jaggedwolf | Movies Rapidfire

Saw a bunch of movies the past few months, have some opinions in reverse order of when I saw them.

You’ve Got Mail

These two deserve each other, I say, with no compliments to either.

I’m convinced the independent bookstore was poorly run from the beginning and thus I could only feel sympathy for the dead mom parts of her side, not anything business-related. She wasn’t even relying on it for her livelihood apparently? My fond teen memories of bookstores are of big box bookstores and so I had no distaste for that, though I do think it’s funny that firstly, the guy barely does any work for said bookstore while getting all the credit/blame, and secondly, it’ll get inevitably crushed by the rise of Amazon.

I liked the morning routine scenes though, and the mutual breakup with the columnist guy. Oh, and the two of them comically avoiding each other.

Ben-Hur

Man, I thought there would be a lot more homoerotic shirtless vengeance in this than there was :/

I liked the flip from cautious friendliness to absolute enmity between Judah and Messala at the beginning, given the whole Roman Empire, the final chariot race was fun to watch, and the dynamic of Judah with that consul guy. But the rest of the movie dragged.

Also, the desire to depict Jesus while committing to never show his face and to never say “Jesus” got really funny really fast.

The scene in ~30 AD where the emperor asks the consul and goes woah, who’s that rad dude with you (the rad dude is Ben-Hur), did give me a moment of forgetting my Roman emperor knowledge.

Me: Huh, the emperor looks and sounds really old, I guess I’ve been incorrectly thinking of Augustus as a young/middle-aged man during his imperatorship

Me, five minutes later in the film: Oh wait, they mentioned Tiberius, right it’s his turn, of course it’s an old man.

Me, googling after the film: ...Augustus died in 14 AD at ag 75, he was an old guy while emperor.

Master and Commander

Boats? Boat. A fun watch.

Had discretion shots of injuries that still made me wince terribly. I, uh, forgot about the child labor of even the rich children when it comes to the British Naval system at this time. (Have just realized how young the midshipmen in Obra Dinn are, oof.)

Absolutely did not expect the Galapagos Island subplot?? They have this surgeon BFF of the captain and I was like oh, he’ll probably get into normal arguments with him about whether it’s worth pursuing the French ship and the safety of the crew, but nah bro, the surgeon gets pissiest when he doesn’t get to spend a week studying new species on the Galapagos Islands....when he’s serving on a Navy ship during the Napoleonic wars? My dude, you are a surgeon, I assume you weren’t press-ganged into this. Their friendship is cute though.

Movie did a good job explaining the boat v. boat strategies and depicting crew life.

Ending felt Sisyphean: we will always be beating to quarters.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

A good adaptation of the prequel. I thought the actors for Snow and Lucy Gray did a great job. I’m disappointed they didn’t make Viola Davis say “Hippity hoppity”, c’mon, she'd have killed it even more.

I’ve seen both the book and the film get criticized for Snow’s turn in the last third happening too fast, but I 100% bought it in both mediums. You can justify so many of his actions till then as self-interest or looking out for his family, but you can also see the self-rationalization hiding a darker, impulsive side. And he is incredibly impulsive - jumping into the truck with the tributes, dropping that handkerchief in the tank, shooting the Mayor’s daughter. He can feel regret later, as when he sobs over Sejanus’s belongings, but he’ll go ahead and do it anyway.

Lucy Gray was exactly the cipher of a performer she needed to be. Zegler did a great job with the songs. Seeing her perspective of the games did way more for me than seeing the non-games perspective in the first Hunger Games film, even though both books benefit from how deeply enmeshed they are in their protagonist’s PoV. I thought nothing of her killing Reaper and Wovey while reading the books, but her watching Dill die because of her was a harder watch.

On one hand, it would’ve been fun to see the District 3 tributes mess with tech as they did in the book, on the other hand I thought the deaths flowed well. Reaper and Lamina were my favorites. Dill as Reaper’s breaking point to pull down the flag and arrange the corpses was excellent, and I liked the way he went out, from warning poor Wovey to sitting regally as snakes engulfed him.

The other mentors could have had a more shading. Clemensia disappears entirely post-snake, and I didn’t like Snow prodding Jessup’s mentor into using water against Jessup when she came up with that idea herself in the book.

Oddly, I think the only part of the film that didn’t work for me was the very end. Reading the description of Snow leaving a poisoned morphling bottle for the Dean felt way more ominous than watching Dinklage act out the dying, and the final Donald Sutherland voiceover was so unnecessary. Let Blyth stare at the statue, it’s fine!

The Marvels

The most I’ve enjoyed an MCU movie in a while, though I admittedly only bother seeing a few of them. (Wakanda Forever’s best part was its opening as everything after left me unable to take the domestic politics of Wakanda seriously, the second Dr Strange movie felt very stupid to me, Captain Marvel worked better for me when contemplating its tropes than when actually watching it, and I have no memory of the second Ant-Man.)

Geez, I guess before The Marvels, Black Panther was the last one I actively liked? Anyway,

Kamala Khan and her family were perfect to me
The swapping action sequences were sick and I’m glad I saw’em on a big screen
I loved the use of the Skrull torture-slash-memory device (because of course I did)
If I think too hard about Carol and the Rambeau family I get sad :(
The big Flerkin scene was so fucking funny, and I didn’t even realize what song was playing till after.
Training montage scene was cute - overall I bought the team dynamic completely. Three is a good number for a movie-length teamup.

Bits of the character stuff felt a tad rushed, and it would’ve been more of a fun rug-pull to have this movie take place after a theoretical Captain Marvel 2 that ends with her destroying the Kree intelligence as a big happy ending, but the plot was straightforward enough to follow anyway.

I hope there does end up being a movie/show with that teased Young Avengers crew. I should get around to watching Hawkeye.

Bottoms

A co-worker asked me if this film was good or bad and I went ??? I don’t know ??? I did deeply appreciate both the Total Eclipse of the Heart and the It’s Complicated needle drops.

Barbie

I mostly enjoyed watching the expressions of Margot Robbie and America Ferrera, including when said expressions were directed at each other. And the Closer to Fine and Billie Eilish song moments were great. Plot-wise...eh, it’s like Bottoms, where I think it’s best to enjoy the individual jokes than expecting it to all hang together.

Red, White & Royal Blue

Solid and fun adaptation. I didn’t mind most of the changes from the book, like Alex’s un-divorced parents, or Alex already knowing he’s bi, or Britain having a king instead of a queen. The only change I didn’t like was Princess Beatrice being Henry’s younger sister who has never Been A Problem for the royals, when in the book she’s the more troubled older sister - the book’s dynamic is way more interesting.