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[Movie] The Grand Budapest Hotel

As Wes Anderson a movie as was ever Wes Andersoned by Wes Anderson, to be sure. The Grand Budapest Hotel is basically everything I could have wanted it to be and then some. The entire movie feels very carefully unreal, in a way that reminds me of cartoons that are made entirely of cut paper moving in stop motion rather than actual animation. It’s all models and intense colors and confections that look like they ought to be made out of play-do but you know they’ll taste amazing.

And Willem Dafoe with a bulldog underbite.

I think the glue that holds The Grand Budapest Hotel together and makes you believe all the careful fakery is that just before the unreal silliness of it hits the point of twee, something shocking happens. Fingers get chopped off. People get stabbed. Ralph Fiennes suddenly starts cussing a blue streak. And even when it’s not necessarily funny, you can’t help but laugh anyway because it’s just so damn startling.

Also, allow me to share with you my favorite exchange in the entire movie. For context, know that Dmitri is Madame D’s son, and has spent pretty much all of his screen time relentlessly attacking M. Gustave’s sexuality.

Dmitri: If I find out you laid one finger on my mother’s body, living or dead…

M. Gustave: I thought I was a faggot.

Dmitri: [moment of confused silence] You’re bisexual.

I almost snorted iced tea out my nose.

The only thing in the movie I wasn’t really wild about was the three layered narrative. I still don’t get the point of adding the third layer, which we only even see at the beginning and the end of the movie. As it is, you get a bit about the “author,” then the author meeting Mr. Moustafa, and then Mr. Moustafa relating the story to him. I don’t see the necessity of that top layer, unless it was self-consciously to mimic the three-tiered design of the Courtesan au Chocolat confection, which really seems like it’s trying too hard. (Or maybe you could tease something out about looking back into the past and looking back into the past again, but that also seems like trying too hard.)

The story is pretty much as presented in the trailer. I suppose if this movie is about anything, it’s the intrusion of war and death–and reality, really–into this carefully unreal place. It’s funny, but for all the death that occurs in the movie, none of it ever feels real until the end, when suddenly the film goes from bright color to black and white. Maybe it’s even a bit about how people form their own family units. But I think the real point is the hectic, fantastic journey. It was weird and hilarious and I loved it.

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movie

In which I talk to myself about why I like Thor best, don’t mind me

Look, I’m just going to talk to myself about superhero movies for a minute, so don’t you mind one bit. Move along, nothing to see here.

I mean the Thor franchise collectively, since I’d be a massive liar if I claimed I liked Thor the character better than his utterly cracked little brother. But I’ve been thinking and thinking about this, since I was so super excited about Thor: The Dark World coming out last year, and now that The Winter Soldier is upon us I’m kind of…meh. Like I’m going to go see it and enjoy the hell out of it I’m sure, but for me it’s in the category of “when I have time” as opposed GIVE IT TO ME NOW, FUCKERS.

I was just re-reading my complaints about Man of Steel, and in particular the ridiculous way the movie tried to make freaking Superman all dark and angsty, and I realized that it’s. That’s why I love Thor and I really like Iron Man. I even liked the first Captain America way more than I thought I would. With all of those movies, no matter how grim things are temporarily, there’s a very definite angst limit before going back to banter and fun and just getting on with the ridiculous life of a superhero.

Tony Stark is a messed up guy with some issues, but he’s also made of 100% supercharged sass and he never really quits. He’s not a dark character in any sense of the word. Then Thor is like the anti-dark character. He doesn’t have a tragic past. He’s not self-hating. He doesn’t spend all of his time isolating himself or trying to destroy the relationships he has to remind us that he’s fucked up. He is, in fact, shockingly un-fucked-up when you compare him to most other superheroes.  The closest he gets to angst is a couple minutes of staring off into the distance while looking super pretty, plainly wishing he could go visit his girlfriend and that his little brother would just stop being such a douche already. And that’s given him a pretty refreshing arc for his character development, because (in my opinion) it’s mostly been about him coming to terms with the fact that the world isn’t a black and white place and learning to deal with it.

And I’m not saying there’s necessarily anything wrong with the traumatic backstory trope but damn, it’s so nice to have a break from it.

Really, the only character that goes for the angsty narrative at all in the entire Thor franchise is Loki, and like >70% of it is his inner bullshit I’m-totally-the-victim-here monolog that he then covers over by being a sassy little dickbag. All the rest of the characters are solidly in the laughing while poking things with a sword category, and I’m totally behind that when it comes to my escapist genre movies.

Which brings us to The Winter Soldier, which I’m sure I will enjoy, because yay Black Widow, and I’ve seen enough clips to know that there is going to be plenty of sass to go around. But Steve is… I wouldn’t in a million years accuse Steve of being a dark character, but he’s generally quite serious, which isn’t really my cup of superheroic tea. Considering the plot for this movie, I’m really wondering just what kind of BAWWWW levels it’ll hit. Guess I’ll find out this weekend, since the current plan is pizza and The Winter Soldier at the Alamo as a reward for unpacking at the new apartment.

Anyway, this is also all part of the reason why I’m a devoted Marvel cinematic universe fan, and I’ve basically given up on DC. Chris Nolan managed to put enough meat in the Dark Knight trilogy that slogging through the grimdark was a rewarding experience, but it probably says a lot that I’ve yet to feel the need to rewatch the third movie, and I can count the number of rewatches of the first two on the fingers of one hand. And then you get to Man of Steel and it’s like reaching for that level of sheer broodiness with absolutely none of the substance and I’m just done.

I’ll just be over here, enthusing about the coming of the RACCOON WITH A MACHINE GUN.

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movie

[Movie] 300: Rise of an Empire

300, why can’t I just quit you?

wpid-IMG_20140308_190058_335.jpg
Oh yeah. That’s why.

I can’t help it. It’s full of men with rippling six packs wearing nothing but tiny leather underpants1 and leather skirts with strategic crotch windows of the sort you normally see women wearing in fantasy art. I’M ONLY HUMAN OKAY2.

(light spoilers throughout)

It actually amuses me more than I can say that in this movie, there are two (wow, count ’em, two! we’re moving up in the world of Frank Miller, ladies. And neither of them are strippers!) women with major speaking parts, and both of them spend the entire movie wearing more than the men. Even during the one sex scene, Artemesia comes out wearing more than Themistokles because at least she’s still got her skirt. 300:RoaE feels like even more of a homoerotic ode to speedos than the original while desperately trying to be hyper uber no really believes us please you have to cartoonishly manly. There should be a subtitle that flashes in the lower right hand corner of every scene that says: **No homo. We swear.

In one scene Gorgo tells Themistokles to stop stroking his cock while he’s watching a bunch of Spartans wearing only modesty speedos wrestle. I’m not even joking.

This movie is ridiculous. And it takes itself so very seriously, which just makes it nothing short of hilarious in scenes. 300: RoaE contains probably the greatest hate fuck scene ever put to film. There are entire server farms no doubt devoted entirely to producing the gouts of cartoonish blood that fill the battle scenes, not to mention the horse that Themistokles rides across several ships that are on fire so he can have a massive sword fight with Artemesia.

And I loved Artemesia, even if I really wanted to lick a napkin and scrub some of the eyeliner off her face. She was just the kind of cold queen bitch character that I am helpless against, and what I loved best was she stayed bad until the end. There was no change of heart caused by an encounter with the One True Cock. (I would have thrown things. Seriously.) I almost died giggling when she taunted Themistokles “You fight harder than you fuck!”

I think that’s the reason I keep watching these movies, and damn me, I enjoy them. Despite the fact that even on their face, they are  cringe-inducingly problematic. It’s got all the unsubtle subtext of the original 300, but turned up to 11 just in case you didn’t manage catch it last time. The Greeks throw around the words freedom and democracy more than your average presidential candidate, and the existence of Greek slaves is for the most part carefully skirted around while slavery practiced by the Persians is given plenty of screen time. The “barbarian” bad guys are pretty much all middle-eastern or black, commonly deformed, etc, and there they are facing off against the chiseled jawlines of the Greeks3. There are even fucking suicide bombers in this one. No really. The Greeks make a great caricature of self-consciously hyperpatriotic America, complete with at one point Themistokles (I think it was him) saying that the Persians just want to kill them because FREEDOM.

But godammit, it’s so fucking pretty. It’s kind of like eating that extra large piece of chocolate peanut butter cheesecake that was baked for you by Satan himself, where you know you shouldn’t like it, you know it’s bad for you, and you just can’t help it anyway because at the time it’s just so nummy. Then next thing you know, you’re laying on the bathroom floor with crumbs in your hair and a mouth that tastes like regret, considering if it would just be better to sanitize the plumbing fixtures by setting them on fire, only hopefully you’ll die quietly from your gallbladder strangling your heart before you ever get that far.

There’s going to be a third movie. It’s inevitable. And I predict with advance shame that will see it too, and then have a mouthful of regret that no amount of nicely cut pecs will be able to erase. I can only hope in the next movie, maybe we’ll finally get an answer to the question of why Xerxes has eyebrows like a chola. Probably because he hates freedom.

(See also: io9’s hilarious review)

1 – Oh my god for extra hilarity, if you’re looking at this before this post falls off my blog’s front page check out which slice of the picture WordPress chose to represent the post. JUST LOOK AT IT. I did not pick that. Sometimes perfection just happens on its own.

2 – Just in case someone out there wants to leap on the fact that I have tacitly admitted that I am an actual human being capable of prurient interest in swathes of rippling man-flesh, I would like to note two important points:

  1. I would never in a million years advocate putting the above image or anything like it on the cover of the magazine of a professional organization of which I’m part.
  2. I would not use the phrase “rippling man flesh” or anything like it in such a venue either, because that would be super creepy. As a real-life grown-up, I know there is a time and a place for rippling man-flesh, and that normally involves my blog and a beer.

3 – There is a very token effort to humanize the Persians in this one. You see Xerxes’s grief over the death of his father, which apparently is what caused him to go soak in a mystical pool filled with a combination of nair and miracle-gro. You also find out that envoy that Leonidas killed at the beginning of the first 300 was actually the man who rescued Artemesia from death and raised her.

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movie

[Movie] Non-Stop

Maybe this is just a combination of nostalgia and confirmation bias talking,but I could have sworn that back in the misty past, Liam Neeson didn’t spend most of his time on screen killing people. I feel like one day, he gained just a couple more gray hairs and little crows feet and that set off some computer in a secret bunker whose only job is to compute cragginess algorithms, indicating the moment when an actor becomes perfect for Male Baby Boomer Action Hero Wish Fulfillment.

I was only thinking about this because Liam Neeson’s looking particularly craggy and done with everything for Non-Stop. Which I’ll admit, Mike and I saw this weekend because there was literally nothing else both of us were interested in seeing at the theater. I like a good popcorn action with a bit of suspense flick as much as the next guy, when the next guy is Mike.

I actually liked Non-Stop a lot more than I thought I would. I came in just not taking any of it at all seriously–come on, Liam Neeson shoots people on an airplane, how fucking serious can this be?–and actually got very drawn in at the beginning. The film feels very gritty and claustrophobic thanks to the camera work, which I think helps it feel more serious than it has any right to be. I mean come on, the basic concept is that Bill (Liam Neeson) is on a flight where a mysterious person threatens to kill a passenger every twenty minutes if he or she isn’t given a bunch of money. And the hell of it is, it actually kind of works in the sense of convincing you to just give it a whirl and suspend your disbelief…until the last thirty minutes crosses the line of Too Damn Silly.

Eh, and I’m going to just hit some spoilers now, so consider yourself warned.

Continue reading “[Movie] Non-Stop”
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Pompeii: Deadly Weaksauce Eruption Destroys City

Well, I did it, you bastards. I saw Pompeii. Sorry that it took me 24 hours to get my write-up done, things were kind of busy today.

So this is the thing. I went into this movie expecting to be incredibly annoyed by the geology. But actually, the geology wasn’t that bad. There were volcanic bombs when there shouldn’t have been, there was a pyroclastic flow that apparently put on the brakes just for the purposes of barfalicious romance dialog, and there was an overly large tsunami. But that stuff, I can put down to dramatic license; it’s nowhere near Dante’s Peak, let alone The Core levels of badness.

What actually really ticked me off about this movie, far beyond the utterly tepid romance plotline that almost made all of the googly eyes in 47 Ronin look like a great love story and the mustache-twirling stylings of Senator Weaksauce Villainus Pantsius was the way it so blatantly and desperately tried to rip Gladiator off.

Do not fuck with Gladiator.

There was actually a gladiatorial battle scene in Pompeii that lurched along all the same beats as the reenactment of the Battle of Zama scene from Gladiator, down to the bit where the smarmy antagonist observes that he doesn’t recall the Romans losing the battle. But the reason that scene was so fucking badass in Gladiator was because Maximus just takes control of his fellow slaves as a general and uses Roman tactics to win.

Oh yeah. That’s the stuff.

Pompeii didn’t have any of the requisite badassery, and the main character was no fucking Maximus Decimus Meridius. And there was absolutely no good reason for the slaves designated as the losing team to win other than oh the script says we’re awesome so we’ll just like…shove people a bunch until Milo can use his magical Celt horse powers and stuff.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Warning: Spoilers. Like you give a fuck.

Continue reading “Pompeii: Deadly Weaksauce Eruption Destroys City”
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movie

[Movie] Her

I’m having a hard time writing about this movie, because it hit me that hard. And Her isn’t nice about the way it hits you, either. No, first it lulls you into a false sense of security, making you think this will be a weird, quirky and awkward comedy where everyone wears high-waisted trousers, and then by the time you realize that this is actually very serious and intensely real it’s too late and you’re crying your eyes out in a theater and just hoping you don’t drip snot on your t-shirt because you didn’t think you’d need to bring a box of tissues along. This movie sucker punches your emotions in the nuts.

And this is the thing. It’s not cheap or manipulative oh my favorite character died. What hits you in this movie is that the pain is so very ordinary and human.

For all that this is a film about a man in an indistinct future year who falls in love with an artificial intelligence, the heart of the story isn’t the science fiction conceit, and I think that’s what makes it so powerful. Most of the time, speculative fiction is at its best when it uses that unreal element to explore what it is to be human, how we relate to each other, how we fit into the world. Her does that with beauty that looks almost effortless.

This is the most human movie I’ve seen in a long time. There are so many moments in the film that are pure, distilled awkwardness, sometimes played for laughs, sometimes painful, sometimes just there. Because let’s face it, being human is fucking awkward. That alone makes everything feel much more real than it has any right to be. The relationships are messy, and there are no easy answers offered. It’s about love, and relating to other people, and letting go, and being lonely, and relationships ending, and relationships beginning and…just everything that is really the lifeblood of being human that is beautiful and agonizing. There are no heroes or villains, there are just people–and I include the AI Samantha in that category.

I also should note that Her is visually gorgeous too, but it’s all a very ordinary sort of beauty, like a shot of steam escaping from under a manhole cover. They used the color orange a lot, which I haven’t seen often, and it feels very earthy, very rich. It’s not a blue-tinted scifi world, and I think even that made it feel more real. Everything looked like the colors we see around us in daily life, with perhaps a bit of haze.

I’m glad I watched Her, even if I spent the rest of the night feeling like someone had run over my heart with a truck. Definitely the best piece of scifi/fantasy from 2013–and 2013 was actually a good year for sf/f–and maybe the best I’ve seen in years. As a writer, I’m still struck by the complexity in the characters and their relationships and I came out of it hoping that some day I can manage to produce a piece of art like that. It’s beautiful. Take a box of tissues with you.

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movie

[Movie] The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is super cute. But first I want to bitch about The Lego Movie. I keep seeing previews for this movie, and beyond the fact that the only funny bits involve Batman and Wonderwoman, it annoys me.

So the whole concept here is that the regular dude main character is “the special” who is foretold by prophecy to…I don’t know whatever. Now, I dearly hope that this is all going to be entirely tongue-in-cheek and at the end maybe the lego action chick will realize that prophecy is bullshit and she’ll save the world because wouldn’t that be different for a change. That would be amazing and I would go suffer through the unfunny jokes so I could watch it. But at this point I would bet you anything that the regular dude main character will discover he is actually super special thanks to everyone else telling him he has to be and the girl BELIEVING IN HIM. Because that’s how these things normally work and I’m SO SICK of the destined savior dude plot I can’t even begin to tell you how much. It just gives me flashbacks to Oz the Great and Powerful where the super competent witches of Oz just couldn’t get their shit together because THEY NEEDED THE MAN FORETOLD BY THE PROPHECY.

Barf. Barfity barf barf barf.

Okay. Now I can get back to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which did not feel me with vomitous annoyance.

Honestly, there isn’t that much I really have to say about the movie, other than it manages to hit all the right notes of cute, funny, heartwarming, and human without it quite seeming like Ben Stiller was going down a checklist to make sure he’d gotten everything. And to be honest, I’ve actually always liked Ben Stiller, and I liked him in this movie. He had a couple moments that played a little too hard for the comedy and came off a bit sour because of it, but otherwise I thought he was incredibly heartfelt.

As far as the plot goes, if you’ve seen the trailer, you know what the movie is about. But it’s ultimately the search for the missing negative as a stand-in for Walter figuring out how to actually get out there and fucking do things, which is the part where so many people fall short. (Seriously, we all know someone or have been the guy who said something like well, I’d write a novel if, or I’d go to Thailand if, or I thought about doing something but then I just didn’t…) But the point of the movie really isn’t the conclusion or the simple concept behind the story…it’s the journey that we go on with Walter.

Man, and it is beautiful. As soon as Walter gets out of the office, there isn’t a shot in that movie that isn’t just breathtaking. I think my favorite shot out of the movie is still the longboard scene in Iceland. Oh gosh.

The only real objection I have is there’s a scene where they drive away from a pyroclastic flow from a volcano. That always drives me batty. But I know it’s just me.

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[Movie] So, about 47 Ronin

All right, so let me tell you about this movie. Once upon a time there was Keanu Reeves I mean a kid named Kai in Japan. He was half-Japanese and half-European and had been raised by the Tengu so he totally has magical powers no really you just read that correctly, I didn’t mistype. Just that sentence right there makes me deeply uncomfortable for a multitude of reasons (you should check out the racebending post about it) but I think what weirds me out the most is that he’s literally a (I am very sorry for using this phrase) “magical half-breed” trope personified and made inexplicably the main character of 47 Ronin. Despite the fact that technically he’s not even ronin (being, you know, not a samurai) and that the real main character of this thing ought to have been Oishi (played fantastically by Sanada Hiroyuki).

BUT ANYWAY.

So all the samurai in Akou are out hunting down a kirin (I think?) because it’s been, I don’t know, leaving massive piles of kirin shit all over Lord Asano’s lawn and that just won’t do because the Shogun is coming to visit. Kai helps kill the kirin and everyone is a douche to him about it. We see a fox with one brown eye and one blue eye and I sure hope you like that close up of those eyes because you are going to be seeing it a lot.

The Shogun shows up with Lord Kira (Asano Tadanobu, perhaps better known to nerds as Sir Not Appearing In This Movie Hogun in Thor) in tow and I’m not event certain why. But you can tell Lord Kira is evil because he smirks a lot and appears to be a patron at the same clothing store that supplies all villains of sentai shows with clothing made out of slightly cheap-looking metallic fabrics. And he has a woman with him who has messy hair and wears a shiny green kimono-ish but not really thing and DUDE LOOK AT HER EYES. NO REALLY. LOOK AGAIN. REPEATEDLY. CONSTANTLY.

This woman is the fox in human form, and she’s a witch. She’s also played by Kikuchi Rinko, doing her best Helena Bonham Carter impression. Her witch powers include:

  • Crazy, prehensile CGI hair
  • Turning into a piece of fabric and flying around the room like a demented magical carpet (but okay, this one looks pretty cool)
  • Being unable to stand up without exposing at least one of her legs up to nearly the hip because SHE IS A WITCH AND THEREFORE SEXY SEXY.
  • Making even the act of saying hello seem like a bad touch is about to happen
  • Turning into a really terribly animated albino dragony thing at the end and getting stabbed by magical Keanu Reeves.

Apparently Lord Kira is at Lord Asano’s house because there’s going to be some kind of samurai combat contest thing. And he has a magical giant suit of armor with a huge sword that he pits against Lord Asano’s champion. Only the witch does something to Asano’s champion so instead Kai steps in and just embarrasses everyone by losing (despite being taught by the Tengu to KILL ALL THE THINGS) and not being a samurai, so he gets the crap beaten out of him.

So then the witch and Kira use a magical spider that poops purple hallucinogenic fluid to make Lord Asano hallucinate and attack Kira. This is a massive no-no, so the Shogun orders Asano to commit seppuku. And once that’s happened, declares all his samurai ronin and decides that Mika, Asano’s daughter, will marry Kira. Mika is TOTALLY IN LOVE with Kai, though, because of course she is, and she has a thing about wearing coats with weird collars over her kimono and I don’t think they dressed like that back then.

Mika gets hauled off to live with the guy who effectively murdered her dad, which could potentially be some interesting character development for her, but instead we just know she’s having a bad time because Kira’s servants make her wear heavy eye makeup and blue-tinted fake eyelashes. Oishi (who was Asano’s chief samurai but enough about him let’s talk about Kai some more!) gets thrown in a hole for a year and then…dragged out. Because reasons.

After being released from the pit and no doubt smelling terrible, Oishi stops at home just long enough to get his son Chikara and have a beautifully understated and tender scene with his wife, then ride off to go get Kai. Because we can’t do this without Kai. Obviously. He hasn’t been in the movie nearly enough. Kai has been sold into slavery on Dejima because reasons. As Oishi arrives at Dejima, he runs across that dude you saw in the previews, you know the one with the whole body tattoos that makes him look like a skeleton, and asks for directions. Well, take a nice long look, because this thirty seconds is the ONLY time you will see that guy, despite the fact that he appears in the trailer and on the fucking poster.

I think Kai is supposed to be somewhat mad, indicated by Keanu Reeves staring at Oishi a little more vacantly than normal. Oishi manages to snap him out of it and then they run away together, cunningly using the fact that apparently oil lanterns are like poor man’s plastique.

And then all the ronin meet up! Yay! Except they don’t have enough swords! Boo! Oishi leads his men to a village of sword smiths so they can get some there, but Kira’s men have inexplicably taken over the village and we learn Kira’s evil plot is to take over Japan…somehow. Kai kills the shit out of everyone to impress the other ronin, and then takes them to the forest of Tengu, because if there’s one thing we all know Tengu have, it’s swords. (…actually no.) Oishi gets tested by the Tengu, where they show him some illusions of his men getting killed to try to force him to draw his sword, but he refuses. Kai shows off he has magical Tengu powers, I’m sure this won’t come up later at all.

Then there are swords! Yay! All the ronin gather again, accompanied by music that is pure desperation given audible form. They decide to try to kill Lord Kira when he goes to his ancestor’s shrine, but it turns out it’s a trap. The witch sets everything on fire and flashes some leg, and the lovable fat ronin gets shot full of arrows, after which he shares a scene brimming with manpain with Kai and Oishi and then expires.

The ronin decide they’re not going to give up. They write down their grievances and all sign their names and add a drop of blood. Including Kai, who is now apparently a ronin because one of the guys who was a dick to him at the beginning of the movie has given him a second sword to carry, and samurai all carry two swords and aggggggh. But anyway, they find a troupe of actors who have been hired to play at the wedding Kira will have with Mika’s fake eyelashes, and since everyone in the world thinks Kira is a dick even though as far as I could tell he hasn’t done anything but secretly betray Asano and make some really questionable fashion choices, they agree to help the ronin sneak in to his castle.

The battle scene is actually pretty cool, I’ll give them that. Up until the witch turns into a dragon thing that Kai has to kill using his super special magical Tengu powers so he can save Mika. Oishi kills the shit out of Kira, which was a relief to me because at this point I’d half expected Kai to show up out of nowhere and save him and do the deed the way they’d been playing him up as the most important character ever, no really. But no, Oishi cuts off Kira’s head and all of Kira’s samurai simultaneously shit in their hakama.

The ronin go back home with Kira’s head in a bag. The Shogun is annoyed with them, but lets them all commit seppuku instead of hanging them like commoners. Which they do. And just to remind us what the most important bit of the movie is, all of the close-ups and focus is pretty much on Kai and Mika, because fuck the ronin, we’ve got a love story with the unnecessarily added character.

And done.

So, I kind of figured the movie would be bad, but I decided to see it anyway because I thought it would be super pretty and bad. Well, it was super pretty, but the pretty did not outweigh the badness. It was the little things, like the awkwardness of some of the English lines when contrasted with the fluidity of hearing the Japanese actors speak names. The editing was even. There were a lot of little scenes that felt random, like they didn’t fit a narrative that seemed cobbled together. (And why did so many of the night close-up shots look so dang grainy?) The scenery was beautiful but the CGI monsters were distracting and looked mostly terrible.

But it was really the huge things, like the way Oishi again and again got shoved out of the spotlight that really should have been his so we could have even more emphasis on the barfalicious love story between Mika and the character who was added to the story because maybe Hollywood thought audiences couldn’t handle a 47 Ronin movie if all the ronin were actually Japanese. It was the way the final scenes of the movie were stolen from the titular ronin, making it about Mika and Kai’s vow to find each other in the next life instead of the incredible determination and sacrifice of the ronin and their deaths.

That made me so. Angry.

Why. Why, 47 Ronin. All you had to do was suck just a little less and I would have come away not feeling like I’d been robbed of two hours of my life and ten bucks of my money. Had it not been for Kai, this movie could have safely joined Onmyoji in the “campy historical fantasy film” box in my brain. But no. You just had to give us another shot of Mika and Kai staring at each other while the soundtrack tearfully begged us on its knees to care.

ETA: Well, this explains why the thing felt so disjointed. Even a lot of the dialog.

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movie you need to do better

[Movie] Blackfish

Some nebulous time when I was in grade school, my family went for a roadtrip vacation in South Dakota. We did that sort of thing, just driving to the other nearby square or nearly square states, because we most definitely did not have the money to fly anywhere, let alone places that involved Disneyland and Sea World.

On this vacation to South Dakota, I remember going to see a dolphin show. Yes, in South Dakota. I think it was at the Marine Life Center in Rapid City, which no longer exists–but don’t quote me. Like a lot of little girls my age, to go with my strange horse obsession (I grew up in the suburbs, for goodness sake) I had a dolphin and whale obsession. Big, cool mammal obsession, I guess. But the idea of getting to see real live dolphins was compelling. I’d been reading about them in various middle-grade books (like this one) where you came out feeling like dolphins were similar to dogs in how much they just love humans to bits.

The dolphins in South Dakota jumped and dove in the pool like you’d expect, but in my memory it was all very… gray. I remember the facility better than I remember the actual dolphins now. The pool was concrete, surrounded by metal bleachers, and I can only recall it being my family there and a group of Mennonites watching the show. (I remember them because all the women were bonnets and long, very old fashioned dresses.) Everything felt very strange, dingy and run-down. It wasn’t like the advertisements for Sea World, where everything is clean and technicolor. It felt like an old high school gymnasium, complete with funky smell.

I don’t think I can honestly tell you what my reactions were, that day. Looking back on the memories now, it all makes me intensely uncomfortable. But I don’t know if assigning that kind of discomfort to my grade-school self would be rewriting history and giving me an awareness I didn’t have at the time. Maybe I was just excited about seeing Real Live Dolphins(TM) and let that kind of overtake the creepy gas station bathroom feeling that I get from these memories now.

But I can tell you, from more than twenty years in the future, I know there was something deeply wrong about it.

Blackfish made me think about that that trip to South Dakota. I put off watching this documentary for a long time, to be honest, because I knew it would wreck me, and it did. It’s something everyone should watch, and then think, really think about the ethics of using wild animals for our own entertainment–let alone wild animals who are so plainly intelligent.

The framework of Blackfish is an incident in which Tilikum (the largest killer whale in captivity) deliberately killed his trainer, Dawn Brancheau. The documentary builds a compelling case that neither Dawn nor Tilikum (who had probably already killed two other humans before her) was to blame, but rather the conditions in which the killer whales were kept.

The documentary tries to take care to not anthropomorphize the animals. But it’s not a stretch to understand that in general, captivity in a small space with absolutely no entertainment isn’t healthy for any living thing. It’s not a stretch to realize that any living thing that has family groups will have problems when those family groups are artificially disrupted. There are parts in the documentary that are existentially horrifying, and other parts that are simply heartbreaking, such as when a female orca has her calf taken away and keeps trying to locate her.

And for what purpose? Entertainment. Money.

This is the sort of documentary that makes you feel horrible for being a human being. And it’s well-earned, in this case.

I’ve never been to Sea World. It’s safe to say that I never will go to Sea World. I’ve also never been to any circus that uses animals, and that won’t ever change either. I still think of watching the dolphins in South Dakota, and I’d like to believe that even then I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with marine mammals surrounded by land, jumping through hoops for our supposed entertainment.

It’s a shameful memory, and I never want to forget it.

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[Movie] Frozen, I feel guilty for not liking you more

So…Frozen.

Full disclosure: I’m one of only a handful of human beings who hasn’t seen Rapunzel sorry I mean Tangled haha that’s right these movies totally aren’t about women. At all. Anyway, I haven’t seen that movie. I keep meaning to, and then don’t get around to it.

I’m honestly not sure if Frozen makes me want to give Tangled a chance or not. I have really, really mixed feelings about this movie.

So, spoilers coming if you care about those.

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