Recent movies
Apr. 27th, 2020 07:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungSome recent mainstream movies I have seen, some good, some bad.
Star Wars 9: Rise of Skywalker.
A bloated plot, yet another return to the original trilogy crap about how a genocidal mass murderer can be fully redeemed if only you love him enough to make him change sides, and crappy writing pull this movie down. The ending did contain some effective and moving bits, but they were not enough to make up for the many bits that made me say give me a fucking break, this plot makes no sense whatsoever, what the fuck are you doing forgiving that Nazi, and oh my god we are only halfway through this thing, if they tossed any more kitchen sinks into the story it would explode.
In short, it was a maltese falchon of a movie, as in the statue, not the classic film. There might have been something valuable there once, but then it got covered over in so many layers of "we didn't mean to offend you in the last film" and "we know you've been dying to see this bit of needless fan service for eight movies now" that it became almost impossible to see the worthwhile bits under all the layers of enamel. They mostly stuck the ending, but I'm not sure it was worth the slog to get there.
Terminator: dark Fate.
A damn fine feminist, woman-centred movie that even the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a reformed robot assassin who saves the day at the end was not able to ruin. It also helped that it made no reference to any of the previous movies in the series other than terminator 1 and 2. A worthy companion to Alien Resurrection, in that it too is a "we are sorry for the previous crappy instalments of the series, here have a woman-centred somewhat feminist sequel with our apologies."
Once Upon a time in Hollywood.
Quentin Tarantino sometimes produces interesting, if highly problematic and violent movies about female characters who kick ass and don't take shit from anybody. Other times he makes highly problematic violent movies about boys. This is one of the latter, with an added layer of self-congratulatory Hollywood narcissism. This is the third or fourth of his films in a row that I did not like. I'm going to stop checking out his works unless they feature female protagonists.
Charlies Angels
Unlike the early 00's instalments, this was not a parody or comedy, and thus was actually well done. Fun and frothy with girl power and women kicking tons of ass. That was the plus. The minus, sadly was the predictable "let's introduce a black character that our heroes love and then kill him off to create motivation" trope in the first act, plus a very white core cast except for one Angel who was the token black girl. Sigh, really Hollywood, it's fucking 2020, non-white people are rapidly becoming a majority, can we please have better diversity than "here's a token Other character?"
Birds of Prey.
DC seems hell bent to turn as many of their properties as possible into movies that hardly anybody in their right mind will want to see. Someday we might gain insight into the corporate mentality that has produced so many "hard pass" movies, but thankfully, for once, this was not crap.
Instead, it was a fun movie with an actually diverse cast, tight plotting, and tons of girl power without any sexist ogling of said girls. In short, a total radical departure from Suicide Squad (which I have not seen but have read rants about), courtesy of a woman director who inherited a hot mess and turned it into something actually decent. Gee, maybe we should ban all men from directing movies for a while and see if that improves the output.
Knives Out
I was surprised to discover that this was not based on a classic manor house mystery novel. Unlike most poorly thought out movie homages to an older genre, the screenwriter and director have fully groked the corpus of classic manor house mysteries, and produced a perfectly executed modern version of them. I could have done with a bit less of white older guy detective with huge ego rescues young woman of colour from being framed for something she didn't do, but still, it was good and I'm keeping it for eventual rewatching.
Star Wars 9: Rise of Skywalker.
A bloated plot, yet another return to the original trilogy crap about how a genocidal mass murderer can be fully redeemed if only you love him enough to make him change sides, and crappy writing pull this movie down. The ending did contain some effective and moving bits, but they were not enough to make up for the many bits that made me say give me a fucking break, this plot makes no sense whatsoever, what the fuck are you doing forgiving that Nazi, and oh my god we are only halfway through this thing, if they tossed any more kitchen sinks into the story it would explode.
In short, it was a maltese falchon of a movie, as in the statue, not the classic film. There might have been something valuable there once, but then it got covered over in so many layers of "we didn't mean to offend you in the last film" and "we know you've been dying to see this bit of needless fan service for eight movies now" that it became almost impossible to see the worthwhile bits under all the layers of enamel. They mostly stuck the ending, but I'm not sure it was worth the slog to get there.
Terminator: dark Fate.
A damn fine feminist, woman-centred movie that even the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a reformed robot assassin who saves the day at the end was not able to ruin. It also helped that it made no reference to any of the previous movies in the series other than terminator 1 and 2. A worthy companion to Alien Resurrection, in that it too is a "we are sorry for the previous crappy instalments of the series, here have a woman-centred somewhat feminist sequel with our apologies."
Once Upon a time in Hollywood.
Quentin Tarantino sometimes produces interesting, if highly problematic and violent movies about female characters who kick ass and don't take shit from anybody. Other times he makes highly problematic violent movies about boys. This is one of the latter, with an added layer of self-congratulatory Hollywood narcissism. This is the third or fourth of his films in a row that I did not like. I'm going to stop checking out his works unless they feature female protagonists.
Charlies Angels
Unlike the early 00's instalments, this was not a parody or comedy, and thus was actually well done. Fun and frothy with girl power and women kicking tons of ass. That was the plus. The minus, sadly was the predictable "let's introduce a black character that our heroes love and then kill him off to create motivation" trope in the first act, plus a very white core cast except for one Angel who was the token black girl. Sigh, really Hollywood, it's fucking 2020, non-white people are rapidly becoming a majority, can we please have better diversity than "here's a token Other character?"
Birds of Prey.
DC seems hell bent to turn as many of their properties as possible into movies that hardly anybody in their right mind will want to see. Someday we might gain insight into the corporate mentality that has produced so many "hard pass" movies, but thankfully, for once, this was not crap.
Instead, it was a fun movie with an actually diverse cast, tight plotting, and tons of girl power without any sexist ogling of said girls. In short, a total radical departure from Suicide Squad (which I have not seen but have read rants about), courtesy of a woman director who inherited a hot mess and turned it into something actually decent. Gee, maybe we should ban all men from directing movies for a while and see if that improves the output.
Knives Out
I was surprised to discover that this was not based on a classic manor house mystery novel. Unlike most poorly thought out movie homages to an older genre, the screenwriter and director have fully groked the corpus of classic manor house mysteries, and produced a perfectly executed modern version of them. I could have done with a bit less of white older guy detective with huge ego rescues young woman of colour from being framed for something she didn't do, but still, it was good and I'm keeping it for eventual rewatching.