Quarantine entry #63 - May 23

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Just look at the grey wolf – one day it is a part of the native ecosystem, the next – they are villains in the script written by the Europeans and their North American descendants, and right now, the wolves are still very much in the grey, pardon the intended pun. What next?

…So, ‘The Lovebirds’. Now that they were released, we can talk about them, and what can be said about this movie? …It is inane. Pause.

Now, here is the thing. ‘The Wrong Missy’ was just… wrong. It is politically deaf, probably not very correct either, and outright grating, even if you keep ‘me too’ issues out of the bracket. ‘The Lovebirds’ aren’t anywhere as extreme – they’re a direct spoof of the various mystery/action movies, just as the ‘Spies in Disguise’ 2019 film was a parody of the spies movies, and ‘Onward’ (2020) – of various fantasy films. Pause.

…Yes, this is already a mixed bag, as ‘Onward’ seems to be a rather more popular film than the ‘Spies’ were, but both of them are rather forgettable – you watch them once or twice and move on. And ‘The Lovebirds’?

‘The Lovebirds’ are birds of a feather, even if they are live-action rather CGI. Featuring an interracial couple, (real life says ‘how cute!’), who were drifting apart but now they have to work together or they are doomed, this movie aimed to entertain and amuse – nothing more. The titular characters half-wander and half-blunder from one episode to the next, and you are left exasperated – why are you rooting for them?

…To be certain, are not as bad as ‘The Wrong Missy’, ‘Doolittle-2020’, let alone ‘Cats-2019’. It just isn’t truly good either – at best it is light-hearted comedy, at worst, it is inane, with more style than substance, and that style isn’t very everyone, you know?..

On the other hand, given how real life sucks, how its’ narrative is so poorly written lately, maybe this sort of comedy is what we all require right now; for those, who want something different, PBS is released its’ own nature mini-series, based on its ‘Spy in the wild’ series, i.e. a nature documentary, and does this bring us back to the natural world?

…On the other-other hand, NG will present ‘Barkskins’, a TV series adaptation of the 2016 novel with the same title, of life in New France, aka the French colony in what has now become Canada. I admit that I’m of mixed feelings here – such adaptations tend to be a mixed bag depending on way too many variables… but it is certainly something different from the aforementioned ‘Lovebirds’ and co., who aren’t bad, just forgettable. (Unlike, say, a scolopendra centipede). Anything more?

I admit that I wanted to talk about turtles once again today. As probably the oldest reptiles of the modern world, they are fascinating creatures, and endangered ones, as humans have fed on them and their eggs to near-extinction; actually, some species – the biggest ones – have become extinct for real, and the smaller tortoises are also in trouble due to the exotic pet trade.

…Yes, I know – we have discussed this – how the terms ‘turtle’, ‘tortoise’ and ‘terrapin’ are interchangeable… to a limit. When I was young and went to an animal-lovers’ club for a couple of years, we had a lot of terrestrial tortoises, and a single terrapin, (I do not know the species), in an aquarium/terrarium combo. The two reptiles looked quite different – the terrapin’s shell was much smoother, much more hydrodynamic, and it was not released from its’ enclosure anywhere as often as its’ terrestrial cousins did. Ah, the nostalgia of the past!..

…For the present, though, this is it. See you all soon!

Quarantine entry #62 - May 22

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. On top of everything else, my summer allergies are beginning to act up, and no one needs that, believe me! So, let us turn away from the reality – given that lately a Pakistani plane has crashed, with 100 people on board or so, no one needs more reality news, I am afraid – and turn to… Netflix.

No, we are not talking yet about ‘The Lovebirds’ – let’s talk about ‘The Wrong Missy’ instead. Supposedly, it is the ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ movie, but without the good aspects. Some other people have compared it to ‘Shallow Hal’ – pause.

Here is the thing. ‘Shallow Hal’ was not as politically correct as the modern movies may be, but neither is ‘The Wrong Missy’. Moreover, out of the two films, ‘The Wrong Missy’ is the more jarring one out of the two. The humor is crude, the titular character – played by Ms. Lapkus – is especially crude, and the male lead is lukewarm, to say the least. Pause.

…Does anyone think that it is wrong or even odd, that a 30-year-old female lead is playing across a male lead who is in his 50s? No? Carry on. The male leading character is a bland milquetoast bitch who has no defining features at all, (especially in the first part of the movie), so why did ‘The Wrong Missy’ latch onto him? Is she a desperate ‘unmarried woman’? Ha-ha, my splitting sides, guess we’re done with the entire ‘me too’ and the rest of the ‘girl power’ topics for now, now that Hillary is done and gone, and the Donald wasn’t too affected by all the parades, protests, and what else you can you the letter p for.

…Back in the movie, we got ‘The Wrong Missy’, who clearly has many issues that she should take care, but obviously, she never does, and so she comes across as a woman with a lot of issues and a low self-esteem… that she buries under a busload – or a boatload, use whichever measure is bigger – of crazy and so she proceeds to drive most of people away from her, leaving ‘The Wrong Missy’ in company of such people as the male lead, who is simply emasculated in a political correctness manner done wrong. The man is clearly a moron – he hated his first date with the titular heroine, so why did he even kept her number? What, was the erasure of it some sort of defiance in face of the relative who would set him up with ‘The Wrong Missy’ and we couldn’t have that, because reasons? 

…For the most part of ‘The Wrong Missy’, the titular character is more obnoxious than sympathetic, and you almost feel sorry for the male lead, but you know what? He asked for this himself by keeping the titular heroine’s numbers, and so he got to reap it all, the good and the bad; good riddance to bad rubbish and sorry for Ms. Lapkus to star in such a tire fire of a film. Anything else?

…’The Lovebirds’ are a somewhat different movie, and we will talk about them some other time; right now, I want to talk about the sloths. No, not the cardinal sin in question, but the tree-dwelling mammals that are named after it, I reckon. The sloths are not exactly living by human standards, but their life pace is slow, even if you compare them to the non-human animals instead. Ergo, so what?

Well, the truth is that apparently the two groups of sloths are not very closely related at all. The three-toed sloths, (four species), are some of the ancient sloths, (alive and extinct), while the two-toed sloths, (two species), are some of the more modern ones, much more closely related to such extinct ground sloths as Megatherium, (featured in the 5^th episodes of ‘Walking with Beasts’), and Nothronychus, (aka the Shasta ground sloth in the 2^nd episode of ‘Wild New World’).  

…The Megatherium deserves a mention here also because just like the currently extinct giant, though yes, there’s a possibility that it’d survived in South America, giving rise to the legends about the Mapinguari, but I’m not certain – the latter seems to fluctuate from a realistic cryptid to an outright fairy tale ogre, with everything in-between… but that isn’t the point, the point is that just like the Megatherium, the two-toed sloths are more omnivorous: while the three-toed sloths are strict herbivores, the two-toed sloths eat some animal matter as well. Isn’t nature weird and grand?

…Well, this is it for now, though – see you all soon instead!