Technically, the rapier is a birthday present for the boy, and the zweihander and seax are mine (the zweihander is nearly as tall as I am, thus the picture with the quarterstaff for scale) but the Siler household acquired a lot of new weaponry today. I thought the Michiana Renaissance Festival was quite a bit more impressive than I was expecting, and the attendance was really impressive– it’s being held at the 4-H Fairgrounds, and judging from the parking in the lot, I’d say attendance was at least a good percentage of what the Fair usually generates on a Saturday.
Got a video game to finish and a book to (hopefully) get a good percentage of the way through, so that’s all I’ve got for today, but one way or another it’s already been a good day.
So I’ve taken on an informal building tech nerd role this year, and in doing so I made a slight miscalculation: we have a lot of new staff this year, and on top of that there was a whole-building renovation over the summer. As it turns out, some of our contractors were not tremendously diligent about making sure that everything was connected properly, especially wiring in the wall that I can’t get at? It’s been fun.
On the other hand, four different people, all adults with college degrees, summoned me to their rooms today because Something Didn’t Work, only for me to discover in three of the four cases that Something wasn’t plugged in, and in the fourth case it lacked a power cord entirely.
Electronics need those!
I told everyone that shit happens and we were all a little stressed out and manic, so no big deal, but that if it happened a second time, I’d be charging my consulting rate.
Had dinner with some family from out of town tonight, and everyone was surprised to see me, which was kind of funny; that said, I’m planning on going to bed early tonight.
The Treehouse set, which has since been retired, has been sitting in my office waiting patiently for me to get to it since my 48th birthday. I finally started putting it together a week or so ago, doing a couple of bags at a time because the instruction manual was terrible and I was going blind every time I looked at it. One way or another today I finally tackled all those leaves and finished it off. There were also green leaves in the box, but I like the autumn look a lot more.
Also, my fingers are not quite bleeding, but damn, putting all those vertical pieces into the leaves hurt.
The leafy portions can be lifted directly off, and all of the roofs come off of the three “house” portions of the set, so you can explore inside if you want to. Everything is detailed and furnished according to Lego’s traditional “details where no one will see them” system (and there’s a yellow gemstone hidden underneath the grass for some reason, too) and it all looks really nice.
In its final resting place, giving the A-Frame cabin some extra shade:
I may end up putting it on a little riser to make it more visible. That picture’s not from eye level in my desk chair but it’s still a little more covered up than I’d like.
What I really ought to do for this review is just copy and paste my Superman review from a couple of weeks ago and then change all the names. Because it’s really kind of ridiculous how similar my feelings on both of the movies are. Which is, if you missed my Superman review, very much a good thing.
My son is sitting behind me, working on something for his summer science class, and he just read that over my shoulder and went “Heh. A good Thing.”
Ben Grimm is magnificent in this film, by the way. There has never been a good Fantastic Four movie, and there’s never been a good Ben Grimm in the bad Fantastic Four movies. This movie somehow manages to be one of the best superhero films I’ve ever seen despite picking up a franchise with an incredibly bad track record on film. I loved it for a lot of the same reasons I loved Superman— namely, that this is a story about heroes, who want to be heroes, and who are expected to be heroes. The whole intro to the film is all about them saving lives. There’s no squirrel rescue scene, or anything like that, but there’s lots and lots of saving people, which is the whole point of this entire genre.
Another thing this movie does right that it has in common with Superman is it knows good and Goddamn well that you’ve been watching superhero movies for twenty years now, and there have been four movies about these guys before this one, and so it dispenses with the origin story in about five minutes. This means that the film doesn’t need to start with Reed and Sue not being married and they don’t need to show them being in love; nay, it can literally start with, in a first for a superhero movie, Sue sitting on the toilet, having just peed on a pregnancy test, which is coming up positive.
Marvel tried to hide the pregnancy angle at first and then stopped, but this movie has no time to waste, so Sue’s pregnant right away, and is actually massively pregnant during the first encounter with Galactus– who, in another first, is also done right. Sue actually gives birth to Franklin Richards on the ship on the way back to Earth, and watching the team deal with her going into labor while trying to not get killed by the Silver Surfer is a hell of a thing.
I’m kind of rambling, so let me cut to the quick, here: this is a great superhero movie, for very much the same reasons that Superman is a great superhero movie: it understands its characters, and it understands why they’ve been in (damn near, in this case) continuous publication since the 1960s, and it doesn’t bother screwing around with them or changing them for the tastes of Modern Audiences, which always, always involves making them more evil and stupid. This Fantastic Four is optimistic and cheery and unapologetically brilliant, and there’s no dark secrets, and no hidden betrayals, and they fucking love each other, and that is so Goddamned refreshing in a 2025 superhero movie that it was really all they needed to get right for me to love the movie.
The boy wants me to mention that Mole Man was cool. He is correct. Mole Man, for the first time in his history as a character, was cool.
The casting was superb across the board, really. I had my doubts about Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards; they were incorrect, and now I can’t really picture anyone else in the role. Sue and Ben are fantastic great. And Johnny …
…
Let’s talk about the Human Torch for a minute here.
Johnny Storm is very frequently, and for good reason, used as the comic relief in Fantastic Four stories, regardless of the medium. He currently literally has a handlebar mustache in the comics for no reason other than that he knows everyone else hates it:
He has an interesting role in this film– and, hell, it’s just now hitting me that this is sort of another parallel to what Superman did with Jimmy Olsen– in that he usually sort of gets the Xander role, as the useless funny guy, and neither movie was interested in that character. This movie remembered that he was on that first flight for a reason, and handles it in a way that I’m still not convinced about.
(Minor spoilers to follow. Not a big deal. I’ll use separators.)
So this universe’s Johnny Storm is apparently a master of linguistics, somehow? Like, on Reed’s level, practically? There have been repeated alien signals coming for months prior to Galactus’s arrival, and Reed is preoccupied with running countless tests on his genetically-altered pregnant wife to make sure that the child is going to be okay, so Johnny takes over looking at the signals. And he figures out that the signals are in the same language that Shalla Bal (Silver Surfer) says to him during a very brief conversation, and he decodes the entire alien language in a couple of months. And then he manages to figure out some other things that I won’t spoil, and it ends up being way more important to the climax of the film than one might expect.
This Johnny Storm also has a streak of nobility to him that isn’t exactly new, but is definitely more pronounced in this film than I’ve ever seen in the past. There are at least two different points where he is more than ready to die so that everyone else can live. He’s completely fearless to the point where it feels unhealthy, to be honest. I like it. He may be the most carefully developed character in the movie, and that’s usually not how these things work.
Minor spoilers end.
Let’s see, what else? I loved H.E.R.B.I.E., and I loved that the movie didn’t bother explaining him and that he was just there. I love the retro-future 1960s look of the movie. Love it. I love that, and this is going to be dodging a spoiler again, the movie managed to surprise me with the way it ended, which has never happened in anything featuring Galactus before. I had some ideas about how this movie was going to connect with the wider Marvel universe(*), and let’s just say I was completely wrong. I don’t think I’ve speculated about that here, so we’re probably good. I liked that they remembered that Ben was Jewish. I liked that they kept him dressed for most of the movie. The Ben Grimm in the comics wears clothes! All the time! And so does this one.
There are some great insights into Reed Richards’ character, too, and some conflicts he gets into with Sue, that really felt true to the characters. Again, the main thing this movie did right was understand the people it was about.
The standard caveats! I am super enthusiastic about stuff I like, and I really liked this movie. To be honest, were I not substantially more invested in Superman as a character than I am the Fantastic Four, I might be willing to call this a better movie, and I think I have fewer complaints about it than I do the Superman movie. It’s crazy that two superhero movies this good in such similar ways came out in the same month. It’s even crazier that we’re basically done with superhero movies and TV shows until next summer, too. I don’t know right now if I’m back on board for Avengers: Doomsday or not. We’ll see. But between now and then, you should definitely make time to see this one.
(*) The movie starts off with a title card stating it’s on Earth-828, a number I thought about for a minute and couldn’t come up with any particular significance for. It ends with a quote from Jack Kirby, who was born on August 28th, 1917. Nice touch. Also, apparently there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Jack and Stan Lee together in a montage at the beginning of the film. I missed it.
For the record, I did see Fantastic Four: First Steps today, and it was magnificent. Full review coming, probably tomorrow.
I finished Crypt Custodian yesterday, hitting 100% after about fifteen hours of play, although there’s a boss rush mode I’ll need to dip into if I want to get all the trophies, and I’m probably not going to. It’s one of the nicer surprises of the year, because I basically just grabbed it for free from Game Pass based on the image you see up there.
It’s a Metroidvania. You play a cat. You’re dead and a ghost. You’re prevented from entering paradise by a really bossy dead frog (that’s not a joke) and you spend the entire game cleaning up trash with your broom and whacking monsters with it. In classic Metroidvania fashion, you unlock a bunch of abilities over the course of the game that let you go back and get into areas you couldn’t reach before, and while I have no intention of spoiling the ending, it revolves around making 10 friends so that you can invade Paradise and visit your still-living loved ones, and the ending will make you cry a little bit.
I play these games for the exploration, right? This is the map:
Or, if you prefer a slightly more abstract, right-click-for-much-larger version, you can have this one:
Don’t worry about the Chinese, the words don’t matter. The point is the map is ridiculously large, and the different areas are wildly different, some with environmental challenges (one area reverses its polarity every time you dash, making walls and floors either appear or reappear along with roughly half of the enemies at any time) and some that just look cool. There’s rainy forests and castles and tombs and enormous retail backrooms and an amusement park. You can teleport to save spots at any time and there’s no penalty for dying, and you can even unlock a power-up late in the game that prevents missed jumps from hurting you, so there’s a strong incentive to just pick a direction and go. Your power-ups can be equipped using little upgrade spheres that can be found or purchased, so there’s an element of switching back and forth between them depending on what you need to do– I found myself with an exploration build and a boss fight build after a while, for example– although by the end of the game you can find enough of the spheres that you can equip nearly everything you need, and you might be able to buy as many spheres as you want; the one vendor doesn’t seem to run out of them.
So, yeah. Games like this are why Game Pass is worth the money; this game is delightful and everyone should play it, whether they have to pay for it or not, but if you can get it for free then you really have no excuse. Give it a shot.
On the right, my five-year-old chair. Or the middle, if you’re counting the half of my wife’s inferior desk chair that you can see. On the left, the new hotness, ready for duty.
Again, I haven’t bothered to, like, dust, or de-cat-hair or anything like that, but the old chair is still in perfect shape, after five years of daily use. I couldn’t be happier with this company’s products, y’all.
I put myself on an RSVP list for this enormous bastard today, which just means that they’ll let me know when it’s for sale, which will be good, because it’ll take a while to sell the house so that I can afford it.
Be sure to note the tiny FF members and the Silver Surfer, for scale.
I somehow wrote over 2,000 words about Superman yesterday and never mentioned the dog.
And I can’t decide which picture I want to use, so have another:
I gotta say, including the dog in this movie was a stroke of genius in a film that is not wanting for genius moments. And making Krypto an asshole was another great decision. I’m choosing that word deliberately, mind you; Krypto’s not mean, he’s not a bad dog, no, he is in fact the goodest of good boys, but he is absolutely a furry little asshole and he could use quite a bit more training. And having a pet, much less a pet he can’t really control, humanizes Superman in a way I really like. Superman’s powers don’t help him with Krypto at all, and his anger when he can’t find his dog after Lex and his crew invade the Fortress of Solitude leads to one of the movie’s best scenes– and, not for nothing, one of its most relatable as well. It’s a two-minute masterclass of acting from both Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult. One of them has to play the part of a man who could absolutely wipe the problem in front of him off of the face of the earth with no consequences, but who knows he can’t do that, and has to contain his perfectly understandable rage. The other guy has to stare his death in the face and smirk. It’s a stellar scene, and for my money better than this scene from Superman ’78 that it’s a callback to:
I had forgotten what a champion shit-talker Reeve’s Superman is. “Diseased maniac” indeed. Corenswet could never. He’s too nice.
… suddenly it hits me that none of the three men in this scene are with us any longer. Damn.
But back to the dog: Krypto is 100% CGI, a decision that I didn’t like until I saw the film and realized that there is about a minute out of the entire movie where they could have used a real dog, and most of that minute is in the two pictures at the top of the post. And the CGI is seamless anyway; the FX in the movie are generally solid, but none of the occasional less-than-perfect shots involve Krypto. (For some reason, shots where Superman is flying directly toward the camera tend to look weird, and I’m not sure why.)
So yeah. Absolutely ready for Krypto to have his own movie, where he goes and does dog stuff and accidentally saves the world while the Justice League is busy with something else. The Zeppo, but with a lead I actually like.
Tomorrow: maybe not a Superman post! But we’ll see.
