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movie

[Movie] Dunkirk

To me, Dunkirk feels really different from a lot of Christopher Nolan’s other movies. The plot and characters are basically incidental to how the film feels, the look and sound of it. The dialogue is almost nonexistent; I think if Nolan could have gotten the feeling he wanted without anyone ever speaking a word, he would have. The soundtrack’s pretty simple; there’s always a background ticking, as if a clock, that progressively speeds up as the movie continues on. The film’s made of three timelines that slowly collapse down to a single point. There are a lot of moments that have a lot of layers to them where the it feels like Nolan’s trusting the audience to pick things up.

Let me explain what I mean, here. The best examples of this are toward the end of the film, where the older men (Mark Rylence as Mr. Dawson and John Nolan as “Blind Man”) interact with the surviving younger soldiers. Mr. Dawson makes the understated point that first, they’ve got a job to do and they’re going to do it, and second, getting people out alive is sometimes the best you can hope for. The blind man at the end, giving blankets to the soldiers, has this interaction: (Might not be quite verbatim)

Blind man: You did good work.

Soldier: All we did is survive.

Blind man: That’s enough.

And then later one soldier comments to another that the old man wouldn’t look them in the eye, obviously projecting his own shame at the retreat onto him. What struck me about that in particular were that Nolan trusted the audience to have gotten that point without needing one of the characters to argue with him—and that both the old men were by grace of their age people who had lived through World War I. It’s another thing the film didn’t feel the need to state, but it’s powerful once you realize it.

There’s a lot of understated, chewy, emotional stuff in there that makes the movie feel more like a poem than a story. It’s different, and interesting, and very powerful at moments.

Which is what makes the last five minutes or so downright bizarre. Here, this bit is a spoiler, so highlight it if you want to read: [SPOILER] Tom Hardy’s pilot character runs out of fuel, and then while gliding, succeeds in shooting down a German fighter before it can kill the Admiral played by Kenneth Branagh, take a victory lap over the beach while soldiers cheer for him, manually put down his landing gear, land perfectly behind enemy lines, and then stand there like a badass while his plane (which he’s set on fire) burn and the German soldiers come to capture him. All intercut with one of the soldiers reading lines from Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.[/SPOILER]

After the rest of the movie, that seemed… shockingly bombastic. Tonally discordant. There’s also a bit where you can really tell one of the planes is CGI and it looks remarkably terrible.

There are some other issues I take with the film. I think during the entire time, I saw one non-white soldier, a black man among the French troops. I point this out as an issue, because not all of the British and French troops at Dunkirk were white—here’s a great Twitter thread about it, and a good NYT article. In a movie where the visuals were everything, this is perhaps even more important, because the simple existence of non-white soldiers or crews on the small boats, however briefly seen, would have been striking. This becomes a problem because Chris Nolan (rightly or wrongly) has a reputation for his movies being as accurate as possible (think about the “they made new science to simulate the black hole in Interstellar” thing), with attention to detail. Some people are going to come out of Dunkirk thinking it’s a good representation of that piece of history. (And the history book written to accompany it apparently makes not effort to correct this.) It encourages the continued belief that people of color simply didn’t exist in massive events they took part in.

On a slightly sillier level, it also honestly confused me after a while, because pretty much all of the actors who played soldiers look exactly the same. They were all thin white guys with dark brown hair in the same haircuts. Most are not given names. I’m guessing this is a statement about the interchangeability of the soldiers… but there were times in the film where we did need to be able to tell them apart, at least a little. When they were shouting at each other and one was getting threatened and so on. When Cillian Murphy showed up, it really distracted me from what was going on because I couldn’t figure out if I’d missed the bit of the story that told me how he got where Mr. Dawson found him, or what was even happening.

All in all, I think it’s a movie that’s really worth seeing, because it’s grim and beautiful in how it visually addresses the ideas of cowardice and bravery and hopelessness and their relationship to survival. Just don’t go in expecting gripping characters or snappy dialogue or a challenging plot. That’s not the kind of film it is.

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movie

[Movie] Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a film set in a colorful, utterly bananas space opera universe, which is unfortunately ill-served by both Luc Besson’s direction and writing, though these problems pale in comparison to its repulsive fuckboy of a protagonist, Valerian.

(For the short version of this post via Twitter rant, see this thread.)

I didn’t go into Valerian with much in the way of expectations. I haven’t read the source material, though my housemate who has was tentatively excited about the film. Since I knew it was going to be directed by Luc Besson, I went in hoping for something as fun and charming and weird as The Fifth Element, under the assumption that it would also come with a helping of racism and sexism. Well, it is weird and colorful, if neither fun nor charming—and I’m sad to report it delivered on the racism and sexism as well.

The story is pretty simple: Major Valerian and his partner Sergeant(?) Laureline are federal agents sent on a mission to retrieve stolen property, a cute little animal known as a Mul Converter. It’s the last of its species, since the supposedly uninhabited-by-sentient-life planet of Mul was destroyed almost thirty years ago. Of course, from the start of the movie, we know that Mul actually had a thriving civilization of tall, thin people made out of glitter, called Pearls, on it. Valerian and Laureline bring the Mul Converter back to Alpha (the city of a thousand planets) and find out that a strange radiation zone that kills everyone who enters it has begun expanding at the center of the city. Their investigation of this mystery leads them deep into a cover up that someone has an interest in protecting with deadly force.

The plot sounds interesting, right? Or at least reasonably so for a scifi effects spectacle. There’s some holes in it here and there, but I thought at least the structure avoided a lot of pitfalls that tend to come with far future or space opera scifi, where things get too arcane for the audience to be able to build an understanding of the universe while tracking a convoluted plot. Unfortunately, the actors stumble through the film, delivering their lines like they’ve all been shot up with horse tranquilizers, with the only relief the occasional spittle-flecked moment of self-righteous yelling before the monotony returns.

If that had been the only problem, it would have been almost forgivable, because the background is satisfactorily bananapants for a space opera world, and unlike Jupiter Ascending, it wasn’t actively boring. However, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has a major problem that Jupiter Ascending didn’t, in that the protagonist is vomitously unlikable and tries to pull the plot off course at every turn.

See, the movie starts with agents Valerian and Laureline having a… weird encounter where they’re both in bathing suits and sort of rolling around and wrestling, at which point Valerian embarks on his ceaseless campaign to get Laureline to marry him. Their relationship made absolutely no sense from the get-go, and veered immediately into intensely creepy territory: we’re basically talking a higher-ranked coworker persistently bugging his lower-ranked partner for a relationship. It was beyond gross. Worse, at basically every turn, something would happen in the plot, and before anyone could react or move forward, Valerian would immediately twist the situation into why won’t you marry me Laureline.

This was not a romance. This was the skeevy, passive-aggressive stalking of a fuckboy who believes he’s been friend-zoned. It made my skin crawl. And from what my houemate has now told me about the graphic novels, it really feels like what got put onto film wasn’t so much Valerian and Laureline as fanfiction written by someone who fantasized all through high school about fucking Laureline. I am not here to shame anyone for their wish fulfillment fanfic; I’ve written plenty myself. But I still know it’s not something that deserves a multimillion dollar film budget and a wide theatrical release.

Valerian’s aggressive skeeviness covers the expected sexism angle nicely, with the added bonus of Valerian’s trip through the red light district, where in the far future we’re still apparently still catering exclusively to straight male tastes. There’s a burlesque performance by a shapechanging alien named Bubble that pivots neatly from the sexism and into the racism. Bubble is played by Rihanna and for all her extremely short screen time, she’s the best developed character in the entire film. She gets an actual background, and motivations. After revealing her actual alien form, Valerian asks her to go back to “normal”—as in her super sexy Rihanna form. She also [SPOILER FOLLOWS, HIGHLIGHT IF YOU WANT TO KNOW] inexplicably dies after helping Valerian in a way that feels like a complete afterthought, though before her death she’s honored to get her skills as an artist validated by Valerian. Megabarf. Bubble helps Valerian rescue Laureline from a group of apparently “savage” aliens who [SPOILER] want to eat her brain, and the coding on the costuming and aesthetic for the aliens is pretty goddamn 1940s jungle witch doctor set. So that was nice.

Valerian also suffers from a problem many big budget scifi movies have, though not as badly as Jupiter Ascending did—it contains several action sequences that add absolutely nothing to the plot, and really feel like they got tucked in because they’ve gone the requisite number of pages and we need some more explosions. It’s particularly notable during the sequences that were almost entirely CGI; I find those extremely difficult to follow, action-wise, and mentally tune them out. The VFX department is showing off in a way that the human eye can’t follow and the brain can’t care about. For example, there’s an interminable battle sequence over the planet Mul that I couldn’t have given less of a shit about because it’s unclear why the battle is being fought, who is fighting it, or what the actual stakes are.

That said, if you could just surgically remove the title character entirely, this would be an almost enjoyable film. The opening sequence, which shows Alpha being built up from its humble beginnings as an Earth-orbiting space station, was lovely, and hopeful, and fun. Too bad the rest of the movie couldn’t live up to that promise.

You’ll notice that I keep bringing up Jupiter Ascending in this review. The movies are very comparable, I think. They’re both delightfully weird space opera universes that get crushed under the weight of their own film flaws. Jupiter Ascending had great characters and then got crushed under the weight of its shit pacing; its greatest sin was being boring. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets had absolute shit for characters to serve its mediocre-but-I’m-not-expecting-great-things-really-at-this-point plot. Both of them have left me frustrated and angry because I can see the bones beneath of what could have been the space opera movie we deserve, the film that would launch us to a place beyond Star Wars. But if you held a gun to my head and told me I had to watch one of them again, I’d have to go with Jupiter Ascending because I could at least nap through the boring bits and enjoy Jupiter being charming.

 

And a small side rant:

One thing I can’t help noticing is that in both of these films, the screenwriting credit goes solely to the directors. It’s endlessly frustrating that in an industry where story is supposedly king, there’s a real desire to make people whose primary skillset and interest is in writing those stories disappear. Maybe there would have been no saving either film, but their most fatal flaws (Jupiter Ascending’s pacing, Valerian’s shitty protagonist and paper thin characters) are just the sort of things that writers, or at least good writers, focus on.

Hire some fucking screenwriters already. And listen to what they say.

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mcu movie

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Honestly, I wasn’t going to bother with this movie. I’m really, really tired of Spider-Man movies. This is the third reboot of the character, and the second reboot left me so incredibly underwhelmed that the only pit deeper in my soul was already occupied by Tobey Maguire’s goth hair in Spider-Man 3. Which is sad, because Spider-Man 2 has pretty much been my favorite superhero movie ever – thanks to Dr. Otto Octavian. The only thing that got me to the theater for this one was that it had RDJ in it, and I’m still not tired of Iron Man.

Which is why, going into the theater, I jokingly called this movie Iron Man 4.

Readers, I was wrong on so many levels. God help me, I finally like a Spider-Man movie again. And I think I might like this one more than Spider-Man 2. We’ll have to see if it has the staying power in my brain.

I think part of what helps is that Spider-Man: Homecoming is not an origin story. It dives straight in with Peter already knowing all about his powers and how to use them, and is more about him trying to find the balance in his life between superhero and teenager, figuring out how he relates to the wider world. So in that sense, it’s more of a coming of age story. He’s got the same trouble juggling responsibilities that we saw in Spider-Man 2, but this go around, Peter’s still in high school. And the crazy thing here is that the movie is populated by actors that really do seem believable as high schoolers. And since it’s basically a current year story, Peter’s in a science/engineering magnet school, which is a great twist on the social dynamic. He’s not bullied for being a nerd because they’re all nerds. Which means the focus gets to be more on Peter and the responsibilities of relationships versus the responsibilities of power, rather than beating the incredibly dead horse of the jock/nerd divide,

I think it’s probably also the most racially diverse MCU movie we’ve seen to date. There’s a great interview with Tony Revelori (Flash in Spider-Man Homecoming) about how Peter Parker’s school nemesis has been reworked here, and if you scroll down there’s a picture of Peter’s peer group. Which looks like an actual group of kids you might see in a big city high school. I also really adored Peter’s best friend Ned. Zendaya as MJ was delightful.

Between Homecoming and Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, the MCU is really hitting it out of the park this year. Hoping they’ll keep it going with Thor: Ragnorak, because the scripting on these last two movies has been a cut above the previous few offerings. (Civil War, I’m looking at you. I love you, but you’ve got some problems.)

So, definitely worth seeing. It’s a movie that’s really having some fun, and it far exceeds what the trailer tells you it’s going to be.

And now I want to talk about spoiler-y things! Because that’s the only way to fully explain why I loved this movie as much as I did.

Continue reading “Spider-Man: Homecoming”
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tv

The Thirteenth Doctor

The thirteenth incarnation of the Doctor has been announced, and it’s Jodie Whittaker.

I’m having a lot of feelings right now that cannot be expressed by just screaming endlessly on Twitter, so I’m putting them down here.

I grew up watching Doctor Who on PBS. It’s been as huge a part of my life as Star Trek. Until new Who showed up, Seven was my doctor. A big part of that was because of Ace, who was cool and amazing and I wanted to be her for a long time. Her relationship with the Doctor was different, somehow. Looking back on it, I think it’s because she had Donna-esque levels of taking absolutely zero shit off the Doctor, while still being young enough that his relationship with her was more avuncular to downright fatherly. And because she was absolutely brilliant, and the Doctor supported her in that. To the extent that he wanted her to go to the academy on Gallifrey and become a Time Lord. I think that last thing is something that’s been heavily retconned in new Who, but the idea that you don’t have to actually be from Gallifrey to be a Time Lord, and that Ace could be a Time Lord? Sign me up.

And then there was Romana. Between her two incarnations she was in seventeen episodes, but she stands out in my mind because… holy shit, a female Time Lord. Traveling around and having adventures. I loved Romana II because she got to be on equal footing with the Doctor, and had her own sonic screwdriver – I mean, how cool is that?

Looking at new Who, my favorite companions have been the ones (particularly Donna) who were able to put themselves on more equal footing with the Doctor. I think I’ve always been searching for women in the series who have that independence, who are as close to being the Doctor as they can get without actually being allowed to be the main show. The companions I liked the least were the ones who were basically doormats that existed to be the Dr. Watson-esque plot receptacle. (And you’ll notice in modern retellings of the Holmes stories, Watson’s become a much more active character in his own right, whose main purpose is no longer being the person who exists to ask dumb questions so the great detective can explain himself.)

Because let’s be honest, when I was a kid and playing pretend, I didn’t want to be the Doctor’s companion. I wanted to be the Doctor. That was why I loved Romana and Ace so much. And yes, you can pretend as many things as you like, but for all children are intensely imaginative, they’re also weirdly pedantic in certain ways. If you don’t ever see a girl being the Doctor, you come to feel that the Doctor is not something you’re allowed to be. Like when the young son of a friend of mine sadly informed one of his female classmates (this happened before we had Ahsoka and Rey, mind) that she couldn’t play Jedi with him and his friends, because girls aren’t Jedi – his parents corrected him on that one, but he made a perfectly logical conclusion from what he’d observed.

And even when you’re an adult and far more capable of saying “fuck your unspoken rules,” that comes coupled with the ability to better read those subtextual signposts about what stories you’re allowed to be the protagonist for. A better ability to fight to get out of that box also means you know how goddamn high the walls are.

Which all comes down to why I’m tearing up over the casting of Jodie Whittaker, and I wish I could tell this one to kid me. Look, one of your heroes you want to be isn’t just a (cis) man. The Doctor really can be any gender the Doctor pleases. Look, you can have adventures in time and space and be the person with the sonic screwdriver and the blue Police Box, and not just the person there to be less clever than him. And I honestly never thought this would happen, after seeing the ever-escalating manbaby shit storm each time a new Doctor was cast and someone said hey, wouldn’t it be great if the Doctor wasn’t white, or wasn’t a man, or (gasp) both? (Still waiting on the first/third of those items, and that should not be forgotten.)

Maybe I’m more surprised than I should be because I haven’t watched the last several seasons of Doctor Who after being so solidly lost by the Matt Smith episodes. I’m definitely going to go back and try the most recent season, now. I want to see the set up. I’m on board for this. I keep trying to come back to Doctor Who (have not been able to care about the show since about a year after Moffat took over) because it was a staple of my childhood, and maybe this time I’ll stick.

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tv

Into the Badlands Season 2 Finale: I’m still angry

It’s been two days, and I’m still furious at Into the Badlands. As usual when I’m writing about this show, there’s going to be a ton of spoilers.

The last two episodes have kind of run together in my head, I think because in all honesty, not that much happened in the final episode. A lot of fighting, which kind of makes sense because it was the battle everything else in the season set up. Over the course of these two episodes, the Widow basically loses all of her allies and Sunny has it out with Quinn. That’s the nice recap.

Before I really work myself up into a howling rage, there were some things I liked. After Tilda and Odessa started their relationship, I was incredibly worried the whole time that either one of them would end up dead, Odessa would end up betraying Tilda, or Tilda would throw off Odessa for fucking MK and his inexplicable protagonist aura. All of those would be really typical ways for the show to fuck up a queer relationship. Instead, after Tilda picks her fight with the Widow and gets put in a cell, Odessa rescues her and they basically ride off into the sunset together. THANK FUCK. I have even more affection for Odessa, by the way, since apparently she saw MK go evil and kill a bunch of cogs in the shipment they were both a part of, and she stuck to her guns about Tilda needing to get the fuck away from him instead of getting hypnotized by his I’m The Writer’s Favorite Character aura. DOUBLE THANK FUCK.

 

The Widow

I’ve got some real mixed feelings about the Widow, at this point. She’s still hanging in there as the most complex of the characters, and I still want to be on her team. But I also think she really earned what happened to her, in the sense of every one of her allies telling her to fuck off. Her decision to give Veil back to Quinn episodes ago bit her big time, and she deserved it. It caused Sunny to turn on her, and Tilda to turn on her, and Waldo as well.

Because this is the thing about the Widow. (And it’s a discussion I had with my housemate, who is more strongly on Team Widow than me after all this.) What’s getting her in trouble is that she’s made such a big deal out of how different from the other barons she is—she’s still ruthless, but she talked a really big game about how she wants to destroy the sick system around her, and bring about equality for people, and protect women. I’m not saying her decision to screw over Veil doesn’t make sense—it does, on an emotional level, because it was an act of pure revenge on her for Veil trying to drive a wedge between Tilda and the Widow—but it was a major crack of hypocrisy in her apparent convictions. And that was going to bite her when people found out.

Where I’ve got really mixed feelings here is wondering where the Widow is going to go from here. Will she course correct and realize she fucked up and recommit? Or is she going to show that she really is a giant hypocrite and it was all a ploy to get power, a different tack in a ruthless system? To be honest, if we get to season three and the Widow is the new villain who is just as bad as Quinn, I’m probably just going to give up on the show. She won’t be interesting any more, at least not to me.

Her final conversation with Waldo is what’s making me think we’re headed that way, though. Suddenly it’s not about knocking down the system any more. Because “these people don’t know how to be free.” Are you even fucking serious, Minerva. (Maybe you could call it a meta-critique of “white feminism” but after the way the season ended, I am giving no benefit of the doubt for this show.) And to me, it didn’t play like someone talking themselves into going over to the dark side, it read like someone finally showing their true colors now that they had their prize at hand.

I’m not expecting the Widow to be some kind of lawful good paladin, here. But I think it would be a lot more interesting watching her try to navigate a compromise between her obvious love for power and sincerely held principles, as opposed to them being faux-principles being something she discards offhand now that she has what she always wanted all along.

Because this is the thing. I never would have been on #TeamWidow if I’d thought she was just Quinn in prettier clothes who we blessedly don’t have to watch eat all the time. I wanted her to succeed because I bought in (got suckered?) to her vision of what she wanted to do and liked the push-pull of watching someone ruthless and pragmatic making terrible bargains with her eyes on that prize. But if it turned out to be bullshit all along? I guess bravo on the Widow for skunking me too, but I sure as hell won’t be cheering for her any more than I’m cheering for Baron Chau.

And at this point, I’m not really willing to trust the writers anymore, because…

 

Veil

After a protracted fight between Sunny and Quinn, during which time Sunny lands several good blows, Quinn seems to die. Sunny inexplicably doesn’t CUT OFF HIS GODDAMN HEAD, so that minutes later he can spring up and grab Veil. Who then stabs herself through the chest so she can stab the man behind her in the heart. And they both die.

No, really, fuck the writers. This was the most lazy, cheap, manipulative way they could have gone. Here, let’s go over a few highlights of how this was shitty, shitty writing.

  • Way to kill off the black love interest. A+ racist trope.
  • Veil was basically the token non-fighter character. Hell, even Lydia gets to put a shovel through a guy’s head. Veil has survived entirely on her wits and her determination because she isn’t a fighter. And they chose to kill her off. I guess if the message was that no one who can’t punch should survive, well done. Slow clap.
  • The clumsy, continuous build up of people questioning if Sunny could actually kill Quinn, since Quinn raised him obviously was leading to this fight. And effectively, because of this build up we get the conclusion that Sunny’s relationship to Veil and his child, whom he is specifically trying to protect, is less important than whatever connection he subconsciously still has with Quinn. This takes two seasons of Sunny’s development as someone who is struggling to escape Quinn’s shadow and shits all over it with a cherry on top.
    • Consider the difference if, say, Sunny hadn’t been able to kill Quinn, and Veil had still killed him, but without killing herself in the process. What does that say about their relationship versus Sunny standing there and watching her off herself because of something he couldn’t manage to do?
  • After you fucking FORCE MARRIED VEIL TO QUINN, this is the payoff? All of her struggle, her survival, her determination, and she literally never gets to escape Quinn because she dies with him. She kills herself with his arms around her. She dies with their blood mingling again, this time through her own action. Just fuck you.
  • Apparently his lover and child are not enough motivation for Sunny going forward. Instead, he needed a good ol’ injection of angsty manpain, because that’s the only interesting way a man can experience emotions? Fuck off.

And do not even come at me with something-something gritty realism. This is a show where the world-building is already paper thin and runs on an engine of fridge logic.

Killing Veil off destroyed a lot of avenues for interesting character development for both Veil and Sunny by cutting them off cold. It showed utter laziness because it plays into the idea that people trying to be in relationships and being prevented from being together is more interesting than people actually being in relationships and figuring them out—and this is the Badlands. It’s not like Veil and Sunny getting out of Quinn’s base together would mean they no longer have anything to do but fence repair and PTA meetings at Henry’s school. This could have been some good, crunchy, interesting character stuff in all directions.

It also basically shit on all the promise of emotional payoff that gets built into horrible situations for characters. I gritted my teeth and kept watching through all the horrific, rapey, awful shit she had to deal with regarding Quinn because I wrongly trusted the writers to give it some kind of decent resolution.

Sometimes it’s good to challenge the audience expectation if you can do something creative and even better with it. If you can take it somewhere new. If you can show there’s a reason for it, a promise that this is going to lead us on an even more wild ride. But the reason audience expectation is a thing is your audience is trusting you to tell them a good story. The way you structure a story is creates those expectations, and you better have a damn good reason if you’re going to whip around and shit all over them.

The entire fucking second season for Sunny and Veil was about a build up to their reunion—Veil surviving, escaping and failing, doing everything she could to just keep herself and Henry alive, while all the time Sunny tried to make it back to her. Their romance is one of the major emotional engines of the show—seeing if love can survive in dire circumstances, if people can keep their families together as the world falls apart around them.

Apparently the answer is no.

Killing off a woman while a man watches in horror is not new. A woman sacrificing herself while her man watches helplessly is not new. These are old, overdone, lazy tropes that reduce female characters to sacred items the men can get upset about is not new, or interesting, or a novel direction. Veil, who had her own internal life and was amazing, deserves better than to be stuffed in the refrigerator with so many other women.

Her death was a lazy betrayal, a failure of creativity, and no good narrative reason was offered. It feels like someone trying to be edgy by playing a nasty trick on an unsuspecting victim.

Sorry, it doesn’t make you edgy. It just makes you an asshole.

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movie

8 Things I Liked About Fate of the Furious

Finally I got to see this movie. And it was everything advertised on the tin, bigger and sillier and more explodey than Furious 7. These have now become my favorite superhero movies. Sorry Marvel. But while none of Dom’s team runs around in colorful spandex, there’s absolutely no pretense at them being ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The sly wink at Dwayne Johnson’s power of super strength and toughness tells us what this really is. And they’re superhero movies that have no pretensions about being serious, but still manage to have a solid emotional core because goddamnit, the cast is still utterly solid.

(Spoilers, obvs.)

I could basically write a thousand words that’s nothing but high-pitched squeeing, but let me tell you my eight favorite things:

  1. Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) coaching his daughter’s soccer team and leading the girls in a haka. If you are having a bad day, this will instantly cure your sadness.
  2. Deckard (Jason Statham) doing an extended action sequence in which he takes out a bunch of goons in an airplane while juggling the world’s most adorable baby. I did not even know that Jason Statham + Baby was a combination that worked, but now I need it in my life.
  3. Deckard and Hobbs having a whirlwind romance in which they realize they have basically the same back story and bond adorably over it.
  4. Tej gets to drive a tank, okay.
  5. Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) is still in, and I love how she deals with both Tej and Roman trying to get with her.
  6. The villain, Cipher (Charlize Theron) is a super manipulative white woman with blonde faux-dreds. (Seriously, she looks like she got imported directly from Boulder.) She comes in pretending to be an innocent lady just having car trouble to hook in Dom, and then gets creepier from there — while still playing the “this is your choice to make” card constantly to force Dom to be complicit in everything that happens. Considering her opponents are a racially diverse team with a token white guy (Jason Statham) (not counting Nobody or Little Nobody here) it feels like deliciously pointed commentary.
  7. Deckard and Hobbs in prison and metaphorically pissing on each other’s shoes is also delightful. The level at which this movie doesn’t take itself seriously, and pokes fun at itself, is high in this scene.
  8. Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is still taking absolutely zero shit, and while she does not kick anyone’s ass while wearing high heels this time, she feeds someone to a submarine propeller and it’s acceptably satisfying.

You’ll note that I don’t really mention Dom, because he’s… kind of there. He’s the motivating force for everything happening, and while I understand that his Wrinkled Brow of Stern Manpain was necessary, it didn’t engage me the same way watching Deckard and Hobbs yell at each other did. Sorry, Dom. The manly man hero is often the least interesting character out there.

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writing advice

Write Every Day

And lo, there is another writer on a fairly well-trafficked site who has chosen to pull down their trousers and show the internet their ass in an effort to give new writers a complex about if they’re doing it “right.” Because if you don’t write every day, you’re not a real writer, apparently.

Well, as someone who is a real writer by this arbitrary standard of egoist nonsense, I say bullshit.

There’s a lot of discussion about why this advice isn’t feasible for a lot of people, which includes points about working, mental health, energy, disability, etc. There’s also the very valid reason that it just doesn’t work for me. And that’s also okay.

I think in the past, I might have handed this shitgem out myself. And for that, I am deeply sorry. I’ve grown up a lot since then and made friends with a lot of other writers, which has taught me the much more useful fact that there is no one correct way to do this. There’s only the way that you figure out how to best squeeze your brain for word juice, and then dribble the word juice on the page in the right squiggles to make it a story that you feel sufficiently okay for having written.

I know I used to hand that out as gospel because that’s how it was handed down to me, and it’s something that’s actually worked for me. And when you’re a newbie trying desperately to pretend you’re a Real Writer(TM) (because you haven’t realized that you are already a Real Writer and there is no Pope of Writing who canonizes you) you want to pretend like you know what you’re doing–or worse, you assume that you do know what you’re doing, and you’ve found the mystical Right Way, and that will show you’ve got it all figured out. And you may have figured it out for yourself, but lack the self awareness to realize that this is only for yourself.

There isn’t a One True Way of writing. It would be a lot easier to be a writer if there was, and you could just learn it from listening to other writers pontificate. But the fact of the matter is, the only One True Way is whatever works for you to get words from your brain meat onto the page, and you’re going to spend a lot of time figuring that out. It takes a lot of try/fail cycles to build a unique process. And the process will probably evolve over time as you evolve as a person and as a writer, and as your life and circumstances change. I know from many a pantser versus plotter discussion that the line between the two is actually a very thin, permeable membrane. Because people will do what works for them at the time.

Writing advice is best when offered as “this works for me” so it can be taken with a sufficient grain of salt. And it’s not at all bad to ask other people about how they write. It’s a way to get ideas on how to work that you can try for yourself, and you might end up with a new gear to slot into your writing machine that will make things run more smoothly. Or you find your writing machine now makes a horrible grinding noise and just shits out rotten world salad, and you better take that gear back out and toss it.

So I mentioned that I’m someone who writes every day. It is a thing that has worked for me. And I want to explain the what and why, in case there’s anything useful to be taken from it.

The reason I write every day is out of fear. I went a really long time in my early twenties when I stopped writing entirely. And when I got started again, it was in fits and starts and had long gaps. And it wasn’t because I didn’t have the ideas, but because it was easy to have other things to do. I had a lot of mental inertia working against me. I started writing again in earnest because of NaNoWriMo (which isn’t the greatest how-to model, but if you can gain useful ideas from it, then it’s worth it) and I learned that I could write long things again if I just fucking wrote them and didn’t stop. If I got inertia working in the other direction, got myself in motion, and stayed in motion.

So that’s why I write every day. It’s not work ethic, it’s fear. I’m absolutely terrified that if I stop, I won’t get started again. If you do not have this problem, I am very glad for you.

The other thing about writing every day is that it’s all in how you define the writing. And it’s not cheating, thank you, because this isn’t a contest and you make your own rules for this mental game you play against yourself. I don’t write new words on a rough draft every day. Sometimes I write non-fiction stuff I owe. Sometimes I just write blog posts about shit I want to write about, like movies. Sometimes I edit. Sometimes, drunk on alcohol or lack of sleep, I put down 300 words of utter, random shit that I will delete in the morning, and then crawl off to bed.

At least for me, writing every day isn’t some kind of holy charge, it’s a bunch of smoke and mirrors I employ to trick myself into writing.

If you can pull anything useful out of that, great. If not, also great. Do what works for you, and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a Real Writer. All they’re proving is that they’re a Real Asshole.

Categories
mcu movie

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and the New Family

I liked Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 better than the first GotG movie, which I already liked a heck of a lot. It’s fun, it’s weird, it’s unabashedly space opera. It’s also got a lot of payoff for some emotional stuff that got set up in the first movie, particularly the relationship with Peter Quill and Yondu. And while in GotG 1, I never really felt like we got a firm grounding on why the team of misfits came together, this at least showed us why the stay together.

Spoilers within, so read cautiously.

Continue reading “Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and the New Family”
Categories
tv

Into the Badlands Season 2, Episodes 1-6

I meant to write about episodes 1-3 a couple weeks ago when I actually watched them, but then I got sidetracked with some editing. So we’re just going to talk about the first six episodes in one big wad.

Spoilers included. So many spoilers. Like sprinkles on your donut.

Season 2 starts with a time skip. Sunny has been sold down the river into slavery, basically, and he’s out of the Badlands. MK is in some kind of monastery that has a super picturesque waterfall. Ryder’s a baron and Jade’s got Lydia’s old job. Lydia’s living a peaceful life in her dad’s cult. And Veil… well, she’s had her and Sunny’s baby (Henry) and is trapped in an underground lair belonging to Quinn.

 

Yeah, Quinn’s still alive

Initially, I was super pissed about this. Sunny killing Quinn at the end of season 1 was like the big payoff. Where even though he failed at almost everything else he was trying to do, he managed that. So it felt like a cheat for him to miraculously have survived getting stabbed through the chest by The Best Clipper Ever™ just to continue slowly dying of brain cancer.

After six episodes, I’m less angry about Quinn still being alive. Mostly because I can see why he makes for such a good villain for story purposes. He’s utterly unhinged, he seems to be descending into more overt forms of insanity (probably thanks to the brain tumor) and he makes a good outside force that’s utterly unpredictable. He’s the nemesis for the Widow and her foil, which is not a role anyone else could have really filled, I think. Ryder didn’t have the chops as a character, and Baron Chau got introduced fairly late. (And it would have been another sort of story problem to kill off the Widow’s old nemesis and promptly introduce a new one.)

But man, Quinn is awful. He’s a very chewy villain, in the sense that he’s the one guy you can root for to get killed off one hundred percent and have no doubts. There’s also that sort of badguy suck field around him, where he tries to twist everyone else into being what he is, which is fascinating and horrible. He tries it on Ryder and it doesn’t work, which is why Ryder dies (can’t say I’m sorry), and then Lydia, and… ew. That’s a slow motion collision of two garbage trucks that are on fire right there.

 

But Lydia

I’m kind of waiting to see where she’s going, because so far it hasn’t been what I expected. She’s got that classic sort of “can’t escape the old life” story, where she seems to be finding peace in her dad’s cult, and then reacts violently to defend them from bandits and gets kicked out in thanks. But after that, what is she up to? She seemed so eager to kill Quinn, and now… yuck. I don’t know. I’m hoping she’s got something more in store than just endlessly repeating bad old habits.

 

But the women in general

Into the Badlands keeps really being about the female characters, I think, with Sunny and his buddy adventure with Bajie the notable exception. Jade’s now a baron thanks to Quinn whacking Ryder, and I don’t think she’s going to have a merciful bone in her body about it. I’m still on Team Widow forever, and it’s interesting to watch the push and pull between Tilda and Waldo on that front, with Tilda pushing the Widow to be more ideologically pure and fanatical, and Waldo trying to coach her on how the game is played—when the Widow at least keeps insisting that her end goal is destroying the game entirely.

I was honestly surprised to see Baron Chau, since I hadn’t gotten the impression there were other female barons, the way everyone had been treating the Widow. But then we get the perspective on why everyone’s challenging her legitimacy, which is still… not making sense? Baron Chau draws the line between herself and the Widow, because Chau “did it properly.” She worked her way up through the ranks, becoming a clipper before she took power from her father “the right way.” (Was this killing him? Did that get explicitly stated?) And somehow that means the Widow isn’t good enough, because she just married a baron, and then murdered him and took power.

Considering the whole thing for this society seems to be “might makes right,” I’m really not buying this distinction. And I’m also wondering about Jade taking her oath as baron, since Quinn was the one who killed Ryder. Are the other barons going to be challenging her legitimacy as well? Or are they just after the Widow, because she represents someone who is supposed to be powerless besting them at their own game and that really upsets them? If this really is about them trying to delegitimize someone who is challenging their power (which as we know is something those in power love to do in the real world), their incoherent attacks on her make sense, and the thin “just-so” stories they’re telling themselves as to why they deserve power and she doesn’t also make sense.

So I do hope that’s what’s going on. It’s sure an effect that should be examined.

The series is building into more rationalizations that people make as well, with the Widow coming up with a super shitty one to rationalize why she’d give another woman (Veil) back to the very thing the Widow professes to hate (Quinn). The Widow needs the alliance with Quinn for her strategy to have a chance, so she grasps at the only straw she has to tell herself it’s okay to treat Veil like she claims no one should be treated.

I just really fucking hope someone calls her on it.

And my god, Veil continues to be my everything. She is unstoppable, even when she’s terrified. And she is living by her wits, which is extra nice to see in a show where martial arts run the world.

 

My Queer Ship

So basically from the second time Tilda and Odessa were on screen together, I was like yes please, give me this. I was not expecting the writers to have somehow read my mind and given me Odessa and Tilda kissing. I made noises that could probably only be heard by dogs.

Please do not fuck this up, Into the Badlands. I know terrible things happen to everyone in this story, but let Odessa and Tilda have a decent moment. Do not give us yet more tragic dead queers. Do not make it all about evil manipulative bisexuals. And let this be the way for Tilda to escape the MK suck field, because she deserves better than that utter nonsense.

 

Because fuck MK

I found MK incredibly annoying in season 1. The greatest benefit of season 2 is that there has been less of him. Unfortunately, he continues to have Chosen One-itis in the worst possible way. I don’t care about his tragic past or his angst, but whatever.

I didn’t actually get angry about it until Ava died for him, though. Oh look, MK’s first on-screen fridged girl, not to be confused with his mom. I’m so fucking done with it. So many characters seem to be caught in this vortex around MK where they want to take care of him, and there is literally no reason for it. Why did Sunny suddenly decide that he couldn’t possibly go back to the Badlands without MK? How did he even know MK was around? There’s no sense to it.

I remember back when I first got into anime and watched Fushigi Yuugi. I was constantly annoyed and frustrated by Miaka, who had this entire harem of hot, powerful dudes who just wanted to protect her. But looking back on it, I can at least understand what redeeming qualities Miaka had as a character. She was cheerful, she always tried to make everyone feel better, she tried to think about others before herself even if she was a total failboat at it, and she genuinely cared about other people. So yeah, I still don’t want to listen to her endlessly screaming Tamahome’s name, but I now get the justification for why the other characters actually gave a shit.

MK doesn’t have any of that. He’s intensely selfish, he’s petulant, he’s got a shit attitude, he’s constantly getting himself into trouble, and others into trouble, and he never fucking apologizes for it. He’s the confidence of a mediocre white dude writ large, where he never has to say sorry for anything because he’s not the one who’s wrong, it’s the world that’s wrong and should change. (Yes, the system around Sunny was wrong and sick and he needed to get out of it—and he already knew this without MK making his life a thousand times more difficult.)

Where this comes out most is with Ava, who was doing just fine in the monastery, and then MK shows up, decides he hates everything about it, and somehow (for no reason I can define) causes Ava to follow him—and not just because she’s going to bash him over the head and drag him back to the waterfall before anyone notices. So of course Ava dies for him.

Fuck MK.

 

And yay for Bajie

I’m basically legally required to like Bajie because of Nick Frost, come on. But he is an utterly delightful foil for Sunny, and he’s a great comic relief character that’s got his own complex and interesting skill set. Can’t we just keep him as the sidekick and get rid of MK permanently?

Categories
worldcon

Hugo Category Thinking, Best Editor Edition

So, Best Editor, Long Form. I’ve been hearing a lot about this category this year. Honestly, when I’m wearing my reader hat, it’s a category I don’t often vote in because I have no idea what any of the editors have done unless someone’s told me. I’ve also noticed it’s a category that tends to be on the low end of the nominating ballot numbers, probably for similar reasons. If you are an industry professional or pay close attention, you can probably make some informed decisions. Otherwise, it’s a big shrug.

(The conspiracy theories that spring up around this category, by the way, are impressive for their baroque twists and utter venom. It’s one hell of a rabbit hole.)

I also think it’s unlikely for Best Editor to get dropped as a category any time soon, since there’s been pretty strong support for it in the WSFS meeting every time it’s been brought up.

And no, Best Novel doesn’t really act as an award for editors. The editor’s name doesn’t get put on the nomination, and the editor sure ain’t the one who picks up the little rocket statue if they win and give a speech. We generally only hear about who edited a novel if the author thanks their editor or the editor mentions it later.

I think the easiest way to make the category more accessible to the people voting (if not people nominating) is if the finalists for Best Editor, Long Form had the titles for two or three of the books they edited that were released in the last year listed by their name. Because of course, the weird thing about being an editor is that probably what they were working on during the nominating period isn’t even out yet, and certainly isn’t the reason anyone nominated them. Thank the lag time in publishing for that one.

I also think it’d be a good idea if the finalists for Best Editor, Short Form had the title of their magazine or anthology by their name. For some reason, I thought this was already the case until I double checked. Probably because short form editors tend to be much more easily identifiable with their publication, be it a magazine or anthology. And I would argue that giving an award to a magazine or anthology is a bit different from giving it particularly to the editor; when you’re putting an award on a magazine as a whole, that’s not just the head editor, it’s really an award for the entire team, down to the slush readers and whoever does the ebook layout conversion. Sort of like the difference between a Best Director award and Best Picture award.

I’ve also heard it proposed that we should have some kind of “before and after” work example for the editors, but I don’t think that would quite work. A big part of the editing job is acquiring the work to begin with—seeing something that they think readers will love and often fighting to get it published. To a certain extent, we’re awarding the editors for having good taste and finding things for us to read.

Because this isn’t “best copy editor.” A before and after wouldn’t be a few pages of a word document with a bunch of tracked changes. For example, if you wanted some kind of before and after of my own novel (Hunger Makes the Wolf) what you’d end up with is two complete versions of the novel to compare, plus a set of notes that I took off an editing phone call—and to be honest, as a writer I would not feel terribly comfortable with people being given those things for several reasons.

So I think the best way to make the category more accessible and meaningful would be to at least link the names of the editors with examples of what they’ve edited. Preferably, what they feel are the titles that best exemplify their work that got published in the last year. (In an ideal situation that would mirror the Best Director idea, they’d be getting the nod for a specific piece of work – but since it can be rather difficult for readers to find out who edited a book depending on how the publisher does the front matter and what the writer said in the acknowledgments, that might be too big of an ask.) That would at least give us context and stop Best Editor, Long Form from becoming something of a name recognition contest.

Thoughts? If this sounds like a workable or useful idea, I’d be happy to work up a proposal on it and seek a cosponsor.

I’m also still trying to figure out some kind of workable solution for smaller films that get released at festivals, but don’t have a wide theatrical release until the next year, which really screws up their eligibility…