Early day out of the way, though now it's 9:00 and I'm ready to go to sleep. I slept very poorly last night, as usual for when I know I have to get up earlier than usual. I'm always paranoid about not waking up in time, so it turns out I just... don't sleep.

Tomorrow is the mystery training day: we'll see what that's about.

Today's managers' meeting didn't yield MUCH info on our missing new owner, but what it did provide was... not encouraging. Apparently the board of the investment company that he was representing suspended him. No one said for what, or if it was/is a suspension with a defined length of time, or what that means for the company as a whole. What shady shit was going on that caused the suspension? Is he coming back at all? If not, does that mean we'll now be owned by this mysterious "board" of people that none of us have ever met or spoken to? If he does come back, what shady shit happened and how do we trust stuff going forward?

Though our center won the award for fastest-growing center, so that's good?

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Yesterday we went to see Firestarter. I actually really enjoyed it, and was surprised when I looked it up after and discovered that is a very unpopular opinion! It's rated really low, and I'm... not sure why? Most of the criticism I've seen I just don't agree with, I guess. I've seen complaints that it had no character arc, but I don't really agree. The arc isn't ENORMOUS, but it does HAPPEN. I think it actually had a very satisfying narrative arc (though not entirely character-driven), but it was a *satisfying* climax, which I feel like doesn't happen as often as I want. Kind of an iddy "aren't you tired of being nice? don't you just want to go apeshit?" arc, which is absolutely zero surprise, but I still enjoyed immensely.

The acting was good. The score was great, thank you John Carpenter (and others).

There are some differences from the source material. To be fair, I don't think that most of the criticism has been that they didn't like that it *was* changed, they just didn't like *how* it was changed.
But... I did? *shrug*

I like that we join up with the family in hiding, but pre-discovery, rather than post-discovery.

I especially liked the ways in which Rainbird's character was changed. He's less the overarching antagonist so much as a tool of the antagonists that's also gotten fucked over, and moving him to being another test subject instead of "just" an assassin made his character far more interesting, and made the government's likely intentions for Charlie feel very present. (Also gets rid of the kind of Unfortunate Implication of "this Native character is obsessed with the protagonist and befriends her and wins her trust with the sole aim of eventually killing her".) (Also also the first adaptation to have a Native actor play the character.)

And the ending as portrayed in the book and 80s film - where they decide to go to the unbiased media, so they can share the story with the world and ensure the government never gets away with this again! - would have honestly just felt... naive, imo, so I'm not mad that they dropped that.

I saw one person in a comments section complain that "a movie called Firestarter should actually have some fire happen at some point" to a chorus of "omg yeah, so boring! no special effects!" and... uh... blatantly untrue?

IDK. Usually I'm pretty predictable - I like a lot of generally well-received horror, and dislike a lot of stuff that a lot of other people also dislike.

But I'd watch this ten more times before I'd watch "Malignant" again, which was one everyone except me loved, apparently.