mendel lee: The trailer itself tried to tug on that [nostalgia] immediately by featuring Solo saying the line “I’ve got a really good feeling about this” as if to say, “We know you loved that line in the original trilogy, so here it is again, love this film!” Too much of the film was littered with those sort of metaphorical empty calories, and I think in the end that made me feel like i metaphorically didn’t eat anything of real substance while simultaneously making me feel metaphorically uncomfortably full.
Solo (2018) – the non-spoiler review » mendel lee . com

mendel lee: Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

non spoiler version:

The opening scene was trying too hard for me and the quick-reintroduction-of-all-characters immediately after felt simultaneously dragged out and rushed, but once the movie got into a rhythm, i got immersed and lost sense of time, which bodes well for the quality of the movie given the long run time. That had an interesting side effect of me not knowing when the film was actually drawing to a close, so when the credits rolled, i was like "oh."

To me, oddly enough, the film felt much more like a Thanos film than an Avengers film kind of like how I felt like Civil War was more of an Avengers film than a Captain America film. Which was great, he was very compelling and nuanced, one of the best antags of the MCU to date, but it accentuated the fact that most of the protagonists (with a few notable exceptions) felt one-dimensional because of overcrowding, kind of like when a single protagonist is facing a lot of masked nameless foes except in reverse. Or maybe more accurately: any depth that the protagonists had were reliant upon how invested the audience has been in the MCU's 10-year history and what implications and inferences they could bring to those characters. Which isn't entirely unreasonable, and it wasn't awful, but i still wish it had been better.

passes the bechtel test.

mendel lee: I decided for my April Kaizen to document a run of FTL:AE since I can't play Into the Breach yet.

mendel lee: I didn't do a Kaizen in Februrary because surgery, so here's the next ep.

This deals specifically with maximizing stats in Injustice 2 Mobile, mainly useful for Arena mode, but also for your overall threat when applying for or being head-hunted for leagues.