The Friday High 5

Days past relived, Sesame Street meets D&D, and needing more speed

20th Century Fox

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High 5. 🙏🏻

I guess I was in a Wolverine mood.

After enjoying his resurgence in Deadpool & Wolverine, last week I dialed up his apocalyptic road trip Logan. And now I find myself working backward through his filmography. I don’t have plans to continue this trip, but you never know.

Days of Future Past is an incredible comic book movie, perhaps the most comic book movie ever. This is a movie in which Wolverine’s consciousness is sent back 50 years to his younger body because mutants in the future are being eradicated by sentient machines with the ability to counter all super powers. Wolverine needs to Back to the Future the situation by stopping the assassination of the guy who built these crazy robots.

Only in a comic book.

The movie unites the two disparate X-Men casts—the 2000s era films and the 2011 First Class prologue, which featured young versions of Magneto and Charles Xavier, the latter whom could walk and had hair, developments that felt shocking. Days of Future Past manages the difficult task of continuing both storylines, and its conclusion pulls the neatest trick of all: Undoing the horrifically stupid X-Men: Last Stand.

The singular joy of these movies is the colorfully unique powers of the various X-Men. I didn’t count or anything but my sense is that Days of Future Past has the most X-Men moments across all the films. It’s Avengers: Endgame before Endgame was even on the radar. And because I adored 2/3 of the 2000s era films, I still get excited to see Iceman, who Wolverine calls ‘kid’ even though he’s a grown ass man now.

Like every movie in which he features, this is a Wolverine movie. We don’t mind because Hugh Jackman regularly kills it as the bearded mutant. And in a meta sense, it’s fitting that Wolverine is the tie that binds the two distinct eras of X-Men movies. As Deadpool & Wolverine says, he is the X-Man.

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In-Person D&D

Wizards of the Coast

Last Saturday we resumed our 2-3 times yearly game with a 6-hour romp through a winter wasteland ruled by demons and other nice things.

I joined this game late, after the original crew had been adventuring for a while. Initially I was joining for a single session, which is why I made my character a joke. One I’m now saddled with.

I’m playing Big Bird. From Sesame Street.

He’s not your momma’s Big Bird! He wraps himself in loose linen because he’s lost most of his feathers and his skin is unseemly. I just realized that might be a metaphor for baldness. Let’s skip over that.

Big Bird is a D&D bipedal bird race called Kenku, who among other things have a way of repeating what they hear. Which is why is full name is “Holy Shit, That’s a Big Bird.” His friends call him Big Bird, though he’d answer to Holy Shit.

As the fates have it, we’re playing another game this weekend! A different game, with different players and characters. Two D&D weekends in a row is my version of living the dream.

A Family Affair

Netflix

Another week, another straight-to-Netflix rom-com.

A Family Affair stars Nicole Kidman as a widow who falls for her daughter’s boss because he’s played by Zac Efron. Or at least someone who looks vaguely like Efron.

Hollywood forces actors—specifically women—to pursue eternal youth by dangling work over their heads. It’s a losing proposition. I understand why so many celebs embrace botox. But Efron looks so different in this movie that it’s distracting. He looks like a wax replica of Zac Efron, in that he resembles Zac Efron, but there’s something 10% off. You can’t quite put a finger on what’s different, but something definitely is.

You never really get over it, which is fine because A Family Affair doesn’t take much to follow. It’s a cute movie, a Hallmark-esque drama-lite story that paid up for talent. It’s not as good as Set It Up, the film I talked about last week.

This is the most lukewarm endorsement ever. But it fits. I’d recommend A Family Affair if you want an easy watch and are tired of scrolling the options on Netflix, which is how we ended up watching it.

The Bear: Season 3

FX

We briefly put aside season 3 because life was hectic and also heavy. It’s taken several weeks for things to reach a new equilibrium, which meant The Bear stayed on the back burner. I’m fortunate in that I can watch anything at anytime and not really be overly affected, but the chaos of The Bear has a way of creeping out of the TV and curling up in your lap. When the days are crazy, the last thing you want is your entertainment to spike your adrenaline. Which is how one comes to watch A Family Affair.

This week we finally resumed season 3.

We’re rounding third and speeding into home, and I still have zero idea how it’s all going to play out. It remains powerful drama and amazing storytelling, but sometimes feels more than a bit scattered and unfocused. Maybe that’s a metaphor for Carmy’s psyche?

The Bear is unique in that each episode is its own thing, often only loosely related to what came before—sometimes the episode is what came before—and therefore the awaited payoffs usually never come. It’s the most real TV show I’ve ever seen, which is both pro and con.

The one thing I can say with absolute certainty: The Bear is not a comedy, and shouldn’t be labeled as such to win Emmys.

Top Gun: Maverick

Paramount Pictures

Though I think many of us remember the original Top Gun fondly, the truth is it’s actually not a great movie. Anything involving fighter jets is exceptional. The locker room antagonism is amusing. Everything else is a distraction from the good stuff.

Top Gun: Maverick is the ultimate version of the experience, as it’s almost entirely about jets and bros who love to hate each other but come around eventually. The aerial sequences are simply breathtaking. The new generation of pilots—looking at you, Glenn Powell—run with the mantle. Though their call signs leave something to be desired.

Maverick himself is a more realistic, better version of the character. In Top Gun, he was too busy smiling and sexually harassing and wearing jeans while playing beach volleyball to be much more than a lazy archetype, the bruised bad boy. In the sequel, he actually feels like a real human being.

The funny thing about Top Gun: Maverick is how it imparts gravitas the original film never really had, simply because it knows we’re all nostalgic for it. We get three(!) separate lingering shots of a black-and-white photo of young Maverick and Ice smiling from the end of the first movie. There are numerous callbacks and references. It makes sense, in a way. That’s 100% what we’re there for—to bask in the glow of shared remembrance.

But it’s also a bit weird that 30 years later, Maverick is still whispering, “talk to me Goose,” in moments of profound stress or doubt. It feels artificial, like he’s saying it just to goose nostalgia. Because he is.

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That’s it for this edition of the High 5. What are you digging at the moment? Drop a comment and let me know!