We're halfway through the third week of shelter-in-place here in California.

It's starting to feel almost normal, this staying home and avoiding other people thing. Natural to move aside when walking on the sidewalk to avoid passing within six feet of someone else. Odd to think about leaving the house.

But then I think about going out for coffee and donuts, or driving out to the bookstore, and I remember. What we're doing, and why. And what we're trying to prevent.

I hope you're own stay-at-home is going as well as it can. That you're safe, have enough food, and don't have to worry about being kicked out by your landlord.

Here's a couple more shows to keep your mind occupied while we wait for the viral storm to pass:

Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist

I didn't want to like this show. True, it's about a programmer, which should immediately draw me in, but it gets everything about being a programmer at a startup wrong, right from the very first episode. It's the equivalent of the lazy "enhance" trick we've seen on too many shows, drawn out into an entire plot point. It rankles me, every time.

And the lead is....let's say bland, shall we? The main character is the least interesting part of the show.

But the rest of the cast is phenomenal, the musical numbers are both weird and fun, and it nails the mix of guilt, hope, and love that comes with caring for a terminally ill family member.

So I've been gritting my teeth through the software-world bits, and enjoying everything else.

Source: Hulu

Birds of Prey

Ok, not a TV show, but have you seen this movie? It's currently battling it out with Thor: Ragnarok in my head for the best superhero movie of the last ten years, and I thought nothing would ever get close to Thor.

It's got goofy comics action -- one scene has Harley shooting people with glitter bombs -- fantastic fight scenes, a crazy sense of humor (wait till you see what Harley will do for a breakfast sandwich), and incredible sets (one scene takes place inside multiple rooms in a fun house).

The cast is phenomenal, with the exception of the kid playing Cassandra Cain (but she's young, so can be forgiven).

My wife and I found ourselves watching it twice in a row one night (the second time with the director's commentary on) and I didn't even mind. It's that good.

Source: Online Rental

I loved this movie when it came out. It was interesting, well-paced, and felt like it did justice to all of its characters, no matter how minor. Not to mention the events of this movie aren’t just taken seriously, they pushed the ongoing MCU TV series and movies in a different direction.

But re-watching the movie revealed a few flaws.

What Went Wrong

The camera is moving throughout the movie, jostling and shaking back and forth constantly. Its particularly egregious in most of the fight scenes, where the trembling camera combines with super-quick cuts and bad framing to render them illegible.

The scene where Black Widow and Captain America are sitting talking inside Falcon’s house? The camera constantly dips down and tilts, so that different parts of Black Widow’s head are in frame every couple of seconds. What did the shaky-cam bring to this scene?

It seems the camera only stands still for the CGI shots, like when the heli-carriers are taking off near the end of the film.

How to Fix It

We’ve also got to reframe most of the shots of the movie. The sequence where the Winter Soldier, Cap, and Black Widow are all fighting around an overpass is in particular need of a re-shoot. Most of the shots are at odd angles, with any background that could help orient the action completely out of frame.

This is a great movie. It deserved to be shot clearly, without the headache-inducing edits that chopped movies like Quantum of Solace into a boring mess.

I’ll admit it. My wife and I are re-watching all the Marvel movies in preparation for Civil War.

Like Iron Man 2, Thor is mostly good. On this re-watch, Loki came across as more of a tragic figure to me, a son trying to prove his worth to his father, but choosing the wrong way to do it. Thor grappling with his newfound weakness on Earth is still my favorite section of the movie (I’m a horrible person, and laugh every time Jane hits him with her car).

But there’s one glaring weakness in the film: Thor’s Asgardian friends

What Went Wrong

Sure, one is female and one is big and hairy and one is Asian and one is dapper. But that doesn’t tell us anything about them as people, as characters and personalities.

We never get a sense of them as individuals, and we don’t get a sense of them as a team. As a result, every scene with them in it lacks emotional weight. We simply don’t know who these people are, or why they’re friends, and we don’t care.

This is important because several key points of the movie involve them: the expedition to Jugenheim, their betrayal of King Loki, the fight against the Defender in the Earth town. Leaving these characters as bare sketches, as stereotypes, lowers the stakes in all of these scenes, weakening the movie as whole.

How to Fix It

We should see each of them exhibit their abilities. Using the Big One’s gregarious personality and Loki’s lies, the two of them talk the group past some guards. The Asian One and the Dapper One do some scouting, which requires them to scale some stone walls and do a little acrobatics. The Female One sticks by Thor’s side, stopping him just as he’s about to step on a trap. Thor can lost his temper halfway through the mission, putting them all in danger and causing his team to bail him out of trouble.

It doesn’t need to be long, just enough to give us a sense that these people have been working together for a long time, they trust each other (mostly), and they’ve all good unique histories. Maybe each one is from a different world, and so they can all give us some sense of how the Nine Realms work together?

To make room for it, we drop the intro sequence about the war with the Frost Giants. It’s confusing, it’s backstory, and we don’t need it. We do need to see Thor’s team in action.

The mission sequence also gives us a chance to show Thor’s second of three strikes. Odin welcomes them home after the successful completion of their mission (it’s the reason for the celebration in the beginning) but chastises them for taking a risk, etc. He can mention a previous (recent) strike, one that Thor thinks of as an adventure, but Odin sees as a mark of his immaturity.

We still have the Frost Giants sneak attack in the middle of this, and the Defender does its job. But now Thor and Loki get to ask what they were after, and Odin gives them the history, but abbreviated, and without the Earth piece.

With that change, the stakes are higher throughout the movie. When Thor goes to Jotunheim, we understand that he’s disobeying his father again, and dragging his team – who we know and care about – along with him. When Thor starts fighting, we understand that not only has Thor put peace between the worlds at risk, he’s put his team in danger, since we just saw Odin warn them against crossing him a third time.

We totally understand when Odin appears and takes them home, then yells at Thor and takes his hammer. It’s the culmination of a chain of events, not a father suddenly turning abusive because his kid stayed out past curfew.

And when Thor’s friends face off against the Defender, we care a lot more. They’ve broken the terms of their freedom in Asgard to find their friend, only to discover he’s no longer the strong fighter he was. The fight against the Defender will likely be their last, but they’ll fight it together.

What Went Wrong

There’s barely enough time to breathe in this movie, let alone let the main cast play off each other like they did in the first Avengers.

We get shortchanged on three fronts: the ensemble cast doesn’t get to interact enough, the villain doesn’t get to do enough to seem like more than a speed bump, and the twins have to info-dump all their backstory so you might care when one of them dies (I didn’t).

How to Fix It

Keeping the Avengers in the castle is easy: we let them find the scepter, but they can’t move it. Say its own power is being used to booby-trap it, so if they try to move it without disarming it it’ll blow up and level everything in a 10-mile radius. Stark and Banner will have to stay to study the scepter and disarm the bomb. The other Avengers will stay to guard them.

Meanwhile, the twins weren’t captured in the initial assault on the castle. They escaped and hid, so now they come out to strike at the Avengers, using Quicksilver’s speed for hit-and-runs that let the Scarlet Witch give the team disturbing dreams while they sleep.

We show their backstory by letting the Avengers discover it: they find a scrapbook in the twins' former cell, filled with pictures of their parents and news clippings of the collateral damage caused by Stark weapons. This will give us some sympathy for the twins, and at the same time use Tony’s guilt over his company’s legacy to push him in developing Ultron.

From here, the beats play out much like the original movie: Ultron kills Jarvis and escapes to attack the team, only to be pushed into hiding. And where does he hide? Why, inside the Hydra machinery buried under the fortress. He uses it to build his new body, an army of android servants, and the giant engines he will activate to push up the ground under the castle (and surrounding town) to create his meteor.

Ultron and the twins never need to meet or collaborate. The twins have their own reasons for going after the Avengers, and don’t need to team up. But the effect of both pursuing their own ends will reinforce the feelings of dread the Avengers and their team start getting from the castle, which feels haunted: a gust of wind from a speedster whipping by, the flicker of a computer screen as Ultron hacks another system, waking up in a cold sweat from a horrible dream that you feel is a vision of a dark future.

All the while, this slow build gives us plenty of time for the characters to talk, to play off each other even as the team fractures under the Scarlet Witch’s influence.

Our climax brings everything out into the open: the twins reveal themselves at the same time that one of the Avengers stumbles across Ultron’s robot army. The Avengers are caught fighting on two fronts, until Ultron reveals the second part of his plan: the engines roar to life, lifting everyone off into the sky, threatening extinction for the human race, with the twins' home town as ground zero.

The twins switch sides, Quicksilver sacrifices himself to help defeat Ultron, and they ultimately succeed in preventing the apocalypse, though they lose the scepter in the final blast.

But Ultron is not destroyed. A final shot shows the Cradle being hauled away on a truck crewed by Ultron’s robots, an ominous “Downloading” flashing on a display.

We leave the actual “Age of Ultron” and the creation of the Vision for a separate movie, so we can give that plot the time it deserves.

Having watched Superman and Superman II: The Donner Cut last year, and enjoyed them, my wife and I decided to skip over Superman III and IV and go straight to Superman Returns (which itself ignores the last two movies, and is set five years after Superman II).

I remember seeing it in 2006, when it came out, and thinking it was a terrible movie. Rewatching it now, I think I missed what Bryan Singer was trying to do: this is a 1970s movie made with 21st-century special effects, an attempt to capture the mood and feel of the first two movies that mostly succeeds.

I definitely prefer its version of Superman – who, while flying by to rescue someone during the climax, casually uses his heat vision to melt shards of falling glass, keeping them from hurting people on the sidewalk – to Man of Steel’s destructive hobo.

And in adopting the deliberate pacing of the earlier movies, it gives itself plenty of time to set up the relationships between Lois, Superman, Richard, and their son Jason that might have defined and deepened the sequels that (unfortunately) didn’t get made.

When Superman discovers he has a son, he’s presented with a unique challenge: he wants to be in his son’s life, and he needs to give his son guidance in the use of his growing powers, but he cannot reveal that he’s the boy’s father without destroying the life that Lois has built for herself while he was gone. That’s a great source of dramatic tension, and I wish we’d gotten to see more of it.

Much as I like it better this time around, two huge flaws still stood out to me: Lex Luthor’s evil plan, and the movie’s treatment of Kitty Kowalski (Luthor’s female companion).

Kitty is pulled right from the earlier films, a soft-hearted ditzy blonde that has no place in reality or in a modern movie. In some ways, she’s worse in this one, since the 70s version actually showed up Luthor a time or two, and her conscience led her to betray Luthor and save Superman. This Kitty is all tears and no action, a throwback to a more misogynistic period that should have been either updated or left out.

And Luthor’s plan – to destroy the Eastern seaboard to make room for his new continent – is simply ridiculous. I understand that Singer wanted to echo Luthor’s real-estate plan from the first movie, but they concocted something that was – frankly – dumb, and unworthy of a supposedly brilliant supervillain.

Instead, they should have had Luthor build his new islands somewhere in the Pacific, in the tropics, and set them up as new luxury vacation spots. Then the movie could have started after the islands were complete, and about to open for business. We drop in news stories in the background talking about the islands' opening, about Luthor’s reform story, about how world leaders are showing up to get a personal tour of his creation, and possibly license the technology themselves to solve their own land shortages. Then, we get Lois assigned to cover the opening ceremony (against her will), with her family going along for the “vacation” part of the experience.

Once everyone’s on the island and the ceremonies start, Luthor unveils the evil part of his plan: he holds the world leaders hostage, shows them how destructive his island tech can be, then tells them he’s got seed pods scattered offshore of New York, Hong Kong, St Petersburg, Tokyo, etc. He demands a large payment, lucrative contracts, and sovereignty over all the land that he might create. He threatens to detonate the seed pods if his demands are not met.

This gives us the same basic setup for the final sequence of the movie – Superman arrives at the islands only to find he’s powerless because they’re Kryptonite, his child can discover his strength by defending his mom against kidnappers, Lois can save Superman, who in return lifts the islands out in to space before Luthor can detonate the seed pods – but now Luthor is threatening worldwide destruction in order to get what he wants, instead of causing destruction in order to get nothing.

It’s a smarter plan, and it gives us dramatic possibilities the other doesn’t, like Luthor setting off two seed pods at once, both to show the world leaders what they can do and to make Superman choose which one to save. It also helps drive home how long Superman has been gone, if Luthor’s had time to get out of prison, discover the Fortress of Solitude, create the islands, and rehabilitate himself as a purveyor of luxury.