Category: movie

The longer I think about it, the more utterly furious this movie makes me.

(SPOILERS, duh.)

Though I will say, Oblivion is an incredibly pretty movie. (Though is it me, or does all the tech look like it could have come straight out of Aperture Science?) It’s just gorgeous. The landscapes Tom Cruise flies over as Jack Harper left me absolutely breathless as a geologist (even while, as a geologist, my brain was screaming THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE). It’s beautiful. It’s stylish.

It makes no fucking sense.

I could go on and on about the ridiculous science (the moon blows up so there are earthquakes and tsunamis what) but frankly at this point, expecting a movie to have even a passing handshake relationship with science is really an invitation to just never enjoy another scifi film again. So fine, Oblivion, I will give you your ridiculous MacGuffins, and well may you enjoy them.

It’s the plot that does it. The plot is one where, if you can thread your suspension of disbelief along, it almost scans. And then something happens and WHAM you’re left wondering what kind of incoherent dartboard of ideas was used to produce this story. To be honest, I cannot even describe to you in detail what major plot holes really tripped me up. The plot has completely slipped from my mind, not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because the lack of internal logic honestly made it hard for me to parse the events when considering them later, while at the time it all superficially made sense. This is a movie that desperately wants to be a mind screw, and it almost succeeds as long as you clap your hands hard enough and believe in fairies. The reveals were shocking, until five minutes later my brain caught up and thought Now wait one damn minute…

But no. The thing that has me breathing fire right now is the fact that of the three main characters in the movie, two were women, and there was not even a sliver of agency between the two of them. The only “female” character that got to be anything but a passive vehicle for Tom Cruise’s soulful or nutty looks was Sally, and I put female in quotation marks because she was, in fact, and evil alien computer thing that just happened to sound like a Southern belle.

And then he blew her up so. Oh well. He destroyed the only female that wasn’t a passive receptacle. Parse that how you will.

So much about this just chaps my ass. If nothing else, a giant point is made in the movie that Jack Harper was an astronaut, and thus one of the best the Earth had to offer. Well, both Victoria and Julia were astronauts on the same goddamn mission, and they were both utterly useless. Victoria existed only to mindlessly adhere to rules and regulations and then, in what I’m sure is complete adherence to the intelligence, determination, and curiosity inherent to being an astronaut, betrays Jack because she’s upset he likes another woman better than her. She doesn’t stop to ask why shit that makes no sense keeps happening. And then she gets blown up by a drone like a sad little foot note, having acted as the agent of her own death.

And Julia? A million times worse. She seems to exist only for Jack to save her repeatedly (four times, by my count) and then help him regain his memories by pointing out that she’s his wife. Oh, and get knocked up. The one meaningful decision she makes in the entire goddamn movie, which is to sacrifice herself with Jack to save humanity, is disregarded by him in one of the more obvious plot holes (where did they get another sleep chamber? how did they transfer her? why bother to put her in the sleep chamber at all except as deus ex machina?) in a way that I’m sure is supposed to be about twue wuv but really just highlights the fact that nothing a female character in this movie does has any goddamn meaning.

Argh. ARGH. I don’t know what makes me angrier, that I sat through two hours of beautiful wasted potential where the plot shit on me at every turn, or that this movie made me actually hope it would be good scifi.

You bet your ass there are SPOILERS. This is the only warning you get.

The funny thing is, I don’t particularly like baseball. But I really do like movies about baseball. Maybe it’s because even if I don’t appreciate the sport in and of itself, I can appreciate that people love it and feel very passionate about it.

42 is one of those baseball movies. It’s also a movie about the first crack being put in segregation for that part of society. It’s a movie that intends to be inspirational and let you leave the theater feeling good, and it makes no bones about that fact. There are a lot of moments in the film where someone who is horrible and racist gets slapped down verbally by someone who isn’t, and you feel a bit like cheering. You’re supposed to.

It’s not a sweeping biography of Jackie Robinson; there’s still a hell of a lot left unsaid about the man. The focus is instead on his year with the Montreal Royals in the minor leagues, and then his rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and because of that much is left unsaid. Though thankfully, it’s not all baseball. Jackie Robinson gets a life outside the game in this movie, and it’s not all focused on the constant, grinding fight against racism. There are a lot of lovely scenes that sketch (and it is very much just a sketch) his relationship with his wife Rae and the arrival of their first child.

In 42, Jackie Robinson feels more like the legend than the man who became a legend, which is the only complaint I have at all. And considering what a likable legend Chadwick Boseman plays him to be, that’s not really much of a complaint at all. I loved watching him steal bases. But I also feel like the focus of the movie wasn’t really Jackie Robinson’s journey – it was the journey of the white men surrounding him who had to step up to meet him. But then again, Jackie Robinson changed the game; the game didn’t change him, other than perhaps to temper him if the movie is to be believed.

The cast in general is really good, and full of familiar faces. Boseman communicates pain, inner turmoil, and struggles with his temper without needing to say a word. Alan Tudyk as Ben Chapman, the horribly racist manager of the Phillies made me cringe in my seat. John McGinley (who I will always know as Dr. Cox from Scrubs) looked convincingly old and sounded entirely different as Red Barber. Christopher Meloni was… well, Christopher Meloni, really, perhaps a bit rougher and more tough-talking than before. 

And Harrison Ford? Holy shit Harrison Ford. I actually didn’t realize it was him, until a scene where he yells at Jackie and then I really recognized his voice. They did some excellent makeup on him. And he did a great job, jabbing the air with his cigar and doing the old man wobble with his chin.

The movie’s got its uplifting and triumphant moment (though at times the score is really trying a little too hard) and a lot of fun back and forth. (The pre-shower scene. Just.) There’s a lot to like about it, and it’s fun. If you ask me, much more fun than actually watching baseball, though I know I’m in the minority there.

This movie is not nearly as silly as I thought it would be.

Which is not to say that it isn’t silly. It is, wonderfully so. It’s an action movie where large portions of the White House get alternately shot up and blown up, and where they randomly make up super secret military technologies just to try to ratchet the stakes up an itty bitty bit more. Where the protagonist literally waits until the glowing red countdown until doomsday has reached 00:03 before entering the abort code.

See, if it was a truly silly movie, he would have waited until 00:01.

Ultimately, Olympus Has Fallen is like political Die Hard. Particularly the first movie, when it was a bit grittier and darker and slightly less quippy. And this one is less quippy than your average Die Hard. And since the protagonist is special forces instead of a cop, he stabs people in the brain and snaps necks instead of shooting and punching.

The thing I liked most about the movie, actually, is that a few major plot points actually surprised me. I won’t spoil those for you, but I really liked it. 

Gerard Butler is excellent as the aforementioned neck-snapping brain-stabbing special forces secret service guy. Morgan Freeman was very Morgan Freeman, as you’d expect from him. I wish the real Speaker of the House was even a thousandth that awesome. And I’d like to give a special shout-out to Melissa Leo as the most badass Secretary of Defense ever seen in a movie.

I’d definitely recommend this one if you like action movies.

No movie has any right to be this cute. Seriously.

Also, I know there are only something like five people left in the US that haven’t seen this movie. Mike and I were numbers six and seven. And it sure took our majorly disappointing day and made things feel all good again. R and M are both utterly adorable zombies, and that’s a phrase I never actually thought I would type.

There are zombies, and some brain eating, but it’s really all an occasionally clumsy (but cute) metaphor for feeling, no matter how painful, being better than not feeling. And let’s be honest, we know how the movie will end as soon as it begins, and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that R is adorable and his journey is adorable and okay the skeletal guys are kind of gross but in the end the good guys and zombies win. And I actually did like to see zombies get to have a bit of personality and change. R goes through some fun character development that shows even in how he moves.

Definitely worth seeing.

Also, I feel like I should probably get a nerd demerit for not noticing R and Julie until there was a freaking balcony scene. Forgive me, geeks, for I have sinned. I’ll do ten St. Crispin’s day speeches and recite the what’s in a name verse backwards.

Finally, finally I got to see this movie. I promised myself that I would after I finished writing the introduction to my thesis, but then there was the apartment hunting trip and shitting myself over getting my novella written and whoops Christmas, so it didn’t happen until now.

Worth the wait. And despite the fact that it was released back in November, the theater was still pretty crowded for a noon show.

(Some spoilers.)

Life of Pi is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. Every shot of it was its own paradise, gorgeous and full of color. And the tiger. Holy shit the tiger. CGI has come a long, long way.

Beyond how visually arresting I found the film, there is a lot to love. Suraj Sharma is just fantastic as Pi. And have I mentioned the tiger? Beyond how believable the Richard Parker was, what I loved was that he never stopped being an animal, and a wild animal at that. Pi and Richard Parker achieve an understanding of sorts, but there’s always that gap of understanding between animal and man. The tiger never stops being a wild animal, even at the end when it walks away from Pi and into the jungle without a backward glance.

That was the part of the movie that made me tear up, when the tiger simply walks away and Pi still desperately asserts that he saw the animal’s soul and it wasn’t just his own feelings reflected back at him. So much of the movie is about the gap of understanding between humans, animals, and nature in general.

And then there is the alternate story that Pi offers as to what happened, opening the possibility that the tiger is an aspect of Pi himself. I like unreliable narrator stories when they’re done well, and this one definitely was. In the end, you get to decide for yourself, which story is true. For my part, I think that both are.

In the movie, they say the story will make you believe in God. I knew about that going in and was a bit curious about it, since… well, not a believer, myself. I wondered if it would be preachy, perhaps. It wasn’t; you’d hardly expect a Catholic Hindu Muslim to be grinding an ax for one religion anyway. But beyond that, to me it wasn’t a story about religion or even belief; it was about trying to understand the unknowable, like the tiger, looking into its eyes and never being quite certain if it’s just a reflection or a reality you can’t quite touch.

Some might call that religion. I would just call it life.

I can’t think of the last time I saw a move with this much controversy around it, which ranges from Spike Lee’s criticism of the movie making light of the horrors of slavery to conservatives predictably freaking the fuck out about the bit in the movie (and Jamie Foxx later joking about it) where Django points out that getting paid to kill white people sounds like an awesome way to make a living because ow my precious persecution complex. Oh, and people complaining about the use of the N-word in a movie set shortly before the civil war and involving slavery, when obviously no one ever talked like that back then. Though I find Amanda Marcotte’s take on how damn meta the film is very interesting indeed, which goes right along with a lot of what Inglorious Basterds had to say.

But anyway. At this point, the discussion about Django and its meaning beyond a movie is fascinating and way, way beyond me. I don’t feel like I have anything useful I could contribute as an average white female nerd who loves action-y movies, but I sure want to keep reading what other people who have different viewpoints from me have to say.