Last doing-things post of the year (mostly movies)

Hard to believe, but I've kept up this semi-regular documentation of media consumption for over a year now. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but in this case, I'm happy to be small. Any day I get to say, "I have done the thing," is a good day.So what have I been doodly-doing? Mostly socializing, baking, and eating holiday food. But also the usual reading & watching. This is a long post since it's been a LONG time since the last one.Books: Lots of fantasy fluff--errrm, that is to say historical romance fluff. Many reprints, which meant plenty of squirmy "wow, that's not a good behavior to promote," moments. Elizabeth Boyle (good stories, but a lot of recurring phrase tics and sketchy themes) Sarah Maclean (great dialogue, fun alterations to history, good job with consent) Julianne Maclean ( similar to Sarah Maclean ) I plan to read/re-read all of N. K. Jemison's ouvre in January as my hibernation treat.Television: I'm watching less and less TV. NCIS will definitely be off the schedule after this season. Ditto Lucifer. They're both okay, but okay isn't enough to justify my time these days. Supernatural is ending, and that's cool. Mostly I'm watching Netflix originals & DVD sets from the 'brarPunisher: A punishing experience, pun intended. (Bwahahahahahaha...ahem...sorry.) I'm not a fan of gore, and this spilled over my tolerance threshold, but it avoided the origin story trap, and it didn't stretch for a redemption arc. I have Major Issues with people giving heroes a pass on murder just because they're killing bad guys, but this mostly dodged that trap too.Defenders: Origin story could have been forgivable if they hadn't taken so MANY episodes setting up the team. Also I could do with a LOT less Iron Fist. And even less "throw every supporting character from every series into this because why not?" plotting. It wasn't bad. It should've been better.Movies:  This has been a bad year for catching movies in the theater. So I'm grabbing them from the library as they hit DVD. (Have I mentioned lately how much of a library fan I am? PUBLIC LIBRARIES RULE!)  Ahem. Anyway. I watch a lot of movies in midwinter. So, grab a cuppa. This gets long.The Great Wall. I almost liked it. Loved that a white guy was the Exotic Dispenser of Magical MacGuffins (contrary to many viewers, I didn't see Damon as White Savior nearly so much as "barbarian dude barely tolerated the whole time." The smart dude who engineered the victory was Chinese, as was the heroine who delivered the final blow. Never was Damon's arc the focus of the plot.) I say "almost liked it" because OMG it was stupid. Fantasy siege battles are all fun and games except the engineering is JUST AWFUL AND COMPLICATED FOR NO REASON and war doesn't work that way. I felt like Sigourney Weaver in GalaxyQuest for over half the movie.Transformers Last Knight. Watching this made me wonder if the writers and producers  got lost in a props department and came up with lame excuses to use everything they ran across. Possibly they were also intoxicated at the time? King Arthur. Aliens. Transformers in all shapes and varieties. Add in massive amounts of voice-over and awkward failed attempts at "snappy" dialogue, stir with a huge cast of cardboard cutout characters and pretensions everywhere. It's a painful, boring, overblown, disjointed mess. Not as bad as Battleship, but close. It made fine background viewing for three batches of cookie dough, but I would have been royally ticked off if I'd spent money on it.Thor: Ragnarok.  Did I mention this one already? No, my November posts were all about food. So here's my Thor report.  I prepped for the new movie by watching the first two back-to-back on Thor Eve, and was once again annoyed by all the oportunities missed in both films.  Thor 1 was not an origin story.  That's the best I can say about it. Well, that and a shirtless Hemsworth. Ragnarok was worth the theater prices and made up for all the prior missed opportunities.I adored seeing Thor as an earnest straight man constantly stumbling into comic situations. I always liked him better in the graphic novels when he was played for comic relief.  I am evidently in the minority when it comes to not missing the formal forsoothian Asgardian language and grammar.  The "main" villain didn't impress me, as well-acted as she was, and the plot felt like they trid hard to cram two movie's worth of plot into one, but hey. Loki & Thor banter. Dr. Strange banter. Hulk banter. ALL THE BANTER AND GIGGLES.  I like it. Another!Star Wars Episode 8. For this one, too, I made the effort to hit a theater, and I'm glad I did.Kong: Skull Island. Hooyah, I'm glad I didn't spend popcorn money on this putrid mess. Not even Hiddleston & some other great actors could save it from its "Heart of Darkness meets Jules Verne plus Jurassic Park with a 70's retro feel" premise. Too many flavors went into the smoothie blender. The result was horrible: gritty, lumpy and with a bad aftertaste. The only redeeming quality: seamless integration of the CGI. Never once did Kong or the other critters remind me they were merely imaginary.Alien:Covenant. Um. The crew were not as fundamentally, hatefully stupid as the crew of the Prometheus, and the dual dose of Skaarsgard was scenery-chewing, over the top fabulous, but...it was still a problematic mess of people behaving so ridiculously I was rooting for them all to die much faster than they did. And the demonstrably incompetent captain's faith being played as a beneficial trait misunderstood as a flaw by the foolish secularists bugged the shit out of me almost as much as the "superior intelligence equals emotionless also equals evil" theme.Get Out. This one would have been too intense for me in the theater. Right at the painful edge of scary. So good. So creepy.King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Does adding a subtitle subtract quality from a movie? Just asking. This might have been a decent, albeit anachronistic fantasy movie a la Knight's Tale, (which I hated on first viewing because I was told it was historical, hah, lols NO) but the producers just had to slap King Arthur's name on this, and it so very much is not true to the King Arthur legend, not even tangentially or as a "re-imagining of the themes." Also WTF with putting in magical war mommoths. EPIC EYE ROLLS.Baby Driver. I can see why it's so well-reviewed. Fantastic cast of fine actors giving it their all, razor-sharp direction, solid writing. More happened in 20 min of this movie than in the first hour of King Arthur. I didn't like it, I generally don't seek out the "I'm only bad to protect other people" not-really-a-redemption-arc tropes. It just didn't wow me. But I can see why other people adore it. (shrugs) It's quite a brilliant film.The Last Jedi. I enjoyed it from opening credits to final fade to black. There is much I loved. Don't get me started on the flaws. Just don't. My objections are all storycraft fails and/or internal consistency issues, nothing to do with changes to the mythology, vioating tropes or departures from canon. I'm on board with all those things. Also, to my surprise, porgs.  I love most the way the story is treating its own history like a spiral that keeps coming around to the same touchpoints but with changes & development each time.The Christmas movie tally: both the Christmas Die Hards, Meet John Doe, (instead of It's A Wonderful Life) Bell, Book & Candle, Lethal Weapon, and A Christmas Carol....and that's a wrap.Upcoming plans include getting my hair buzzed off because it's past time, and buckling down on the new book (which I have shamefully neglected in favor of Doing All The Other Things this month) plus beginning revisions on Heartwood.  I'm try to aim at weekly or bi-weekly updates here. Shorter reports are happier reports.