Six books, all from my Unread Shelf, next to Squirrelly Dan for scale. Which book has the most pages, and which has the fewest? The answer may surprise and enthrall you!
Month: August 2022
#REVIEW: The Princess (2022)
You could be forgiven– I would forgive you, at least— if you dismissed the idea of watching Hulu’s The Princess almost immediately upon hearing about it. You have literally heard the plot a thousand times; the titular Princess, who is never named in the movie, is expected to marry a Bad Guy to ensure the also-unnamed Kingdom has an heir, refuses to do so on account of he’s an obvious sociopath, blah blah blah everyone’s captured and she’s chained up in the top of a tower awaiting her forced marriage because apparently the Bad Guy’s only rule is that he can’t just usurp the kingdom by killing the king; he has to do it “legitimately,” even though the wedding is a farce.
The movie has the distinct feel about it, especially in any scene not starring Executive Producer and star Joey King, of something that Disney would make with 7-10 year old girls as the expected demographic. There’s a lot of broad humor. At one point there’s a trap pulled directly from Home Alone. There’s a guy whose only role in the film is to be fat. The first forty minutes or so are structured in a way that feels very video-gamey. It’s all very, very Disney, and while there’s nothing wrong with making movies for 7-10 year old girls, it is also fine (especially if you aren’t a 7-10 year old girl) if you are someone who does not enjoy said movies.
And then, maybe five minutes into the start of the movie, the Princess dislocates her own thumb on camera so that she can slip out of her chains and then messily kills the two men who are there to keep her quiet and under guard. And, uh, we’re off to the races after that.
So take that Disney movie you had in mind, and then cross it with a really hard-R Charlize Theron action film, only with better fight choreography and a petite redhead who doesn’t immediately scan as a monstrous badass, and understand that there is DNA of both of those things in this movie (which is, for the record, rated R), and that this film, which starts out with the Disneyest of imaginable plots, ends with a beheading.
It’s … really something.
I only found out about this movie from TikTok, which advertised it to me relentlessly for weeks until I caved. I haven’t seen any promo for it anywhere other than TikTok and Hulu.
You want to see this movie for a couple of reasons: 1) the fight choreography really is fucking amazing. It’s well-shot, which is getting rarer and rarer in action films, and the choreographer never (well, really rarely) forgets that his heroine is a 120-pound girl, and despite fighting lots of grown men who are much bigger than she is, she manages to come off … realistic? She uses her agility and size to her advantage throughout the movie, fighting with accuracy rather than strength– there’s a bit where she’s fighting a knight in full armor that is just remarkably well-done, as she focuses on dodging big, heavy swings and counter-attacking at the gaps in his armor, and the movie never lets you forget that swinging a sword around is exhausting, as King spends roughly half her time on-screen gasping for breath.
Oh, and she has virtually no dialogue at all for about the first 45 minutes of the film. There’s only escaping, hiding, and kicking ass. The film’s even really light on badass quippery, which wouldn’t feel appropriate with this character. She does get a great “to the pain” monologue late in the movie, but there’s surprisingly little badassery for the sake of badassery in this movie.
The second reason is closely related to the first: Joey King is awesome, and I want to see her in many many more movies, only movies that know from the start that they’re geared for adults. I don’t know how well this has done for Hulu (it’s possible it’s been a runaway success; I genuinely don’t know) but it straddles two genres that really don’t generally … uh … straddle together, and I fear that that might have cost it some well-deserved viewership. This kid’s the real deal, and the fact that she somehow snagged an executive producer role for this and a couple of other Hulu projects makes me think that she’ll be around a while. The movie itself? Harder to say, but the bad parts are wrapped around some seriously cool shit, and I think it’s probably worth your time.
In which this is bullshit
My son has Covid, and he’s in the living room feeling completely fine and screaming at the friend who gave him Covid over his iPad, so nothing abnormal there at all. I do not have Covid, or at least these tests I keep taking keep coming up negative, but I’ve probably been asleep for at least 35 of the last 48 hours and I still feel like hell. My goal this year for school was to show up; I want to finish the year with at least half of my sick days still available, and I’ve missed two of the first three days of school already.
This is bullshit.
I watched Prey last night, or at least I think I did; I don’t really have the energy to review the thing but it was pretty good and if you’ve been meaning to watch it but haven’t you’ll probably really enjoy it. I may finally watch The Princess tonight; TikTok has been showing me ads for it for what feels like months and I want to watch it. I’ve also got half a season of Sandman left and apparently the first episode of She-Hulk dropped yesterday? So maybe I’ll just spend the next day and a half watching TV and catching up on all this shit.
This is it, though. Once I’m over whatever this is, second bout of Covid or not, I’m not getting sick again in 2022. You fucking hear me, universe? We’re done. I’m going to work every day and it’s going to be a good year and I’m going to enjoy it, and I’ll fight you if I fucking have to. The end.
One down, 179 to go
I have absolutely had worse first days of school. Any time I make it through the whole first day without quickly and cleanly identifying the kids I’m going to butt heads with all year, I’m starting off the year in good shape. Remarkably, I don’t think my biggest class is going to be my troublesome group, although those two things go together most of the time. My fifth and sixth hour is squirrelly but feels like mostly nice kids; my other two groups seemed pretty chill. No major organizational clusterfuckeries today either.
Do I need to have a word with Mr. Hoe-puller up there? Yeah, maybe, although I’m pretty sure this was meant as a joke.
I’ve also set a new record for kids who made sure to let me know on the first day of school that they are somewhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, including this one (look at the bottom answer):
Gonna have to have a word with that one, I think, to make sure I know exactly what their guidelines are about their parents. Sometimes with these kids, too, you want to make sure they’ve seen how other kids react if I drop an unexpected “she” on somebody in class. I want to respect their wishes, but I also want to make sure they’ve thought everything through first.
Meanwhile– and this is entirely typical for the first day of school– I’m so exhausted that I want to die. There will be no video tomorrow on the channel; I don’t have the energy to do any recording tonight and I’ve been too busy lately to get any kind of buffer going. I’ll try and get ahead this weekend.I gotta go do lesson plans now, though, so y’all have yourselves a nice night.
So far so good
Got through a day of meetings without any rage-murders, although I may have a teacher to talk off the ledge tomorrow morning, we’ll see. So far no one has tested positive for Covid in my house either, and we all took tests this morning. I just went through the schedules of all my students and reported any inconsistencies or problems I found and I think 7:41 PM is a decent time to be done working for the day, especially since I was expected to be at work before 8.
There was no video posted to my YouTube site today, because first week of school, so I’m going to go see if I can get the next couple of days knocked out before I fall asleep. Tomorrow will be a late night because I have school and then Parent Night, so if I don’t post anything don’t get too het up about it.
Nineteen years. Let’s do this.
Well, shit
Had a great time at the party yesterday— not that that was a surprise, mind you– but we didn’t get home until nearly midnight and pretty much collapsed into bed and died, and as of right now (4:36 PM) I haven’t managed to shower yet. Oh, and we got a text from birthday mom that the birthday girl woke up with mild cold symptoms and promptly tested positive for Covid.
Super.
My son doesn’t start school until Friday, and my wife had already taken the week off, so technically in a world where someone in the house has to have Covid, this would be a pretty good week for one of them to catch it. My wife had it in January; the boy hasn’t caught it yet. Me? School starts Wednesday, and tomorrow I’m expected to be at a meeting with every single other teacher in the district. Plus, despite having done it once before (*) I really don’t know how to write sub plans for the first Goddamn day of school, much less the first few.
So, yeah, I’m going to be testing tonight, and we’ll see how that works out. If I’m negative and unsymptomatic I’ll go ahead and go to the thing tomorrow, but I think I’m gonna mask up all week no matter what happens, just for shits and giggles. We’re all vaccinated to the gills and I should still have some antibodies left over from having it in May, but I really don’t love the school year starting off like this.
(*) The boy’s birthday is August 23rd. I attended parent/teacher night right after he was born and really enjoyed the looks on people’s faces when I told them I wouldn’t be there for the first two days of school (confused, angry) and then how they changed when I told them it was because I’d just become a father. The difference is at that school we had an experienced building sub who knew how the place worked and how I wanted my classroom run. Here we’re going to have teacher coverage, which is not going to be the same thing at all.
Fucking Christ, that’s enough
Damn near all of this is good news, one way or another, and you can imagine how jubilant I am that we might finally get a perp walk for that orange shitstain sometime in the near future. But all I can think about right now is Salman Rushdie. I don’t know why I haven’t seen the phrase “assassination attempt” used in any of the media accounts I’ve seen of the stabbing attack on him today, but the latest information I’ve seen (as of 8:23 PM) is that he may lose an eye, that the nerves in one arm were severed, and that he sustained damage to his liver as well. He is currently on a ventilator but I’m choosing to not read much into that given that he just came out of major surgery, and being on a vent after something like that is pretty much par for the course.
Initial reports (which may, of course, be wrong) suggest that his attacker is an Iranian sympathizer and he does not appear to have been provided with any security at the event where he was attacked. I don’t know how that happens. If he doesn’t make it through this it’s going to be the biggest loss to world culture since Lennon was killed.
I dunno, it’s got me fucked up. I hope he recovers. I can’t deal with Salman Rushdie being assassinated right now.
Out of town tomorrow for a birthday party in Indianapolis, and I’m back to work for real on Monday, so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me on either or both days. The classroom is in decent shape (I’ll have all of Tuesday to finish it off; Monday is all meetings) but I’ve got a lot of writing and presentations to create so if I behave like an adult for the next couple of days I’ll be busy as hell.
I have done nothing useful today
… like, nothing. Or at least it feels like it. I meant to go into work for a while longer again today and didn’t; I did technically get some work done at my computer but I can’t see that and if we’re honest I’m not a hundred percent sure I did what I was supposed to do.
Gotta do better tomorrow.
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