Film Friday :: 2017 in film

First off, we have already seen The Last Jedi. We saw it opening night. We’ve just been waiting to write about it because A) we’ve been crazy-busy, B) we want to go see it again to pick up more before we write, and C) we figured it would be nice to let the spoilers die down a little. But I will talk about some things about it.

So!

Best Times At The Movies This Year

4. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
So yes, we’re in the camp that quite loved this movie. And our first night crowd was great! They laughed at all the right parts. It was a stressful time that also involved tears and emotions, but it was good and important.

3. Thor: Ragnarok
Good grief. Drift partner and I loved this damn movie, as evidence by the fact that we went to see it a second time in celebration of our anniversary earlier this month. Hela (Cate Blanchett) is a brilliant villain, Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) is the bisexual warrior goddess icon we all need, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is a big golden retriever memelord, Bruce (Mark Ruffalo) is a good buddy who needs protected, Heimdall (Idris Elba) is our lord and savior. Etcetera.

2. Wonder Woman
This is cinematic gold. This movie was such a relief and such a celebration. Diana (Gal Gadot) is the other bisexual warrior goddess icon we need and also Etta (Lucy Davis) is absolutely everything.

1. The Fate of the Furious
Admittedly two of the best times we’ve had at the movies involved being able to drink during, but that’s a coincidence. This is a beautiful garbage movie full of a beautiful garbage family and the stupidest most wonderful nonsense ever, and I’m so glad of it.

Biggest Emotion-Grabbers

(Emotions other than intense happiness, since that was covered above.)

4. The Shape of Water
This movie, as we said last weekend, is flipping weird, but it’s beautiful and quiet and touching and just… lovely. It might not be for everyone, but it’s lovely.

3. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
For joy but also heartwrenching…ness both because it’s inspiring to watch Wonder Woman come to be and because a movie about bisexual polyamory that’s not only committed and tender and loving and emotionally intense but real is something that never happens and should always.

2. Get Out
This emotion, on the other hand, is some cross between anxiety, dread, and disgust at the world. This is such a fascinating movie, and while I don’t feel it’s my place to get into all of the details I feel it is my place to say it’s expertly done.

1. Hidden Figures
This emotion is pride, mostly. I am proud of these real people and the people who made this and the fact that this is a story we can tell and that it’s true and that it just rocks. Also Janelle Monae, Taraji P. Henson, and Octavia Spencer are goddesses.

Some Standout Ladies

10. All of the women of Star Wars
Leia (Carrie Fisher) always. Bless you space mom, thank you for sending us your bees and love. Rey (Daisy Ridley) always. We love our daughter. Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) is a beautiful delight and we also love the hell out of her. Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern) is, surprise, also a bisexual goddess. I want more Maz (Lupita Nyong’o) in Episode IX, dammit. I’m glad Kaydel (Billie Lourd) got more to do and I dibsed her on principle.

9. Lady Bird McPherson (Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird)
As drift partner said, Saoirse deserves her damn Oscar for this emotional and compelling performance. Period.

8. (As mentioned,) Hela and Valkyrie
These two are opposites, enemies, and wonders. Hela is the most extra character, from the horns to the cape to the necroswords to the dramatic magic, and Cate Blanchett was clearly having the time of her life. Val is a tragic babe with a happy outcome, a pegasus-riding sword-wielder, and the kind of character women rarely get to be. They both make a great movie even greater.

7. Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch, Batman and Harley Quinn)
I’m counting it! We watched this on-demand one night and then immediately ran out to buy it because it is a perfect movie. It exists in the same continuity as Batman: The Animated Series, but it’s rated significantly more PG-13, and Harley is done perfectly. She’s a big bisexual nerd trying to make good, flirting and punching and punning and singing and literally saving the world with her love for Ivy (Paget Brewster). Especially after Suicide Squad, this movie is a breath of fresh air and so is this incarnation of our best clown princess weirdo.

6. Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall, Professor Marston…)
Like, I’ve always loved Rebecca Hall, but this performance is transcendent. Not because it’s flashy or particularly weird, but because it’s heartfelt and honest and, yes, quite h-o-t. It’s the best kind of movie about queer women, which is to say one that actually comes through a queer female gaze and not a straight male one, and Rebecca Hall shines as a fully realized person with fully real desires and appeal.

5. Michelle “MJ” Jones (Zendaya Coleman, Spider-Man: Homecoming)
She is just what we need in everything, namely a snarky black girl who takes no shit from anyone but isn’t afraid to give it. She’s so deadpan and perfect and such a great addition to the universe and the story and I’m excite to see how she ends up being properly MJ.

4. Mantis (Pom Klementieff, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2)
These movies are definitely hit and miss in a lot of ways, but there are some universal truths, among them that space is very beautiful to look at and that Mantis is an adorable sincere autistic baby who needs to be protected. She’s so utterly charming and her need to be loved and be helpful is, uh, #relatable.

3. Cipher (Charlize Theron, The Fate of the Furious)
This is a garbage film, but she is the garbage queen. All of ur cars are belong to me.

2. Laura Kinney (Dafne Keen, Logan)
This kid. Just her performance in the final act of the movie nearly put this movie on the emotion-grabbing list, too, because she’s heartwrenching. She’s a little badass through the film, but she’s also so little and good and I’m proud of her and would like to make her cookies.

1. All of the women of The Lego Batman Movie
Obviously Barbara (Rosario Dawson) is the main female character in this movie, and she kicks so much ass and is just so delightful. I’m also talking about my favorite thing, the (potential) Gotham City Sirens triumvirate of Harley (Jenny Slate), Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz), and Poison Ivy (Riki Lindholme). That’s the perfect film right there. Get on it.

–your fangirl heroine.

Spoiler Alert Sunday :: our thoughts on Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

So I will begin by saying: gosh, we enjoyed this movie. I mean, that should be kind of a gimme, considering it’s about the bisexual triad responsible for creating and inspiring Wonder Woman, who is a wonderful and kickass character and a feminist inspiration. But I went in expecting to go “oh, that was really good,” not necessarily to feel as many things as I did.

Here’s the thing. A lot of what I felt was deeply personal, and not necessarily the sort of personal I want to or can find words to describe in detail. There was a quiet beauty to this story and its telling, though, that I can explain.

Let’s start with Rebecca Hall, portraying scholar of psychiatry, wife, and muse Elizabeth Marston. I have always been very fond of Rebecca Hall but this performance was poignant and sometimes painful but thrilling. (I’m not great at award predictions, and I doubt this will garner the proper attention to secure her any nominations, but I’d be very much supportive of it if it did come to pass by some miracle.) She was this fascinating balance of caring and heartsick and abrasive and vulnerable and angry and just so many things, and it’s not just the “true story” aspect of things that made this character seem very real, real in a way a lot of female characters don’t. It was a thoughtful portrayal that was full of nuance and flaw and dimensions. Also, she’s gorgeous and incredibly electric to watch.

Bella Heathcote, as the student who became the Marstons’ lover and mother of two of the triad’s children Olive Byrne, was decidedly more openly caring and vulnerable most of the time and yet perhaps the figure with the most ultimate power in the situation. She naturally has a sort of unusual porcelain doll quality to her, which worked to her advantage here for certain (one of the first scenes is the Marstons discussing the psychological advantages or burdens of Olive’s physical beauty, which was itself fascinating). But she was also so, so good at the moments where more steel was required of her.

Luke Evans was the titular Professor (William Moulton) Marston, and quite good as well. I haven’t seen him in many things, but what I have seen has been… well, a Fast and Furious film or something, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect from him. It was interesting to watch a movie in which he was the protagonist, technically, and the guiding figure of the story, but he as a character was quick to ascribe more importance to the two women in his life and he as an actor was quick to let the two actresses take the spotlight much more often as it suited. He was a framing device sometimes more than a character, but he was also, I must say, a very good ally. The construction of the story (scenes from the trio’s lives intertwined with an interrogation by, essentially, the old-timey morals police) provided him ample time to elaborate on his psychological theory and the motivation behind his creation and handling of Wonder Woman as a character.

But honestly, there’s a lot that can really only be experienced for yourself. It’s possible that it’ll hit some of y’all differently than it hit us, because not everyone is us (and let’s not mince words, I’m sure being Sapphic women made it hit us more strongly than it might hit others), but it’s small and beautiful and wholly worth it.

–your fangirl heroine.

Film Friday :: 2013 in film (5 award-type movies, 5 action-type movies)

I’ve come to the conclusion that the big trends with what I see are award-buzzy sorts of things and action-related sorts of things; of course, there are others, but those are the big categories.  So here is me ranking some of those that I saw this year.

Award-type movies
I had feelings about all of these to an extent and they either deserve nominations for some things or deserved them.  Linking to past discussions thereof.

1. Beasts of the Southern Wild
2. Much Ado About Nothing
3. Short Term 12
4. 12 Years a Slave
5. Gravity

Plus bonus for all of these movies: two of the five feature nonwhite protagonists and four of the five feature female protagonists, and all of these handle such things with nuance, sympathy, and respect.  That’s awesome.  Beasts of the Southern Wild made me way more emotional than most films have the ability to and managed to feel both realistic and magical.  12 Years a Slave made me emotional, too, albeit in a different and admittedly more uncomfortable but necessarily so way.  Gravity is almost entirely comprised of Sandra Bullock, by herself, which is amazing (I can’t actually think of another film that does that with a female character), and Short Term 12, in addition to handling the subjects of foster care and familial abuse with care and respect and featuring a romantic relationship that was acknowledged as being flawed but also not destroyed just for the sake of narrative angst, featured a realistic and multilayered relationship between two female characters (Brie Larson and Kaitlyn Dever, respectively).  And, well, the last of them is Joss Whedon doing Shakespeare, which is just greatness.

Action-type movies
Same goes.

1. Pacific Rim
2. Thor: The Dark World
3. Iron Man 3
4. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
5. Machete Kills

Yeah, okay, all of these have flaws.  I could have done without Machete Kills‘ multiple trips to the fridge, and Hansel and Gretel was cheesy as hell (but it made me smile, and Gemma Arterton was there, so it can stay).  The MCU (and really most all movies) could stand to up its diversity quota for sure.  But the thing that all of these movies have in common is that they made me smile.  I saw a lot of movies this year that did not make me smile in the slightest, so this is something special.  But again: two of these featuring nonwhite protagonists, and between two and four of them featuring female protagonists (depending on if you class the MCU ladies as main or supporting characters, I guess, though I’d tend toward the former). 

Another thing these films all have in common is that each one features ladies kicking ass prominently.  Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako is, bar none, the hero of Pacific Rim and a wonderful badass with a classic character arc refreshingly applied to a character who’s not a white guy; the charming white guy of the film, Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh, could have gone down a journey of manpain, but instead dealt with it and proceeded to cheerlead like nothing for her (without their relationship ever being forced down an explicitly romantic route, although they were totally in love).  Oh, and her relationship with her non-blood father (Idris Elba’s Stacker) was also beautiful and much more heartwrenching than something in a movie about robots punching sea aliens usually would be.  Thor 2 gave moments in the sun to all of its ladies (Natalie Portman’s Jane, Kat Dennings’ Darcy, Jaimie Alexander’s Sif, and Rene Russo’s Frigga) and valued their respective strengths equally, Iron Man 3 featured both an excellent morally gray lady scientist (Rebecca Hall’s Maya — also, I’m tentatively mentioning a belatedly started Maya Hansen Lives campaign, because of reasons) and an excellent CEO temporarily gone physical fighter emerging from the flames (Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper).

The other two movies on this list were decidedly and more openly silly, and I do not deny this at all.  But, again, they made me smile.  And that counts for something.

–your fangirl heroine.

Spoiler Alert Saturday :: my thoughts on Iron Man 3

…are best summed up in the phrase “yes, all right!”

This is to say that I did really like this movie, and straightforwardly so.  It had

• Excellent ladies (because Pepper [Gwyneth Paltrow] rocks always, yes, and Maya [Rebecca Hall] definitely interested me — I mean, lady scientists always, yes, and on top of/because of that she sort of pinged me with a few stray Bennett feelings I think?).
• Re: the above, Bechdel test pass!
• Emotional darkness, but not too much that it felt overwhelming.
• Politics, but not too much that it felt overwhelming.
• Interesting points about the showmanship of politics.
• A good helping of snark (mostly Tony [Robert Downey Jr.] of course, but everyone snarked a little).
• A good helping of noir (because seriously, the fact that it was Shane Black who also did Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang directing had me noticing this everywhere, and really, it was… a little bit the same movie [narration, tone, Christmas, the life-dangling-by-threads, the decoys in the less-good department] but I’m not complaining, I love that movie and also I love noir).
• Some science bros after the credits (hiii, Mark Ruffalo with glasses).
• Guy Pearce being sleazy, which is definitely his m.o. of late, isn’t it?
• Science in general!!!  I have said it before and I will say it again, while I am not particularly science-minded myself, gosh I love when fictional people talk about/do science.  Especially of the neuro- variety, so I was very pleased here.  Also, while I stand firm in my theory that 3D digital screen readouts are never used in situations where nothing bad is happening, I appreciate that Tony Stark uses them in the context not of doing bad but of investigating bad, so.
• A little boy (Harley, played by Ty Simpkins) who didn’t feel cloying to me.
• Rhodey (Don Cheadle) being pretty cool and badass too.
• Mostly, though, PEPPER.  Who has always been a badass in her way, but (specific spoiler I guess) well, there are few things I love more than badass ladies rising literally from the ashes to do badass things.  So.

–your fangirl heroine.