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[passmethatpopcorn]

There’s so much wisdom in here, I can’t find anything

That’s how I felt, watching this movie. Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely cute, and Dreamworks made a good choice in capitalizing on this while the getting was good. But, to be honest, the movie felt a bit forced. We went from “the potential was in me all along (there is no secret ingredient)” to “I’ve accepted my past and found inner peace” to “I can be a student/teacher/panda-son/goose-son all at the same time because I’m the Dragon Warrior.”

These are all good sentiments, but it started getting laid on thick in the third movie. “I’m not trying to turn you into me, I’m trying to turn you into you” indeed. There was so much “you have no idea who you are” in this movie layered with “you have to look inside” that not even the overflowing comic relief could really cut through the awkwardness.

On top of the obvious villain problem (an old colleague/nemesis of Master Ooguay, go figure) there was the conflict of Po’s adopted father butting heads with Po’s biological father. I totally understand Mr. Ping’s insecurity; Li came back into Po’s life, intent on making a new start, and Mr. Ping felt threatened. I imagine this is something that happens often when both adoptive and biological parents are trying to find space in a child’s life. It was honestly the most sincere part of the entire movie. Li and Mr. Ping eventually saw eye-to-eye in order to support Po so that Kung Fu could win the day.

On that note, the Dragon Warrior. They were really leaning hard on the concept, this time around. The whole premise of this movie was learning about ‘chi,’ which was explained essentially as the energy of all living things that kung fu masters could harness and use. So, of course, Po ended up tripping over the secret to chi at the last possible second in order to win.

Backing up a bit: all of the Furious Five (Tigress, Mantis, Crane, Viper, Monkey) were turned into little jade talismans by the main villain, so he could steal and use their chi. That was his whole schtick, really: turning masters into jade to steal their power, and using it to create copies of them (out of jade) to do his bidding. The main villain himself is some sort of undead kung fu master; he came out of the Spirit World somehow, and was functionally immortal. The only way to beat him was to drive him back into the Spirit World and defeat him there.

Cue the convenient epiphany that enables Po to beat him. Po essentially dies--ie disintegrates and goes to the Spirit World--and realizes that he’s always been who he really is, and manages to master chi in about forty-five seconds or so. His chi takes on the shape of a dragon (of course) and everything is swirling peach blossoms and sunshine after that.

All in all, the movie was cute and funny, though the humor was forced about half the time. Three stars, because it was still visually good.

[passmethatpopcorn]

Great, now the sky is bleeding

That was about as much sense as the whole movie made when I went to see Allegiant. Granted, I didn’t read the books, so maybe it was true to the books, I don’t know. But the entire thing boiled down to a huge facepalm and a flailing “that’s not how any of this works.”

Let’s start with the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. Essentially, the faction system was created when genetic modification of humans got out of hand and created people with damaged genes. In an attempt to fix this horrific error, people were put into isolated cities across the ravaged US and left there to develop until someone (here meaning Tris) was born with ‘complete’ or ‘undamaged’ genes again. That’s not how genetics work. Genes don’t just fix themselves over time. Or at least, it takes a hell of a lot longer than a few generations to do it.

The red rain was particularly odd. Yes, okay, I’ll believe that the wasteland is still mildly radioactive. Okay, fine. But the red, viscous, radioactive rain was taking it way too far. There was zero indication of where the rain came from, or what made it that way. Fluid that thick couldn’t have evaporated and condensed in the right way to become rain, physics don’t work that way.

And then, when it was clear that the ‘experiment’ was a success on a large scale and a failure on a small one (it ‘fixed’ the gene problem but the walled city was eating itself alive in civil war), the decision was made to literally gas them all. A forgetting serum was synthesized into a vapor and pumped into the walled city via the ventilation system (from the outside, no less, talk about a controlled environment). Of course, it was stopped in time, but then the excess gas was sucked back into the vents, even out in the open. That’s not how physics work. You literally can’t disperse a gas and then vaccuum it right back up in an open space. A closed space, sure, but not outside. Not even mentioning the fact that the Bureau had been routinely kidnapping children from the wasteland and gassing them to forget their families, even though it was made clear in the movie that they were also damaged.

Moving on to: Tris’s mother. Early on, probably all the way back in Divergent, we were told that Tris’s mother was both Dauntless. Apparently, the writers of Allegiant think we’re stupid, because now the woman is from the Bureau instead, having chosen to join the experiment in the hopes of creating a Divergent. (Still not how genetics work, btw.) Which is it? Was she Dauntless, or an outsider? Or did she let herself be gassed with the forgetting serum so she didn’t know she was an outsider? That’s not how storytelling works.

That’s not how any of this works.

Two and a half stars, because it was still a decent dystopia.

[passmethatpopcorn]

It’s like a one man reign of terror

So I did end up seeing Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. I had intended to see if anyways, and a class project just gave me the excuse, so I parted with my hard-earned money and sacrificed two and a half hours of my life and sat down for the movie.

Even being familiar with Batman, I have never seen a drama queen like Bruce Wayne in this movie. “Do you bleed? You will.” “There was a time above… a time before… there were perfect things… diamond absolutes. But things fall… things on earth. And what falls… is fallen. In the dream, it took me to the light. A beautiful lie.” Holy unnecessary drama, Batman. And that mechanized suit, oh my god. He was a giant twelve-year-old in a padded Halloween costume.

And while we’re on the subject of overgrown children, Lex Luthor. Holy shit, he was terrifying in the worst way. He was spoiled, corrupt, and short-sighted. He was entitled and bitter. He was the absolute epitome of Spoiled White Boy, and he had absolutely no retraining influence. Even Bruce Wayne had Alfred to tell him when something was a Poor Life Choice. Bruce rarely listened, but Alfred was still there.

Superman was the better of the two headliners, in my opinion. He was relatable, he was conflicted, he was compassionate. A little blinded by his personal relationships, yeah, but to be honest I liked him more than I liked Batman.

Honestly, the best part of this train wreck was Wonder Woman. While Bruce and Clark were floundering, Diana was moving around them and Getting Shit Done. She was working around Batman nearly flawlessly, and she was able to function completely independently of either Batman or Superman. “Is she with you?” “I thought she was with you.” That’s the kind of reaction you want for a female character. She was literally efficient enough and impressive enough that the men each thought that she had to be affiliated with the other. They were convinced she had to be taking a man’s lead.

Ultimately, it was a set-up movie.. The main ‘bad guy’ (separate from the villain) was a cop-out, there was no real plot, and the end was unsatisfying. All I can say is that the movies being set up for are better, or else this was all for nothing, and that’s not fair to Wonder Woman.

Three stars, for Wonder Woman.

[passmethatpopcorn]

Bunnies can go savage

So it’s a little late, but I did get to go out and see Zootopia a week or two back. And I have to say, whatever I was expecting, that wasn’t it. But at the same time, it was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was cute, and it was funny, and it somehow managed to touch on exactly what I needed to.

On the surface, it was a cute movie about not judging people by appearances, and to always go for your dreams, no matter how far. Pretty par for the course for Disney lately, as far as I can tell. A bunny (in this case, it seems to be a metaphor for a woman in general) makes it onto the ZPD, which is overwhelmingly dominated by larger, more aggressive animals (here seeming to be a metaphor for men in general) and is immediately given a job obviously intended to keep her out of the way. For a kid, this would be the sort of life lesson of “follow your dreams, stick to it, you can do it.” For me, an adult woman, this screams at me “you’re a woman, you can’t hack it in a man’s world, just like this bunny.” It made me angry, to be honest. A little bit. I saw that bunny and saw all of the things women have to go through.

Also, cue the obligatory Frozen reference. “Let it go!” Indeed.

BUT THEN things got interesting. Having taken a film analysis course in college, I’m involuntarily in the habit of keeping mental track of anything that might even resemble a clue. Nothing in a movie is wasted, not when they have to tell an entire story in the space of two hours and still have room for wisecracks. So when the first clues appeared, I caught them and mentally filed them away for later, figuring it would all come together in the end.

And by god, it did. It was a beautifully complex storyline, for only being two hours or so long. And that’s not even counting the explosively effective partnership between Judy Hopps and Nick Wild. That was a thing of beauty that I haven’t seen in a Disney movie for quite a while. Those two characters together sort of became the story, the lesson about not judging, and the underlying issue of addressing racism and prejudice. And don’t get me wrong, that was there. The entire underlying message here was that no matter how ‘civilized’ we consider ourselves, we’re still, as a society, struggling with the issues of race. Only the movie portrayed it as ‘predators’ and ‘prey’ instead of ‘whites’ and ‘minorities’ and ‘men’ and ‘women’. But it was there.

And Judy Hopps didn’t turn out to be one of those types who felt she had to be ‘tough’ to be accepted by her peers. She worked hard to impress them, yes, but she wasn’t the ‘I have to be mean and tough all the time’ type, in my opinon. Her most ‘feminine’ moments did feel forced, however. Telling another female “I love your hair/dress” in the middle of a crisis was not the time nor the place, but it can sort of be written off as ‘Judy being a country bumpkin in the city’ sort of thing. But once Judy realized that she didn’t have to impress everyone, things smoothed out a lot with her.

And on another note: yes, there was the obvious Frozen reference at the beginning, but it was the one at the end that was truly, dazzlingly brilliant in its depth. There was one character, a weasel named Duke.

Yeah. Sharp Frozen fans know where this is going.

Well, Duke was ID’d by Judy as ‘Duke Weselton,’ to which he immediately replied (in the voice of Alan Tudyk) “It’s WEASELTON!”

Cue my ugly laughter in the middle of the theater.

For those who don’t get it, Alan Tudyk also lent his vocal talents to Frozen as… the Duke of Weselton. Who, when his town name was mispronounced as “Weaseltown” in the movie’s running joke, would promptly correct everyone with “It’s WESELTON!”

I’m fairly certain I’m the only one in my particular theater who caught that joke, and I caught it immediately. I’m more certain that everyone heard my cackling from the back row.

Before I wrap this up, one last thing. You lied to me, Tumblr. I saw gifs floating around of muscley tigers in sparkly hotpants and glitter in their fur, and I went into this fully expecting tiger strippers. There were no tiger strippers. They were the backup dancers for Gizelle, the in-universe equivalent of Beyonce who was voiced by Shakira. I felt a little cheated, not gonna lie.

All in all, excellent movie. Four stars.

[passmethatpopcorn]

That’s like, sixteen walls

I did get out to see Deadpool the weekend it opened. Most of the people I know told me that it was “an awesome movie” and that “it was amazing.” I have to admit, I had been looking forward to this movie for a while. Deadpool has a certain reputation, after all, and let’s face it, Marvel owns a significant portion of my soul. I was practically obligated to see the movie. So I found some time on Discount Tuesday, and I went to see Deadpool.

It was pretty much what I expected. Every opportunity to break the fourth wall was taken, every opportunity for a joke was seized, and Deadpool was generally the self-aware smartass we all expected him to be.

It was all of these things... And it still felt forced. I laughed at the appropriate moments, but I found myself about half-way through the movie thinking to myself ‘I’m laughing, it was funny, but...’ It just didn’t feel truly genuine, at least not to me.

Not only did the humor feel forced, but so did some of the plot. I wasn’t expecting Game of Thrones-level plot, mind you, but it just started to fall flat around the half-way mark. The manhunt was pretty interesting, yeah, and even the man-pain was done a bit differently, and taking his name from the list of bets of who would die was a fun little quirk.

I have to admit, I liked Vanessa. I felt like I identified with her a bit: she was doing what she had to to survive, and I feel like that resonates with my generation a bit. And then when the news about the cancer broke, she really showed that she was strong in a way that had nothing to do with superpowers. It was refreshing, to be honest.

And then came Colossus.

Colossus was only there to fight Angel Dust. Literally, that was his function throughout this whole thing. The Russian-accented preaching just felt like something to fill the silence and give him something to say. He had no real purpose, and he could have been replaced by any tank (or even an actual, literal tank) and nothing would have changed. Hell, his best moment was when he actually paused the fight to tell Angel Dust about her wardrobe malfunction. (And on another note, I did appreciate Angel Dust. She was allowed to be strong and sturdy while still being allowed to be attractive.)

Along with Colossus came Negasonic Teenage Warhead. And I have to admit, she was cool. If I’d known about her when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I would have genuinely felt like I had found a sort of role model. She was cool, she had awesome powers, and she wasn’t reduced to being just a teenage girl. She was useful. She had a purpose, even if it was just in the final fight. My only thing about her was the name. Yeah, she’s a teenager, and I promise you when I was that age, I would have claimed a code name like that in a heartbeat. But she has to have a real name, too, somewhere in there. I was honestly, genuinely surprised that Colossus didn’t call her by her personal name at some point during the movie. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing (because, hey, respecting her choices!), Colossus struck me as a sort of patronizing chaperon figure and it would have fit that sort of persona to call her by her personal name.

Hey, even Wolverine called Rogue ‘Marie’ a few times, and he came across as way more of a father figure than Colossus did.

So overall, it was exactly what I expected it to be. It was crude, humorous, and there were three badass women in the movie. I wouldn’t say the movie was “omg amazing,” but it was definitely a good movie.

Four stars.