Every other Thursday I get banished from my house.  I have a house cleaner who comes to do all the cleaning that I am too lazy and unmotivated to do.  In the circles I travel in this is a confusing thing.  People don’t do this.  In fact, it took a while to make the people I work with understand that I haven’t engaged in human trafficking.  I don’t have a sad woman locked in my basement who needs to clean for me every day.  Basically, she comes in and cleans whatever big stuff she can get done in four hours.

This used to be perfect because I would leave for work every other Thursday and come home to a clean house.  Then my work schedule changed and I have Thursdays off.  Now I have to leave the house before she gets here at 8 AM.  In theory I don’t have to flee but I can’t be here.  It is super uncomfortable.  I couldn’t be the woman who is lounging on the couch reading while someone else cleans the house.  Too much Protestant work ethic or guilt or something.  So I flee from 8 to noon.

Sometimes I watch an early matinee.  This week I ended up watching Power Rangers.  Yeah, the pickings were slim.  Ghost in the Shell seemed like a more interesting story but I support the spirit of the boycott over the whitewashing of the film.  I had been drawn in my the Power Rangers trailer before I knew it was Power Rangers.  A group of kids find some artifacts and they become powerful.

I’m a sucker for an origin story.  I always want to know how something started much more than how it ends.  I like the tales of regular people finding out that they can become something extraordinary.

I’m too old to have been a Power Rangers fan when it was out in the U.S. before.  I knew nothing about it other than the cheesy costumes I saw when flipping channels.  Turns out that I may not have missed much.

It started out ok.  White jock boy does something stupid and crashes his car running from the cops.  He hurts his leg and all his dream of football glory are gone.  I hate that this story line is a thing.  Can adults please stop caring about high school athletics?  It’s embarrassing to me when a whole town is super into a football team or other sport.  I understand the students liking it and the family members of the players maybe but no one else should be that into it.

Then there was a black, autistic guy who gets rescued from a bully by the white jock boy.  Does stupid white boy have to automatically be the hero?  He turned out to be the leader of the team because he had the red coin.  Whatever.  I think it had more to do with racism and sexism myself but I might be jaded and cynical.  Anyway then there is a white girl and a Latina girl and a Chinese guy.  More diversity than you seen in a lot of superhero films. They all end up at an abandoned mine with all kinds of Keep Out Signs that everyone seems to ignore.  They find these coins that give them super powers.  In the meantime they total black guy’s mom’s minivan that he took without permission.  This is never addressed.  How did his mother not kill him?  He should have been grounded for the rest of the movie.

Then you get the obligatory training montages with the worst teachers ever.  In the meantime someone is trying to resurrect a monster made of gold?  Why gold?  Gold is soft and expensive.  If I was making a monster it would be made out of something tougher and cheaper.  I’d be a very practical supervillian.

Finally, finally, they get to be power rangers and then the movie got boring.  How?  How did they actually make super powers boring?  That takes skills.  They get these artificial dinosaurs to drive around in so they don’t even have to do any of the fighting they were training for.  They just shoot the bad guy until he throws them in a pit and the dinos accidentally combine into a giant robot.  That’s just like Voltron.  I know Voltron.  I saw those cartoons.  That was cat robots turning into a giant human robot.  Is this a common thing in Japan?

They beat the gold monster and then the towns folks clap and take pictures while the giant robot dances.  Yeah, I wish I was making that up too.

This is why Hollywood needs to stop whitewashing movies so I could have gone to see Ghost in the Shell and not have felt morally obligated to support the better casting in an awful movie.  At least I got soft pretzels and a clean house.