Coyote Blog

After seeing the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer a while back, I thought the movie would suck.  The movie just looked stupid.  I had not intention of going to see it, until my son pointed out the high Rotten Tomatoes review scores.  I still hesitated, figuring the only people who had seen it and were reviewing it well were a select group of Comicon attendees or something similar.

But my son talked me into it and it was thoroughly enjoyable.  Sure, its still a comic book movie so its not winning any Oscars and there are a few plot holes (if everyone is looking for the movie's MacGuffin so hard, why was it so easy for the protagonist to find?).   And plenty of it is derivative (Rocket and Groot are Han and Chewy repackaged).  Some of the characters seemed to be tossed in out of nowhere (e.g. the Collector), but I never read the comic book and presume, since this is clearly the first in a series, that they are setting up future regular characters. But the visuals were good and the dialog had some wit and charm to it.   I loved how they worked the 70's music sound track into the story.  I had wondered if Chris Pratt could carry off the leading man role but I thought he did OK.   A very solid summer movie.

Postscript:  My four word review:  Zoe's Green This Time.

Skip every other release.

Here are the original cast Star Trek Movies:

VI:  OK, kind of

V: Bad

IV:  Goofy but enjoyable

III:  Truly terrible

II:  Awesome, to the point that the two Chris Pine et al reboot movies have drawn more heavily on the Wrath of Khan than the original show

I:  Flat, boring

Here are the recent Windows releases:

Windows 8:  Sucks

Windows 7:  Excellent

Windows Vista (6?):  God awful

Windows XP :  Very Good

Windows ME:  God awful

Windows 98/2000:  OK

Do you see the pattern?  Windows 7 redeemed the awful Vista in the same way XP redeemed the awful ME.  I can only hope the to-be-released-in-October Windows 8.1 fixes some of the awful mistakes in Windows 8, not the least was the grafting of a butt-ugly touchscreen tablet interface to a PC OS most of us use with mouse and keyboard.  Until then our company is still only buying Windows 7  computers.  Some of my employees buy their own computers -- I provide all the company's tech support and have told them they are on their own if they buy Windows 8 and then can't find the control panel.