Hey hey hey! Happy Friday, folks. We’re getting some relatively nice days after a run of Weather(tm). And there is a lot to look forward to media-wise, this weekend.
The new season of Jessica Jones is out on Netflix. I am planning on seeing A Wrinkle In Time in theaters. (I read that book roughly one hundred billion times as a kid, along with any of Madeline L’Engle’s I could get my grubby kid-hands on.) In general we’re creeping up on a bunch of shows starting up again and the oscar nominees are finally loosening their grip on theaters — making way for some big, explosion-based fun.
Here’s some fun stuff that’s streaming this week:
Netflix
Our old flix friend has Moon. A polished idea scifi film that I was impressed by. Sam Rockwell does a fabulous job playing the lone technician working for corporations on the moon. The film addresses some traditional scifi questions as well as digging into potential endgames for a mechanized future.
Having come out in 2009, I feel as though it was at the forefront of the wave of big-budget high-concept scifi which we (well, definitely I) have been enjoying for the past several years.
A warning – certified horrible human Kevin Spacey voices an AI in the film. Which is a fucking shame. Because it’s a really good movie.
Amazon has Thanks For Sharing — a film I have thrust upon many friends through the years since I’ve seen it. Brought to you by part of the creative team behind acclaimed indie film The Kids Are Alright, Sharing stars Mark Ruffalo as an addict in a twelve-step program. The story is a complex, but sympathetic look at twelve-step programs, how they work for folks and their limitations.
Kids
Netflix has made-for-tv movie High School Musical and its sequel, which are cute and upbeat.
Prime has 2005 scifi adventure Zathura.
Hulu has last year’s live-action Power Rangers, which was a pretty fun (and diversely-casted) kid-aimed action film.
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That’s all for this week! I wish you peace and pizza.
I don’t pay attention to critics of film. I often, in fact, go out of my way to avoid other people’s opinions of a film before I’ve seen it. And afterwards, I may go check out what other people thought, but I don’t really care that much. What one will enjoy is pretty subjective, and the collective consensus about pop culture skews white, straight and male to a degree I find positively demoralizing.
This is all to say I mostly don’t give much of a fuck about the Oscars. I sometimes watch them for the red carpet spectacle and fashion, but I didn’t last night. It’s nice that Jordan Peele won best writer for Get Out, though. (Kind of ridiculous that he was the first black person ever to win best writer, though. We have so far to go and just a huge history of bullshit to try to dismantle.)
Anyhow, while I didn’t see the oscars, I did get out to see Red Sparrow. I was amused afterwards when I looked up info about it on the way out of the theater to see that people were accusing it of “failing at its women’s empowerment message”. I have no idea where they got the notion that it was supposed to have a women’s empowerment message. Certainly not textually. Maybe the director said something somewhere?
Anyhow, it’s a spy/counterspy film set (largely) in Russia. And its the kind of story where everyone is super dangerous and the Russians speaking to each other basically never speak in Russians, but always have Russian accents. It’s a bit too thriller-y for my usual tastes, but it’s a woman-led action movie, so it made it onto my list anyway.
Before I saw it, I was calling it “the sort-of Black Widow” movie. The heroine does indeed have some cosmetic parallels to the Marvel character – ballet, deception, catch 22s and coercion.
The story is not really exceptional if one is familiar with the spy thriller genre. The only things that really do distinguish it are that a woman is the main character and the focus on sexual exploitation as a spy gambit.
This is where any argument about its ever being intended to be about women’s empowerment falls right down for me. It’s not about voluntary use of sex as a tool in a spy’s arsenal. It’s about people who don’t quite know what they’re in for being trained as mini modern Mata Haris. There are male-bodied folks as well as female in the training program, but most of the grinding humiliation and forced participation is directed at female characters.
The fact that Jennifer Lawrence’s main character gets a little slice of her own back by the end of the film after being put through this program is mildly emotionally satisfying but in no way diminishes not just the story she’s been through nor how the movie chooses to tell the story.
Both the story and the movie are about exploiting womens’ sexuality. And the story is engaging, but it’s not groundbreaking nor particularly political (ironic for a spy thriller, I guess). I feel as though if a similar film had been made with the same characters 10-20 years ago, Lawrence’s character would not have been the main character but would have been an accessory to some guy’s story.
The one thing that is slightly empowering, in a cold, shattered sort of way, is that our heroine ultimately saves herself. There are a lot of men in the story pressing her in many directions and putting her in invidious positions over and over and she uses what she’s learned to outsmart, outlast and manipulate them. It’s a story about creating new options for yourself when you’re given a choice of evils, but it doesn’t lead us to believe that the new third way is, in contrast, an unequivocal good.
For my many sensitive friends, I will say that the film has many, many awful scenes – torture, sexual coercion, violent rape & rape attempts. Basically all the CWs ever should go on this film. I didn’t find the rapes to be diminished or sexualized, for what little that’s worth.
It kind of reminded me of La Femme Nikita in attitude, though this is a more difficult watch (and I didn’t find Nikita easy). I’m sure that it’d be enjoyable to folks who are comfortable enough with spy genre tropes. I’m equally sure that the mild emotional satisfaction the resolution of the film brings is not remotely enough for anyone uncomfortable with any of the plot elements I mentioned to push through and watch it anyway.
So, honestly, the best thing about it is probably that it out-performed Bruce Willis’ Death Wish at the box office in the first weekend. As well it should. As little empowerment as Red Sparrow offered, it has to be better than two women fridged in the first ten minutes as motivation for the main character. And in our current climate of mass shootings, I’d really rather see sex used as a weapon than weapons used as solutions to All The Things in my downtime.
It is a soggy, drenched evening here on the East coast of the U.S. It’s the kind of night that makes me bitter that “it was a dark and stormy night” is the go-to example of triteness in writing, because if you’ve been out on a dark and stormy night, you know it’s spooky and sometimes also miserable. To be barely able to see and have wind and rain whipping around your head and making creepy noises – you can see why people go there to evoke mood.
This weekend, films I may see in the theater include Red Sparrow, Phantom Thread, and Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.
Here are some streaming recs for those who are (wisely, if you’re anywhere near here) staying in, tonight:
Netflix
New streaming on netflix is Wind River, a mystery thriller starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen. I haven’t seen this one – it was on my list and got away from me, as movies sometimes do, but the critics liked it quite a bit. I may watch it myself, this weekend.
It also has one of my cheesetastic favorites, the 2001 Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie.
This is not a good movie, per se, but I like it a lot. And Jolie does a bunch of her own stunts, which is impressive. Just…don’t look at the plot too much. Or at all, if you can help it.
Hulu
First let me say that I finally got around to watching the first season of Hulu’s Runaways, and it was pretty good. It might actually be more enjoyable if you’ve never read the comics and don’t know which cards are being left out of the deck, but I’ve read them and still enjoyed it.
They also have the movie Mermaids (1990). Cher and Winona Ryder star (along with an itty bitty baby Christina Ricci) in a film about mothers, daughters and romantic relationships. It has a bit of funny and a bit of moving and all in all is kind of sweet.
Prime
Prime has what I can only describe as a cancer comedy: 50/50.
It’s a buddy comedy based on the real life experiences of writer Will Reiser. It runs the gamut of emotions and feels very real and visceral in places while still being overall pretty funny.
Kids
Not movies, but Hulu has the first three seasons of Steven Universe, now, which I adore. And they also have the classic Pinky and the Brain and the series off of which it spun, Animaniacs.
Netflix has the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in its current kid movie selection.
Annihilation was one of the movies I was really looking forward to, this year, and I wasn’t disappointed by it. Visually striking and beautiful, which is perhaps to be expected from director Alex Garland. Also thoughtful, interesting and full of characters that are largely better developed than I would expect, given the number of them.
Five different women with their own idiosyncrasies and their own voices travel through a dream-like reality and carry us with them on their journey. As I told a friend just before I saw it, Annihilation is a woman-led ensemble action scifi horror movie, and is therefore what I would like to pump directly into my veins to wake up every morning and keep myself vital.
I know that there were questions of whitewashing the movie. Other people have discussed that with more depth of knowledge than I could. It does, however star five women of different ages, all of whom are portrayed with their own strengths and weaknesses, most of them are scientists. None are sexualized outside of the snippets of actual sex scenes we see Natalie Portman’s character in, and those are well-placed in an emotional context.
So: problematic, yes. But I enjoyed it anyway. I liked seeing women as strong and as intellectual on the screen. I liked seeing them get to be emotional and seeing the ways they dealt with those emotions.
In its treatment of women it was a nice change from the only other of Garland’s films I’ve seen so far, Ex Machina. That bought hard into some deeply irritating sexist tropes. It may have been attempting commentary on them, but I’m not convinced it succeeded.
I keep thinking I should watch Ex Machina again, considering that, unlike the majority of movies I didn’t enjoy watching the first time, it has really stuck in my head and kept me thinking, which I believe is a point in its favor. However, there are so many things on my to-watch list, I don’t know when I’ll be able to make that happen.
But I digress.
Like in Ex Machina, setting is like an additional character in the film, driving the plot forward in the way that setting rarely does. I got a very palpable sense of the the landscape our characters ranged through. And that landscape developed throughout the film, carrying the film’s themes of creative destruction and transformational journeys within itself as well as passing it on to the people moving through it.
It is deeply a science fiction movie, full of ideas and lines of thought that raise many more questions than they answer. The plot doesn’t fully resolve at the end of the film. I don’t know if that’s an artistic choice or because Garland is planning to adapt the other two novels in Jeff VanderMeer’s southern reach trilogy into films as well. After seeing this one, I hope he does. And I’d like to read the novels themselves, though I understand there are lots of differences between the screen version and the original written one (as there almost always are).
Annihilation is a rich tapestry, with a lot to take in. More, I suspect, than can be absorbed in one viewing. I certainly would be open to repeat watchings to try to take in more of its layers.
It is also very definitely a horror film. Things that happen in the dream-like, ethereal landscape are in hard contrast to the landscape itself. The horrific things that happen (and how they happen) are frequently vital clues for our band of scientists on the screen, moving the plot forward with the information they bring.
In the film landscape, there have been a slate of Big Idea Scifi films over the past several years. And I am in love with them. In love, really with the whole new hard scifi film movement that brought us Gravity, Arrival, Interstellar, and The Martian. I would definitely place Annihilation in this movement as well.
As much as I enjoy a good space opera (a fuckton, for the record) it’s nice to see some science fiction cinema that has a lot more intellectual depth and which sticks a little closer to home. It’s nice to see some bigger budgets invested in Idea Genre Fiction in general. I hope we’re starting to get past the era of snobbery in which genre fiction isn’t taken as seriously as ‘realistic’ fiction.
All fiction that works deeply for the audience is based more in emotional truth than in factual reality. Science fiction and horror can bring us just as much emotional truth and deeply relevant themes as any random award-seeking biopic or Work of Art.
The upshot of all this is that I enjoyed Annihilation a lot. It was effective as both scifi and horror. It had lots of intellectual badass women characters. It’s beautiful and thoughtful and emotional — pretty meaty as an experience.
If one lives in one place for any length of time, one is likely to become a regular at some business or other. Being a regular is this weird, transactional, casual relationship. It can feel awkward to be noticed, but it’s also nice to have people be nice to you.
My goal in any retail or service-receiving situation is for the person on the other side of the counter to remember me either as one of their favorite customer for the day or as completely forgettable. I try to be nice and polite to all these folks to make it easy for them to be nice and polite to me, since they pretty much have to.
This means, though, when I fall off the grid for a month or so at a time, people notice. One never goes through life without impacting others and most of us impact lots more people than we think about when we consider the question of our own worth.
The upshot of this is, if one, say, spends the vast majority of January fighting off a depressive episode and wrestling with one’s inner demons to get out of bed every morning, instead of doing one’s usual errands, one is likely to get some questions when one re-emerges.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” the guy at the sandwich shop might say. And what can I say back to that? Saying “I was locked in a Sisyphean cycle of my brain eating itself” is a bit much to lay on so casual a relationship, particularly one where the other person is supposed to show sympathy and kindness at the expense of their own energy and emotions.
I usually go with “I’ve been out of town for a while,” (true, for the week before my depressive episode began) or “I’ve been sick for a while” (true, for the week after it ended) or “It’s been really crazy at work” (true for several weeks in the middle).
To be open about one’s mental illness is all well and good, but my barista should not have to get into this shit with me just to sell me coffee, no matter how nice and friendly he appears to be.
Retail interactions aren’t where activism lives, is I guess what I’m saying. And while I sometimes do get into identity politics with service folks (like thanking someone whose nametag lists their preferred pronouns, for instance) I don’t usually go beyond a sort of queer secret-handshake-style interaction (when called for).
It’s one thing to be open and honest about this shit. We do need that. Mental illness needs to be de-stigmatized. (Hell, plenty of *physical* illnesses still need to be de-stigmatized, too. The culture of associating morality with illness and disability is a huge topic and one that is too big for this post.) But it’s okay to not tell all of the truth all of the time. It doesn’t undermine your truth. It’s not a failure of will.
So — all this is to say that stuff got to me in January. I always struggle in deep winter (the lack of light especially eats my brain). I’m behind on basically everything in my life and running to catch up. I know it’s late for me to say this, but I’m still hoping to get some good work done in 2018. I want to bend towards action and positive change.
It’s not a resolution, because I don’t make those. Just a goal or a hope. And as always, in perpetuity, it starts today, because that’s what I’ve got.
Hey all! I’ve been out of commission for a while because of family visit, depression, depression, work crunch time, depression and most recently a wicked cold that had me out of work for a few days and still has me sleeping almost as soon as I get home from anywhere.
More on all that later, though. This is our typical Friday post.
THIS WEEKEND, I will be seeing Black Panther (for the third time), and, if my cold allows me time and energy, also Annihilation and possibly also Phantom Thread, Game Night, some of the Oscar-nominated short films, and/or one of the classic films in the Sidney Poitier repertory series going on at my local theater (though most of that is double features and honestly ???? I might fall asleep. Because of the cold, not the content, obviously).
Some streaming recommendations for y’all:
Netflix
Netflix is pounding harder and harder on its original shows, and I do see why, but I came to you for movies, netflix! Please don’t forget!
Epic BBC miniseries North & South is back in rotation. If you’re a fan of costume drama or Richard Armitage looking all brooding and sexy, this is a great watch. It also has some hot takes on the industrialization of Britain and the ways inequality interacts with that in the circle of capitalism’s cause and effect. Based on the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.
For a bit more fun and a bit less realness, both Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 and Ocean’s Eleven (2001) are up right now.
Hulu
I haven’t seen it in a while, but I do remember being *ahem* strongly encouraged to watch romance The Cutting Edge by a college girlfriend and enjoying it a lot more than I expected to.
Hulu also has Frank an indie about the intersection of mental illness, exploitation and art which has a surreality that turns on a knife edge from whimsy to something a lot more difficult. It’s very well done and a fascinating watch, but not an easy one. It stars young Magneto, General Hux, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as bitter, artistic-purist queen of my fucking heart.
Prime
Amazon has one of my favorite films of last year, Logan Lucky. It’s a heist film and a justice film and a romp and emotional and I have been known to refer to it as a lost episode of Leverage.
They also have the musical film of Little Shop Of Horrors (1986), which had spot-on delightful casting and was generally well done if you can ignore the mangling of the Broadway show’s ending to something more sappy-Hollywood. It’s funny, creepy and catchy as hell.
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There we go. I’m not gonna pick out any kid-specific recs tonight because I’m honestly kind of amazed that I’m still awake.
So I’m in the middle of a freaking depressive episode. Started sometime yesterday. Spent last night laying in the dark in my bed trying to convince myself that eating was a thing that should happen (I did eventually succeed). Spending this morning listening to the entire Panic! At The Disco catalog on spotify in chronological order.
I know what started the train down, but it doesn’t really matter after a certain point. Avoiding triggers may help one avoid these things, but demystifying them does fuck-all.
This too shall pass, and I do have plans to go see some stuff this weekend. Tops on my list are Proud Mary and The Post. Other possibilities include Coco and Phantom Thread, though honestly, I am probably more likely to go see The Shape of Water or Call Me By Your Name again.
It is a three-day weekend for me (yay working in academia) so I hold out hope.
I don’t actually feel like hunting up what’s streaming where, today, that I’ve seen already. I thought I’d highlight some of the things that are streaming that are on my list (and in some cases have been for ages) that I still haven’t watched.
Less Than Zero
A young Robert Downey, jr. plays an out-of-control drug addict. This will be a hard watch but I suspect a good one. It’s on netflix.
Teeth
This film made waves when it came out almost a decade ago. I wasn’t nearly as big a horror buff then as I am now, though, and even though I was pretty delighted by the concept of the vagina dentata making its way into modern pop culture, I haven’t watched it yet, even though netflix has made it super easy.
Mulan
Being involved in pop culture spaces means I already know half the freaking songs from this movie. Just never got around to watching it. Also on netflix.
Camp
I have heard the legend of this movie from a lot of Theater Kids of a Certain Age (aka younger than I am). I have only seen snippets of the incredible music performances in it. It’s streaming on hulu.
Fences
As a former theater kid, myself, I feel like I SHOULD HAVE FOR SURE seen this movie. Not to mention it’s rated pretty highly by plenty of critics and my mom (a retired literature teacher) liked it. It’s also on hulu.
Allied
This was just one of those movies I wanted to see when it came out and never got around to. It’s streaming on amazon.
Landline
From the director and writer of one of my favorite comedies, Obvious Child, this film also stars Jenny Slate, who is fantastic. I wanted to see it when it came out and didn’t get to. It’s on amazon.
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Honestly, I probably will just keep watching episodes of The Addams Family and stupid youtube videos, instead.
I hope y’all have a great weekend! And next week, may my brain be less annoying.
I find it very difficult to be bored when engaged in conversation with a knowledgeable person on the topic of their enthusiasm.
Just as the best way to see a country or region or neighborhood is to stay with someone who lives there and knows it intimately, one of the best ways to experience pop culture is through the eyes of someone who loves it. This is not so that you absorb their view of it – for people who love something may be blind to its flaws (though they may well have eyes wide open to the flaws and love it, anyway – which can make for some very interesting discussion), but so that their enthusiasm can be a prism through which you gain a greater understanding of the way the piece of culture is viewed.
Part of this can be getting a hint of the deep contextual nuance of what makes or made a piece of art feel relevant to people at its popular height.
I have a friend who, though she is similar in age to me, missed a lot of the pop culture I grew up with. She likes seeing it through my eyes or through the eyes of her other friends who show her things that they love. There is a lot of talk in my circle about ‘catching her up’ on movies or TV or music, though that’s really not what’s happening, of course.
She is a tourist in the pop culture realms I am a native to. In spite of the fact that we were born in the same country and grew up speaking the same language, she has a completely different contextual framework than I do.
Frankly, it’s a lot of fun to introduce her to things I love, be they music, comics, movies, TV or just strange, small pieces of ephemera. She gets to see them through my lens, and I get to see them through hers.
Watching something with her that she is seeing for the first time is an absolute blast. It can also be uncomfortably revealing. All the stuff that I didn’t really pay attention to because that’s what we all did, then or because I was just a kid come into sharp relief as I am forced to look at them with fresh eyes.
It’s such an education, even with things I’ve experienced so many times before that I can recite them.
I was there, for instance, the first time she watched The Thing. It’s an older movie — considered by some (me) to be a classic and considered by many others to be a bit too schlocky with too cheesy of special effects to be taken seriously in this day and age.
But imagine watching a horror film with someone who doesn’t know any of the tropes and likely twists of the genre. Imagine not knowing any of the meta-syntactic filmmaking cues that can give away the direction a story is headed. Imagine seeing a story truly for the first time and having no clue what was going to happen and living and dying with every breath.
I hope it doesn’t make me a sadist how much I enjoyed seeing her entwined helplessly in the film moment-to-moment.
It honestly put me in mind of when I was a middle schooler and read Pride and Prejudice the first time, knowing nothing about romance tropes (I was, predictably, a scifi/fantasy nerd). I was genuinely shocked when Mr. Darcy proposed. I was further shocked at what went on between Lydia and Wickham. I had no precedent for what went on in that well-worn story.
It’s a feeling I think we eventually assume is impossible to recapture. Generally when something shocks me that way at this point it’s either something extraordinarily rare and well-crafted, or (far more frequently) it’s something truly awful. The joyous storytelling river that swept me away is largely closed to me now.
It’s nice to feel I can take short rides on it, now and again, with a friend.
So she and I were talking, over the holidays, about this phenomenon she’d experienced multiple times, where she’d experience a song or a film or whatever and not like it much, but then if a friend showed it to her again, some of their enthusiasm may rub off. Or she would see its better qualities because the filter of a friend could show them to her.
This is not to say that she replaces her own opinions with those of other folks. She is a thoughtful and engaged consumer of art. She’ll mull it all over on her own terms, but she recognized how much easier it is to appreciate something when its in its home context, as it were.
She and I get together every few weeks to watch movies together and chat. It’s quite a rewarding exchange (for both of us, I hope). My knowledge and enthusiasm for her intelligence and fresh eyes.
I hope we get to keep doing it even if she gets as jaded as I am, though I honestly doubt that’s entirely possible. In the meantime, I hope she gets as much out of experiencing things with me as I get experiencing them with her!
“Fairy tales,” Neil Gaiman once wrote, “are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
Narratives can teach us that we can win against our demons, or, I suppose, that we can lose. They also teach us the costs of fighting and of persevering. There is a strength to knowing one isn’t in that fight alone. And a strength in knowing that success is what happens if you keep going through failure after failure.
Modern fairy tales can also teach us other things. I was thinking about this again, in regards to The Shape of Water. We can learn that the one wearing a dragon skin may not always be an enemy. Just as ones wearing human skin are not always friends.
Of course, anyone who grew up a little bit Different already knows this. The ones wearing human skins (and standing, often as not, in judgement over our own) are not always friends, do not always have our best interests at heart (even when they’re supposed to) and sometimes set out to wound and erode.
One could make an argument that a dragonish heart is what makes a dragon — that someone who behaves so poorly is a dragon no matter how human the skin they are wearing. But we all know what assumptions are made when difference is so palpable and what pressures are put upon the different.
Through the cultural forge, we sometimes learn that it is easier to hate ourselves than it is to incorporate the truth that society can be quite as unfair as it is. If you believe in the justice of judgments passed upon you, it’s an ugly feeling, but the cognitive dissonance is so much less that it can be a relief, at least temporarily.
So stories where monster and beloved are one and the same are distinctly powerful. Through people sympathizing with the ugly, the broken, the overly powerful, the weak, the different and the peculiar, we learn not only that dragons can be beaten, but that they can be appreciated. They can be supported. They can be loved.
Knowing that you can be loved no matter how monstrous you appear to yourself or others is at least as profound a statement as that that evil can be defeated. That you do not, in fact, have to stop being a monster to be loved. That there is nothing wrong at all with what many people find to be monstrous.
Here are a few films for when you feel like an unloved dragon:
So, it’s 2018 (which still sounds fake to me) and it’s colder than a warlock’s willy up in my adopted New England hometown. When I woke up this morning it was 1. One degree Fahrenheit. Which is about -17 in Celsius. And it felt colder with wind chill.
I hope I don’t come across as too much of a delicate flower when I say FUCK THAT NOISE.
I actually turned the heat up at home when I got back from my Location of New Year Carousing. The only time my feet have felt warm enough, today, was when someone was sitting on them.
BUT ENOUGH WHINING. Let’s talk about something FUN. Here are some of the movies I’m looking forward to in 2018:
The Post
Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and good journalists doing what good journalists do. I love me a journalist-as-hero film and this looks like it’s gonna be a pretty strong one.
Proud Mary
Taraji P. Henson (Of Hidden Figures fame) as badass action hero. I have been yearning for this ever since I heard about it and it’s coming out in just about two weeks! wheheheeeeeeeeee.
Black Panther
Every time I see the trailer for this I fucking get chills. This is gonna be the first serious superhero movie led by a black actor since the Blade movies and it is long fucking overdue. And I am just in urgent need of the glorious design of this movie. Give me some Afro-futurism and some solarpunk! I NEED IT! And badass warrior women! I NEED THAT TOO. I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS MOVIE. GO SEE IT. I’M GONNA SEE IT AT LEAST THREE TIMES.
Annihilation
I am adoring the buttered and sugared fuck out of all the new woman-led action films that have been coming out. This one isn’t just action, it’s also scifi-horror, which is one of my main wheelhouses and I am beyond here for it. Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson venture into a scary portal thing for the sake of scientific discovery and to rescue Oscar Isaac (who plays Portman’s character’s husband) who is in a coma as a result of going through the same portal.
Men in peril? Women of science? Delicate waifs with machine guns? Fuck. Yes.
A Wrinkle In Time
A book I adored growing up gets a modern makeover, some diversity, and apparently some truly awesome design. It looks like it’s going to be fantastic and I am psyched for it.
Tomb Raider
I am not gonna lie. I loved the Tomb Raider movie from 2001. Angelina Jolie with an English accent….Daniel Craig with an American accent (and a shower scene), that guy who played Rimmer in Red Dwarf as a butler with calm determination (and occasionally a shotgun). It was cheesy and fun and Angelina Jolie did a bunch of her own stunts after training with R.A.F. fellows and I loved it and always will.
The new one stars Alicia Vikander (who I know best as Gabby Teller from Guy Ritchie’s Man From U.N.C.L.E., but who was also in Ex Machina, The Danish Girl and one of the Bourne movies). It looks like it’s going to be fun and full of action and somewhat gritter than the 2001 film, but I think the character will bear that. I’m interested to see how it’ll play out.
Pacific Rim: Uprising
I wasn’t that big a fan of Pacific Rim. It was okay and I had been hoping it would be fanfuckingtastic. I know there are plenty of folks who thought it was (I am on tumblr where the fandom kids hang out and talk about these things).
This sequel looks promising to me. Not just because of John Boyega, but also because of getting to see some of the fun characters from the first film in the light of a different creative team. I am cautiously optimistic.
A Quiet Place
This looks like an amazing premise for a horror film and I’m looking forward to seeing the execution.
Rampage
I love a good creature-feature (as you might already be aware) but I full-on laughed my ass off when the title of this film came up at the end of its trailer. Movies have been made from some very thin premises, certainly, but I haven’t been so blown away by the wedging in of narrative on the thinnest of frameworks since the film Battleship came out.
For those who don’t know, Rampage was an arcade game (later ported to the NES) where you and a friend smash a city for points. Literally that is it. Once you smash the hell out of one city, they send you to another one. That’s it. That’s the game.
But Battleship turned out to be a surprisingly good popcorn action film, and this one looked as though it might be, as well.
Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1
I didn’t want to care about this. Not after the hot flaming dumpster fire that was Age of Ultron and the depressing grind that was Civil War. But I do care. I do. I can’t help it. I know that the Marvel Studios folks trying to tell a story with as many characters as they are, even across two films, is gonna be ludicrous, but I can’t help it. I’m hopeful.
Deadpool 2
I’m honestly not sure if the sequel can live up to the awesome of the first film, but I know that Ryan Reynolds really cares about this character and his story, so I hope it will. Also, the marketing for it is already hilarious. I’ve never enjoyed a marketing campaign for anything as much as I enjoyed the one for Deadpool and it looks like the advertising team for the sequel is keen to live up to that legacy.
If you haven’t, already, check out this early trailer…ish…thing:
Oceans 8
MORE WOMEN-LED ACTION! YES! YES! Heist movies are some of my favorites and the trailer makes this one look like it’s going to at least be a lot of fun, even if it isn’t a masterpiece of the genre.
The Incredibles 2
It’s about damned time.
Aquaman
The Justice League movie was only okay, but it definitely sold me on some of the characters. I hope they give Jason Momoa something meaty to work with. And I hope we see a lot of floating hair wreathing incredible biceps.
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Mostly watching this for The Wasp and for the far-flung possibility of Cassie Lang showing any signs of being likely to be the springboard off which they launch a Young Avengers movie.
Come on, Marvel. Give me a Young Avengers movie. Give me Kate Bishop. Give me Billy and Teddy being sickeningly cute. Give me Eli fucking Bradley, you cowards!
X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Once again, I don’t really WANT to care, but I do. I love the X-Men in the comics and no matter how badly they keep screwing up the characters in the movies, I keep finding myself wanting to see the next one.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
A Miles Morales movie! Long overdue! I wish it was live-action, but still. I’m psyched about this.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Rami Malek is going to make a great Freddy Mercury. If you haven’t seen his other work, you should check it out.
* * *
Obviously, this isn’t all the movies that will be good or all the movies I’m going to see in 2018. There will be lots more to watch out for. I hope you all stick with me to see it unfold!
