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I have a lot of feelings about Dumplin’

I saw Dumplin’ on Netflix last weekend thanks to Sarah Gailey, and I’m glad since I might never have gotten around to it otherwise.

If you don’t know about Dumplin’, it’s about a fat girl named Willowdean (Danielle MacDonald) who is the daughter of a former beauty queen (Rosie, played by Jennifer Aniston) who is still deeply embedded in the pageant circuit and culture. As you can imagine, mother and daughter have some conflicting interests. Willowdean was much closer to her Aunt Lucy (Hilliary Begley), a beautiful and vivacious fat woman who instilled in her an absolute love of Dolly Parton… and who had recently died. In an act of grief and defiance, Willowdean decides to enter this year’s beauty pageant, along with her best friend Ellen (Odeya Rush), and two girls who also definitely don’t fit the pageant scene: defiantly queer Hannah (Bex Taylor-Klaus), and Millie (Maddie Baillio) who is extremely earnest about everything and also a fat girl.

So basically I’m going to spoil everything about this movie, so just go and watch it because it’s really fucking good.

Any movie that involves fat characters, especially fat female characters, is one I approach with caution. I’ve been burned way too many times by narratives that hinge on a girl “becoming” beautiful by losing weight. Or by the fat girl being the thin girl’s accessory. Or by the fat girl being the butt of the jokes instead of the one who makes them. Add that the whole thing centers around a beauty pageant and I would have been wary about picking it up on my own.

But the thing about Dumplin’ is that it’s one of those movies that constantly defies the expectations that have been drilled into us as an audience. For example, I spent the whole movie expecting Willowdean’s love interest Bo (Luke Benward), who is a traditional white teen guy hottie, to turn on her and be using her to score points, or because he expects her to be easy, or any of the horrible stuff that normally happens to fat girl characters. And it never happens. Bo’s earnest, and good, and… well, getting in to my own feelings as a fat person, there’s an amazing scene where Willowdean asks him why the hell he would want to be with her considering how she looks. Which is one of those moments where the movie got just too fucking real. I’ve had that conversation before. I’ve felt the disbelief that even when someone says they like you for your whole self, you think that can’t possibly be true. Willowdean’s someone that’s grown up in the same fat-hating culture as the rest of us (and it’s on display in the movie in horrible, familiar ways), with the added fun of having an image-conscious, incredibly thin mother.

(A mother who eagerly blames Aunt Lucy’s death on the fact that she was fat in an argument I felt like a punch in the gut.)

The movie does that with a lot of choices, taking the unexpected route that steps around cheap inter-character drama rather than following the familiar tropes. It’s also a massive meditation on friendship, and the strength of bonds between girls. We see Willowdean and her friend Ellen grow up together, solid friends into their teens. Ellen decides to participate in the pageant earnestly, and not as a way to try to destroy it. She and Willowdean get in a pretty nasty argument about things, where Willowdean basically calls out Ellen for being thing and says that people who look like Ellen (beautiful in a conventional sense) don’t have a place in the revolution.

The easy and expected route would be for them to be at odds for the rest of the movie. Instead, Willowdean apologizes and says she misses Ellen. And Ellen accepts the apology but says she’s still too mad to talk immediately… and Willowdean respects it. Then later, they’re back to being arm and arm, facing the world together. Like holy fucking shit, give me some more friendship like that. Give me teen girls having each other’s backs, because it’s them against the world. Give me teen girls that know they have different experiences of the world and use that difference to be even closer. I’m tearing up just thinking about it, because it was beautiful.

The sort of open heart that the film has about teen girls/young women being complex people with deep inner lives really does extend outside of Ellen and Willowdean. Millie is an actual precious cinnamon roll in human form, yet she is also without a doubt the most absolutely determined and implacable character on screen. Hannah’s a fucking adorable baby queer trapped in a small town, who goes from doing everything with full, angry irony to finding her own balance of earnest participation and still absolutely being herself. Watching Hannah and Millie become friends in the background is a fucking amazing story on its own. (And I would also totally ship it.)

And even the rest of the girls in the pageant aren’t reduced to caricature even if we don’t know their stories. It’s another moment where the film could have taken the expected route, making a bunch of teenage pageant participants into raging, catty bitches, and sidesteps that. They’re welcoming, and they believe in what they’re doing. Hell, there’s a scene where Willowdean shows her talent (a magic trick) in front of everyone and I wanted to die of transmitted embarrassment because she does so badly… which is the point because at that point, she’s not taking things seriously and hasn’t practiced. But the scene is actually a thousand times more uncomfortable not because the girls in the audience are being nasty, but because they convey that they really want her to do better, and that’s so much worse.

The movie does critique pageant culture for the way it excludes fat girls and is often used to make them feel worse about themselves. The scene where Willowdean signs up for the pageant, where the women in charge make it very clear that she does not belong here with tone and expression, is exactly what you’d expect. Yet the critique comes from a place of love rather than misogyny, which is where a lot of criticism of pageants loses its way. It’s possible to criticize fat-shaming and promotion of eating disorders without denigrating the idea that some people might find embracing that branch of femininity, with its sparkling dresses, empowering.

Ultimately, Dumplin’ embraces the beauty pageant as a place that allows Millie particularly to realize her potential by singing her heart out and looking goddamn fabulous in a dress. It touches on how important events like that can be in fairly small towns–so big in a girl’s life that even twenty-some years later, it’s the biggest accomplishment that Rosie’s ever had and it’s made her dedicate herself to shepherding other girls that way. And it presents its own vision of the world as it should be, with Millie placing in the pageant to thunderous applause because she goddamn well deserves it.

Which curiously, circles back around to Aunt Lucy, whose presence never leaves the film. Rosie has hit the stage of grief where she wants to get rid of Lucy’s old possessions; Willowdean isn’t quite there yet, which is another point of friction. And she wants to find a broach of Lucy’s that looks like a bee, something she always wore. Willowdean joins the pageant on a half-formed whim when she finds some paperwork among the boxes that shows Aunt Lucy was going to do the pageant the same year Rosie did… and mysteriously dropped out. The natural assumption in that moment is that Lucy didn’t make it into the pageant because of her weight… and so Willowdean decides to do it herself, to complete her lost aunt’s dream and to also get a kind of revenge, since Willowdean believes the pageant is bullshit and wants to prove it.

What we eventually come to find is that Lucy dropped out of the pageant not because she was forced out, but because the family couldn’t afford even one suitable dress, and so she dropped out and made one for Rosie herself–the one Rosie still wears every year. And in the end, Willowdean finds her own meaning in the pageant by embracing it to the point that she gets herself disqualified by doing an unapproved and incredible magic performance. Which sure seems like something that would have made Lucy proud, while still being very Willowdean. And Rosie finds she can no longer fit into her teen pageant dress… but she goes on stage (in a borrowed dress) wearing Lucy’s broach. Both of them are letting go, and changing, and still keeping the person they loved in their life in a positive way.

All this, and you get Dolly Parton drag queens too. And a ton of great Dolly Parton songs. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier. I just have a lot of feelings, okay?

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[Movie] Mary Poppins Returns

Look, Mary Poppins Returns is a Mary Poppins movie, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you if you just read the fucking title of it. There’s a sequence where Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) and Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda) dance with a bunch of animated characters. There’s silly, surreal sequences involving bathtubs and balloons. There’s a lot of singing. There’s a whole big number where a bunch of working class London dudes dance and do some BMX stunts, except this time around they’re “leeries” instead of chimney sweeps. It’s approximately thirty years into the future of the first Mary Poppins, so Michael Banks has his own kids and Jane Banks gets to wear trousers.

Plot-wise, and the plot isn’t terribly complicated because it’s there to hold all the musical numbers together, it’s about Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) trying to save his family house after his wife has died and he’s been bad about keeping up the bills while caring for their three children. It’s during the Great Slump (aka the Great Depression in the UK) so he doesn’t exactly have a lot of job options; he works part-time as a teller for an evil banker played by Colin Firth, who is the same guy who wants to repossess Michael’s house. Mary Poppins shows up to reignite the joy in the family and incidentally help them not lose their home.

It’s like the original Mary Poppins, but a bit more pacey. Lin-Manuel MIranda gets to do a tiny bit of rap, even though he had nothing to do with the lyrics, which we can all breathe a sigh of relief about. I mean, it’s just really nice? And suitable for small children? And very colorful. The costume design was really great, especially what they did during the animated sequence.

Really, it’s all cute wrapping paper for the fact that Mary Poppins is a terrifying eldritch being that descends to earth once a generation, spreads a particular kind of madness around, and then leaves once she is on the receiving end of enough laughter from people whose reality she’s utterly broken. Okay, look:

  1. She descends to earth from the heavens in a terrifying shadow, one foot cocked up as if about to tap impatiently because it’s been so long since she’s had some delicious mortal souls.
  2. She spends all of her time taking the kids on strange adventures that, when the children try to describe them later, she tells them that of course these things didn’t happen.
  3. She bends reality around herself. Mirrors don’t respond properly, etc.
  4. There’s an entire song she sings (while in the trippy cartoon realm) about not judging a book by its cover. Sure, it’s a warning about Douchebag McBankerface, but more importantly, she’s delivering a winking warning about herself. Don’t judge her by her charming exterior when it’s actually just a flesh bag that contains an unending sea of glittery, chthonic madness.
  5. At the end of this film, Angela Lansbury gives her a fucking bright red balloon like she’s fucking Pennywise the Clown because JESSICA FLETCHER KNOWS WHAT’S FUCKING UP

But come on, it’s not like any of this is a surprise if you saw the first movie. It’s very consistent. The one thing that isn’t consistent, that’s still bothering the heck out of me, is an almost throw-away line at the end of the film. I guess count it as a SPOILER if you’re really concerned.

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Christmas 2018 Airplane Movies, part 1

I love international flights because they give me a reason to sit in one place for long enough to watch multiple movies. On the way over to the UK, I only watched two new ones because I made the attempt to sleep. With as much sleep as I got (about an hour and a half), I should have just watched more movies.

Ocean’s 8

I kept meaning to see Ocean’s 8 in the theater and just never got around to it. I think that was before I had regular access to a car, so that’s my excuse. Am I sorry I only saw it on the tiny screen of an airplane? Ehhhh… it’s a fun movie, that’s for sure. I mean, if you like the other Ocean’s movies, you’ll no doubt enjoy this one. If for no other reason than to watch Cate Blanchett strut around in a variety of beautifully tailored trousers. It’s got a heist, it’s got a ton of talented women in it. It’s light fluff that I enjoyed in the moment but really can’t remember much about now… other than Cate Blanchett. And I did love there was at least a nod to the importance and strength of friendships between women, even if I never quite felt like the group gelled as well as I would have liked. I’ll be happy to watch it again the next time I see it’s around on Netflix.

Searching

Saw the preview for it in front of an Alamo Drafthouse movie, and I was interested. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see Searching before now. John Cho plays a dad whose daughter has gone missing, and he’s frantically searching for her while realizing just how much distance has grown between the two of them since the death of his wife two years ago. The conceit of Searching actually works pretty well… the film is told entirely via interactions on a computer: text messages, chats, facetime calls, streaming videos, etc. There’s a time or two where it feels like the scope of the action is fighting the format a little, but it honestly doesn’t feel as contrived as I expected. John Cho does an amazing job, and the twist was actually not one I expected. It’s great to see a dad searching for his daughter in a way that doesn’t go all Taken and feels quite authentic. I do want to see it again when I can find it on Netflix or Hulu, because the tiny airplane seat screen made it hard to read some of the text-based stuff for the story. (Apparently this caused me to entirely miss a sort of easter eggy subplot.) Definitely recommend.

 

Also, I watched Crazy Rich Asians again. It’s still fucking adorable.

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[Movie] Anna and the Apocalypse

The pitch is: Shaun of the Dead meets High School Musical. In Scotland.

If you’re like, “FUCK YEAH GIVE ME THAT IN THE FACE” then you’re going to like this movie. If a zombie musical with Christmas visual jokes sounds awful to you, I’m not going to try to change your mind. This movie absolutely is what it is, and it leans hard on the musical trope of people randomly singing and doing choreographed dance routines, then continuing on with their lives as if nothing at all weird has happened.

Regular kid Anna wants to get out of her little town of Haven in Scotland; her goal is to escape to Australia and travel for a bit, though she assures her janitor dad that she’ll be back and will go to University. (He is, as you can imagine, not convinced.) Anna’s friends/compatriots have their own problems: Steph is a socially awkward lesbian who just wants to bring attention to important social issues while having no idea how to interact with normal humans; John is in love with Anna and just wants to go to art school; Chris needs to figure out how to emotionally connect with the subjects he’s filming and find their humanity; Lisa wants Chris to show up for her when she needs him and for Anna to buck up; and Nick is just a douchebag. Oh, and there’s a new headmaster taking over the school, the bushily-bearded Savage, who is a total dick when the movie starts and just gets worse.

Then the zombie apocalypse happens. In a slight reversal, most of the kids are trapped outside of the school and are coming in to rescue their loved ones, while inside the building things are getting… touchy.

It’s very much the kind of movie it is. If watching comedic gore and Yes-Belive-Us-They’re-Totally-Teenagers deal with their emotional issues sounds good to you, you’re going to have a lot of fun with this. The music’s poppy and engaging; I got earwormed pretty bad by one of the songs for about two days after seeing it. If it sounds not fun to you, I’m not going to try to change your mind.

I think what was an interesting angle in the film was the conflict between the headmaster, Savage, and Anna’s dad, Tony. It’s very much something you could read as a north vs south (UK style), educated middle class vs working class conflict, the the upper class dude (Savage) at one particularly horrific point calling Tony a “pleb” as other very bad things are happening. Though Lisa provides the moral center of the film in an absolutely memorable exchange with Savage, which occurs because Lisa is concerned about the heart condition one of the people trapped in the school has. It goes something like this (per my unreliable memory):

Savage: And what does society do when things start to fall apart?

Lisa: We help each other.

Savage: We prioritize.

I’m betting here that Savage is a Tory. Just saying.

As with many horror-comedy movies, the horror wins out a bit over the comedy in the end. Just don’t get too attached to a lot of the characters is the moral here. But some of the comedy is screamingly funny, with the big winner being Lisa’s song at the Christmas show, which is incredibly, hilariously dirty and involves dancing boys wielding large candy canes in absolutely mortifying ways. About all I wanted out of the film that I didn’t get (other than happy endings for several of the characters I liked, which is just not going to happen because… horror) was more of a character arc for doucheboy Nick. I think the movie was trying to aim at something and didn’t quite succeed, maybe because there wasn’t quite enough room in its lean, 93-minute run time.

[JUST ONE SPOILER BELOW]

As a free service to my fellow queers, however, I’m happy to inform you that the lesbian doesn’t die.

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[Movie] Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Hopefully by now, you’ve had at least one friend shriek at you on Twitter or Facebook about how fucking GOOD this movie is. If not, consider me that friend. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is fucking amazing. It’s definitely the best Spider-Man movie I’ve ever seen. It’s quite possibly the best animated movie I’ve ever seen. It’s in the running to be the best movie I’ve seen all year, and it’s without a doubt the most fun I’ve had at a movie since Thor: Ragnarok.

So that should give you some kind of idea what we’re talking about here. I generally don’t watch animated movies and don’t like them that much, I think because I don’t tend to connect to the characters well for some reason. Or maybe I just don’t find the plots compelling. Maybe the emotional stakes don’t tend to work for me. I don’t know. Combination of factors perhaps. So it’s a Big Fucking Deal when I tell you that I LOVED this movie, that it made me tear up three times because it had so much emotional truth to it, and not just because like someone’s dad got whacked and the actors were really convincing.

I’m hoping this is a movie that’s going to get all of the ticket sales it deserves because of people like me, howling about how damn good it is at all of their friends and family. Because let me tell you, I couldn’t have been less interested in the trailer, which made it look like a cute-but-forgettable direct-to-dvd release that had unaccountably gotten bucked into theaters. I could not have given less of a shit about this movie until I saw Venom… because for whatever reason, they’d nailed about five minutes of Into the Spider-Verse on after the credits and I’d stayed to watch it in case there was a credit cookie. THEN I was hooked.

So why is it good?

The plot on its face sounds cartoonishly wacky. Ordinary (but brilliant) high school student Miles Morales gets bitten by a radioactive spider while he and his uncle are putting up some graffiti art in an abandoned area in the subway. Hijinks ensue, and then by accident Miles runs into Peter Parker Spider-Man as he’s trying to stop Kingpin from using a giant McGuffin machine to connect to all the alternate universes in an attempt to get his wife and kid back. During the fight, the machine instead yanks several Spider-People from other universes into Miles’s: Spider-Gwen, a schlubby burnout version of Spider-Man, Spider-Man Noir (voiced AMAZINGLY by Nic Cage), Penny Parker (an anime girl from future NYC who pilots a spider mecha), and Spider-Ham (a Warner-Brothers-esque 2D animated pig). They all join forces to save the world.

Yeah, I know. I wasn’t convinced either.

What summarizing the plot can’t do without spoilers is explain the massive, beating heart of emotion that moves this film. All of the various Spider-People get their own mini-arc, and Miles struggles to find his place in his own life, in his powers, in his family, and in the rest of the world. A lot of superhero movies give lip service to the idea that they’re a blown-out metaphor for the way the ordinary actions of regular people are still important. This is the first one I’ve seen that actually believed it, and really questioned what heroism is in the context, up to and including self-sacrifice.

Into the Spider-Verse gives us a vision of what it means to be a blue-collar hero in the modern world in the most life-like New York City I’ve ever seen in a Spider-Man movie. Miles’s dad is a cop and his mom is a nurse (neither of them are white) and they’re both moving heaven and earth to put him in a more upper class school that the obviously doesn’t feel comfortable in. The movie addresses the trauma of survival, the need to accept pain and not being defined by it, the true power of personal connections and sense of self, and the vital necessity of empathy. I could go on forever about Miles’s relationship with his dad alone, but I don’t want to spoil it.

And as a work of art of itself, it’s fucking gorgeous. As someone who is no aficionado of animation, I won’t make claims about if something is groundbreaking or not. But this was an animated movie that felt like it really lived in the medium and made very specific artistic choices because it exists so comfortably in its own skin. It freely references comic book tropes, mixes 2D and 3D animation to great effect, and even does some absolutely gorgeous shots that look almost like traditional cell animation with a painted background. I was blown away by it. Even just little things, like the way the animation has halftone gradient effects subtly all through it.

Oh yeah, and it’s fucking HILARIOUS.

I was not prepared for this movie and what it did to my heart while I was laughing hysterically. I don’t think you can be. And I haven’t even touched on the spoilers–let’s talk about challenging expectations and examining preconceptions–because for once I’m glad I went into something unspoiled.

You should go see it.

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[Movie] Infinity War

I’ll admit, I was having a hard time getting hyped up about Infinity War as we approached it. First I thought that Black Panther had stolen all my excitement, but once the movie was past, still didn’t feel that enthused. I just kept looking at Infinity War and thinking oh god this is going to be a train wreck. Just too many characters in something movie-length.

Well, having seen it, I can now tell you that past me was wrong. The movie actually did a really good job of fitting in all the characters and giving most of them at least a moment or two. This was accomplished by splitting them up into several groups, and then interweaving the individual plots of those groups to build up to the Epic Battle(TM). That worked way better than I could have imagined; it was fun, the right people got put together for neat interactions, and I never found it confusing.

No, I’ve got completely different reasons that I’m not happy with this movie.

The plot, by the way, is that Thanos is a dick and wants the Infinity Stones so he can make half the people in the universe, determined by RNG, instantly die. Because scarce resources, something something no one ever bothers really arguing with his philosophy. The good guys think this is a bad idea, and thus there is conflict and a lot of punching.

There were things I really liked, which are the standard things you get out of any MCU film: some damn fun dialog from characters I like and good fight scenes. I did genuinely enjoy myself at places.

If you want to know what I didn’t like, well. That’s spoiler territory. Read at your own risk if you haven’t seen the film yet. And also let’s keep in mind that I’m totally allowed to have my opinion and you’re totally allowed to disagree because different people relate to pieces of art differently! *throws confetti*

ATOMIC SPOILERS INCOMING, TURN BACK NOW TO SAVE YOURSELF.

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[Movie] Pacific Rim: Uprising

Easiest review ever: If you liked the original Pacific Rim, you’re going to like Pacific Rim: Uprising. If giant robots punching things left you cold the first time around, this one isn’t going to change your mind.

Several years after the original Breach is closed in Pacific Rim, Jaegers are still around because thankfully humanity isn’t dumb enough to think its safe. We find out that Stacker Pentecost had a son named Jake (John Boyega), who is a sriracha and oreo-hoarding party boy rather than following in the footsteps of his father. Jake runs across Amara (Cailee Spaeny) while they’re both trying to steal the same junked Jaeger parts–only Amara wants them to finish her tiny Jaeger, Scrapper, who is small enough for a single person to pilot. Jake and Amara get caught and dragged to Ranger academy, where we find out that Jake was a full-blown Ranger and crapped out of the program for… daddy reasons. Then things get real when Liwen Shao’s company wants replace Jaegers with remote-controlled giant robot drones. Too bad that’s not the only existential threat facing the scrappy Jaeger pilots.

This movie is mostly special effects fun of giant robots throwing down in a way where you can actually tell what’s going on at all times. Unlike another giant robot franchise I could name (*coughcoughTransformerscoughcough*). Visually, it looks cleaner and more streamlined than the first Pacific Rim; you can tell that Guillermo del Toro wasn’t at the helm of this one.

I felt Uprising managed to leave a little more room for characters than the first movie, surprisingly. John Boyega seems to be having a ton of fun as Jake, bouncing off his even-more-generic-than-Charlie-Hunnam white boy foil, whose name is apparently Nate (okay) and is played by Scott Eastwood (sure). There were multiple female pilots, and they all got to talk and have little moments of their own. Newt and Gottlieb get to be quirky and interesting and consequential again. But the real show-stealer is Tian Jing playing Liwen Shao.

And I can’t really tell you why without getting into spoilers. Which follow below the fold. But anyway, enjoy this movie if it’s the kind of movie you like.

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Thor: Ragnarok

The first thing you need to know about this movie is that it’s fucking awesome.

I saw it twice this weekend. I’ll be seeing it more times before it leaves the theater. And after several days to collect my thoughts so I can write something more coherent than a high-pitched squeal of delight, I’ve calmed down to the level of OH MY GOD COLORS AND FUNNY AND LOKI AND VALKYRIE AND SO MANY JOKES PLEASE TAIKA WAITITI TAKE MY SOUL IT’S YOURS.

If you’re not familiar with Taika Waititi’s work, it’s time to get right with the world. A great place to start is with What We Do in the Shadows, which is a mockumentary about vampires living in New Zealand–and bonus swearwolves. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is also freaking amazing and easy to find. I first encountered his work in Flight of the Conchords, and was hooked. His sense of humor (heavy on the irony and diminution) and aesthetic sensibility are both right up my alley, so I’d already just about lost my mind when I found out he would be directing Thor: Ragnarok. Finally, I thought, if someone was going to get Loki right as a character, it would be him.

Well, I was right. And so much more. SO MUCH MORE.

The non-spoiler plot summary for Thor: Ragnarok is that Thor’s been having a lot of premonitions about the end of Asgard, so he’s doing his best to stop it. Unfortunately for him, Hela shows up with the intent to ruin everyone’s day and rule Asgard. Thor (and Loki) gets diverted to the colorful garbage-land of Sakaar, ruled by Jeff Goldlum being fabulously Jeff Goldblum, where he meets Valkyrie and gets forced into fighting as a gladiator. It’s up to Thor to put together a team to stop Hela and get them all back to Asgard before it’s too late.

The big thing that doesn’t really show up in the summary is how fucking hilarious this movie is. It just doesn’t stop the entire time, even in the action sequences. And the humor cleverly disguises–and also sharpens–some incredibly fucked up things that the film examines. And between jokes, there are quiet character moments that have more impact because they occur in the ten seconds you aren’t laughing–or you are laughing and then you realize just how important this is to that character and it’s like a punch to the sternum. I’d also recommend this piece about the Maori spin on Waititi’s brand of humor as seen in the movie, though it could be considered spoilery depending on how sensitive you are about that stuff.

It’s a gorgeous, and immensely colorful film. Between that and the humor, it feels like an unsubtle rebuke and mockery of the DCEU’s relentless, desaturated grimness. Like look, here’s an entirely unserious superhero movie that’s a hell of a lot of fun. The MCU movies have often played with genre, and this is definitely their take on the comedy–which makes it a really nice other half to the tragedy that Kenneth Branagh filmed into Thor 1. I also really love the way it was filmed… you get a lot of sweeping, colorful, epic-feeling vistas (particularly on Asgard), contrasted with a lot of close shots that give the important conversations (like when Valkyrie makes some big decisions) feel incredibly intimate.

Oh, and while we’re talking visuals, I have to mention the amazing moments of 1980s pulpy scifi/fantasy movie nostalgia. We already knew we were in for a particular sensibility when we saw the title text for the film, but Waititi keeps it going. Large portions of the score are done on synth and feel like a direct nod back to all the films that made me love fantasy as a child. And the setup of some of the sequences and shots feels like an ode to 80s and early 90s metal band album covers–particularly the sequence with the Valkyries. It’s got nostalgia, but not in a way that excludes those who won’t get that joke–there are plenty of other nods and winks.

I also want to mention that this film has more women (and women of color, at that!) and men of color than any of the other MCU films so far by a long shot. The fact that it’s got a female villain (Hela, played by Cate Blanchett having way too much fun) who doesn’t get shuffled off to the side so she only fights the female hero is immensely fucking cool too, by the way. But it’s even little things like when you look at crowd scenes, particularly on Asgard, there are a significant number of non-white faces you can pick out at all times. This stuff matters.

If you need a happy thing, I think this will provide.

(And now if you’ll forgive me, I need to go on a bit about some SPOILERY stuff, so I’m putting that below the cut.)

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[Movie] The Dark Tower

I made a special effort to see The Dark Tower before I departed for Finland, because I was that excited about seeing Idris Elba be the gunslinger. Not that I’ve got that many gunslinger feelings, you should realize. I’ve never read the novels, because I’m just not that much of a Stephen King fan. But I am that much of an Idris Elba fan.

This seems to be a movie that a lot of people have some really strong feelings about, and I just don’t. Maybe because I didn’t read the books. I went in without any expectations. I don’t regret the price of my ticket or the snack food I bought since I hadn’t bothered to eat breakfast. I had an enjoyable ninety minutes and I felt appropriately entertained.

And to be honest, I don’t really have many strong opinions on this film either way, other than gosh I really love Idris Elba, and Matthew McConaughey is finally playing the evil scumbag character I always thought he had in him. Flagg (aka the Man in Black) probably could have been more evil and scummy, but there’s a limit to what you can do in a PG-13 movie. The mutual hateboner was pretty great to witness, and I bet they were both having one hell of a time.

With most films that I either really love or really hate, I can examine what about them made me feel that way. I can’t really do that here. The script for The Dark Tower ticks along and doesn’t drag. It could probably use some more developmental moments, give us a bit more time with Roland or Flagg, but I can’t really pick out anything in particular. The dialogue was serviceable as far as I can recall, and Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughy are both good enough actors that they can own just about anything anyway.

The plot is a simple portal fantasy: we have Jake, who has been catching glimpses into Roland’s world. Because of this, he’s almost taken away by some of Flagg’s henchmen, but he escapes and uses a portal to go to Roland’s world. Jake and Roland meet up, and Roland realizes he can use Jake’s information to find Flagg. Ultimately, Roland has to choose between his vengeance on Flagg and fulfilling his purpose as a gunslinger.

The only one thing I can pick out that really has a problem in The Dark Tower is the women. In that there aren’t really many to speak of, and most of them get done in rather horribly by Flagg. Like most action movies these days, it runs entirely on daddy issues, and makes no bones about it. Women are pretty much set dressing and angst-fuel and that’s it.

So if you have objections to portal fantasies about a special kid whose very special and becomes super important to the indefatigable badass character of the show, sure, it’ll probably grate on you. But if you want to see Idris Elba being awesome and having some delightful fish-out-of-water moments when he’s on Earth, you’ll probably have fun like I did. I’m not sorry I went out of my way to see this movie, but I doubt I’ll go out of my way to see it again unless I’ve got some laundry to fold.

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[Movie] Dunkirk

To me, Dunkirk feels really different from a lot of Christopher Nolan’s other movies. The plot and characters are basically incidental to how the film feels, the look and sound of it. The dialogue is almost nonexistent; I think if Nolan could have gotten the feeling he wanted without anyone ever speaking a word, he would have. The soundtrack’s pretty simple; there’s always a background ticking, as if a clock, that progressively speeds up as the movie continues on. The film’s made of three timelines that slowly collapse down to a single point. There are a lot of moments that have a lot of layers to them where the it feels like Nolan’s trusting the audience to pick things up.

Let me explain what I mean, here. The best examples of this are toward the end of the film, where the older men (Mark Rylence as Mr. Dawson and John Nolan as “Blind Man”) interact with the surviving younger soldiers. Mr. Dawson makes the understated point that first, they’ve got a job to do and they’re going to do it, and second, getting people out alive is sometimes the best you can hope for. The blind man at the end, giving blankets to the soldiers, has this interaction: (Might not be quite verbatim)

Blind man: You did good work.

Soldier: All we did is survive.

Blind man: That’s enough.

And then later one soldier comments to another that the old man wouldn’t look them in the eye, obviously projecting his own shame at the retreat onto him. What struck me about that in particular were that Nolan trusted the audience to have gotten that point without needing one of the characters to argue with him—and that both the old men were by grace of their age people who had lived through World War I. It’s another thing the film didn’t feel the need to state, but it’s powerful once you realize it.

There’s a lot of understated, chewy, emotional stuff in there that makes the movie feel more like a poem than a story. It’s different, and interesting, and very powerful at moments.

Which is what makes the last five minutes or so downright bizarre. Here, this bit is a spoiler, so highlight it if you want to read: [SPOILER] Tom Hardy’s pilot character runs out of fuel, and then while gliding, succeeds in shooting down a German fighter before it can kill the Admiral played by Kenneth Branagh, take a victory lap over the beach while soldiers cheer for him, manually put down his landing gear, land perfectly behind enemy lines, and then stand there like a badass while his plane (which he’s set on fire) burn and the German soldiers come to capture him. All intercut with one of the soldiers reading lines from Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.[/SPOILER]

After the rest of the movie, that seemed… shockingly bombastic. Tonally discordant. There’s also a bit where you can really tell one of the planes is CGI and it looks remarkably terrible.

There are some other issues I take with the film. I think during the entire time, I saw one non-white soldier, a black man among the French troops. I point this out as an issue, because not all of the British and French troops at Dunkirk were white—here’s a great Twitter thread about it, and a good NYT article. In a movie where the visuals were everything, this is perhaps even more important, because the simple existence of non-white soldiers or crews on the small boats, however briefly seen, would have been striking. This becomes a problem because Chris Nolan (rightly or wrongly) has a reputation for his movies being as accurate as possible (think about the “they made new science to simulate the black hole in Interstellar” thing), with attention to detail. Some people are going to come out of Dunkirk thinking it’s a good representation of that piece of history. (And the history book written to accompany it apparently makes not effort to correct this.) It encourages the continued belief that people of color simply didn’t exist in massive events they took part in.

On a slightly sillier level, it also honestly confused me after a while, because pretty much all of the actors who played soldiers look exactly the same. They were all thin white guys with dark brown hair in the same haircuts. Most are not given names. I’m guessing this is a statement about the interchangeability of the soldiers… but there were times in the film where we did need to be able to tell them apart, at least a little. When they were shouting at each other and one was getting threatened and so on. When Cillian Murphy showed up, it really distracted me from what was going on because I couldn’t figure out if I’d missed the bit of the story that told me how he got where Mr. Dawson found him, or what was even happening.

All in all, I think it’s a movie that’s really worth seeing, because it’s grim and beautiful in how it visually addresses the ideas of cowardice and bravery and hopelessness and their relationship to survival. Just don’t go in expecting gripping characters or snappy dialogue or a challenging plot. That’s not the kind of film it is.