verbminx

I have numerous and contradictory things to write about. I think this post will have MPD.

First of all... are all of London's LJ contingent OK?
I already made contact with my only good IRL friend in the London area - actually, she lives in Kent, and happened to not need to be in London today, and feels greatly relieved. So she's fine. I hope you and yours are all fine too, UK people.

Second of all, I went to a sneak preview of The Fantastic Four tonight. Tom and I joked that we were only going out of a sense of morbid curiosity, since neither of us would actually pay to see it, not even at the dollar theater. From the ads, I was expecting it to be truly and painfully horrible, something along the lines of... I don't even know, because I don't usually watch movies that look that bad. Actually, though, while it's not exactly a "good" movie, it has some mild success as a light comedy, most of the way through. There are a lot of really bad dialogue transitions, the completion of Victor's transition to Dr. Doom is very abrupt, the action climax feels silly and rushed*, and Ben's Thing suit looks super-fake. At many moments, the whole movie looks kind of cheap. I'm not a fan of the comic AT ALL, so I had no positive expectations whatsoever.

But it's not completely terrible if seen as a "popcorn movie" for 10-to-14-year-olds, which is what it feels like in depth and pacing, and it is certainly at least as good as most of those that I can think of (for example, I thought it was far superior to Spy Kids, while vastly inferior to the more "grownup" superhero films of the last few years like both Spiderman and XMen movies, and Batman Begins). Is that damning with faint praise? Probably. Still, it's shallow and vaguely entertaining fluff to which you can take your kids or younger siblings or cousins, and which they might enjoy, and you might not be driven to gouge your eyes out with a spoon as a result of having to sit through it. The only things that even set a lower age limit are one scene in which a character dies because a hole is bloodlessly blasted through his chest, and another in which Jessica Alba is very briefly shown in her underwear. The performances are OK - Chris Evans is especially engaging and bratty as Johnny Storm, the Human Torch.

Third of all, I have been having an awful week, with a moderate CFIDS relapse. Mostly just very tired. Wearing the same denim skirt every time I go out, because nothing else is comfortable in this weather (I don't actually own any shorts). I can't handle driving myself or being out for very long at a time, but today seemed better than the rest of the week has been.

The real bright spot in my day was popping by the library to return some things and finding that my reserve copy of Yotsuba& had arrived. That's pronounced "yoht-soo-bah-toh", and is about a charmingly weird and spacey little girl named "Yotsuba"; "to" means "and" (&), so each chapter is Yotsuba's encounter with a different thing. The first is "Yotsuba & Moving", for example. It's from the creator of Azumanga Daioh, which I really like. Here's some commentary about both of them.

*How silly and rushed? Well, I got bored and started thinking about laundry that I needed to do at home, and as a result I actually lost track of what was going on.