I usually do these on Sunday mornings, but Union’s graduation was this past weekend, and took up much of the day. But I had another thing to do this morning, which blocked out a more substantive post, so I’ll just throw it in here.
Death on the Nile:
We watched the Branagh version of Murder on the Orient Express a while back, and the kids enjoyed that enough that The Pip suggested the sequel, even though it got mediocre reviews. It’s basically fine, as it turns out— the biggest problem is that they’re very clearly not actually in Egypt, so everything looks kind of cheesy.
The Spy Next Door:
We had a big baseball day on Saturday— The Pip was 3-3 at the plate, ending up on third base each time (at least one of those was technically a double where he reached third on a throwing error), and then dinner out with my parents, so we were late getting started on Movie Night. The Pip asked me to scroll recommendations on Prime, and this came up, and he said “Hey, I like Jackie Chan, let’s watch this.” I knew that this was a really late Jackie Chan movie, though, so tried to pull up something better, but renting Supercop or Project A was weidly complicated, and he kept saying “Let’s just watch that first one,” and I was tired, so I gave in.
This was genuinely pretty terrible, at least from an adult perspective. The child actors are annoying, the plot is stupid and makes no sense, and the action scenes are really limited, because Chan is getting old. To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, the blooper reel at the end is 90% Chan stumbling over English dialogue, with only a smattering of physical pratfalls.
On the other hand, it’s only an hour and a half, and The Pip seemed to enjoy it just fine. So I guess it worked, but I still wish I’d gone to the effort to figure out how to get one of the older movies that’s actually good.
As noted above, these reports on media watching are usually a weekend thing; if you’d like to get that sort of thing in your email, here’s a button:
If you would like to defend the sad late-period Jackie Chan flick, the comments will be open:
But I would strongly urge you to instead consult a qualified medical professional for an evaluation of any recent head injuries you may have sustained.