We saw "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" and it breaks my rule on writer/directors

I have a general rule that films with the same person serving as both writer and director will be better than splitting those visions. There are lots of good movies with different writers than directors but also lots of bad. There are fewer bad in my experience with one writer/director. That said, this was too long, poorly written, and disappointing. 3/5, saved from 2/5 because Gamora.

One of the things that should've been a clue for this movie's problems is the lack of a subtitle. Every other Marvel-universe sequel I can think of has had a subtitle that tells you what the movie is going to be about. Think "Age of Ultron" or "The Winter Soldier". Now pause for a moment and try to come up with the three- or four-word subtitle that would describe this movie. I can't think of one because the movie doesn't have a focus. It would be something like "we try really hard to do more of the same stuff and be funny at it." Or "Isn't Baby Groot Really Cute?"

Yes, Groot is cute. No, the movie isn't really funny. The movie lacks anything like a coherent plot but let's put all the complete spoilers under the cut tag...
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No one expects a sequel to be as good as the original. The first GotG was so off-the-wall, so out of character for all the other Marvel Universe movies, that they had to sell you on the idea that it was Marvel universe. And that movie was great. Likewise, I expect the next Deadpool movie will have a hard time living up to the original. But GotG 2 suffers from a lot more than sequel-itis. It suffers from a bad script that drags everything else down.

I don't fault Chris Pratt for being wooden, nor Kurt Russel for being ridiculous. But that's what the script makes their characters be.

April update, the second part

I've caught up on reading now, so let me try to catch up on writing, some. The previous April post only covered the first few days of the month

In between there was the saga of the disappearing child, which is long and gets its own cut tag:
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Then there was Passover, which got its own post eventually.

That brings us to mid-April, when we took a family trip to eastern PA.
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The next weekend was intended to be the Boston version of the March for Science, but that seemed to be the "stand around for science" and there were other things and I ended up not going. I still feel ambivalent about that. I'm really failing to find a resistance group or activity that holds my attention and interest and lets me feel like I'm DOING something. I call my Rep now and then to congratulate and encourage him; most recently for continuing to try and get some measure of truth around the Trump team's involvement with Russia. There's so much going on (wrong) that it's easy to lose sight of the things I think are important. Like, is anyone else in the current Administration subject to blackmail or actively suborned by the Russians? Like, how the hell do we stop them upgefukking the next election?

More to come...