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Mar. 17th, 2018 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsIn the last month I have seen FIVE (5) movies in theaters, which is well above my standard average, I don't understand what's happening this spring. But I don't regret my choices!
Black Panther: This was amazing and I have pretty much zero critical thoughts about it except that I loved basically everything that was happening, especially whenever Okoye, Shuri, Nakia, or M'Batu were on the screen which fortunately for me was almost all of the time. Also, Michael B. Jordan basically exudes charisma out of his pores and it's extremely unfair. 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 expect I will see it again sometime before it goes out of theaters and enjoy it even more the second time around.
My favorite audience reactions were a.) the shouts of glee from all around when Okoye threw her wig, and b.) the girl in the middle row who gasped "Sebastian Stan?! What are YOU doing here?" during the post-credits scene.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle: Jumanji Original Flavor is a movie that I saw approximately 20 times growing up, so even though I never ended up having time to throw the Jumanji Double Feature party that I wanted to, it was very important to me to see New Jumanji before it left theaters. And it was, for the most part, cute! The video game conceit worked pretty well, the Rock and Karen Gillan were both extremely charming, and Jack Black was surprisingly endearing as a teenage girl.
I have some qualms about the racial politics of a plot in which Spencer the nerdy Jewish kid, in video-game-land, gets to be the game's Designated Hero, while his estranged best friend Fridge the black football player becomes tiny Kevin Hart, the Designated Comic Sidekick. I think they were going for parallel arcs in which Spencer learns that his Inner Heroism was in him all the time while Fridge learns that Heroism Is About What's On The Inside, but unfortunately Spencer's is the only one that really comes through -- so what you get is a film where the hero is a Jewish kid in brownface while the black kid is trapped as comic relief, all of which does nobody any favors, but I think COULD have worked with a better script. I'll be here all week anybody wants to hear more of my thoughts on How I Would Have Script Doctored Jumanji, but I have three more movies to write about in this post so we'll move on.
A Wrinkle In Time: I didn't love this like I wanted to, but the cast was great, it was visually gorgeous, and the costume designers had SO MUCH FUN -- like, some of the costumes were weird as heck, but you could tell the designers just had license to throw all the rules out the window and go for broke and I was super into it.
I didn't reread the book before going into the film, and so the bits that I remembered were all the parts that made the strongest impression on me as a child: the end sequence with the children bouncing balls in perfect rhythm (and the one that didn't), Meg and Calvin reciting so as not to fall into rhythm, IT as a brain in a jar, Meg saving the day with the combined force of her anger and her love for Charles Wallace. The film moves away from IT as a being of absolute imposed order and towards IT as a more nebulous force of evil, which made me a little bit wistful, and for me didn't tie in as well to the theme of Meg's faults of sullenness, anger, and resistance to authority becoming her strength. Also, I wanted a much creepier sound design while the kids were on Camazotz ... and a creepier Charles Wallace throughout .... more creepiness all around, really, although, uh, I get the level of creepiness that I might have wanted also might not be super appropriate to a kid's film.
However, my roommateattractivegeekery is reading the book for the first time now, and having mixed feelings about it, and more than once she's complained to me about a plot point that I totally didn't remember and I've gone 'huh, they fixed that in the movie -- oh, that was better in the movie, I liked the way they did that!' So apparently the film fixed a whole bunch of things in the book that I had forgotten because I didn't like them, and the takeaway here is that I need to reread the book to appreciate the choices the movie made, but I'm also curious if anyone saw it who hadn't ever read the book and how they felt/what they thought was going on.
Annihilation: Speaking of films where I hadn't read the book, I askedvaradia if I should read the book before seeing the film, and she said no, see the movie first, so I did and I think this was correct because I had no preconceptions and I enjoyed it very much. It was beautiful in the creepiest possible way, like someone took all the best things about 2001: A Space Odyssey (the cinematography, the sound design, the weird science and sense of overwhelming dread) and combined it with all the best things about that Terry Brooks book in which a plucky heroine leads a band of sad elves through mutated jungle to get picked off one by one (female-dominated cast, cool mutant rainforest visuals, a different kind of sense of overwhelming dread that unlike the sense of overwhelming dread in 2001: A Space Odyssey is not overwhelmingly boring) and got something much better than either of them.
(At the end of the film I turned toaamcnamara and said 'see, THIS is the sound design I wanted in Wrinkle in Time! -- but probably ... should not have gotten .... in a kid's movie ......")
Love, Simon: This is another movie where I had not read the book first and was probably the better for it, because I had no expectations but that it would be cute and lo and behold, it delivered! Everyone in the cast was so charming! There were a couple scenes I had to watch through my fingers because TEENAGERS WHY, but that's the price of admission to the genre and I'm a lot more willing to pay it when I know the adorable gay children are going to get a happy ending.
We got advance tickets through the Somerville library and the screening was packed full of enthusiastic queer teenagers, which enhanced the viewing experience tremendously. 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!" My heart, which had already grown three sizes, grew three sizes more.
Black Panther: This was amazing and I have pretty much zero critical thoughts about it except that I loved basically everything that was happening, especially whenever Okoye, Shuri, Nakia, or M'Batu were on the screen which fortunately for me was almost all of the time. Also, Michael B. Jordan basically exudes charisma out of his pores and it's extremely unfair. 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 expect I will see it again sometime before it goes out of theaters and enjoy it even more the second time around.
My favorite audience reactions were a.) the shouts of glee from all around when Okoye threw her wig, and b.) the girl in the middle row who gasped "Sebastian Stan?! What are YOU doing here?" during the post-credits scene.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle: Jumanji Original Flavor is a movie that I saw approximately 20 times growing up, so even though I never ended up having time to throw the Jumanji Double Feature party that I wanted to, it was very important to me to see New Jumanji before it left theaters. And it was, for the most part, cute! The video game conceit worked pretty well, the Rock and Karen Gillan were both extremely charming, and Jack Black was surprisingly endearing as a teenage girl.
I have some qualms about the racial politics of a plot in which Spencer the nerdy Jewish kid, in video-game-land, gets to be the game's Designated Hero, while his estranged best friend Fridge the black football player becomes tiny Kevin Hart, the Designated Comic Sidekick. I think they were going for parallel arcs in which Spencer learns that his Inner Heroism was in him all the time while Fridge learns that Heroism Is About What's On The Inside, but unfortunately Spencer's is the only one that really comes through -- so what you get is a film where the hero is a Jewish kid in brownface while the black kid is trapped as comic relief, all of which does nobody any favors, but I think COULD have worked with a better script. I'll be here all week anybody wants to hear more of my thoughts on How I Would Have Script Doctored Jumanji, but I have three more movies to write about in this post so we'll move on.
A Wrinkle In Time: I didn't love this like I wanted to, but the cast was great, it was visually gorgeous, and the costume designers had SO MUCH FUN -- like, some of the costumes were weird as heck, but you could tell the designers just had license to throw all the rules out the window and go for broke and I was super into it.
I didn't reread the book before going into the film, and so the bits that I remembered were all the parts that made the strongest impression on me as a child: the end sequence with the children bouncing balls in perfect rhythm (and the one that didn't), Meg and Calvin reciting so as not to fall into rhythm, IT as a brain in a jar, Meg saving the day with the combined force of her anger and her love for Charles Wallace. The film moves away from IT as a being of absolute imposed order and towards IT as a more nebulous force of evil, which made me a little bit wistful, and for me didn't tie in as well to the theme of Meg's faults of sullenness, anger, and resistance to authority becoming her strength. Also, I wanted a much creepier sound design while the kids were on Camazotz ... and a creepier Charles Wallace throughout .... more creepiness all around, really, although, uh, I get the level of creepiness that I might have wanted also might not be super appropriate to a kid's film.
However, my roommate
attractivegeekery is reading the book for the first time now, and having mixed feelings about it, and more than once she's complained to me about a plot point that I totally didn't remember and I've gone 'huh, they fixed that in the movie -- oh, that was better in the movie, I liked the way they did that!' So apparently the film fixed a whole bunch of things in the book that I had forgotten because I didn't like them, and the takeaway here is that I need to reread the book to appreciate the choices the movie made, but I'm also curious if anyone saw it who hadn't ever read the book and how they felt/what they thought was going on.Annihilation: Speaking of films where I hadn't read the book, I asked
varadia if I should read the book before seeing the film, and she said no, see the movie first, so I did and I think this was correct because I had no preconceptions and I enjoyed it very much. It was beautiful in the creepiest possible way, like someone took all the best things about 2001: A Space Odyssey (the cinematography, the sound design, the weird science and sense of overwhelming dread) and combined it with all the best things about that Terry Brooks book in which a plucky heroine leads a band of sad elves through mutated jungle to get picked off one by one (female-dominated cast, cool mutant rainforest visuals, a different kind of sense of overwhelming dread that unlike the sense of overwhelming dread in 2001: A Space Odyssey is not overwhelmingly boring) and got something much better than either of them. (At the end of the film I turned to
aamcnamara and said 'see, THIS is the sound design I wanted in Wrinkle in Time! -- but probably ... should not have gotten .... in a kid's movie ......")Love, Simon: This is another movie where I had not read the book first and was probably the better for it, because I had no expectations but that it would be cute and lo and behold, it delivered! Everyone in the cast was so charming! There were a couple scenes I had to watch through my fingers because TEENAGERS WHY, but that's the price of admission to the genre and I'm a lot more willing to pay it when I know the adorable gay children are going to get a happy ending.
We got advance tickets through the Somerville library and the screening was packed full of enthusiastic queer teenagers, which enhanced the viewing experience tremendously. 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!" My heart, which had already grown three sizes, grew three sizes more.
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Date: 2018-04-15 01:30 pm (UTC)But I guess I did feel like there was a sort of texture and specificity to the other planets in the book that the CGI couldn't capture; they just felt like generic Wondrous Lands? I felt like the most genuinely eerie and interesting shot was the one of the Three Mrs. in the wheatfield. The costumes were the most meaningfully rich and alien thing, I feel like, and that was partially because they actually existed and responded to conventional physics.
I was not into the Charles Wallace casting (get a kid who can ENUNCIATE, I whispered, crankily) until he turned evil, and then I found his acting choices and direction much more believable.
I did really like Meg - I just did wish she was crankier instead of just genuinely oppressed by exterior factors. My absolute favorite part of the book as a child was when Charles Wallace and Calvin are really getting into the whole "warriors for light" bit, and are like Einstein! Jesus Christ! Marie Curie! and Meg is genuinely disinterested in the whole question and does not feel like participating at all.