(no subject)

[skygiants]

In 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 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.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

ah, interesting--another friend felt that the changes from the book were for the worse. I have only distant memories of the book (A Swiftly Tilting Planet was my jam, however, and despite its faults contributed significantly to my studying medieval lit much later), and since Reason is almost old enough to understand/care, I'm trying not to revisit Wrinkle yet.... (Spoilers are fine or I wouldn't be trawling for friends' reactions, heh.)

[sovay]

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!

[littlerhymes]

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!"

That's so endearing I wanna cry! I too have not read the book and feel like that was probably the better choice, though I might track it down now. It was such a sweet movie to see with an enthusiastic audience.

[kore]

BLACK PANTHERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

was so awesome I didn't even mind Mouldy Jam Watson in it. I just sort of smiled even through all his scenes. Everyone was so fantastic.

Annihilation sounds neat! and....like something I should not see in a theatre. sigh.

I read Wrinkle in Time really early and imprinted on it and could probably still recite large passages of it, so I'm not sure how much I would enjoy it as a movie. This adaptation does sound like it has aspects that should be appreciated in the theatre, though.

[ceitfianna]

Ooh, you've been seeing so many films and makes me excited to see them. I haven't but want to.

The book that Love Simon is based on is lovely. I read it in one day while also being a substitute librarian, its just lovely and the author clearly knows teens.

[evewithanapple]

Oh man, I tried to read the book Love, Simon is based on and had to peave out halfway through because the secondhand embarrassment was TOO STRONG. Which is, as you say, the price of admission when it comes to books/movies about teens; it's also why I don't read a ton of contemporary YA.

I did read A Wrinkle In Time, though! For the first time ever, a few weeks ago. It struck me as a book I would have very much enjoyed as a kid, as I enjoyed anything that told me non-conformity was the way to go. Later, I saw a post referencing AWIT's anti-Communism, and belatedly realized that most of my beloved non-conformist childhood favourites were probably also written to warn me away from the Red Peril.

[genarti]

Ugh, I still really need to see A Wrinkle In Time! I expect I will love parts but not all of it, from what I've heard -- I've been avoiding specific spoilers, but reading friends' general-reaction kinds of posts -- but I want to see it, anyway, and to give one more ticket to the general box office take of This And More Future Movies Like It.

I kind of want to see Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, too, but as you know I haven't actually seen the original movie. Would it still be fun, do you think? (I'm assuming yes, given the number of years in between and the fact that it's aimed at kids, but I'm curious as to your thoughts.)

[pseudo_tsuga]

I've only discussed Annihilation with other people who have read the books so it's refreshing to get an outside view! The movie definitly suffered from the comparison for me but I did leave actually getting to see all of the strange nature happening.

[obopolsk]

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.

I think my heart grew three sizes just reading this!

(I haven't seen the movie yet but really enjoyed the book.)