The other day, I saw my friend Rod after he’d been away for a while, and he asked me how I’d been and what I’d been up to. I tried to cast my mind back to the previous month–February, that is–to tell him about what I’d been doing, and I found I couldn’t really remember anything.

So much of the focus has just been on looking ahead to March and all the anticipated craziness surrounding my immediate family unit’s first wedding since my own. I couldn’t remember what I’d done; all I could recall is how much energy that I’ve been putting in to hat is coming up.

But I don’t to disrespect February–it has an identity all of its own, just like the rest of my family does in the face of all the attention that is currently being given toward my eldest daughter’s impending nuptials.

What do those things include? Can I remember anything now, that I couldn’t recall when Rod asked me?

Well, I went to a birthday party where we were expected to dress up as movie characters. This caused a reasonable amount of stress in my household as we all attempted to figure out what we were going to do. Then a friend suggested the obvious–just wear my long black jacket (that I’ve mentioned before) and go as someone in The Matrix. So that’s what I did–here I am, alongside my wife as Mrs. Bennett from Pride & Prejudice.

I doubt they’ve ever met in any fiction, but if they did, they’d have been a power couple.

Aside from that, I served at my church’s soup kitchen, I ran powerpoint for one church service, I washed dishes at my missions community, I ran some meetings and attended other meetings, I helped my daughter get enrolled for her new online university program, and I went to the dentist. I also worked on a couple of film projects, both of which have been around for a long time–a documentary called The Mt Margaret Story about a town in my state that started off as a far-reaching development outreach amongst Aboriginal people in my state over a hundred years ago, and a short film called Finishing Touches that we shot a couple of years ago but stubbornly lingers on in an undone state, although we it’s almost done, we are really close, I promise.

In the meantime, I’ve also plodded through some TV shows and books, and I even got to the cinema to see a movie!

Captain America: Brave New World

Like many, I’ve been decidedly underwhelmed by Marvel’s film and television content in recent years, and the advanced press for the latest Captain America film did nothing to change this tone. Everything about the movie looked…okay. Not necessarily terrible, but nothing to genuinely look forward to. Still, I was interested in checking it out in the theatres simply because I haven’t been out to the movies for a while time (since seeing Rashomon last year; my last first-run movie was Twisters).

My experience watching the film more-or-less met my expectations, in the sense that the movie was not particularly good, but was basically fine, especially when measured against Marvel’s post-Avengers Endgame output (and most of the DC stuff that has come out in the same window). Brave New World is a passable action thriller with political overtones, but it’s been rightly criticised for the way that Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, isn’t really the focus of the story in any meaningful way. He’s still the guy with the most screen time, but though we’re watching him investigating stuff and fighting bad guys, the story is not actually about Sam in any meaningful way. Instead, the focus is on Harrison Ford’s Thaddeus Ross (a role he took over from the last William Hurt). Ford is quite good in the part, but it’s strange to have Sam as such a non-entity in what is supposed to be his own movie.

Instead of meaningful character development, the movie shoehorns in a couple of bits where Sam has some emotional distress over how well he’s doing this Captain America thing. It feels like the filmmakers realised that the movie wasn’t giving Sam any room to grow and just found a couple of places where they could force something in, even though none of it supported by anything that happens in the vast majority of the movie.

There are also some problems with the story’s pacing, particularly in Ross’ story related to turning into the Red Hulk (ostensibly a spoiler, but only if you haven’t seen any of the film’s marketing). There is a bit about 2/3 the way through where Ross is under such distress that you think he’s going to turn into the Hulk, but suddenly the movie pulls back on the tension and the transformation doesn’t happen. Of course, we know that this has to happen, so then we have to wait awkwardly for things to build up again. Only, it finally does, it doesn’t feel like the situation is nearly as stressful as before. It all amounts to an unnecessary and awkward de-escalation, which of course pretty fatal for creating gripping drama.

Other negatives are the fact that the plot cribs extensively from previous Captain America films (especially Civil War and Winter Soldier) and the post-credit scene reminds us that the multiverse is a thing. On the plus side, Harrison Ford does good work, as I said, as does Carl Lumbly in a supporting role. Overall, it’s probably a bit below average for the MCU overall, but well above average if we only look at what’s come out in the last five years.

Surface

On the TV front, I made my way through the entirety of season 1 of Surface, an Apple TV+ show starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Sophie, a woman who has lost her memory following a suicide attempt (she jumped off a ferry). The series shows her trying to figure out who she is, and what was going on in her apparently happy and fulfilled life that led to her taking such drastic action. The show has shades of psychological thriller, elements of conspiracy thriller, and lots of general relationship drama, but it paces out its story in such an unsatisfying way that I really can’t recommend it.

Mbatha-Raw herself delivers a strong performance which makes it all watchable, but that only goes so far when the series itself drags things along so slowly and seems determined to never make anything really clear. Sophie does discover some interesting things about herself and about her husband James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who I’ve only lately realized is also the husband in Wilderness, where he also played the troubling husband of the lead character, in that case portrayed by Jenna Coleman) that definitely give her a different picture of her life than the show starts with, but it feels like it probably should have taken about three episodes to get where the series does at the end of eight.

There is one meaningful twist, where Sophie realizes that a lot of things she is becoming suspicious of about her husband are really her own fault. She describes this by saying that she woke up after her suicide attempt to find herself in the middle of an explosion, and then realized that she was the bomb. It’s an interesting and insightful moment.

But then many of the things she does after that are confusing and seemingly unmotivated. It’s like the series is trying to keep the mystery alive, telling us that if we keep watching this it will eventually become meaningful, but doesn’t do the work to make it interesting to watch in the meantime. When the season is over, a major character has died off-screen, we still don’t know who Sophie really is as a person or why she tried to kill herself, and a whole new plot line has opened up that I just cannot rally up the energy to care about. Season two (which has just come out) is going to be a pass for me.

Also, the season has three separate instances where characters figure out passwords for online accounts by looking around and finding random objects in a house, which, if it isn’t three times too many, is at least two.

Books

Over in the world of books, if you read my posts for last month, you know I’ve started pulling unread titles off my shelf and am trying to get to a chapter or two a day, just to build up that reading part of my life again (and also to give my brain a focus shift off the more stressful parts of my existence). These have been happening in two main streams–Christian books, and mysteries.

In the first stream, I finished reading Jesus the King – Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God by Timothy Keller, which I quite enjoyed. It’s a series of meditations and expositions through the Gospel of Mark, roughly covering a chapter of the Bible for each chapter of the book. It was an enjoyable read which gave insight into the story of Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection through discussion of the cultural and historical context of the different aspects of the account, along with theological interpretations. I found reading it to be highly encouraging, although I finished it long enough ago that I can’t really remember anything specific at the moment.

Apparently, it was originally published as King’s Cross, which I think in some ways is a better title, since the book (like the book of the Bible it is talking about) is divided into two main parts, one establishing Jesus as king, and one talking about focusing on the cross that he resolutely made his way to at the end of his earthly life.

I also read In Japans the Crickets Cry by Ronald Clements and Steve Metcalf. This is a missionary biography / autobiography of Steve Metcalf, who did extensive Christian work in Japan. His story is certainly interesting–he grew up in China as the child of missionaries (his mother was Australian and his father British), but while attending boarding school found that he and his classmates were suddenly prisoners of the Japanese during World War II. In the prison camp he met and was deeply encouraged by fellow prisoner Eric Liddell, the famous runner whose story is popularised in the movie Chariots of Fire, who has long been something of a minor hero to me. Metcalf had to confront the resentment his experiences brought him against Japan to follow God’s call to be a missionary to the Japanese.

(Actually, this part of the book is not as big a deal as I was expecting it to be–as you can see in the image above, the cover seems to pose this as the book’s central question, “How could Steve Metcalf forgive the Japanese?” But in the narrative itself, Metcalf seems to be able to do this without any great distress.)

The most interesting parts of the took out to be (for me, anyway), the accounts of how the war impacted the Japanese mindset. There is an evocative description of the bombing of Hiroshima, but even more compelling is the story of what happened decades later when the Emperor Hirohito died, and the Japanese people found themselves cultural free for the first time to start openly processing what the nation had experience during the war, including the realisation that their emperor was not perfect and the revelation of their people’s own culpability. I find Japanese honor-shame dynamics to be fascinating (not in the least because of what it tells me about my own motivations and reactions, as I am half-Japanese, although I was born and grew up entirely in the United States), and this book gave me another peak at that, through the eyes of someone who seems to have genuinely loved God and the Japanese people alike.

On the mystery novel front, I read a bunch more Agatha Christie’s, including

Sparkling Cyanide

A year after the mysterious death of the beautiful socialite Rosemary Barton at her birthday party dinner (ruled a suicide, but was it really?), all the guests are assembled again by her husband to go back to the same restaurant, only for tragedy to repeat and the husband to be murdered as well! What on earth is going on? The characters of this mystery thriller are well drawn and the pacing is quite good. And the solution to the mystery is satisfying (although like I said last time, I find the actual moment of denouement to be less thrilling than I used to).

The story doesn’t feature any of Christie’s major detective characters, so there’s a little less personality on display then when you have Hercule Poirot involved, but I still liked it.

Sad Cypress

This one starts with Elinor Carlisle (another beautiful socialite) on trial for murder of another woman, Mary Gerrard, who potentially threatened her inheritance from a wealthy aunt, Laura Weldon. It then goes back to explore the events that led up to Mary’s death, which includes the death of Aunt Laura (who was ill) and a bunch of confusion about the aunt’s will. Then Hercule Poirot shows up and spends the rest of the book investigating what actually happened. That investigation takes the form of basically a different character being questioned in every chapter, until Poirot has put it all together. Then in the last part of the book, we return to the trial where the results of Poirot’s investigation are revealed by Elinor’s lawyers, which we only see through her own exhausted and increasingly dazed perspective.

Poirot is always fun and the mystery is typically clever, though the pacing of the investigation becomes a little repetitive. I still found it interesting though.

Spider’s Web

I also read this book, although I actually finished it in March. Still going to mention it here.

This one is actually by Charles Obsborne, though based a play by Agatha Christie. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a novelisation of a play before–it’s a little strange because of course most of the activity takes place in extended sequences in singular locations. There is a distinct sense of what is “on stage” and what is “off stage”, which is a little odd for a book.

The story is interesting enough. The wife of a government official is shocked to discover the dead body of a family enemy in her drawing room. Believing that a child in her care was accidentally responsible, she becomes desperate to cover it up. Of course, the child turns out to be innocent, and one of her guests is guilty…but which one?

It’s diverting enough of a read but it’s clear the whole way through that this is nowhere near up to the experience of reading one of Christie’s own books. I’d have found it fun to watch the play though!

Speaking of mysteries, I also did a Sherlock Holmes-themed online mystery game with some friends for my buddy Josh’s birthday. The four of us did a training course together with the missionary society that I work with a long time ago. I led it, Jason was my staff, and the other two were my students. As a joke, I once referred to the four of us guys as the “Quadradudality” (four dudes who function as one, more or less), and that nickname has stuck for all these years. And so now, even though we don’t all live in the same country anymore, thanks to the power of the internet, we were able to spend a few hours playing this game together. It comes from Wolf Escape Games, and was called Sherlock Holmes: Phantom’s Hour.

The way it works is that only one person can actually manipulate your character and perspective, with the others participating through screen sharing. However, when you pick up clues they go into a “bag” which everyone can look at on their own devices. Since the game is designed to be very narratively linear (with lots of cut scenes featuring voice actors as Holmes, Watson and other characters) and you are only ever working on one puzzle at a time, this works quite well. Different ones of us could look at the various clues and pieces of evidence we’d picked up and we would all collaborate on solutions.

At the end we got this nifty little graphic as a keepsake. I wouldn’t say our time was particularly impressive given the website estimates the game will take about two hours (at least we didn’t need ny hints!), but we enjoyed it, and given the right opportunity I’d consider playing another one from the same company.

OK, signing off for now. February ended, unfortunately, with me straining my back and causing all sorts of trouble to a bunch of my muscles. I’m seeing a physiotherapist, but full recovery is taking a while. It’s gotten a lot worse in the last couple of days as there was a bunch of very busy stuff going on, so I should be resting as much as possible.