Freestyle Love Supreme (Broadway) (2019-21)

 I snagged two center orchestra tickets from work. Amex sponsors Freestyle Love Supreme. They were giving out tickets to colleagues who volunteer. I actually missed the deadline given in the email because I was in Maine and off work. But luckily they still had tickets available. And alas there were some empty seats at the performance. The theater was full of Amex colleagues and so they made a bunch of Amex jokes; play to your audience. 

I'm not going to give this a rating because it's a different show every night. I don't know if Broadway has ever seen anything quite like this. Freestyle hip hop, essentially improv comedy in the form of hip hop. Like watching Whose Line Is It Anyway? There are two keyboards, a beat boxer, and three freestyle rappers who also sing melody.  They're very good at what they do. And they're lots of fun. Aneesa Folds is especially funny, definitely the standout member of the cast. The show is short, 90 minutes without intermission. Would have been great if they had a special guest appear but I guess they don't do that when no one in the house paid for tickets.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

I was largely unimpressed by the second installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. The first one was novel, unexpected and knowingly poking fun at itself. The second one has some similar humor, but it doesn't land. It is more annoying and not as witty. We have Kingsman and Deadpool and the Lego Movie--the self-deprecating humor isn't new anymore. It does some things really well though. The music supervision is spot on. The special effects and production design is fantastic. I appreciated the movie's boldest statement, it's depiction of the video game-ification of drone warfare. I did not appreciate Mantis, a dangerous stereotype of a subservient and submissive Asian woman. Drax insults her throughout the film, insults her appearance and her personality. She seems relatively unimportant to the plot, only serving as the butt of a joke.