The Marci Rating System

1. I totally thought this was the movie that opened with a scene of a guy who was cheating on his wife in (Japan?) getting clobbered to death by hail. It was one of my least favorite things about the movie, in fact. Except that apparently it’s not that movie at all. Huh.

2. So dumb, and yet I’ve now seen it twice! The perfect movie to watch if you are feeling insecure about your creative talents. Someone paid $130million to make this movie! Compared to that, a bunch of hours banging away at the computer keyboard is cake. (And the end result has at least a 99% chance of being better than watching the Silver Surfer use his abs like a tele-tubby.)

3. Speaking of ab!tv… WHAT WAS THAT? Please tell me that was not a comics!canon Silver Surfer power, because that would just be… wow. Although I actually think that was one of my favorite Sue Storm facial expressions in the movie — I can’t even imagine what the direction was there, but her face is so perfectly ‘WTF you couldn’t have just used words?’

4. Speaking of the Storm family… No mention of female relatives at all in this one, after the intriguing tidbits in the first movie. (Instead we got “Dad would be proud.” According to wikipedia — and a sketchy matchup of timelines — ‘Dad’ was probably in jail at that time, so I’m not sure how much Sue would care about making him proud, but she seemed to appreciate the sentiment.)

5. Last but not least: so, aren’t there still like seven or eight giant HOLES in the planet? I’m not a geologist, or a seismologist, or anything like that, but I’m guessing giant holes are generally considered to be not good. Am I the only one who worried about this after the movie was over?

[Add-on Note: Apparently the F4 franchise will be rebooting in film in 2014?]

The sun is shining, the temperature is above freezing — it must be time to read fanfic!

Ghost in the Wires, by sororexitium

Avengers AU where everyone thinks Tony Stark died in Afghanistan, except for Obie (who’s a bad dude) and Steve (who thinks the computer AI that keeps talking to him is suspiciously sentient).

Carefully he peers into the lab, but it’s dark, and Steve can only see half-reflections that come from the light upstairs. He steps in cautiously, whispering, “JARVIS, where are the lights?”

A voice that isn’t JARVIS’s answers, “Well, normal people put them to their right, but it’s been a while since I designed this place. Sooo…”

My monthly email to myself! (I have confirmed that no one else was ever told to do this, but since my coworkers are regularly baffled by such computer amazements as the auto-fill feature, I’m not sure I trust their advice anyway.)

Leap year, seek year: where is the path I’m looking for? It still amazes me that I’ve reached a point in my life where my common reaction to things is to think, ‘well, I suggest prayer, and let the universe sort it out.’ More things on heaven and earth, truly.

Best of luck in the month of hearts and cookies!

Much love,
Marci

Look, it’s my January fic! In February! (Hardly late at all, really.)

Warn the neighbors

Personally, Tony was of the opinion that if Reed couldn’t figure out what was going on outside his own windows, that wasn’t the Avengers’ fault, but he’d been outvoted.

I had to choke back laughter at work today at this exchange:

Coworker 1: Phone call for you on line one.
Coworker 2: Yeah?
Coworker 1: It’s one of your *customers.*

To fully appreciate that, you have to picture someone roughly the age of the Queen of England, saying “one of your customers” in the same way one might say “(paint me like) one of your french girls.” You would think we weren’t a perfectly respectable retail establishment, where nearly all of the calls are, in fact, from customers.

Just a quick announcement that we are now into double digits in the Avengers movie countdown. (97 days to go!)

credit: I saw it first on tumblr (which is where I was able to nab the image from, no thanks to flickr there), but it was credited there to Rob Kroenert, so a thank you to him as well!

[Note: This is cool -- R. Kroenert notes that there were about 20 other photographers also taking pictures, which means that there are a relatively large number of people dedicating their time to photographing spectacular natural phenomena, as opposed to, say, committing crimes.

Also, more than 900 people have favorited the photo over on flickr, which is awesome -- that's 900 people *celebrating* spectacular natural phenomena as opposed to, say, committing crimes.

You know what sucks, though? The way that *I* was exposed to this photo, and the way *I* am celebrating it by posting it here, albeit credited and linked and everything, could be considered a crime if certain ::ahem:: legislation passes.

Dammit.]

{NOTE2: Hey, but check this out! wikipedia has a pic that’s shareable under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. Woohoo!}

credit: E. Howe (aka Ambitious Wench) THANK YOU FOR SHARING!

This movie was very pretty, from a visual sense, and it had good music. Unfortunately, if I wanted to watch a pretty movie with good music, I would watch Fly Away Home, not ROBOT BOXING.

Really, that’s the premise of the movie: ROBOT BOXING. Sounds exciting! And yet I fast-forwarded over vast swathes of the first hour or so (the movie is over *two hours* long) because it was so dull. (It’s possible I have been forever spoiled by seeing the third Bourne movie in theaters — so much excitement! I had no idea what was going on, but it was happening SO FAST!)

Anyway, the biggest problem I had with the movie was not the horrible sidelining of female characters, or the lack of interesting plot, but the lack of any actual character development. So I made up my own. Get ready for this:

MAX IS A ROBOT.

It kind of works, if you don’t think about it too hard, which clearly the movie’s creators did not. It can be used to explain away some of the most egregious handwave moments, and takes the movie to a much more interesting ‘I, Robot’ kind of place instead of a ‘Wolverine: Origins: if Wolverine were really boring and robots boxed’ place.

I wasn’t too impressed by the first episode, but ep 2 (Molehattan) offered a hilarious look at what it’s like to be a Baxter building tenant:

“Is it Doctor Doom? A giant monster? The Negative Zone again?”
-Mr. Bartleby

“Is that one of your supervillain friends? He’s quite tiny, isn’t he?”
-Mrs. Monet

(Mole Man just never gets any respect, does he?)

(Since apparently no F4 post is complete without a shoutout to Party of Two, by Traincat:

“I’m pretty sure we can watch a movie and then go defeat the Mole Man,” he said. “It’s not like he moves very fast. He’s got like, arthritis or something. He’s ancient.”)

Also, I had a startling realization re: Baxter building neighbors. The Fantastic Four apparently live next door to Christine Lagarde!

Christine Lagarde (IMF Managing Director)

Classy Neighbor Lady

Stuff I’d Watch in Theaters
-The Avengers (May 4)
-The Amazing Spiderman (July 3)
-The Bourne Legacy (August 3)

Stuff I’d Put in My Netflix Queue
-This Means War
-Men In Black III
-The Dark Knight Rises

Stuff I’d Be Mildly Interested In Watching At Some Point and/or Would Read The Fanfic
-The Lorax
-The Hunger Games
-Rock of Ages
-Snow White and the Huntsman
-Rise of the Guardians

Non-Movie Viewing Events I’m Keeping An Eye On
-The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes
-Ultimate Spider-Man
(both scheduled to start up with new episdoes in April!)