Lightning Round: Movies
Which we shall now call "lightning round" in quotation marks, since one blurb took another few months to come back and finish. Book version to follow ASAP.
Atomic Blonde (2017)
Fangirl movie night consensus: well-shot but cold. Amazing fight scene choreography as promised. Still don't care about James McAvoy's face. The mixing of original '80s songs with cover versions threw me, as did seeing "1980s Berlin" in HD.
Wish I'd seen this before posting Five Endings for Constance Heck; would've written the second section differently.
Nights in Rodanthe (2008)
I felt like watching a romance. This did not scratch the itch. Insubstantial foundation for the attraction between the leads made the build toward the supposed climax boring. Maybe if Richard Gere's face does it for you without needing anything else? And you're not bothered by the plot where he's a hotshot surgeon with a bruised ego after losing a patient, and where all the woman (Diane Lane) talks about is her kids and soon-to-be-ex-husband, and her job is to teach the doctor empathy so he can apologize to the patient's family and reconcile with his son James Franco before A Tragic Event? Also they cast Viola Davis but only let her be the supportive friend even though most of the movie took place in the business she owned. Also also, an actualfax hurricane barely damaged a wooden, multistory North Carolina bed and breakfast set on stilts ten feet from the ocean.
Mamma Mia! (2008)
Some friends were horrified to learn that some of us other friends had never seen this movie, so they hosted a viewing party. I enjoyed it more than expected! It was funny-on-purpose, the casting decisions clearly hadn't been made based on singing and dancing abilities, and I even discovered an ABBA song that I like, Chiquitita. I'd say my overall amusement arose 90% from the group-watch context, 5% from slashing the three paternity candidates with one another and 5% from Colin Firth's deadpan line deliveries & plot twist.
Starman (1984)
I did make it to the rescheduled screening and had a good time both reexperiencing all the long-ago memorized lines and watching the movie for the first time as an adult. "We go to-Arizona-maybe"! "The baby will know"! "Red means stop. Green means go. Yellow means go very fast"! Though much of it is sappy and of its time, it was interesting to note how much better it handled consent around a woman's bodily autonomy and reproduction than a lot of media and, you know, public discourse, today. Plus it presented a still-too-familiar scenario of a police officer trying to stir up trouble. Also, ha, as a kid I never thought to envy the smooth efficiency of the government/military teams hot on the good guys' trail, as compared to what happens in reality.
Dawnland (2018)
Powerful documentary about a truth and reconciliation commission set up in Maine to try to heal the still-raw wounds inflicted on Native families whose children were taken away and put into foster "care" outside the tribes. I cried like six times. There is no other response to hearing even these short segments of people's testimonies as they themselves cry.
Okay, the reason this post stalled is that I had trouble writing this paragraph. I wanted to say something about how, in continuing evidence that our hometown's supposedly excellent school curriculum left out an incredible amount of basic Native American history, I didn't know about U.S. policies that emphasized child removal and placement outside home tribes and cultures, nor about how social workers willfully mistook--mistake--systemic poverty for child neglect, until last June I heard the Métis in Space podcast episode on Lilo & Stitch and then saw the first-season Longmire episode about it. It was good to get a more formal, local version of the story here. The documentary also drew a direct line to forced fostering from the residential schooling system, which, again, I had first learned about from a movie, The Only Good Indian (2009). So I'd been thinking about this personal education gap in early- to mid-20th century Native history and how pop culture started to clue me in. Flawed though Hollywood depictions usually are, they at least provide(d) a stepping-off point to learn about history and its continuing ramifications. Like a professor of mine once said of Wikipedia, movies and TV are a good place to start and a bad place to stop.
A panel followed our screening that included the co-director, two scholars, and a Wabanaki tribal advocate who featured prominently in the film. The introductions took too long and the scholars didn't add a thing, IMO, but the rest was interesting. I even asked a question! It was about the thinking that went into selecting the final scene and who was given the last line.
The film airs aired Nov. 5 on PBS's Independent Lens, for anyone who's interested. There are were additional in-person screenings across the U.S. and Canada in October. ETA: Oops, waited too long for this to be relevant. Still, it's possible PBS archived the video to watch online.
The 160ish testimonies are archived at Bowdoin College in Maine. Sounds like a start to something like the Shoah project.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/378634.html, where there are
comments.
Atomic Blonde (2017)
Fangirl movie night consensus: well-shot but cold. Amazing fight scene choreography as promised. Still don't care about James McAvoy's face. The mixing of original '80s songs with cover versions threw me, as did seeing "1980s Berlin" in HD.
Wish I'd seen this before posting Five Endings for Constance Heck; would've written the second section differently.
Nights in Rodanthe (2008)
I felt like watching a romance. This did not scratch the itch. Insubstantial foundation for the attraction between the leads made the build toward the supposed climax boring. Maybe if Richard Gere's face does it for you without needing anything else? And you're not bothered by the plot where he's a hotshot surgeon with a bruised ego after losing a patient, and where all the woman (Diane Lane) talks about is her kids and soon-to-be-ex-husband, and her job is to teach the doctor empathy so he can apologize to the patient's family and reconcile with his son James Franco before A Tragic Event? Also they cast Viola Davis but only let her be the supportive friend even though most of the movie took place in the business she owned. Also also, an actualfax hurricane barely damaged a wooden, multistory North Carolina bed and breakfast set on stilts ten feet from the ocean.
Mamma Mia! (2008)
Some friends were horrified to learn that some of us other friends had never seen this movie, so they hosted a viewing party. I enjoyed it more than expected! It was funny-on-purpose, the casting decisions clearly hadn't been made based on singing and dancing abilities, and I even discovered an ABBA song that I like, Chiquitita. I'd say my overall amusement arose 90% from the group-watch context, 5% from slashing the three paternity candidates with one another and 5% from Colin Firth's deadpan line deliveries & plot twist.
Starman (1984)
I did make it to the rescheduled screening and had a good time both reexperiencing all the long-ago memorized lines and watching the movie for the first time as an adult. "We go to-Arizona-maybe"! "The baby will know"! "Red means stop. Green means go. Yellow means go very fast"! Though much of it is sappy and of its time, it was interesting to note how much better it handled consent around a woman's bodily autonomy and reproduction than a lot of media and, you know, public discourse, today. Plus it presented a still-too-familiar scenario of a police officer trying to stir up trouble. Also, ha, as a kid I never thought to envy the smooth efficiency of the government/military teams hot on the good guys' trail, as compared to what happens in reality.
Dawnland (2018)
Powerful documentary about a truth and reconciliation commission set up in Maine to try to heal the still-raw wounds inflicted on Native families whose children were taken away and put into foster "care" outside the tribes. I cried like six times. There is no other response to hearing even these short segments of people's testimonies as they themselves cry.
Okay, the reason this post stalled is that I had trouble writing this paragraph. I wanted to say something about how, in continuing evidence that our hometown's supposedly excellent school curriculum left out an incredible amount of basic Native American history, I didn't know about U.S. policies that emphasized child removal and placement outside home tribes and cultures, nor about how social workers willfully mistook--mistake--systemic poverty for child neglect, until last June I heard the Métis in Space podcast episode on Lilo & Stitch and then saw the first-season Longmire episode about it. It was good to get a more formal, local version of the story here. The documentary also drew a direct line to forced fostering from the residential schooling system, which, again, I had first learned about from a movie, The Only Good Indian (2009). So I'd been thinking about this personal education gap in early- to mid-20th century Native history and how pop culture started to clue me in. Flawed though Hollywood depictions usually are, they at least provide(d) a stepping-off point to learn about history and its continuing ramifications. Like a professor of mine once said of Wikipedia, movies and TV are a good place to start and a bad place to stop.
A panel followed our screening that included the co-director, two scholars, and a Wabanaki tribal advocate who featured prominently in the film. The introductions took too long and the scholars didn't add a thing, IMO, but the rest was interesting. I even asked a question! It was about the thinking that went into selecting the final scene and who was given the last line.
The film airs aired Nov. 5 on PBS's Independent Lens, for anyone who's interested. There are were additional in-person screenings across the U.S. and Canada in October. ETA: Oops, waited too long for this to be relevant. Still, it's possible PBS archived the video to watch online.
The 160ish testimonies are archived at Bowdoin College in Maine. Sounds like a start to something like the Shoah project.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/378634.html, where there are
comments.