— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ चौरानवे —
Last night was Action Movie Night, and the choice was . . . not the greatest. It was Tony's choice this week; he always takes his turn after mine these days in the cycle of regulars, and in his defense, he did reveal that he had not already seen it. The movie was
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, and I pulled a Shobhit and slept through some of it. As I noted in my Letterboxd review, I already knew that I'd get as much out of snoozing through the movie's so-called "climactic" sequence.
Shobhit slept through a whole lot more of it than I did. But, as I noted last night, he falls asleep during almost every movie we watch, so that's not much of an indicator. Still, in keeping with his long knack for predicting the grade I give a given movie, when this one ended last night, he said, "What grade did you give it? C-plus?" He was
spot on.
Now, when the movie started and I saw what it was, I actually thought: maybe I'll actually have a good time this time, since it can't disappoint me. That often happens, and has actually happened more than once with movies I didn't think were that great but I had to re-watch at Action Movie Night. Well, not this time. I still feel that this movie is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. I think it's particularly out of touch with its overdone "zombie teenagers with smart phones" take. The biggest offense is its 134-minute runtime; this premise would work way better as a 90-minute or even 105-minute movie, but this film spends way too much time on individual character backstories that don't really enhance the material much.
I never did hear how Tony himself specifically felt about the movie, but several guys commented on how much they enjoyed it after it ended, and I kind of thought: maybe this group collectively doesn't have taste? Indeed, there have been times when movies I thought were genuinely great were selected, but often the person making the choice has never seen it, so it can feel like even choosing a great film is an accident. I'm not being fully fair here, though; you can check out this movie's Letterboxd page and see that plenty of people loved it (four out of five stars is inexplicably its most popular rating; average rating is 3.4 stars)—it's not like the guys in this group are outliers. The real issue is that I did not understand why so many people liked this movie last month, and I also do not understand why as many people at Action Movie Night liked it, although in the latter case it was less surprising.
It was a good sized group this week: Tony, Ryan, Ben, Derek, Daniel, Andy, Greg, Shobhit, myself—
and Tony's wife Sarah, who often stops by but I can't remember her ever staying for the entire movie before, but she did last night. There was another resident from The Braeburn who showed up during the movie itself, so there were 10 of us during the pre-movie potluck but 11 of us in the theater; I won't count him in the Winter Social Review, though, because a) I had no interaction with him which excludes him from my social activity; and b) I can't remember his name anyway.
There was an interesting moment just before the movie started, when Andy mentioned how people often react when he mentions "Man Movie Wednesday," which is the term this movie night started with, years before Shobhit and I started coming, and which I have already mentioned here many times. Andy relatively recently starting coming after having come some years prior, so his origins must date back to "Man Movie Wednesday" still being what they called it. Anyway he said people often look at him "like we're a bunch of male chauvenists." I didn't say this, but: yeah. Excactly. There's clearly a reason they changed it to "Action Movie Night" when they made it an official biweekly event open to anyone in the building—even though, functionally, it remains just Tony and his friends.
Most days, Tony and Shobhit and I are the only people there who actually live in the building. Now, Derek
used to live in the building but still comes regularly; and last night there was that guy whose name I forgot who lives in the building, plus Sarah, being married to Tony, naturally lives in the building too. But none of the rest of the many regulars actually live there. It was just made an "official" building event some years ago because Tony had been reserving the theater every other Wednesday, which is technically against the rules.
Anyway, it's been "Action Movie Night" for years now. But, a few of the people from the early years who still come will still sometimes refer to it as "Man Movie Wednesday." Not even I would have been nearly as inclined to go had that been the name when I was first made aware of it. I'm rather glad the name was changed. This is a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but sometimes minor things actually change the grand scheme of things, you know?
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ चौरानवे —
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ चौरानवे —
I don't know if Sarah is a teacher or what—I should ask Tony—but it was clear that she works in education. So between her and Andy, who was complaining about class sizes in Seattle having too many kids at 32, I can't say it went over super great when Shobhit attempted to argue that there should be consolidation of Seattle schools because we have fewer children per capita than anywhere else in the state. In his mind, that data point alone supports the argument, even though he has zero experience or actual expertise regarding Seattle Public Schools. And he loves to bring up that plenty of students succeed in classrooms in India that have 47 kids per classroom, although I would bet anything that with that kind of volume, plenty of those kids are
not thriving either. In any case, why he ever thinks any American is going to be on board with these ideas, I'll never know; he's well aware that these are wildly different cultures. There may be a case to be made that parents should be more involved in their kids' education, but that's rather beside the point here.
There are just times when Shobhit is in a group setting and trying to make the case for something that's going down like a lead balloon, and he is just utterly incapable of reading the room. And to be clear, everyone in the room was very polite and gracious with him, even with friendly laughter at times, but they also clearly were not having it with any of these arguments. I actually suggested we talk about something else, as I could tell no one wanted to continue hearing this stuff, but Shobhit just kept barrelling through with anecdotes about his Indian education, completely ignorant to their utter irrelevance. All I could think about was how, if he had done this while in the middle of campaigning for City Council, he'd have guaranteed the loss off every vote in that room—except for mine, of course; and possibly Tony's, who seemed to support Shobhit's 2023 campaign more because he felt it was the neighborly thing to do than for any other particular reason. Tony's a pretty upstanding guy. There's no way I would support candidate just because they were my neighbor; they would have to have a platform I stongly agreed with.
As for the food, Shobhit and I brought two Costco trays of scallop potatoes, which we both absolutely housed a giant portion of; we probably polished nearly a solid tray between just the two of us. Part of this was the limited vegetarian options otherwise, though Daniel brought soup dumplings, half of which were vegetarian; and half a pizza Tony brought was vegetarian but Shobhit would not touch because it was touching the anchovy pizza in the other half of the box. I would, though, and that slice of mushroom pizza was super tasty.
Shobhit went out and fetched the second tray of potatoes that was still about half full during the movie though, and brought it back into the theater. I couldn't help but take several bites myself. It was right there! To say that we both ate way too much would be an understatement. Shobhit was feeling a bit more down than usual yesterday, probably because he made the mistake of looking up reviews of
The Foreigner and finding them to be pretty positive. I noted that any review of regional live theater is probably predisposed to be nice; I actually think that's true. We also watched this week's episode of
Shrinking on Apple TV before coming downstairs, and the episode title being "Depression Diet" felt a little on the nose for our evening.
Not that
I'm depressed. I'm not, I'm actually fine. So I don't know what my excuse was. That starch is addictive?
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ चौरानवे —
[posted 12:42pm]
