Category: movie

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movie

Pacific Rim: Your argument is invalid because Sword Button

Let me be clear: I was born to love this movie. I grew up watching Voltron, Power Rangers and other sentai shows, and kaiju movies. I was a giant Gundam weenie for years and years. (Evangelion not so much, but that’s a rant for a different time.) This movie was designed to hit every single nerd squee button I possess all at once and turn me into a shrieking explosion of popcorn and glitter. It’s GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING KAIJU HOW COOL IS THAT.

However, had it only been giant robots fighting monsters, I would have left the theater happy, but not been thrown into paroxysms of pure glee like I am now. Obviously, I’m capable of disliking movies that involve giant robots. I hated Transformers 2 and 3, after all.

But this movie was fun. And it was good. I’d even go so far as to call it groundbreaking, and let me explain why.

But there will be SPOILERS. [okay, I’m trying to use the “more” tag but I don’t know if it’s working, apologies if not.]

Continue reading “Pacific Rim: Your argument is invalid because Sword Button”
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movie

Pacific Rim: Initial Reaction

NGEMIOJREFWOEF-9230IK2P34T8U3540KQFWPSDVLWG-W4TJ24POMFWS;F,PSDCMOEF8Q0912!!!!!!!0WEJPOWEMFW;EFM3-012-13JGIRMWGE[VQ-9R1POLMGRGRJJWEFJEJR[KOQR3[[EKR AND A SWORD BUTTON THERE IS A MOTHERFUCKING SWORD BUTTON IN THIS MOVIE TAKE ME NOW JESUS I AM READY AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Okay, I’ll write a real review tomorrow, I promise. I am so ridiculously tired right now you wouldn’t believe. (I rode 67 miles today and didn’t take a nap, so that might have something to do with it.)

BUT THIS MOVIE. YOU SHOULD SEE THIS MOVIE.

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feminism movie

Disney, why are you now trying to pretend women don’t exist in your movies?

So before Monsters University yesterday, one of the previews they played was this one for Frozen.

Now, this is still the description of the movie from the Disney site for Frozen.

Walt Disney Animation Studios, the studio behind “Tangled” and “Wreck-It Ralph,” presents “Frozen,” a stunning big-screen comedy adventure. Fearless optimist Anna (voice of Kristen Bell) sets off on an epic journey—teaming up with rugged mountain man Kristoff (voice of Jonathan Groff) and his loyal reindeer Sven—to find her sister Elsa (voice of Idina Menzel), whose icy powers have trapped the kingdom of Arendelle in eternal winter. Encountering Everest-like conditions, mystical trolls and a hilarious snowman named Olaf, Anna and Kristoff battle the elements in a race to save the kingdom.

The trailer above is underwhelming to say the least. I am completely un-whelmed, really. If nothing else, it gives the impression that it’s a movie about Olaf the snowman. Or possibly just the cute animated short that will lead for the movie, since that seems to be a thing now for Disney. For a bonus, Olaf is also the character who shows up on the story page. (Though in the art there are some nice pictures of Anna and Kristoff.) Kind of makes it seem like this is a movie about a doofy reindeer and snowman combo (Ice Age-esque, really) and involves no humans, let alone any girl ones, at all.

The reason this gives me no warm fuzzies whatsoever reaches back to the debacle with the Rapunzel movie’s title being changed to Tangled because otherwise people would assume it was a girly movie or something. Yes, this is just a pre-pre-pre trailer, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like they’re trying to disguise what the movie is really about. Because girl stuff is yucky and we all know boys won’t watch girl stuff. (But girls totally watch boy stuff all the time. Because that is the natural order of things.)

Another bonus! This is what the Japanese trailer looks like!

Hint: Anna spends a lot of time in the trailer mentioning her sister and her sister’s magic. And Anna exists in the trailer! And is plainly the heroine of the story!

DOUBLE BONUS: The Japanese title of the movie is 『アナと雪の女王』–Translated: Anna and the Snow Queen. Not something as non-specific as Frozen.

Disney, why the fuck are you now trying to pretend women are not present in–nay, CENTRAL TO–your movies? Is it the same utter, contemptible bullshit that motivated the title change for Rapunzel? Well, little girls watch boy movies and then we can hook them in with the princess thing, but we shouldn’t even try to get little boys interested in movies with women? Is that the thing now?

This just infuriates me. I get that it makes marketing sense, if you think that’s what’ll get butts in the seats. That doesn’t make any less infuriating. Before The Princess and the Frog, there were plenty of Disney movies that had a title centered around the leading lady. But the issue has now been made into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Way to reinforce the idea that women in lead roles just don’t get butts in the seats by making them vanish.

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lgbt movie things that are hard to write

Still Not Going to See Ender’s Game: Separating the Art From the Artist

Orson Scott Card would like us to be tolerant of his anti-gay marriage views, now that we’ve won. The point is, apparently “moot.” I call bullshit on that one.  DOMA may be dead, and the language of that decision may be what will make the rest of the dominoes fall, so to speak. But the point is not moot. Gay and lesbian citizens still can’t get married in the majority of states in this country, many of which have enshrined homophobia in their constitutions. Transgendered Americans are still even further behind when it comes to having full rights to be who they are. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that there are rights beyond marriage.

So no, the issue is not  moot. The issue will not be moot until every one of us is equal under the law. Telling ourselves that we have already won and stopping the fight before the finish line would be foolish indeed.

And even if victory is inevitable (oh how I hope that it is), OSC is still in prime position to fund the foot dragging and last tantrums of a lost conservative cause. So no, I don’t think it’s time to forget that yet, not when he hasn’t backed down, hasn’t changed his mind. He’s just been overruled.

What about separating the art from the artist? You don’t have to like someone and their views to like their art, to consume and support it you know.

I’ve had this argument with friends before, specifically in regards to Orson Scott Card. It’s an uncomfortable subject, and I have conflicted feelings about it. Not in the least of which is the fact that when I met OSC in person years ago, I thought he was a pretty nice guy, and he gave me some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. He’s very likeable in person.

Then I remind myself that, as a bisexual woman, he thinks there’s something wrong with me and would want me to be a shamed, second-class citizen if I had fallen in love with a woman instead of a man.

But separate the art from the artist. It feels like a horrible twist on “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

There is a reason, for the most part, that I don’t actively seek out the opinions of artists. Sometimes knowing too much ruins it. Sometimes knowing too much means you can no longer read or watch or listen to a piece of art you enjoyed without thinking about how the artist has harmed something about which you care deeply. Sometimes you wish you just didn’t know.

But artists are people just like the rest of us, and they have opinions, and they have a right to express those opinions. Wil Wheaton points this out eloquently and often whenever someone complains about him daring to have politics out loud where people can see them. And like for everyone else, the freedom of an artist to express an opinion is not the same as the freedom to have no consequences because of it. When we’re talking about artists like OSC, his voice is louder than that of many others because of his art. He has a platform. We, his fans, built that platform for him with our support.

If we do not like what he is doing with that platform, I don’t think we are in any way obligated to continue that support.

But separate the art from the artist. Why can’t you do that? Shouldn’t you do that?

Does art happen in a vacuum? Is it truly a thing separate from the artist? This isn’t just an academic question for me, when it comes to Orson Scott Card. I read Ender’s Game as a teenager. I literally finished the book in twelve hours, unwilling to put it down. It had a lot of meaning to me.

And yet.

At the reading where I met OSC, someone in the audience asked him a question: As a Mormon, did he try to put his religion into his work? And OSC gave what I thought was a very true and important answer that has stuck with me—he doesn’t try to do that. Preaching at your audience never turns out well. But he said that his religion is fundamental to who he is, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it comes out into his art in subtle ways.

Because as artists, even when we are imagining ourselves as other people, we are the ones doing the creating. I am a white, bisexual woman, and I’m sure that no matter how hard I try, my experiences will always subtly reflect in how I create. Because it is my art.

Can you truly separate art from the artist? How do you deal with, say, Chris Brown and Roman Polanski if you like their art but cannot support them as human beings?

Art does not occur in a vacuum. And while you can appreciate art as good or bad without knowing the person behind it, regardless of the person behind it, consuming that art does in fact mean you are supporting its creator. And by supporting them, you are complicit in their causes. I have joined in boycotts of companies when it was revealed they were donating money anti-gay groups. Why should an artist be any different? Because he wrote some books I like? I’ve eaten Chik-fil-A sandwiches and nuggets more often than I’ve re-read Ender’s Game.

If you can separate the art from the artist, maybe that makes you a better person than me. Feel that way if you like. But I cannot support someone who believes that me and many of the people I love and esteem are not full human beings. Orson Scott Card chose to use his platform to denigrate LGBT people. I can damn well choose to take a tiny sliver of his platform, a platform I joined with countless others to help build, away.

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movie

Monsters University

This is another movie I wasn’t that excited about, but I wanted to see a movie on Sunday, and I liked the sound of this one better than any of the alternatives. I liked Monsters, Inc. all right, but it’s not one of my Pixar favorites. I’ve seen it maybe twice and have felt no great desire to own a copy on DVD.

This one, I liked a lot better. It was what one expects from a Pixar movie–funny, with more than enough smart jokes to keep grown-ups happy, and appropriately heartwarming at the same time. The animation just keeps getting better and better between movies. It was fun to learn how Mike and Sully got to be friends, and to watch their relationship go from bitter rivals to the best of friends. It still followed the doofy buddies in college comedy in formula, which means nothing in the plot was all that surprising, if still amusing.

This next bit is about the overall message of the film and is thus SPOILER-Y.

What I found most interesting about the movie was the message, however. It wasn’t the standard “if you can dream it, you can be it.” Which always does seem like a heartwarming, nice message until you consider that sometimes people are just physically or mentally not capable of achieving whatever their big dream happens to be; for example, some people just are not physically set up to be ballet dancers or Olympic athletes. And so on.

So instead, the message became more about Mike finding what he was truly good at and truly loved doing, and doing that even though it was a different dream than the one he started with. He starts out wanting to be a Scarer, but through the course of the movie he displays again and again that he’s an amazing coach, and that he is simply not scary at all. So instead, at the end he and Sully achieve their dream job (after being expelled from school) by joining Monsters, Inc as entry-level employees and excelling at everything they do, thus working their way up the ladder.

This isn’t the normal course for kid’s movies.

Also, when Sully comes clean about cheating, he (and Mike) get expelled. Things only work out for the boys after that dishonesty because they change tracks and start over. I also don’t feel like this is the most common message.

There’s a lot about this kind of message that I actually like. Because it is a hard but true thing that you can’t necessarily be anything you dream to be. Happiness tends to be finding what you like doing and what you’re good at and doing that. And there is a lot to be said for the idea of rising through the ranks through hard work; on the other hand, there’s the never ending boot straps narrative that isn’t really true.

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movie

World War Z

I’m kind of late to the party on this one. It wasn’t high on my list of movies to see, to be honest, and we only ended up going today because no one was that excited by the other available options this weekend. (BUT NEXT WEEKEND IS PACIFIC RIM MOTHERFUCKERS ARE YOU READY OR WHAT?) Anyway, I’m a bit familiar with World War Z the book, in that I listened to the audiobook. (Which is abridged.)

I thought the audiobook was… okay. The production values were great (one of the voice actors was Allen Alda) but the content itself didn’t excite me. Part of the issue was that it was written as a memoir, which is not really my favorite format. Secondarily, I got annoyed that apparently the survivors of the zombie apocalypse were 80% male if you went by just the selection of stories told. But it wasn’t a bad book. It helped me pass the time in the gym pleasantly.

Anyway, I think I would have been better off if I wasn’t familiar with the source material. I might have ended up marginally less annoyed, particularly with what turned out to be the dealbreaker for me in the movie.

I came out of World War Z the movie feeling like it was somehow significantly longer than its two hour running time, which is a bad sign when it’s an action/suspense movie. And you know how I said I couldn’t believe I wished there were fewer explosions in Man of Steel? I wish this movie had fewer action sequences; they were predictable, clunky, and endless, squeezing out any development that might have helped me like the characters. Literally, every time Gerry goes somewhere, there is an action sequence involving a mob of zombies basically destroying everything, and he barely escapes with his life. Every goddamn time. There was no suspense to these action sequences because we knew they were coming by the third one.

Gerry was all right as a character, I guess? The main problem is, you never get to know him. You know he loves his wife and his two incredibly annoying kids. You know he apparently is the kind of guy that will randomly welcome an orphan into his family (hello, token brown child who is eerily calm). But what did he once do for the UN? We know it was important and badass and has apparently taught him the art of bayonetting zombies, but we never really find out once. His character is nebulous in ways that really make it hard to connect with what he’s trying to do and how he feels about things, because there’s no clear place from which he comes. Honestly, in the entire movie, the only one I really liked was Segen, a female Israeli soldier who goes through most of the film with only one hand and is incredibly badass while simultaneously being human enough to feel pain. The rest? Meh.

At least the zombies were suitably creepy. The way they moved was just viscerally wrong. That wasn’t enough to salvage the movie, though. Perhaps because there were just too damn many of them. There are some nicely creepy moments, but they often do not make any sense at all in the context of what the film has established. (e.g.: if you shoot zombies in the head and/or burn them, they die. Why then, do we see a corpse that appears to have been reduced to crusty ash wiggling its fingers? Creepy, but nonsensical.) The solution to the zombie apocalypse was nonsensical. As far as I could tell, Gerry (Brad Pitt) only had a family for the sole purpose of them screwing something up so an action sequence would be required.

Also, the fact that it literally takes only ten seconds from initial infection to a person becoming a full fledged zombie, while occasionally worked to creepy effect, is stupid.

Let me go into a few more details, so SPOILERS BELOW.

So, of the material from the book that I could tell was preserved, the only major points were that the zombies were attracted to noise (not uncommon in zombie lore) and that Israel had saved itself by building a wall early on and hunkering down. That’s really it.

Of course, the inclusion of Israel as seen in the book ended up being the thing that made me say screw this movie, I’m out. In the book, Israel has built a wall around the entire country (if memory serves) and invited not just all the Jewish people of the world to come and be safe, but anyone (including Muslims) who were originally born of that region. That’s one of the rather pointed ironies of the book, I think, that it takes a zombie apocalypse to bring peace to the Middle East. But either way, Israel survives the entirety of World War Z.

And then in this movie, this fucking movie, Israel gets overrun by zombies in approximately ten minutes, because Gerry showed up and everything he touches is destined to get eaten by zombies I guess. And the way they do it just really annoyed me. Gerry is being shown around by an Israeli guy, who is proudly telling him how they’re welcoming everyone inside the walls, because every person they save inside means one less zombie they will eventually have to kill. Sounds good. A crowd of what are presumably Muslim men and women come in and are welcomed. There is singing. And then somehow, a couple of the women get microphones (how? doesn’t matter! we need an action sequence!) so they can sing over the PA (if they know zombies are attracted to noise by now, why is there a PA system? doesn’t matter! we need an action sequence!) and that attracts every zombie in the universe. The zombies promptly climb the walls, somehow missed by the entire fleet of helicopters circling the walls, and that’s it for Israel.

Well, that’s what you get for singing and cooperating, humans.

This was immediately followed by my second least favorite action sequence of the movie. Gerry and Segen escape on a commercial jet that flies away from the airport as it is being overrun. Somehow, a zombie has gotten on the plane! How? Doesn’t matter! It’s been ten minutes! Segen and Gerry might like talk and have character development if we don’t stop them! So the passengers in Gerry’s cabin try to stack up luggage to form a barrier, but someone drops a suitcase and so everyone gets eaten.

I have had enough of these motherfucking zombies of my motherfucking plane, man.

Neither of those action sequences was all that interesting, or even necessary to the plot. They didn’t ratchet the tension up any higher. We already know the world is boned, guys. Frankly, if anything they destroyed the feeling of tension because they were so contrived and we knew they were coming because this movie is incapable of giving the audience (and characters) a little breathing space so that something can actually have impact.

What makes a movie scary or suspenseful isn’t when every time you hear a noise, it’s the serial killer. Sometimes the noise really does need to be just the cat, so you can think for just a moment you might be safe.

Oh, and the solution to the zombie apocalypse? Apparently zombies (using super psychic zombie senses or something) can sense when somebody is terminally ill, and thus that person becomes a non-target to them. So the solution is to infect everyone with some kind of special strain of a deadly disease. I KNOW, RIGHT. SORRY FOR SPOILING THAT ONE FOR YOU.

In other news, I saw the trailer for the new Wolverine movie. I tried really, really, really hard and still could not give even the tiniest of craps.

But on the other hand, I kind of want to see this. It looks funny in a horrible way, I would wager due to the association with Edgar Wright.

Best line of the preview: “He’s not a person, Tina, he’s a Daily Mail reader.”

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movie

This Is the End

This comes as a surprise to me, but I actually really liked this movie. Like a lot. Like I’m considering buying it when it comes out on Blu-ray and setting it perhaps a shelf or two below my hallowed copies of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

I honestly have not been that much of a Seth Rogen fan before. And to be fair, I’m not generally that into comedy movies. (This, despite the fact that my favorite movie ever–Hot Fuzz–is a comedy.) I have a low tolerance for gross humor, which seems like a button that often gets punched in comedy movies, particularly American ones. Look yes, I get that character X has some profound flatulence, could we move on? And so on.

Don’t get me wrong. There is some gross-out stuff in This Is the End. And plenty of dick jokes. And dicks, most of them attached to terrifying CGI demons. But it was an order of magnitude less about dicks than I actually expected. And (I never thought I would type this sentence in my life but all things truly are possible on the internet) I think the dicks on the demons were perfect. It added the twist of the ridiculous.

And let me be clear. There were dick jokes and rape jokes and gay jokes and race jokes and basically the full rainbow of offensive humor. If you want to avoid movies with that sort of thing in it, this one’s not for you.

But what was truly funny for me about This Is the End was the actors playing caricatures of themselves as mind-meltingly shallow and pathetically unable to cope as possible. I realized that I was going to get something far better than I expected when, at the very beginning of the movie Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel are driving and talking about the evils of gluten. Jay accuses Seth of not even knowing what gluten is. Seth comes to the conclusion that gluten is a catch-all term for anything that’s bad for you in food, including calories. And then cut to Seth and Jay eating giant Carl’s Junior hamburgers.

And James Franco wins everything by playing the most pretentious asshole version of James Franco imaginable, and with obvious glee.

Maybe that’s what it is; I like it when people don’t take themselves seriously, and that’s much of the meat in this movie. That, and amazing dance number that I will not spoil for you, but I almost peed my pants laughing.

I thought it was hilarious. Mike actually really liked it as well, and he has an even lower tolerance for comedy movies than I do. I think the last time I saw him laugh this hard in a movie was during Cabin in the Woods at the jumping the motorcycle over the chasm scene, and now everyone who knows Mike is nodding wisely because yes, of course he would have hysterics over that. But anyway, if we both found it funny, you might as well. I can’t guarantee that, since humor is such an individual thing, but it could well be worth a try.

Now I’m just waiting for The World’s End. Come to me, my pretty. Come to me.

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movie

Much Ado About Nothing

Joss Whedon really has managed to find himself the only love gods. That movie is fantastic. If you like Shakespeare at all, hell if you like Joss Whedon at all, you should go see it.

And it’s definitely a Joss Whedon movie, for all that it doesn’t contain the patented Whedon snarky dialog. (It’s not like Shakespeare needed Whedon’s help with Beatrice and Benedick.) It’s all in the staging and the subtle (or not so subtle) actions of the actors. It’s the brofist, the iPod, Beatrice falling down the stairs with a basket of laundry, the clever take on Sigh No More, Ladies.

I love that this movie doesn’t even pretend Claudio and Hero are more than window dressing for the two lovers we really want to see. And Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof do them justice.

Really, the entire cast was excellent. And hey, we got a genderbent character out of the deal–Conrade is female in this one. Though some day I would love to see a film production where Benedick and Beatrice are both women because reasons.

This isn’t your average Shakespeare movie. For the most part, the actors deliver their lines like they’re just speaking the language normally rather than declaiming something in the Globe. And it really works. I’m well versed in watching Shakespeare now, but this was more easily comprehensible than any other movie I’ve encountered. (So I definitely recommend it for Bard beginners.)

And a special shout-out to Nathan Fillion. This is the first production of Much Ado About Nothing I have ever seen where I could actually understand what Dogberry was saying. I now understand that the character is fricking hilarious, and it has nothing to do with a comedic and incomprehensible accent and everything to do with the fact that he has no idea what words actually mean. It was wonderful.

Oh yes. And Clark Gregg because… Clark Gregg. Saying, “This naughty man,” and shaking his finger at Borachio.

I must own a copy of this.

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movie

In which I try and fail yet again to give a crap about Superman

Saw Man of Steel. For the record, I wanted to see This Is the End. I was outvoted by a combination of spouse and housemate interest, and the fact that I have an early morning ride tomorrow and the time was more convenient.

Gotta say, I wish I’d just stuck with it for This Is the End.

Light spoilers follow, I suppose, if you consider the revelation of how much real estate gets blown up and where a significant spoiler.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’ve never been a fan of Superman as a character. In the droves of comic book movies and their respective main characters, I think the only one I ever cared even less about was the Hulk, and for very similar reasons. They’re both a bit too stupidly powerful for me to really find them interesting. But then Joss Whedon and Mark Ruffalo used their amazing wondertwin powers to get me to admit yeah, okay, maybe I could give a crap about the Hulk now.

So I was kind of hoping that Zack Snyder and Chris Nolan and generic strong-jawed white guy Henry Cavill could work the same magic. I’m sorry to say that was not the case, and all I feel I really got out of my evening was an excellent pizza at the Alamo Drafthouse and a new movie soundtrack I want to buy. Because all the bitching I’m about to do about this movie aside, the score for Man of Steel is excellent.

My biggest general complaint about Man of Steel is that it feels like it was trying to be about too many things and go too many places at once. We get to see bits of Clark’s past peeking through during the entire movie, but a lot of time without the full significance ever actually being explained. The movie never feels quite coherent, the major scenes never quite connected.

And the exposition. There is a lot more exposition in this movie than I’m normally prepared to take, I think because there is such a lack of development in the plotlines. It has to be verbally explained away, which is never a good thing. There is one character, I will call him General McDimpleChin, who seemed to only exist for the purpose of providing exposition or asking kind of dumb questions to enable other characters to do exposition.

The disconnection between the narrative threads also turned into a disconnection between characters. The only characters I ever felt any real chemistry or emotional connection between were basically young Clark and his parents and… Faora and Colonel Hardy, who had the most giant battle hateboners for each other that it kind of took my breath away. Lois and Clark didn’t have much going on, probably because any relationship development time was abandoned in favor of destroying a few more blocks of New York City Metropolis. (By the way, I’m pretty sure Superman personally destroyed more acreage than Loki did in Avengers, which I find quite hilarious.) The only other time a movie has ever made me wish for less destruction and fewer explosions was in Transformers 2. Well, I guess this movie at least didn’t involve a lot of slow motion shots of people running away, but it’s probably not a good thing when Man of Steel gets compared in my mind to a Michael Bay film. But for goodness sake, I would have rather a few more buildings got to stand and we had more character development. Plus Superman’s apparent lack of concern for flattening an entire town while he had his fight felt very, very weird from what I know of the character.

(For another point on this and the reason I didn’t care for the ending, please see the review in Locus. It’s more coherent and thoughtful than I could manage, and also lets me keep this basically spoiler free.)

And since I’ve mentioned the Marvel franchise, I’ll note yet another problem I had with Man of Steel: this movie wasn’t having any fun, and therefore it was difficult to sit in the audience and have fun with it. The Marvel movies have always been incredibly playful; I think DC could have done with stealing a bit of that. They’ve already got one hideously serious superhero franchise (Batman). They didn’t need another. And come on. Superman wars red underpants over his tights. How serious can he be? There’s about two minutes of Clark having a good time when he figures out how to fly, and the only real verbal playfulness in the movie ended up in the trailer, when Lois asks him about the S.

Now, it was a visually beautiful movie. Though in the field of pretty, it honestly had nothing on Oblivion. However, unlike Oblivion, Man of Steel did not actively piss me off. It just annoyed me and occasionally made me slap my palm to my forehead. And while it’s not saying much, a couple of the women in this movie got some actual agency, unlike in Oblivion. Lois Lane sure does some stuff in between screaming uselessly and needing to be rescued, even if we never have any idea why. And then there’s Faora. She had agency, and decided to use that agency to be a giant BAMF and punch missiles in the face (no, really). Which was a very nice change from the sighing over Superman’s chiseled jawline and needing to be caught up in his manly arms.

Though I will note one thing I found interesting. Even if the female characters were what I’ve come to expect from a comic book movie for the most part, they generally weren’t visually objectified. Take Faora, over there on the right.

I mean holy shit. They dressed her in armor that actually looks like, you know, armor. There’s not even a boob window! And there was at least one other female Kryptonian, who had the same sort of armor. Also, in the scenes that involved the US military, there were actually visibly women in uniform, combat ready. That impressed me a lot.

I’d guess it’s fun if you like that sort of movie. If you’re really in to Superman. I have it on good authority from my housemate that this one is immeasurably better than the previous Superman movie, though that apparently also isn’t hard to do. And it is, of course, Zack Snyder pretty. But if you’re like me and have never been that excited about the concept or the character, you might want to just to see something else or risk spending close to two hours of your life picking at nagging plot threads that never seem to quite connect. Now, I can’t say if This Is the End is any better yet, but I intend to find out soon.

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movie

Five movies in brief.

So I usually take long flights to catch up on movies I didn’t have time to see in the theater. There was actually a bit less of that this time around since I had a lot of editing work to do both ways (I completely killed my laptop battery on the flight home) and then I actually managed to sleep some on the flight out (shock!). But, here are my thoughts on the few movies I saw. If a bit late.

I imagine there are technically spoilers for these. They’re also generally older movies so I’m a little less concerned, but there you go.

Rise of the Guardians

I kind of already expressed my opinion on this one, which was a resounding: meh. It’s a pretty movie, yes, but these days a movie needs a damn good excuse to not be pretty. The plot just wasn’t there for me. After I got over my delight at Hugh Jackman and Alec Baldwin being over the top as the Easter Bunny and Santa respectively, there just didn’t end up being a lot of there there. It was very much a kid’s movie, without enough added oomph to it to make it interesting to me as an adult. Now I’m sure, in the grand scheme of movies that adults are forced to watch by their children, it’s probably a superior offering. But since I don’t have kids making me watch bad, treacly movies, I can be picky.

The Tempest (2010)

I wanted to love this movie. I really, really, really wanted to love it. It’s The Tempest genderbent so that Prospero is a woman – Prospera. And there were certain parts I did really love. Every scene involving Helen Mirren as Prospera just had me breathless. That woman is a treasure, and the depth she gave to that character was beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. I also really liked Ben Whishaw as Ariel, and some of the visual effects trickery they did with him. But other than those two? Much of the cast left me unconvinced, I’m afraid, and the play was very liberally cut down to fit in a standard movie length. The cutting they did still spent too much time on the more comedic scenes with Caliban, and the way that was all played just didn’t grab me at all. (Particularly since I’d just seen Hamlet and perhaps my expectations were even higher than normal.) I also can’t say a lot of the visual effects in the movie felt like they added to it.

Oz the Great and Powerful

I expected to not give a single shit about this movie, and was shocked by giving a small fraction of one by the end. Mostly because James Franco. My dislike of this movie is woven into its very fabric, however. The entire plot hinges on there being a prophecy about how a powerful man will come save Oz. I’m not keen on prophecy as plot fuel to begin with, and considering this basically meant three very strong and interesting female characters spent the whole movie going on and on about how a man needed to save Oz, it’s a wonder I didn’t just implode on the plane. I really liked the three witches. I thought their interplay was fascinating. And then every time one of them brought up the stupid prophecy, I wanted to grind my teeth, because any one of them was shown over and over again to be far more competent than the Wizard. Save yourselves, ladies. For fuck’s sake.

Seven Psychopaths

This move was weird, and twisted, and darkly humorous. And Christopher Walken. If you like movies like Boondock Saints, you will like Seven Psychopaths. It hits those same places of dark, macabre hilarity, over and over again. It’s about dognapping and psychopaths and assassins and, oddly enough, the struggle of what you want to write not being the same as what you actually write or what people want. I loved it. I also can’t really say much more about it without seeing it again because it’s a very difficult movie to explain.

Taken 2

Seriously, why do people keep messing with Liam Neeson’s family? I just watched this to pass the time before landing, and I ended up really enjoying it, for much the same reason I really liked all of the Bourne movies (other than my shaky cam objections). While there is a lot of fighting and killing, there are also lovely scenes where it’s just Bryan using his brain. The ending kind of annoyed me, however, with Bryan’s wife being randomly dead but not really and apparently she forgets to breathe unless he touches her or something. I didn’t get it, it made no sense, and it was just kind of stupid.