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mykpopconfession · 4 years

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It's long but hey, thank you so much for allowing me to share my thoughts as kpop is something I do enjoy but I like to look at it from other points of view, how it looks to me from various perspectives, not just as face value kpop fans have tantrums every time something isn't right or whenever idol does something so small and irrelevant it becomes a scandal… shocking but idols are humans and won't always perform to the fans standard.

Fans bitch and whine about how the standard of kpop industry is too harsh yet it's not the industry that is encouraging it, it's the fans themselves, they cant accept minor mistakes and everything gets taken out of context while fans claim they know the idols… ie: Jennie's “lazy” scandal.

Yet they don’t scrutinize the idols whenever they are sexist, colorist, ageist, misogynist, racist, because they can “do no wrong” or their fans, will come to save their asses… even the flipping companies encourage it because they want them to be younger. After all, it's more appealing??? but what 25+-year-old fans are going to be drawn to teens in a group? I don't even find itzy, txt appealing and their whole group’s image is directly for those of teenagers and below, the music/dances, the image, it’s all catered that specifically of a younger audience, shame, I would’ve liked them otherwise.

The younger the idols = the better publicity and the higher chances of gaining popularity by getting into “scandals” for the lack of maturity and social awareness nor are they likely to take accountability and just do whatever they please anyway because they’re idols and their fans will still claim that their age isn’t a problem or because they’re a child/teenager/minor then its okay kpop idols are so out of touch with reality that when they have some form of criticism they start banning and suing left right & center… because they live as though everyone is going to fall head over heels for them and blindly accept everything they do because most kpop fans are already blinded by their idols and cant accept when an idol says or does something disgustingly wrong nor can they accept mild criticism without getting their pitchforks out.. its a cult, no denying it.

As lovely as the choreography might be I don't want to watch the idols if they are doing any of the above: dancing overly provocatively (especially when they may be on the minor age scale), twerking or grinding the stage or anything overly sexual at that.

Kpop fans lap it up because its socially acceptable to objectify the idols and make them appealing because of their “dancing/performance” when it is turning them into some trend because they “danced” overly sexy/cute, that's all they amount to is the dancing side of it

TBH I found it intriguing at first but now every kpop group tries to have this “sexy” look and it just doesn't work. it’s like asking a foreigner to be interested in kpop when they act cute except its not normal to appear cute over here, it's only going to appeal to those who maybe find it intriguing or different from their own culture.

Yet cute/sexy is all kpop idols can amount to even if it looks so uncomfortable and unpleasing to watch. alas they are idols, they’re not humans, they can twerk, dance provocatively and act cute all because the fans will enjoy it no matter what it is or who it is… age isn’t even considered but the younger the better they stand a greater chance.

Which is like bighit canceling everyone of the older generations who maybe possess the same talent but with a maturer image and behavior… its both ageist and sexist, why is it some huge fetish that just boys in or around 1999 only for their new survival show thing i-land? I find it… odd more than exciting or interesting cause I know its just typical for the members to be more younger but less appealing to older generation cause I have nothing that I’d relate too I don't even relate to the TikTok trend because that's all it is, another trend or bandwagon. yet everyone treats it as being this incredible new thing that suddenly acceptable for young folk even though it brings so much disgusting behavior/drama along with it, its a recycled version of the vine but worse, in the same sense this is what kpop does, recycle groups once they’re less appealing to make way for the same groups but look slightly different. 2ne1/blackpink, BTS/txt yet the fans don't say nothing about how it is encouraging the sexual appeal and almost asking for fans to thirst over them because this is what “dance” supposedly should be. sexy/cute nothing in between, it's saying that idols should portray this image cause it’s more appealing than the music itself. if the male idols show their abs/skin even better, females? wear the most uncomfortable looking clothing and ur good to go.

The kpop sounds now have become about the group's image, level of popularity, as opposed to actual talent, creative freedom and ability to give off a genuine performance that doesn’t include anything generic or robotic image. its got to be loud, bright, vivid because its all for the dance/sexual appeal of both the male and female gender is almost aligned with the concept for it.

The lyrics can be as disgusting as they please because its okay, its only kpop. any lyrics are acceptable, bts got called out for their lyrics in one song yet not in any of the others? same for other groups, so few call out the lyrics because lyrics mean nothing. it's about the visual appeal of the groups and the kind of fame they gather from it alone so you can have the visuals but do the bare minimum and not have much stage presence but be classed as a main singer or dancer, its okay fans will lap it up no matter what it is. also, I’ve noticed the same sound being used across several groups depending on the concept of the song… repetitive much? why does kpop fear change or standing out? why get idols to become something they are not ie: whitening their naturally beautiful dark skin, have idols who don’t need to, lose weight. it's not the company its the idols encouraging it because it's acceptable and normalized to be anything other than thick, natural and healthy.

Ppl act like trying to shove kpop into the western music genre will make it appeal any better, the fans act like they couldn’t see the racism coming, but that's what happened bts were forced into a culture that had nothing to do with them because in western we generally hop from one bandwagon to the next and just roll with it since it's popular it must be good.

ie: one direction, psy, 5 seconds of summer and now bts… how do so many don't see the pattern nor did they see bts coming? you expect Asian artists to become greatly admired over here too but when you shove it in ppl’s faces and try to get it to become the next big thing, not everyone is gonna see the appeal I honestly feel like it's been forced… not by the companies but by the international fans. now instead of trying to gain popularity in their home country kpop groups try too hard to appeal to the western market… you can’t even deny how vastly generic bts’ music has become SINCE they hit the American music awards or whatever it was. note: they didn’t even win awards for their music, but simply their popularity is what got them there

I loved boyz with fun, despised boy with Luv yet because they’ve been in the American industry’s eyes they put it out what has become popular just using their language… well sometimes, even idol, what could’ve been a great song with a nice meaning missed some marks, as in the overuse of auto-tune has become almost normal for them? vs using natural vocal abilities, I'm no coach but straining one's voice to hit a high note in a slow song doesn’t sound healthy. when all bts have done in the past is upbeat music is why they struggle to maintain high notes in slow songs because they’ve followed the same music style for so long then suddenly changed it so their voices don't match softer songs… which I’d appreciate more of instead of just dark lyrics and over-hyped upbeat poppy music.

ie: I loved the sound for serendipity, but the lyrics weren’t as good and Jimin kinda struggled to sing it well enough both in-studio and live, however its one of my more favorite songs. I’d also appreciate a slower gentle song that isn’t about a relationship too thanks looking @ you euphoria.

You think it's about the music, lyrical side of it but I disagree, it's merely the concept of yet another boy group that's sadly taken over in the most overbearingly forced way possible and you all act like the racism wasn’t going to occur. nct had an incredibly shit time in America during their tour its because it's not meant for America, its trying force kpop to become something it's not just to fit in with western music taste. I miss when they did full songs in Korean now they do English full versions with hella cringe-worthy lyrics and expect them to blow up or become the next big thing.

I’ve been walking with the cheese and the queso????? if ur happy and u know it clap ur hands???? theses ones make me laugh more than wanting to listen repeatedly, they throw them in there simply to appeal to western music, no matter if its a bad lyric, doesn't make sense or is cringe-worthy.

Kpop is built for Korean consumption it's great to see it's expanded however, its in the wrong directions for the wrong appeal. bts did not pave the way when psy also existed the same year they debuted. bts tried to get a following in America but failed because naturally psy was almost made fun of for just being an Asian doing what he does best yet the hype quickly dyed down & everyone moved on until bts came into the scene… so far behind than when they should’ve gone viral years before. not the companies fault but merely the appeal of the image/music wasn’t suited to the western music genre so when they become familiar more with America they switched the songs to sound pop-like… nothing wrong but less appealing than their original image/music, which I prefer, I’d say it started to change with not today era.

The only reason being bts have stuck around now is because of the boy group concept even if the lyrics aren’t that great when translated into English, they’ve already tried and IMO, failed to push their music into the western music industry and they’ve won awards solely based on the fandom/popularity alone kpop has become less and less about the music, energy of the performances, now it's about if they look right together as a group. how the group as a whole appeal to the fans and what makes the fans blinded by them… which is essentially their sex appeal, whether the idols are grown women or men or even teenagers, who might be uncomfortable with fans lusting after them. whether they’re dancing sexy or acting somewhat cute doesn’t matter because it's become acceptable and a must if you want to be an idol so fans can thirst over them.

Sorry not sorry but kpop has become much less about the music itself and see what is trendy puts it to music and calls it the next big thing. which is a shame I love the language I love how it sounds in the songs & I also love that it encourages me to learn the language that's more appealing than the group image/songs itself but they’re letting looks matter to the point where groups are mistreated abroad by both media and fans alike all because of this group image concept. nct getting mixed up with bts was pure racist but how can they fail to tell how different they are? wait, no, any Asian boys in a group must be considered to be bts… see its just one hype train after the other, even Astro got mixed and when parasite become popular and rightly won the awards some were racist. Trump's comment was appalling but at least he got the country right, yes, everything that's become popularised in America is from South Korea, gold star for that.

Its the concept of boy groups. not the music itself. if it were music then day6 would have a similar appeal, gain the same momentum as bts/nct have done, yet because they differ from the typical dance style boy group they won't gain the same effect as their counterparts, bts / nct & whoever else.

Yet they’re still appealing to the wider international audience and did very well with their tours, same for the rose, they don’t trend in the same way boy groups do but have some form of appeal because it’s a different concept/image style altogether than the way bts / nct, etc are put together but still they don’t have the same effect as some of the more dance-based groups have because its a different genre but still from the same industry…

Different genre means less appealing or less popular but I’d say day6 are doing better, producing a greater amount of pleasing music, with reasonable lyrics but don't receive the same amount of popularity. compare to bts / nct who follow similar styles mixed up of what is trendy and call it a day. whereas kpop dance groups throw anything out there and its okay cause fans will lap it up too.

It's not the song that got blackpink to Coachella, its purely the appeal of yet another young women based group, again solely so they can push the feminism, girl power movement through their “songs” but it's their image of youthful cutely acting girls that gains the attention of western men/women… little mix tried it so why not blackpink, heck even fifth harmony failed to maintain the popularity because the appeal wasn’t there in the songs, but they were females in a group, therefore, they must have some form of appeal to the public / recent trends, bandwagons

#kpop #kpop confession #kpop confessions #general

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marvelous-heroimagines · 6 years

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Bad Press

Requested by: @havaawhoose (Here are the specifics)

Pairing: Reader x Steve Word Count: 2.6K Warnings: Angst, fluff, racism (implied), swearing

A/N: Reader is POC

You’d always dreamed of becoming an Avenger, of being able to help people all over the world and give young children of colour a superhero that represented them. But the media had soured your dream the moment Tony announced that you were joining the team. You’d grown up being ridiculed by racists, but you’d never expected to be such a controversial topic in the media.

No matter how much your teammates tried to help - reminding you that each of them had been in the negative spotlight themselves - it still hurt to hear the harsh and offensive comments that were said about you everyday. All you wanted to do was help people and save the world; but the media disregarded all your good work, instead just focusing on the fact that your skin was a different colour from the rest of your teammates’.

Even though the world outside the Compound was divided on the subject of a person of colour being an Avenger, your teammates were welcoming and warm towards you, they made you feel a part of the family.

You’d only been a part of the team for a couple of months when you and Steve confessed your feelings to each other - your other teammates had seen it coming from the moment you moved in to the Compound. And while the two of you had fallen deeply in love, you’d both agreed that keeping your relationship secret from the outside world was best for now, until the controversy of your skin had died down.

While that had been the plan, it didn’t work out that way. And now, just as the media had started to back off; a fateful mission changed all of that. Now footage of Steve passionately kissing you - after you had almost died at the hands of an enemy - was plastered all over the media. You couldn’t turn on a tv or open the internet without seeing that footage played over and over. You tried not to pay attention, but you couldn’t deny that it was getting to you.

Walking into the living area, you hear daytime talk show hosts discussing your and Steve’s public display of affection. You stop in your tracks as you see Steve walking the talk show, he hasn’t realised you’re frozen behind him, watching his body language more than the show itself.

The hosts are discussing whether it’s appropriate for the symbol of America to be dating you, a woman of colour. Usually, on talk shows, one of the hosts has an opposing opinion, but there seems to be no debate with this topic.

As the hosts continue to criticise not only you, but Steve too, you watch as Steve’s shoulders slump and he lets out a sigh. Your stomach churns as you watch their words affect the man you love. Steve had always wanted to be a role model to the public; and while he himself has gone through the media hating him, you’ve never seen him affected by their opinion - until now.

Your heart hurts as you watch your love get affected by the media’s words, and as tears start to well in your eyes, you turn on your heel and hurry away silently. You barely make it to your room before the sobs rip through you. This whole drama was ridiculous and stupid - why was everyone making this such a huge problem? You’d always tried to keep a thick skin to people’s comments about you being a person of colour, you had dealt with it your whole life. But now your ethnicity was dragging the man you love back into the negative limelight.

You hoped that Steve wouldn’t take their comments to heart, but a part of you felt guilty that you were the reason that all the hard work he’d done to clear his name after the Sokovia Accords was becoming undone.

Over the next few days the drama around your and Steve’s relationship only increased, and you tried your best to ignore it - and hope he was too. But you noticed that something was different.

Steve stopped sleeping in your room, he stopped being affectionate even within the privacy of the compound, and you felt as though he was actively distancing himself from you. While you could ignore the public’s comments, you couldn’t ignore the fact that they had deeply changed Steve in some way.

You hadn’t seen you boyfriend all day, and decided that it was up to you to confront him on what you had secretly seen last week. Your heart raced as you softly knocked on his door, unshed tears already prickling at your eyes as you thought through what you were about to do.

“Come in,” you hear him call from inside, and you take one last, deep breath before entering.

You feel like you’ve been stabbed as you watch him stiffen the moment he sees you’re the person visiting you. It was only for a second, he quickly relaxed his body - probably consciously - but it still hurt to see.

“Hi,” you say tentatively, closing the door behind you and hovering near it; unsure if you were really welcome here anymore.

A tight, closed lipped smile spreads across his face, “Hi,” he replies and motions to the bed as he sits on it on.

Your hands were almost shaking as you cross his room and join him. You have to force yourself to look at him; even if the knowledge of what you were about to do was making eye contact uncomfortable.

“What’s up?” he asks after a few too many seconds of silence,

“You’ve been ignoring me,” you blurt out. It wasn’t a question, and by the way he deeply swallows you know it’s the truth,

“Y/N, I-” he starts,

“I saw you the other day,” you interrupt. Your thoughts are racing and you’re not even taking a second to think of words before they force themselves out, “Watching the news...” you drawl out.

Steve’s eyes flit to the floor and he shuffles uncomfortably; he obviously knows which day you’re referring to. You, too, look down at his floor, unable to look at him any longer - partly because you didn’t want to see him try to hide his true feelings and partly because you wanted to hide your welling tears for as long as possible.

“Look,” you sigh, your chest feeling heavy with the weight of your decision, “I don’t want to put you through this anymore. I can handle the media ridiculing me, I’ve dealt with people hating me for my skin my whole life, but I don’t want to drag you through this shit too,”

From your peripherals, you see Steve’s eyes snap to you, but you keep them trained on the floor, needing to get through this before you cry uncontrollably.

“I know you’d never want to hurt me,” you continue, “So I’m going to do it for you-”

“Y/N-”

“It’s over Steve,” you strongly say, “It’s better for you, especially after the Accords, if you keep a good public opinion,”

Steve stays silent, his breathing ragged and a frown set between his brows. But he doesn’t say a word, so you finish what you came to say, hoping that your tears hold off just long enough.

“I can handle the hate. I’m not going anywhere, no matter what people say about me, and they’ll get over it sooner or later,” you add, “Maybe once all of this dies down we could try this again?”

Silence falls over the two of you, Steve’s mouth is agape, and when you finally steal a look at him - you wish you hadn’t. Tears are slowing rolling down his cheeks and he stares at you as though you’d just caused him physical pain.

But he stays silent. Feeling uncomfortable with the silence, you just nod to yourself and leave - not once hearing a word from your now ex-boyfriend.

~~Steve’s POV~~

“What’s wrong with you!?” Sam yells the moment Steve finishes telling him that you had broken things off, “Why didn’t you say anything?! You’re an idiot!” Sam continues. He paces around Steve’s room while huffing with frustration.

“I-I don’t know,” Steve admits, hanging his head in shame, “It all happened so fast, and... and-”

“God help me, if you say she had a point, I-” Sam stops himself with a sigh, finally stopping his pacing and crossing his arms as he stands in front of Steve. Steve stays silent, letting his friend continue.

“She hasn’t been in this life long enough,” Sam says sombrely, “She doesn’t know yet that giving in to what the media wants won’t make them stop hating her for the colour of her skin,”

Steve glances at his friend with confusion, “Won’t it all blow over, in time?”

Sam scoffs, “Yeah right, just like it has with me,” his tone thick with sarcasm. Steve is only further confused, and Sam must notice this as his friend explains, “I’ve been a part of this team for how many years now? And yeah, while they have never publicly berated me... They seem to simply ignore that a black man is a member of the Avengers,”

As Sam’s words roll over Steve, he begins to feel guilty that he’d never picked up on it before; as he thinks over all the coverage of the Avengers had gotten since Sam joined their ranks, he realises that Sam’s words are true.

“S-So there’s never going to be a time when I can be with Y/N without the media portraying us negatively?” Steve asks, a sinking feeling settling in his gut.

Sam just shakes his head, a look of sympathy on his face, “The only way to get them off your back is to own it. It’s no one’s business if you and Y/N are in love. They can say all they want, but if you show that your love is stronger than their comments, they’ll have to deal with it,”

Steve nods, mostly to himself. He knows Sam’s right, and while it made him feel even more stupid for letting you walk away, it also made him more determined to get you back.

Steve stands abruptly, a new found motivation coursing through him. Sam smiles proudly at his friend, “Got something in mind?” he asks,

Steve nods, “Where’s Tony?”

~~Reader’s POV~~

You’d spent all night curled up in bed, crying and wishing you hadn’t broken up with your love. You’d tried to convince yourself that it was the right thing to do, to save Steve from the media’s ridicule; but after you had left his room yesterday, you felt nothing but regret.

“Ms. Y/L/N,” F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s voice sounds through your room, “Mr. Stark requires your attendance in the East Wing’s conference room, 30 minutes,”

A frown knits between your eyebrows with confusion - the East Wing’s conference room was where Tony held all of his press conferences - but you get out of bed and start getting ready to be in front of the press; the last thing you wanted right now.

“Cutting it fine, Y/L/N,” Tony scolds in a whisper as he drags you to the side of the stage, just out of sight of the news and paparazzi cameras,

“What is this all about?” you question, staring out at all the media representatives that had nothing but bad things to say about you,

“You’ll see,” Tony says, a small smirk pulling at his lips. You’re about to question him when Steve’s voice pulls your attention to the stage.

Your breath catches in your throat and your stomach knots as he glances over, catching your stare and holding it for a few seconds before he turns towards the press and clears his throat.

“Thank you all for coming here today,” he begins, “I’ve decided it was time I came forward and commented on the footage of me and Y/N that has caused everyone to erupt in debate.”

Your heart sinks as you listen, the paparazzi camera’s flashing a mile a minute as every reported in the room excited chatters about what Steve is about to discuss. Your cheeks flush as you realise he’s here to break the news of your break up.

“I’ve heard everything you have all been saying not just about me, but about Y/N,” Steve takes a brief pause to breathe before squaring his shoulders and continuing, “I think you should all be ashamed for ridiculing Y/N on nothing but her ethnicity,”

Silence falls over the room, and your jaw drops open, as Steve’s parent-like scold resonates. But that doesn’t stop him, he doesn’t even miss a beat.

“In the past, you have portrayed me in a negative light for the decisions I have made, which is a fair topic to criticise. However, the colour of Y/N’s skin, nor my choice to date a person of colour, is a topic that can be fairly debated on,”

You can’t tear your eyes away as every reporter in front of Steve shuffles uncomfortably and seems embarrassed - as if they were children being told off.

“Now,” Steve continues, seeming unfazed by the awkward tension he had created, “While I can not control the news cycle discussion, nor the opinions of racists,” he pauses for a second to let his words really hit home, “I can control how I respond to the hate comments regarding my personal life,”

If your heart wasn’t racing before, it definitely was now. Steve glances over at you and beckons you to join him. Your breathing shallows as you’re frozen in place, not wanting to go out and face the crowd full of reporters and cameras. Tony shoves you, and you barely save yourself from falling as you stumble up the couple of stairs to the stage.

The paparazzi camera’s flash wildly and everyone in front of you can’t tear their eyes from you and Steve. Steve wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you close, making the reporters explode into chatter.

“I want everyone to know - whether you think you have a say in my love life or not - to know that Y/N is a valued member of the Avengers, she isn’t going anywhere,” Steve pauses briefly to lovingly stare into your eyes, “And I love her,”

Your stomach flips as you hear him say those three little words for the first time. While you had been concerned about facing the hoard of reporters before, they seemed to immediately fade away as Steve leant down and kissed you softly. Nothing in the world mattered now, it was just you and Steve.

Steve pulls away and turns back to the reporters, who are now screaming over one another, desperate for their questions to be answered.

“That will be all,” he concludes, a smirk pulling at his lips as he grasps your hand and pulls you off stage.

When you and Steve leave the conference room, the sound of the yelling reporters now all but silenced, thanks to the closed door. Tony is only staring at the two of you, a wide, proud grin on his face.

He makes a move to enter the conference room - probably to answer questions and quell the crowd - but Steve stops him, “Don’t bother,” he says with amusement, “There’s nothing more to be said,”

Tony chuckles and nods before instructing F.R.I.D.A.Y. to ask the reporters to leave the premise.

You’re still in a daze as Steve walks with you, hand in hand, through the compound, “I can’t believe you did that,” you breathe out,

“I don’t care what they have to say,” Steve says as he stops, turning to you and holding you by the hips, “I love you, and nothing in the world can change that,”

You can’t help but grin as Steve leans down and kisses you again.

Tags: @hantu369mc, @pleasefixthepain, @impala-moose, @heismyhunter, @coffeeismylife28, @redstarstan, @bleedingrosey, @klutzly, @leahhavoc, @dreamimes, @thegreatestpilotinthegalaxy, @stratmoxphere, @bearded-bucky, @meep-meep22, @caitsymichelle13, @strangermarvelthings, @specs15, @sebstanwassup, @wunnywho, @thedarknesswarrior, @girlwith100names, @melconnor2007, @ipaintmelodies, @letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked, @spookydoritos, @fanboyswhereare-you, @kiroumons, @tcmhollnd, @providence-impoverished, @lilya-petrichor, @hells-princess, @sarahp879, @arxsvante, @geeksareunique, @courtneychicken, @peter-spider-parker-man, @mizzzpink, @lovely-geek, @httpmcrvel, @sebstanismylife, @glitteringsarah, @stardustandbucky, @lena-stan-xavier, @princess76179, @thisismysecrethappyplace, @everythingbooknerd, @hiddles-rose

Tags that didn’t work: @hesitant-poison, @mo320, @xplumsceptrequeenx, @yoyolovesbucky, @additctionmarvel, @mrs-stan-barnes, @janellexox0, @impossiblyteenagestudent96400

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manifestoonmoralmanlove · 5 years

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Gormless Ch. 9 - Maccon’s into violence, hypocrisy, raceplay, but worst of all progressive politics.

A well-meaning friend gave me a book series that is hilariously bad. The first book was Souless and my riffs were entitled brainless. This second book is entitled Changless and these riff are then gormless.

I mean to say I have entitled them gormless! Not that my riffs are dumb, and the effort I spend on them stupid since I’m the only one who enjoys them. HAHA!

The story is SUPPOSED TO be about how a badass lady wearing a rad-looking carriage dress hits baddies with her umbrella and bangs her hot werewolf husband. In reality it’s mostly poor attempts at being witty, flirty, and superior.

For the last book check out the brainless tag.

If you want the TL;DR version but want to read these new riffs anyway?

This story is set in supernatural Victorian steampunk England. Alexia is our NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS protag. She is a soulless, which means she’s able to negate the abilities of vampires and werewolves by touching them. She’s recently married a big oaf, named Lord Connel Maccon. He’s the manchild in charge of the supernatural police with a zillion dollars and he’s totes super hot too ok. Their relationship is mostly arguments about how Maccon can’t tell her fucking anything. Alexia has also recently become head of ~Soulless affairs~ in Queen Victoria’s government. She has a dumb friend named Ivy, a gay vampire friend named Akeldama, a family who’s evil because they do the same shit as her but while being blonde, and most importantly Alexia is better than everyone cause…cause.

Last time on Gormless:

There’s some mysterious force that’s turning the Vampires and werewolves into humans. Alexia is in charge of figuring out that deal, and she is doing a bad job at it. They are at her husband’s old pack castle about it. Are they hiding something?????

Chapter 9 – Maccon’s into violence, hypocrisy, raceplay, but worst of all progressive politics.

So off to dinner we go! They talk about what a FRIGHTFUL sight it was that Alexia didn’t style and unfrizz her hair before going down to dinner with such dramatic terms that make me wanna gag. But I went from that to barfing myself inside out when I read the following line about Alexia’s frizzy hair:

“Lord Maccon adored it. He thought she looked like some exotic gypsy and wondered if she might be amendable to donning gold earrings and dancing topless about their room in a loose red skirt…”

GOD DAMN AUTHOR! We went from some poor choices but plausible deniability to straight up…

Like a lot of my racism complaints are subjective and nit-picky I will give you that. But the author done goofed good and fucking proper with that line jesus fucking Christ.

GY*SIES IS A SLUR, AND ROMANI WOMEN ARE NOT ~EXOTIC~ SEXUAL OBJECTS! GOOOOOOOOOOOOO FUCK YOURSELF!

I could fume about that fucking egregious shit the rest of the day but let’s try to distract myself with the parts of this story that aren’t openly racist.

At dinner, LeFoux is talking to some nerd about nerd shit. Ivy is trying to talk about fish to some dude even though both of them don’t know anything about fish. There’s a bit of drama when Lady Kingair (aka Sidheag) allows Maccon to sit in the Alpha seat, which TO BE FAIR is kinda bullshit, but the drama dissipates with a harmless distraction. There is a brief interaction between Alexia and Maccon on the subject of the Tunstell/Ivy drama. Maccon says they’re a bad match and Alexia agrees DESPITE THE FACT SHE LEGIT TRIED TO HOOK UP THE TWO AT THE END OF THE LAST BOOK BUT THAT’S FINE! Maccon ends the conversation about this slipshod ship-fest by sighing out a perplexed…

“Women”

Maccon you’re literally agreeing with a woman right now! Boy howdy am I getting increasingly sick of how Maccon uses that word. If a male partner of mine used that word (woman) the way Maccon uses it (as this bullshit signifier that #yesallwomen are so hard to understand and difficult to deal with) I would uppercut him in the fucking taint.

CAN YOU BE ANGRY ABOUT THE ACTUAL CONTENT OF THE STORY FAPS INSTEAD OF THESE THROW-AWAY LINES THAT YOU’RE OVERANALYZING!

BLATANT RACISM AND SEXISM AREN’T THROW-AWAY LINES, BUT YOU BET YOUR ASS I CAN BE MAD AT MORE STUFF! I AM ALWAYS HUNKERING TO ANGRY IT UP!

There’s a point where they call Alexia curse-breaker multiple times (cause she’s a soulless that can negate the powers of the supernatural.) Ivy and Felicity have no idea what that means and don’t know Alexia is a soulless but nobody bothers to inform them. I don’t know if this is going to be a conflict at some point or not.

Alexia then has to ~make a fuss~ by asking them about the humanization problem. They act like she is breaking some taboo, but honestly I don’t understand why. They’re having a problem; it’s her and Maccon’s job to solve the problem, so they should ask about it so they can solve it right? Also these Scottish folks seem much more down to earth and don’t subscribe to the stuffy social mores of British society. So it’s dumb that they act as if Alexia is rudely asking why cousin Larry has two weeping pussies where his ears should be, while jabbing at them with a pencil, and making sexist jokes about it.

But she doesn’t ask questions that are going to be useful until a few pages into this conversation which means just in time for the author to avoid it with a distraction. I have a feeling the author is going to do the same thing in this book that she did last book. Started with a mystery, dances around it for the vast majority of the book without adding much to it, and just ¾ the way in the book SUDDENLY SHIT HITS THE FAN ALL AT ONCE AND IT’S REAL DUMB!

So it’s now after dinner and the men and women are separated to chit-chat. Alexia starts quizzing Lady Kingair. Lady Kingair says she wishes she could be a full blooded werewolf. The only werewolf within a zillion miles who is powerful enough to turn someone into a werewolf is Lord Maccon, cause of course it is. But Maccon doesn’t want to try to turn her because she’s his last heir and women very rarely survive the transformation.

Which like, there’s no reason so far why the werewolf club has to be vast majority male. No ALL MEN orgies, and no SINCE YOU’RE THE ONLY GIRL WE’VE SEEN IN 80 YEARS ALL OUR ERECTIONS POINT TO YOU FEMALE PROTAG! Perhaps there is some plot point later on. But honestly? I suspect it comes down to the bias that simply werewolfism is considered a male phenomenon. You can read all sorts of analyses of this but basically it comes down to that men are supposed to have a violent, animalistic nature that they try to suppress. But women aren’t supposed to be angry, powerful, uncontrollable, or like worst of all HAIRY! So I don’t want them even as no-name background characters yuck!

Also, oddly enough, last book they said that werewolves sought out actors, and arty types cause they seemed more likely to survive the transformation. Creativity is tied to ~extra soul~ or whatever. So I want to know why all these werewolves are dim-witted, gruff, military philistines instead of sweet, sensitive, arty twinks, smooching each other? Is it cause her type is gruff meathead and like an idiot she outright contradicted her own story for no particular reason?

SEEMS SO! GOD I WANT A CASTLE FULL OF HAIRY BESTIAL WOMEN AND/OR CUTE SENSITIVE TWINKS! IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK FOR?

Nothing else really comes out of the conversation with Lady Sidhaeg Kingair and thankfully we’re saved from that conversation by the sounds of the men folk fighting.

Maccon is fighting with the current beta. Maccon wins, cause of course he does. They both grumble bitterly at each other for BETRAYAL and nothing is revealed. Like I am glad there was action, but this was so limp and tepid. It could have easily been dramatic and they should have revealed something, especially considering they dump the whole story at the end of this chapter.

So Alexia takes him upstairs for fade to black SEX, cause of course she does. Like I won’t kink-shame much, but getting all hot that your husband beat up another dude who is clearly weaker than him for no real reason is bogus yo. A thousand kink-shames upon you.

Afterwards Maccon FINALLY fucking explains something. He says the reason why he left the Kingair pack is because everybody in the pack was planning to kill the queen of England and didn’t tell him about it. They’re Scottish and Supernaturals and APPARENTLY the crown hates both of those things. She appoints Scottish and Supernatural people to the highest places on her court and we have not seen any oppression but just trust us okay. They kept it from Maccon, because Maccon is a ~progressive~ and thought killing the queen would be a bad idea. He believes this because the Queen is giving Supernaturals more rights and that if they kill her that it would make Supernaturals look real bad and innocent Supernaturals would be targeted.

That’s a reasonable fear, and honestly since we’re supposed to be on Maccon’s side she doesn’t really try to explain the other side. Like was it supposed to be a military Coup so that werewolves would be in charge of Britain, since the military is made up of werewolves? Cause that’s honestly pretty fucking interesting. I know the author says there are a lot more humans than werewolves…but I don’t know why they would fear much of a backlash if they all have superpowers, lots of the money, and are the ENTIRE military. The fucking Spartans quelled every slave uprising even though slaves vastly outnumbered their military cause their military was trained as hell. Those masc 4 macs thug bros weren’t even able to turn their faces into dog faces.

Also Maccon’s feelings were really hurt when they were going to kill the queen with poison.

“Poison is for bitches amirite?” Maccon laughs misogynistically. Alexia chuckled in kind and sprinkled something in Maccon’s 5th glass of Scotch. As he dies in agony Alexia licks her fingertips in triumph. Oops they still had poison on them and she dies. LeFoux travels to reality and she has the good sex with me. The End!

Okay that exchange didn’t happen, I just wish it did.

So anyway due to the ~betrayal~ Maccon left his pack and it really fucked his pack a big one because nobody was powerful enough to turn other people into werewolves so their pack couldn’t grow and outsiders were disinterested in serving them. (BTW humans who serve werewolf packs in exchange for being turned into werewolves are called Clavigers in this book.) But this was their punishment for betraying him. Not punishment for the high treason of attempting to murder a queen and thus throwing the entire country into violent chaos which could have resulted in millions of deaths. The focus for the punishment is highlighted as Maccon’s feelings were hurt.

I have a million questions about this situation but I can forgive the author for not going into more detail. This is a fluff story and doesn’t need to be bogged down with politics. I can’t help but be frustrated because the author doesn’t give anything of substance, so when something mildly interesting happens I want to latch onto it but it’s just plywood stuck to a cliff with bubblegum, it ain’t gonna hold my weight.

Thus I plummet back into the pit of frivolousness, hoping futilely there maybe something enjoyable I can grab in order to save my sanity from this stack of bullshit.

PS – I’m way into the fact that the thing they did reveal is not relevant to the actual conflict at the center of this book.

LOVE THAT!

PPS – The fight should have had the Beta forcefully removed from the fight. That he thrashes against another werewolf about how ineffectual Maccon is. That he has all sorts of strength, power, and money but he’s just a complacent lapdog. Since he has been dubbed ‘one of the good ones’ he’ll let the less fortunate ones of his race rot while he nibbles pheasant in his castle. Maccon fires back how hypocritical it is to say you want what’s best for werewolves/Scottish folks while picking fights and putting the less fortunate on the line. That he’s proving to the kingdom that werewolves are valuable by being a good example and working within the power structure to help his own kind. Afterwards Maccon goes back to his room physically and emotionally exhausted, and cuddles with his wife while he explains the backstory. He cries over his guilt of hurting his pack, and wonders if what he is doing is the right thing.

Problem with that is it doesn’t make the conflict easy to understand and cut and dry. It also makes Maccon emotionally vulnerable…which like I’M INTO but seems as if it’s not the author or this set of reader’s fetish.

Say something nice Faps:

After pulling teeth for a book and a half we learn something about Maccon. And it’s actually potentially interesting.

Ivy’s back and forth about her lack of knowledge about fish was genuinely cute and funny.

#gormless #changless #riffs #riffing #tw: racism

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a-magpie-witchling · 7 years

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What's the deal with the drama surrounding that slur? What happened?

SUMMARIZING A LOT(yes, I promise the long post is summarized. If you support me, it would mean a lot to me if you read it, since people turning a blind eye has been the problem)

The context

There’s a game, and in the game there are 4 characters, two of them are poc and two are white. One of the white ones and the other two are friends and in a part of the story in a flashback they were making fun of the other white guy who is an utter piece of shit but is dying of a plague the main trio is looking the cure for, since the whole country is basically dying of it. A person pointed out that the bullying’s not very hero-like of the main trio, since they’re supposed to be the good guys and just look like a bunch of incompetent idiots while bullying the guy who has brought them together with the objective of healing him and by proxy healing the whole country. So far in every flashback of the story these three are seen fooling around, chit chatting, having sex, taking vacations, etc. The trio consists of a doctor (the white guy), a wizard, and a countess. Now the doctor and the wizard have been seen kinda… trying? To cure the plague, but just barely. The countess however hasn’t been shown doing anything of actual value, even though theoretically we know she’s ruling the damn country. But so far we’ve only seen her in her down time.

The problem

I didn’t know the person that pointed this out. I don’t agree with their point but I did say that this is an issue that takes place a lot with false representation in media, especially with women, especially with women of color, and almost always with queer women of color. They’re written as these amazing badasses in paper, and then when it comes to the story their overqualifications don’t *do* anything because advancing the plot is something left for cis white male everyman protagonists.

So we’re left with this unused resource that is just there as a token Strong Minority Representative Character™ that has no actual use in the story whatsoever and that is just there to make minorities including women shut the hell up because what else could we possibly want!?

This is a problem. A big one. And very similar to queerbaiting. I’m sure there must be a name for it.

So I pointed out that the countess is a black woman who is in the highest position of power in the setting and yet we’ve never seen her *do* anything related to that. She has lost her memory in game, so we see her drinking wine with some courtesans a couple of times, but what about law making? What about actual leadership? And this is especially troublesome in the flashbacks in the game because back then she was the only ruler and had her memories, so she was at the top of her game and still we’ve only seen her literally drink tea or wine, take a vacation, get drunk and splash in a fountain with her friends, and talk about eating delicacies.

We know theoretically that this isn’t everything she’s doing, because logically it couldn’t possibly be, that this is just her in her downtime. But then people say “this is NOT a strong queer female character of color” and they have the canonical backup of “she’s lazy and does nothing”. And this is something caused by poor writing.

It’s called dissonance of framing.

Theory: powerful queer black woman who is the leader, strong character.Screen time: queer black woman who does absolutely nothing of use with her time or extremely big skill set, token minority character.

The drama

The drama started because I pointed this out and immediately found people were calling the OP racist. As I said, I don’t know this person, at all, but in their page they had bio info that said they were from the Netherlands. They were really pissed at them because they used the word “colored” instead of saying “of color”. So I pointed out that if you’re gonna call someone racist, it can’t be because of the accidental use of a racial slur when they’re not native English speakers.

I was told then that they refused to listen to me for coddling a racist, to which I answer “I’m not, I don’t know this person, if they have been racist (turned up they were) to fucking hell with them, but I’ve seen this happen in real life and it got ugly very fast because non-conservative American young people or Americanized foreigners that are in constant contact with them (see most of Tumblr) forget that sometimes there are culturar barriers that aren’t easy to break especially if you speak different native tongues. I always give the benefit of the doubt because in my country the N word is used to say sweetie or darling, and I’ve seen a black girl break down in tears and be very rightfully pissed because she spoke Mexican Spanish (I think) but that didn’t mean she knew this particular cultural gap, and nobody around her thought of explaining it or being mindful, to quote just one of a dozen examples. We need to give people some leverage if a single misused word can end up ostracizing them. If I see them being racist, I’ll bring the torch. Else we could be incurring in racism or xenophobia ourselves.”

These people said that they would not read what I had to say.

They said that I had to learn to shut the fuck up.

They said that I should learn the language.

They called me a dipshit and told me I wasn’t valid.

After calling me a dipshit and telling me to shut the fuck up, I told them that I didn’t expect to have a conversation with them because they were two 19 yos one dissing and the other one hollering “TELL EM BESTIE!” in the back, and then they said they wouldn’t answer to me more because “I was being condescending”.

And this happens all the time. These people have never seen my face. They know I’m latina though. They’re both half white and trying to tell me I’m not interested in POC because I coddle racism, which is, again, not true. I’m saying I don’t go for the throat if I see an honest vocabulary mistake being made. They tell me I would know the difference if I was interested, because I’m on Tumblr and it’s a word you come across all the time.

I’ve been on Tumblr for 3 months.

Guys, colored is a 50′s racial slur, it’s not something you hear every day. I have been a fluent English speaker for almost a decade now, and I found out the word ‘colored’ existed just one year ago playing Bioshock Infinte, a game that takes place in the 1910′s. This is a mistake I could have made a mere year ago!

So, clearly, it’s not a word you get to hear every day. Shit, the first time someone called me a wetback I had to google it.

But these people refused to hear anything I had to say. They’ve been in the fandom of this game for a much longer time than I have so now I’ve been cut off entirely. I was ostracized, insulted, removed from a discord server, given the entire cold shoulder, all for saying that I won’t immediately think someone’s racist for accidentally using one of the dozens upon dozens of racial slurs that exist in the English language when they’re not a native speaker. When I started digging I found this person was being in fact quite racist, so I told them to go fuck themselves and then blocked them.

Damage is done, though. And honestly? Who the fuck cares. I know what I said, I know what I think, I know I am right, so these people can eat a dick given that they chose to not hear.

And that’s why I say that screaming BLATANT RACISM at a single easily made vocabulary mistake by a non-native English speaker is a big setback in the cause of fighting actual blatant racism.

But the truth is that it’s better this way. It’s gonna sound like I’m victimizing myself, but honestly, if I had to choose, I’d choose a non-racist (as much as one can actually be, of course) be ostracized and called racist, than an actual racist being excused and coddled.

So yeah, that’s what happened.

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a34trgv2 · 7 years

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Top 10 Disney Disasters

#10. Renewing Pickle and Peanut: I acknowledge from a business stand point, if a show is popular, it should get another season. Pickle and Peanut, however, is not that popular. Not only have ratings declined since it’s premier, but less and less people are talking about it, and when they do it’s not positive. But apparently, no one at Disney Television give a shit as it’s been renewed for another season. If you thought less people were watching it by the end of Season 1, then no one is going to watch it at the start of Season 2.

#9. Giving up on John Carter: After being in development limbo for over 80 years (I’m not kidding, Hollywood’s been trying to get this character of the ground since the 30s), Disney finally gave John Carter his cinematic debut. Despite under performing at the box office and getting mixed reviews from critics, audiences were very accepting to it and wanted more. However, instead of let’s say attempting to make an animated show based on it like one of their other cult films (Tron) or having the character find new life in video game form, Disney just gave the film rights back to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ estate. Really? After decades of being stuck in development limbo, John Carter is just thrown back in? I know Disney lost money on the film, but they could’ve saved the character from falling into obscurity again by making a tv show. But, that’s reality I guess :/

#8. Ripping Off Ren and Stimpy: I’ve talked about this before, so I’ll keep it brief. Disney is a company that has made a name for themselves in pushing the boundaries of animation and story telling. So they should be more than ashamed of themselves for mooching off the success of their competition instead of making their own original show -.-

#7. Ending Wander Over Yonder: Just, why? About a year ago, Disney decided not to renew Wander Over Yonder. Why? Honestly, I don’t know. I know Craig McCracken said they “felt 2 seasons and 80 cartoons was enough,” but he never explained WHY they felt that. And no, it wasn’t because of the ratings nor was it because Disney didn’t like it. It really does baffle me how Phineas and Ferb got 4 seasons and 222 episodes before getting the axe (not bashing the show, I actually like it, I’m just trying to prove a point) and yet they felt Wander Over Yonder was just a 2 Season show and a 3rd would spoil it. What?!

#6. Canning Potentially Good Sequels: I know the direct-to-video sequels are notoriously unpopular, but that doesn’t mean they’re all without merit. Cinderella 3 told a fairly solid story and had some genuine stakes involved. Tarzan 2 you could argue is just filler, but kid Tarzan does go through a real character arc in this movie. And Return to Neverland is my personal favorite of the bunch and that’s mainly because of Jane. Disney Toons had plans for sequels to Dumbo, Chicken Little, Meet The Robinsons, and Pinocchio among others before John Lasseter shut them all down. I respect his dislike for these films, but I honestly believe some of them could have been more than just run of the mill. Like, more adventures with Pinocchio or The Robinsons; I actually wanted to see a Mulan 3 (Mulan 2 isn’t in my top 10 Disney sequels, but I don’t think it’s that bad). At the very least, these movies could’ve been decent with the right amount of effort, but like with Circle 7, John would like the rest of the world to pretend these ideas never happened.

#5. Bad Timing on Release Dates: Winnie The Pooh, Muppets Most Wanted, The Rescuers Down Under, The Rocketeer and Treasure Planet. You know what these movies have in common? They were all released at the worst times for their respected genres. I’m not a box office analyst (check out Grace Randolph for those statistics; yeah, yeah I know “she’s terrible” “kys” blah blah blah -.-), but last time I checked, you shouldn’t put something as innocent and family friendly as Winnie The Pooh up against something massive like Harrry Potter. Nor should you release a goofy family comedy like the Muppets in the spring if you expected similar results like its predecessor. Also, who’s idea was it to release one of, if not THE best Disney sequel the same week as Home Alone? I don’t know about you, but that’s not very smart if you ask me. Why? Really think about it; this was Disney’s first sequel and it’s set in the desert of Australia. They put in alot of effort to make this an improvement over it’s predecessor; from the animation, to the characters, to the story, even down to the humor. All that effort and yet they decided to release it around the holiday season, as opposed to, I don’t know-SUMMER?! I know no studio is perfect, but there should be no reason why they messed up these release dates so bad.

#4. Sitcom Overload: You know how many sitcom are on Disney Channel right now? 6. And they’re all about preteens or teens going through their everyday lives with wacky hijinks and some character bonding along the way. To be fair though, they are better than the Stupid Sitcoms on Nickelodeon, but the quality of them isn’t the problem. The problem is that there’s so many of them and not enough animation. Like I said earlier, Disney has made a name for themselves in pushing the boundaries of animation and storytelling. So, where on Earth is the animation on television? Answer: Disney XD. The reason why this is bothersome is because when people think of Disney, they think of the animated content first and the live action stuff after. Disney has made some good live action movies and tv shows for sure, but they’re not nearly as remembered as the ones that are animated. As such, the Disney Channel is generally regarded as the Disney Sitcom Channel. Yes, from a business standpoint, sitcoms are profitable, but too many sitcoms can damage you brand as an animation company and in a sense it has. Also, on a minor note, can we change Disney XD back to Toon Disney? I’ve honestly never understood the name change so can we turn it back? No? Worth a shot :/

#3. Controversial Jokes: I know comedy is subjective, but that doesn’t mean joke’s can’t cause an uproar if handled poorly. And boy were these handled in the worst way possible. Making a joke about models barely eating on paper, sounds exactly what you think it sounds like: a joke that inadvertedly sounds like an eating disorder joke. And it was. The joke was from an episode of Shake It Up and while that joke was removed, this wouldn’t be the last time Disney did something like this. Did you know Jessie has a character who eats a glutten free diet and they made an episode revolving around this? No? Because alot of angry parents saw that and Disney was forced to change it or risk getting doxed. Disney should really remind themselves that they can’t make light on topics like these as it does more harm than good. They didn’t joke around with racism, so eating disorders should obviously be a no no.

#2. Producing Dumb Ideas for Bad Movies: Mars Needs Moms, Alexander and the God Awful Title, The Santa Claus 3, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Prom. All of them were terrible ideas made into equally terrible movies. Mars Needs Moms, from the title alone is their worst film, no contest. You know it’s bad when the title sounds like a 4 year old thought of this film. The plot is nonsense, the characters are awful, not even the animation does it any favors. This isn’t the first time I’ve ranted on this film, so let me explain the biggest problem with this movie: the concept. Why would an alien race need our human mothers to grow the species? They were doing just find before. Alexander, meanwhile, is based on a kids book. Wouldn’t be so bad if A. The title wasn’t stupid and B. The plot wasn’t a light version of Everybody Hates Chris. I’m aware The Santa Claus has its fans, so it wouldn’t be fair to put it on the list because of my hatred for the film. Objectively, however, The Santa Claus 3 should not have been made with the generic It’s a Wonderful Life plot. I don’t care if It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic, it should not be remade and retold over and over again. The other two were based on a joke or dare, I swear. Who was asking for a movie about going to the prom? And don’t people hate Lindsay Lohan? And drama queens? Especially if they’re teenagers? I’ll refer you back to my point at #s 4 and 8 because I hate repeating myself -.-

#1. Ignoring Song of the South: In the Tom and Jerry Highlight Collection, Whoopi Goldberg did an introduction explaining why the cartoons featured in the DVD included Mammy-Two Shoes despite her being criticized as a racist stereotype (I’m with BenTheLooney in that this criticism is bull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl01VhWbC74). Whoopi said that taking her out of the DVD would be the same as pretending she didn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong, racial stereotyping is bad, but so is pretending films and cartoons involving black characters didn’t exist. Case in point, Song of the South, I feel, is one of Disney’s underappreciated films simply because of the portrayal of blacks in the Post-Civil War era. I get it, slaves were miserable after the war; that said, that’s not what the film’s about. Its about a boy living on a plantation who listens to the stories of Brer Rabbit, told by Uncle Remus. The film was last seen in theaters in 1986 and never received a home release in the U.S.. Bob Iger calls it “fairly offensive” and you can debate all you want, but not giving this movie a home release isn’t helping your case. That only makes people want to see it more. Whoopie Goldberg herself wants this movie to have a home release. Sure you can just bootleg it or watch it online, but if you were to own it on Blu-Ray, you could get some insight into the process of making this movie, a brief history of racial stereotyping in movies. They still play the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah song, and they put alot of effort to the theme park attraction. This movie should not be ignored because the company wants to stay family friendly. Families don’t keep things from each other, just saying.

Conclusion: I love Disney, just about everyone loves Disney; but they’re not perfect and to think otherwise would be foolish. Pointing out their flaws and criticizing their actions is the only way they can get better. I’m aware of the Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar problems, but I wanted to focus on Disney specifically. Know any other Disney slip-ups? Let me know in response to this post. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon.

#Disney #Walt Disney Pictures #whoopi goldberg #song of the south #uncle remus #Disney Channel #disney xd #disney television animation #cartoon #sitcoms #like #share #reblog #follow #pixar #marvel #star wars #Wander Over Yonder #savewoy

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justinmoviereviews · 7 years

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The Class of 2017

This one is starting early, inspired by my least favorite movie of the year. I’ve got a bunch more on my list I’ll get to at some point.

Strong Island - Yance Ford

I don’t watch documentaries, but of the three I saw from last year this portrait of a family’s grief was my favorite. Because it was visceral and simple, catching a family as it processes the death of its oldest son, and then learns the circumstances surrounding why his murderer was never charged.

Columbus - Kogonada

It’s not just the architecture, which is fantastic throughout--every shot is set up to look as striking and pretty as it can, like a movie that was filmed entirely inside the Met.

Last Men in Aleppo - Feras Fayyad and Steen Johannessen

I’m not gonna say anything bad about this movie. I’m not a lunatic. It’s not an easy thing to see real footage of dead babies, but one of several interesting things in this documentary is how these guys go from digging bodies out of rubble to attending a wedding. Life goes on, it turns out, even in a place like Syria. These are people who fantasize about going to Turkey, but recognize that they’d be greeted with resentment and bigotry there, and anyway feel a responsibility to stay in their homeland. Their happiness comes from being with their friends, and occasionally planting trees, or buying some pet fish. Their day job is rescuing people from random air strikes perpetrated by their own government. They’re legitimate heroes, and Bashar al-Assad is a legitimate monster. One funny thing, the user score for this movie on Metacritic is a bizarrely low 3.3, with a handful of reviews that accuse it of being Al-Qaeda propaganda. The reviews are written by people with user names like MetacriticSuccs, so credit to the Russian cyber agency for their thoroughness.

Detroit - Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow has become the master of telling macro stories about chaos. The first half hour about how riots turned Detroit into a war zone are perfect--maybe her best contained piece of filmmaking yet. When this movie settles into its plot--about how a bunch of racist cops tortured a group of black people in a cheap hotel--it’s such a natural extension of what she’s good at that it doesn’t feel like it all takes place in a single location, even though it does. As the night wears on you start to realize that in black cities like Detroit police were and maybe still are barely disguised domestic terrorists. When a character asks someone “will we be safe?” she’s referring to the cops, but she might as well be referring to the villain in a horror movie. This one shoulda got a lot more attention.

Personal Shopper - Olivier Assayas

I’ll start with a criticism: Kristen Stewart is really bad here. I actually think she’s a great actress, but here she’s a collection of her worst impulses: tics and stuttering, like an SNL parody of her. It’s actually not much of a liability though, because this is a movie that’s entirely about events and mood. I’m like six viewings away from understanding what the hell is going on in it, so here are just some thoughts: the movie does away with any ambiguity about whether ghosts are real. They’re all over the place, haunting houses and generally causing mischief. But the clarity on an afterlife does nothing to explain the plot of this movie. The bulk of it takes the form of an extended conversation over text between the main character and a mystery presence. It’s never explained whether this presence is haunting her or helping her, if it’s a ghost or a person or a figment of her own imagination. I half-heartedly entertained a theory that it was the boyfriend of the woman she worked for her screwing with her, which would make enough sense to be plausible, but not enough to provide the movie with any sense of resolution. Basically I have no idea what Assayas is trying to say, or what any of this means. I don’t know if I’m supposed to. It doesn’t matter. This movie is creepy as hell, and incredibly, superlatively good.

Lady MacBeth - William Oldroyd

This movie is called Lady MacBeth because it’s essentially a retelling of MacBeth, if his wife had been more willing to get her hands dirty. It looks and feels like a period drama about a marriage arranged between families for financial reasons and a resulting affair of passion, but it never actually is that. From minute one it’s pitched at such a tense, bizarre level, that when Mrs. MacBeth switches from a sympathetic if inscrutable kept woman to a full out psycho, it’s not all that unexpected or surprising. It’s still heavy though, because MacBeth is a heavy play. And this movie absolutely lives up to that ambition.

The Florida Project - Sean Baker

Sean Baker’s last movie was about two black transgendered prostitutes in LA--a demographic that to my knowledge has never been the focus of a movie before--and rather than ask his audience to pity them he just told a story about them. It worked so well for me because it never felt like he was trying to please the cultural moment. He just realized this was an underreported American vibrancy. Here he takes a slightly different approach. Everyone and their mother has taken a stab at American poverty, but Baker manages to tell a story about adults living in harrowing conditions from the point of view of children who don’t realize their situation is difficult and so don’t feel any difficulty. Actually, now that I think about it, they are pretty similar. Both movies are about how daily life can keep the sadness about one’s condition at bay. For the prostitutes in Southern California, it’s whatever workaday stuff they have to deal with at any given moment. For the left behind margin-dwellers in this movie, it’s either children or childhood.

The Beguiled - Sofia Coppola

90 minutes on female horniness and the color white. Who says no?

Beatriz at Dinner - Miguel Arteta

You’ll forgive me for thinking this was going to be the cringe comedy it was billed as, with a Trumpian bent as a casually racist rich old guy makes increasingly inappropriate comments to an unexpected Mexican houseguest. But in retrospect, doing that would have put the onus on the Mexican to be uncomfortable, and that’s not what this movie wants to do at all. Instead she spends the whole night making everyone else deeply, cringingly uncomfortable. Which makes this movie much more interesting than the one it was billed as.

Gerald’s Game - Mike Flanagan

I’m going to reiterate an earlier point, which is that for a basic bang for your buck, it’s hard to do better than well made low budget horror flicks. Get Out may win the best picture Oscar, but at it’s heart it’s really just a best case scenario for what these movies can be--fast, fun, small, structured around really good ideas. They’re the best playgrounds for smart filmmakers. Gerald’s Game includes a scene near the end in which a woman rips the skin off her entire hand--a scene that stressed me out more than my first first date--but ignoring that I could easily watch it 600 more times. The most watchable movie since, well, Get Out.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. - Dan Gilroy

Here’s a not terribly controversial opinion: Denzel Washington is the greatest movie star of all time. Who’s better? Jack Nicholson maybe? Cary Grant? His total comfort in front of the camera, his powerhouse intensity, his towering presence, the way words roll out of his mouth like a waterfall from the fountain of youth. He’s been doing this shit now for four decades, and none of his movies are less than good. He is the king. I mostly loved this movie. Completely ignored by a general audience, I thought the trailer looked great and was disappointed it was removed from theaters before I could see it. For the first hour it’s rather near perfect. Denzel Washington talks and talks, citing legal statutes, expressing disdain for the obviously fucked up legal system, stuttering through social situations he never bothered to learn how to navigate. He’s confident but not comfortable. The second half goes off the rails. It’s the kind of mess you want to blame a studio for, or an angry producer who was annoyed there weren’t more car chases. But maybe Gilroy--who’s Nightcrawler was a more coherent movie--just lost the plot somewhere along the way. No real matter. More legal dramas should be this sharp and this fun. And one must hail the king.

Mudbound - Dee Rees

For the first 45 minutes this movie has an As I Lay Dying quality, where multiple narrators lay out the state of their moral and historical situations in portentous southern language that always sounds profound when done well, like it is here. It never gets quite that deep again, but it becomes a sober and accurate look at what this country, particularly the south, would have been for blacks, women, and even white men in the 1940s. Halfway through I started to wonder if any movie had ever shown how plain old fashioned American racism strips away the dignity of blacks and the humanity of whites as well as this one does. 12 Years a Slave, maybe, but even that one cheated a little bit by being a horror show. Also, Rob Morgan, who plays the paterfamilias of the black tenant farming family, especially finds the Faulkner in his character’s position. For my money he’s the breakout star here.

Icarus - Bryan Fogel

A problem I have found with certain documentaries that rely on their primary sources to tell their story is that the narrative can get blurry. This is a movie that would benefit from a narrator just to keep an eye on the spine of this fascinating true life event. The premise seems to be that a filmmaker stumbled completely by accident onto something so interesting that it obviously needed to take over his movie. Maybe a better filmmaker would have stepped back and asked some of the bigger questions presented by this narrative, like, why did this scientist seem compelled to run Putin’s national doping program? Maybe a master filmmaker would have dug into the heart of a man like Vladimir Putin who felt compelled to orchestrate a national doping program, a true story of global deception and malevolent corruption that deserves dozens of movies. But you’d have to be a walrus to not be intrigued by this guy, or eternally grateful that someone with a camera managed to catch him as his crime was discovered by the IOC and his government threw him under the bus and forced him into witness protection.

The Discovery - Charlie McDowell

I’ll get this out of the way first: the twist is not good. A squander of a pretty great concept that they could have anything with. But the rest of the movie is. The concept really is neat, and the whole thing looks great. This is a small, self-contained movie that chugs along at a heady pace. It’s a perfect Netflix movie, a genre I suspect we will all learn to recognize pretty soon.

Wonderstruck - Todd Haynes

I’m Not There is a profoundly silly movie, but Carol was made by a consummate pro, so I’m inclined to like Todd Haynes, and trust him when he experiments by, say, making a silent movie that intersplices stories from two generations and shoots them to look contemporaneous to movies of their respective eras. Like The Shape of Water, there must be a wavelength that really gets this movie. Maybe one day I’ll give it another shot, but fuck it’s slow.

Good Time - Ben and Josh Safdie

Woah. Let’s see here: This is a grim, ugly, unpretty neon movie about a side of New York that most people don’t like thinking about and will generally choose to ignore. It’s not just the poverty--there’s a darkness here, an ugliness and a savageness that’s usually examined sociologically if it’s examined at all. But this movie lives in it like it grew up in it, which for all I know it did. It’s about a white guy--and his skin color is very relevant--careening through Queens, ruining lives along the way in a single-minded quest to raise enough money to make his autistic brother’s bail. Mostly it’s so exciting and unpredictable that it flies by, telling a story about a guy with the survival skills of a cockroach getting through a night we might describe as eventful. And I need to give special mention to Jennifer Jason Leigh. She’s only in one scene, but she takes it to a dark, viscerally disturbing place. I don’t know that much about her as an actor, I don’t know what kind of work she usually does, but in a movie populated by characters I sincerely wish could have better lives, she will stand out in my mind for awhile.

Song to Song - Terrence Malick

Part of me wants to like this movie, or at least respect it. Every shot is interesting--in fact that might be most of the point: every scene takes place in a visually arresting location, the actors do odd things with their bodies, the camera shoots them from weird angles. And I admire that Malick has mastered an impressionism that is uniquely his. But I also suspect that maybe this is just a bunch of bullshit from a guy who’s talented enough to make decently interesting work without trying very hard. I mean, he used to take 20 years to make his movies, now he’s pumping out one after another like he’s Woody Allen. And I think a movie can only have so much emotional resonance when the average scene lasts about 5 seconds. I don’t know, I can sort of see why a person might like this sort of thing, if a person was so inclined, but man did I think it was boring. If he’s just gonna make ponderous nonsense now, then at least The Tree of Life had the decency to be about the meaning of the universe.

Hostiles - Scott Cooper

This is first and foremost a really solid western. Stoic and sharp and very well made. Christian Bale is amazing at this and should do one of these every couple of years. My only complaint is that it could have been better. It could have been a masterpiece. But it points to ideas about the inhospitality of the American frontier that it never really manages to show. People knocked the Revenant, but that movie really slaps you on the ass with how tough it was to hang in the old west. Hostiles wanted to do the same thing, but it settles instead on the simpler thesis that we stole this land from it’s rightful inhabitants. Which, I mean, fair enough I guess.

Molly’s Game - Aaron Sorkin

If Aaron Sorkin wants to write a novel and release it as an audiobook narrated by Jessica Chastain, guess what, I’ll listen, but he is not a director. This is a movie where the voice-over will voice over dialogue because good lord does he love to write, and a movie where the main character at her lowest point will narrate her depression over a shot of her in bed, because good lord does he not know how to show. So this movie loses something his screenplays don’t when they’re filmed by top shelf talents like David Fincher or Danny Boyle. But Sorkin is one of my favorite guys to write about because he’s so talented and also so flawed. He’s in love with academia, and with knowing things. I can’t imagine what he’s like to shoot the shit with, but I assume that the person he wants to be is the person he keeps writing--the hyper-literate Renaissance man (and now woman) with a top 99 percentile intellect and some kind of pathological drive. Lots of movies are about everymen, but neither you nor I will ever be a Sorkin protagonist. His doormen are wittier and better educated than we are. Anyway, his biggest flaw in my opinion, besides a tendency to get high on his own supply, which we might as well call a feature in this case, is his tipsy uncle sentimentality. But other than a scene at the end between Molly and her father, which is a cinematic crime against humanity, this movie mostly avoids that. It’s too busy being his most fun movie yet. Even more than Steve Jobs, which is where I learned to tear down my cynical walls and lean into his brand of goofy pop intellectualism. Here’s my take on this one: it will not stand up to repeat viewings. At all. Like, at all. But it made me want to get a job in finance just so I can start going to high stakes poker tournaments.

Kong: Skull Island - Jordan Vogt-Roberts

2017 was such a good year for movies that even bullshit like this was great. This movie pulls ideas whole cloth from the last Godzilla movie--here there’s also a benevolent monster god, a showdown between giant creatures over the soul of man, and almost contemptuously fantastic cinematography (because if something this corporate can look this good, than how much should we even value high priced photography?)--but it takes itself a fraction as seriously as that one did, and is by legions less stupid.

Call Me By Your Name - Luca Guadagnino

More movies should have stakes this low. There’s a lazy confidence here that I like a lot. This is how a movie about a 17 year old boy’s summer should feel. Nothing really matters, and every day is pretty good. Over the course of two hours he will swim, smoke, read, and fuck a boy, a girl, and a peach. He’ll grow up to become a gay man with a pretty normal and hopefully happy life. He’ll remember this summer very fondly.

Win It All - Joe Swanberg

If every movie were like this, movies would be a lot more boring. But I suppose there is a space out there for simple stories told simply. The best scenes are the ones with Keegan-Michael Key, who is so charismatic that he risks derailing the utter unexceptionalness that is this movie’s point.

A Ghost Story - David Lowery

Does it seem gimmicky to make a movie about a dead husband as a guy in a white sheet with two eye holes cut out out like a child’s Halloween costume? I don’t know, the effect in practice to me was to make this celestial being look lonely and sad. He hangs his head in a silent longing and watches time hurdle through space from a fixed point he either can’t or won’t leave. This is a quiet, still movie; the kind that doesn’t cost much and is probably over-represented at film festivals. But it is, and forgive the sincerity here, devastatingly beautiful.

Phantom Thread - Paul Thomas Anderson

I wanted to give this a few more days to sink in before I wrote about it, but I’m nothing if not a content provider, so here we go. As the greatest artist of a generation ought to do, PTA upended my expectations about his style with this one, creating something new and challenging and not beholden to his previous work. His last couple movies have been about tension and release. This one really isn’t. Instead it’s a love story, or actually I mean it’s a relationship story, about the hunt for connection that all relationships become after the initial euphoria wears off. It’s still a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so it’s haunting and strange and made up of tense dialogue that obfuscates it’s artistic intentions, spoken by strange people with unclear motivation. But it’s also funny, and mostly straightforward. It’s centered around a relationship, but this movie is as impossible to reduce as the last one, or the one before that. There are limits to my partisanship--there’s a dandyism to this movie that I don’t like at all, but this guy is consistently setting his sights up past the rafters, and throwing walk off touchdowns every single time.

I Love You, Daddy - Louis CK

Louis CK’s disgrace is the only one I’ve had trouble reckoning with, because he’s the only person so far to go down who really had more to say. Unfortunately, if this ends up being his last project, it’ll have been a disappointing note to end on. Louis’ artistic problem is that he’s too hard on himself. Very often he will set up a disagreement between himself and another character and have the other character essentially school him, even if he’s not wrong. He has a tendency to shortchange his own point of view. But it’s never been detrimental to his work until now. This movie is essentially a professionally successful version of the pathetically passive guy Louis always plays getting chastised by a series of articulate women. The writing is very often great--he’ll probably never get his due now, but he’s the best writer of dialogue since Woody Allen--and it’s a little sunnier than his usual point of view allows for, but it’s less focused and less interesting than either of his two TV shows.

The Post - Steven Spielberg

Like Bridge of Spies, this is a minor work from the master. The only bad thing I can say about this movie is that he’s not doing anything new, and the subject matter invites comparisons to more interesting movies, like Spotlight, and All the President’s Men, which would make a hell of a second billing here as a diptych about the rise of the Washington Post. Unlike Clint Eastwood, I believe Spielberg still has extra gears. He still has a few more home runs in him. But like Eastwood even his most workmanlike products are made with a level of casual mastery that makes them perennial top tenners. I don’t know that this movie was made for any reason other than to express a distaste for the current occupant of the White House. It still earned Meryl Streep another Oscar nomination.

It Comes at Night - Trey Edward Shults

Why are all these low budget horror indies so good?

The House - Andrew Jay Cohen

Will Ferrell movies have reached this weird place now where the concepts are funny but their executions aren’t. They’re coming up with good ideas but filming them straight because at this point they’re businessmen with schedules to keep. There’s none of the peripheral lawlessness that made up his earlier work, or makes up really any good comedy, especially in the Apatow era. This movie is only worth watching for two reasons: 1. it will pump you up if your on the way to the casino, and 2. evil Amy Poehler is so much better than civic do-gooder Amy Poehler.

Snatched - Jonathan Levine

Is Amy Schumer the first comedian since Jerry Seinfeld who’s funnier in their scripted work than they are in their stand up? Anyway, until she starts phoning it in like elder statesman Will Ferrell, or is supplanted by someone newer, she’s my comedy protagonist of choice. Why did people take on a pass on this? Cuz the plotting is lazy? When isn’t it in a comedy?

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House - Peter Landesman

This movie is a huge mess but I refuse to not like it. It’s murky, paranoid, serious; in other words a great spy movie, about institutions of American government that dislike, distrust, and actively work to undermine one another. Nixon is barely even mentioned until the end, and the Washington Post is barely mentioned at all. But this should have been a miniseries or a novel. It’s a ten hour story condensed into two, and thus makes even less sense than a good spy movie ought to.

The Dark Tower - Nikolaj Arcel

As someone who has not read the books and wasn’t even aware there was a cult behind them, I can say this is a perfectly enjoyable plane watch.

Battle of the Sexes - Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

I suppose this is the safe and logical choice for the recent Oscar winner, and it’s not a bad movie by any stretch. The actual battle scene at the end is quite excellent. But ignoring the current political environment, a movie where a tennis prodigy discovers her sexuality and takes on a boy’s club is much less interesting to me than a movie about a hustler who’s past his prime, gambling with his buddies and turning himself into a heel. Steve Carrell plays it as a good natured ode to a dopey strand of American hustle. He’s the best thing in this. But of course that’s not why this movie got made. I guess I’m ultimately just a member of the boy’s club.

American Made - Doug Liman

Speaking of American Hustle, this Goodfellas in planes strikes me as more Hustle with drugs, inasmuch as the ostensible good guys, the feds, are really just a bunch of selfish ambitious cowboys playing with house money. Where Bradley Cooper’s FBI agent was too stupid to realize how bad he was at his job, American Made’s Domhnall Gleason, who I understand is now in every movie, is some kind of CIA stud with no accountability and no budgetary restraints, coming up with increasingly outlandish ideas for which there are no consequences at all. When Tom Cruise starts working with Colombian drug cartels, the implication seems to be that everybody knows and nobody really cares. I’m not sure this movie makes any sense at all, or if it’s supposed to. It’s buoyed by movie star Tom Cruise at his movie star best, bringing a slight, slight maturity to his Top Gun self.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Rian Johnson

In The Force Awakens Adam Driver was the only good part of a bad movie. Now he’s the best part of a great movie.

The Lost City of Z - James Gray

The epic as a genre seems to me inherently flawed; who wants a movie that goes on too long and changes tone 7 times? This is an interesting one: it's first foray down the river comes with Apocalypse Now ambitions that it holds its own next to. The second trip is fun and captivating. The third trip, after extended scenes of World War One and, I don’t know, some family stuff, is too little too late. Basically, when this movie is in the jungle, it’s great. When it’s not, it’s not.

Lady Bird - Greta Gerwig

Let me stand apart from the glut of people my age who thought this movie was made specifically for them, and say that this movie was made specifically not for me. I can’t think of anything I want to see less than a coming of age tale called Lady Bird about a high school senior who decides to call herself “Lady Bird.” But the thing about good movies is that they transcend premise. Greta Gerwig isn’t dogmatically sticking to genre here--the dialogue is sharper than the average movie about an idiosyncratic high school senior, the parents and their financial situation occupy a more central role, and when the protagonist briefly tries to fit in with the cool kids, she kinda pulls it off--but really she’s just made a better coming of age movie than most people who try ever do. This is what we all would like to turn our childhood memories into. And for those concerned, like I was, by a trailer full of precious dialogue, the movie is so snappily edited that lines that would read as self-indulgent or treacly come out down and dirty in practice.

The Disaster Artist - James Franco

One of the impressive things about this movie is that it’s a comedy that doesn’t come at the expense of it’s subject: a man who in a slurred Slavic accent tells a room full of theater students “I’m not villain, you are villain!” A man who in other words could have an entire Office-style show built around him by a less charitable filmmaker. But James Franco is here to celebrate this bad movie, and honor the weirdo who made it. This isn’t the direction I would have gone in: I’d be too curious about the why and the who. But Franco does a really good job with his material. This is a really good and funny movie, with a murderer’s row of supporting actors who should all be doing stuff like this rather than whatever the fuck Seth Rogen is working on right now. Franco paints Tommy Wiseau as a pretty damaged guy with boundless ambition and absolutely no understanding of how human beings behave or how to interact with them--at one point he talks about wanting to run his own planet--but he keeps it light. Our man Tommy gets a standing ovation at the end, which I don’t believe really happened, but in this context I support.

I, Tonya - Craig Gillespie

One thing about Tonya Harding is that if she were coming up now, in the era of Lavar Ball and Jezebel, she’d be uncontroversially loved, and never would have had to club anyone in the kneecap. As far as I’m concerned she’s owed a revisit, which this movie gives her, and makes her look sympathetic and talented and fundamentally decent, if a little unwilling to take responsibility for anything at all. Anyway it’s a pretty damn good movie. Not quite as wild as it’s masterpiece of a trailer suggests, but pretty fun and breezy the whole way through.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle - Jake Kasdan

Nowadays, most theaters will let you bring alcohol into the screening. So here’s a fun game: go see comedies you have no interest in, and drink steadily throughout them. Preferably with others. I’m not being a dick here, I found this experience highly enjoyable.

The Shape of Water - Guillermo del Toro

Pan’s Labyrinth has earned Guillermo a ton of goodwill. And I mean, I caught part of Hellboy 2 on HBO the other night and that is a flick. This may be his next one-for-me, but it’s not Pan’s Cold War. The genius of his earlier masterpiece was that the descent into nightmare of its real life surroundings was mirrored by the descent into nightmare of its fairy tale. This is a pretty simple love story between a mute woman and a fish man, set during the Cold War. It’s a ripe premise and a ripe backdrop that Guillermo weirdly squanders. Any movie that casts as its villain Michael Shannon, the strangest and most intense man alive, and then makes him just another square 1950s Keepin’ up with the Joneses asshole, isn’t going to stand up to Pan’s Labyrinth. This movie is a love story between a mute woman and a fish man. It should be a whole lot weirder, is my point.

Logan - James Mangold

What this movie gets so right is rather than make super hero movies that could conceivably take place in our world, directors should make super hero movies that would take place if they were the real world. Hence the cursing, the ultraviolence, and the theme of consequence which hangs over Logan like a lampshade. Watching Wolverine and Professor X say “fuck” and brutally murder government agents feels like removing the sanitizing goggles that the older movies were shot through and seeing them for the first time as they really are. These are two badly broken people keeping each other alive. It’s also by happy accident a movie for the era of Trump, where a shitty present has the bad guys in the driver’s seat and forces everyone in the margins back into hiding. Patrick Stewart brings warmth and realism to a new version of an old role. This is the best super hero movie ever made.

Darkest Hour - Joe Wright

So Gary Oldman’s definitely going to win the Oscar here, right? It’s fine, he deserves it. I could have used more about who Winston Churchill was, why he was such an eccentric alcoholic, but as a portrait of a great man working through his defining moment this is a great movie. Between this and Lincoln I hope every new biopic is about the defining moment of a great person’s life. So much more interesting than biopics about great people.

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri - Martin McDonagh

At first I thought he was just making fun of American hillbillies. But if this isn’t his best movie, it’s definitely his deepest. Like a darker redneck Batman it’s main character lets a justified anger turn her into kind of a monster, and maybe gets redeemed at the end. It’s funny and entirely surprising. Sam Rockwell should get nominated.

The Big Sick - Michael Showalter

A movie about two saintly parents dealing with not only their comatose daughter, but an overgrown forty-year old child who’s rude to them yet refuses to leave them alone, and never has to face his own pathetic shortcomings because sometimes people are racist to him. Fuck this piece of shit movie.

Thor: Ragnarock - Taikki Waititi

Chris Hemsworth seems cool.

Last Flag Flying - Richard Linklater

Eh. I’m much less of a Linklater partisan than most, but this movie actually wasn’t that well received. It’s not bad, it just kinda meanders, and I actually don’t think Bryan Cranston or Steve Carrell are particularly good actors. It’s anger is righteous though, and Lawrence Fishburn is a titan.

Blade Runner 2049 - Denis Villeneuve

This one slows down a little once the plot kicks in, but holy god does it look good. A worthy heir to the original.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Yorgos Lanthimos

I think I figured it out--this guy likes to set up insane premises, force his characters to speak so flatly that it seems absurd, and then lift the gate and see how the ball rolls down the hill. Every character in this movie acts calm and rational and mostly human in the face of something so bizarre and terrifying as to defy logic. I like The Lobster more because I suspect it had more to say, but this one keeps you on a knife’s edge and forces you to prepare yourself for anything.

Wind River - Taylor Sheridan

This is the third screenplay and first directorial effort from the guy who wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water, two of the best movies of the past few years. This is his worst movie. I suspect the culprit is novice direction. Despite this having a 501(c)4 title card at the end, for the first time I’m not sure what the point is or what he was trying to say. But I hold this guy to a high standard, it’s still pretty damn good. It looks great and the story’s good.

The Foreigner - Martin Campbell

This is a movie about Jackie Chan--still kicking ass in his 60s--avenging his dead daughter by boobytrapping a woods outside of a mansion, and another movie about a radical Irish politician and his cronies agitating for Irish independence, possibly through terrorism. Both of these movies should be awesome, although only one of them is. I don’t want to spoil by giving away the answer, but you can probably guess.

Marshall - Reginald Hudlin

A pretty simple courthouse movie about the future Supreme Court Justice when he was just a lawyer who apparently never spent a day in his life being intimidated by racism or the second smartest guy in the room. Sure, why not?

The Babysitter - McG

The second best horror/comedy of the year. My man McG is still killin’ it.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) - Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach is a guy who likes a lot of stuff I don’t, but he’s enough of an adult here to write adults who don’t seem trapped in the imagination of a guy who hasn’t grown up yet. This is a really entertaining movie. Adam Sandler is very good.

It - Andres Muschietti

I’m a little surprised this didn’t take more flack for being the R-rated Stranger Things. This is also about a group of oddball friends dealing with something weird and scary in that sleepy town called 80′s Nostalgia. It even has one of the same damn actors. But maybe it didn’t take more heat for the simple reason that it’s really good. It might not hold up on repeated viewings the same way Stranger Things really doesn’t, but it’s the best horror/comedy of the year.

mother! - Darren Aronofsky

The more I think about it, the more I like it. I went back and watched some of his other movies, and concluded that Black Swan might be his masterpiece by default, but he’s never made something I really loved. He still hasn’t, but this might be his best movie yet. It’s about Adam and Eve, and it’s about mother earth, and it’s about a self-absorbed artist wrenching everything he can out of his muse. But it seems like Aronofsky is having fun screwing around with all these concepts rather than somehow trying to tie them all together or say something profound about any one of them. Which makes the movie a lot more fun than it’s reputation suggests. In any case, my immediate take walking out of the theater was that it more than anything was about some poor guy who gave up everything he had just to write a damn poem.

Logan Lucky - Steven Soderbergh

This one didn’t do nearly as well as I thought it would, which might have more to do with its distribution model than anything else. Ocean’s 11 for hillbillies couldn’t be more accurate, but it’s not criticism. At least not coming from me. First of all, Ocean’s 11 is like the perfect movie. Second of all, I mostly love redneck culture. Adam Driver has an amazing ability to land roles that shortchange him and make great work out of them anyway. And every real man knows Channing Tatum is a better star than George Clooney.

Dunkirk - Christopher Nolan

Chris Nolan isn’t any good at telling stories, and anyway doesn’t seem to like doing it, so it’s no mystery why his best movie bags the plot completely. Even with it’s time looping gimmick premise this movie takes place entirely in real time, in the present, which is, it turns out, by far the best way to shoot a war movie. It’s hard to imagine something better coming out this year.

Baby Driver - Edgar Wright

The best music video ever made. Pour one out for Kevin Spacey.

Wonder Woman - Patty Jenkins

I resist these pieces of shit like Roy Moore resists girls who can buy their own alcohol, but every year I end up seeing one or two. This is probably the best case scenario for a DC comic book movie in 2017. Gal Gadot is a very pretty lady. This coulda been a good WWI movie.

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer - Joseph Cedar

Richard Gere plays a possibly homeless and mostly benevolent conman who befriends an Israeli bureaucrat and sees his fortune briefly change when said bureaucrat stumbles into the Prime Minister position. I walked into this one completely blind because it was March and I wanted to see a movie. I might be the only person outside of Israel who’s ever seen it. Which is unfortunate, because it’s better than a movie dumped out in March has any right to be. Kinda funny and kinda sad. Kinda satirical and very warm.

Get Out - Jordan Peele

Of course it’s a little overrated at this point. How could it not be? But the first hour of Jordan Peele’s cultural explosion is perfect--a breakdown of every awkward moment between black people and--let’s be honest--all white people. The second half is less deep and a little less fun: it’s when the social commentary flick turns into a genre film. But it’s a damn good genre film. Deservedly on everyone’s top ten list.

A Cure For Wellness - Gore Verbinski

I caught this one of the strength of it’s trailer and thought it was excellent, a creepy kind of horror movie that not enough people saw, about a health clinic that either prolongs or sucks the life out of rich retirees. Kind of a Shutter Island for a crowd less inclined to have its mind fucked.

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