The site prompt is to find an “entirely uninteresting story,” and consider how it relates to your life. I don’t understand it at all. There is almost nothing that is entirely uninteresting, and as everything is connected, considering doesn’t take much time or effort. Maybe finding uninteresting things requires being uninteresting ourselves, and we are lots of things, but uninteresting is not one of them. If anyone told you otherwise, they lied to you.

I watched 2 movies – fiction, not documentaries, as is my usual practice. Both were excellent. Well, maybe they weren’t excellent, but I sure loved them. I would, because they were pretty sweet and very hopeful. I shed buckets of tears at both, which felt like a beautiful soul-cleansing rather than the anguished expulsion of the broken-hearted.

The first excellent movie was Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. I was surprised, too. Dreamworks isn’t Pixar, after all. There aren’t any Up’s or Inside Out’s to be found on their slate, and with few exceptions (the How To Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda trilogies), they’re all sort of average. Shrek is mostly ok, but the sequels bring the property values waaay down. I wouldn’t say I wanted to watch The Last Wish, but my son suggested it, and I like him a lot, so much so that it would more than make up for an hour and a half of garbage. But it was great, the feel good hit of the summer, as they say. I don’t know or care about any of the characters, but mortality, family, the battle between selfishness & selflessness, and love transcend studios or personalities. Everything negative said about it is true, it was predictable and broad. But we like what we like, and there doesn’t have to be a good critical reason. Some Britney Spears songs are terrific.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was the other. Finding original material instead of sequels/prequels/re-makes/re-imaginings is apparently quite difficult. The MCU has been on a losing streak lately, scattered and sophomoric, and this affected my expectations for GotG3, which I chose not to spend the million dollars to see in the theater. And maybe there are mountains of negative press for this, too, and probably they’re accurate, too.

I watched it twice in 2 days. The second viewing was better than the first. I have a bit of anxiety when I watch a new movie, ignoring (or trying to ignore the) questions: What’s going to happen? Will these characters live or die? And then, I don’t want them to die, I want them to live happily ever after. I like when the good guys win, evil is vanquished, the one ring is destroyed, and the emperor dies. So I can’t relax while I focus on plot and consequence. Afterwards, I can think about writing and performance, cgi and music. I can finally see the film.

Anyway, if you didn’t like it (and some in this house didn’t), that doesn’t matter to me. I wish you would have, obviously, but that’s because I want you to have a great life and enjoy the things you eat/see/hear/read/experience. I want you to feel the significance & delight in his/her lips when you kiss them. I want you to dance wildly and sing out loud. You deserve wonderful things.

Anyway (again!!), it doesn’t matter because I did. I don’t need you to, I don’t even really need it to be great high art. Like The Last Wish, it’s mortality, pain, meaning, selfishness v selflessness, identity, family, and most of all, love. I love it even more as I’m thinking about it now.

I guess that’s the point that young me so often missed, it doesn’t have to be “great” to be awesome. Kid A is a masterpiece and clearly a superior work than The Bends. But The Bends is perfect, something we all can listen to forever, and Kid A is horrible.

The things that matter touch us in ways we can’t always explain, but they leave us transformed. I might not be able to articulate why I love Local Natives cover of “Right Down The Line,” (which you should listen to as soon as you can), I don’t know the chords or the time signatures, but I do know it makes me get so lost in the Angel that the 2 become inextricably linked. It’s not Dylan, but baby, it’s .

The Last Wish and Guardians 3 are not Taxi Driver or Pulp Fiction, but not everything has to be. We just have to feel them. They remind us we’re alive, and what better compliment could there ever be??