Movie Theaters - the end looms

Oct 2022 marked movie theaters worst performance in 20 years.   https://www.yahoo.com/news/october-box-office-sinks-21-131500823.html

I'm unclear on something -- theaters may have a big picture (& sometimes good sound), but they have tons of drawbacks -- overpriced food & drinks, annoying rude audiences, kids kicking and messing around, and cold / flu / COVID.

Meanwhile home theaters are better than ever, episodic TV series are more interesting and look just as good as movies, and streaming is cheap.

Why would people see a movie theater as a better experience?

Movie theaters have gone the way of the casette/CD/DVD/BluRay. They are relics that don't know their days are over.

rekzkarz (.com) ends 5/2021 -- domain expired & bought: it's become Chinese Spam

 I haven't been blogging in awhile.  I liked that I had my domain - rekzkarz dot com - and that I could use that instead of rekzkarz.blogspot.com, but I found it annoying that it cost between $12-$18/year.  

When I first got the domain, it was $8 for 3yrs and it was a novelty.  But now I had to do stuff with Godaddy -- who always try to upsell you anytime you call, and it seemed like too much money just to go to a Blog, etc.

So I called GoDaddy & asked what happened?  Turns out my last payment was May 2020 and it didn't get renewed May 2021, so someone bought it --> who the heck besides me wants REkzkaRZ (???) <-- and they immediately filled it with what looks like a spam site.

When I look at their crappy site, full of GIF banners for casinos, it's just annoying and dumb.   But it's also kind of how the internet is becoming warped & ruined.

The premise was anyone who wanted to could post information, make books / magazines, do reporting, etc.  But over time, and the end of net neutrality, what's happened is that people are pulled to Youtube and Facebook, Reddit fight videos are more interesting than the news, and also all these sites are removing any reporting / data that they disagree with.  They want to filter news & information, which literally goes against the USA Constitutional guarantee of Freedom of Speech & Freedom of the Press.

You have to give some credit to the devious thinking behind subverting Freedom of Speech & Press.  Couple this subversion with Trump's ingenius invention of Fake News and Fake Facts, and you have a challenge to the INFORMATION REVOLUTION core principle, and instead that revolution becomes degraded into the lack of reliable information revolution.

The main positives out of my website getting moved to someone else are as follows:

• For the foreseeable future, I will rely on Google Blogger to show my site for free online and I won't use any paid service for domain redirection.
• When the GoDaddy guy told me someone else had purchased my domain and I had no more products with them, then said, "Thanks for being part of the Godaddy team", I got to respond, "I don't think I am anymore."  Wow that makes me feel unusually happy.

Makes me wonder how good it would feel to delete myself out of Reddit & Facebook & Instagram & whatever other online sites are out there vampiring me & my data?  Well, this is a good start.

New Mutants - could've been good, wasnt

New Mutants could have been excellent.  The core characters (SunSpot, Magic, Wolfsbane, Moonstar, and Cannonball) are great, the comic was great, and the concept of teenager heroes dealing with teen life AND super powers seems loaded with story-telling opportunities.  Unfortunately, the production seems to run away from those opportunities and is afraid to dig in.

The film fell into the pothole of needing to 'control everything' so much that not only did the lead villain put everyone inside immobilizing force fields, but the entire story was squeezed into a 'psych ward / rehab' style facility instead of being allowed to move around naturally.

There were surprises, but the writing in general was lacking.  These comic heroes have depth, but none of it was explored in the movie.  From Cannonball & Sunspot not knowing how to use their powers being downplayed, to Moonstar's lack of knowledge about her powers being magnified to overlay the entire film, there was a lack of critical decision making to fully flesh out characters.  A burn scar is not background unless you dig into the story of it.  

Also, the characters were not treated fairly or well -- couldn't Magic have left whenever she wanted?  Why didn't Sunspot use his powers more effectively/often?   Who was the doctor watching them?  Who is Essex corp?

Instead of exploring subplots in the story, the film feeds tidbits and then hides from all of them.  It was like a series of constant misfires.

Last critique -- altho I have more gripes - is that the entire film was supposed to be a horror film, and yet it shies away from delivering any real horror.  Cutting away from each scary scene, not using any real horror film technique, and the scariest creatures (Magic's fears) are never explained, easily dispatched, and essentially blind scary-faced fodder. Moonstar's power is interesting, but when you go 100% CG, no one has any emotional investment in what they see.  So it was one of those, "Oh, this is the big reveal.  Meh." moments.

So it could have been so much more.  The actors were ready to deliver, but the writers and the director didn't seem to be able to provide a quality movie for the actors to work with.