Ezra Miller

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords to half the second verse of “La vie grise” (The Grey Life) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished memorizing “Aux enfants de la chance” (To the Children of Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. I found a set on Ultimate Guitar and started transcribing them.

            During song practice I played my Kramer electric guitar for the first of two sessions but halfway through, the volume started kicking out. I thought it was the amp but I plugged in the acoustic and the other electric and they all had steady volume so the problem must be with the Kramer. I’ll have to take it to L’il Demon today if they’re open. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I took my Kramer to L’il Demon. He’s supposed to open at noon but he’s sometimes late and so I went at around 12:30 but he still wasn’t there. I had to wait about twenty minutes. He plugged my guitar in and the volume was fine. He said that the problem might be the cable. He saw that my neck needed adjusting and did it for free. He suggested that I invest in a room humidifier and that’s something I’ve been considering for a while. I told him my place has those old style radiators and he said those are the worst. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before lunch.

            In the afternoon took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos at 17:30. 

            I roasted a beef sirloin tip and had a slice with a potato and butter while watching The Flash movie. 

            This was another overly long superhero film but some parts were entertaining. The beginning was a little boring though. Flash is on his way to work and really low on food energy because super speed obviously burns up a lot of calories. Batman calls him to Gotham where there seems to be an Earthquake. Batman is car chasing terrorists while Flash has to clean up. A hospital is collapsing and several babies are falling. Flash finds food falling as well and snacks at super speed before saving the babies. 

            Barry’s father is on trial for murdering Barry’s mother. There is closed circuit footage of his father in a store at the time of the murder but the image is not clear and that’s the only evidence that could save him. Barry is angry and starts to run faster than he ever has with the result that he breaks the time barrier. He begins considering going back in time to save his mother but Batman advises against it. He reminds him of the Butterfly Effect as presented in the 1952 Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder” in which even stepping on a blade of grass while time travelling to the past could change the future. Barry remembers that his father went to the store to get a can of tomatoes and while he was gone the murder of Barry’s mother occurred. His mother was at the store earlier but forgot the tomatoes. Barry thinks that it would be a small thing to simply go back to that earlier shopping trip and slip a can of tomatoes into his mother’s cart and so that’s what he does. On his way back to the present he is pushed by someone out of the time stream a few years earlier than the present. Barry goes to see his parents and they are surprised that he cut his hair. Then Barry looks out the window and sees his younger self coming up the walk. He intercepts him so his parents won’t know there are two of them. The younger Barry is in college and Flash explains to him the situation. Then Flash hears thunder and realizes that today is the day when the lightning struck the chemicals near him when he was working in the lab and he got his powers. This younger Barry has no interest in science but Flash thinks that he has to put him in the same situation he experienced or else he will lose his own powers. They go to the lab and Flash recreates the circumstances of the lightning event by arranging the chemicals as they were for him. But the younger Barry is freaking out about letting himself be struck by lightning and they struggle a bit with the result that the lightning hits Flash from behind and goes through him to hit Barry. This causes Flash to lose his powers while the young Barry gains them. 

            Now the older and powerless Barry has to train the younger Barry on how to use his powers. Meanwhile he also learns that this timeline has changed. The Back to the Future movies starred Eric Stolz and not Michael J. Fox. More seriously he learns that there are no super heroes. He sees on the news that Zod’s ship has arrived on Earth and is looking for Superman but there is no Superman to fight him. If he is on Earth he has yet to reveal himself. Barry also can’t find Aquaman or Wonder Woman. He tries to track down Victor Stone but he hasn’t become Cyborg yet. But then he learns there is or was a Batman but no one has seen him for years. Older Barry takes younger Barry to Wayne Manor where the door is unlocked. Inside they are attacked by a long haired and bearded and drunk late middle aged Bruce Wayne played by Michael Keatan. So Barry has even changed some of the sequences of the timeline so that even though the other Barry is younger, this Bruce is older. When Bruce calms down and learns the situation he gives a tutorial in temporal physics. He says going back in time doesn’t create a branched timeline but rather a fulcrum of timelines. It’s retrocausal. If you change the future you change the past and you end up with a multiverse. 

            Bruce explains that he no longer needs to be Batman because Gotham is one of the safest cities in the world. He tells Barry he won’t help them. The Barrys go to leave but older Barry decides to access the Bat Cave. All of Batman’s vast technology is still there. Barry works at Batman’s computer to try to find Clark Kent. He falls asleep and wakes up with a file next to him that reveals that an alien was discovered and is being held in a facility in Siberia. Batman agrees to take them to Siberia in the Bat Jet and he helps them infiltrate the facility. They fight their way in with Batman doing most of the fighting. They find the person being held but it is a young woman and not Kal-El. They rescue her anyway and escape but outside they are all captured. But the young woman who is now out in the sun turns out to be Supergirl and she attacks the soldiers. They all go back to the US and Wayne Manor where the young woman explains that Kal-El is her cousin and her name is Kara. She was sent to protect Kal-El because he was a baby when they left Krypton. They take her to the roof to recharge her powers in the sun and she puts on her Supergirl costume. Older Barry gets Batman to help him recreate the lightning strike that gave him his powers. He does so but the electrical system is not enough and so Kara flies him up into the storm. It works and now there are two Flashes. They all go to fight Zod. Batman flies air support, the two Flashes fight Zod’s army and Kara goes after Zod. Zod has already started terraforming to turn Earth into a new Krypton but he tells Kara that the code for fulfilling that task is in the blood of a Kryptonian child. He says they intercepted Kal-El’s pod but he did not survive the extraction and they learned it wasn’t his blood they needed but hers. Kara fights Zod. It seems odd that a teenager who has been stuck in a chamber for years would be able to hold up so well against a trained warrior with the same powers. Batman gets shot down but deliberately crashes into the main war ship to take it out before he dies. Kara seems to have beaten Zod but it’s a ruse and when her guard is down he impales her. Then her blood is extracted. The Flashes find Kara dead. Young Flash tries to change the timeline to save everybody but in each new timeline Kara and Batman die. They meet a middle aged version of the young Flash who has been trying over and over again for years to change everything and now he has lost his mind. He’s the one that knocked Flash out of the time stream into 2013 at the beginning of the story. Flash sees all of the alternatives of versions of Superman and Batman that have appeared in the past and they are all possibilities in the multiverse. But this particular version of Earth is doomed to be destroyed by Zod in every scenario. Young Barry dies. Flash decides to correct his mistake and to recreate the circumstances for his mother to be murdered. He takes the can of tomatoes out of her shopping cart. 

            Barry returns to the present in time for his father’s murder trial. Technology developed by Wayne Industries has enhanced the closed circuit footage of the supermarket camera to prove that Barry’s father was in the store at the time of his wife’s murder. Barry then meets Bruce Wayne but it is not the Ben Affleck Bruce Wayne but the George Clooney version from the Batman and Robin movie. This movie had some very engaging moments but they lingered way too long on a lot of them. Just like with Wakanda Forever it could have stood to lose an hour. Ant Man: Quantumania and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 were just as long but they were engaging and exciting and interesting all the way through without any useless moments and boringly executed and drawn out battle scenes. The action was repetitious. 

            Ezra Miller put in an amazing performance as the two very different Barry Allens. They started to train as an opera singer at the age of six. They have sung with the Metropolitan Opera and in the premiere of Philip Glass’s White Raven. They starred in the movie Afterschool at the age of 16 and dropped out of school the same year. They co-starred in City Island, We Need to talk About Kevin, and Every Day. They starred in Beware The Gonzo. They played Damien in the series Californication. They co-starred in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. They are a singer and the drummer for the band Sons of an Illustrious Father. They co-starred in three fantastic Beasts movies. They played Flash in several DC superhero films.