The fight for diverse and conscious voices

Technically, it's Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn and whatever other terrible name it was released under before DC realized people had no idea what the movie was about and were missing it because DC couldn't publicize it properly. 2/5 stars if you're me; I suspect the target audience would rate it higher; I know friends who saw it 2-3x in theaters.

There are a handful of ways to do movies with the bad person as the protagonist. Birds of Prey goes with "Hey, it's a comic and funny and most of those guys are probably worse humans anyway" and hopes you won't think at all about the not-bad people who get hurt. Like, y'know, a Bond film, only funnier. The film leans heavily on its comic roots; with a little editing it could've gotten a PG-13 rating.

The plot doesn't exist. No, seriously, there is no plot. OK, the entire plot is "Harley broke up with Joker and various stupid people think that means since she doesn't have his protection they can get revenge for all the bad stuff she did while she was his g/f." That's it. There's no tension, no character growth, one villainous kid thrown in because kids are sympathetic even when villainous. I think; honestly, I couldn't figure out what the kid was there for.

The movie has two major things going for it. One is an actually clever non-linear storytelling mode. It's narrated by Harley herself, not exactly the most reliable narrator, and jumps back and forward in time to give you lots of backstory before the big ending section. You get a couple different points of view and it keeps things more interesting than a simple linear story would.

Two is the cast. The titular Birds of Prey are Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), The Huntress (aka Crossbow Killer, Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell). All four are really good, with Smollett-Bell a stand-out as she gets a good chunk of screen time as Dinah Lance, the singer in the crazy mob boss's nightclub who gets suddenly promoted to be his driver.

Given a real script I think this cast could have done even more amazing things. I'm all in favor of there being more Thelma and Louise=type films that don't end tragically. This is totally a "girl buddies kick many asses of men whose asses badly needed kicking". I just... enh, it's OK I suppose. I didn't get the "rawr" or emotional thrill I've gotten from seeing other female-fronted action films. Nobody, least of all me, expects Harley Quinn to be Wonder Woman, but I do think DC should put more into these films because Robbie and her co-stars are worth it.

I might've mentioned that I noped out on the third season of Jessica Jones. There simply was no one I cared about, everyone was being awful to everyone else and I didn't give a crap about the fact that the show's writers couldn't seem to come up with an original plot bit.

I watched all of Star Trek: Enterprise, with mixed reactions. There were a few notably bad episodes, ones in which I have figured out what's going on less than ten minutes into the ep and I am not inclined to watch the cast bumble about for another half hour failing to see what is evidently in front of their noses.

On the tech side, I found it frustrating AF that the writers seem to believe humanity will give up all robot and drone tech between now and a couple centuries from now. 90% of the stupid stuff could've been avoided with judicious use of robotic probes but apparently light-speed starships don't carry any of those. SRSLY?

Jolene Blalock carried a lot of the weight for me. I liked how she played her character and most of what the writers did with her relationships. I also liked that the series at least attempted some level of universe continuity. Beyond the big season-long arcs you'd have an episode where so-and-so did such-and-such and many episodes later you'd see people doing things in reaction to that. I also liked how the writers slowly evolved the tech over the seasons of the shows. If you know original Trek you know where they're going so it wasn't exactly a surprise but it was fun to see.

I also liked how they ended it. Like, "we're done here, thanks" proper ending and all.

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I watched Sherlock, again all of it except for one episode that was set in a historical period that required the show to jump back on all the things it was doing. The attempt to update this show to modern times required them to deal with many of the canon's problematic elements, like casual drug addiction and rampant misogyny. In telling the stories in the present day, I think the show did pretty well.

I particularly liked their updating Holmes' eccentricities into recognizable mental conditions. He refers to himself as a "high-functioning sociopath" a couple times but that's really not right. He's wildly on the spectrum and many of his good and bad characteristics are framed in that way. This makes them understandable even when not likable. As one of the characters says to him, "You always say such horrid things" and it's true. Like other people I know on the spectrum (including myself) he says things that pop into his head without actually stopping to understand how his words are going to affect the people who hear them.

I also particularly liked how the series incorporated technology. It's modern times so people have computers and cell phones and much interaction happens through them. Rather than stopping the action for exposition, Sherlock's writers opted to make the technology into characters that are present in the scene and "speak" through text on the screen. The techniques reminded me a bit of some of the better graphic novels and let things flow better.

One of the best aspects was the women - what they did with Irene Adler, and with Mary Morstan (who becomes Mary Watson). Even their updating of Mrs Hudson was generally delightful. Perhaps as a result, I felt the last season was the weakest of all. I would love it if they did more, moving back to some of the better things of the first couple seasons.

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I watched the one season (so far) of The Witcher. There has been some comparison of this with Game of Thrones which is not entirely wrong but also kind of misses the point. GoT is a big sprawling epic. Witcher is an exploration of what it means to be a monster, both in the literal sense and in the sense of humans who do monstrous things.

Both series have magic/fantasy themes and elements and both are quite violent. Witcher derives from the series of computer games by CD Projekt Red, a Polish-based games company that adapted local folklore into an RPG world. If you've ever read the original Brothers Grimm stories you'll know that central European fairy tales are nothing like the sanitized things American kids get fed. The tales from which Witcher draws are like that, only amped up a lot.

The Witcher game series so far has had three installments. The first was execrable and I only played 2 because people assured me it fixed most of what was wrong with 1. That's not entirely wrong and I actually enjoyed 2 enough to play it through. (I abandoned 1 when the awful misogyny got too much even for me.)

The third installment was the best by far, both in terms of storytelling and in how it addressed modernizing these old tales. Like with Sherlock, there's a lot problematic in the source material and CD Projekt Red took it head-on, telling a new and interesting story while staying largely true to the universe they had created.

This is relevant because in the Witcher series so far I'm seeing characters and locations I know from the games. Knowing what happened in the games makes me interested to see how the material is going to translate to screen. So far it seems like they are staying true to the struggle that Geralt (the titular witcher) goes through in the games - constantly finding that the humans are more monstrous than the deadly beasts he is hired to fight.

Also like Sherlock, Witcher turns significantly on the female characters. In this universe most magic wielders are women and it's said that women can't become witchers (hold that thought, we may yet come back to it). Still, the women are often rulers of nations and powers behind the thrones. Yennefer (played here by Anya Chalotra) has such an important role that I'm willing to put up with Henry Cavill (whom I basically do not like).

Yen's origin story and development are given full throat in Season 1 and I have a lot of hope for what they'll do with her and Ciri (Freya Allan) based on what I saw so far.

I also give the writers a lot of credit because they did an excellent job of putting together a non-linear narrative throughout the season. Like, you watch episodes and then you realize "wait, this is taking place in the past of that other thing". Stay with it, because it'll all come together for the season climax that manages both to pay off much of what was promised and also be a bit of a cliffhanger for what may come.

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I'm currently almost through Season 1 of Altered Carbon another take on source material that I really liked. I'll try to remember to write this one up when I'm through season 2.

The second Malificent movie does a good job of filling out the world story and letting Angelia Jolie show her range and chops. Michelle Pfieffer struggles against an incoherently written part but she's good at what she does. Generally, if you liked the first one you'll like this one and should see it. Starting with this one might be harder. (3/5 stars for getting the job done with nothing truly great.)

Spoilers below for both this and the first movie.
( Let's talk about sequels for a minute )
I still think Disney controls too much of our entertainment lives and that they could ruin a wet dream. Fortunately, they seem not to have done that here.

On the flight home we watched the 2018 Tomb Raider. The movie disappeared from theaters pretty quickly, has a 52% Tomatometer and a 6.3 rating on IMDB. It's also a reboot of a movie made from a video game one of whose main selling points for a long time was the scantily clad large-chested nature of its heroine. This is so very much a factor that the choice of Angelina Jolie to play Lara Croft in the 2001 movie was a significant discussion element and there was considerably awful commentary on Ms Vikander's comparably smaller chest size.

Well, fuck all those dudes, this is actually a pretty good movie, given the material it has to work with. 3/5 stars if you like action-adventure things and aren't too bothered by shock horror bits now and then.

You may recall that Vikander did a considerable number of her own stunts. The movie has the expected action sequences, death-defying sequences, and more fighting than I'd anticipated. Vikander handles herself well in all of it. The only thing that nagged at me is the movie makes some attempt to show her being injured (which you'd expect given what she goes through and the body beatings she takes) and then she just goes on about doing her athletic things as though there were no injuries.

There's a plot, sort of, but who really cares? This version has her being a recalcitrant teen/young adult, angry at an absent father that you just know she's going to set off to find. I do like that they also make her the smartest person in the room and, despite showing her working on her fighting skills, she still loses most of her fights. I think it looks good from this point in her character arc and it sets up some potentially good things to come. I hope they'll do a sequel.

Vikander is also surrounded with a good and competent cast, from Dominic West playing a much more interesting (if patronizing) father Croft, to Walton Goggins turning in an absolutely villainy villain performance. Daniel Wu does a good job of 21st-century Kato. And bonus minor appearance by Derek Jacobi.

As I mentioned above, the movie resorts to jump-shock things several times, which I felt was jarringly out of synch with the rest of it. The result feels like the director (Roar Uthaug, who had mostly done Norwegian films prior to this) couldn't decide what sort of movie he was making. I don't exactly mind the result but I don't feel like it helped the movie. I'd like to see what a more seasoned director could do.

Cutting one spoilery bit from the end:
( I know you can't change some things... )

James McAvoy's Professor Charles Xavier has been a narcissistic, self-indulgent prick through too many movies. I frankly don't give a f*ck about him, resent that he gets top billing and screen time and mostly just want him to go away. Unfortunately for all concerned, he's central to the Dark Phoenix story, which this movie attempts to portray. That it doesn't utterly F everything up makes it better than I feared, but it's not the story I wanted and it's majorly flawed. 2/5 stars, and that's being generous.

The Dark Phoenix story is my favorite X Men story of all time. It's classic Chris Claremont writing and I have not seen much like it in major-title comics. Part of it is standard "fall of a hero" stuff and partly it's a story in which the writers faced up to the dictum that "major characters can't die" and dealt with consequences in a moral way. Things I've read indicated that the writers struggled with the impact of what they were writing and about how to manage/end things. It's well thought-out and meaningful. That it sticks with me nearly forty years later is a testament to the story's power.

To its credit, the movie tries to keep to these themes, but without the extended time and rich universe of the comics it ends up feeling forced. In the comics, Jean Gray's relationship with Scott Summers is much better developed and is a focal point of the story. In the movie you kind of know that they're together but it hasn't been explored. Crucially, this changes a set of actions where a female character makes volitional choices about her own fate because of her own feelings into a generic "women as mother-protectors story."

I think the actors do well with the roles as written. Fassbender's take on Magneto continues to evolve and to be one of the most interesting elements of this movie arc. I hope he sticks around in whatever comes next. The directing is competent if not exciting and the movie kind of moves along. Its core problem, though, is that there's nothing really to care about, nothing to hang your hat on, and the person occupying the screen too much of the time is someone I just want to smack. Hard, and not in a fun way.

In the comics, the Hellfire Club is well established and it plays a major role in the Dark Phoenix storyline. Here it's not even mentioned and Jessica Chastain, playing a character everyone watching knows is supposed to be Emma Frost, is just referred to by a made-up alien name. Like... what? Did they not have the rights to those characters or something? It feels like an homage attempt that just becomes another "yadda yadda" moment. Chastain does a good job with what she's given, but I feel like the entire thing is lacking.

Major spoilers below the cut. No, seriously, in a movie with effectively zero surprises or twists you don't want to know this beforehand.
( Specifics )

If you read my review of the Glitch Mob DJ set you'll recall that although I found it interesting as a sociological experiment, doing club nights with doors at 10 and a couple hours before I got to see what I came for was not on my "to do" list anymore.

But then Paul Oakenfold came to town and I could go see him live. This was always likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I didn't think he'd ever play a small enough venue I could afford it. Yes, he's certainly past his prime but Paul Oakenfold is the godfather of a tremendous amount of EDM.

I'd been listening to electronic music for a long time before that, of course. Go back to Kraftwerk and Devo and I was good with all that, but Oakenfold defined a new genre for me. First with Tranceport, then his Perfecto mixes, and finally with Bunkka he set and then re-set what I thought EDM could be. Ready, Steady, Go (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGMwmY_RaRI) and of course the epic Nixon's Spirit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM6nuaBazo8) off Bunkka were staples of my listening.

So, yeah, Oakenfold live is all that and all you'd expect. As before there was an opener. Forgettable, but not bad. Oakenfold came out without fanfare and just started doing his thing. His live-mixing was amazing. He didn't use headphones - everything was in the moment as the music spun and the audience moved. He clearly had some set pieces and I could recognize bits he drew from his back archive but that wasn't the point. This was a master at work and you could see it.

Or, rather, you COULDN'T see it because there was constant, heavy, bright strobe lighting going on. Even when it wasn't directly in my eyes it was pervasive enough to be headache-inducing. I'm not particularly sensitive to strobes but a couple hours of that is more than I can take under the best of circumstances. I don't recall when we called it quits - earlier than I would have liked, later than my eyes wanted.

Overall a frustrating experience trying to fulfill a bucket-list item.

This movie is already making a ton of money and likely will break all the records. It's the end of a long build-up and the second half of a movie that ended on a cliffhanger of sorts. Although we "know" what's going to happen because of leaks and future movie plans and such there's a value in seeing how it's pulled off.

It's also the final performance of some actors who have become identified with the roles over the past decade+. Lots of people - most of a generation - have grown up with Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, and Chris Hemsworth as Thor. Not only are these actors now the iconic faces of those characters, the real-life decisions by each of them to end their roles within the MCU drives a lot of interest in seeing how they end things. It's been obvious for a while now that the Russos have had character arcs in mind for all of the major players and though different writers have penned the screenplays it's all fit within a particular vision. Seeing the denoument of that vision is compelling.

Or, should have been. Mostly I left the theater feeling a little sad and a lot empty and confused. Despite the movie's vaunted three-hour length there's both too much and not enough here. Trying to fit everything in leads to a scattered and jumpy narrative with a deeply confused third act that requires you basically ignore almost everything that has been set up beforehand. Obviously, talking about this is going to require major spoilers, so herewith a cut tag...
( Things that are right; things that are wrong )
Bottom line: as an emotional experience, this movie has several things to recommend it. As a movie you want to be the peak of the longest arc in American movie history it falls massively short.

Instead of the long-awaited third installment in the original Hellboy franchise (Guillermo del Toro, Ron Perlman) we get this semi-retread, semi-reboot helmed at least nominally by Neil Marshall, though lots of written rumor stuff says that the producers interfered heavily. The movie is not better for it. (2/5 stars, watch with a beer or other intoxicant of choice)

Hellboy has always been a challenging character. The comic has a small but devoted fan base but in the era of mega-sized superhero productions from Marvel and DC the movie needs a wide appeal and this just isn't going to do it. Credits to the cast for trying. Mila Jovovich is enchanting, Ian McShane is plugging away as best he can being a flawed person with no good answers to the questions he's being asked, and both Sasha Lane and Daniel Dae Kim serve in the "new sidekick" roles with appropriate levels of gusto, snark, and angst. David Harbour works at being a worthy successor to Perlman despite being hampered by prosthetics that seem designed to make him awkward and expressionless. I like the actors' work enough that I'd be willing to see what this cast does with a good script and I raised it from one to two stars based largely on their efforts. But this film wastes almost all of it.

There are also some SFX fails, but the script is the downfall of this film. It's ponderous, ridiculously expository, and full of frankly unnecessary bits. Nobody actually faces the camera and says "As you know, Amanda..." but they might as well. The film starts off with backstory exposition that would've gone better as a flashback for Jovovich's Nimue character and includes a tie-in exposition that links the secondary villain with one of the sidekicks. Why? Because... reasons. Worst of all, there's an entire cul-de-sac that involves Hellboy fighting some giants (you see a bit of this in the trailer) and frankly the ENTIRE thing is disposable. Like, irrelevant. A distraction. If you took it out you'd have precisely the same movie. I can't fathom why it's in there.

It also has stupid unnecessary splatter-gore bits that just... why?

Alita: Battle Angel is a western adaptation of a popular manga. As such, it's already treading on some very thin ice. Previous attempts to westernize manga have ... not gone well. This one avoids many of the bad pitfalls but ends up not being entirely satisfying. 3/5 stars for basic competence and yes I'd probably watch a sequel if one gets made.

Alita is a SFX tour-de-force, portraying a world of mixed machine/human bodies from grotesque prostheses up through full-on cyborgs. At some level you know it's animation and effects, and the film doesn't try to hide that. Instead, it wants to keep your attention with a combination of action and novelty, wrapped tightly around a self-discovery story.

Rosa Salazar plays Alita through a dizzying set of changes. One scene she's a disobedient fourteen-year-old girl; the next, she's a teen discovering a potentially mutual attraction with another teen. Not long after that, she's a fighting machine and then ultimately she goes (effectively overnight) from 14-15 to young woman. She's figuring out who she is, who her friends and enemies are, and how she will shape her place in the decaying decadent world she inhabits.

Given that it's manga you need to keep both hands firmly suspending your disbelief because... really? I mean... really? OK, no spoilers, but there's just a huge handful of things that make no sense even if you accept the movie's premises and context. Getting past that would be helped if more of the supporting cast were given better dialog. It almost feels like screenwriters James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis forget characters are in scenes at times. This is particularly painful in early scenes where Alita and Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) are talking. In the room is also Nurse Gerhad but she remains silent throughout the scenes. Idara Victor is reduced to nodding, waving, and looking concerned in places where you'd expect a normal person to have something to say. I was actually surprised when her character did speak; I half-believed she was intentionally mute.

Of the supporting cast, the only one I really liked was Vector, which is likely due in part to Luke Cage having turned me into a Mahershala Ali fan. Walz does a competent job but the problem is that he's initially set up to be the father figure of the naive Alita; the film doesn't seem to know what to do with him once she attains (effective) womanhood.

The film's other big problem is its unsatisfactory ending. In a manga, you expect the end of a story (volume) to be just a chapter in a long-running saga. Translating that onto film requires something more and this script falls short, I think. See this for the cool effects and snappy action and let's hope Rosa Salazar gets to shine more.

I will defend this as the best Spider-man movie ever, and a contender for a place in any list of top 10 superhero films of the modern era. Some people think that animation is a different category to live action and you can't compare the two; I happen not to agree but I'll recognize that as a valid point of view. In that vein I will say that Spider-Verse is the best animated comic-book movie ever. It is made by people who have a deep love and understanding of many comic styles and it uses lots of them to good effect. (5/5 stars, possibly the most underrated under-promoted movie of the past year)

The plot, such as it is, is really simple: in the world where Miles Morales lives, he gets bitten by the radioactive spider and becomes (a) Spider-Man. However, that reality is collided with others in which other Spider people exist and they get pulled into Morales' version of reality in order to stop this madness and set things right.

What things? Well, like the whole of existence but also some things in peoples' lives. This is part of what makes the movie shine - its ability to delve into the details of Morales's and a couple other characters' lives and work those into the over-plot. The character voicing and rendering support this extremely well, another of the film's strengths.

All of the voice actors are good, and I particularly liked the way the film re-imagined Aunt May. That's been one of my major beefs with the MCU version of Spider-Man and I was happy this film went in a totally different direction.

The film uses a wide variety of animation styles and the first time I saw a sound effect rendered on screen in text I nearly whooped for joy. I very much want to get this film on disk so I can frame-by-frame through it to pick up what I expect to be dozens of clues, homages, and references most of which go by much too fast at movie-projection speeds to catch. For example, each time another Spider-Verse character appears, they do so by popping into Times Square. Each time there are subtle (or overt) changes in the artwork, billboards, and animations going on behind the character.

There's also a couple of numerological themes happening - it's teensy spoiler so I won't say more, but do watch the numbers when you see this film.

The film does behave as though you have seen at least a couple of the other Spider-Man films and are at least somewhat familiar with the character's story and milieu. That said, the references and shout-outs are just fun things to know, not essential to enjoying this film. The only drawback of seeing Spider-Verse as your first Spider-Man movie is that everything else is going to be a letdown compared to this.