I saw Rogue One. The odds are pretty good that if you’re reading this, you’ve already decided whether or not to see it, and if you haven’t yet seen it you’d rather I not spoil anything. I’ll make this quick:

It is a fine film beyond simply being a Star Wars film. I think it’s a better movie than The Force Awakens, and it does an outstanding job of setting up the original trilogy. It clears the Threshold of Awesome, and if you’re a Star Wars fan, I suspect you’ll be quite pleased with it.

That’s it. Enjoy the movie!

Arrival is brilliant, beautiful, touching, and quite thought-provoking. It clears my Threshold of Awesome, and invites me to say very little about it lest I rob my readers of the voyage of discovery the film offers.

The film is adapted from Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” which can be found in the collection “Stories of Your Life and Others,” which Publisher’s Weekly called “… the first must-read SF book of the year” back in 2002.

My oldest daughter came home from college for the weekend, and insisted that I not see Doctor Strange without her. I talked to the rest of the kids about it, and one by one they each decided they wanted to see it too.

On opening night, in 3D¹.

I was $75 down before arriving at the theater, and then we bought snacks². I tweeted my forlorn hope that I was somehow going to have $110 worth of fun in the next two hours.

When the film ended, we all had smiles on our faces. We talked Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff until late, and the kids’ opinion was that this was the best Marvel movie³ to date.

My own opinion is that it’s not the best, but it’s certainly quite good. We got to see Benedict Cumberbatch play someone who grows into a sense of personal responsibility, and by the end we got to see a Marvel superhero who not only warps reality, he also chews scenery.

Doctor Strange clears my Threshold of Awesome, and I’m quite excited to see more of Doctor Strange in upcoming films.

¹The 3D turns out to have been worth it. I’ll be seeing it again in IMAX 3D just for that experience. But I’m waiting for $5.00 movie day, because ouch that first showing was ‘spensive.

²Theaters generally do not get a cut of ticket sales for the first two weeks it’s out, and sometimes it’s even longer. They depend on concessions to keep the doors open. I always buy concessions because that money (for the local cinema chain) stays in town and creates jobs.

³They have seen all of them except the Edward Norton/Tim Roth Hulk movie. We are now collecting the Blu-Rays, and we’re two Caps, two Thors, and a Hulk away from having all of them. Oh, and the first Avengers film. We have that on DVD, so Sandra says it can wait.

The trailers for the latest Tom Hanks Treasure Hunt, Inferno, looked kind of silly. The line “I left you a path… the hardest one yet” suggests that somebody has created a puzzle for Professor Langdon, and is deliberately leaving the fate of the human race in his hands.

Fortunately, the trailer is misleading.

As archaeological puzzle-solving goes, Inferno has almost nothing to offer. As a spy thriller, however, it works pretty well. Tense moments, cool action scenes, and a twisty, fun plot. It deploys some tired tropes, and then nicely explains why these things could actually happen here.

It doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I did have fun.