Category: Blog

A Review of Every Movie We Saw This Year At The Drive In!

October 29, 2022

Another season at our local drive in has ended, and I thought it would be fun to review every single film we saw this year. To keep things short, the reviews are five words only, and most were written immediately after the films ended and therefore were first impressions. Lastly we saw several films twice, and in each case we reviewed them both times. Here’s a seasons worth of film reviews, in order…

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 – Jim Carey steals the show.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore – Left early due to boredom.

Dr Strange in The Multiverse of Madness – Bonkers in the best way.

Everything Everywhere All At Once – Starts well but ends weak.

Dr Strange in The Multiverse of Madness – Better than the first time.

Top Gun Maverick– An entertaining military recruitment film.

Jurassic World Dominion – Dirt on an old boot.

Thor: Love And Thunder – Fun overall despite excessive comedy.

Lightyear – Charmless and a bit boring.

League of Super Pets – The best DC universe film?

Nope – Best film of the year.

Nope – Even better on second viewing.

Black Phone – Didn’t tread any new ground.

Bullet Train – We left after 20 minutes.

Dragon Ball Super: Super Heroes – Most entertaining film of 2022.

Bullet Train – Stupid but also slightly entertaining.

Minions: Rise of Gru – A very predictable kids film.

Beast – Written and directed by fools.

The Invitation – Should have been called ‘Crapula’.

Tremors – Six degrees of monster worms!

Brain Dead – Seventeen percent on rotten tomatoes.

Dawn of The Dead – Grim and chilling zombie archetype.

Phenomenon – Jennifer Connelly is a star!

The Woman King – Spoiler: the king is male.

Pearl – Equal parts disturbing and funny.

Jurassic World Dominion – Time to flush this franchise.

Spider Man: No Way Home – One of the MCU’s best.

Lyle Lyle Crocodile – Many smiles for this crocodile.

Black Adam – Objectibly terrible; I enjoyed it!

Black Adam – The Rock meets CGI cutscene.

Halloween Ends – It never should have started.

That’s a lot of films, and we absolutely got our moneys worth from our season pass. While some of the films were objectively awful, even a bad film can be watchable at a drive-in, and it’s always fun to go. You can bet we’ll be getting the pass again for 2023 and doing this all again next year 🙂

Incidentally while Nope was probably the ‘best’ film of the year, Dragon Ball Super: Super Heroes was unquestionably my most entertaining. The fight scenes in particular were the work of genius, and I had a big smile on my face throughout the entirety of the film. Watch it!

The Box Of Treasures

September 25, 2022

This came in the mail the other day:

It’s a box from Adam’s sister (let’s call her AC) in Japan! It’s a large box and had been traveling for almost 3.5 months! It was sent surface mail which could be the topic of a blog post in and of itself (but I shall save for another time).

The box was a big surprise, and I couldn’t wait to open it. But never in my wildest imagination did I expect the contents:

Look at this pristine condition burger box from McDonald’s! Back in April Macca’s Japan had a Shin Ultraman collaboration which featured the return of two chicken burgers which would be sold in Ultraman boxes. AC sent me two of these boxes! Aren’t they beautiful 🙂

But it didn’t stop there! Inside the box was also three of the special Ultraman branded plastic cups, also from McDonald’s. These are even prettier than the burger box and have immediately become the stars of my ‘Ultraman fast food packaging’ sub-collection!

I don’t know any details behind the acquisition of these items – AC included limited commentary in the box – so I assume she went to McDonald’s herself and purchased a Shin Chicken Tatsuya burger with accompanying McFizz Aomori Fuji Apple beverage. And yet the burger boxes are absolutely spotless and look unused… did she have a black market connection? However she obtained these, I appreciate it.

If you’re not aware, these items are in collaboration with the brand new Shin Ultraman film that opened in Japan in May. I want to see this film more than any film that ever existed but it hasn’t yet been released outside of Japan so I continue to wait. I’m guessing Amber saw the movie, since the box also contained this extraordinary item:

I believe this is a cup purchased from a Japanese cinema! The side of the cup features the movie logo, and underneath it says ‘fantasy special effects film’ just in case you’re one of the handful of Japanese movie-goers that hasn’t heard of Ultraman! The cup is large and the Ultraman on top – in his Spacium Beam pose – is large and dynamic. This is an amazing item that will proudly be displayed on my shelf for ever!

And this wasn’t everything in the box. There were a few other Ultraman items, an extraordinary hand towel (that you’ll see in a future post), a clear file (how did AC know I was planning an upcoming clear file post?!?) and two more incredible Gotochi postcards including this one:

I need to go back to Japan so I can send some of these special postcards myself…

Thanks AC; this box was like Christmas coming early 🙂

The Bonkers Picross Book

September 20, 2022

I bought this last time I was in NYC:

KLS and I both enjoy Picross puzzles, and even without opening it I knew I’d be buying it. Here’s what the cover says:

Summer 2022 Anime Feature?!? Fun, beautiful and easy to draw? Dream co-star feature?!? Sheep with presents??!?

This was my sort of book!

Picross is the puzzle where you fill in squares in a grid to make a picture according to the numbers along the edges of the rows and columns. If it says 4 that means 4 connected squares. 4 2 would mean an unconnected blocks of 4 and 2 along that line (or column). It’s fun 🙂

The book is loaded with puzzles – over a hundred – and they get difficult almost immediately. The above photo are all the ‘easy’ ones they have, and after these you dive right into this sort of madness:

The difficulty difference between the eggplant and whatever the above is is tremendous, and it would take a great deal of time to solve.

But this book has incentives for beating the puzzles! When you finish one you can answer the question next to it (which seems to usually be ‘identify this character’) and submit your answer to win a prize, some of which are very nice:

As befits an anime themed puzzle book, many of the prizes are for anime/game fans as well. Alas the submission for entry was September 19 (yesterday!) so it seems I’ll miss out.

If you’re some sort of Picross god and have no trouble with that 45 x 50 shown above, this book has you covered, since it even has several large fold-out puzzles including this lunacy:

That’s 60 x 200, or 120 times larger than the goat I did above. This would be a monumental achievement to complete. I wonder how long it will take me?

And if you’re just masochistic, the book even includes some (harder) colored picrosses, including this fold-out one:

Yes, it is as difficult as it looks.

Oh and if you’re wondering what these look like when finished, the book also includes the full solutions to the previous issue, which it seems was anime-themed as well:

Since I’ve done the easy 10 x 10 puzzles I’m moving on to a bigger challenge: a 45 x 50 one featuring characters from the Bastard!!! anime:

I’ll follow up if I ever manage to complete it 🙂

Robot Claw