Rambles by Drew

A few months ago, my good friend Chase told me he was planning a cross-country road trip that would take the entirety of July 2018. He asked me if I was interested in joining him. I said yes, of course. Then, on June 30th, we set off: Chase, Raven, Tripp, Curtis and myself piled into a rental Dodge Caravan and began the drive. Chase and Rave were (and are) two of my closest friends. I knew Tripp, but not particularly well. Apparently, Curtis and I had met before, but neither of us remembered. Oh well. We all got to know each other quite a bit better over the course of the following month. I knew I wanted to write something about the trip - I'd be an idiot not to. Originally I'd planned to just give a summary - where we went, what we saw, etc. But that sounded both vague and dull. I instead decided to share some short stories from the trip: any of the strange or funny things we did, or people we met along the way. If you are interested in more detail, I believe Chase and Curti...

A few weeks ago, I wrote something defending the character of Rose Tico from The Last Jedi . It got a lot of positive feedback from some very nice people, which I very much appreciate. A coworker of mine even told me, "That's what you should be doing with your life." High praise. So I thought to myself, "Maybe I should keep doing this sort of thing - tackling a real-life issue through the lense of movies (pun intended). Maybe I could actually make a small difference, and leave the world a bit better than I found it." But THEN I thought to myself, "Oh wait, I wanna talk about The Incredibles ." So here we are. As you definitely already know, The Incredibles 2  has just been released in theaters. And it's doing pretty alright for itself. In just one weekend, it's made over $180 million, making it the 8th biggest movie opening ever, and the biggest animated opening. Ever. Sources say, "That's pretty good." According to a VERY r...

You're probably heard all about the Kelly Marie Tran/Star Wars news of late. If not - Tran (who played Rose Tico in The Last Jedi ) has been dealing with online harassment for over a year, even before the movie was released. The offenders are all the usual bigots: sexist, racist, probably insecure, etc. Tran has since removed all of her Instagram posts, and isn't much active on any other social media. Of course, the good guys of the internet have come to her defense in waves. Co-stars, directors, and fans alike have publicly reached out. It's a comforting thing to see. But, it doesn't change what's already happened. So why did it happen? I think there's more than one reason. The first, and probably the more important, is because she's an Asian-American woman who doesn't have the "Hollywood body type." This is somehow an issue for some idiots. I'm not going to discuss this much - I don't think we need any more straight white dudes weig...

Ok, look. I know I said I was going to keep writing about Harry Potter, and that this should be about Chamber of Secrets , but I really can't be bothered. If you're still curious: the book is great, the movie is fine. Sound familiar? What I had to say about Sorcerer's Stone  can pretty easily be applied to any of those books/movies. There's no point in writing the same thing seven times. BUT, that does lead to an interesting discussion about why that is - specifically, why the Harry Potter  movies have the problems that they do. My theory (if you'll indulge me) is that they're all reactionary. Let's take a few steps back. Hollywood, for better or worse, has always had a tendency to create and follow their own trends. A movie will come out, make a billion dollars, and then be followed by a dozen films trying to emulate that same success. Sometimes this works, and then Hollywood has two billion-dollar movies. But usually, audiences are privy to what...

Harry Potter 's good, innit? I'm going back through the books for the first time in about ten years. After reading Sorcerer's Stone I thought to myself, "Hey, I've got that great new blog that everyone's been reading and talking about, why don't I write about this?" And THEN I thought to myself, "Oh, why don't I compare each of the books to their corresponding movies?" To which then I replied, "Wow, what a great idea!" After several more minutes of patting myself on the back, I got to it. Now, a quick disclaimer: I've seen each of the Harry Potter  movies a few times, and I... don't love them. None of them are bad, but I don't think any are even close to as good as everyone else seems to think.  Also, of course, full spoilers for the books and movies. But honestly, if you haven't read/seen Harry Potter  by now, you've got bigger problems.  Straight up - this book is awesome. It's a perfe...

Over the past eight months, I've had a stark realization: post-college life is really boring. So, as a part of my quarter-life crisis, I started a blog. Do people still read blogs? I have no idea. Either way, here we go. I saw a lot of movies last year! Some were good, some were great, and some were neither of those things. Today, I'm ranking them from worst to best and talking a bit about each. Haven't seen some of them yet? Don't worry - this will be 100% spoiler free guaranteed. Also, this is all totally subjective and I'm just some guy. But ALSO keep in mind that I have very  good opinions.  Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Valerian  feels like a George Lucas fever dream. I had high hopes for it - I love a weird and wacky sci-fi. This was both weird and wacky, but not in the right way. The two leads have a very 70s, thinly-veiled-sexism kind of dynamic; he spends the whole movie lusting after her, and even though she knows he's a cre...