, all they made Ken Watanabe do was look around confused. So, so confused. Poor Ken Watanabe.

Then again, I have a massive soft stop for the 90s movie. So bad. So good.

I finally got to see Captain America, I loved it and can't wait to go watch it again! Natasha wins everything, and the expected Steve/Bucky reunion didn’t disappoint, and then oh, my heart, that last scene after the credits! So pumped up for fic now :D

I read Divergent on Sunday, because despite knowing that I tend to be disappointed by YA*, I saw the trailer and was interested. I mean, it was all right, but I get tired of the first person ‘oh i’m such a special snowflake’ narrative. Show, don’t tell. But really there’s such a huge suspension of disbelief with these dystopias - there’s no way that people would allow the systematic murder of their children on tv for almost a century, or that people would split themselves into who likes being friends and who likes to get piercings. That’s not how the real world works. The Handmaiden’s Tale, for example, is also quite hard to believe being allowed to happen (although it’s sadly more possible), but of course Margaret Atwood is Margaret Atwood and at least within the novel it feels very plausible in a visceral way.

I was - or still am, I supposed - reading the Veronica Mars novel, but out of nowhere, BAM, Mexican cartels. I see enough of that shit in real life, thanks, so I’ve sort of put it down for now. Veronica Mars just works better as a visual medium, anyway.

*It’s not so much the genre or the weird trends, but the dry writing and easy plots that usually let me down. They’re teenagers, not dumb. They can stand some pretty writing in their books.

I finally watched the Veronica Mars movie! ♥
Sure, it had its flaws, and of course it would've worked better as a miniseries, but I seriously spent the entire thing being utterly charmed, wringing my hands and making dying whale 'eeeeeeeeeehhhh' sounds of excitement, so I honestly do not care. Oh, Veronica, I'd missed you.

I hadn't heard about the canon books, and whrn I saw the first one is out tomorrow i clicked buy so fast it was dizzying. Yay, more Mars Investigations!

Today I went to see Almodóvar's new film, Los Amantes Pasajeros*, it was so good! I seriously hadn't seen such a funny film in a while, the entire theater was in stitches. It was crass, surreal and wildly inappropiate, and it had amazing Almodóvar trademark dialogue. I do love me my 'strangers trapped together' plots. It's most definitely not his best work, but his last films were so serious that it was a nice break. I do wonder how it'll stand to translation!

* The title can be translated both as 'The brief (or passing) lovers' and 'the loving passengers'. I love how good writers can play with Spanish so. Shakira too used to do amazing things with language shrouded in pop music, but she kinda stopped when she went massive. 'Espero que no esperes que te espere después de mis veintiseis' still makes sigh all satisfied.

So, I went to see Man of Steel. It was good, but it was also... weird? As a sci-fi movie, it was interesting and well-shot. As a superhero movie - eh, it lacked warmth, and more Lois Lane badassery because while she was badass all right, Lois is a force of nature, and Amy Adams is a tad too sweet an actress.

Anyway, they went so artsy with their slow-mo hipster shots of grass and laundry moving with the wind and close-crops of faces and grainy shaky camera effects that they distanced themselves too much from the superhero theme. I get what they were trying to do, and it would've worked in any other movie, but they could've used that energy instead to, you know, actually give the characters a personality. Clark's personality was practically non-existant, which is sad. And, the whole 'oh, the midwest, heart and pride of the US and all things wholesome' message was a bit heavyhanded. Or, you know, a lot.

Also, it seems like we're far enough from 9/11 that movies feel comforable with levelling entire cities again? Or maybe it was because nobody minds when it's fake Metropolis?

Anyway, I really liked the ending, felt the most Supes to me. Then again, I'm not really a huge DC fan, I'm not super knowledgeable about the comics and my favorite Superman comic is Superman: Secret Identity, which is a Clark-who-is-not-our-Clark story (and is absolutely brilliant, btw), SO.

So Iron Man 3 has been out for a week in a fuckton of countries and apart from a hilarious in hindsight post about a watch I had not seen any spoilers in tumblr. It's been out for like a day and a half in the US and it's already all over my dash.

( good thing I saw it today, then! )

So I just came back from seeing Stoker, and oh, was it beautiful. Gorgeous, gorgeous cinematography, solid acting, amazing music and a really interesting story. It's slow and it can be problematic in the way it equates female sexual awakening with violence, but oh, I really liked it.

Also, for such a twisted and dark film, it manages to have some seriously funny moments, without forcing anything.

Now I'll go buy the soundtrack (because Clint Mansell, yum) and Iron Man shall be the next movie to watch.

I was thinking yesterday of how I don't think I've ever watched Daria in English. And like, I'm not sure if I want to? That dubbing was a master piece - it managed to be contemporary, hip and faithful to the characters while translating suburban US English into neutral latinamerican Spanish. Apart from the first Shrek, very few things manage to sound actually decent in dubbing. It even used the word 'cool' in english as part of Trent's chain smoking voice and actually managed to use it right for the like two seconds it was popular in the late 90s!

I also just very very recently got to watch Back to the Future in English. This was less due to nostalgia but to the fact that I watched it a million times in my childhood with the shitty dubbing of canal 5 (with aproximately eight thousand commercial breaks in it), and Marty's absolutely horrifyingly awesome yell of 'DOC!! DOOOOC!' is so hilarious in spanish that I never felt the need to see how it compared XD

Anyway, I watched Take Shelter last week and while it was good, the pacing was so slow I wanted to hit things. The ending pretty much made everything worth it though. And then I went to see Side Effects on sunday, which was also really good. It's so cleverly written - it completely turns around on you as it plays out. I don't really believe Sodebergh when he says he's quitting, but I guess it was a good send off.

Am I really the only one that thought Lincoln was over-long, bloated, a bit boring and horribly sentimentaloid? I mean, I'm a lowly Mexican so by default I wasn't gonna worship at the altar of 'mythical' US presidents, but oh god, was I bored. Good acting, yeah, but not my cup of tea.

Zero Dark Thirty was also quite 'let us chant USA!!i!' but it was a bit more honest, I'd say, and it was closer to the characters so it was a lot more intimate. Also super suspensful and superbly done.

Silver Linings Playbook was adorable, sweet and cute, but not best picture material.

Argo was seemingly good but I saw it with horrible sound and totally random subtitles so I had no idea what was going on at any time.

Django Unchained was controversial for the sake of being controversial but dammnit, was it an amazing movie. The sheer ridiculousness of it added to the performances, music, look and story, I just really loved it. Also, Jamie Foxx was so hot it was hard to believe. Was it a story that was a POC's to tell? Yeah. But it's Tarantino, he lives to be a dick.

Life of Pi looked beautiful, but it lacked a bit of the heart of the book. I haven't seen Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild or Les Misérables, though I look forward to them. Especially Beasts of the Southern Wild, hopefully it'll open here soon.