— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ नवासी —
The "hightlight" of my evening last night was taking myself to see the new Pixar movie,
Hoppers. What a disappointment.
I had sent Laney the trailer to see if she might be interested in joining me; she declined, and she made the right choice. I thought about asking Alexia if she wanted to join me; I decided against it, and I made the right choice. I must have been maybe 15 or 20 minutes in when I literally thought to myself,
This movie is losing me.
And it's getting pretty good reviews! I don't get it. But, I'm stuck on what Pixar Animation Studios once was and stood for (quality if sharp wit, emotionally rich, and a knack for creating indelible classics) and how this movie has no connection to it except the name.
Hoppers could have been made by any run-of-the-mill animation studio, and is mostly characterized by how zanily forgettable it is. Young kids will have a blast, but then grow up never thinking about it again. Honestly this kind of bums me out. Pixar has long been clearly passed its peak, but damn. Their heydey isn't even much being linked to with their current work anymore.
The silver lining, if there even is one, I guess, is that this made writing the review easy. Just as happened with
The Bride!, I came home and the review just flowed right out of me. Shobhit wasn't home when I got home, and in fact he quite perfectly timed his return right when I was finishing up.
So then we watched
Fackham Hall, the spoof of
Downton Abbey and English murder mysteries that was released last year. I had it on my calendar but then it never fucking played in any of my local theaters. (To be fair, it probably did play at the AMC at Alderwood Mall, but this would have been before I realized how relatively easy it is for me to get up there since the opening of the Lynnwood light rail extension.)
Shobhit started to watch it on HBO Max yesterday, having not even previously known about it. He found it so funny that he stopped it so we could watch it together, and texted me about it. I was thrilled. Of course, in the end the movie was . . . fine. Like far too many spoof movies, it largely runs out of steam about halfway through. I still got a lot of good laughs out of it, especially from a lot of its knowingly dumb humor. I'd say I'm happy about the recent resurgence of spoof movies, which we haven't seen in ages, except that most of them actually aren't that good. Last year's reboot of
The Naked Gun was surprisingly good, and just as these things go, heralded a spate of inferior imitators.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ नवासी —
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ नवासी —
I don't want to glean over the fact that Shobhit actually went to an audition yesterday, his first since being let go from
The Foreigner two and a half weeks ago. I'm thrilled that he's weathered this blow pretty impressively and is already getting back on that horse. I really hope it continues, and I suspect it probably will.
I've had friends ask if it makes a difference, and I really think it does, that his actual job is also in the arts industry—specifically, he's the Finance Manager for Theatre Puget Sound. I've said many times now that this could not be more perfect for him, managing finances for an arts organization. He's obsessed with finances but also creative and loves acting. This means he's surrounded regularly by other people in the arts, and I don't think he ever would have weathered this setback nearly as well had he not had that built-in community of support.
And he's been involved for a while now with both the local theater community in that way,
and the local actor community by being on the board of SAG-AFTRA Local. It's even been a few years now that he has a presence in both those arenas of local and regional arts. This puts him in a far different position now than he was, say, after returning from L.A. in 2016. At that time, he had merely been an aspiring actor, in the exponentially larger context of Los Angeles, and then came home and worked minimum-wage retail jobs for eight years. Here, he's in a smaller pond but a much bigger fish, especially after finally quitting his last retail job a year before last Christmas; he's now actually in multiple arts-community leadership positions. That has to have a very positive impact on things like confidence and ego. He may have felt kicked to the curb but he's still got a runway. He even has some influence on certain aspects of local traffic. He's just far better positioned to push through setbacks now, probably better than he's ever been.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ नवासी —
[posted 12:31pm]
