Category: Miscellaneous

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!

  • Posted in Blog
  • Robert

20 Minutes Into The Future

  • October 23, 2022

I recently bought these:

It’s a full set of Max Headroom stickers from 1986. Although not labeled as such, these were a Topps product and are mostly based on the TV film that introduced the character, although some images clearly come from The Max Headroom Show.

I was surprised to learn these existed since I’d never heard of them, and while wax packs do exist, I can’t find an image of a box anywhere. I have read claims that the set was released in very limited quantities in the USA only, and another online article claims it was sold as sets only (which can’t be true since there exist wax packs on eBay). It’s a mystery!

The first two-thirds of the stickers resemble fairly standard Topps-style trading cards from the mid 1980s, only they would be mostly meaningless to non-fans since the images seem to be in random order and the backs contain no text; instead being dedicated to two large ‘puzzles’ of Max:

The remaining quarter are foil stickers, which are reflective, slightly embossed and very impressive for a 1986 set. However five of them are extremely unusual, especially if you’re familiar with the character:

These look like poses the actor that played Max (Matt Frewer) did to test the prosthetic or perhaps to be digitized for marketing purposes. I’ve never seen these images on any other Max Headroom product and they seem out of place here!

The backs of the foil stickers contain the origin of Max taken from the film:

This is curious for a few reasons. Firstly I don’t think the film ever screened in the USA (and in fact Max himself didn’t catch on here until about a year after the rest of the world) and secondly it doesn’t say much at all about Max himself! Once again this would have been a confusing product for non-fans.

These didn’t cost me much (<$20) and the stickers are in perfect condition so it’s a fun curio for my collection. I’d love to test and see if a sticker still worked, but I don’t have any doubles so I’ll never know. Likewise I doubt I’ll ever know the true history of this weird product. Do any of you remember these from 1986?

  • Posted in Collecting
  • Robert

Day At The Museum

  • October 14, 2022

We’re in NYC for Kristin’s birthday trip, and today we went to the Museum of Natural History next to Central Park. We’ve been here before but not for many years, so we were looking forward to the visit.

The museum was enormously popular – we had to join a long line to get in – and once inside we legged it to the Hall of Minerals so we could enjoy it before the screaming throngs arrived. Our plan worked, and we had the gallery almost entirely to ourselves.

There were gems and precious stones and amazing mineral specimens everywhere! Some of the largest and most spectacular examples ever known are there to see, and it was incredible just seeing the variety and abundance of beautiful stones on display (like the tourmalines above), including the famous ‘Star of India’:

They had gems and minerals in both raw and cut versions, and many displays on every aspect of minerology (I liked the science of how gems interact with light). If you like rocks – especially pretty ones – be sure to visit one day 🙂

With the minerals and gems done – and after a break for a (grossly overpriced) lunch – it was time to admire the museum’s famous animal dioramas.

There are dozens of these in various sections throughout the museum, featuring mammals and birds and sea life and even humans. They consist of lifelike taxidermy set in a foreground designed to replicate real life, backed with a painted background. They are eerily realistic, and I can see now why a popular movie was made with that as the plot!

We watched a video about how these are made, and I was surprised to find that almost everything is fake. All the grass and leaves and flowers and snow is fake, and yet it looks incredibly real. I loved these exhibits and if I lived in the city I’d see myself visiting regularly just to sit on the benches and admire them.

A gallery about Earth featured lots of volcano facts and one of the oldest rocks known (over 4 billion years) and hidden away in the back we found a seismograph connected to a pressure plate. Of course I had to try and generate a good signal….

I’m sure you’ll agree the slight injury to my upper sartorius muscle and the subsequent agony I experienced every step during the one-hour trek back to the hotel was absolutely worth it for the satisfaction of knowing I moved the seismograph needle a few millimetres.

And then the dinosaurs! The fourth floor of the museum is essentially dedicated to dinosaurs, and there’s hundreds of skeletons and fossils on display. It’s beautiful and fascinating and undoubtedly the reason the museum draws such large crowds.

A great many of these are real skeletons (as opposed to casts, which are common in other museums) and the museum has owned some for over 100 years. They’ve got one of the biggest known skeletons on display (a titanosaur) and many tiny ones as well. From dinosaurs to prehistoric sea life to early mammals (including prehistoric kangaroos) there’s an incredible variety on display.

Apparently only 15 T-Rex skeletons have been found, and some of those are only bits and pieces. Naturally the museum has the best one on display, it’s the showcase of the entire exhibit (and maybe the entire museum?), and it’s swarmed by people trying to take photos just like mine above.

It is an extremely impressive sight, but not too far away they have an arguably more impressive item: a cast of what is believed to be the most famous fossil in the world, the ‘Berlin specimen’ of archaeopteryx, which paved the way to our current understanding that perhaps dinosaurs didn’t truly die out, they just evolved into birds:

It’s impossible to walk these halls and not wonder what these creatures were like. How they looked, walked or swam? What they sounded like, how they behaved and what they ate? Why did they have spines and plates and sails, or long long necks or tiny feet? How did they live, and how did they die? The displays frequently remind the visitor that very little is known about dinosaurs, and even theories (which constantly evolve) can never be tested.

One of the most thought-provoking comments I read today is that there are a many questions we all have about dinosaurs that we don’t know the answers for when applied to animals still alive today. Dinosaurs therefore will always be beyond our understanding: monsters and myths, surviving only as fossils. We can only ever guess and wonder at their reality.

It was a full day at the museum, and this doesn’t include everything we saw. If you’re ever in NYC put this place on your list; I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.