Review Guardians of the galaxy 2
I had quite high expectations as I really liked the first movie despite not being a huge fan of superhero movies, even those widely regarded as great. Well, when it came to visuals my expectations were more or less met even if the Stormtrooper level of shooting was awkwardly bad at times. It wasn't marvelous but no complaints. The main characters worked out fine together, just like last time. The rest sucked.
The only characters that had a real reason to be in this movie was the guardians, the villain and to some extend extra daddy Yondu.
The golden people in the start? Attacked with spaceships twice and that was it, didn't matter to the plot at all.
The sister of Gomora? Completely pointless, first tried to kill her sister then they suddenly become friends again, after that she is unnecessary.
Yondus gang and people that stopped working with him etc? Worked as motivation for him to join the guardians and help out but played a far too large part for just introducing Yondu.
Yondu? Nice seeing him again after the last movie as he is an interesting character. He matters in this movie as it is pretty much about the main characters backstory, where Yondu was more or less the father. There is also a quite nice scene with him in the end.
The plot? You don't know what the movie is about until Ego aka biological daddy suddenly turns out to be a bad guy with a weird motivation. I think that happens 20-30 min before the movie is over, which makes the story from there on far too stressed and fast. The only things that mattered in the movie before that is that Ego picked up the main char and that Yondu got thrown out of his gang by mutiny. This could have been done in 30 min, then 60 min could have been spent on getting to know Ego and gradually showing how he was a bad guy instead of it coming out of thin air. Make it like that, meaning 90 minutes long, and it could have been a decent movie.
The only reason I don't give this movie 1 or 2 is because the "jokes" where Drax and the antenna girl didn't have any social barriers and spoke the truth all the time were hilarious and made parts of the audience laugh out loud, including me.
Review La La Land
I decided to watch this movie a late evening after somehow being reminded of Mamma Mia the musical. As I love Abba I also love Mamma Mia, even if it had a few plot holes it was funny enough to make up for it with no trouble, a simple happy pill. I guess Mamma Mia is a guilty pleasure of mine.
In the trailer to La La Land there was a large happy song with people in cars stuck in lines on the highway. I found the song decent but then decided that I can't expect a random musical to have songs of the same quality as Abba. Well, after the first song I had a fairly good impression, not too long after came then second one that was pretty nice. After that ... nothing. What was supposed to be a musical turned into a horribly predictable and cliché love story. The songs were pretty much like background music where the main characters did a decent dance multiple times. There is predictability and then there is knowing completely what will happen in the story, which applied to this movie. The only surprise I got was in the end. I can't say I liked it, in fact I found it very bad, but I will admit it surprised me. Still, don't bother watching this movie and don't believe the imdb critics, it's very very boring.
Review Eurovision
Sweden has a fairly boring entry this year. Robin Bengtsson is in no way bad but the song is the kind of stuff you hear on the radio every day, at least in my opinion. And that is exactly what most songs were, boring. There was one or two songs that I liked and would be happy the hear randomly on the radio but only one song I really liked, Cyprus. The number with the singer doing a weird balancing act on stage looks quite odd and I'm not really impressed by it but the song is really good in my opinion. Or well, the song is decent and the chorus is great. Link to the performance at the end of this post. I didn't watch the entirety of every song but I watched through the different reruns and checked out the songs that interested me.
Anyway, I hope for a better second semi final even if I doubt I'll watch it as I've got stuff to do tomorrow evening. I might watch the finale out of curiousity tho. If I'm cheering for Sweden? No, not really. Cyprus or perhaps Moldova as "Epic sax guy" is making a return in their performance. If you don't know epic sax guy, search on youtube. He is probably the single most famous person from Eurovision. It wouldn't surprise me if Sweden won tho. And I admit that it would be nice to catch up to Ireland in the amount of Eurovision wins and have a shared first place.
Still ... what happened to stuff like Waterloo, Stormvind/Lovestorm, Evighet/Invincible, Ein bisschen Friend and so on. There were so many good songs before I was born, so few after. The only winner I have really liked after year 2000 is Lordi and that is probably mainly because I love metal, which is rare in Eurovision.
To add something nice and not make this post seem sad: Today the student organisation had an event where there was free surinamese and javanese food. Some kind of chicken in bread that was really great. I was worried that it might be spicy, which I don't like, but there was no problem at all. I would buy this dish at a restaurant without hesitation.
Link to Cyprus performance Gravity with Hovik below. The picture is from the performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B94IsBm4Y0Q