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- Watching Adam Driver sink in quicksand must have been how it felt to have anything to do with this film. Itâs a bad film, and I should feel bad for watching it, and I do. Media can make you into a worse person, and this film is proof.
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I really wanted it to be even decent so I could watch it with my dinosaur-obsessed 10-year-old. I tend to screen movies before I watch them, so I ended up watching it alone and it was far more miserable than I had expected. I wasnât expecting a Jurassic Park-level masterpiece but an enjoyable popcorn flick would have been nice. Instead it was boring, dark, joyless, made the recent Godzilla schlock look like Shakespeare.
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Thor: Love and Thunder. On the one hand, a classic Thor adventure. On the other, a slightly confused film thatâs deeply fun and silly, irreverent in the main, and yet featuring a cancer subplot. I enjoy the fact it doesnât take itself seriously, and find the grim villain and the doomed love interest very odd components. I think Marvelâs film future should do more of This Sort of Thing, but with less cancer, please. I have no interest in âseriousâ Marvel films, but the daft ones are good fun.
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On one hand I agree and I am all on board with Thor being a comedic character. On the other hand, Cap 1 and Winter Soldier might be my favorite MCU movies so Iâm on board with serious, too.
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I liked big chunks of Winter Soldier, but ultimately Marvel is allergic to real stakes unless itâs killing love interests; New York was destroyed and the death toll was like a hundred people. Undoing The Snap was bad enough in terms of robbing it of impact, but pretending to seamlessly reintigrate billions of people into a world without wars, widespread famine, and genocide, was just a blatant return to the status quo and ignoring any possible consequences despite the fact thatâs where interesting and serious stories would be. They never want to be more than fluff, so I would rather they be funny.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once is now on Prime, so I got around to that. Itâs delightfully silly and surprisingly well-acted. However, it is yet another example of a problem Iâve long had, but hadnât really described (mild spoiler below): when fiction describes a desirable state of affairs made possible by, essentially, magic, I take away the dual message that this state of affairs is valuable, and also that itâs impossible. Buffy, for example, shows girls being powerful (yay!), but only because theyâre magic. Which, on the one hand, maybe helps audiences get used to the idea of young women being powerful, but also undermines that expectation. Similarly, in EEAAO, the main characterâs large unrealized potential gives her some advantages in using the science dingus the movie is premised on. Thereâs this genuinely touching framing to that realization, that all her disappointments and failures contribute to her value, which feels like itâs trying to help audiences feel like itâs okay to have failed. I love that! Itâs such a humane message, and, as a failure, one Iâd like to have been able to connect with. But the only mechanism the movie has to offer for failures being valued is via sci-fi nonsense.
I felt the same way when reading Becky Chambersâ Monk and Robot books. There, it wasnât any explicit magic, itâs just that everybody up and decides to be groovy. So thereâs this marvelously healing, hopeful depiction of a sustainable society without want or power struggles, and it just makes me feel like a good society is even less possible than I did before I read them, because it makes it seem like the only way for society to become good is impossible to get to from here.
This probably says more about my psychology than anything else.
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I found Love/Thunder unwatchable and only lasted about the first 30-40 mins. I donât mind when Marvel tries to be goofy or comedic, but I largely prefer when itâs serious with a chunk of snark and witty dialogue. Like @Mirefox, I liked Winter Soldier a lot and think Cap1 was quite good. The first Avengers movie was also really good for what it was trying to doâwas there ever a super team movie before that succeeded so well?
Marvel seems to be floundering badly ATM, and I think itâs because the tone of their movies has become so uneven. Across the spectrum, you have Love/Thunder and Guardians, then you have Dr. Strange and Ant Man, then Capt. Marvel, and then the Avengers. And I would argue that the Raimi Dr. Strange had a tone completely all its own and not fitting with any of the other movies. Black Widow was an unwatchable mess that switched tones constantly (like Love/Thunder was doing).
Looking at that in comparison to the very consistent tone in the first Caps, Iron Mans, and Avengers, it just seems to me that Marvel departed from a tone that was really working for them.
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I feel like maybe you missed some of the details in EEAAO.
âSurprisingly well-actedâ? Did you not know it earned 4 acting Oscar nominations and won 3 before you watched it? I donât usually agree with the Academy, but this is one of the few cases where I think they may have gotten it right.
The âsci-fi nonsenseâ is an exaggerated metaphor for the modern digitally-connected world. The âmain characterâ isnât a powerful young woman. Itâs an elderly woman who is trying to regain a connection with her daughter. The root of Joyâs despair is that her mother is trying to cover up Joyâs relationship from her traditional grandfather. Out of all the skills and alternate lives that Evelyn passes through on her journey, the one that addresses her crisis is just âbe present and supportiveâ. Thereâs no magic in that, she just needs to pay attention to the version of Waymond that has been by her side all along. Wherever your kids end up, whoever they turn out to be, your job is to be the rock that sits patiently on the cliffside next to them so that they know youâre there for them. And if you have to settle for a mundane life of âlaundry and taxesâ so that you can be available for this purpose, thatâs ok. Maybe it is your psychology. I have a friend whose daughter took her own life during the lockdown in 2020, so this one resonated with me. I donât bother to collect physical media anymore, but I was happy that Netflix sent me a consolation copy when they shut down their disc service earlier this year.
Love/Thunder was trash. I liked Ragnarok, but that felt like someone had a leash on Taika Waititi. That restraint was gone on the latest one, and Jojo Rabbit is not the kind of peanut butter I prefer in my MCU chocolate.
I did not! I was thinking of this movie as having actors who are known for, in one case, martial arts movies, in the second, being the token Asian guy in a million movies, and, in a third, being the promising child actor who didnât act again for like 40 years because he didnât want the career of the second actor.
As for the spoilery part, youâre right that it wasnât magic which gave her the final resolution, but it also wasnât her failures and disappointments.Those were crucial to get her to that point via the magic, but they motivated her, for decades, to fail to be supportive. Instead, she thought she owed the world, or her father, or herself, success, and she wanted to pass on that expectation to her daughter. Thatâs why she felt like she had to turn her hobbies into profit-making mini-careers. If she had already been a success, she would have had space to think about what her family needed from her (which is why they never actually show an alternate universe in which she is successful and has a child: if it were consistent, that would just be better). Indeed, when we see her in a loving relationship with someone other than Waymond, it looks pretty nice, except for the hotdogfingers.
So, what I needed to make the point I was hoping for was either something suggesting that, in other universes in which she was successful, she never learned the humility to attend to the needs of her family, or something suggesting that success never satiates the need for success, but merely makes her feel ever more responsibility to succeed further. Something like that might have struck me as schmaltzy, but it would have given some sort of payoff to the âbecause youâre a failure, you have the quality we needâ which didnât make me feel like the failures were irrelevant or negative.
The lesson âbe present and supportive for the people you loveâ is a good one. I donât mind that they made that movie. But Alpha Waymondâs line about how her failures and disappointments were what made her ideal got my hopes up that they were going for a slightly different lesson, offering people who see themselves as failures some way to find value in themselves which would let them get past the sense of manipulative sentimentality and connect with them. As a failure who is struggling at mid-life (which, for some reason, is what we call it when weâre probably a good deal closer to death than birth) to find a purpose now that my kids donât need me much, I could have used that.
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Lots of thought provoking sentiments on Marvel content. The franchise has had increasingly intractable problems maintaining any consistency in both quality and tone. Come to think of it, that describes every franchise I can think of.
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Napoleon. Where to even begin? 
The best, most accurate performance of the entire film was Catherine Walkerâs as Marie Antoinette in the opening scenes.
Thatâs about the only good thing I can say.
Our screening included an introduction and Q&A with Alexander Mikaberidze, a leading Napoleon expert, author, and historian. He commented that he had been moved to tears at the end of each viewing. (He clearly meant tears of anger and frustration.)
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The Menu. Yeah, I get it. I wish I didnât. I donât think there is anything more depressing for me than seeing actors strictly limited to the strictures of their roles and those roles being, well, not that great. Self-defeating social commentary.
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I didnât make it more than halfway through. Your comment is 100% on-point.
So, was watching Aladdin on Disney+ with kids today and at the start it come with a cultural trigger warning - apparently it uses racist stereotypes that are bad.
Huh - I thought it was a good story, but I suppose everyone gets to be upset about something these days.
I wonder how long it will take for me to be in the position to be upset.
Does it count if you become upset about people getting too upset?
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Yeah! Can I get upset about people using unfair stereotypes of oppression and colonisation / racism?
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Rebel Moon, Part 1, on Netflix.
https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81464239?s=i&trkid=14751296&vlang=en&clip=81721802
Some really cinematographically beautiful moments. Planetscapes, ships in orbit (cue Blade Runner line), and all the cool shit that goes with space opera. Some cool fight scenes. Clearly the director is inspired by Star Wars, Dune, and maybe some WH40K?
Plot? Not so much. Coherent story? I mean, I guess?
All that is to say, what the shit was this beautiful trash. Itâs like going on a date with a supermodel and finding out she has a third grade education.
I want @OhBollox to watch this just to see his comments
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I wouldnât even be as generous as you. I thought it was a dumpster fire through and through. Even suffered a little for having too many locations that were low-detail green screen. I caught a whiff of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but that movie at least did it first - 20 years ago. There was absolutely nothing likable for me in this movie.
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