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Believe it or not, I have actually seen a reasonable number of films in theaters recently besides Cats (2019).

Knives Out: I had heard this was great and I was not disappointed! elegantly constructed plot; gorgeously shot; painfully perfect portrayal of racism, privilege and hypocrisy that nonetheless allows for enough of a spark of human warmth that you leave the theater feeling satisfied rather than grimly depressed with all humanity. I have heard there is a sequel in the works and I, too, hope Daniel Craig has a different accent in each one. I do find it really funny that the entire internet is inexplicably gaga over men's sweaters now; throwback to when the Hays Code tried to ban angora sweaters for being too sexy in 1941.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker: I did not like it and I think it was overall a bad movie and I'm mad on behalf of Kellie Marie Tran; that said I did enjoy watching large chunks of it, especially every time Daisy Ridley and John Boyega and Oscar Isaac's charming faces were all actually in the same frame and also every time someone intoned "Rey Palpatine" in a portentous tone and I burst out laughing once again in the back of the theater. When Rey turned up to face Palpatine for the final sequence I leaned over to whisper "GRANDMAMA!" to

genarti and I'm still not entirely sure she's forgiven me for it any more than I've forgiven the movie for not having Rey dramatically drop a Jedi robe at that pivotal juncture. The prequels would have committed!

All that said the real thing for which I haven't forgiven this movie, or indeed the entire trilogy, is for making me excited about Finn as a co-protagonist in the first film and then never delivering on it. I would have forgiven this film a whole lot if Finn had had a coherent arc, but alas.

Jumanji: The Next Level: Was this, on the other hand, the best sff blockbuster of 2019? POSSIBLY. Whoever decided "how do we improve on the premise of Jumanji and Newmanji? ADD GRANDPAS" is a genius. Oldmanji is a conceptual work of art. I want to spend my life watching different action and comedy stars trading off bodyswap shenanigans and competing to see who can do the best Danny DeVito and Danny Glover. Also, I'm just really charmed that there exists a major sff blockbuster that's emotionally grounded in re-forging the friendship between two eighty-year-old restaurateurs who are being guided through mortal peril by a collection of very tired college students and one good-natured grunge dad.

The movie has only one big flaw in my eyes but it is a large flaw: the last Jumanji film included a fairly boring but inoffensive obligatory romance between two of the kids, and for a long period of time in this film those two kids were played by Awkwafina and Karen Gillan, and yet NOT ONE ROMANTIC MOMENT BETWEEN AWKWAFINA AND KAREN GILLAN DID I GET. All romantic resolution was carefully delayed until Kid 1 was once again played by the Rock; the filmmakers are cowards and I, personally, was robbed.

All that said, at the end of this film they teased a next Jumanji film involving the main kid's mom and I am there for Jumomji with bells on, I hope they drag this franchise out on increasingly wild legs as far as it will possibly go.

Little Women: The film does an incredible job making both the world and the story of the source text feel extremely lived-in; I walked out of that movie and was like "I can't believe how comfortable they all seemed in their Civil War-era outfits, they made me believe those clothes were comfortable." This is not a small thing! So many historical-set films fall into the trap of feeling like a Costume Drama and I was vastly impressed by how this movie avoided that, and how all the actors inhabited their characters and made them feel like complicated, layered humans. I also think Greta Gerwig and the cast did a pretty stellar job complicating scenes and themes like Laurie Shames Meg For Enjoying A Party, and shout-out to Laura Dern while we're at it for making me incredibly interested in Marmee for maybe the first time ever. The metafictionality, intercutting and flashback structure worked well enough for me that I'm not even going to talk to much about my questions about the timeline - I mean, they were there and we had them, but that's a pretty small price to pay for what I thought overall was a really effective and innovative take.

Daughter of Shanghai: This is not a recent film but I did see it in theaters in the past two months and have been wanting to write it up so we're counting it! This was, I believe, Anna May Wong's one theatrical role in which she played the action heroine, against Philip Ahn's dapper hero -- she's the plucky daughter of a sweet Chinese-American businessman murdered by an evil gang of people-smugglers, he's the FBI agent who's brought in to catch the people-smugglers, they both independently go undercover to investigate. Hijinks and heroics ensue!

I do think it's a little bit telling that the two heroic Asian-American stars are explicitly as law-abiding legal immigrants working to foil an illegal immigration scheme -- an illegal immigration scheme that's explicitly led by evil white people selling hope to positioned-as-sympathetic victims, which is vastly more than one might expect in 1937, but still, like, they're not fighting jewel thieves, you know?

On the other hand, how much do I love that the lead villain is a white society lady whose pose as a simple Orientalist patron of the arts is a cover for her evil schemes? SO MUCH I LOVE IT.

Anyway

sovay has a much more thorough review over here so if you're interested you should go and check that out.

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This is a great post and your feelings are largely my feelings (or probably would be for those films I haven't seen)

(also there's a bold tag missing after "Little Women")

Knives Out was so good!!!! Daniel Craig was clearly having the time of his life in that role.

I also saw The Rise of Skywalker and I feel like, a year+ ago, I would have been v. mad about many things in this movie, but I went into the theater like "I am going to turn my entire brain off for 2 hours and 22 minutes," and I found it entertaining, mostly because Rey, Poe, and Finn actually got to be on screen at the same time and doing delightfully quest-y things together.

Awkwafina pretending to be Danny Devito was amazing.

I'm going to see Little Women in... uh, like 3 hours, so I'm glad it gets your stamp of approval!

Going into Knives Out not knowing anything about the shape of the story I honestly may have been most excited for Southern Accent Daniel Craig because he also did a Southern accent and a kind of brilliant-but-goofy character in Logan Lucky and my response to that was like. This feels like the most I've ever seen Daniel Craig act. Why has this great character actor been hidden behind 'stoic and/or British' for so long??????

Also I really liked the rambunctious energy Little Women gave the March household. (even if I am... only halfway through reading it for the first time but whatever.) It felt like the Period Movie equivalent of that set of old photos where the couple breaks their stoic pose and starts laughing.

I liked TRoS but I agree with your criticisms, including that the movie NEEDED a Kenobi-style dramatic robe drop! But getting the OT3 onscreen together and giving us JEDI MASTER LEIA was enough for me.

Indeed, Finn did not have a coherent arc, but then, neither did Rey. (But Rey was, at least, a main character for the entire series, as opposed to Finn who somehow wasn't even while being in all of it. Kind of a neat trick, that.)

V. Good point about the energy and the lived-in-ness of the Little Women experience. Other versions have been like... careful.

And, on Jumanji: Wait, *actual* Danny Glover? I may need to see this. Like, today, since I have time.

TRoS is very much a movie where I enjoyed the experience of watching it and came out of the theatre going "well there's more fodder for fanfic now I guess". I wish it had been better. It could have been. But it succeeded in making me feel emotions, so I can just politely ignore all the bits that I'm angry about at whatever point I feel like writing fanfic for it. (Or just go pettily play in the prequel era for ages, I guess, that's the other thing I might do.)

Knives Out was a lot of fun! It definitely was a good thing to go see when the entirety of what I knew was "It's a murder mystery, Daniel Craig has an iffy American accent, and something about sweaterboys?" It's the sort of movie that I'm in no way fannish about but that I absolutely loved the plotting of and want to watch again now that I've seen all the pieces click together (and now that I might be able to follow the family relationships).

I didn't like TRoS going in or walking out, though the actual experience itself was more enjoyable than I'd been expecting. But every time I think about it I just get angrier at what a hack job it was.

Little Women made Marmee and Aunt March interesting for the first time probably ever. I thought it was a great job all around--I don't think that Emma Watson is weak as Meg at all--and I loved it.

I also think Greta Gerwig and the cast did a pretty stellar job complicating scenes and themes like Laurie Shames Meg For Enjoying A Party...

Yes! Seeing that scene in parallel with Laurie's adventures in Europe makes it seem more like a hypocrisy on his part than a failing on Meg's.

Also, the scene where Professor Bhaer -- whom I love in the book and adored in the film -- criticises Jo's writing, and reframing that in less moralistic terms and more in the sense of pushing her to be more honest -- I loved that. And the scene where Laurie and Amy debate genius, and women's place in the canon. It feels like Laurie and Bhaer are both men who take women's work seriously, but are still figuring out how to be tactful at the same time.

(As a Jo/Bhaer and Amy/Laurie shipper, I was very happy -- I know a couple of people are annoyed at the fake-out with the Big Romantic Ending, but the fact that Frederick is there and part of the family in the end means something, and the audience can interpret that how they want.)

I went into Knives Out expecting to like it (because Christie-esque country house murder mystery!) but didn't expect to love it so much! One of my first thoughts leaving the theatre last year was "man, it's too bad Yuletide nominations are already over, or this would totally be one of my noms."

Craig is clearly having the time of his life! The screenplay has been posted online and I looked it up; Blanc is described as having "the gentlest southern lilt you have ever heard in your life" and he went ahead and did THAT.

Both of the new Jumanji films are an absolute delight for precisely the reasons you state -- it's fun watching the avatar-actors play their "real-world" selves, and they do a moderately astonishing job of pulling it off.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, the boss fight at the end of Next Level is notable in that Yergen turns out to have a player-character stat card. Which means that he's almost certainly not actually gone for good despite that drop into supposed oblivion at the end.

I did not like it and I think it was overall a bad movie and I'm mad on behalf of Kellie Marie Tran; that said I did enjoy watching large chunks of it, especially every time Daisy Ridley and John Boyega and Oscar Isaac's charming faces were all actually in the same frame

My feels exactly. That was a good group hug that they hugged at the end.

The new kink is sweaters, apparently! and I would love to see Daniel Craig in a sequel though I'm curious if they'd keep the same cast of characters or transplant him somewhere else with a new setting and murder plot...

I was SO VERY excited about the existence of Finn and his highly important story arcs that I didn't go to see the second and third movies at all because I'd heard they didn't deliver on the promise and Finn was almost everything I cared about. And I didn't want to see Carrie Fisher's screen time wasted.

I've ranted a lot about how upsetting TROS was for me for lots of reasons, but one of the major reasons was how Finn was just... wasted. I mean, they all were, but after all the brouhaha of Rey having to have a surname ~~to link her to a man's power because heaven forbid she have it on her own since she's merely a woman~~ (ahem sorry about that), Finn gets nothing. No surname, no clue about his origins, no rallying the other First Order conscripted and brainwashed soldiers, no smooches with either handsome boyfriend Poe or feisty girlfriend Rose... It's a damn shameful waste.

I also find it sadly amusing that no matter who you ship or who you like or dislike in the series, we're all just like "...what the eff was that???" and try to focus on the enjoyable parts.

At least there's Knives Out and its soothing brilliance and wit. The performances were all so strong. I loved everyone in it.

Edited 2020-01-14 04:15 (UTC)

"I can't believe how comfortable they all seemed in their Civil War-era outfits, they made me believe those clothes were comfortable."

Yes! I spent much of the movie coveting Jo's writing pajamas/jacket outfit and I don't think I would actually find it even remotely comfortable in real life.

for a long period of time in this film those two kids were played by Awkwafina and Karen Gillan, and yet NOT ONE ROMANTIC MOMENT BETWEEN AWKWAFINA AND KAREN GILLAN DID I GET. All romantic resolution was carefully delayed until Kid 1 was once again played by the Rock; the filmmakers are cowards and I, personally, was robbed.

WTF!!!!!!

Agreed entirely on Little Women <3

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