We watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home last night. It holds up better than I thought it would. At the end, I found myself trying to imagine the conversation between the whales and the probe. Probably something like this:

— Hey! We’re still here! Or, we’re back, anyway!
— Oh, good! What happened to you? We’ve been trying to reach you for ages.
— Apparently the humans killed us all.
— Wait, they did WHAT?
— Well, some of them did. But some of them brought us forward through time to make up for it. They won’t kill us now.
— They’d BETTER NOT!
— I think we’re OK now.
— *sigh* OK, good to know. We’ll go report back. Keep in touch.
— Thanks!

And I also imagined their reactions at the end, as they frolic in the 23rd-century ocean:

Wow! We’re in the open sea! And we talked to aliens! And the humans have stopped hunting us! And they’ve stopped polluting the oceans! This is AWESOME!

Well, except for the whole thing with us being the only humpback whales on the planet. But it’s not like we were really able to talk to much of anyone from the aquarium to begin with.

Seriously, though, it’s encouraging to know that, decades after the ban on hunting went into effect, the humpback whale population has rebounded so successfully that most populations are no longer threatened by extinction. I found articles citing a worldwide population of “over 80,000” and “just under 100,000” in 2016 — an order of magnitude more than the less-than-10,000 that were left in the 1980s!

Poster: plain white background, characters lined up, with the movie title, "Who will change the future?" And the sign of the Deathly Hallows in the background.

It’s not a very visually exciting, informative, or interesting poster in itself…

But what is interesting is that it’s a clean break from the look of the Harry Potter movie posters. Heck, you have to look hard even to find the words “Fantastic Beasts.”

And yet the sign of the Deathly Hallows looms over everyone, unmistakably linking it to the wizarding world we’ve come to know.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (movie): New tech leads to an economic boom, but politics and greed conspire to ignore warnings from a scientist about the long-term dangers of this man-made climate change until disaster strikes.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2: A tech company without ethics is run by a nerd who grew up to become the bully he despised. He ruthlessly exploits a fragile ecosystem for profit, regardless of the damage done to endangered species or what remains of the island’s society.

Plus, you know, Jurassic Park with food instead of dinosaurs.