Today is Tuesday, March 18, 2025. Yes, I was absent from this spot yesterday, as I said I might be. Elliot and I commuted out to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in order to meet Elliot’s first girlfriend, “Deborah,” at the Cobble Hill Cinema to see the new Bong Joon Ho-directed sci-fi comedy Mickey 17 at 2. We eschewed driving to Brooklyn this time and took the subway instead. We didn’t have to take more than one train, the F, where we got off at Bergen Street. From there, it was about a 7-minute walk to the movie theater. We stopped at a bagel emporium on the way since we got to the region a little after 1. In the bagel joint on Warren Street, we saw a pair of young women in the store where one of them was cradling a kitten in her arms. Elliot accosted the one who was holding the kitten and asked her how old her cat was. I believe she answered that she was eight days old.

Then we walked to Court Street where the cinema is located. We espied Deborah who was buying her ticket to the film at the box office. We crossed the street and announced ourselves. We then bought our tickets which cost only $13 each. It wasn’t two yet, so we spent the next few moments in two toy stores in which Deborah saw a friend of hers with her young granddaughter. Deborah introduced us to her friend in one of the stores in which Elliot bought a few items for his grandchild, “Sally.” One of the things he bought her, I think, was a yo-yo.

Now to the movie, which the three of us were divided over: Deborah didn’t much like it (but I believe she’s not much of a fantasy/sci-fi fan), and Elliot and I were not overly fond of, but thought there were some thought-provoking items in it. I felt the film could have resonated more if there was a tighter edit made of it: we thought it was far too long – at two hours, 17 minutes.

The film stars Robert Pattinson as sad-sack Mickey Barnes who flees earth with his Korean friend Timo (Steven Yeun) after they are irretrievably bound to a loan shark for reneging on paying back a loan for a macaron shop that fails. The film is set in the year 2054, and this time, the main character, Barnes signs up to become an “expendable,” in which he becomes a guinea pig in experiments being conducted on a spaceship on a mission to colonize another planet, Niflheim. As an expendable, he suffers sixteen deaths in which he is “reprinted” after every time he dies. He is reprinted with all of his data encoded in the next iteration.

On the ship, he meets Nasha (Naomi Ackie) during the journey. They fall deeply in love during the mission to save lives on the ship whether it’s from Barnes dying from a toxin discovered in space or from dying of a new vaccine created to eradicate a novel disease. The true fun begins when Mickey 17 survives a fall into some ice cave on the planet and survives being chowed down by the native inhabitants of the planet, some sort of slug-like, sand worm creature. When he returns to his cabin, he’s immediately shocked to see another Mickey in his bed: thus Pattinson becomes two distinct characters: Mickey 17 and, now, Mickey 18. From then on, the two interact throughout with hilarious results. Mickey 17 is weaker, funnier, and milder than Mickey 18 who is more forceful, angrier, and impulsive.

On the ship are two villainous humans, one former senator Kenneth Marshall (played snarlingly well by Mark Ruffalo) and his wife, Ylfa Marshall (Toni Collette), who are the stand-ins for the current buffoonish president, Donald Dump, and his vanishing First Lady, “Melanoma” Dump. Here they rule the ship with an iron fist and Ruffalo as Marshall displays the same self-obsessed, messianic importance that afflicts the current Orange Ogre in the White House.

As I already stated, the beginning of the film gets off to a slow start and uses too much narration to get to what it wants to say. However, this movie lands squarely in a time when many world governments are trending towards autocracy, even with ours right now. With the planet that the earthlings are supposed to colonize, the inhabitants there, now dubbed “creepers” because of their shape and form, serve as the scapegoats of history, think of indigenous Americans and Australian aborigines, for example, who are plundered and conquered. Bong adds strong political themes into the story, even if they’re a little too apparent.

All in all, I’d say this was a good but flawed film. There is a lot of food for thought here like the question of mortality and identity that are thrown in here. Pattinson as Mickey is always asked by his shipmates what’s it like to die and he always answers the same way: it’s painful. But he always gets to be reborn anyway.

After the film, we went to a traditional bar to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Deborah drove us to O’Keefe’s Bar & Grill, located on Court Street. There we all ordered corned beef and cabbage and I had a cup of their lentil and cabbage soup.

For dessert, we went back to Deborah’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights for coffee and cookies.

We then bid our friend adieu and walked to the subway where we took the 7 train the wrong way: we were heading out to Brooklyn rather than back to Manhattan, so we got off the next stop to get the 7 back to Manhattan. We got off at Times Square to take a Queens-bound train. We did eventually get home after 9, I believe.

When we got home, we began watching a film from 1990 on TCM that I taped: An Angel at My Table which chronicles the life story of New Zealand writer Janet Frame. The film was directed by Jane Campion. We didn’t finish the movie since it’s close to three hours long.

Tomorrow I will be meeting my Manhattan cousins “Rivka” and Dillon” with Elliot for dinner at 7. I doubt that I will writing my blog here after the rendezvous since we generally consume three hours or more for supper and conversation, then we have to travel home. This time I’m positive we won’t be traveling in the wrong direction. Tomorrow we’re meeting Rivka and Dillon at 83rd Street and 1st Avenue at a restaurant called AOC East.

So I should be back on Thursday, God willing.

Have a good Wednesday, everyone.

And so it went!