lots of movies
I wrote most of the first part of this up in Day One back on July 9, to test the app out, then never emailed it to myself to post. Tsk. But it seems a waste to have written this much and not posted it, so even though it's now weeks late, what the heck.
Over the holiday (July 4) weekend, I did a bunch of stuff. Mostly I sweated, because it was incredibly hot. And I sorted out videos of my cats (and, um, uploaded some of them to youtube), and I watched a bunch of movies.
On Thursday (the Fourth), I actually remembered to pop my 1776 DVD into the DVD player, and watched it on the correct day and everything; I always intend to do that, but most years don't quite manage. I've loved that movie for years; I saw it in the theater on a school field trip in 1976 for the Bicentennial, and it's been a favorite of mine ever since. Most of all, I love that we have the restored version to look at now. For years, all I'd seen was the abridged version that made it into the theaters.
So I still get a little happy moment every time I see the restored footage, properly merged into the movie on the DVD. (The Laserdisc - which I had a tape of - had the restored footage, too, but it hadn't gone through post-production, so you could really tell what had been cut. Which was verrry interesting in its own way, really.)
Even more fun, though, was pausing the movie and going to Tumblr for the first time in ages. To my surprise and delight, my dash had a lot of 1776 posts on it, with gifsets and quotes and great stuff. For years I thought I was practically the only person who loved this movie, and it's been amazing to find out that I'm really not. I love the Internet a lot.
The next day, I think, I watched almost all of Independence Day. I missed it when it first came out, because I didn't think it was my kind of thing – I'm not into the Top Gun type of entertainment, really – so years later when I finally watched it I had a happy surprise waiting for me. Still lots of fun! Although wow, it was really blatantly obvious that the women's real roles were to run into the heroes' arms at the end (although the scene with the stripper-mom and First Lady Laura Roslin is always fun, and helps balance that out a bit *g*).
On Saturday, I went out to the movies, in an actual theater, with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
therienneand mollyamory. We had two options: The Heat, and White House Down. It was my call, because they'd gone out the day before to see World War Z to get away from blistering temps and a house under renovation. I was the one who had suggested The Heat originally (which I still want to see at some point), but when push came to shove, I figured the over-two-hour movie was better than the under-two-hour movie to beat the 98° day.
So we saw White House Down. It was a little too long for the story it was telling, and it wasn't telling anything deep, but I had a lot of fun anyway.
I really like a bunch of the things they did in it. I loved that it was a little girl who was the smartass geek about facts and figures and details, instead of the usual smartass boy. I like that she wasn't just smart, but she saves the day – everyone knew it was a little girl who got the video and send it out, everyone knew it was her on the lawn waving the flag. Girls don't get to do that very much, and how awesome was that, that little girls watching this could see that they could be heroes, and that little boys could see that little girls could be heroes. Without it ever being treacly, or overly trite, or anything. She was just a kid, who cried because she was scared, but used her brains and her courage.
I like that even though it was his daughter being in danger that got John Cale to go on the rescue mission, he got sidetracked into the actually more important job of protecting the president. He never forgot about his daughter, but he never lost sight of the fact that his job was to protect the president.
I like that the president didn't let himself be swayed into setting off the nuclear football when Emily was threatened, and that they'd set her up as understanding enough about politics and how the world worked – even if not in the small politics of who gets hired to be a Secret Service agent – that when the president told her he couldn't save her, she at least understood a little.
I like that they had the head of the Secret Service (*looks up*: Walker) have a brain tumor – it was a good explanation for why he was acting so out of character, combined with the genuine grief and rage driving him. I appreciate that they didn't dwell on it, and no one made excuses for him about it – no one said oh it's just a brain tumor, we can't blame him. Everyone blamed him, and rightly so. But there was a reason for what happened, he didn't just go randomly homicidal and traitorous (and he also hadn't been planning this for years while no one noticed).
But even more than that, I really, really, really liked his wife. It was such a standard thing, for them to look at him and decide “oh we'll bring in his wife, she'll calm him down, she'll talk him down, she'll make him see reason.” And she tried! She really did. She didn't know what he was doing, or why he was doing it, and she was very distressed by it all. Right up until he told her why. And in a way, I kind of wanted to cheer when her face went still, and her eyes went angry, and she told him to do whatever he had to do.
I just love that this calming, soothing, pacifying nonentity of the wife turned out to have as much agency as her husband did. She was grieving just as much; she was just as angry at the universe and at the country and everything. When does that happen? It was a very brief scene, but it was kind of a game changer.
I kinda loved Donnie the Tour Guide taking everything personally because the bad guys were destroying all the artifacts he loved so. <3
I also like the fakeout. The movie went on too long, and it went on too long because they had to wrap up the movie as though Walker was the real villain before they could get the fakeout in. So, not great narrative pacing, necessarily. But the fakeout itself, with the power behind the power pulling the strings? That was actually pretty great. Because the guy was brilliant. He was quiet, and unassuming, and he had everyone completely snookered. He had set up this horrible situation exactly perfectly. Therienne was nodding along with him when he said he was going to blow the White House up, because, yes. That was the right call, under those specific, particular circumstances. Whoever was in charge had to destroy any possibility that those nuclear missiles could be sent.
He was *thisclose* to a perfect, horrible coup, and being hailed as the unexpected hero who'd saved the world from total destruction. And it was a really nice echo that Walker had broken and gone on this rampage in part because his son had died in combat, and Speaker guy (Raphelson) got taken down because he'd helped Cale get a job after he saved Raphelson's son in combat. (And, of course, that Cale was there in the first place to impress his daughter - it's all about fathers doing things for their kids.)
There was even some fannish actor-spotting to do -- Lance Riddick as General Walker, which made me really happy (I love him, and man, does he have the gravitas to pull that off. Fabulous choice.), and Jimmi Simpson as Skip the Hacker, which was really distracting, as he was playing a variation of his Logan Pierce character from Person of Interest -- all immature brattiness and smug superiority. Once I got over the surprise it was fine, though. *g*
All in all, a much more enjoyable movie than I'd really been expecting; I'd gone into it thinking it would mostly just be explosions. (Of which, to be fair, there were roughly 7 million. Between the guns, grenades, rocket launchers, missiles, Blackhawk attacks, attacks on Blackhawks, exploding poolside cabanas, and whatever else I'm forgetting.)
Last weekend was not broiling, for once, but Pacific Rim was out, and we'd all been seeing great things about it, so off we went. Two theater movies in two weeks is really unusual for me, but this sounded like too much fun to miss.
And it was indeed also a really fun movie!therienne had told me that Tom Cruise was originally up for Idris Elba's role, and dear GOD am I glad they gave it to Elba. They seriously traded up, there. This would have been... wow, so bad, if Cruise had been playing the man in charge.
I was a bit overwhelmed by all the closeup fight scenes; I could tell who was doing what (and having just read on Wikipedia that del Toro was looking for a "light and airy" feel... I don't think he quite managed that. with the giant heavy Kaijus and the giant heavy Jaegers. as such.) But I loved the echoes of old Japanese monster movies, and the mecha feel of it all.
I had a little bit of a cranky moment when it looked like every Jaeger team was two men - where were the sister teams? But then at least they had what looked like a brother-sister team from Russia, and they were one of the strongest teams out there. And the triplet team, wow, that was cool. But I'm still sad that we never saw a single all-female team. And I wish we'd seen a bit more about other non-relatives teams; clearly it's possible, since they just assumed they could try Raleigh out with a bunch of non-related candidates, so there have to have been some teams like that.
Mako was also pretty damn cool, although I winced a little at the scene where she just stepped silently back and watched as Raleigh and the aggressively macho Australian dude duked it out -- beyond thinking that was way to passive for Mako (she's polite, not subservient!), it was just stupid for two pilots to get into a fight that could have done them real harm, when they were the only thing standing between Earth and destruction. Someone should have dumped a bucket of water on their heads the second they started posturing. Idiots.
Ordinarily I like the geeky-scientists part of movies like this, but I mostly gritted my teeth through them this time. Newton was trying too hard to be Rick Moranis in... pretty much anything Rick Moranis has ever been, all squeaky flailing, and while I sometimes like Rick Moranis, apparently I can't deal with imitators. Also I was a little baffled that apparently there were only two scientists left trying to figure anything out, and that neither of them could see a shred of value in the other's work, when they were just coming at the same problem from different directions.
Also, seriously, when Newton hooked himself up to the Kaiju, my first thought was "uh, you think this is a hive mind, and you're sitting in a secret last bastion connecting to them so they can see exactly where you are and what you're doing?" Because really, beyond the utter idiocy of connecting to an alien brain with no failsafes to pull you out -- or, you know, someone standing by to shoot you in the head if you get taken over -- how completely stupid do you have to be to connect to a hive mind? It was really jarring, because other than that bit, there wasn't a whole lot of "no, we've never watched tv or read any SF, why?" going on.
I did love the people in the subway (?) believing him instantly when he said the Kaiju was after him, and just backing right the hell away to leave him alone. Well done, people! Good survival skills, I approve.
I also loved the worldbuilding around the Kaijus interactions with Earth -- that after the first attacks they buried their dead, memorialized the tragedy, and moved on; that we'd turned them into plush toys and jokes when things seemed to have stabilized; that there was a thriving black market that knew more about the Kaiju than the official scientists did; that buildings were using Kaiju bones/horns as decoration, because sure, why not? (I had a moment during the movie wondering what on earth they were doing with these giant, rotting carcasses -- but of course someone was scavenging them and selling them for huge profits!)
I liked that we never really saw the political side of anything, just the hands-on and day-to-day, and the little political stuff we saw was basically nonsensical, people in safe areas making decisions that have brutal effects on people in the path. I'm kinda curious about what really drove the decision to suspend the Jaeger project in favor of those utterly useless defensive walls. Which on the one hand, dear god, so useless. But on the other hand, it gave a lot of displaced people something to do, and let them feel like they were participating in their own defense. If the world's governments had decided everything was hopeless, it's not actually a terrible sop to the people to give them a (false) sense of agency and usefulness, instead of telling them to just huddle in fear and pray. (Although if I'm remembering right, the crowd of wall-workers hoping for a spot was all men, once again - argh.)
I also liked that we did see people being affected by all this - not just random destruction where people are dying in droves, unnoticed, as battles rage around them, but people running for safety, Jaegers saving boats in the ocean, little Mako crying her heart out terrified and traumatized. Someone on my reading list or network posted a while back about the weird shift in a lot of action films to massive destruction with no consequences, and how it's a relief to see some movies remembering the human element (like the MCU films), and I was feeling the same way here.
Okay, and I'm just gonna wrap that up there, because suddenly there is thunder, andmollyamory called a few minutes ago to tell me there are torrential downpours a few miles away from here. I just hope the promised cool front behind these storm cells really exists. Seven straight days of over-90-degree temps, with heat indexes over 100 much of the time, is just way too much heat for Boston. (Seriously - three days above 90 is rare enough to qualify as a heat wave here. Seven in a row? UGH.) Weather people, you better be telling the truth about it actually dipping down below 80 at some point in the not too distant future! (At least at night? Please? I would like to be able to open a window again and get some fresh air in here.)
Over the holiday (July 4) weekend, I did a bunch of stuff. Mostly I sweated, because it was incredibly hot. And I sorted out videos of my cats (and, um, uploaded some of them to youtube), and I watched a bunch of movies.
On Thursday (the Fourth), I actually remembered to pop my 1776 DVD into the DVD player, and watched it on the correct day and everything; I always intend to do that, but most years don't quite manage. I've loved that movie for years; I saw it in the theater on a school field trip in 1976 for the Bicentennial, and it's been a favorite of mine ever since. Most of all, I love that we have the restored version to look at now. For years, all I'd seen was the abridged version that made it into the theaters.
So I still get a little happy moment every time I see the restored footage, properly merged into the movie on the DVD. (The Laserdisc - which I had a tape of - had the restored footage, too, but it hadn't gone through post-production, so you could really tell what had been cut. Which was verrry interesting in its own way, really.)
Even more fun, though, was pausing the movie and going to Tumblr for the first time in ages. To my surprise and delight, my dash had a lot of 1776 posts on it, with gifsets and quotes and great stuff. For years I thought I was practically the only person who loved this movie, and it's been amazing to find out that I'm really not. I love the Internet a lot.
The next day, I think, I watched almost all of Independence Day. I missed it when it first came out, because I didn't think it was my kind of thing – I'm not into the Top Gun type of entertainment, really – so years later when I finally watched it I had a happy surprise waiting for me. Still lots of fun! Although wow, it was really blatantly obvious that the women's real roles were to run into the heroes' arms at the end (although the scene with the stripper-mom and First Lady Laura Roslin is always fun, and helps balance that out a bit *g*).
On Saturday, I went out to the movies, in an actual theater, with
therienneand mollyamory. We had two options: The Heat, and White House Down. It was my call, because they'd gone out the day before to see World War Z to get away from blistering temps and a house under renovation. I was the one who had suggested The Heat originally (which I still want to see at some point), but when push came to shove, I figured the over-two-hour movie was better than the under-two-hour movie to beat the 98° day.So we saw White House Down. It was a little too long for the story it was telling, and it wasn't telling anything deep, but I had a lot of fun anyway.
I really like a bunch of the things they did in it. I loved that it was a little girl who was the smartass geek about facts and figures and details, instead of the usual smartass boy. I like that she wasn't just smart, but she saves the day – everyone knew it was a little girl who got the video and send it out, everyone knew it was her on the lawn waving the flag. Girls don't get to do that very much, and how awesome was that, that little girls watching this could see that they could be heroes, and that little boys could see that little girls could be heroes. Without it ever being treacly, or overly trite, or anything. She was just a kid, who cried because she was scared, but used her brains and her courage.
I like that even though it was his daughter being in danger that got John Cale to go on the rescue mission, he got sidetracked into the actually more important job of protecting the president. He never forgot about his daughter, but he never lost sight of the fact that his job was to protect the president.
I like that the president didn't let himself be swayed into setting off the nuclear football when Emily was threatened, and that they'd set her up as understanding enough about politics and how the world worked – even if not in the small politics of who gets hired to be a Secret Service agent – that when the president told her he couldn't save her, she at least understood a little.
I like that they had the head of the Secret Service (*looks up*: Walker) have a brain tumor – it was a good explanation for why he was acting so out of character, combined with the genuine grief and rage driving him. I appreciate that they didn't dwell on it, and no one made excuses for him about it – no one said oh it's just a brain tumor, we can't blame him. Everyone blamed him, and rightly so. But there was a reason for what happened, he didn't just go randomly homicidal and traitorous (and he also hadn't been planning this for years while no one noticed).
But even more than that, I really, really, really liked his wife. It was such a standard thing, for them to look at him and decide “oh we'll bring in his wife, she'll calm him down, she'll talk him down, she'll make him see reason.” And she tried! She really did. She didn't know what he was doing, or why he was doing it, and she was very distressed by it all. Right up until he told her why. And in a way, I kind of wanted to cheer when her face went still, and her eyes went angry, and she told him to do whatever he had to do.
I just love that this calming, soothing, pacifying nonentity of the wife turned out to have as much agency as her husband did. She was grieving just as much; she was just as angry at the universe and at the country and everything. When does that happen? It was a very brief scene, but it was kind of a game changer.
I kinda loved Donnie the Tour Guide taking everything personally because the bad guys were destroying all the artifacts he loved so. <3
I also like the fakeout. The movie went on too long, and it went on too long because they had to wrap up the movie as though Walker was the real villain before they could get the fakeout in. So, not great narrative pacing, necessarily. But the fakeout itself, with the power behind the power pulling the strings? That was actually pretty great. Because the guy was brilliant. He was quiet, and unassuming, and he had everyone completely snookered. He had set up this horrible situation exactly perfectly. Therienne was nodding along with him when he said he was going to blow the White House up, because, yes. That was the right call, under those specific, particular circumstances. Whoever was in charge had to destroy any possibility that those nuclear missiles could be sent.
He was *thisclose* to a perfect, horrible coup, and being hailed as the unexpected hero who'd saved the world from total destruction. And it was a really nice echo that Walker had broken and gone on this rampage in part because his son had died in combat, and Speaker guy (Raphelson) got taken down because he'd helped Cale get a job after he saved Raphelson's son in combat. (And, of course, that Cale was there in the first place to impress his daughter - it's all about fathers doing things for their kids.)
There was even some fannish actor-spotting to do -- Lance Riddick as General Walker, which made me really happy (I love him, and man, does he have the gravitas to pull that off. Fabulous choice.), and Jimmi Simpson as Skip the Hacker, which was really distracting, as he was playing a variation of his Logan Pierce character from Person of Interest -- all immature brattiness and smug superiority. Once I got over the surprise it was fine, though. *g*
All in all, a much more enjoyable movie than I'd really been expecting; I'd gone into it thinking it would mostly just be explosions. (Of which, to be fair, there were roughly 7 million. Between the guns, grenades, rocket launchers, missiles, Blackhawk attacks, attacks on Blackhawks, exploding poolside cabanas, and whatever else I'm forgetting.)
Last weekend was not broiling, for once, but Pacific Rim was out, and we'd all been seeing great things about it, so off we went. Two theater movies in two weeks is really unusual for me, but this sounded like too much fun to miss.
And it was indeed also a really fun movie!
therienne had told me that Tom Cruise was originally up for Idris Elba's role, and dear GOD am I glad they gave it to Elba. They seriously traded up, there. This would have been... wow, so bad, if Cruise had been playing the man in charge.I was a bit overwhelmed by all the closeup fight scenes; I could tell who was doing what (and having just read on Wikipedia that del Toro was looking for a "light and airy" feel... I don't think he quite managed that. with the giant heavy Kaijus and the giant heavy Jaegers. as such.) But I loved the echoes of old Japanese monster movies, and the mecha feel of it all.
I had a little bit of a cranky moment when it looked like every Jaeger team was two men - where were the sister teams? But then at least they had what looked like a brother-sister team from Russia, and they were one of the strongest teams out there. And the triplet team, wow, that was cool. But I'm still sad that we never saw a single all-female team. And I wish we'd seen a bit more about other non-relatives teams; clearly it's possible, since they just assumed they could try Raleigh out with a bunch of non-related candidates, so there have to have been some teams like that.
Mako was also pretty damn cool, although I winced a little at the scene where she just stepped silently back and watched as Raleigh and the aggressively macho Australian dude duked it out -- beyond thinking that was way to passive for Mako (she's polite, not subservient!), it was just stupid for two pilots to get into a fight that could have done them real harm, when they were the only thing standing between Earth and destruction. Someone should have dumped a bucket of water on their heads the second they started posturing. Idiots.
Ordinarily I like the geeky-scientists part of movies like this, but I mostly gritted my teeth through them this time. Newton was trying too hard to be Rick Moranis in... pretty much anything Rick Moranis has ever been, all squeaky flailing, and while I sometimes like Rick Moranis, apparently I can't deal with imitators. Also I was a little baffled that apparently there were only two scientists left trying to figure anything out, and that neither of them could see a shred of value in the other's work, when they were just coming at the same problem from different directions.
Also, seriously, when Newton hooked himself up to the Kaiju, my first thought was "uh, you think this is a hive mind, and you're sitting in a secret last bastion connecting to them so they can see exactly where you are and what you're doing?" Because really, beyond the utter idiocy of connecting to an alien brain with no failsafes to pull you out -- or, you know, someone standing by to shoot you in the head if you get taken over -- how completely stupid do you have to be to connect to a hive mind? It was really jarring, because other than that bit, there wasn't a whole lot of "no, we've never watched tv or read any SF, why?" going on.
I did love the people in the subway (?) believing him instantly when he said the Kaiju was after him, and just backing right the hell away to leave him alone. Well done, people! Good survival skills, I approve.
I also loved the worldbuilding around the Kaijus interactions with Earth -- that after the first attacks they buried their dead, memorialized the tragedy, and moved on; that we'd turned them into plush toys and jokes when things seemed to have stabilized; that there was a thriving black market that knew more about the Kaiju than the official scientists did; that buildings were using Kaiju bones/horns as decoration, because sure, why not? (I had a moment during the movie wondering what on earth they were doing with these giant, rotting carcasses -- but of course someone was scavenging them and selling them for huge profits!)
I liked that we never really saw the political side of anything, just the hands-on and day-to-day, and the little political stuff we saw was basically nonsensical, people in safe areas making decisions that have brutal effects on people in the path. I'm kinda curious about what really drove the decision to suspend the Jaeger project in favor of those utterly useless defensive walls. Which on the one hand, dear god, so useless. But on the other hand, it gave a lot of displaced people something to do, and let them feel like they were participating in their own defense. If the world's governments had decided everything was hopeless, it's not actually a terrible sop to the people to give them a (false) sense of agency and usefulness, instead of telling them to just huddle in fear and pray. (Although if I'm remembering right, the crowd of wall-workers hoping for a spot was all men, once again - argh.)
I also liked that we did see people being affected by all this - not just random destruction where people are dying in droves, unnoticed, as battles rage around them, but people running for safety, Jaegers saving boats in the ocean, little Mako crying her heart out terrified and traumatized. Someone on my reading list or network posted a while back about the weird shift in a lot of action films to massive destruction with no consequences, and how it's a relief to see some movies remembering the human element (like the MCU films), and I was feeling the same way here.
Okay, and I'm just gonna wrap that up there, because suddenly there is thunder, and
mollyamory called a few minutes ago to tell me there are torrential downpours a few miles away from here. I just hope the promised cool front behind these storm cells really exists. Seven straight days of over-90-degree temps, with heat indexes over 100 much of the time, is just way too much heat for Boston. (Seriously - three days above 90 is rare enough to qualify as a heat wave here. Seven in a row? UGH.) Weather people, you better be telling the truth about it actually dipping down below 80 at some point in the not too distant future! (At least at night? Please? I would like to be able to open a window again and get some fresh air in here.)