skygiants

I did sort of wonder, Watsonianly, why CIA Agent Ross there at all during most of his scenes (Doylistically I am sure every Marvel executive cluched ALL their pearls at the thought of having an entire! movie! without ANY sympathetic white men) but also someone suggested to me that CIA Agent Ross might turn out to be a long-game villain, which is a very nice thought and one I wish I could believe.

I was surprised by but actually fine with Ross' arc for reasons detailed here and here; he's contingently sympathetic and he's not the point.

a.) the shouts of glee from all around when Okoye threw her wig

That was fantastic. I loved it both as politics, physical comedy, and the dude on the receiving end being so surprised.

I'll be here all week anybody wants to hear more of my thoughts on How I Would Have Script Doctored Jumanji

Totally. I'm never going to see it and I'm curious.

It was beautiful in the creepiest possible way

So I want to write about Annihilation because I loved it, but one of the aspects I really loved was the way its beauty is not booby-trapped. Those mitotic white deer with their antlers of soft pink fungi or flowers do not suddenly split open into sharp teeth; they bound away into the undergrowth, as easily spooked as the white-tailed deer that served as their template. The leafy, human-Hox-gened silhouettes in the abandoned neighborhood are not full of bones. The glassy trees that spike like fulgurites or neurons from the beach-sand never do anything but stand there. The film never made the common horror mistake of thinking that the audience needs to be jump-scared into recognizing strangeness. It's just full of things that are beautiful and not right. It pulled off numinous.

Favorite audience reactions: the theater-wide gasp at The Reveal of who Blue is at the end, and the girl in the row next to me who sat up during the scene where Simon's dad awkwardly but endearingly expresses how much he loves and supports him and whispered, "that's MY dad!"

Aw!