review

Friday, 2 June 2017Monday, 19 June 2017 StarrLeave a comment

[ NOTE: This review is in-progress but my wifi is spotty so I’m putting it up now for you to enjoy. Thank you for your patience and support! ]

Thank you to Hotchka DC for inviting me to view Wonder Woman early and to the Spy Museum for helping me win my 2nd-ever in-person raffle!

At. Long. Last. After actual decades of a Wonder Woman movie being discussed and passed from studio to studio, director to director, actress to actress, we finally have our first-ever live-action Wonder Woman feature film! Can you believe it’s taken so long? It has taken decades of pressure on studios to convince them that yes, a female standalone superhero movie is not even a gamble at the box office. People are interested in the character and her being a woman will not hurt your profit margin. In fact, women, who are also in possession of money to spend at the movie, are eager to buy tickets to see a movie starring a strong female superhero, THE strong female superhero.

TL;DR: Wonder Woman is a pretty standard Marvel movie with Zac Snyder’s visual signature and a female superhero.

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Quick confession: I have not been keeping up with the DC Extended Universe movies. I begrudgingly watched Man of Steel and found it as meh as friends’ reviews indicated, and I had almost no interest in watching Batman v Superman or Suicide Squad. So, admittedly, my comments about the rest of the DCEU aren’t entirely fair, since I don’t have firsthand experience of seeing those films.

I say that Wonder Woman felt like a standard Marvel movie because it is very familiar, both with its positive and negative qualities. Even the structure and basic premise is quite familiar: Diana, aka Wonder Woman (although no one calls her that in the movie), is a bad-ass and optimistic character who does not understand the strangeness of our human ways and finds herself fighting in a world war with literal brute force. Many critics are saying that her origin story is like a mix of Thor + Captain America. (My faves! Chris Squared!)

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However, I think it has similar pitfalls to many superhero movies now. I’ve complained about it here before and I probably will never stop but I found the villain(s) to be poorly developed and lacking of compelling characterization and motivations. “Because he’s a bad guy” doesn’t cut it anymore as the answer to “Why is the bad guy doing the bad things?” We have several antagonists in this movie and I found myself not knowing very much about them at all. Just some menacing looks and vague ambitions of prolonging World War I in the face of an armistice and for what? Because! (I’ll discuss more of our villain characterization in the spoilers below the trailer.)

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One of my favorite, too-short, parts of this movie was the scenes on Themyscira, not least of all because they are uncharacteristically sunny for a DC movie! (Don’t worry, the rest of the film remains very blue-grey with spectacular flashes of yellow+orange for effect.) While the slow-motion that Zac Snyder often gets criticized for now gets tired, I liked watching the Amazons be bad-ass in slow-mo. Themyscira seemed very beautiful, if poorly protected from outsiders. (It’s an island in the middle of the ocean that is always a sunny paradise but around it is dark and cloudy and the seas are rough. Which means that, as per the trailer, a plane can just fly in. But also boats can basically just cruise on through. Whatever, it was refreshing to see a bright and sunny scene in this cinematic universe and all these amazing women doing awesome stunts. (Don’t fret, most of the movie is filmed in the dark or on suspiciously overcast days, as per the other DC films.)

Gal Gadot was a pretty good choice to play Diana, Princess of the Amazons. It goes without saying that she is incredibly beautiful. (My boyfriend and I became fans of hers when Fast Five came out.) She is also very bad-ass, as someone who trained in the Israeli military. While I did find myself wishing she was a little more expressive, she was very good at being naive and finding little pleasures in things like snow and babies. She also pulled off subtle comedic moments quite well. Her chemistry with Chris Pine, who always plays a charming guy with differing levels of douche-baggery (see: Star Trek, Into the Woods), was great. I really have to commend Chris Pine on playing Steve Trevor as a charming hero who recognizes that Diana is amazing and does not go hypermasculine in response to that. (It is unfortunate that this very basic demonstration of decency is commendable, but it is.) I felt that almost every other actor was… underutilized.

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Robin Wright gets top billing as the greatest Amazonian warrior of all time, Antiope, but she is so stoic and doesn’t have much depth, as with most of the characters in this movie. She is a general, she fights, she trains. She trains Diana to become an Amazon warrior against her sister, Queen Hippolyta’s, wishes. Why does Hippolyta, played by Connie Nielsen, think that she can get away with just sheltering Diana away forever, anyway? It doesn’t look like Amazons age (and I mean, we know Diana doesn’t age at all between World War I and when she meets Bruce Wayne so I mean…) so trying to just wait it out seems foolish. That is never made very clear and, in the context of the events in the film and the very little circumstantial context we are given, it seems dangerously unreasonable.

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I must say that this movie is… not the kind of feminist movie I think I was expecting it to be. There’s a reversal of the male gaze trope where Diana walks in on Steve Trevor emerging from a bath. There really is no reason for him to be naked in this scene, or for him to be naked for as long as he is, but he is naked because nude Chris Pine serves as eye candy, both for the audience and for Diana, who has to ask if the first man she has ever laid eyes upon is “average for his sex”. Even with so many awesome Amazonian women, I feel like maybe there were scenes cut out of the film that would have fleshed some of them out more. For example, at one particularly emotional scene near the beginning of the movie, one of the Amazons runs forward in tears. I have no idea who she is or why she is moved more than the rest of the Amazons? She is visually differentiated from them when she runs forward but I don’t have a clue who she is, she doesn’t even look familiar to me, don’t even ask me to tell you her name. While looking for the movie poster for this post, I wondered if she is the mysterious 4th Amazon woman on some of the posters that feature the powerful women of Themyscira but, again, I just don’t know? And there is a severe dearth of women with depth throughout the movie, aside from Diana. Etta Candy, Steve’s secretary, is sassy and loyal. Doctor Isabel Maru, aka Doctor Poison, is……. uh… she likes poison gas? I don’t know?? It’s a similar problem that we encounter with the villains.

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Before I forget, I also was bothered that, while Wonder Woman and Sameer speak a few lines of a few different languages in one scene, the Germans are all speaking English. (Some with German accents…) Steve Trevor does, however, put on a German accent when acting as a spy and talking to Germans. (???!) We know that we aren’t simply suspending disbelief because Steve Trevor remarks that Diana and the other Amazons speak very good English. Not perfect English, as everyone on Themyscira speak with a variation of Gal Gadot’s accent, but very good. I think if that line was left out of the movie, I wouldn’t be as bothered about the language thing but it is what it is.

(Also, I’m not sure I like Wonder Woman’s musical theme. It just doesn’t seem quite in character for her, and it plays several times throughout the movie and is featured prominently in the trailer. Not a fan of it, personally, for Wonder Woman.)

I liked this movie. It was a lot of fun and I think it will send the message that Hollywood can stop avoiding making films with female protagonists and should especially stop making excuses to not make female superhero movies. (How long have we been begging for a standalone Black Widow movie???) It isn’t a perfect movie and I don’t think it deserves all the hype it has been getting. Criticism that the fight scene at the end ruin the tone and pacing of the movie is valid, as is other criticism about what about Diana is actually valued by other characters. (Has she been reduced to a token female? Eye candy? The girl who men want to bang because she acts a bit outside of her gender role?)

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Still, this movie is important. It’s so important for young girls to see a character like Diana on the big screen because it’s astoundingly important to see yourself represented in the media. So to see Wonder Woman, a beautiful woman who does not compromise on who she is or the things that make her a woman, a person who does not fully understand why wars happen and the complicated nature of mankind, is extremely powerful. And it will be similarly powerful for movie audiences to use their ticket purchases to show Hollywood that this movie is overdue and that we want more like it.

Wonder Woman is in theaters everywhere today. Discussion of some spoilers after the trailer.

My Experience with Blue Apron

Friday, 12 May 2017Thursday, 11 May 2017 Starr4 Comments

Note: I am posting photos of the recipes in the order that we cooked them. The comments before or after the photos do not apply to the dish pictured.

I really love cooking, although I don’t stay home to cook my meals as often as I’d like. I tend to cook the same recipes but I am finding more and more success with new ones that I find online.

I also really really love grocery shopping. Walking through a supermarket’s aisles or a farmer’s market really gets me going. It’s like shelves upon shelves of possible ways I could reach my maximum domestic bliss potential. (My favorite things to buy, of all time, are school/office supplies, food, and cleaning supplies. I will shop for those things over clothes every day.) It’s not difficult for me to spend a long time in a grocery store, filling up my basket or cart with loads of goodies that I could potentially cook.

This love of cooking and grocery shopping is not universal. Take my partner, for example. He never fell in love with the supermarket the way I did. (I think our trips to the store are amusing because I am a weirdo but, ultimately, a bit draining for him.) I have a coworker who similarly hates going to get groceries, and she is a Blue Apron customer.

I’ve always rolled my eyes at the idea of Blue Apron. I love grocery shopping, why would you charge money to take that joy away from me? But I started to empathize more with the fact that Ben really doesn’t get as excited at the store as I do, and he also prefers following recipes in front of him because he isn’t that comfortable in the kitchen with more complicated recipes yet.

So we decided to try it.

TL;DR I think the concept is fine (although not for me, personally), Blue Apron’s execution fell a bit short for me and we will not be ordering any more kits from them, even if we decide to try more meal delivery kits in the future.

Our biggest issues with the recipes were:

BAD RECIPE INSTRUCTIONS – Several times, I had to veer away from the recipes because I knew that following them exactly would wreck the food. For example, they’d list cooking times that needed to be halved at the least, or the order of adding things to a pot/pan was off… And speaking of the instructions…

S & P – Blue Apron has a big problem with telling you to salt and pepper your food in the recipes. In one of the recipes, I counted they asked you to do this almost 10 times. 3 of those were for a single step in the recipe. “Salt and pepper before putting it in the pan. Then add salt and pepper while it is cooking. After taking it out of the pan, salt and pepper it to taste.” That is a whole lotta salt & pepper, folks! Given that several of these recipes were already very heavy in sodium and/or were very salty without adding more salt (+ pepper), definitely do not S + P every time Blue Apron tells you to, your mouth will punish you.

VALUE – These just did not seem like a great deal for what we were paying for them. The prep work was needlessly cumbersome for a few of them (for example, why have us crush our own almonds and peanuts?), especially for folks who do not want to do a lot of prep work. And the quality of the ingredients was good, but, again, I wasn’t sure about the value of the kits.

INGREDIENTS – We had one specific instance where a dish featured a specific fish and leeks, and we only chose that box because we wanted to try cooking leek. Lo and behold, the box arrived with a note that said after working with farmers, they decided to give us yellow onion instead of leek. What?! Yellow onion is not a leek at all, and we should have been notified before the box arrived with the option of getting a different box if the primary ingredient we wanted to get from this recipe was unavailable at the price Blue Apron wanted it from the suppliers. Or they should have just shelled out more for the leeks because I know they were in season. Leek and onion are not comparable vegetables and this was supremely disappointing for us because we specifically wanted to cook leek.

TASTE – Honestly, most of these recipes tasted very mediocre. (Even when I held back on the salt & pepper, which would not have improved the taste.) This was a combination of the recipes forcing me to overcook things, but also had to do with them skimping on the seasonings and condiments in the boxes in favor of you salting the bejeezus out of the food.

HEALTH – For all of this, we had this idea that Blue Apron boxes would be a bit health conscious but in fact, some of these meals were super unhealthy. We had one that was veggies, rice, and chicken breast in a peanut sauce and we checked the nutrition facts to see astounding numbers for saturated fats and sodium which must have all come from this crazy tablespoon of full-fat peanut butter that came with the recipe. Most of the meals had super high sodium levels, many of them had very high amounts of sugar and fat, and one even had trans fats in it. With the bulk of the meals being lean meats and veggies, this usually boiled down to something like the one tablespoon of butter that became the base of the sauce for the recipe.

My favorite recipes from the few weeks we tried this out were:

Would I try another meal kit delivery service? Maybe, but we may only do so if it is a more health and nutrition-focused service. Eating this mediocre meals with crazy amounts of sugar and sodium and fats was probably the biggest issue we had here.

Will I try Blue Apron again? No. I may look to the (free and available to anyone online) recipes for inspiration on how to use ingredients, but it is not a good value for me and my family at this time.

Have you ever tried a meal kit delivery service? Which one and how did you like it? My friend recommended I try one called Home Chef, so maybe we’ll try that one out someday.

What are your favorite things to cook at home? While doing Blue Apron, I also loved doing ragù bolognese, but as the weather warms up, I’m foreseeing a lot more salads and stir-frying.

Also, let me know if you’d be interested in me posting more recipes and homecooking posts. I enjoyed taking the photos for these (worked REAL HARD to plate them for you all!) and I love cooking a lot, but I know my rambling recipe style is probably not that easy to follow…

Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 [review]

Tuesday, 9 May 2017Monday, 8 May 2017 StarrLeave a comment

You’re not friends.
No. We’re family.

(And suddenly, I wondered if I was watching another Fast & Furious movie!)

For your pleasure, feel free to listen to “Awesome Mix Vol. 2” while you read.

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Being a “Vol. 2”, everyone is comparing the latest GotG movie to the first one, the one that was a gamble, that was a show of Marvel Studios’ power over their audiences and their market share.

I really enjoyed watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. It was super fun, even if the story and jokes were a bit alllllll over the place. But the humor at the core of the movie really held it all together. I dare you to not have fun watching. Vol. 2 knew what people liked from the first movie and brought a lot of it back, like:

Adorable baby Groot (so cute I cried a little bit and I am not ashamed)
Awesome throwback soundtrack
Drax being a weird alien who doesn’t understand things like societal norms
Yondu and his bada** arrow

Bonus: We get a Stan Lee cameo in this one!

I did really enjoy Guardians 2. There were so many different levels of jokes in this movie, and just the amount of humor packed into the movie made for a really entertaining ride. One minute, you’d be laughing really hard at a visual gag that even your kids could enjoy and crack up at. The next, you’re drying your eyes because this movie decided to touch on some pretty heavy themes of family.

(Also, Baby Groot is legitimately just SO cute and has such a cute little voice — that Vin Diesel does himself with very little processing! — and I cried on the inside during a scene where people are being really mean to him. That being said, his cuteness is what kept him alive to see that scene out, and I’m happy for that.)

The second scene, where we see the Guardians fighting a giant alien together, is a pretty good tone-setter for the rest of the film. We have the Guardians working together(ish) to fight a monster. We have a dancing Baby Groot. We see some great dynamics between the Guardians. We have a lot of action going on.

It’s worth mentioning as well that Kurt Russell was pretty great as Ego, and apparently his de-aging for the scenes in the 80s was mostly makeup and very minimal CG! What the heck!!

There are 5 sting scenes before, during, and after the credits, so stick around if you want to see them. Be prepared to laugh, cry, and be a little confused maybe, sure. More spoiler-y type comments after the trailer.

Making Fitness a Habit (with ClassPass)

Friday, 28 April 2017Monday, 15 January 2018 Starr5 Comments

Back when I was setting my New Year’s Resolutions for the year, I really wanted to take my fitness resolutions more seriously, as they are pretty consistently the resolutions I take the least seriously and, as a result, see the least amount of progress on.

I set 3 concrete fitness resolutions and follow-up resolutions:

Learn to lift + lift a certain weight once I did
Run a mile without stopping + get that mile within a certain time
Do a full split + both vertically and horizontally

We are almost halfway-through the year, so it is time for me to get to the point of looking at the follow-up resolutions and check in on my progress. While these resolutions have not been the primary focus of my short-term fitness goals, I have been doing really well with making fitness a regular weekly habit for myself since January and I really do have to thank ClassPass for it.

ClassPass is a monthly membership that gives you access to many, many boutique fitness studios and gyms in over 30 cities around the world. It’s great specifically if:

… you want to try out classes at a boutique studio or using the equipment at a gym but don’t want to commit to a membership fee without knowing if you like it
… you would rather go to many different studios and gyms throughout the month than commit to one kind of workout or one facility

In celebration of that “new year, new me” mentality, ClassPass was running a promotion in January: 50% off their usual $55 for 5 classes deal, which meant I got 5 classes a month for $27, with each class being just a little over $6, for 3 months. That’s an awesome deal, so I went for it, hoping that 3 months was enough time for me to form a habit.

Long story short, I think this was one of the better moves I’ve made with my time and money in a really long time. I’ve found studios and classes that I really love. With my ClassPass plan, I’m able to visit a studio 2 times within a month, so I’m able to switch it up while still visiting my favorite workout spots twice a month. It’s added something to my routine and I am seeing physical results. There are little baby pre-muscle bumps on my legs and my arms that weren’t there at the beginning of January, and I cannot tell you how exciting that is!

I won’t mince words: it was, and remains, really hard. I knew that the only time I could regularly commit to working out was in the morning before work, since my post-work schedule varies wildly but usually is filled with other activities. To give myself enough time to work out in the mornings meant I was choosing 7AM classes, which still kills me many mornings. The pain was also intense. I was going from being quite sedentary to working out 1-2 times a week (and up to 4 or 5 times a week some weeks), and that was extremely painful. I felt sore sore sore and the hardest class for me was my first session at a local kickboxing gym where I do high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Because it was so painful for me to just walk out of that gym, on top of the several days where I was so sore that it was difficult to bring food to my mouth, I have made that kickboxing gym one of the spots that I visit twice a month, every month. It’s one of my shortest workouts at 30 minutes and I love it loads.

One thing that has helped with the amount of soreness and reducing my recovery time from days to singular days is consuming protein powder. I know, I KNOW, I hardly recognize myself right now. But there are a lot of fitness and weight-lifting enthusiasts in my office, and I overheard one of them suggesting increasing another person’s protein intake upon hearing that the other person was taking a long time to recover from muscle soreness. I figured it wouldn’t hurt, and whaddya know, I am not feeling as sore for as long. (In fact, sometimes I am suspicious that I’m not working out hard enough because I am not feeling as sore as I did those first 4 weeks I started working out.)

On top of my 5 fitness classes a month, I am also trying to take advantage of the gym in my office building that is available to me free of charge! Especially during weeks that I only have one fitness class scheduled, I’ll try to make time to go to my building gym (again, at 7AM), and lift weights and then run on the treadmill. I’m going to be honest: I never have a real plan when I lift weights. This is a problem that I think may be remedied by me investing in a trainer, as was my original plan back in December, but right now I do essentially every exercise I know I can do with dumbbells and that takes me about 40 minutes. Then I run for about 20 minutes. I move up to heavier dumbbells when the ones I usually use are not on the rack. That is maybe not the best reason to increase weight but that’s what I do!

This is really uncharted territory here. I now own grippy socks and boxing handwraps, because my favorite classes are barre and kickboxing. (?!) I have a tub of protein powder in my pantry. I am increasingly finding myself in the unfamiliar dilemma of needing more workout clothes because I really don’t do laundry frequently enough to get by on how much I have currently.

And I like working out. That is maybe the most bizarre thing to me, but I look forward to my workouts. It’s a time when I am too busy trying to keep myself alive to worry about the myriad of other things I concern myself with usually. Exercise keeps me too physically busy to be anxious. It becomes an almost meditative experience, that I’m able to be so focused on physical activity that my mental activity has to take a backseat.

I’m not expecting to be swole (despite how much I joke about it). (It is maybe not funny how many times I now utter the word “swole” out loud.) I am still in that stage where I talk about my working out pretty often because I’m still in a state of shock that I’m doing it and I kind of need to vocalize it to confirm that it’s really happening. There are weeks where I don’t work out as much as I know I should and I’m still struggling with problem areas on my body that need more attention. I need to really get serious about weight-lifting if I want to set certain weight goals there to reach by December, and that will require me to do something different from just… all the dumbbell exercises I know. I also need to get more serious about running and flexibility.

But I think I like this new version of myself that is exercising and investing time and money and energy into my health. And I hope I like her enough to keep investing in her and making her better.

How do you stay in shape? The studios I have favorited are barre, kickboxing, and yoga. I am a creature of habit, which means I’m actually having a hard time trying out any new classes, so if you’re in the DC area and have specific studios to recommend or you just have a workout to recommend in general (I keep seeing Bodypump pop up!), let me know!

Do you like group fitness or doing your own thing at the gym more? I really love group fitness, because I think the peer pressure of a bunch of strangers really keeps me on track and helps push me a bit farther than if I were just working out on my own. I don’t like working out with friends very much because I know I’m not in shape and I fear judgement from people I know and care about. I am getting better about working on out my own at the gym, but my biggest source of anxiety there is just running into coworkers. This social pressure is all in my head, I know, and I am getting over it little by little as I get stronger, little by little. I also tend to not push myself quite as hard and, of course, not have a particularly good comprehensive workout plan when I am on my own.

This is not a sponsored post, by the way. I just wouldn’t be in the place I am in right now without having paid for a month of exercise upfront for 4 months, and I know that, and ClassPass has been really great for me and my needs specifically. I am including a referral link if you’re interested in trying it out for $30 off.

The Fate of the Furious (2017)

Friday, 14 April 2017Friday, 14 April 2017 StarrLeave a comment

Can you believe we have 8 Fast and Furious movies now?
Can you believe there will be [at least] 2 more?

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What amazes me the most about the ridiculous franchise isn’t just that it keeps going and going and going, but that… people really love these movies! There isn’t much street racing in them anymore, but you get a few things pretty reliably:

Hot cars
Hot girls
FAMILY

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I’ve seen every Fast and Furious movie since the 4th (Fast & Furious, the worst-named one) in theaters, movies 4 through 8. But you know what, I have a hard time recalling the first 3 movies. I definitely understand that Tokyo Drift happened, but I don’t know much about the first movie or 2 Fast 2 Furious, although I think I may have caught bits and pieces of the first 3 movies when they aired on TV.

With that being said, I love this franchise. It’s so absurd but pretty pure entertainment. It follows the above formula and always delivers. The plots have become less about street racing and more about elaborate heists that involve highly trained people who also love cars and are skilled drivers. (At least since the fourth movie, but my impressions from the first three are that there was a heavier emphasis on street races.)

I’ll talk more about my relationship with this franchise after the cut, but Fast 8 (“F8” of the Furious, as it were!) (really grateful that someone exercised the restraint to not stylize the title this way) raises the stakes. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), who spends so many of these movies growling about family and strengthening his team…

… goes rogue, betrays his team and his loved ones. Dom is the core of the team and of these movies (aside from Paul Walker’s character, Brian), so seeing the family try to figure out not only how to maneuver without him but maneuver to catch him is interesting.

the-fate-of-the-furious-trailer — With antagonist “Cipher”, played by Charlize Theron. She has these gross locks-esque things on her head that make sense when we first meet her character in Havana (she seems like a harmless hippie tourist) but I don’t know why she has to have them throughout the entire film. Like sure, you can have beautiful female hackers, but if she’s the bad guy, then she can’t be too together, let’s give her this hair??

At the risk of spoiling too much, I’ll just leave it at that, but I enjoyed the movie. I thought that the reason for Dom going rogue was… not entirely convincing. And some of the action sequences were definitely straight up ridiculous. (Remember the absuuuuurd car leap in the last movie?) But they’re still fun and entertaining!

I mean, at the end of the day, the Fast and Furious franchise doesn’t try to make sense. It aims to entertain, with an emotional core of family, padded out with hot cars, hot bodies, and hot locations. (Although F8’s climax happens in Russia, so… hot cars on cold ice!)

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Rest in peace Paul Walker, whose character is mentioned in the movie, but again, it’s not quite satisfying how they explain why Brian doesn’t get involved when Dom goes rogue. (Because they promised to leave Brian and Mia alone to raise their family and live in peace… which is a good reason but I feel like Dom threatening the safety of the world is a pretty good reason to call them up?)

I am a bit conflicted that as they have characters leave the franchise, they just kind of tack on new ones? Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is fantastic in these movies, and the addition of Scott Eastwood in this movie was pretty fun, but how big does this family need to be? It just feels strange given that I’m not done mourning Han and Gisele and Brian and now I have to just welcome all these new characters to the roster? I like Nathalie Emmanuel but I didn’t think she would be back for this movie, to be honest. (Ultimately, I’m glad she was.)

ALSO, lemme just say that I love the soundtracks of these movies. They always serve as great dance music for whatever summer they are released. So good.

Spoilers and more ranting about this franchise after the trailer.

The Fate of the Furious is out in theaters today. Let me know what you think if you see it!

Lemme talk about The Rock some more, okay, he is just a machine?!

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Also, I liked the bromance between him and Deckard (Jason Statham) that develops over the movie. They have a good moment where he realizes that Deckard has a similar background – they’re both in prison despite serving their countries so well and with high honors. And Deckard becoming a part of the team is pretty natural, as everything he did in the 7th movie was to avenge his brother. (Who makes an appearance in this movie!)

Helen Mirren plays the Shaw brothers’ mother, and it’s fantastic, she has this great accent and it’s beautiful and Helen Mirren is wonderful, thank you for all your gifts.

One of my FAVORITE PARTS of this movie was when The Rock led his daughter’s soccer team in performing a haka. I’ll just leave this here for you to watch if you’re not that familiar with it and/or want to see what kind of care they did/didn’t take to do it. (Also, The Rock as a father figure is still debatable but he seems to try a bit harder in this one!)

I know that before he voiced Maui in Moana, a lot of people didn’t know The Rock was of Samoan descent, and I’m glad he doesn’t seem to want people to let that factoid go unknown anymore. The Rock is awesome, full stop.

I was unsurprised to see that Dom went rogue because he is a father. This is foreshadowed a few times, and he and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) even discuss the topic. But I assumed that Letty had lied to him about not being pregnant but Cipher had the proof and used that against Dom. Imagine my surprise when we find Elena (Elsa Pataky) and her son by Dom are captive. I have no idea how long Dom was with Elena during the time that Letty was “dead” but not really, because they got together at the very end of Fast Five. (Elena has always gotten the short end of the stick in these storylines.) (It doesn’t help her that she gets killed in this movie. She doesn’t really have any agency through any of the films she’s in….)

The baby is so cute though!!! Such a cute fat baby!!!

And the scene where Jason Statham takes out the plane full of henchmen while carrying the baby carrier is really fun and very cute, although needless for the sake of entertainment, as he could have easily neutralized everyone on the plane BEFORE picking up the baby carrier?

Another ridiculous scene? Everything with the submarine. Nothing made sense, and at that point, nothing really needed to I guess.

I did think it was interesting that there was a scene where cars are hacked to basically storm a target in the streets of New York. I have always been concerned about car hacking with them becoming Internet-connected, and this movie kind of illustrated the worst of those fears. JEEZ.

These movies are still not great to women and how they treat them… but you can’t care about these things TOO much when the rest of the movie also is just ludicrous. (Shout-out to Ludacris, who plays a nerd hacker and who I have always loved.) (Please start an organization soon to get kids interested in coding instead of helping sell Xfinity packages.)

Anyway, I was still so happy coming out of that movie, and you bet I’ll see the next 2 in theaters. Whatever, I don’t care! Go see it and let me know what you think!