Morning coffee

Sunday morning is ending, the day moving ever so slowly toward noon. Rain is coming and going outside and I am curled up in a cozy sofa, tapping away to soft background music, coffee and other niceties within easy reach. I decided to have another little break with habits and so got myself out of the house for breakfast. I found Café no 77 on the line, and it turned out to be just as nice in real life as it appeared on Facebook.

I feel brought right back to the week in Berlin. I believe these places are much more common than they appear to me, cafés and other eateries where you drop by and feel at home without pretentions or forced hipsterness.

Café no 77 welcomes you Café no 77 welcomes you

Yes, I do feel very welcome.

I should come back here.

And I should find out what other places I have been missing.

Marveling

I watched Captain America: civil war the other day. Now I have, as is my tradition, also gobbled up the Incomparable episode about it. In many ways, it felt like a Marvel take on the same thoughts Batman v Superman tried to tackle. I found it a somewhat better take, but still not a great one. One fun aspect is that when we talked about Batman v Superman we said something along the lines of "this would not happen in the Marvel universe", where "this" was things like collateral damage and world reactions to super heroes rampaging about. We were clearly more wrong than right about that. Even the tone goes in the same direction, but the take is still distinctly Marvel. The heroes have a lot more humanity to them, and that makes the whole thing seem just a bit more believable. Where Batman v Superman tried to increase drama by making events more apocalyptic, Civil war goes in the opposite direction and makes it more and more about individuals. In the end, the two central characters are beating eachother up hand to hand, making eachother bleed and feeling believably angry. You can see how they got here, and even if some of the steps were a bit weak it still fits with their personalities. The end actually feels greater the more I think about it, and the world did not have to hang in the balance all the time.

On the other hand, Civil war was another overly long creation overly stuffed with characters following up on other movies and setting up future ones. I had a good time, but I keep wondering why and for how long we can let a movie serial like this go on. Why did this story deserve to be told in this way? How does it deserve this amount of care and time? Marvel seems to be able to take any story they want, bring it to some good enough level and then throw care and craftmanship at it until it becomes another solid two hours of action and conference room discussions.

Surely there are even better stories they could tell with all that money?

Favorite detail: the title cards for locations.