Valerian - Movie Review

We don't see a whole lot of movies any more and since the volume is low I try to keep the quality high. Last night on a whim we saw "Valerian" and boy I wish I hadn't...

The trailer looks pretty good:

Its a Luc Besson movie, he did "The Fifth Element" which I'm a big fan of and I'd hoped this movie would be similar. In a way it was, this isn't "science fiction" since that would require some kind of real science. The film ignores science and physics almost completely. Gravity exists pretty much everywhere, all the time as does, apparently anyway, air.

Dane DeHaan isn't an actor I'd seen before but his portrayal of Agent Valerian is one of a spoiled man-child. He's at once a super tough fighter and suddenly a limp noodle. Cara Delevigne's Sergeant Laureline may have set the cause of women's rights back 15 years. My friend rightly pointed out "She never did anything useful in the whole film." Thats not 100% true, she saved Valerian's life exactly once, then she immediately got kidnapped apparently forgetting that in the previous scene we'd seen her with a gun. She plays the helpless maiden to the hilt, sergeants around the world will cover their eyes in shame.

Rhianna makes a completely unnecessary but appearance only to be killed off within minutes of her introduction. Its especially sad because hers was one of the best characters in the film, of course the character is ruined in a completely pointless and sappy death scene...

With plot holes you could fly a 747 through and lead actors that look and sound like petulant teenagers I'm stunned by how positive the reviews online are with most reviewers commenting on how good it looked. I can't disagree more with that, the imagery is overly busy with no common look or theme to be found anywhere. I see that this was all based on a comic, while the movie thoroughly sucked I'm interested in reading the source material and feel bad for the author who's vision was implemented so poorly.

Living with a 52 year old lawnmower

Its not hyperbole to say we have a 52 year old lawnmower, in fact in this first picture both of the lawnmowers are 52 years old. Thats right they were each made in 1965.

I was mowing the lawn yesterday thinking that this is probably the only lawnmower I'll ever need. Unless we get a much larger lawn I don't see why I should ever buy another lawnmower. Yesterday I mowed our lawn and half of Bill's in less than an hour using less than one tank of gas. Considering the gas tank holds less than half a gallon thats quite economical.

I've been using this mower since 2009 with relatively little drama until a couple months ago. Angie had cut the whole lawn and parked the machine when she commented that it didn't seem to have any power. I fired it up, engaged the blades and it made a gawdawful racket. I pulled off the pulley cover:

Doesn't look too exciting right? Look closely at the pulley, right under the nut, see the silver ring?

 

The pulley was made in two pieces and the key'd part sheered off.

Nothing a couple minutes with the welder couldn't solve.

I've mowed the lawn twice since that happened, I was a little worried I'd need to balance the pulley but I think since the repair is so close to the center it doesn't matter.

I'm thinking I probably need to replace the spark plug and airfilter, it took 3 pulls to start yesterday, which I guess is something most people would be happy with. I do need to replace the fuel shutoff valve, its gotten loose and yesterday once while I was mowing it fell into the off position and killed the engine. No big whoop but as its not right I'd like to remedy it.

Whelp...

We'd gone to camp for a week when I got the notice that Photobucket turned off 3rd party linking on my account so if you dig back into the blog you'll find lots of the 3rd party link placeholders.
Actually pretty soon you'll see no connection placeholders as I'm deleting my Photobucket account. I've been in and downloaded all of the albums and deleted them. I'll be uploading everything to Google Photos but it'll take some time.

Edit: Looks like I'd done more with Google Photos than I remembered, all of 2017 and 2016 are now back online. 2015 is about half there. I'm not sure how far back I'll go but my Photobucket albums are moving over pretty well. I also took the opportunity to sort through the 800+ photos in my unsorted bucket and move a lot of them into better places, maybe this isn't all bad...

In the meantime here's a picture of my 1965 Cub Cadet 70 with the generator hitched behind it.

New content soon!