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Recent Movies
Jul. 4th, 2023 08:41 amAs another piece of my plan to Make Life More Interesting 2023, my friends and I have trooped to many movies. Upon sitting down to write reviews I realized that almost all these cinema trips were rewatches of beloved favorites: The Princess Bride, Spirited Away, Arsenic and Old Lace, etc. etc. Which was lots of fun! But I don’t have much to say about most of them.
However, we did see a couple new movies, including Everything Everywhere All at Once. I appear to be the only person on the entire internet who felt that this movie was merely fine. It’s just a little too zany for me, I guess. (I also found the people with the hotdog hands exceedingly gross, which really undermined the love story between hotdog hands Evelyn and Deirdre.) I did laugh when Alpha Waymond explains to Evelyn that she can access a huge number of powers from her alternate universe selves because she is currently living the worst possible version of her life. What a reason to be a superhero!
Also Labyrinth! Somehow I made it through my entire childhood and adolescence without ever seeing this movie, and since they were showing it at the Artcraft OF COURSE I had to see it on the big screen. There were at least three Jareths in attendance, and the audience SCREAMED when Jareth first came on screen.
Now I think one has to see this movie at more or less the onset of puberty to get the full effect, but I did very much enjoy it. Magic! Muppets! The amazing visuals: the rotating pyramids of crystal balls, the ballroom dream sequence with Sarah in that amazing dress with the tremendous cloud of hair, Sarah’s bedroom (WHAT a fantastic bedroom), the Escher staircase sequence where Sarah runs up stairs that turn into upside-down stairs as she tries to reach her baby brother…
Long before I ever saw this movie, I peripherally glimpsed some fandom wank about whether Sarah is a brat for not wanting to babysit her little brother. Now that I have seen it, (1) who among us was never a brat at the age of sixteen?, and (2) complaining that the characters are not moral paragons seems like the most boring possible way to engage with this movie. Indeed, with almost any movie, and I hate that this has become such a common form of fandom engagement, although let’s be real, there have always been people whose preferred mode of fandom engagement is “everyone but my fave is so morally compromised.”
However, we did see a couple new movies, including Everything Everywhere All at Once. I appear to be the only person on the entire internet who felt that this movie was merely fine. It’s just a little too zany for me, I guess. (I also found the people with the hotdog hands exceedingly gross, which really undermined the love story between hotdog hands Evelyn and Deirdre.) I did laugh when Alpha Waymond explains to Evelyn that she can access a huge number of powers from her alternate universe selves because she is currently living the worst possible version of her life. What a reason to be a superhero!
Also Labyrinth! Somehow I made it through my entire childhood and adolescence without ever seeing this movie, and since they were showing it at the Artcraft OF COURSE I had to see it on the big screen. There were at least three Jareths in attendance, and the audience SCREAMED when Jareth first came on screen.
Now I think one has to see this movie at more or less the onset of puberty to get the full effect, but I did very much enjoy it. Magic! Muppets! The amazing visuals: the rotating pyramids of crystal balls, the ballroom dream sequence with Sarah in that amazing dress with the tremendous cloud of hair, Sarah’s bedroom (WHAT a fantastic bedroom), the Escher staircase sequence where Sarah runs up stairs that turn into upside-down stairs as she tries to reach her baby brother…
Long before I ever saw this movie, I peripherally glimpsed some fandom wank about whether Sarah is a brat for not wanting to babysit her little brother. Now that I have seen it, (1) who among us was never a brat at the age of sixteen?, and (2) complaining that the characters are not moral paragons seems like the most boring possible way to engage with this movie. Indeed, with almost any movie, and I hate that this has become such a common form of fandom engagement, although let’s be real, there have always been people whose preferred mode of fandom engagement is “everyone but my fave is so morally compromised.”
