April 2018

April was a fairly uneventful month. Norma and I saw Arlo Guthrie at the Saban Theater on April 5. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it, but it was a very fun evening with lots of great music, much of it from Arlo’s daughter. I actually walked away wishing the show had been longer! The following week, my work colleague and I conducted our annual Speedboat Magazine Swimsuit Issue photo shoot at Lake Elsinore, which was fun. I guess those were the big highlights. I also got a new crown on an eight-year-old implant after the original crown became loose (and got the ball rolling on replacing another crown as well). Oh, and I solved a great deal of Jumble puzzles in April. BOOKS: I listened to the audio version of When You Disappeared by John Marrs, and started to listen to The Perfect Roommate by Minka Kent as well as to “sight read” Listen, Please Listen by Naomi Hintze. TV: Homeland ended its seventh season, and many of my regular series (Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, Special Victims Unit, etc., will have their season finales in May. Here are the movies I saw in April:

READY PLAYER ONE (2018)—Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s sci-fi novel is set in dystopian 2045, where most of the country’s residents alleviate their depressing real lives by plugging into the virtual reality world of OASIS. Protagonist Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) spends the whole movie searching for an Easter Egg in the game left there by OASIS founder James Halliday, who is dead. It’s a real hodgepodge of a movie with some excellent special effects, but most of it is forgettable nonsense. There’s a very interesting sequence that revolves around the movie The Shining; that is probably the only thing I’ll remember about this movie. Oh, and that it reminded me a lot of the South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft” (which is far superior to this). (7)

A QUIET PLACE (2018)—John Krasinski, star of the sitcom The Office, stars in and directs this scary horror movie, which more than anything else resembles the aliens-will-get-you shocker The War of the Worlds. The (by now) well-known gimmick is that it’s almost a silent movie, because the aliens are blind—they use their sense of hearing to hunt and catch you, so you have to be very quiet. As Krasinski’s wife (Emily Blunt) discovers, that gets really tricky if you step on a nail with your bare feet, or if you give birth to a baby. The movie leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but it’s very engrossing nonetheless. (8)

THE ENDLESS (2018)—Two escapees from a “UFO cult” return to the camp years later, mostly out of sheer curiosity, and find some extremely weird supernatural things going on there. Some of it is interesting, but as the movie goes on, it gets more and more ludicrous and bizarre (there are a bunch of time-loop domes spread around the countryside for some reason). The first half of the movie is very compelling, but then it kind of goes off the rails. (7)

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (2018)—This is the third and (so far) best of the Marvel Avengers movies. There are so many stars and superheroes in the film—too many, to be honest—that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. As always, the thing I love about these Marvel movies is the humor. They can’t put too much comedy in these movies, because there’s so much sinister stuff and fighting and evil villains…it’s nice to be able to laugh and relieve the tension. (Robert Downey Jr. is the funniest of the superheroes, although Chris Pratt is a close second.) This is essentially a good guys vs. the bad guy movie, and it all ends on an extremely somber note where half of the cast perishes—at least, until they can all be revived in next year’s sequel. And Zoe Saldana is the most heavenly green goddess of all time. I enjoyed it! (9)