#besides the cgi looked pretty fucking badass and it still does

[irondad-defensesquad]

might be remembering it wrong but i'm pretty sure we (me, my brother, and my mom) only watched iron man 1 in the theaters bc they played black sabbath in the trailer

[trainsinanime]

Logan

About a day has passed, I’m mostly awake again now, and I know more people on my timeline have seen the movie, so I think it’s time to dive in and talk about it in detail. Which requires spoilers for absolutely everything, so don’t read this yet if you’re planning on watching the movie soon.

I’ve already said that this movie is great in every way; the best X-Men movie yet (even including Deadpool), and quite possibly my favorite Marvel movie. I mean, Avengers 1 was nice and all, but now that the novelty value has worn off, it’s really just very nice; and Guardians of the Galaxy’s soundtrack was making promises that the movie sometimes struggled to keep.

Hugh Jackman is amazing in this. Patrick Stewart is even better, doing perhaps his best acting since „there are four lights!“. Both portray characters that are broken, full of history, portraying most of the things that need to be said without words. All their emotions are genuine, beautiful and heartbreaking. But we already knew these guys were great. What’s really amazing is that Dafne Keen as Laura cannot only keep up, she often ends up stealing the scene. Careful and guarded, then suddenly full of wonder, weary beyond her young age and incredibly badass, she does it all and it’s perfect. And most of that without ever speaking.

The movie is beautifully shot and directed, which you already knew if you saw the trailers. Most people talk about how it’s a western, and it is. But the really important thing is how human this movie is; how close it gets to its characters and their emotions. It all works.

Now for some things I wanted to discuss in more detail:

Why no post-credit scene tho?

After so many years of patiently sitting through the credits and wondering why movies always need someone to grip keys, it’s certainly unexpected to have it missing here. It’s nice that Marjorie Liu and Kyle Host got special thanks.

While I did sympathise with the disappointment that could be heard throughout my theatre, I think it was the right choice. The movie didn’t need a post-credit scene, and any post-credit scene would have made it weaker. Post-credit scenes are hints for what comes next, but this movie is all about providing closure, and it does so beautifully.

Whatever happens next, if something happens next, is a new story. Not a new part of this one.

What is the locomotive on the mexican freight train?

No idea; I think it’s entirely fictional. The lack of windows implies automatic operation. The closest thing visually would be the GE U50 (which has been out of service since 1977) and maybe the E60C, but both of these are a big stretch honestly. So my guess is entirely fictional, just like the automated trucks.

Gabriela: A reference to All-New Wolverine?

Maybe, but I’m guessing it’s just a coincidence and that both projects were developed more or less in parallel, without either one influencing the other to any meaningful degree. If they had wanted to reference Tom Taylor’s work, they could have put him on the „Special thanks“ list after all.

Could automated trucks really be built without a cab, just the pure container ending there?

Yes! The idea of a truck without a cab in front of the trailer is not actually new; the Steinwinter 2040 was a prototype built int he 1980s. That one still had a cab, of course, and the concept ultimately never went anywhere - while there was a lot of interest, nobody wanted to fund a series production. This approach would make a lot of sense for a fully autonomous vehicle, as well, where the issues of visiblity and crash safety are less pronounced.

I don’t know whether it makes enough sense to actually happen; even for automated road trains, some sort of shield before the trailer would make sense aerodynamically (if the aerodynamics of container haulage interest you, then don’t forget to google „UP Arrowedge“). I’m also not sure that we’ll be in a place for fully automated trucks by 2029. I guess it works if we have a head canon where these trucks are limited to motorways and a few well-defined roads between loading areas and motorways. We can almost already do that today. „Platooning“, i.e. automated control of multiple trucks together as if they were one very long truck, is already being trialled as well.

Generally speaking, one of the big problems of trucks is that they have to carry a person around. The cab is dead weight and takes up lots of space. Getting rid of it makes trucks much more attractive compared to trains. They still have the disadvantage that they have lots of small (by railway standards) diesel engines instead of one big one, and that rubber wheels on roads have much higher friction than steel wheels on steel rails, but every little bit helps. If such technology is available, you can be sure that there will be much more freight hauled on overloaded road networks, increasing traffic jams, and much less on energy-efficient, economically and ecologically superior railroads. Progress!

Is there anything wrong with the movie?

Nothing major, I guess. X-24 is ultimately a waste. He could have worked as a contrast to Logan, but the movie never goes there, so he’s just a CGI-heavy obstacle. In general, the movie suffers heavily from forgettable Marvel movie villain syndrome; nobody will remember who Pierce was two months from now. Finally, compared to Laura, the other kids that show up in the third act are just not that interesting.

Mind you, what this boils down to is „at times, the movie almost drops down to the level of Iron Man“.

Will Laura become the new Wolverine now?

God, I hope not. That would be incredibly stupid. Laura is her own character, always has been, and putting her into someone else’s shoes does disservice both to the original character and to her own history.

Yes, it works well in All-New Wolverine by Tom Taylor. But the reason why it works there is because Laura didn’t. actually become Wolverine. She’s just using the name and costume. It’s still clearly a Laura book just as much as the ones with X-23 in the title. There’s no overlap with Logan’s history, with Logan’s usual modes of operation and so on. It works, but giving her the name is entirely unnecessary for that.

In general, what does this movie set up?

No idea. There are certainly some hints dropped that can be picked up elsewhere, but it seems just as likely that future X-Men movies will ignore it and leave it in some sort of canonical timey-wimey limbo, presumably the same one that Deadpool is in.

I’d be okay with that. Ultimately, no amount of setup can ever change whether this was a good movie, and it was.

Isn’t this movie taking a woman’s story and turning it into an accessory to a man’s?

This is a point I heard on Twitter shortly after the first trailer dropped. Having seen the movie, I can confidently say: Yes, kind of.

Obviously, the movie is called Logan, and it’s ultimately him that is the star. But it’s also notable how little women there are besides Laura. Sarah Kinney, her mother in the comics (it’s complicated because comics) is absent. Her closest equivalent, Gabriela (reference to the current comic or just coincidence? I’m leaning coincidence), gets killed fairly soon, but she also has far less impact on the story. Sarah was in many ways one of the masterminds of Laura’s torture; she had agency, culpability, guilt and internal conflict. Gabriela doesn’t get any of that depth.

There’s also the part where the three surviving mutants are all men, despite X-Men being pretty balanced ever since Claremont. The movie’s plot is carefully constructed so that it seems inevitable that these are the folks involved, but it’s not like that was the only choice.

(If you’ll allow an aside: They could, for example, have chosen Kitty Pryde instead of Caliban. Just make her a former mutant hunter. After all, there’s precedence for randomly giving Kitty powers that actually belong to Rachel.)

I think the movie can get away with this simply because it is so damn great, and because Laura in particular is so great here. I know some people will weigh things differently and come to a different conclusion here (though I don’t expect there to be very many).

If the stretch limousine is a 2024 Chrysler, and FCA plans to use the Giorgio platform for basically all their RWD stuff going forward, then doesn’t that mean someone did a stretch limo of a car with a transaxle platform and a carbon-fibre drive shaft?

That’s where my mind is going to anyway. My head canon is that they swapped the carbon fibre driveshaft for a cheap one made of steel, though I have no idea whether that is more or less realistic than any alternative. Either way I would assume this car isn’t that great for high-performance driving.

By the way, this is once more a movie that is full of FCA cars but doesn’t have any Alfa Romeos. I hated that about Batman v Superman. Here, I think it fits. This movie works if the heroes are driving an American truck; it would never work with a Stelvio. In Batman v Superman, though, they even brought in an IVECO truck (from the truck division of CNH which is the industrial arm/sister of FCA) to an ostensibly American city, even though that company’s products where never sold in the US, so the odd Giulietta wouldn’t have hurt, would it? Basically, fuck Batman v Superman.

With people praising Logan, will they now give the DCEU the second look it deserves?

I actually found a person on Tumblr who said that, then forgot to save a link so I guess I’ll have to sub-tumble them. Sorry. Dear person, if you read this: No. While you are correct that there are high-level similarities between the two, if you look in detail you’ll find that everything that actually matters is done well in Logan and badly in the DCEU. For one example, see the paragraph about the cars and product placement right above.

If that’s not sufficient, then let me put it like this: In its efforts to be dark, gritty and mature, the DCEU has thrown out plot, relatable characters, and all forms of fun except pee jokes. That is a major misunderstanding of mature. Logan is mature, gritty, violent, not the slightest bit flashy and so on. But at its core, it’s about humans relating to each other. It’s about them coming together, not finding ways to divide them. It’s violent, but it’s also all about the cost of that violence and about finding a way out of that cycle.

Perhaps most importantly: This movie takes comics, the old brightly coloured ones that are silly and full of flashy costumes, the very thing that both the DCEU (and the original Old Man Logan comic…) tried to abolish to show us how mature they are… and tells us how important it is to believe in them. That by believing in the „childish immature crap“ from the comics, we find together, and we get the strength to get us to where we’re going. Because it’s not actually childish to dream of a better world at all, as our hero has to learn; it’s what makes us human.

So pack in all your pitchforks, dear DCEU fans, when you hear that Logan is getting much better reviews than any DC movie ever, and that it’s making much more money. It’s not because people like Marvel more. It’s because DC keeps making shitty movies whenever they’re not made out of Lego.

(I do hope Wonder Woman won’t be shitty, but based on the trailers, the most I’m hoping for is „a little less shitty“. Sorry.)

What about that MovieBob Video? Will attempts at copying Logan lead to a new comics crash?

I’m talking about this video here. And let me just say that while I respect Bob a lot, he’s also wrong a lot. That guy thought Cars 2 was a better movie than Cars 1, after all. This video, to me, feels like a guy with too much time on his hands thinking too much about stuff that happened decades ago.

The fundamental problem with his argument is that comic book movies are in the mainstream, and they’re being made because they get mainstream levels of money. There was a good (short-term) business case for going fans-only for the comics industry in the 1990s. That’s just not the case today.

It’s certainly possible that Logan will inspire studios to try dark and gritty deconstructions of superheroes… but DC’s been doing that for years with questionable success and no influence whatsoever on the company that makes the good ones, i.e. Marvel.

What I do find fascinating is that between this, Deadpool and Legion, we’re now in a place where Fox’s X-Men movies may just be the inventive, innovative and weird superhero franchise, and the bits and pieces and preview animations that have come out for the New Mutants movie hint that it may be going in that general direction as well. That would be an awesome way for things to develop, and the X-Men certainly have their share of characters that fit that description. Of course, it seems like Fox landed in this place almost by accident, so any attempts to prolong it or end it or pretty much do anything with it seem incredibly dangerous. We’ll see how it turns out.

[callingallmarshmallows]

The Last Jedi spoilers below the cut 

Okay sooo this movie was just really weird to me?? Like was it a good movie? Definitely. Was it a good star wars movie? I really don't fucking know tbh. Gonna have to watch it again to form solid opinions. For now, I'm just gonna talk about the good and bad.

The Good:

It seems to me that put the reylo story to rest which is brill!!! Like I know that it seems like it was a pro reylo movie (and yeah, there were parts like the shirtless scene and the hand holding scene that were) but it seemed to me that by the end of the movie they were through with the kylo redemption arc. Rey shut the door on his stupid face, it looked final. And if after this they still try to redeem him I will literally fucking scream

I know a some people didn't like the way the Luke/kylo story was handled but I found it interesting. It's always been implied that the dark side can make you do things that you wouldn't think of otherwise, draws on more intense, darker feelings like pain and fear, and I think that's exactly what happened with Luke. He got scared and succumbed and for a split second was ready to kill the piece of shit kyle (should've done it tbh). This led to him being bitter, and I can understand that too. The guilt obviously weighed heavy on his conscience. I would have preferred a movie where Luke hadn’t turned into a bitter old man, but as it is I didn’t absolutely hate his arc I guess. 

I mean, they already fucked up the perfectly happy expanded universe endings so I’ve been resigned to the bitter fates of the original trio. 

I also quite liked Rey trying to figure out her past, and I especially loved that she turned out to be descended from "no-one." It's the theory I've been hoping was true (the other ones I wouldn't have minded was her being related to obi wan or qui-gon). It's a message I thought was cool: anyone can be force sensitive, anyone can be a Jedi. Ofc, kyle might have been lying and she might still be a skywalker and this whole reylo thing might be a gross ploy by rian to imitate the incest stuff from the original movies in which case i will personally find rian and stab him

Quite liked the theme of letting the past go. So many of the characters are stuck in their pasts, and the first order existing sort of hinges on the ideas of the original empire so the overarching theme of letting the past die resonated. It applies to fans too: purism gets you nowhere. 

The fight sequences were all amazing. Luke fucking owning kyle's ass made my life!!!!

SPACE MOM USING THE FORCE TO GET BACK TO THE SHIP MY HEART ALMOST BURST

Yoda!!!!!!!!!!! Listen, I’m just a bitch for OT characters showing up

Holdo being a badass and just straight up flying her ship at lightspeed through the first order barrage like wow how fucking iconic??

Rose being the sweetest ever (Kelly Tran played her to perfection, working wonderfully with the material she was given). She was allowed to be soft, sweet, kind and capable, strong, badass all at the same time, which was so great. And her crush on Finn as well as their dynamic was adorable.

The Bad:

Ho my god- the reylo. The Force Skype thing was literally a fanfiction plot. The angsty longing gazes from Kyle's end made me gag. The hand holding thing?? The elevator scene?? Why would you make me look at that with my own two eyes whyyyy. Thank God it's (probably) over

WHY TF WAS FINN GIVEN SUCH A THROWAWAY PLOT

It just boggles my mind??? That whole sequence where he and rose go to that planet to get the hacker guy took my out of the movie completely. It almost felt like prequel levels of nonsense. Were both rose and finn as a pair entertaining to watch? Yes. Would they be good as a couple? Yeah sure. Is it super fucking great that they're an interracial couple? Yes!!! Doesnt fucking erase the fact that it felt like that whole plot and Rose (as much as I love her and as much as I'm happy she exists) too was created because they didn't know what to do with Finn.

And why tf was there so little interaction between Finn and Poe?????????? Look, I get that Disney can't make them a couple if they don't want the movie to be banned from some (bigoted) countries (including mine unfortunately). Movie making is a business, whatever I get it, but the interactions between these two were part of why I (and so many others) liked tfa so much. That whole hacker planet plot should either have been Finn and Poe's, or else Finn should have had a plot back on the ship. Ughhhhhh

And also, making Rose and Finn kiss/a couple basically just ensures that Finn is never going to end up with Rey and I'm fine with that only if she ends up single by the end of this series. Or like, just as long as she's not with fucking kyle ron. I'm just terrified that that's exactly what's gonna happen though. Let's hope j.j doesn't let us down.

Other stuff:

Did anyone else notice that Rey had taken the Jedi books from the temple. Is that why Yoda was chill with destroying the temple?

What was the Dark Side seaweed pit about? It was a pretty cool sequence but like?? 

Pretty disappointed with snoke tbh. Went into the movie looking for answers and came out with absolutely nothing. Where did he come from? Why is he the supreme leader? Why is he the supreme leader if he’s a little bitch who was beaten by actual child kylo ren? Why wasn’t he 15 ft tall smh

I’m really sad that Luke’s gone, but I’m pretty sure he’ll appear as force ghost in the next movie. He has to.

How are they gonna deal with Carrie Fisher’s death? They’ve apparently said that they don’t wanna bring her back through cgi so does that mean they’ll have to kill her off? She was supposed to have a pretty big part of ep9 but I don’t see what they can do besides killing her off. They could send her off elsewhere but it would be pretty odd if she was alive and she didn’t appear through the movie. 

ANyway I cried every scene she was in

[paoulkaye-blog]

Action vs. Live Action

                 So… can we talk for a second about all of the live-action ‘remakes’ we’re seeing? I mean, okay, yes, Hollywood has run out of ideas, and Disney struck on a way to make even more money out of its old movies by remaking them shot-by-shot with actual people, but seriously. It even goes beyond that to movie adaptations of books, or comics (thanks, Marvel) or even video games. And why are some of these great and why do some of them suck?

                Let me just state up front that I am in no way a qualified film or entertainment media critic. I’m just someone who happens to enjoy a good story and feel confident in my ability to spot why certain elements work in some mediums, but not others.

                Personally, I was okay with Beauty and the Beast. I liked the actors, I thought they did a great job with the music, and some of the added scenes actually explained a few things that I was curious about.  I was NOT okay, nor do I think anyone was, with M. Night Shamablamadingdong’s The Last Airbender and its monumental waste of such an astoundingly good premise. The Super Mario Brother’s movie makes me cringe, Warcraft was pretty and actually more fun than I expected, Doom was… just… ugh, and the Transformers movies literally turn me into my 13 year old self every time I watch them. These are to say nothing of the other ‘darker and edgier’ reboots of countless older movies or shows that my generation grew up with.

                Now, look back on the movies mentioned and notice: The first is a movie-to-movie ‘remake,’ which is pretty straightforward, especially since Disney wisely avoided the ‘darker and edgier’ nonsense. You already have motion-picture length pacing and beats there, so it’s pretty easy to translate. The second was an attempt to shove a 26 episode animated season into a 2-3 hour long movie, and M. Night Sheboygan managed to surgically remove all of the fun and leave behind (and magnify) the Aangst. The video game movies have their own issues which I’ll go into later, and the Transformers have been longstanding victims of the basest of Hollywood whims: Marketing.

                So why are some of these good, and why are some of them awful? As I said before, Beauty and the Beast had the advantage of being exactly what it said on the cover: A live-action remake. Not a re-imagining, not something set in the same universe, a literal remake. At this point, Disney’s only real gambles were casting (and you cannot go wrong with Kevin Kline in my book), character design (admittedly not my favorite part) and what, if anything, they decided to add. I love that the Sorceress that curses the prince has an expanded role. I love that there’s an added moment of heartbreak when you discover what happened to Belle’s mom. I like that Gaston in this version isn’t just the town braggart, he was in the military and has a record to back up his attitude. What I got out of the new one was pretty much the same if not a little more than I got out of the animated one, and that’s worth the price of admission for me.

                The Last Airbender sacrificed too much of what was great about the original series to focus on the melodrama and high-destiny crap that, while present in the original, was always counterbalanced by the fact that our hero was 10-13 years old. Aang in the cartoon occasionally went off the reservation to have some fun, to sidetrack himself and his friends on this all important journey to save the world to just be kids for a while. Sure, that seems like needless fluff for a movie, but in the long running series, those side stories helped flesh out the world, deepen the connections between all of the characters (both good and bad) and with the exception of the Great Divide, all of them played an important role later in the series when the good guys went to recruit their friends for an attack on the bad guys. And, of course, there was the absolute screw up of the special effects or lack thereof for the various bending arts in the movie. Just… such a waste.

                Video Game based movies suffer the inherent problem of presenting the viewer with a world they are familiar with, ideally, and have had agency in through gameplay. Then the movie, by being a movie, removes that agency and tells a static story. Often with the ‘darker and edgier’ thing thrown in. The Super Mario Brothers movie was an early casualty of this, and it’s easy to argue that Doom wasn’t… Doom enough. That it was trying to be ‘Alien’ but with demons. And besides, turning an inherently arcade concept like Doom into a movie is just silly because the story is too flimsy on the face of it, and anything you fabricate to help tell a better story in that same arcade environment is only going to upset someone somewhere by not being ‘true to the original’.

                Warcraft got off sort of light here, I feel, since they went back to the beginning of the franchise history to tell an origins story. They were presenting a story that was pretty much always established cannon, with a few minor tweaks, but in a way most players in the Warcraft universe hadn’t been able to see before. All in all, Warcraft was a good video game movie because it did something the developer was not interested in doing with the game itself, and that’s the sort of partnership that cross-media endeavors like this can actually do well. Sure, it had issues with the acting, way too much CGI, and was a bit on the too-serious side when there’s quite of lot of tongue-in-cheek humor to be found in the games, but it told a serviceable story and looked pretty good while it did so.

                And then there’s Transformers. God, I love these movies, and I will happily admit that, but they are, objectively, bad. They appeal to the 13 year old in me, and that kid loves these movies, even if the adult I am these days has to cringe and sigh at some of the… I don’t dare call them ‘comedic’ moments. They’re just painful.

                Transformers bears multiple scars: It’s ‘darker and edgier’, it’s a marketing juggernaut, and in the vast macrocosm of Transformers, it had to twist and change and modify a lot of the existing cannon in order to be made in movie format. The fights are more violent, with punches and kicks that shear off whole pounds of metal instead of ineffectual laser blasts that fly all over the place. The stakes are higher, with Earth routinely being threaten by whatever the Transformers did there that we could think of this time. The humans are the most unbearable they have ever been, with only a few exceptions, and the story is often a convoluted mess that, when viewed objectively, makes no fucking sense from one half hour to the next.

                So why do I love them? Well, mostly it’s Optimus Prime. Dude’s a badass. Like, a badass beyond what you get in movies these days. Peter Cullen’s voice work does a wonderful job in portraying a tired soldier who is simply too fed up with Megatron’s nonsense to let him get away again. The immortal line ‘… Give me your FACE’ was one of the few times I ever stood up and cheered in a movie theater. The one armed beat down of Megatron right after the chillingly awesome delivery of ‘Let’s find out’ is burned into my memory. Seriously, the trailer for the fourth movie showed Optimus Prime riding Grimlock into battle. How do you not immediately go see that movie in theaters? The next one looks tailor made to appeal to my inner child, even just in the subtitle. ‘The Last Knight’? I like Knights. I like Transformers. Sold.

                But while I have such a big soft spot in my heart for Transformers, it indulges in the kind of nonsense that I just will not put up with from other movies, the cringe-inducing comedy being chief among them. There are any number of reasons for a remake to be bad, and they’re hard to get right, because you need just enough of the old and enough of the new that it will play on nostalgia and still be accessible and look good and… it’s just too much. Good remakes, especially live action ones, are hard. They are a challenge for any studio or director or crew to put together and have it go well. You either have to cut too much, or add too much, or change just that one thing that made the original work and… why do movie studios do this to themselves? Multi-billion dollar risks on things that have already been done seems like bad business sense.

                But for the time being, that’s the direction film entertainment has chosen to go. I’m sure I’ll get back on this subject later with regard to Marvel and DC, and maybe I’ll dig into projects that were announced but never got finished, and why that might have been a good or a bad thing, but that’s for later. Right now, I think I need to go dig up my copy of Revenge of the Fallen again and watch it with my kids. Watch most of it with them, maybe. Some of it. I’ll be skipping around, I think. Thanks for reading.