Media Reviews
Mar. 11th, 2018 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotIn order of watching.
Black Panther
It actually took me a couple of weeks (or maybe just a week?) to see it, because after Civil War I was kinda eh on Marvel movies, and movies with long fight scenes and such in general. But the good press was impressive, so I went!
It's been a week so my impressions are much vaguer, but - I loved the costume and set design, despite never having had an interest in Afrofuturism (or like any kind of modern or futuristic art movements). I loved everything else, too. The female characters were SO great, with a big range of personalities and goals. Nakia following her own conscience by helping people outside of Wakanda - Okoye the loyal warrior - Shuri the funny one and the Q, very very nice - Ramonda the ever-dignified queen (PERFECT casting, I mean all the casting was perfect, but that was the best of all).
I literally only had three criticisms in the entire film (if you don't count "when Martin Freeman plays Americans it hurts my brain, it's just wrong"). 1) It really needs to be better spelled-out why bringing an American kid back to Wakanda would have possibly endangered the country, because it doesn't make a lot of sense; presumably he would have had a Harry Potter reaction and wanted to stay in Wakanda for the rest of his life, so what made T'chaka feel the only way to keep Wakanda from being exposed was to leave him behind? 2) I would have liked for T'challa to have turned Killmonger instead of having to kill him, because I am soft-hearted and want to see villains with sympathetic backstories get redemption. 3) "What are those" was a relevant meme when the script was written but by the time it came to theaters I had actually forgotten what it was.
Okay, 4) yes, we call that garment a "corset" in English because that's the Western understanding of something worn around the torso, and it could very well have been uncomfortable, but whyyyy did that have to be the go-to uncomfortable thing for the joke.
(as you can see, two criticisms are extremely minor and one is a preference rather than a real criticism.)
Jessica Jones
JJ was a million billion times better than The Defenders! You can tell because I actually watched it. That being said, it wasn't quite as good as the first season.
I LOVED the twist that the villain was her mother, but part of the reason Kilgrave was such a compelling villain was the male privilege/entitlement aspect, which is of course 100% lost. The critique of toxic masculinity was way way less than last season all around, with Kilgrave gone (minus hallucinations) and Simpson only slightly in the picture; the mad scientist didn't tie into a societal critique as far as I could see and Malcolm and Oscar were both What Men Should Be. All there was was the sadistic prison guard, which ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Not very biting.
And the same issue as with BP above - I wanted Mom redeemed, in large part because of Feels. But also because it seemed to fall into exactly the same formula as the first season in a really unfortunate way (because predictable). Mysterious villain is causing trouble, villain is tied to Jess's past, villain and Jess fight, villain offer to reform and it looks possible for a bit, villain reveals that they can't be reformed because they won't give up doing bad stuff, villain gets got.
I kind of hope that S3's villain is only a moderate part of the plot so that a) we can break out of the formula, and b) Trish gets to do more than just have a Drugs are Bad bu Addiction is a Spiral storyline.
A Wrinkle in Time
This I went to see today, so I have the most defined memories and opinions. Tragically, I was overall disappointed.
I will say that the visuals were nice, the costuming was interesting, and the casting was great (both for matching to characters and for representation). But in the end, it seemed like the wonderful weird soul of the book was blockbusterized into a more standard kid's movie, and while Tumblr is blown away by it (because the representation in casting is genuinely wonderful) I suspect that it's going to fade in the popular consciousness pretty quickly.
- I haven't read all of the Murray books because they are just plain weird. Weird enough that I went back to AWIT and AWITD as a younger adult, thinking, "I bet parts of these will jump out at me as suddenly making sense now that I'm not a kid." Nope! It's a blend of science fiction, fantasy, and religion that nothing else is like. There are tiny mouse-shrimp living in your mitochondria. (I was so disappointed to find that farandolae weren't real.) Welsh people came to prehistoric America and their descendants - carrying on names for dozens of generations, or just magically hitting on the same ones because of destiny - became either terrorists or heroes. Unicorns fly through time. What about the semi-immortal antediluvians and the seraphim/nephelim they chill with. And so much more! These are not standard kid's fantasy, and that's why they're so cool. But that makes them harder to sell to a mass audience, so the weirdness has to be smoothed out.
- It is Very Important to me that Calvin is, in his own word, a "sport" from a redneck hick family that he doesn't fit in with. I suspect they changed this because a) an overbearing bourgeois father who's abusive over mediocre grades is easier for the 90% of American society that doesn't live in rural areas to identify with and b) okay, it's kind of classist to depict Calvin as "better" than the rest of his family in that situation. And c) hardly any characters in movies/tv are allowed to be really properly poor. But Calvin being neglected but loving his 11 siblings and parents anyway makes him a more interesting character than what we got.
- The New England setting is also Important to me, but expecting any given movie or tv show to be set somewhere other than NYC or the LA area is just pointless these days.
- The Mrs. Ws are centaur angels/ex-stars!! Where were the centaur angels?? (see point 1) And the tentacle-creatures that help heal Meg when she gets hurt tessering through the darkness? (see point 1 again)
- The Happy Medium is a WOMAN, why randomly make her male? Bizarre.
- Charles Wallace ought to be a bit more otherworldly-smart rather than sitcom-precocious, but that's a hard line to walk when you have to use actors instead of just writing. He's kind of supposed to have powers beyond just precocity, though, and that was really dropped - I guess they don't plan to making any of the sequels?
I need to reread the L'Engles I have read and read the ones I haven't. Mayhap I will stop at the library tomorrow and see what they have.
Black Panther
It actually took me a couple of weeks (or maybe just a week?) to see it, because after Civil War I was kinda eh on Marvel movies, and movies with long fight scenes and such in general. But the good press was impressive, so I went!
It's been a week so my impressions are much vaguer, but - I loved the costume and set design, despite never having had an interest in Afrofuturism (or like any kind of modern or futuristic art movements). I loved everything else, too. The female characters were SO great, with a big range of personalities and goals. Nakia following her own conscience by helping people outside of Wakanda - Okoye the loyal warrior - Shuri the funny one and the Q, very very nice - Ramonda the ever-dignified queen (PERFECT casting, I mean all the casting was perfect, but that was the best of all).
I literally only had three criticisms in the entire film (if you don't count "when Martin Freeman plays Americans it hurts my brain, it's just wrong"). 1) It really needs to be better spelled-out why bringing an American kid back to Wakanda would have possibly endangered the country, because it doesn't make a lot of sense; presumably he would have had a Harry Potter reaction and wanted to stay in Wakanda for the rest of his life, so what made T'chaka feel the only way to keep Wakanda from being exposed was to leave him behind? 2) I would have liked for T'challa to have turned Killmonger instead of having to kill him, because I am soft-hearted and want to see villains with sympathetic backstories get redemption. 3) "What are those" was a relevant meme when the script was written but by the time it came to theaters I had actually forgotten what it was.
Okay, 4) yes, we call that garment a "corset" in English because that's the Western understanding of something worn around the torso, and it could very well have been uncomfortable, but whyyyy did that have to be the go-to uncomfortable thing for the joke.
(as you can see, two criticisms are extremely minor and one is a preference rather than a real criticism.)
Jessica Jones
JJ was a million billion times better than The Defenders! You can tell because I actually watched it. That being said, it wasn't quite as good as the first season.
I LOVED the twist that the villain was her mother, but part of the reason Kilgrave was such a compelling villain was the male privilege/entitlement aspect, which is of course 100% lost. The critique of toxic masculinity was way way less than last season all around, with Kilgrave gone (minus hallucinations) and Simpson only slightly in the picture; the mad scientist didn't tie into a societal critique as far as I could see and Malcolm and Oscar were both What Men Should Be. All there was was the sadistic prison guard, which ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Not very biting.
And the same issue as with BP above - I wanted Mom redeemed, in large part because of Feels. But also because it seemed to fall into exactly the same formula as the first season in a really unfortunate way (because predictable). Mysterious villain is causing trouble, villain is tied to Jess's past, villain and Jess fight, villain offer to reform and it looks possible for a bit, villain reveals that they can't be reformed because they won't give up doing bad stuff, villain gets got.
I kind of hope that S3's villain is only a moderate part of the plot so that a) we can break out of the formula, and b) Trish gets to do more than just have a Drugs are Bad bu Addiction is a Spiral storyline.
A Wrinkle in Time
This I went to see today, so I have the most defined memories and opinions. Tragically, I was overall disappointed.
I will say that the visuals were nice, the costuming was interesting, and the casting was great (both for matching to characters and for representation). But in the end, it seemed like the wonderful weird soul of the book was blockbusterized into a more standard kid's movie, and while Tumblr is blown away by it (because the representation in casting is genuinely wonderful) I suspect that it's going to fade in the popular consciousness pretty quickly.
- I haven't read all of the Murray books because they are just plain weird. Weird enough that I went back to AWIT and AWITD as a younger adult, thinking, "I bet parts of these will jump out at me as suddenly making sense now that I'm not a kid." Nope! It's a blend of science fiction, fantasy, and religion that nothing else is like. There are tiny mouse-shrimp living in your mitochondria. (I was so disappointed to find that farandolae weren't real.) Welsh people came to prehistoric America and their descendants - carrying on names for dozens of generations, or just magically hitting on the same ones because of destiny - became either terrorists or heroes. Unicorns fly through time. What about the semi-immortal antediluvians and the seraphim/nephelim they chill with. And so much more! These are not standard kid's fantasy, and that's why they're so cool. But that makes them harder to sell to a mass audience, so the weirdness has to be smoothed out.
- It is Very Important to me that Calvin is, in his own word, a "sport" from a redneck hick family that he doesn't fit in with. I suspect they changed this because a) an overbearing bourgeois father who's abusive over mediocre grades is easier for the 90% of American society that doesn't live in rural areas to identify with and b) okay, it's kind of classist to depict Calvin as "better" than the rest of his family in that situation. And c) hardly any characters in movies/tv are allowed to be really properly poor. But Calvin being neglected but loving his 11 siblings and parents anyway makes him a more interesting character than what we got.
- The New England setting is also Important to me, but expecting any given movie or tv show to be set somewhere other than NYC or the LA area is just pointless these days.
- The Mrs. Ws are centaur angels/ex-stars!! Where were the centaur angels?? (see point 1) And the tentacle-creatures that help heal Meg when she gets hurt tessering through the darkness? (see point 1 again)
- The Happy Medium is a WOMAN, why randomly make her male? Bizarre.
- Charles Wallace ought to be a bit more otherworldly-smart rather than sitcom-precocious, but that's a hard line to walk when you have to use actors instead of just writing. He's kind of supposed to have powers beyond just precocity, though, and that was really dropped - I guess they don't plan to making any of the sequels?
I need to reread the L'Engles I have read and read the ones I haven't. Mayhap I will stop at the library tomorrow and see what they have.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-12 07:43 pm (UTC)