Considering you don’t actually see the titular desolation until over halfway through the movie, I thought perhaps some alternate titles would be more appropriate. [Spoilers]
Categories
Category: movie
Categories
Wonder Woman in a movie… yay?
I’m going with… not yay.
So this is the thing. Apparently Wonder Woman is going to make an appearance in the Batman vs. Superman movie.
Numbered list, go!
- I seriously could not give less of a shit about this movie if I tried, Wonder Woman or no Wonder Woman. I’ve honestly never been that in to Superman as a hero, and then when it’s going to be Zack Snyder’s wangsty collateral-damage-what-collateral-damage Superman from Man of Steel, my levels of meh reach dangerous proportions that might threaten my ability to continue breathing as I am crushed by ennui.
- We have been bitching and moaning and asking and begging for a female superhero movie, (but action movies with women in the lead don’t work ever except oh hi Catching Fire) and this is what we get? If you want to win our hearts back from Marvel, DC, make a fucking Wonder Woman headlined movie. Otherwise it’s more well Black Widow doesn’t get her own movie but she’s totally in Captain America 2 and that counts right? bullshit. Forgive me for not being excited that Wonder Woman is going to be the third wheel in a movie where two other heroes get billing. It’s not like it’s going to be a team movie like Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy.
- So when you add 1 and 2 together to get 3, I’m STILL not in the least bit excited about this movie.
- This is all the more hilarisad considering you know who is getting her own movie? Maleficent. Yes, she isn’t a comic book character. But she’s a powerful female icon and a villain. This just strikes me as even funnier considering the song and dance Marvel has given fans who want a Loki movie because villain movies Just Aren’t Done. But there is a villain movie, about a female villain, and arguably the greatest female superhero of all time is still an afterthought to Orphan McBroody versus Orphan McShouldn’t-Be-Broody-But-Angst-Stands-In-For-Character-Development-Right.
- And then the Zack Snyder thing. I (shockingly) don’t have quite the hateboner for Snyder as others do, though god knows why. I think it’s because I actually kind of enjoyed Sucker Punch, quite possibly because it was SUPER PRETTY and I went in with such low expectations to begin with. I also think anyone who thought Sucker Punch was anything approaching a female empowerment narrative needs their damn head examined. Which circles us back to… gosh, yeah, I don’t trust Zack Snyder with the superhero whose underoos I wore as a child. (Could be worse, I guess. Could be Michael Bay. Amirite?)
The reason I even heard about this was a friend of mine posting the above linked article and saying that she really didn’t think Gal Gadot looked like Wonder Woman to her. And that was honestly my initial reaction as well, because Gal is a very pretty but very thin lady in that picture. Which upon sober reflection, kind of makes me cringe at my own thoughts, considering I’d be going fucking ballistic if anyone was saying she was too fat to play Wonder Woman.
I think the reason I had that reaction is Wonder Woman is… buff. Amazonian. And while I don’t have any right to be judging thin ladies, at the same time there is already such a conflation of fitness and thinness (I mean for god’s sake, people are still getting on Jennifer Lawrence about being too “fat” when she concentrated on looking really fit for Katniss) and it already feels like “very thin pretty woman” is the default setting. I desperately want to see some more diversity in body type for women in film, and superhero movies are a great opportunity for, I don’t know, at least some LADY MUSCLES or something. (They are non-threatening because they are lady-like!)
I had a brief Twitter conversation with Chuck Wendig about this (thanks, Chuck! And here is his post on the topic by the way), and he nicely deflated me a bit, which I appreciate. Also, apparently some people in the Twitter-verse are bitching because Gal Gadot is a model? So fucking what? (She’s an actress too. Fast & Furious, hello.) He also pointed out that Gadot was a soldier, which I hadn’t known before. (And hey, I know woman train up for roles like this; Jaimie Alexander did for Lady Sif!) So I will shut up about that now and have a good think about my knee jerk reaction.
My feelings toward the movie in general are still an uncomplicated BLEH. Considering it’s Zack Snyder we’ll probably get something like BONDAGE WONDER WOMAN because that looks strong, right? Gah.
Please feel free to prove me wrong. That would be awesome. And I’d see the movie twice. Okay, at least once.
Categories
[Movie] Catching Fire
This movie made me actually cry twice and tear up an additional four times. What even gave you the right, Catching Fire? You’re supposed to be a big-budget sci-fi action movie. What’s with this actual heart-punching emotion in the middle of all the wacky fashions and shouting and stabbing things?
Effie made me cry. Effie Fucking Trinkett made me weep a silent, manly fashion. (Those weren’t tears. It was just sweat from my heart.) I can only guess that Elizabeth Banks is actually some kind of goddess.
I really enjoyed the entire Hunger Games series as books. I read all three of them in four days because I refused to put them down. The first movie was… all right. I wasn’t quite so excited about it probably because I loved the books so much, but I liked it in the theater even if I never felt compelled to actually buy it on DVD. In the first movie, the only scene that actively destroyed me was Rue’s death, and I’d gone in expecting it. (Though I should have known, you can never be prepared enough for that.)
I really feel like Catching Fire took everything that was good about the first movie and turned it up to eleven. There was just so much more emotion in it, loss and rage and helplessness. And the acting was all around so excellent that scenes didn’t so much tug at your heartstrings as wrap them up in a fist and just rip them right out of your chest.
All the major action points out of the book were there, but I never once hit a point where I felt like the action was going on too long, or like we were getting some big cgi production piece in place of actual character development. It’s incredibly unusual for me to feel that way about big budget movies these days. (I’m looking at you, The Hobbit.) I felt like there was a lot less shaky cam in this movie than in the previous one, and that it was better used as a way to make the action feel very immediate. Considering the movie was well over two house and didn’t feel nearly that long, they kept it cranking along.
There was a lot to put in the movie because there’s a lot of character development and emotional meat, and there’s no skimping on that. I think that’s why there’s so much emotional impact–the movie gives you a chance to get to know everyone, and their conflicts. You get to know that Katniss is not some kind of superhero, but rather a terrified, angry girl who is being pulled in far too many directions at once. The ways she’s being manipulated by nearly every person around her are very clear…as are the multitude of different ways she loves the people in her life. I’m so glad we got that instead of an extra ten minutes of CGI monkeys chasing very fit people in spandex body suits.
Oh, and Jennifer Lawrence? Still the most perfect. I adore her.
And I just want to say that while the guys all did an excellent job, to me the people who really stood out were the women. Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Banks, and Jena Malone (Johanna) were all powerful. And Lynn Cohen as Mags, who did everything without even being able to speak, won the whole movie as far as I’m concerned.
So yes. I liked it. I’d recommend it. However, if you haven’t seen the first movie or read the book, you’re really going to need to do that beforehand. Catching Fire wastes no time at all on retreading the background story. And I’m glad for that.
Looking forward to being utterly destroyed by Mockingjay.
Categories
[Movie] Lady Eve
As a happy birthday to myself, I decided to go see The Lady Eve at the Alamo Drafthouse, since it was one of their special offerings for badass ladies month. The Lady Eve was filmed in 1941, so I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of it. I certainly hadn’t, until I watched the trailer at the Drafthouse before Thor 2.
“I need him like the axe needs the turkey.”
And that was the reason I decided I had to see the movie. Just for that line alone, which was spoken by Barbara Stanwyck in an utterly predatory tone.
The Lady Eve is a romantic comedy, of sorts. I’m honestly not that big into romantic comedies, because any more they fall into the formula of a man-child causing a woman to give up her independence to become the stand-in for his mom while hijinks ensue. The Lady Eve is definitely not of that mold. Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) is a con artist who manages to utterly wreck the same man twice while he looks on in deer-in-the-headlights befuddlement.
And this movie is hilarious, with a distinct lack of the scatological humor that bores me half to death in a lot of new comedy movies. This one gets its humor from taking romance tropes and turning them on their ear. There is a marriage proposal scene that could have come out of any cheeseball romance where Jean and Charles are cuddling on a hill at sunset, and the entire time Charles is trying to make a romantic speech, a curious but insistent horse is trying to eat his hair. It’s wonderful.
I think the best part of The Lady Eve (other than that it almost caused me to pee myself laughing) is that Jean is the driving force behind the movie. She’s the one in charge. And even if the trope is that she’s the con artist that made the mistake of falling in love with her mark, she is still in control of the situation. It’s a wonderful inversion of gender roles that just filled me with glee.
Even better? If you want to see it, it’s on Netflix instant. And trust me, you want to see it.
(Also, it will forever be my headcanon that “Colonel” Harrington and Gerald are Jean’s gay dads. GO AHEAD, TELL ME I’M WRONG.)
Categories
[Movie] 12 Years a Slave
12 Years a Slave is an absolutely brutal movie. It gives the audience no breathing room and no escape from the horrors of slavery on full display; not just violence, but the twisting of relationships, the abuse of power, the dehumanization. Director Steve McQueen is fond of letting scenes run long, far longer than where you’d expect there to be a cut to spare us some stomach-clenching cringing.
Which is at it should be, considering the absolute injustice and horror of what is often termed “America’s original sin.”
That phrase sprang to mind often as I watched the movie, because the other word I’d use to describe it is beautiful. Steve McQueen lets the landscape of the south speak volumes in long shots of moving water, reeds, or trees covered in spanish moss. It’s this last that makes the beauty feel distinctly sepulchral. The landscape is haunted.
The horror of 12 Years a Slave is in what humans do to each other, in the evil lies of justification they tell themselves, and what was pitilessly done to an entire people. The story of the film is built on betrayal after betrayal, from the foundation up when Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is utterly perfect) is tricked to coming to Washington, DC in order to be drugged and sold into slavery in sight of the US capitol. Near the beginning, a plantation owner’s wife says to an enslaved woman who has just had her family broken up, “Something to eat and some rest, your children will soon be forgotten.” Even that is a casual, terrible brutality.
Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack was good–as usual, come on, it’s Hans Zimmer–but far more striking were the silences in the movie, where there’s nothing but the sound of insects, of wind, of people crying out. In one scene, Solomon is hanged from a tree with his feet just barely touching the ground so he can just manage to breathe. And he’s left there for nearly the whole day in a long, endless scene that made me want to beg for mercy so I could look away. There is no dialog in that scene, no music, nothing but the sound of the rope creaking, Solomon gasping for breath, the soft sound of his feet digging at the ground as he fights to stay upright and alive. These silences, too, are absolutely brutal.
But 12 Years a Slave is also about survival in the face of these horrors, about one man fighting against despair for twelve years. Early on, Solomon says he doesn’t want to survive–he wants to live. And later: “You let yourself be overcome by sorrow, you will drown in it.” That he maintains some sense of hope as he is repeatedly betrayed and brutalized is the truest beauty of the film.
This is a movie filled with more truth than is easy to stomach. More truth than I could handle without crying, that’s for certain. But I think that’s what makes it important.
Categories
[Movie] Man of Tai Chi
So, this movie has a lot of major assumptions to swallow. The most difficult of which is probably Keanu Reeves being an evil martial arts badass that makes people fight to the death for the entertainment of his patrons. And that he lives in an evil Batcave.
Yeah.
No one in this movie seems to believe tai chi is capable of being awesome. Even in a martial arts tournament. I can only assume that none of these characters has ever watched an actual kung fu movie. Tai chi masters are always the biggest badasses to ever badass in those things.
Other than that, it’s a very standard boy learns tai chi, boy doesn’t listen to his master, boy betrays his master and then learns the awesome tai chi technique where you punch someone with your chi and make them vomit blood and thus suddenly knows the True Meaning Of Tai Chi. Only this involved Keanu Reeves looking like he wanted to rob a bank.
I thought the tai chi looked pretty awesome. Mike didn’t complain, though Mike is currently also very sick so he might not have had the strength. There was a sort of meaningless subplot where the police tried to hunt down the underground fighting ring, and it was all really a framework upon which to hang fight after fight.
The fights were… all right. Not bad. Not really good enough to distract me too long from tumblr. But it was nice to see a movie where tai chi was the focus and you could actually see it in action beyond moving very, very slowly. I don’t know if it was $8 worth of nice from On Demand, though.
Categories
[Movie] Thor: The Dark World
[Seven pages of frantic key smashing later…]
I will keep myself pretty spoiler free for now. There is SO MUCH MORE I want to say, but I need to think, and not have two extremely generous beers flowing through my bloodstream, and see this movie a few more times before I can reach Pacific Rim levels of nerdly overthinking.
As usual for these kinds of movies, there is a MacGuffin. And it’s a silly MacGuffin, though not quite to the level of red matter thank goodness. But the McGuffin really doesn’t matter in the slightest. What matters is that this movie is having fun. And you get to have fun with it. The Dark World filled me with Nutella-flavored glee.
And it’s pretty. Oh gosh is it pretty. And so much snark. So, so much snark. This is the movie I wanted in every way.
I’d actually started getting worried that it would be a bit too much Loki (yes, I do believe there is such a thing despite the fact that he’s my favorite You Little Shit of a character ever) just considering the released footage and the fact that you literally cannot turn around without seeing Tom Hiddleston promoting the movie, to the point that it would almost be a bit creepy if he weren’t an adorable life model decoy made out of sunshine, curly blond hair, and swan-murder. But no. The amount of Loki is perfect and viciously jocund.
And Jane is most excellent. Have I mentioned I like Jane? Because science. This movie finally made me buy Thor/Jane, which I appreciate after being left in such a state of Meh after the first movie. Jane got to be the smart, strong in her own way character I always wanted her to be.
Really, I don’t have a lot of complaints other than I would have always loved more. At least we got a bit of time with all of the side characters. (Darcy-senpai!) They did the best they could cramming that much awesome into 112 minutes. The movie definitely didn’t feel that long, which is always a very good sign. The only reason I knew time was passing as such were the increasingly plaintive signals of distress coming from my bladder. (I did mention the two generous beers thing, yes?) And it had a bonus unexpected mini-heist movie right in the middle because why the hell not. Really, I’d love to see a bit more genre play like that, it was fun.
And there are some excellent cameos that made me repeatedly slap my housemate’s leg but it’s okay she still likes me anyway. If you liked the first Thor, I have little doubt you’ll like this one even more. Because this movie is honestly more fun, and determined in that special way Marvel movies have mastered to be a motherfucking comic book movie, exuberant and larger than life and unabashedly cheesey.
Stay all the way to the end of the credits. All the way. There are two extra scenes. (Marvel, this is getting a bit silly, when will it end?)
Thanks to the wonders of magical, lying VPN services, I got to sneak in a watch of Muse of Fire [Warning, video begins to automatically play on the site, SHAME ON YOU DAN AND GILES.] on the BBC iPlayer. I really wanted to watch this slim little documentary because I was in on interviewing Dan Poole for The Reel Britain and it sounded like great fun. And also, I’m a giant Shakespeare nerd, for all that my Shakespeare nerd cred is often called into question because I cannot memorize for shit.
The documentary is excellent. It’s very personal, since it’s all about following Dan and Giles on their journey, and it’s done with a lot of love and humor. Hopefully it’ll be available to American audiences who don’t want to engage in internet cheating relatively soon. And the interviews they got–aaaa! Dame Judi Dench! (I got to shake Dan’s hand, so does that mean I’m now one degree separated from Judi Dench oh my god I’m hyperventilating.) The topic is framed as Dan and Giles getting over their own fear of Shakespeare, so it goes to why people find his work so intimidating and how it can be made more accessible.
Anyway, good documentary, watch it when you can, Dan and Giles are both adorable and adorkable and they put the film together in a very fun way.
One point they bring up is often, how someone first comes to Shakespeare is really what colors their feelings for the rest of their life. (Though when you put it like that, it sounds like when people talk about how they came to Jesus, and it becomes quite evangelical.) I’ve always been bothered by how Shakespeare is presented as so intimidating and impenetrable, because I never really found him to be so… but I also got into Shakespeare entirely because of Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 Henry V movie. He got me when I was young.
Which was for the best, come to think of it. When we hit Shakespeare in school, the first (and sometimes only) play that seems to get done is Romeo and Juliet. I don’t know why. Maybe teenagers are supposed to identify with the characters more, since they’re teens as well, but ugh. I just thought they were very stupid, to be honest. (I can appreciate the play more now, but as a bitter and angry teenager, not so much.) I think if that had been my first exposure to Shakespeare, I wouldn’t like him nearly so much now.
But instead, thanks to Branagh’s Henry, I’m stuck on Shakespeare. I was even excited to take a Shakespeare for Non-Majors class as an undergrad, despite the fact that it was an 8am class (yes, those are things that exist and proof that we live in a godless universe of pain) and the teacher constantly used the word problematize. I read and re-read plays all the time now, though the funny thing is, I still have difficulties with Shakespeare when I’m just reading it to myself.
Which is why I read it out loud to my cats. Shut up, that’s totally normal. I’m teaching the furry little bastards to love Shakespeare too.
Categories
[Movie] Zero Charisma
Zero Charisma is a comedy about That Guy1. You know That Guy, if you’re a gamer nerd. Or if you don’t, you should probably take a good, honest look at your life because you very well might be That Guy.
I honestly did not find Zero Charisma all that funny. That’s because I was too busy cringing in my seat, my hood over my head with the aperture drawn as tightly shut as possible under the laws of physics. This movie is made of pure, distilled awkwardness.
The main character of this movie, Scott, really has been written to have a charisma stat of zero. A man-child with no interpersonal skills and a massive chip on his shoulder, he’s even given an incredibly sympathetic backstory, but quickly throws any audience empathy away by never, at any point, taking the high road or learning from the hideous social mistakes he’s already made. We get that he controls the tabletop game he created because he cannot control anything else in his life–but Scott obviously doesn’t.
I suppose it’s refreshing. If this was a conventional studio movie, by the close of the third act we’d see Scott manage to grow up, regain his friends, say sorry, and maybe get a better haircut, a better car, or even a girlfriend. Isn’t that how men are supposed to be rewarded in these films? Nope. The best we see is the barest glimmer at the end, indicating he may have figured out that people other than him are allowed to make decisions in his game.
Make no mistake, I desperately wanted to empathize with Scott; as a nerd, Scott was designed to be one of my people. I’ve even been in a lot of the horrible situations (whence my literal cringing) as the socially awkward person that the world considers a punchline. Watching this movie was fucking painful at times.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t really see the funny in Zero Charisma other than some very uncomfortable laughter at the beginning. I looked at Scott and thought that could have been me if I’d gone with a slightly less constructive coping strategy. Ultimately, it feels less like a comedy and more like a nerd cautionary tale screaming DON’T BE THAT GUY.
1 – You know, That Guy who always has to know everything and have all the answers and be bored with all of your ideas because he had them first? The one who thinks he’s the Alpha Geek? That Guy who is always nerdier than thou? That Guy who has appointed himself the arbiter of all disputes whether you want it or not? That Guy whose character is the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral? Yeah, fuck that guy.
Categories
[Movie] Gravity
The first two words I said after the credits rolled: Holy shit.
You can tell I’m a writer. I’m good with words.
I really don’t know how else I can react to this movie, though. I spent most of the film on the verge of tears and at the edge of my seat with my hands pressed against my mouth. It’s one of the most if not the most gorgeous movie I’ve ever seen. There’s a constant interplay between the unbelievable beauty of Earth as seen from space and the silent, terrifying void of space, and Gravity just rips your heart open and pours both in. This is one of the few times in my life I desperately wished that 3D didn’t give me headaches and make me want to barf, because as breathtaking as this movie was in 2D I can’t even imagine how it would have looked with an added third dimension.
I know I’m probably the latest to this party. I’ve been traveling for most of the month and literally have not had the time to see this movie until now. And if you, like me, have not yet seen Gravity, you’d better have a damn good excuse.
If this movie does not win five million awards, I’m going to start flying places and flipping podiums like a little bouncing ginger rage ball, I swear to god.
This is probably the most scientifically accurate movie I’ve ever seen. (Which isn’t to say it didn’t have flaws, but if I can manage to enjoy Star Trek without popping a brain aneurysm, I can somehow manage to survive Sandra Bullock’s hair forgetting that it’s in a zero-G environment.) While the visuals are what really stick with you, the sound design for the movie was absolutely amazing.
And there’s something even more horrifying about watching a space station get ripped to shreds without even a dismayed, metallic sigh.
I’ve seen this movie called a thriller over and over, and I suppose it is in the sense that the tension just never stops. It’s a disaster movie in space that never lets you forget just how fragile human life is as opposed to the implacable, inhospitable void. It’s all about human ingenuity struggling against the certainty to death. But the bigger story is really the internal journey of Ryan Stone and her decision to let go of sorrow and keep living by letting go of the comfortable void of space and returning to Earth. It was such a human journey played over a massive spatial scale.
This was also a much needed reminder for me that Sandra Bullock is a very good actress. The movie rides mostly on her shoulders, with a little support from George Clooney, and she makes you feel every second of fear, uncertainty, and hopelessness that lead up to that terrifying decision to keep fighting. I read a couple of articles about Gravity before seeing it, and one mentioned that there had been pressure to change the character of Ryan into a man. I’m so glad that they didn’t. Honestly, the characters in that movie really could have gone any way with gender, I think; there was nothing intrinsically male or female about any of them. But keeping Ryan as a woman made this one of those rare films where the woman is unquestionably the main character. (And Gravity was #1 worldwide for three weeks straight; maybe something to point out the next time someone trots out that bullshit about people not wanting to see movies with women in the lead.)