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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2022 MOVIE OF THE WEEK #33

disenchanted. i......have been avoiding this review since literally months ago because just thinking about reviewing this movie makes me sad and tired. if you loved this movie, which i think some people must have because i’ve seen the occasional gifs from it on my dash, feel free to skip this. it’ll go behind a cut, because i suspect it’s gonna get long.

(spoiler alert: it got ridiculously long. how did i have five thousand words to say about this? and if anyone besides leander reads this i’ll be shocked but that’s fine cuz they were the one encouraging me to make it through this rant and if they hadn’t i definitely would have given up even trying a long time ago.)

and it is pretty much universally negative, because i could not have been more looking forward to this sequel featuring literally my favorite disney (noncanon but still mine) princess and it not only let me down (as sequels tbh do a lot so that’s not even surprising) but it sincerely broke my heart.

in a ‘wow i’m being really overdramatic about a disney movie’ sort of way, but it’ll make more sense after i explain it, i promise. you had to be there, i think, to care as much as i do, and only @actuallylukedanes was, so it was also pretty convenient that i ended up watching this with them when they were gonna watch it with their partner and invited me to join. cuz they felt the same way i did about the sequel, which is how i knew i was not overreacting.

it was also leander who advised me to start posting completed reviews of other 2022 movies since i was stuck on this one, even though i never posted them out of order before. (i ended up realizing in january that i totally forgot a movie from 2022, so it’s good i wasn’t as obsessed with perfect chronology anyway.)

the first warning sign i had with this movie was honestly its release. they had been talking about an enchanted sequel for so long that i had stopped hoping for one, and then when it was really happening they wouldn’t even put it in theaters!! i was so pissed off about that, because enchanted felt like a magical (pun intended) experience for me in 2007.

it came out exactly on my birthday, when i turned 23, and @actuallylukedanes and i saw it in the theater to celebrate. we lived in utah then, and were happy rather than homeless, and we paid for the movie using a card that had a ‘reward’ system like a lottery where they told you they would at some random time choose a single purchase you made, and reimburse you for it. out of everything we paid for with that card, it was the tickets to enchanted that they made free.

and i couldn’t have been more excited to see enchanted back then, because it was a real live musical, and those have always been rarer than i wish they were, and the cast was ridiculously great. long before amy adams was making bigger movies, she had played tara’s cousin on buffy and a memorable one-episode character on charmed, and i had just always loved her an unreasonable amount like i had been waiting for her to be a movie star. plus i had discovered wicked in college and dove deep into other idina menzel musicals as well as every one of her solo albums (and singles that weren’t sold anywhere, which i downloaded illegally because that is called devotion) and was just generally obsessed with her for years.

and then there was patrick dempsey, reliable dreamy star of grey’s anatomy (which i gave up on quickly but he was good in) and james marsden of the x-men trilogy i had watched a zillion times. (his character was not one i liked in that, but he was great as a comedic part of this.) i had grown up with susan sarandon and wasn’t used to her as a villain but she brought just the right level of Too Much, and her henchman was perfectly cast. they somehow managed to even make the child in the story not annoying, which can be really rare, especially when she has an actual role--but she’s great.

the mix of animation and live-action was really fun, and when giselle’s dress goes from cartoon to sparkly 3d it was so swoony. truly like a disney fantasy sort of moment, they brought so much to life. and they did so even where it shouldn’t have worked! the basic plot of ‘two couples aren’t meant to be so they switch partners amongst themselves and then it’s perfect’ is not one i like in other movies, but here i’m just like, yeah absolutely, dance with patrick dempsey in your pretty dress, and let idina menzel go live in a fairy tale.

but in addition to all of that, and the catchy, catchy music, what i really, truly loved about enchanted, and why it was one of my all time favorite movies to put on that i never got sick of (along with mamma mia and a few others, i really like musicals okay), is how much it turned out that i identified with giselle. how much she not only made sense to me, even as she was supposed to be this wide-eyed disney princess, but how she gave me language for things i was still figuring out, and i got so attached to that.

i was 23 years old. i had left home less than two years earlier, and i didn’t know i was autistic yet, let alone bipolar/anxious/adhd/disordered eating all knotted together. i hadn’t begun thinking about what it meant to be ‘developmentally disabled,’ and how unprepared that made me for adulthood, independence or being in a relationship. I had just leaped into all those things, and i wasn’t necessarily all that good at any of them.

but there was giselle, singing her way through a world she didn’t understand how to navigate either, and it was okay because there was somebody who loved her for her exact weird self and a child who needed her. (substitute cats for child and you see where i’m coming from.) she was relentlessly optimistic but also cursed by forces outside her control, and she was full of creativity.

my absolute favorite moment that giselle has in the whole movie, when it comes to why it was important to me, is when she experiences anger. at first she can’t even name it, and then there’s a kind of joy she finds in it, in having a new feeling...in having the FREEDOM to feel that difficult feeling, and not need things to be perfect all the time. until i saw that scene, i had never realized that my childhood had trained me to not be angry--before i was even conscious that had happened. and once i saw that scene, i started to wonder if maybe anger was something i was allowed to feel, after all.

i think if you’re not me, or you didn’t know me at 21 (a fragile adorable unstable bby desperate to be rescued from my life), it might be hard to understand that, how i didn’t just love giselle for being giselle, but loved her for being the most me a character played by amy adams could be.

up until i fell in love, and was loved in return (my only real wish thanks to moulin rouge), i collected tv and movie characters, made little lists of them, and they were always the ones i wanted to be like, ones i wanted to grow into. usually the snarky best friends, the deadpan wits, the ones who pined but never got the guy. (bby me didn’t think anything but ‘guy’ was an option.) i didn’t spend time claiming characters that were like me, that made me feel seen, until i was older. (i couldn’t, when i didn’t know who ‘me’ was.) so giselle felt like one of the first ones, with her autistic literalism and trust in humanity and her joy in everything.

then flash forward fifteen years and they’re continuing the story. even more amazingly, they’ve brought back the whole central cast (minus the child actor, who i assumed they replaced because New Morgan sings and dances, but i didn’t look it up or anything). idina is much more famous now thanks to her frozen work and of course amy adams is amy freaking adams now, nominated but never oscared, but they both came back. the direct-to-streaming release worried me, but i saw a trailer and the movie looked way better than i kind of expected, so i was excited after all. and as mentioned above, i settled in to watch it with my family.

^^^^and that is where this review left off, almost a year ago--because it was still so hard for me to wrap my brain and my heart around writing it. but at this point i’ve reviewed all the other movies i watched in 2022, AND i’ve watched almost 20 movies this year and reviewed most of them, and those reviews are just sitting in my drafts waiting for me to post them once i finish this. so here goes:

this movie was bad. obviously that’s a personal opinion or value judgement or whatever, but like...it was really, really bad. it bore no resemblance to the original and painfully reminded me how disney’s moviemaking these days is so soulless when it comes to trying to squeeze more money out of its existing IP. and i can handle fairy tale/princess modernizations that aren’t all that impressive (idina was in one of those as well, cinderella), but even those had parts that i liked or that were fun once i was grading on a curve for the whole movie. i can’t say the same for this one.

first of all, we’ve skipped time since the original, which makes sense, since everybody’s older. but nothing about the time progression makes sense, because offscreen fifteen years have passed, making amy adams 48 when this movie came out. giselle and robert have just had a newborn whose royal inheritance is what leads to the movie’s plot--at best, i guess we can assume amy was supposed to be playing giselle a lot younger than she, the actress, was. or maybe her andalasian genes make her immune to fertility averages?

either way, though, that still doesn’t explain morgan. who in addition to becoming literally a different person (and i hope they only replaced her because the original actress opted out, because she was so great in the first movie i’d resent disney for dumping her just to make the new one sing and dance, or whatever other justifications they might have) is a teenager now. Original Morgan was nine years old in enchanted, or the actress was, anyway. if we assume they meant for Original Morgan to be only seven or eight as a character, that still doesn’t explain a now-high-schooler morgan in this movie. it has been literally twice as many years in real time as it would have to have been in this movie world for morgan to be this age! and unfortunately for the movie, it’s mainly about adults, who have aged the fifteen years you would expect. so that’s ridiculous.

but anyway. somehow, all the adults from enchanted look fifteen years older but morgan’s a teen, and her parents have had a shiny new baby. idina’s character moved with prince james marsden to his world, and literally everyone is depressed now except prince james marsden (and presumably the baby). giselle sees a billboard and decides that’s a plausible reason to uproot her whole family from the city she fell in love with and that the others were from even before meeting her...to move to the suburbs.

at first, because of the impression i got from the trailer, i thought she would be moving to a perfect-seeming little enclave that was secretly evil, like a magical stepford or something, and that it would turn her evil and throw her family into peril. but the real plot is not that creative. it’s literally just the three of them moving to an ordinary suburb that (gasp!) doesn’t automatically fix their lives. instead, robert has a slog of a commute now, and in their own ways, giselle and morgan both struggle to fit in with their new local peers.

everything establishing this movie’s setup baffled me because it felt so random and flimsy, when the original was a beautiful sendup of classic disney tropes that managed to be subversive but still magical. i referred earlier to giselle deciding on a plausible reason, and i felt the same way about disney and this sequel: it felt like they decided this concept was a plausible reason to bring the cast back together, mix in a few new actors, and try to make money off the result (in this case by locking it inside their streaming service as though that would force new subscribers to disney+ instead of what i’m guessing actually happened, having less viewers for the movie than they would’ve gotten in theaters--cuz even i, the biggest fan of the original, wouldn’t have subscribed just to watch it).

but their ‘plausible’ setup is therefore that everybody’s feeling a bit meh in new york city. robert’s not excited about his job, morgan’s a sullen teenager, and giselle misses the days when everything felt magical and new and perfect. instead of recognizing that they have a freaking newborn, which i may not have experienced personally but have certainly heard is a difficult phase of life (especially the first time, for giselle), and that they simultaneously have a teenager, which anybody who’s ever been or met a teenager can tell you is a difficult phase of life for both the teen and their parents--heck, instead of just going to THERAPY when new york city is one of the few places it may still be easier to find access than everywhere else these days--they move to a random place where they know no one for truly no reason.

the movie wants us to believe that the reason is giselle seeing a billboard and believing its promise (or still being unusually literal?) but neither of those makes any sense because even if we had reason to believe that giselle hadn’t learned anything or grown in the last mysterious number of years and would truly treat a billboard like a promise rather than an advertisement (and i don’t think what we see of her in the sequel supports that idea) it’s still robert she’s married to now, and we know he’s always been someone who lovingly but firmly points that stuff out.

morgan’s unhappy because she’s a teenager, she doesn’t actually want to move, and as much as robert loves giselle, i don’t believe at all that he would just let her have her fantasy of a fresh start without injecting reality into the situation--so i think the real explanation is that both robert and giselle, for their own reasons, are desperate enough to try it despite knowing it won’t be a magic fix. but then idina menzel and prince james marsden (i should remember their character names but i really don’t at the moment) pop into their new, still-unhappy-just-in-a-different-time-zone, lives and make everything even worse. way to go guys!

continuing the flimsy plot setups, they’re visiting to give a gift to the new baby, to basically proclaim how special she is and make morgan feel like she’s neither special nor giselle’s ‘real’ daughter. giselle is thrilled by the gift from her childhood home and her former prince remains as hilarious as ever (the acting in this movie is good, they’re just not given as much to work with; ‘campy humor’ was the only element they could successfully recreate for some reason). but nancy is clearly already Over It, the former new yorker not exactly as enchanted with prince james marsden as she used to be now that she has to live with his personality 24/7.

you might expect this to be woven in with the central family’s ennui in some way, but you would be disappointed--that general intermittent eyerolly energy is never directly addressed and as far as we know by the end of the movie, she’s still with him. and i guess will remain so forever? because that’s the rule when you choose a fairy tale life?? even though giselle’s story was entirely about leaving fairy tales behind when they weren’t what she wanted???

maybe we’re supposed to read nancy’s reactions as like, lovable occasional annoyance at How Very Much her guy can be sometimes. but it didn’t come across that way to me; it seemed intentionally to mirror the dissatisfaction giselle and robert were struggling with. i could have been giving them too much credit there, i guess, in assuming deliberate parallels.

but the real point is that the adults were unhappy in the city, and now, in the suburbs, they’re still not very happy. after the gift-givers go back to andalasia, giselle makes a wish using her baby’s magic present, wanting to make their family into a fairy tale...and she gets her wish. morgan goes from a strugglng teen to a cheerful girl again, running around singing and eventually having to be the savior of her family. robert goes from a commuting lawyer to a wannabe monster slayer, and giselle slowly transforms into an evil stepmother--while the women in town who’ve been snubbing her turn into an actual villain with henchwomen in tow.

from then on, it only gets more ridiculous. amy adams is an immensely talented actor, and like i said, i’ve loved her since she was on tv. but she is not doing her best work here, switching between normal giselle and evil stepmother giselle in response to a chiming clock in a way that reminded me of one of those over-the-top acts where a guy hypnotizes people and then can trigger them to be a chicken or something. it was just so over the top, and lacked any of the emotional depth the original movie brought to her character that made me care.

and poor robert, it was clear, they did not know what to do with. a convoluted exchange with prince james marsden before the wish created circumstances where he was carrying a sword around on his commute. that, i’m sure, was supposed to help make it seem like it made sense for him to become a giant fighter or whatever. but really, they had a sequel to make in which he had to be there because he was her happily ever after in the first one, except now robert isn’t a love interest anymore, there’s no drama between them--and the actor was never meant to be a major contributor to the musical part of these movies, so what’s the point of his story? to run around looking for monsters, totally separate, and mostly unnecessary, it turns out.

the fairy tale transformations mean that we go from watching giselle being sad and hurt in response to morgan’s attitude to morgan’s being mistreated by her now-evil stepmother--neither of which is fun. in giselle’s intermittent ‘good’ moments, she tries to encourage morgan to be free of her and get help, and eventually morgan does end up in andalasia with nancy (she’s also a cartoon at that point, i think). nancy helps her understand what might fix things, and the fact that it’s up to their teenage daughter (whose complaints the whole time have honestly seemed the most reasonable to me compared to her parents’ vague ennui) to save not just her own family but both worlds from doom...it doesn’t seem at all fair. but okay.

the solution for making giselle good again involves morgan’s memories and singing and the idea that with the power of love it’ll all be fine, but what i remember most about it is that the scene is really just a vehicle for idina menzel to get her own song. which, duh--i was very disappointed that she didn’t sing in the original, and given the success of frozen, it would’ve been crazy for them not to showcase her more this time.

but the song she’s given? it’s so bad. so very bad. the others i was watching this movie with spent a significant portion of the song time mocking it, and i couldn’t blame them. at a certain point, it just devolves into idina belting the words ‘love power’ over and over and over. you know how some words or phrases become completely meaningless if you say them too much? this definitely felt like that, like the big drama’s ‘solution’ was flimsy to begin with, and then they forced a song into it that wasn’t even a good song, and got idina to sing it. she’s so much better than that! it genuinely made me wonder if she has some kind of disney contract that left her stuck dealing with this.

somehow thanks to morgan, though, giselle does stop being evil by the end--i don’t remember exactly how that scene plays out so i doubt it matters too much--and ending the sort of wish curse she inflicted on everybody means they go back to living in a normal suburb. the woman who briefly became her villain nemesis apologizes in a ‘sometimes i’m a lot oops’ way, and giselle is just like ‘hey, me too, no big deal.’

and this brings me to my two biggest problems with the movie, outside of how much it felt like it was trying to destroy any love i still held for the original.

this movie has no real villain. unlike the first one, where susan sarandon was camping it up in a delightfully appropriate way, and was defeated in the end...this movie falls into the same hole that so many New Disney Movies are determined to, for unknown reasons. we can’t have classic straight-up evil anymore; our heroes have to instead be facing antagonists that are less specific or even less corporeal. it’s family! who of course will no longer be in conflict by the end, and don’t actually need to be ‘defeated.’ or it’s emotions! and once they can be accepted rather than avoided then things will be okay again.

i’m not saying that’s a bad thing, in general. i love encanto, and i thought turning red and inside out were great. but when you’re dealing with a now-franchise whose original style was to reference and gently mock and lovingly rework classic disney tropes...why would you toss that out completely and make a sequel that feels like the other movies disney makes now? why can’t people appreciate that beloved movies are beloved for a reason and you can’t just slap the ‘brand name’ on whatever you want and act like it’s just as good?

but yeah. this movie decided to have no villain by way of having two villains, both of whom were only temporarily villainous due to indirect magic and who became normal again once it stopped. they bear no real responsibility for being villains, because after all, they aren’t really. post-movie, it seems like they may even become friends! all’s well that ends well.

which really annoyed me, lol, because it felt so incredibly pointless once i knew that was how it ended. our main character accidentally makes herself evil, makes somebody else evil, has to be saved from being evil while fighting the other evil, and the grand conclusion is that they just finish back where they started? how is that a story that moves forward, let alone a good story with some kind of point or even just a good-versus-evil win, fairy tale style?

it’s like the main conflict of the movie is created by them having problems, but then the problems they were having...are solved because they’re no longer in conflict. which brings me to my second issue with the movie’s ending: apparently the ultimate lesson of this follow up to enchanted is that growing up means learning to settle, rather than believing in happily ever afters.

despite the cheerful singing at the end of the movie that tries to make us believe it’s just as great an ending as enchanted got, i was so underwhelmed and disappointed and tbh freaked out, that they reached that conclusion. the story we were given was giselle and robert and morgan are a family now just like they wanted but they’re all unhappy, so they move out of the city to seek happiness elsewhere. and it fixes nothing which instead spirals giselle into cursing the town but in the end everybody’s okay and there are no consequences and nobody’s mad at giselle cuz she didn’t mean to do it...so she and robert and morgan commit to trying even harder to be happy in their new suburban life.

and all i can wonder is, why is that the lesson? why is that the right place to end up? why couldn’t they go back to the city and figure out their problems there, since clearly suburbia wasn’t a fix on its own? there didn’t seem to be a real reason for requiring giselle, who loved the sparkly harsh city she landed in years ago, to become a suburban mom--or for uprooting morgan, or making robert become a ‘small town practice’ kind of guy.

i guess what grates on me about it is that it has such a hallmark christmas movie vibe of just assuming their real happy ending would naturally be escaping the city, no matter how central it was to their original story and lives. whatever their deeper issues were that made them unhappy in the city, they haven’t addressed those by the end of the movie; they’ve just somewhat improved the issues that moving TO this new place piled on.

therefore my logical brain goes, you were unhappy and tried to fix it by moving but that only made things worse. why wouldn’t you reverse the making-it-worse part by going back, and then continue trying to figure out how to fix it? i just don’t get it. and i may be kind of offended by it, because the giselle who i have always adored is a completely different person in this movie, and not because of some wish curse.

she’s older, and sad, and it’s like nothing about her life is fun anymore...and maybe there could’ve been a way to craft an interesting story out of that, though i don’t know what it would be off the top of my head. but we don’t get whatever that could’ve been. and we don’t get a sequel about our faves from enchanted having more hijinks and having a to fight a new tropey villain, in the style of the first one. what we get is a story about everybody from the first one not liking their lives and having to fight the fallout from that and then concluding that hey, at least the world didn’t end so they must be better off than they thought, time to make the best of it. it deeply depressed me.

and look--i’m not saying i demand happy endings always. i don’t even require happy endings mostly! but unless there is some requirement i’m not aware of that post-pandemic we are no longer allowed happy endings at all, this was not the movie world to bring back just to say ‘the best you can hope for is meh. good luck.’ giselle and everybody else deserved better.

i will say that there was one thing about this movie that i liked. exactly one thing, sadly, or at least only one i clearly remember. i was really excited about the casting before this came out, because i love jayma mays, and maya rudolph is reliably good always. once i actually saw the movie, i was bummed that jayma mays and the other henchwoman didn’t have roles worth including, but maya rudolph was as good as i expected.

and since this movie was such a mess, she also just really stood out. she’s a ‘can do it all’ kind of performer, in a way that makes it look easy, and i feel like that’s the difference between amy adam’s background in a lot of dramatic roles and maya rudolph’s background in snl. they’re both super talented and both have range, but are a good fit for different things because of that.

so there is one song in this movie and one performance (cuz it’s the performance of it that makes it good) that i genuinely enjoyed. it’s basically a face off between the two not-actually-villains, kind of like ‘anything you can do i can do better’ but sillier and maximum camp. it’s the only part where it felt like that was what the movie was deliberately aiming for, and both actresses are fully going for it while sometimes we’re watching them parallel on splitscreen...it was ridiculous but in an entertaining rather than cringe-inducing way.

so that part is great, but also highlights even more what this movie could have been. if only they had let maya rudolph be a proper villain, the leader of a trio of new antagonists for our faves to face, that would’ve been potentially a great movie. she could have gone evil after getting her hands on the baby’s wand, then gone down fighting after the family consulted with their andalasian friends on how to deal with magically corrupted humans. the ending could have been more interesting with bigger stakes than ‘everyone survives and decides to play nice.’

heck, i could write that version of that movie! lol. but i won’t. because it would probably necessitate rewatching disenchanted and that is something i never ever want to do. that was a piece of my heart you fucked with, you jerks. and i’m gonna stay mad.

#disenchanted #rant #amy adams #idina menzel #patrick dempsey #james marsden #susan sarandon #actuallylukedanes #actually autistic #autistic #jayma mays #maya rudolph #negativity #enchanted #2022 motw #my formative years

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bethanyactually · 3 years

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I was tagged by @actuallylukedanes <3

sunflowers or roses? skirts or dresses (as long as they have pockets)? books or movies? long sleeves or short sleeves? quiet libraries or crowded coffee shops? sweet or sour? city or countryside? Nutella or peanut butter? romance or drama movies? pictures of flowers or pictures of the sky? skin care or hair care? watermelon or honey melon? horses or ponies?

if you wanna do this consider yourself tagged!

#meme #me #actuallylukedanes

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beturass · 5 years

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actuallylukedanes replied to your post “Dear tea-drinking friends:”

I love mine so much. Electric. By the brand Bella.

I am really sorry that this got lost in my activity but I wanted to thank you for your recommendation! :)

#actuallylukedanes

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i-have-zero-chill · 6 years

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actuallylukedanes replied to your post “one of the annoying things about tumblr and twitter is they make me...”

nah, I feel this way too. Like, it undermines y gay cred to /not/ like every single f/f ship? Wtf. Like, I don't like Ginny (HP), so I don't ship her with anyone and don't really appreciate her with F characters that I /do/ like...but saying so is like...against my being queer? Or something. F-ed up.

@actuallylukedanes SO IT’S NOT JUST ME okay good

but yeah exactly like no one should be made to feel “less queer” just for not shipping something it’s ridiculous

#actuallylukedanes #reply

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thewestfling · 7 years

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y @actuallylorelaigilmore is problematic:

- adorable

- too cute when interacting w/actuallylukedanes

- writes the good tww fanfics

sbed me /ew/ for y ur problematic

#asks

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 6 months

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@actuallylukedanes sent me this and it is my favorite memorial of matthew perry without question. made me want to cry.

#also made me literally think 'some of this kind of sounds like me to me?'#'a huge open heart with a joyous pyrotechnical brain'#'fountain of light with a huge capacity for darkness'#his death has felt like the first time something was ripped out from under our whole generation #in a way that shook me up so that i keep thinking about my own future death as more of a visceral thing #so reading this tribute made me sad but also made me feel like #...i hope some people can say things half as nice as this about me when i die #rip #matthew perry #bradley whitford #actuallylukedanes #i have the best best friend

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2023 Movie Journey #4: All The Bright Places

all the bright places. every time i tried to start writing this review in my head, i hit a wall, because this movie was so good in some ways and then it was just totally ruined for me by how it ended, and i’m still upset about that. like, a man called otto left me feeling freaked out and as though the movie wasn’t for me, but it’s much rarer for a movie to leave me feeling primarily frustration. so if you don’t want to read a rant post, skip this one.

i watched this with @actuallylukedanes on the anniversary of kinnie’s death. we planned in advance to play minecraft dungeons and watch a movie, and i chose this one from the three options off our watchlist that they offered, because while i didn’t know anything about the plot, it seemed less dark than the other two choices and that felt best for a sad day. i mean, the poster gives the vibe of a bittersweet YA romance, like a story where one of the kids has cancer or something...but it also looks happy and i love both elle fanning and justice smith a lot.

it was therefore pretty alarming when the movie opens and we see him stop her from possible suicide. not what i expected! but i loved his character right away, with the way he initially seemed adhd-ish and then later on was giving off major bipolar signals. so i enjoyed watching him try and draw her back into the world. the actors had great chemistry and did good work, and while some of the plot threads (like the school counselor) were predictable and didn’t add much to the story for me, it was moving along as a sweet, complicated teen romance.

spoiler alert for a movie from two years ago...but THEN HE DIES. as we were nearing the end of the film, leander and i were agreeing that things felt very doomlike, as if death was coming for someone as the conflict increased. but i still wasn’t prepared for it, because i loved his character and i just didn’t want that. and obviously i can’t expect movies to do what i want all the time, but in this case what upset me most was how his death changed the whole movie.

after he dies, we see her mourn very briefly, but then the movie ends on a long uplifting monologue and montage where she talks about how he taught her so much, but she didn’t learn to see what he was going through. and as she talks about the lesson he left her with, about finding brightness in dark places (hi movie title) we’re seeing her connect with her family, her best friend, his friends who apparently are also very uplifted immediately after his death, and revisiting places that remind her of him.

mostly, she just looks happy, which befits the super-uplifting and optimistic ending. but i’m still upset about it, like i said, because it created a tone i find totally nonsensical. he ‘saved’ her from the dark place she was in, and she couldn’t do the same for him, but rather than spend too much time dwelling on that and how she was oblivious to his needs/struggle on such a major level and how upsetting that is...the movie pivots as fast as it can to emphasize how much he improved her life as though that’s what we should care about.

basically, while i was watching the movie i thought i was watching a teen romance full of drama because they both had serious emotional issues to work through. but the end of the movie turned it instead into a teen coming of age story in which the main character works through her issues thanks to a damaged boy who wants to help...and then he dies instead of getting to work through his own issues because it turns out he was never as important as her and we shouldn’t have expected him to get the same amount of growth and potential.

the fact that he existed in the story just to help and change her and then also give her more growth by dying was even more unsettling to me given that she’s white and he’s black. as a white viewer, i never know how to interpret dynamics that make me concerned and uncomfortable that way, like maybe i’m missing something and it’s not as gross as it seemed on that level--but it felt that way to me. given all of the above, i didn’t end up liking this one and wouldn’t recommend it. if the moral of the story had seemed less confused in the end, i might have a different take on it.

#all the bright places #2023 movie journey #actuallylukedanes #i have the best best friend #elle fanning #justice smith

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2023 Movie Journey #13: Barbie

barbie. i had been so excited about this movie for such a long time! as i'm rapidly heading towards forty, i tend to have a pretty good gauge of what i like and what i don't--so good by now that i usually don't need much to know in advance what i'll love. this was one of those things.

it wasn't even related to the massive ad campaign or the giant fandom joy in response to it before i saw it myself--they announced that margot robbie was producing a barbie movie where she would play barbie and greta gerwig would write it, and that was kenough. i knew it was gonna be My Kind Of Movie.

and so i was excited, because there aren't that many of those. i try hard to go into movies with an open mind, because i really like liking things, and i'm happy to be surprised. but i also kind of feel like that's the stance i have to take, because very few movies are the sort i predictably love. musicals are rare, i'm a horror wimp even if i've gotten a little better at finding good horror comedies, and the majority of the other movies my local theater releases are action, superhero, or christian-centered.

so giving me a truly amazing cast crammed into a surprisingly tight story overflowing with feminism and feelings was a true gift, even better than i hoped for. and the length of my review probably won't indicate that, because i feel like barbie is a hard movie for me to review the way i do others--i don't have a ton of things i want to break down and criticize, but i also don't want to just list off why it's awesome. that would literally just be me making a long bullet-point list until i ran out of things i could remember.

and i feel like if you've seen the movie, you know why it's amazing and fun and deep and beautifully shallow, all at the same time. and if you haven't seen it, i really don't think i could explain the whole of it to you in a doing-it-justice way. so i'm just going to mention a few things, but don't let that make you think i only found a few things notable. this movie is art.

when it comes to some things i loved about this movie, let's start with the fact that it is my exact sense of humor. i couldn't get over that, the whole time, as ken is serenading barbie with a matchbox twenty song i definitely didn't used to think was a misogynist anthem and then the shot pulls back and it's ALL the kens doing the same thing. or the multiple group dance numbers. or simu liu as ken's archenemy, ken. or the movie's opening song that narrates AT barbie and changes as her experience does. seeing the movie a second time didn't make any of it less funny for me--it's a perfect blend of snark and meta jokes and queer tones.

another important and great thing! AMERICA FERRERA. i knew she was in the cast, but honestly, the cast list that was released before the movie even came out was soooo long, she was just one of many actors i like that i looked forward to. i didn't expect her to play such a central role, and despite this being The Barbie Movie, they really made her the heart of the story--or at least, a heart of the story. she grounds it in such a great way and adds a different kind of depth from what margot robbie could bring to actually playing (and looking like) a barbie doll.

i just love what america ferrara got to do with this role, and getting to see the kind of work she takes on over time. this movie was a nice reminder of how artificially limited the opportunities are, for marginalized talent--even a woman of color who's worked a lot, like she has, had to be sort of snuck into this movie and then made important once people were already watching. i'm grateful to greta gerwig and margot robbie and all the other people in charge for wanting to do that, but it still sucks to know that it wasn't ever going to happen otherwise. she wouldn't be given this kind of project to lead on her own, when she's just as talented and worth watching. she made me cry.

major shoutout also to the character in this movie who i originally named something like 'woman on a bench,' played by ann roth. i absolutely adored her and her scene; it was small but so meaningful. it really grabbed hold of me. and then i found out that she's a 91-year old friend of greta gerwig's in real life, and also happens to be a super-famous costume designer who worked on (among piles of other things) mamma mia! i love that.

another great casting note: i was really excited in advance about the fact that emma mackey was included, because i've very slowly been watching sex education with @actuallylukedanes--but even before i saw any of that show, i had seen gifs of her as maeve on tumblr for years and i couldn't get over how much she looked like margot robbie. then they put her in this movie with margot robbie, so of course i highly supported that.

what i didn't expect and wasn't really prepared for was the fact that they didn't just give us emma mackey. they gave us a sex education trifecta! leander and i spent the movie trying to figure out how we knew the mattel employee who seemed super familiar, only to eventually learn he was the actor who plays adam. and i still haven't been able to get past the facial hair and other barbie aesthetics that made him totally unrecognizable for me, but the fact that they also took the actor who plays eric and made him a ken? perfection.

literally the only problem i had with this movie was at the end. unlike my best friend, i completely agreed with barbie's choice to become human. my bipolar heart always lands on the side of 'why wouldn't you want all the feelings, even when they're so much they drown you and you don't think you can take it? more feelings please.'

but the very final scene, when she's getting supported by her new little found family (which i also loved, yay them) and heads into a building for what i definitely assumed was a job interview...has her going to the gynecologist. and this scene gave me possibly my first moment ever of being the person with an Unpopular Opinion. i used to play an ask game about that, and it was really fun, but i was always like, how do i know what's unpopular or popular?

in this case, my reaction really does seem to have been unpopular. or uncommon, anyway. we find out she's going to see her gynecologist. and barbie is lit up with joy, it's clearly meant to be a triumphant moment. finally, she's fully human. she's not perfect but she's a real woman.

and all i could think was, wait. wtf. does this movie think you need a vagina to be a real woman?!?? i literally sat in silence for a minute while the credits played before asking my best friend something like, if i was totally crazy for finding that moment transphobic.

because it's not like i don't know that there are people who claim to be feminists who hate trans women. i just didn't expect to end a movie i absolutely adored by feeling as if i'd just been slapped in the face by one.

and as far as i can tell since seeing it, almost nobody else interpreted the scene that way. a lot of trans folks seem to have appreciated the movie specifically because they felt seen by barbie's journey, not the opposite. and of course, the cast even has a trans woman in it! (she was great.) so i highly doubt the people making the movie are secretly trying to send a message about how much they hate trans people. on my second watch in theaters, when i already knew it was coming, it wasn't so rough.

but it still upset me in that first moment, and led to a whole personal epiphany that wasn't actually about barbie but that i guess i will forever have to thank the barbie movie for? so that's weird, though not bad. i just had to note all of that, because it was surprising and important and it's rare for me to realize that my reaction/opinion on something isn't one i can find tons of other people already shared if i look into it.

beyond that, though, this movie is just the best. it's everything. it gives us the nine-women supreme court that ruth bader ginsburg recommended, while also pointing out that too much power corrupts even the blankest of slates. it's here to teach kids about misogyny and to show everybody the wide range of outfits and accessories barbie has collected in her lifetime. it lets barbie have independence and leaves ken behind where i hope he one day realizes his rivalry with ken masks a totally different kind of tension, so he can have love after all. i don't think i'll ever get sick of it.

#barbie #2023 movie journey #actuallylukedanes #margot robbie #greta gerwig #america ferrera #ann roth #simu liu #emma mackey #ncuti gatwa #connor swindells #sex education #matchbox twenty #lgbtq

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2023 Movie Journey #17: Elemental

elemental. i watched this one earlier this week with my family...and i'm finally caught up on movie reviews! which means i can now post new ones right after i see the movies. yay.

this movie's cast has some actors who i know, probably most notably a guy i enjoyed in jurassic world dominion. but much, much more importantly, the star of this movie is leah lewis, so even if i hadn't liked the movie overall i still would have had a great time watching it.

i fell immediately in love with leah lewis's portrayal of george when i started watching nancy drew this year. and i mean immediately--i was watching with somebody who loved bess the most, and i had seen so much ace on my tumblr dash that i knew i'd like him too, but george was still my favorite character by the time i finished the pilot. without even knowing how great and rewarding her season 1 arc would be, or how much depth she would eventually have beyond her introduction as 'grudge-holding black sheep nancy's boss,' i could just tell she was my type of fave.

and even after watching the whole first season of nancy drew, it wasn't until i was rewatching it to show it to @actuallylukedanes that i accidentally learned george was played by leah lewis...and that i already knew her! she was in the half of it! which i watched and reviewed in 2020, and loved so much that i've wanted to get other people to watch it ever since. i didn't connect her performances at all, but even my review back then raved about how she was what made the movie good.

so when i realized she was starring in this, i was thrilled. and what i love about her is that she's consistently the kind of actor who has a real presence: she makes her characters engaging and stands out in a big way for somebody still young (though she started acting as a kid, so i know she's not new just cuz she's newish to me). she's signed on to the matlock reboot with kathy bates and i don't expect to love that cbs show, but i am very excited to try it anyway.

as for the movie though: i couldn't help but spend the first half just hearing george, in all her lines. not in a distracting or bad way, but a nice familiar feeling. i suspect the goal with animated disney heroines is to not make them too distinctive, because there's kind of a 'friendly normal' sound to the modern ones regardless of the actress that means even when i can recognize who's speaking, they all sound a little more similar than i would ever say they do in live action work. (either that or it's just me not being able to differentiate as well in animation, which is certainly possible.)

anyway, i loved everything about her work in this; she was the reason i cried a few times. in my opinion that's always a mark of good work, making an impressive amount of connection with viewers using just your voice.

i also really liked her parents and wade, despite the movie's core conflict revolving around all of them--this movie did a good job of explaining who everybody was as things went along, in a more than superficial way, so that it was much easier to still like people when the Bad Times came because they made more sense and were more sympathetic. as family conflicts go, compared to encanto and turning red, this one was my favorite because of that. no matter how angry or disappointed her father got, or how much that affected ember, i could still sympathize with him too and believe that his love for her was more important than anything else.

now, i know this movie got mixed reviews (or possibly worse? i only saw vague headlines) but i'm not really sure why! the metaphor they used to tell the story about immigration and a diverse society was maybe more blunt than usual, but i don't think that's a bad thing. and while it did center on themes that disney movies cover a lot (family expectations, parental disappointment, feeling like a failure, being an outsider, etc)...there are reasons those themes pop up so much!

especially when pixar movies are trying to appeal to both kids and adult audiences, i think it makes total sense to keep coming back to the 'classics.' again, there were a lot of thematic similarities between encanto and turning red and this movie (despite their differences in the details) and i watched those other two--encanto more than once--but still cried just as easily when ember confessed to her dad that she was a bad daughter, and when they bowed to each other before she left. the wounds between us and our parents never really heal, i think, at least not for everybody. so this movie tugged at me by just representing those feelings well, and making me care about the characters.

and when it comes to caring about the characters, probably my favorite thing about the movie besides the cast was the way the plot genuinely surprised me. i expected a happy ending, because it's a disney movie. but based on the trailer, i didn't know what to expect between ember and wade beyond 'they meet and things happen.' and the movie does such a good job of setting up the world they live in and the rules they live by that i believed them.

so in the beginning, i figured they were going to become unexpected friends, and navigating that alone would be a challenge. in that story, presumably the happy ending would've been something like, she learns that wade is right and she doesn't have to stay with fire people and never interact with the rest of the world, and they get to have further adventures.

but then! it turns out that this movie is going for romance. weirdly, i don't expect that from disney movies--you'd think i would when they're the home of princess culture and everything, but i wasn't a 'princess meets her prince for a happy ending' kid. i grew up with disney classics but didn't imprint on any of them.

instead, i was a don bluth kid! singing music from an american tail is literally one of my earliest memories, and my animated love story growing up was anastasia. if i squint, i can kind of see overlap between that animated romcom and this one, in terms of traumatic family history and a guarded, feisty female lead who gets what she thought she wanted all along just as she's also fallen in love with someone whose difference threatens her new fulfilled goal.

i'm not saying the two movies are very alike, lol...a zombie sorcerer belongs nowhere in elemental, obviously. but they both treat their romances with less sentimental sweetness, more sparkage and sincerity. the flirting in this is cute, and i loved them more the further along we went.

but of course, there's still that pesky plot-established problem that makes them a doomed romance. so once it was clear that their dynamic was about falling in love, not just befriending the 'other'...then i honestly expected a bittersweet ending where friends is all they can be. because this is disney, not pushing daisies, and in a world where nobody seems to have invented the elemental version of saran wrap for characters to safely kiss through, what kind of future could they have?

i did not expect them to give us this story where the characters are all believable in how firmly they believe (or don't, in wade's case) that different elements can't mix, and then for the story to show us those differences being overcome. i mean, that theme isn't exactly a new one, love conquering all, but the differences were so much more concrete here--it was life or death for them! when the parental disapproval alone was almost enough to ruin their chances!

i suppose you could flip my reaction to this movie and look at it the opposite way, and complain that their ability in the end to do what the story all along told us couldn't be done made it a waste of time, like the stakes were fake even if they didn't know that. maybe if you predicted the ending from the beginning, it could have felt that way.

but i didn't have expectations for the ending. so while i was really hoping ember and wade could be together, i was prepared for the alternative, a more modest 'crossing the aisles' journey of discovery for them both that opened her world and future and allowed him into her life from a safe distance going forward. instead, their whole story was wonderful and i love them and i'm so glad that they get to be the odd couple they are in a very divided world.

one last fun (if also slightly vexing) thing about this movie is that while it does end, it leaves a lot open, too. and i wanted to get to see ember start her internship; i wanted to learn about their new life and if it goes well for them once they're out in the broader world. i guess i wasn't ready to say goodbye to them, really, is all.

but that was fun at least on the level of seeing this with my family--it meant that after it ended, we were discussing what a sequel could be about, and that segued into a discussion about whether ember and wade could have kids or if they'd have to adopt--and how cool it would be if them having kids would create new elements or something. i love that idea a lot.

and i enjoyed this movie a lot. it was super pretty, i liked most of the characters, and it was unexpected romcom fun. i'm officially rooting for pixar to make more love stories now.

#2023 movie journey #elemental #actuallylukedanes #leah lewis #anastasia #an american tail #nancy drew #encanto #turning red

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2023 Movie Journey #16: Heart of Stone

heart of stone. this is a movie i never would've watched if it weren't for my family. the only actors in it i knew were gal gadot and jamie dornan, and it's an action movie--so it would not have gotten my attention on netflix. but i was invited to watch it with them, and i checked out the trailer...and while trailers hugely lie, so i don't count on them anymore, it did give me the story's basic premise. which intrigued me! rare for an action flick.

so, as a movie that gal gadot also produced, this movie offers a few things i'm guessing were the goal. global adventuring, which i think is a lot more common these days in action movies, is definitely happening here. we're cheering on a tough female lead, who gets to behave like classic male action heroes: disregards orders, is nearly always right, has few ties to other people, survives innumerable deadly situations, has all the skills.

the plot itself i found unusually predictable, and it also has that thing where it centers on nearly mystical forces (in this case science so advanced it predicts the future) and expects you not to overthink it, to instead just go along for the ride. honestly, none of that bothered me--it wasn't meant to be a 'deep thought' movie and i didn't get bored (which i can, with a lot of action scenes) so i had fun overall.

there was only really one moment that surprised me, a plot twist that almost felt like a kind of jumpscare--and it was the jumpscare part that was surprising, not the twist itself. i had been waiting for that to happen eventually. so i would've liked a few more things that genuinely surprised me, if it were up to me, but there's nothing wrong with a movie decently fulfilling the beats you expect from it.

my actual complaint, the sole issue i had and the thing i would've changed if it were up to me, is the intensity and the tone of the violence in this movie's final battle.

our hero in the movie is practically indestructible for a lot of the film. she bounces back from all kinds of injuries and adventures and we see how powerful and smart and strong she is. so i get that the stakes are very high, by the time she's facing off against our antagonist--he has to be practically her match, and we have to believe there's a chance she could lose the fight, or it won't have an impact.

but because the scene is a physical fight between those two characters, and because of who we know them to be by the end...the fight scene is gruesome in a way that feels more like it's reveling in the visceral brutality of a man against a woman.

i really don't know if that feeling it gave me was intentional, on the movie's part? and if it was, i can't say i would understand why--it wasn't like it weakened the main character and therefore made the stakes feel higher. when your hero is already fighting for her life, it's a choice to have her male opponent choke her nearly to death, to show that to viewers, to make it part of what she has to overcome.

it's also a choice, to make him a misogynistic villain rather than one just motivated by money or politics. and maybe the violence and his attitude are supposed to be connected, maybe they did consider those elements important because in the end our hero triumphs and that's what we should care about: that even in the face of all that, she gets to win. i could imagine why they might have wanted to do that, and consider it a good thing.

but to me it just felt like watching an up close portrayal of violence against women while the camera lingered for way too long, leaving me deeply freaked out by an otherwise good experience.

some characters were drawn thin, creating plot choices that for me were the same as plot holes--or maybe i just have less patience than i used to for antagonists who are redeemed in the end because the hero brings them into the fold, skimming right past the harm they've caused to happy endings all around. (i love antagonists, but i prefer the complex kind, and this movie had limited time for complexity.)

like i said, it's not a movie i can think too deeply about, or it hurts my head. but it was interesting! and gal gadot carried it well.

#heart of stone #gal gadot #jamie dornan #actuallylukedanes #2023 movie journey

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2023 Movie Journey #15: Overboard

overboard. this movie is so incredibly charming. i grew up with the original, the same way i grew up with goldie hawn more broadly--she shares my birthday, and as a kid i found that magical. i loved her movies. so i was very worried going into this one, because i was watching it with my family, who already knew they liked it, and i never needed a remake to exist (even one starring anna faris, who i love in everything).

but it really is so good! and more surprising to me for some reason, it's full of the same kind of heart as the original...and calls back to SO much of that one, in a way that made me happy. with this premise you can never fully get around the problems of 'hey what if we kidnap an amnesiac and mess with them for revenge until we become a happy little family?' but i do think they confront more of the issues head-on in this one, rather than brushing them aside or playing them all for laughs, because in the original the character is an Awful Woman and you really didn't need much of a reason to enjoy watching Awful Women 'get what they deserved' in the '80s.

but yeah. i don't have too much more to say about this one because the premise is modernized and gender-flipped but still so similar. oh, i really enjoyed the slightly different family dynamics they gave him though, they were fun. and the kids in this movie are FANTASTIC. the feelings in this version are so much more intense in a way that's both believable and justified.

it's sweet and it's funny and it's sad, and i just love a sincere comedy so very much because they feel kind of rare to me, like it's more difficult somehow to balance humor with depth so instead now we more often get gross-out comedy or detached arch comedy. this movie says, you know what's fun? watching normal people get happier, and an asshole choose to be better. and this movie is right.

#overboard #anna faris #actuallylukedanes #i have the best best friend #2023 movie journey

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 9 months

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Tagged by: Fave of faves @bethanyactually--and usually I save every post I'm tagged in to (at least theoretically) do later, but since I actually have returned to watching and listening to things lately, I'm gonna do this one right now.

Last song: Like You Do by Josh Ramsay. And Christian Kane's cover of Fast Car, both of which were recced to me by Leander, who knew I should hear them. But also, while I haven't listened to any of it since Tuesday, I woke up with the Daisy Jones and The Six soundtrack playing in my head...just like it has been ever since I originally started watching the series. Today it's mostly been The River featuring Simone, Regret Me, and More Fun To Miss. I know enough of the lyrics now for the soundtrack to be my constant mental radio as I go about my day.

Currently watching: Nancy Drew S2 (I'm 4 episodes in and enjoying it a lot), Schmigadoon S2 (I've seen half of it and it's still fantastic and I'm bummed I only have 3 episodes to go) and today I'm about to start my Good Omens rewatch so I can head into the new season full of S1 feels. Because my best friend is literally the best, I'm also partly through a DJATS rewatch with Leander seeing it for the first time--making that my favorite thing I am watching right now.

Currently reading: Nightwork by Nora Roberts (I'm about halfway through it and have been borrowing it from @actuallylukedanes forever and I feel very bad about that! I will finish it! I'm also partly through How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, also on loan from Leander. And before that, I was (and remain) partway through literally 20 other ebooks of all kinds--most recently Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig. There's a ton of great nonfiction that I already have on my tablet and know I'll enjoy cuz I'm that kind of geek...I just rarely read anymore because reading time is time I'm not spending with my millions of other hobbies.

Current obsession: As referenced above, Daisy Jones and The Six, which I am so so happy Leander is watching with me--both helping me get it out of my system a little and letting me indulge even more in my love of it. After we watched it on Wednesday, I was able to listen to something that wasn't the soundtrack for the first time, so I just may be able to dial this obsession down to manageable levels at some point. But GUYS IT'S SO GOOD. I want to gif it as soon as I get back to Photoshop and I kind of want to read the book, when I didn't before. I just want to burrow into the world and live there, and I haven't felt that way in quite a while, about anything. (It's made it harder to engage with other things, which is why I originally was going to add Ted Lasso's completed final season to my week along with Nancy Drew and Schmigadoon, but ended up not doing so because my head and heart are full of DJATS right now. But I missed this feeling, too, so I'm happy to be in love again.)

No-pressure tagging: @actuallylukedanes, @jicklet, @jakeperalta, @beturass, @hondagirll, @mythologicalmango, @dollsome-does-tumblr, @anextrapart, @sentichefuoripiove, @robbiedaymonds and anybody else who wants to do this.

#actuallylukedanes #i have the best best friend #daisy jones and the six #christian kane #bethanyactually #josh ramsay #the river #regret me #more fun to miss #nancy drew #schmigadoon #good omens #nightwork #nora roberts #ibram x. kendi #how to raise an antiracist #zero fail: the rise and fall of the secret service #carol leonnig #tag games

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2023 Movie Journey #14: The Super Mario Brothers Movie

the super mario bros. movie. this is another movie i watched with my family. i didn't plan on watching it, so all i knew going in was that chris pratt was mario. for some reason, i also believed going in that jack black was luigi--i knew he was also in it, but in hindsight i'm not sure how i got that specific idea.

i love anna taylor-joy so it was cool to learn that she was also a star of this. the role didn't show off her fascinating range, but i understand why it was never going to while she was playing this type of animated character.

i can't stand chris pratt and there was no way for me around that, unfortunately. it might have been different if he was one of the minor characters instead. and as somebody who barely grew up around nintendo, i also couldn't gain much from the nostalgia elements of this movie that i'm sure delighted other people--i recognized things like donkey kong, but don't personally have any attachment to them, so that level of the movie felt like it was expecting viewers to love it just based on all the recognizable faves and it didn't accomplish that with me.

the rest of the voice cast did a good job, though i didn't place any of them as i was watching--even though i did know some of the other actors once the credits rolled. i think i was just too distracted by the animation to focus on the voices more, because the style of animation was really really cool. i'm not automatically a big fan of animated movies, because how they're animated affects me a lot: certain styles can clash with my brain and make it hard to enjoy even a movie that's great in every other way. this one's style is sort of soft and rounded in a way that i enjoyed a lot.

my two other favorite things about this movie are first, how colorful it was. the rainbow bridge! a literal rainbow! possibly the only car chase scene i have ever enjoyed in my life!! every car chase scene in every movie now should have to be that colorful so i care. lol.

and probably unsurprisingly, my other favorite thing throughout the movie was jack black. while it was very confusing for me at first that he was not luigi (instead of asking @actuallylukedanes why luigi didn't sound like jack black, like i should have, i just kept watching and thinking i must be hearing him wrong somehow), he was perfect as the antagonist. i adored him and every one of his little songs. i wish he was going to have his own spin-off movie.

this movie was cute and i'm glad i saw it. i can imagine it being just as fun on a rewatch. and for me jack black was worth it all by himself.

#the super mario bros. movie #actuallylukedanes #i have the best best friend #(i'm glad they wanted me to see this so i got to experience the jack black of it all)#anna taylor joy #jack black #colors #rainbows #2023 movie journey

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 9 months

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i was sitting on the ledge of a cold decision, yeah you were sitting on the edge of a blurry vision, yeah and i turned my head, stopped me dead i don't know just what to do now it'll never be same from my heart's collision, yeah

and, and i know, i know i know that we could hurt each other but i know, i know i know who we are

i'm the fight when there's no light into the darkness you're the feeling when i'm reeling from the heartless

#shoutout to all my alvareider friends!#actuallylukedanes #just introduced me to this album and i found a new song for a beloved ship :)#josh ramsay #you & i #alvareider #odaat #i have the best best friend #i love music so much though #Spotify

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 months

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2023 Movie Journey #12: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

indiana jones and the dial of destiny. so i really enjoyed this. a lot. here’s my complicated backstory: my mom owned one or two of the original indiana jones movies on vhs, i remember seeing them in our movie cabinet--but i’ve never seen any of the movies in the series. i wasn’t planning on watching this one, either, because while it has an obviously great cast, i’m just not an action movie person. at best, i like action movies in spite of their genre, like birds of prey or mad max fury road.

so unlike when i plan to see a movie, i wasn’t avoiding spoilers for this one. and what i did read about it, was interesting. and @actuallylukedanes was already planning to see it, and invited me to join--and let’s face it, where phoebe waller-bridge goes, i will follow. leander promised i didn’t need to have seen the rest of the movies to watch the new one, and i figured i could always watch them later if i wanted to--this was not the first time i dove into the end of a world first.

with a few minor exceptions, i absolutely loved it. they created a story that (to me, at least) felt like it existed for a point--like they had something specific to say, in bringing indiana jones back, rather than just wanting to cash in forever on the franchise. i’m not saying they weren’t also doing that, of course...i just enjoyed the way it felt conclusive to me as a movie. it stood well on its own and i loved its themes. i like my action movies with some feelings.

spoilers ahead:

harrison ford was predictably great and i enjoyed watching him. i didn’t even realize antonio banderas was antonio banderas, until leander mentioned it after the movie was over. there’s really nothing i can say about mads mikkelsen because he is a delightful chaos agent always, and i don’t actually enjoy watching him play a nazi, but he’s one of the very best when it comes to character actors. as usual, he made a great villain.

and of course, phoebe waller-bridge was everything i wanted and more, as helena. she was conniving, she was conflicted, she was wearing an unconvincing facade and carrying an unexplained backstory, and whenever she faced off against indy like some kind of shadow self from a new generation, it was as if she believed she was a badass antagonist, when mostly she just seemed sad and hollow underneath a smirk and a truly great wardrobe.

i was just so thrilled that they gave her such a huge role in the action--i knew she was in the movie, obviously, but it’s so against type for her to do that kind of acting that i think i expected more of a bantering sidekick thing. she was a full-fledged participant in the high-speed hijinks! i couldn’t have been happier about that. it was so fun to see. and i wish we knew more about what made her who she was.

the four issues i had with the movie overall were an underwater scene (because i have drowning fear, so it wasn’t anything specific about the scene, i hate all underwater scenes where humans could die), the way that they used the era the film is mainly set in (late 60s) to make a lot of the action based on car chases and plane drama, the use of the movie’s two black characters, and the way the happy ending kind of seemed to undermine the whole point of the movie.

when it comes to the car chases, which lasted forever and i found really boring, they only bothered me because i wasn’t expecting them. even though i haven’t seen other indiana jones movies, i had the sense going in that they were set far back in history, with his adventures revolving more around, like, cave stuff. even the trailer for the new one didn’t emphasize the modern elements so much, in the trailer fast-forwarding to indiana jones’s elder years. it’s like ‘whip versus guns!’ played for laughs.

but in the movie itself, i got the strong sense that the filmmakers were thrilled to have the option of making huge scenes out of vehicle chases in a way they couldn’t before, because sure, this may be indiana jones, but people seeing blockbusters today love giant car (and train, and plane) chases--the best way to make a better movie is include more of them! whereas i’d much rather see an indiana jones movie, which leander assured me afterwards really didn’t use to have that stuff. those other movies already exist! for the people who want that!

it was kind of uncomfortably meta for me, like the movie plot was saying the main character doesn’t want to live in the modern world surrounding him...while they were also filling the movie with modern elements i didn’t want, as a viewer who came to see that main character who’s out of place.

when it came to the couple of black characters in the movie, i really felt like they were wasted, because the acting was way better than their roles so i expected more. the cia agent who was working with the villain as a sort of handler and facilitator, she spent the movie trying to corral him and failing, telling the nazis off for undermining their mission...but given how her storyline ended, she could honestly have been removed from the movie entirely and nothing would have changed. i don’t remember a single moment in the movie where her involvement made anything happen or not happen--and that’s not meant as an insult to her!

i was waiting for her to get to be cool somehow, surprising, because she could have been. where was her big moment, while helena was getting so many? i know she’s not the lead, but she was on the movie poster too. instead, in her final scene, i was just left thinking that’s all? what was the point? i guess it was meant to complicate the group of nazi goons chasing our heroes, but given that it didn’t end up turning that into action, i’m not sure it really complicated anything, so much as it went hey look a black woman is working with secret nazis. and then it had nothing else to say about that. she really deserved better.

the other character was a minor one, he didn’t even have a name, but the actor grabbed my attention and the scene was so tense, i said out loud that i felt bad for him, because it was pretty obvious what his fate was about to be. and then it didn’t happen! instead, the hotel porter just had this truly well-acted scene opposite mads mikkelsen, and it raised the emotional stakes in a way that none of the nazi’s interactions with indy (past or present) really could, because his hatred of indiana jones was personal even more than it was political or national. the kind of dangerous revulsion he simmered with in that hotel room, that was the stuff true bad guys are made of.

it made me all the more disappointed, though, because they didn’t give that same kind of space to the cia agent who actually had a name, and major screentime. the antagonist kept his disrespect for her on a more detached level, so it could be explained away as a snobby scientist looking down on a government worker he doesn’t find useful. we don’t get to see her wrestle with the realization that she’s in danger just being around him, or the true evil that lies under his well-regarded skills. even when his goons start killing people, she’s more upset that they have no restraint than over the actual murders, because she thinks they’re all after the same objective. and that’s gross, and definitely could have been resonant, if it had ended up mattering more.

besides that, though, i enjoyed the ‘supernatural’ element they went with for the movie. it was a good time, and also added emotional weight to the end that was great. my third issue comes from that, and it’s not a real problem i have or anything so much as an open-ended wondering about what they did.

because they set it up to give everyone a happy ending, a nice found family and family reunion with the characters who were left. but to get there, they had to piece together an object that made the adventures possible, while stopping nazis from using it to go back and win the war. once they’ve defeated the nazis, and everyone is reunited and happy, they have the intact object--the one they spent the whole story trying to keep nazis from piecing together to use for evil. it’s unavoidable that they had to fix the object, even as it was dangerous because bad guys wanted it...but once they did fix it and return to ‘normal,’ are we supposed to believe that it’s not dangerous anymore?

obviously it’s safe with our hero, but these movies are all about history, and history knows that nobody and nothing lasts forever. the best efforts to protect a powerful, dangerous object are naturally imperfect. unless the point is to keep the object, on purpose, to be able to time travel (which the movie seemed to say at the end was not what they should do, even indiana jones, because of the risk it would pose to everything that came after) then it seems to me the moral of the story is that the safety of the world depends on destroying the object, just like helena’s father wanted.

because even splitting it into pieces and hiding those wasn’t enough to protect it from nazis, and they only stopped those specific bad guys. the world already knows the object exists, even if it’s a myth to most, and there will always be evil in the world. so looking far down the line from indiana jones’s specific life, the best case scenario is a future where he (or another well-meaning person) chooses to time travel and we’ll then see the wide-ranging unpredictable effects of that. the worse future is one where an inevitable new evil rises up, with enough knowledge and resources to try to find and use the object and destroy everything or rule everything.

i suspect i’m overthinking it, especially since they swear there’s no continuation planned with phoebe waller-bridge as a natural choice for indy’s successor in a new world. but to me those questions were just left sitting on the literal table.

it didn’t take away at all from how much i enjoyed the movie. i just...wonder. i definitely recommend this one, though, especially with snacks. movie popcorn got me through that car chase. and watching it with somebody you love is even better: leander was great comfort during my drowning anxiety, and while i stared away from the screen entirely during a spider scene. (ack.)

i especially appreciated getting to see harrison ford as indiana jones in this closing chapter, partly because what this movie digs into with his character is a focus on the past when the past is gone--and at the beginning of the year, i saw a totally different movie that was exploring such similar themes: a man called otto.

but where that one emotionally scarred me, i felt like this movie gave us a man looking backwards, and did it better. or at least, it did it in a way that i liked a lot more. when we start this movie, it’s the end of indiana jones’s life, well past the end of his adventuring career, and what he has left is an emptiness he’s not even trying to shake. just like a man called otto, the real point of this movie is the many reluctant interactions with other people that start to improve his outlook and his life in general--but first, requiring one final grouchy return to adventuring!

while he can’t completely turn back time to fix all his heartbreak or escape it, he gets a much happier ending than otto, on multiple fronts. i didn’t know and love indiana jones going in, like i know most people already will when they see it. but i absolutely loved him by the end, in all his curmudgeonly glory, and this movie just made me happy. he and phoebe waller-bridge made me happy, the cleverness and the nazi murders and the time travel made me happy...i’d enjoy this one just as much on a rewatch.

#indiana jones and the dial of destiny #actuallylukedanes #harrison ford #phoebe waller bridge #mads mikkelsen #antonio banderas #2023 movie journey

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