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[Movie] Warcraft

It says a lot that it’s been something like two weeks since I saw Warcraft and I’m only now writing about it. Mostly because… honestly? I don’t have a lot to say.

The thing you need to understand here is that I’ve played all the original Warcraft RTS games, and devoted more hours of my life than I’m willing to actually count to World of Warcraft. So there is a huge part of me that cannot look at this film in an uncritical way because other criticisms aside, it looked like Warcraft. It’s gorgeous. My god, the humans go flying around on gryphons, HOW COOL IS THAT. The orcs look great. AND OH MY GOD THAT WAS DUROTAN FROSTWOLF CLAN REPRESENT and KHADGAR JUST SHEEPED THAT GUY DID YOU SEE THAT OH MY FUCK and–and–and–

This was a big part of my teenage and twenty-something gamer years, splashed out on the screen and looking cool. I knew the story going in. I knew the characters. I just about shit myself over Gul’dan in the first two minutes.

But this is the thing. I can take a step back and try to address it from the perspective of someone who hasn’t been a fan of the Warcraft franchise, and in that case, the movie is severely wanting. Seriously, if you don’t know who Khadgar is, if you haven’t run the Karazhan raid a million times and known in the marrow of your bones what a dickbag Medivh is, does any of it come out to more than just-so stories and alphabet name soup? From what my few friends who went in canon-blind to see it had to say afterward, the answer is no. The characters aren’t nearly as exciting and compelling when you have no idea where they’re going to be going or what their significance is to a world you’ve never been to. There’s way too many characters, way too much going on in the film, and way too much unspoken backstory that fans can and will fill in easily, but leaves everyone else scratching their heads. Even some of the hand-waving orc culture stuff was a bit much for me, and I knew what was coming.

And that makes me sad to say it, but I also don’t know if there’s really a solution. Warcraft was going to either be a movie that the fans like me would love, or it would be a movie that people unacquainted with the lore could really sink their teeth into. I honestly never thought it was going to be the latter, because translating this much sprawling lore into something you can consume and feel satisfied by in a feature? That’s one hell of a tall task, and at that point would it be recognizable as Warcraft any more? But goddamn, if you’re a fan, it was an amazing two hours. The real question on my mind now is if the film’s going to make enough money for there to be more. It hasn’t done so hot in the US ($45 million so far, oof), but it’s been doing much better internationally ($376 million). I’d love to see another film. I want Thrall: The Movie. I’m hoping I get it, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

But damn you Blizzard, now I want to re-up my WoW account.

By the way, I recently also saw Now You See Me 2. I decided to write up my review of that for my Patreon subscribers only, so if you’re curious, all it takes is a buck.

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[Movie] Independence Day: Resurgence

In news that should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever spent five minutes in a room with me, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

Please note here, I am not going to make any claims that it is a good movie, by whatever measure of good you want to pretend is in some way objective. To me? It was fun, it was enjoyable, I want to see it again, but it certainly was not: innovative, groundbreaking, special, excellent, unexpected, exceptional, or artful. On the other hand, you have seen the original Independence Day, right? It wasn’t any of those things either, but it was hella fun and caused the consumption of mass quantities of popcorn. Considering the size of the shared popcorn bucket my friend and I consumed in ID:R, we’re right on track.

Independence Day: Resurgence takes place 20 years after the first invasion. Humanity has recovered, the world’s basically become multinational and peaceful thanks to humans having something bigger to worry about killing than each other, and alien technology has been incorporated fully into this alternate 2016. On the anniversary celebration of humanity’s epic win, people who were psychically exposed to the aliens (like Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore, prematurely aged by the experience) are Having A Bad Feeling About This. The aliens show back up in an even more ridiculously enormous ship that has even less of a passing relationship with physics as we know it, and decide to drill to Earth’s nougatty center because reasons. It’s up to the old and new generations to fight impossible odds and save the Earth again, though this time there might be some mysterious help that I won’t describe further because it’s a bit of a spoiler.

There were a few things here that were a bit stupid even for me, which had me rolling my eyes at the movie rather than grinning along with the fun dumbness of it–namely the 3000-mile-wide alien mothership (for reference, that gives is a bigger diameter than the Moon) that has its own personal gravity field when it’s convenient for the purposes of special effects and then doesn’t every other time. If nothing else, even if it’s got a larger diameter than the Moon, it’s not spherical, so I have a hard time believing that it actually out-masses the moon; beyond that, the Earth is still a hell of a lot bigger. And while I don’t come to movies like this for the science–GOODNESS NO–that was a bit too dumb even for my popcorn-addled brain. Particularly when the disaster special effects that it’s used to explain really are a bit to the boring side. At some point, the thing you’re attempting to blow up is just too big and impersonal and it looks like you’re throwing a box of tinkertoys up in the air. The whole “drilling to the Earth’s core” thing was also derisive snort-worthy, particularly when they had to find a melodramatic way to ratchet up the ticking clock even more. Then again, basically any alien invasion movie that works under the assumption that the aliens are after some kind of resource we have (most often water) that they can suck away and leave Earth a lifeless husk really shows laziness on the part of the writers; either they don’t know that any resource of that nature on Earth can be found more easily and more abundantly by harvesting asteroids and comets, or they just don’t care.

That said? I loved pretty much everything else. Many of the beats in this film mirrored ID4; fair enough since they are both alien invasion films and big budget action tentpoles, which means there will be certain required beats that have to be met. But those story beats are accompanied by a world that has indelibly changed in 20 years, and that keeps it from feeling like an exact retread. To me, the best part of ID:R really was the alternate 2016 imagined in the film. The alien technology incorporated into human military technology makes for some fun variation on standard alien invasion fare, because it does touch on something that so often gets ignored–of course we’d try to figure out what makes the technology tick and then incorporate the helpful bits to prepare for the next invasion. And it makes the fun point that after twenty years of prep time, humanity has really stepped up its game–while the aliens are pretty much coming at us with the same bag of tricks they had before. The film tries to address the aftermath of so much worldwide destruction in the first movie, including the large number of orphans left behind, and the effect that had on the kids who have grown up and are now taking on a fight they’ve believed might be coming for their whole lives. Even the fact that the older generation told those kids that if the fight came, they’d be ready, and they’d win again is brought in–as a moment where the older characters fight off despair and try to find a way to keep that promise. (Look at the Baby Boomers and Millenials cooperating in alternate 2016; all it took was a world-wide disaster induced by alien invasion.) I loved the world of ID:R. I loved the setup it makes as a springboard for another film that promises to be significantly different.

International cooperation is placed at the forefront. The casting is more diverse in a lot of ways than in ID4. I loved Rain Lao (Angelababy) and Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe) flying jet-spaceship hybrids around. Both old characters and new had great moments, the only exception being I’m still not sure what purpose Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch) really served in the narrative. Things get blown up. Aliens get punched in the face. Female fighter pilots get to be badass. American exceptionalism has been replaced by human exceptionalism, which is still cringe-worthy in context, but a vast improvement that cannot be understated. But my favorite part? The return of Dr. Okun, and I have very specific reasons for that, which I’ll explain past the spoiler wall.

At any rate, if you’re looking for dumb, explodey fun to accompany shoving popcorn into your food hole, I recommend it. I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

Brief SPOILER discussion below

Continue reading “[Movie] Independence Day: Resurgence”
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Alternate Titles for X-Men: Apocalypse

X-MEN:

The Best Apology for X3 We’ll Get Because Seppuku Isn’t Exactly Legal

The Perfect Mohawk Storm

We Need to Talk About Erik

A Decade Later and Charles and Erik Are Still Arguing About Who Broke That Fucking Pickle Dish

Marriage Counseling Would Be Cheaper Than an Apocalypse

You Sure Don’t Look Ten Years Older

Moira McTaggert and the Chamber of SNAFU

The Chronicles of Xavier’s Hair

Thank Fuck Wolverine Is Only a Cameo

You Can Find Erik’s Family in the Refrigerated Section Next to Our Selection of Fine Pastas

Nightcrawler (No, Not the Creepy Sociopathic Reporter, the Blue Guy in a Michael Jackson Jacket)

That Can’t Be Scott, He’s Not Nearly Enough of a Dick

Okay But Where Is Our PG-Rated Jubilee Movie?

Skynet Did It Better OR Never Send An Immortal Douchebag Mutant to Do a Computer’s Job

A Complete Waste of Oscar Isaac’s Talents

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[Movie] Thoughts on Captain America: Civil War

Well, holy shit. I went in expecting a hot mess that I’d love anyway (hello, Age of Ultron) and instead got a movie that I feel like I need to make dying seagull noises about and then place it on a shelf next to Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

I’m not going to write a more standard-ish review. I fucking loved this movie, end of story. If you liked CA:TWS, you’ll probably love it too. Instead, I want to scream about some very particular things, so this is going to be nothing but SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.

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[Movie] The Boss

The Boss isn’t getting very good reviews. As of right now, it’s at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. (For what it’s worth, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is only at 19% and I thought that was pulpy fantasy fun, so maybe I just have terrible taste.) But I decided to see it anyway, for exactly one reason: the cookie seller street fight scene.

I don’t know if it’s because I was a Girl Scout for years, and put in a lot of time selling cookies, but to me, that alone was worth the price of admission.

The Boss is about Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy), who has made a ton of money doing nebulous business things and screwing over everyone, including her former flame Renault (Peter Dinklage). He turns her in to the FTC for insider trading and gets her thrown in white collar country club jail for five months, during which time she loses all of her assets. She emerges, deposits herself on her former assistant Claire’s (Kristen Bell) doorstep, and comes up with a new scheme quickly: selling Claire’s amazing brownies with a knock-off, capitalistic version of Girl Scouts.

This is definitely not the most well put together comedy movie I’ve ever seen. It’s got its problems with internal consistency, has some weird pacing hiccups, and at times feels like a loose collection of sketches for McCarthy to ad-lib her Michelle Darnell character. The plot at times doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, and the Michelle Darnell character arc is incredibly predictable and pat, something that feels steered by script beats rather than organically developed.

It also, I’m sorry to say, has the Lazy Trans Joke. Bleh.

On the other hand? It had a lot of really funny moments. I never really bought Claire as a character or her muddled arc, but her love interest Mike (Tyler Labine) was delightful. The interplay between Michelle and Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) had some great moments. And Chrystal (Eva Peterson) the resident “giant” for Darnell’s Darlings was the MVP of every scene she was in. And Renault? Fucking hilarious, I thought. And Lazy Trans Joke aside, like many of McCarthy’s movies, it showcases women being hilarious with other women in an expansive rather than self-hating way.

I’ve heard from a lot of people that Spy is superior in every way to this movie, and I’m looking forward to watching it. (Still mad that I didn’t get a chance to see it in the theater.) Hopefully it’ll be On Demand with my cable company, I just haven’t had a chance to check yet. But I’ll probably write a little post about it when I do and let everyone know they were right. As for The Boss, I’m kind of on the fence whether to recommend it or not. If you really love Melissa McCarthy and did your time in the Girl Scouts, you might find it suitably amusing, but your mileage may vary.

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[Movie] The Huntsman: Winter’s War

As half-prequel, half-sequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, The Huntsman: Winter’s War pretty much nails everything that was fun about the first film (namely, the Huntsman and the Evil Queen Ravenna) and leaves behind the less arresting bits (eg: Kristen Stewart’s Snow White). If you liked the first movie, you’re going to like this one. If you didn’t, then I’d be shocked if Winter’s War changes your mind.

The beginning of the movie explains the origin of Eric the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) and identifies the source of his deep font of manpain, Sara the Huntsman (Jessica Chastain). It also brings us a new evil queen, Ravenna’s little sister Freya (Emily Blunt), who has her own utterly tragic reasons for being evil and wearing some incredibly beautiful costumes. Freya, driven into the depths of despair by the murder of her infant daughter by her would-be husband, decides the best way to deal with all that pain is to conquer the entire north (lots of planets have a north) and take all available children so she can craft them into an army of badass, leather-jerkin-wearing super soldiers who are admonished that only chumps believe in love. Eric and Sara are among these children and as they grow up, they develop a forbidden love for each other, which Freya Does Not Take Well.

Fast forward seven years to after the events of Snow White and the Huntsman, and we find Eric once again living in the woods and apparently avoiding baths if his hair is anything to go by. He’s dragged back into the world of having to interact with other humans when he’s told that Ravenna’s mirror has gone missing, and sets off to find it before Freya does.

This movie is utterly gorgeous, far more so than the first. There’s actual color, and lots of it. The costumes that Freya and Ravenna wear alone deserve to have a shrine built to them. The story is pulpy fantasy fun, as are the action sequences. The comic relief dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon) are well overmatched by the absolutely delightful she-dwarves (Sophie Cookson and Alexandra Roach). It’s predictable in places, and a bit weirdly discontinuous with its own mythology in others (more on that later), but all in good fun.

And it’s actually a fantasy movie that manages to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, believe it or not. Ravenna and Freya manage to have some evil queen back and forth that does not center around men. The main casting is delightfully female heavy: two male dwarves, two female dwarves, one male huntsman, one female huntsman, and two evil queens. Lovely! I was also charmed by the equal partnership between Eric and Sara–and Sara’s fierce independence as she tells Eric, “I choose for me, not for you.” She has an excellent speech about how their relationship is not determined by the man passing some test and then she has to love him. It’s a nice jab at fairy tale tropes when that normally is what it boils down to. Ravenna remains the most compelling character of the franchise, though I’m not sure I’m on board with the implicit statement that both evil queens have their magic because they have eschewed love and family for various reasons.

Winter’s War is ever so slightly less lily-white than Snow White and the Huntsman. There are non-white background actors in Freya’s kingdom, which is… something. Sope Disiru plays another of the Huntsman, Tull, who has a speaking role and feels curiously like he should be much more vital to the movie than he really is. I came out of the film wishing I knew more about him, his motivations, his relation to Sara and Eric, because he feels like he must have been pulling some narrative weight that ultimately (and disappointingly) fell to the cutting room floor. I’m also not really sure about the depiction of goblins in this fantasy land as midnight-black, savage, horned gorilla-like creatures with tar for blood.

I also could have done without the aggressively heterosexual ending, in which every male-female couple possible shows the audience that they will be getting together happily ever after, because love conquers all and saves the day if you’re straight and monogamous, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being straight, I get that it’s not a choice or anything, but do they have to flaunt it like that?

Not flawless but fun, worth a watch if you want to see Chris Hemsworth run around in leather pants and be cute. As you do.

(A few short, spoilery things below the cut.)

Continue reading “[Movie] The Huntsman: Winter’s War”
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[movie] I Saw the Light

I was legally required to see this movie, because Tom Hiddleston. Well, and because I actually really like Hank Williams, so I was excited about a biopic for him, even if my initial reaction to the announcement was oh dear god but Hiddleston sounds so British.

Silly me.

image

I’m not a native of the south (and I’m also not great at accents), but Tom Hiddleston made for a convincing enough Hank Williams. More importantly, I think he did justice to the music. For example, Move It On Over (original) and Move It On Over (movie), even if it never sounded quite twangy enough. (Though how much of that is due to differing recording quality is open to question.) When I have some extra money (sob), I’ll probably see about picking up the soundtrack. It’s on the list at least.

I Saw the Light covers about eight years of Hank Williams’s life, from his marriage to Audrey in 1944 to his death in 1952. It’s a simultaneous career ascent and personal descent that ultimately kills him, and the movie’s not shy about the fact that the man had some serious substance abuse problems and was no angel. In many ways, it plays out like any other biopic of an artist tragically dead at a young age because he (or she) is pulled in too many directions at once, has no stable home life, and is enabled in the abuse of drugs by so-called friends and doctors-in-name-only.

There’s a lot to like about I Saw the Light. The principle cast–Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams, Elizabeth Olsen as Audrey Williams, Bradley Whitford as Fred Rose–all turn in excellent performances. It’s a very nicely shot movie. The sound is excellent. There’s a different tone here because the artist in question did country music rather than rock, which lends some extra interest. Country music (and its fans) don’t get a whole lot of love in film, so it’s refreshing to have a movie that seems to really get why this music speaks to people.

But–and this kills me to say this because I wanted to like this film so much more than I did–it feels like a collection of at times disconnected scenes out of a man’s life rather than a movie. The music and the good performances aren’t enough to really pull together what suffers from a fundamental problem of writing and editing.

Books and movies are obviously two very different media that approach things in very different ways, and nowhere is that more evident than in biographical film versus biographical books. Human life generally doesn’t have a discernible plot arc or an overall theme. We’re far too messy for that. Good biographies in book form not only transmit the dry facts of someone’s existence, but find a way to weave together events to show the whole person, their development, the way they touched the world, the way the world touched them. But it’s not something that’s generally going to fit ye olde three act format. And you can get away with that in a book because you have so much more time and space to build.

In a movie, you’ve got about two hours, and the need to hold someone’s attention for that entire time. Part of it is a matter of audience expectation–I go into a movie with much different expectations than I have going in to a documentary film. You expect a story out of a movie. That’s the reason biopics infamously play fast and loose with details, because reality bends to serve the art–and the art it’s serving is the story, the theme. I came out of 42 and Lincoln and Walk the Line feeling the satisfactory open and close of those stories, knowing what the director and actors were trying to say and how they felt the life of that particular person fits into the human experience both past and present.

And sadly, I Saw the Light misses out on that. I got some hints that there were dots the film was trying to connect, between the titular piece of music that makes its two appearances (the second in a heart-breaking and historically accurate way), the time or two Hank Williams talks about darkness in his music. But it failed to gel into a coherent thesis from where I sat, never quite connecting the details to the music in a satisfactory way.

I think it’s a movie that’s worth watching if you like Hank Williams. Maybe you’ll like it more than I did and it’ll work for you where it failed to work for me. I’m just sad that a movie I anticipated so much didn’t stick its landing for me.

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movie

[Movie] 10 Cloverfield Lane

I almost didn’t watch this movie. I never saw Cloverfield, and heard enough about it that I wasn’t really all that interested in it. So something that sounded like it might be a sequel wasn’t really on my radar. But then I heard from Sunil that this was a standalone thing, and more importantly, there weren’t any other movies I wanted to see that weekend. I decided to brave the potential scary and give it a whirl.

I’m so very glad I did. 10 Cloverfield Lane isn’t a horror movie, I don’t think. It’s more of a thriller, with the ordinary everyman Michelle trying to figure out what has happened to her and escape her captivity to gain freedom in a potentially deadly world. It’s unbearably, superbly tense at times, relieved occasionally by some delightfully black humor.

The basic plot is simple: Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has just broken up with her fiance and left their home. On the way through the countryside, something hits her car. She wakes up, injured and held captive in an underground bunker with survivalist conspiracy nut Howard (John Goodman) and hapless regular guy Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr). And it looks like they’re going to be trapped down there fore the long haul, because according to Howard and Emmett, there’s been some kind of chemical attack at the surface and everyone is dead.

It’s a pretty simple setup, three people attempting to live together while one of them–Howard–is absolutely unhinged in a very quiet way. John Goodman is absolutely terrifying in the quietest way possible, delivering a twitchy performance that leaves the audience as off balance as Emmett and Michelle, unable to tell which way he’ll turn. And the way Howard talks to Michelle while staring through her and past her gave me chills. The power of the film is ultimately the way the three characters interact, with Michelle and Emmett forming bouncing between deep suspicion of Howard as new facts are revealed, coupled with deeply weird, almost familial moments of these people just trying to get along–sometimes because they genuinely find something to like about each other, sometimes because they’re desperate to appease their mercurial captor.

Michelle makes for an amazing hero with a very satisfying character arc. Michelle is the sort of hyper-competent problem solver that we so rarely see female characters get to be. The most interesting thing about her is the fact that she’s a wannabe fashion designer, and obviously has been written by someone who gets that it’s a serious profession with a lot of skills involved. She addresses the problems presented to her by looking at the materials she has at hand and designing some kind of solution–there was so much make it work in her that I think she’d make Tim Gunn weep with pride.

Another thing I appreciated, in light of the stories we normally get where a female character is held captive, is that Michelle doesn’t ever get sexualized by the two men in the bunker, let alone sexually assaulted. (In fact, Howard polices very hard against it, for incredibly creepy reasons of a different sort.) It’s a sad statement that I have to point that out as a bonus, but I think it’s an important thing to note.

There are a lot of surprises to this movie and some very unexpected turns that I don’t want to spoil. It’s well worth watching, and seeing Michelle unravel the mysteries is incredibly rewarding. Perhaps my enjoyment was enhanced by the fact that I never watched Cloverfield, so I had no expectations coming from that name. Let this one be its own movie, and you won’t regret it.

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[Movie] Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Alfred

Batman vs Superman is the story of an engineering genius named Alfred who has decided to dedicate his life in service to the Wayne family as a butler, much to his detriment. As not-so-young-any-more Master Bruce goes into an out-of-control spiral of obsession laced with extremely lucid an violent dreams that really ought to have him seeking out help from a mental health professionals, Alfred does the best he can to get him to reel it in, with such pointed remarks as, “…the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men cruel.” Alfred can only watch in growing dismay as Bruce becomes completely fixated on Superman as a symbol of all things wrong, presumably resentful because Superman is way better at murdering people than Bruce, and is also the most popular girl at prom. It’s the story of one man being slowly crushed under the weight of another man’s insurmountable ego, as Alfred laments, “Go upstairs and socialize. Some young lady will make you honest… in your dreams, Alfred.” Ultimately, Alfred’s soul becomes one more piece of collateral damage in the massive manpain dick-waving contest that occurs between Batman and Superman, thankfully cut short by the intervention of a badass woman wielding a sword and round shield, who is the only person capable of finding some sort of joy in this entire film. Maybe she will make the dark knight an honest man and answer Alfred’s dying hopes, but I wouldn’t want to inflict that on her, she deserves so much better, and it’s obvious from the way she’s willing to dive into battle and take her hits with a fierce grin, having at last found a worthy opponent.

In case you couldn’t tell, the only parts of this movie I liked were Alfred (Jeremy Irons) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who probably accounted for less than 5% of the film’s running time. (My driving away from the movie reaction here, since Didi asked for it.)

I’m not surprised I didn’t like this movie. I really didn’t care for Man of Steel, and in Batman vs Superman, Zack Snyder makes a film that’s even less coherent than the first. Even worse, the soundtrack for this one is bombastic, overblown, and oddly desperate, which is the cherry on the shit sundae, kind of like the soundtrack for Transformers 4 sucking. (The only good bit of the soundtrack was when Wonder Woman showed up, holy shit that guitar though.) You leave me with nothing, Snyder. But I decided that I would see BvS anyway because 1) Wonder Woman and 2) Alfred, and at least they didn’t disappoint. Also, it’s hard to justify saying mean things about a movie if you haven’t seen it (particularly egregious nonsense like Gods of Egypt excepted) no matter how much of a hot mess it looks in the trailers.

As usual, Zack Snyder makes a film that’s visually appealing (if so ridiculously color filtered that at times it looks almost black and white) and lacks any sort of sequential or narrative coherence as shots form scenes. It also feels like he jammed at least three movies together and the plot just bounces between them all like a frantic pingpong ball. We get the Batman origin story again. We get Lex Luthor coming out of left field (way the fuck out in left field, more on this in a minute) and doing some kind of six dimensional villain chess thing that’s so poorly developed it’s impossible to follow. We get Wonder Woman trying to set up the Justice League, squeezed into a few spare seconds. We get Bruce’s manpain, and more manpain, and even more manpain, and then some bizarre dream sequences that really don’t add a fucking thing. We get Superman getting called in front of Congress and constantly talked about as what a giant threat he is because everyone likes him, which seems very weird when in the movie literally no one but Lois Lane seems to like Superman until we’re midway through the second act and he finally rescues some people from a burning factory. (By the way, Lois Lane and Clark have a couple really cute scenes and kudos for that tiny sliver of character development.)

Henry Cavill tries with Superman, bless him, you can tell he’s trying so hard as someone who gets the character under a director who plainly doesn’t. But I honestly laughed out loud when Ma Kent reassures Clark that he’s not a killer. Actually, Ma, we have Zack Snyder and the previous movie to thank for that. Though I will note that Clark goes out of his way in this movie to try to not murder a lot of civilians, and that I appreciated. But it’s a bit ridiculous when his supposed reason for going after Batman is that Batman is brutal and causing people to die. Your body count is still way higher, kiddo. But it doesn’t help that even Superman doesn’t seem to know why the fuck Superman is doing anything, perhaps because Zack Snyder doesn’t get it either, and Ma Kent acts as reverse Uncle Ben, assuring her son that, “I never wanted the world to have you… you don’t owe this world a thing. You never did.” (Ma Kent’s an objectivist, who would have thought.)

Of course Ben Affleck’s Batman is another step in the descent of this character becoming the Punisher Lite. There’s only one fight in the entire goddamn movie where it really feels like he’s fighting like Batman, using hand to hand and ninja skills and gadgets instead of shooting things and blowing up cars and basically murdering people left and right, even if he doesn’t do it personally. This version of Batman, charmingly enough, brands people with the bat symbol so that when they get sent to prison, they get murdered by the inmates. This is a thing he plainly knows is happening. It’s as if Snyder took a look at the Bale/Nolan Batman and went, yeah, but this guy is way too likable and morally upright. Now, why he’s got a hate-on for Superman makes sense in a strictly hypocritical fashion–it’s okay to murder people when you’re Batman, but Superman is just way too good at it. Obviously this cannot be allowed to stand, and thus some kind of battle, blah blah blah manpain manpain angst angst posturing oh wait we need to unite to defeat a common enemy that gets airdropped in at the last minute. (Though I will note that I think Ben Affleck did a fine job with what precious little he had, and I’d actually really like to see more Batfleck if he’s in a movie that isn’t directed by Zack Snyder.)

Maybe if you liked Man of Steel, you’ll like this. Maybe Zack Snyder movies are for you. But if you’re like me, just wait for some perfect soul to make a super cut that’s nothing but Wonder Woman (or ideally, Wonder Woman and Alfred) and watch it on youtube. Don’t worry, there’s a much, much better Batman movie coming soon.

The worst part of all of this is I’m going to drag myself to whatever DC does next as long as Gal Gadot is in it, because I’m that fucking thirsty for a female superhero movie. So hell yeah, I will still show for a Wonder Woman movie, even if Zack Snyder ends up directing it, (bless Farli for pointing out that Patty Jenkins is directing Wonder Woman, I can feel hope again!) because I love Wonder Woman and still have hope in my heart that hasn’t been entirely crushed that maybe she will get the treatment she deserves. (Her five minutes in BvS was pretty good.) But I sure don’t have a reason to trust her movie won’t suck, not after the way this one ended.

SPOILERS for the end from this point, if you even care.

Continue reading “[Movie] Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Alfred”
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[Movie] Zootopia

I’ve been avoiding writing about this movie. Not because it’s bad. Hell no. Exact opposite. But because there’s just so much meat there that I’m not even sure where to start.

Well, I’ll start by saying that I absolutely loved this movie, and that I almost didn’t see it. After my feeling of profound meh from Frozen and my increasing grumpiness at how damn oversaturated everything to do with that movie was, I was a bit done with Disney. Honestly, the only thing that convinced me to give Zootopia a chance was seeing an article where it got mentioned what a big deal it is that there isn’t a romance plot.

From a Disney movie. (Setting Pixar films aside, here, as their own thing.) No romance plot. Okay. You have my attention. That’s all I knew going in.

It’s a fun story. Small-town bunny Judy Hopps goes to the big city, Zootopia, to follow her dream of becoming a police officer. Zootopia is an amazing mix of technologically created biomes, where predator and prey animals live together in relative harmony via handwavium that’s never explained and really doesn’t need to be. Judy’s the first bunny to ever become a cop in a police force that’s really controlled by size more than anything else; she’s tiny compared to the big cats, water buffalo, bears, hippopotami, and other big mammals that dominate the force. She gets assigned to write parking tickets, where she runs across conman fox Nick Wilde and gets hustled by him. Not long after, in the right place at the right time and on the verge of being fired, she picks up an abduction case. With no resources and no help to be found within her department, she pulls her own hustle on Nick to force him to help her, and it all proceeds from there.

I’m a sucker for a good buddy cop comedy. I really didn’t expect this one to kick everything but Hot Fuzz out of its way, but Nick and Judy (how many cross-gender buddy cop duos have we had? Not bloody many) have firmly found a place in my heart right next to Nick and Danny. Just on the level of a buddy cop movie, Zootopia succeeds beautifully. It’s got a fun case with some twists in it that I didn’t expect. It’s got a lot of comedy, much of it based on the setting and mammal jokes. I’m going to end up buying a Disney animated film for the first time in years because I enjoyed it so much and I love these characters.

But what makes Zootopia special and incisive is that it acknowledges not just the existence of prejudice (racism, sexism, classism) but privilege as well, and the interplay between them. I’d caution against taking the allegory too literally. If nothing else, there’s an odd interaction along the predator/prey divide, where prey animals still haven’t forgotten the “savage” days when predators ate them and thus remember the fear and distrust, while in the modern city of Zootopia, the predators only make up about 10% of the population. It’s not something that has a direct analog to any part of the modern world that I’m aware of, and that’s okay.

I suppose technically what follows could be considered a spoiler, but I’m going to talk in generalities here.

Judy’s the underdog character for much of the movie. She’s a small town girl, viewed as a hick in a big city, fighting to find her place in a department that’s generally hostile toward her because of who she is. Yet we see her exercise her own privilege over the fox, Nick, in little ways and then big, awful ways. She calls him articulate. And in a scene midway through the film that I found incredibly difficult to watch, she vilifies predators as a whole and does incalculable harm to them by telling the truth as she sees it. She’s even initially puzzled why Nick is so hurt. Because she just told the truth, right, why is he so upset, he’s her friend and he’s different. Ow, ow, ow. As a reminder that just because you face oppression of your own (for being LGBT, say) doesn’t mean you don’t also have privilege you can wield to devastating effect, it’s razor sharp.

And of course, yes, let’s talk about vilifying a minority group as a means to gain and maintain political power. It’s definitely not the first time a movie’s made that point, but it’s worth making again and again until people fucking listen. It was a cringe-worthy irony that the theater I watched Zootopia in was right across from one playing London Has Fallen.

Zootopia is good. It punched my soul in the kidneys. But it’s funny. There are sloths in the DMV. And I’m going to dream of an ever so slightly different ending, in which Judy turns to Nick and says, “Little hand says it’s time to rock and roll.”