#the most empathetic men i know are star wars fans

[8thmuse]

i think there are so many conservative, right wing teenagers/young adults nowadays bcs noone showed them star wars at a formative age

[endeavornetwork]

Random rant, but I'm just wondering why Zack Snyder's Justice League keeps being referenced in media as shorthand for a toxic male space? I dunno about you, but I wrote hashtags, watched the movie on Max, got my DVD, and stfu. All of the people I follow on Twitter and Tumblr from fandom days have moved on to other things: other fandoms, reviewing films, discussing other media.

A lot of the leaders of the DCEU/ZS fandom were women, like the women who put together and hosted JusticeCon. I don't know the demographics of the fandom, but if there are more men than women or non-binary folks, then it's not like that's unusual. Most geek fandoms have more men, like Star Wars, Marvel, and any major video game. And there are infamous contingents of those fandoms who are misogynistic and racist. But for some reason, the DCEU/ZS fandom has become shorthand for a toxic male fandom.

I remember when the movie first came out, I thought people were finally empathetic. People were saying they were glad Zack got his version out after being mistreated following a family tragedy. They said the movie was pretty good, surprisingly good. They were relieved that the fandom would stop campaigning on Twitter.

But now, it seems like that temporary good will has faded, and people are back to making fun of the fans, and by extension, the movie. Making fun of the movie is, at the least, mean. Considering the circumstances that destroyed it in the first place.

Waiting for a year when no one references the movie or its campaigners. A lot of us moved on. You can too.

[yourwakingnightmares]

Now, I’ve made no secret that I loathe the new Star Wars movies. However, I do want to take a moment to point out all the potential that was there.

Fans of the movie will often say that people who disliked are...

1. Old school fans who wanted to see the OT cast be the main focus

2. Evil white men who hate women and minorities

3 (and the one I hate the most). Taking a movie about ‘space wizards’ too seriously.

However, this discounts the fact that many people WANTED to like the new movies; many who disliked the movies will admit that there was potential, even with the mess that we were given.

Let’s talk about Kylo Ren. I think Adam Driver did an amazing job with a character who had no internal consistency, or logic. I came out of the trilogy WANTING to like Kylo. I wanted to know more about him, despite being (as one YouTuber put it) the definition of tangled up Christmas Tree lights drenched in yogurt and acid.

Despite this inconsistency, despite his steady flipflopping around the screen, he had so much potential -why did Luke sense this potential for evil in him? Were the Knights of Ren the students who went with him? Why is he so intent on living up to Darth Vader? Where did this hero worship come from? Why was Snoke able to latch on to him? How did he even get to Snoke as a presumably young teenager? Why is he so desperate for Rey to love him back?

(Be advised: Spoilers for all three Star Wars sequels below)

One of the moments that evoked a heartfelt emotion in meme, while watching these movies, the only memorable moment I felt an emotion other than disgust or annoyance watching this, was when Kylo tells Rey, “You’re nothing; a nobody. You have no place in this story,” while seemingly choked with emotion. Here is a man, desperate for this woman to come with him. He’s telling her that, sure, maybe she doesn’t have a place in this large, intergalactic war, but she has a place with him. He doesn’t care that she’s a nobody; he wants her as she is. She can be a nobody to everyone else, but to him, she’s important, and she has a place in his story.

I wanted so much more from this! Is Kylo so desperate for love because everyone was always too busy for him as a child -Leia organizing the Republic, Han at her side? Or, if Han and Leia had broken up before he went off to Luke for training, was he stuck in the middle of their fighting?

While he was training with Luke, what was their relationship? Why did the sting of Luke’s betrayal drive him to become a near-sociopathic mass murderer, trying to resurrect the Empire? Did he love his Uncle? Idolize him? Was Luke the only one there for him as a child? Is that why Luke’s betrayal drove him into such a frenzy?

What about Kylo and Chewbacca? In the Rise of Skywalker, we see that he’s captured Chewbacca, yet we’re given no emotion in this scene.Think of the lost potential here!

“Chewie. I’m sorry it came to this; you were always kind to me, and you don’t deserve this.”

Or how about...

“My father was always so busy with you, Han and Chewie, off to save the world; you were more family to him than I ever was.”

Either of those lines would’ve given us so much more background on the two of them, and would’ve been a highly emotional scene for both the old fans, and the new fans.

Why was he so prone to fits of rage whenever something went poorly? Was he afraid of failure? Afraid that Snoke would turn on him, as Luke had? Was he trying to prove that he could be better than Luke, the uncle who betrayed him?

What was his life like, after leaving Luke? I’m fairly positive we can all agree that Snoke wasn’t ‘kind’ or ‘nurturing’ to Kylo; were failures punished with torture, or humiliation? That would explain the outbursts of rage whenever something doesn’t go according to plan. Was he raised to believe that only Snoke could teach him the true secrets of the Force?

After all, we see that Kylo is incredibly powerful in the Force; he’s able to stop blaster bolts in midair, rather than deflect them. He’s able to pull the information he wants directly from someone’s mind. He’s able to hold his own against Rey in Rise of Skywalker, keeping her from pulling the ship back down.

So why was he content to be on an equal footing with Hux for two movies? Why did he never rise up against Snoke, to take over as Supreme Leader? Why did he allow Snoke to humiliate him in front of Hux? Why would someone as powerful as Kylo Ren allow Snoke to belittle him, calling him a child, in front of Hux, his rival? Why wouldn’t he have argued the point, or at least try to defend his actions?

Let’s switch over to Poe. We’re told that Poe is the ‘greatest pilot in the Resistance’ -that is all we have to work with for 2 and 2/3rds of these movies; no other background is given. Eventually we find out that he was a spice runner (the drug du jour in Star Wars), and he ‘betrayed’ his old crew -however, we don’t know how he ended up as a smuggler, or what that ‘betrayal’ actually was.

For example: in the books, we find out that Han -who didn’t have a last name at the time -was simply a child that a group of smugglers picked up somewhere, and raised by Dewlanna -a female Wookie who took care of him, and protected him until her death in his teenage years. This drives him to leave the smuggling crew, and eventually join the Empire (yeah, Han wanted to be a Tie fighter pilot). However, when he sees a storm trooper beating Chewbacca, he kills the storm trooper to save him, telling Chewie later that he owed a life debt to Dewlanna, and since he��d never been able to repay that debt, he’d saved Chewie.

What if we were given something similar with Poe? Perhaps he and Zorii were orphans together on Kijimi; they grew up together, and always had each other’s backs. Eventually, through their street smarts, they and their friends turn themselves into a gang, eventually earning enough money to buy their own ship, and begin smuggling spice. However, perhaps during one of their smuggling runs, they accidentally kill an innocent bystander; perhaps Poe sees one of their crew OD and turn into a mindless vegetable after a bad hit of spice. Perhaps he sees the First Order kill a settlement of villagers while they’re off world. Any number of these things could drive Poe to forsake his old life, and flee to the Resistance. He leaves everything behind, including Zorii, the woman he loves, to try and clear his conscience. 

Any of these would’ve given us a reason to understand Poe better; as it stands, all we know is that he used to run drugs, and now he’s just a super good pilot who defected to the Resistance for some reason, and ended up as a Commander. How did he learn to fly an X-wing? How did he become such a great pilot? How did he become a Commander? 

We see, frequently and repeatedly, that Poe is afraid of nothing; that he’s able to resist interrogation without giving up information, forcing Kylo to eventually use the Force to pull the information from him. We see that’s he brave, and he is -at heart -a good man; the death of the villagers in the opening scene of The Force Awakens shows that he was unwilling to leave this village of innocent people to their fate; that despite being hopelessly outnumbered, outmanned, and outclassed, he stays to try and help them.

Yet we have no idea why he does these things; we have no background information on him, so we’re unable to truly appreciate these actions. Is he just a guy who won’t ever run from a fight? Does he have a personal beef with the First Order? Did he believe that he would be able to buy time for someone to come and save him?

We don’t know, so his actions mean nothing to us. Hell, for all the background we have on this character, he could’ve been a blind idiot, who couldn’t see how many storm troopers there were until it was too late, and his actions were simply him screwing up, and not heroic at all.

And then there’s Finn. Finn, who was the first Storm trooper given a face. The disappointment with his character was immense. How did he end up so happy go lucky, so bumbling, given his supposed brainwashing into something that had one purpose: to kill.

We’re given the impression that the storm trooper Poe kills -the one who leaves the blood on Finn’s helmet -was his friend; how did they become friends? What impact did this other storm trooper have on him? How was he even able to form an emotional connection with someone, if he was raised as a child soldier, and brainwashed to hate and kill?

What, exactly, did this ‘training’ consist of? Was it propaganda, like the Nazi Youth? Was it torturous and cruel, punishing them for any act of kindness, or empathy? A mix of the two?

And how was Finn able to overcome this upbringing? How as he able to remain such an empathetic, protective adult, with a sense of humor on top of it? Could any stormtrooper defect as easily? Was it something from his home world, some small memory of a ‘life before’ that he was able to hold on to? Did something happen during his training to jolt him out of his ‘programming’? 

With this character alone, the possibilities were endless; this was completely uncharted territory. We could have been given any background on this, and it would’ve been brilliant. However, we were given nothing more than it happened.

If we were given answers to even ONE of the numerous questions I’ve asked, even just one per character, it would’ve given us reason to root for these people. Reason to love them, reason to hate them, or a reason to sympathize with them. 

Look at the characters from the OT -we know that Luke was only searching for adventure, to begin with. To save the damsel in distress, the chance to be a hero -something that a bored farm boy from the middle of nowhere couldn’t pass up, particularly when we’re told his friends were off fighting.

Leia was raised by her adoptive father into the Rebellion- Bail Organa was one of the founders of the Rebellion, and one of its most prominent leaders. After the destruction of her home world, we see that it becomes a personal vendetta for her, to make the Empire pay for the deaths of her friends, her family, and her planet.

Han was a smuggler: he was just there to get paid, and accidentally got stuck fighting. He insists he’s only in it for the money, a cold-blooded businessman, until he starts to fall for Leia. Until he realizes that Luke needs him, and will die without his aid.

In the OT, we’re given characters with background, characters with depth. Characters whose actions we understand, because we’re given details about them as characters.

And before someone says, ‘time constraints’... I would like to point out that these three movies combined were seven hours, and fifteen minutes long. Seven hours and change, for zero character development. Hell, we spend 152 minutes (TLJ) watching a slow speed space chase, that -as it turns out -was redundant anyways. 2/3rds of The Last Jedi ended up being completely pointless, as we find out, and Finn and Rose’s quest was pointless. Finn’s mutiny was pointless.

Most of the suggestions I made above could’ve been given with a line or two of dialogue.

Here are a few quick lines that would answer many of these questions. Mind you, I’ve taken minimal time to come up with these; most of them are off the top of my head as I sit here.

Kylo:

“No one has ever understood me; I’ve been alone my entire life.”

“Luke was my hero; my idol. I looked up to him, I wanted to be him, and he betrayed me. Tried to kill me in sleep. He didn’t even have the courage to look me in the eye.”

“My parents didn’t know how to deal with my strength in the Force, so they shipped me off to Luke as soon as they could; they didn’t even try to understand me.”

Snoke: “Careful, Kylo; you know the price of your arrogance. Or do I need to remind you again? Do not think yourself above being taught a lesson about your station.”

Poe:

“Yes, I ran spice, okay? Is that what you wanna hear? I was young, I was stupid, and I was just trying to survive. You wanna criticize me for that, go ahead. But I had nothing, and nobody aside from Zurii, and we did what we had to do.”

While being tortured by the First Order: “You guys think this is torture? My friends used to hit me harder just to wake me up!”

When Holdo tells him to just ‘have hope’: “Look, lady, I grew up in Kijimi; ‘hope’ wasn’t gonna feed us, ‘hope’ wasn’t gonna give us somewhere to sleep with a roof over our heads. Doing nothing gets you killed faster than doing the wrong thing.”

While in the desert of Passaana: “There’s always First Order patrols in outer rim worlds like this; when I was a kid on Kijimi, they’d beat you down just for walking in front of them.” or “There were festivals like this when I was a kid on Kijimi; I used to watch ‘em and wonder what it would be like to actually celebrate it. Don’t suppose we have time now.”

Finn:

“Look, something about me was always off, okay? I don’t know why, but I always just... knew that what we were learning was wrong.”

“I don’t remember much about my parents, but I remember my mom used to tell me stories. About Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and their adventures.”

“There was one man, who trained us. He was... nice, in his own way. He used to try and help us when he could, comfort us after we’d been punished. They made me kill him.”

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid being the killer they wanted me to be; now you’re asking me to become a killer for your side.”

These lines would’ve taken a minute; one minute, perhaps two at most. 12 lines that would’ve given us details about these characters. Even at two minutes, that’s 24 minutes across a series of movies that was 429 minutes long.

Instead, we were given mere hints of the characters these people could’ve been. The smallest glimpses of stories and backgrounds that would’ve made these characters amazing.

That aggravates me worse than the terrible story-telling; there was potential here, and they just squandered it.

[leepace71]

The Political Avenger: Chris Evans Takes on Trump, Tom Brady, Anxiety and Those Retirement Rumors

Ahead of 'Avengers: Endgame,' the progressive Captain America actor and Twitter firebrand says he's ready to retire his Marvel hero for directing gigs, a new Apple show and the fight against the "dumb s—" president: “I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t speak up.”

It's a Friday afternoon in February, and the view from Chris Evans' house in the Hollywood Hills consists mostly of fog. He bought this place for $3.2 million in 2013, back when he was two hit movies into his seven-film stint as Marvel Studios' Captain America; there's a Zen-ish garden inside the front gate, and a stone Buddha sits by the door. Evans banishes his dog, Dodger, to the guest room, shuts off the TV in the family room (CNN on mute), cracks a can of Modelo, and takes a seat on the couch. His arms are insane, as thick as thighs.

Evans has a movie coming out in a few months — an intimate little passion project called Avengers: Endgame (April 26). It's the sequel to last year's Avengers: Infinity War, which raked in $2 billion worldwide and ended with Thanos (Josh Brolin) disintegrating half of Earth's population, including the still-bankable likes of Black Panther and Spider-Man. The moody trailers for Endgame are designed to reveal even less than usual, but it's safe to assume that Captain America rallies Earth's mightiest surviving heroes for a rematch with the mad god who finger-snapped their friends and loved ones into oblivion, which means this will be the first of the four Avengers movies to depict actual avenging.

Evans — who made $15 million for the past two Avengers films, up from $300,000 for his first stint as Captain America — has said he's done playing the character after this. It's been reported that he intends to retire from acting entirely. And yet the announcements of new work keep coming. He's in Rian Johnson's crowded-house murder mystery Knives Out, due in November. He's playing the father of a teenager accused of murder in Apple's forthcoming limited series Defending Jacob. He's in talks to star in Antoine Fuqua's Infinite as a presumably Chris Evans-ish guy who can recall his past lives. It's a crowded dance card for a newly retired 37-year-old actor, and when I bring this up, Evans gets as annoyed as he'll get all afternoon.

"I never said the word 'retire,'" he says. "It's a really obnoxious notion for an actor to say they're going to retire — it's not something you retire from."

All he said — back in 2014, as the end of his obligation to Marvel loomed on the horizon — was that he was hoping to get behind the camera more, and that he'd told one of his CAA agents, "We are turning a corner." Cut to 5,080,000 Google hits for "Chris Evans retiring."

So, for the record: He's not retiring. He'd love to direct more, but the way he talks about it makes it sound more like a five-year plan. He's been looking for a good script, except the problem with good scripts is that they tend to go to great directors, which is not a weight class Evans would put himself in, not yet. He's directed one film, the slight-but-not-embarrassing indie romance Before We Go, which grossed $37,151 in theaters in 2014, or roughly 0.01 percent of what Infinity War made on its opening weekend. When that project is faintly praised in his presence — he also starred in it, opposite Alice Eve — he waves this off, saying it mainly taught him how much he didn't know. "I'm OK with making mistakes," he says, "and I learned a lot from that one."

Once he's done helping Marvel hype Endgame, he's going to take advantage of the security provided by nearly 10 years of huge superhero movies by letting the next phase of his career unfold at a more leisurely pace. "Momentum is a real fallacy, in my opinion," he says. "But it has a really strong hold on a lot of actors' mentalities. You really believe that while the ball's rolling, you gotta keep it rolling. I could be wrong, but to me — I just don't believe in that. I don't think that's real."

I guess we'll find out.

Evans laughs. "My last cover interview."

Here are some things we learned about Chris Evans, from what may or may not be his last cover interview:

He uses the word "pretentious" a lot, usually because he's worried something he's just said sounds pretentious, which it rarely does.

He will talk at length and in detail about himself, and his neuroses, and the conversations he has with himself about his neuroses.

He keeps it closer to the vest about other people. He mentions in passing that Justin Timberlake lives around here — "I think" — without mentioning that Timberlake lives around here with his wife, Jessica Biel, who was once Evans' girlfriend. Nor does he mention his former girlfriend Jenny Slate by name, although he occasionally says things about what it's like to hang out with a bunch of comedians, something he clearly knows because he dated Slate, on and off, for a while. They are off again, per the gossip pages; on Valentine's Day, a few weeks after we meet, Evans will tweet a picture of himself nuzzling Dodger and wish the best to his 10.6 million followers "from this pair of dysfunctional codependents."

When asked how he functions in relationships, he says: "I'm the one who fears being enveloped. I was always a really autonomous guy my whole life. Camping by myself is one of my favorite things. I really like to be with someone who also has their own thing to do as well, you know? If I'm with someone who just kind of adopts my life, that can feel a bit suffocating."

Evans and actress-comedian Jenny Slate, in 2016. At her urging, he read a collection of feminist essays, The Mother of All Questions. "You have to understand that you don’t understand," he says.

When he's not working or camping by himself, you can find Evans camped out on Twitter. He is extremely online in a way that actors who headline ultra-mainstream movie franchises tend not to be; on any given day, you can find @ChrisEvans quoting Idiocracy to mock President Trump's McDonald's buffet for the Clemson Tigers, signal-boosting tweets about gay purges in Chechnya, or addressing Sen. Lindsey Graham as "Smithers."

He worries about doing too much of this sort of thing, about it seeming performative or becoming white noise — Chris Evans, back on his bullshit. He does not worry about saying something online that might inspire MAGA-minded fans to microwave their Captain America action figures. And for what it's worth, he says, "Marvel has never said anything. On the contrary — when I bump into Kevin Feige the first thing out of his mouth is 'Man, I love what you're doing [on Twitter].'"

"I don't see it as trash-talking," says Feige, Marvel's president. "I see it as very astute, very honorable, very noble, very Cap-like. Commentary and questioning. I've said to him, 'You're merging! You and the character are merging!'"

"I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t speak up. Especially for fear of some monetary repercussion or career damage — that just feels really gross to me."

Evans campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016; and while he has not decided on his 2020 candidate, his crusading use of his platform has made him a real-life superhero to a certain segment of the online #Resistance. Days after we talk, he pops up on Capitol Hill to do some bipartisan grip-and-grins with Senate Democrats Brian Schatz, Chris Coons and Jeff Merkley and Republican Lisa Murkowski. In March, he does the same at the House of Representatives. It turns out he's conducting interviews for A Starting Point, a politics website whose mission is "to create informed, responsible and empathetic citizens." He's a co-founder, along with the actor Mark Kassen and entrepreneur Joe Kiani; the launch date has yet to be announced.

While he's only visiting Congress for now, everyone jokes about him getting a job there someday. There's familial precedent; his uncle is former Massachusetts Representative Mike Capuano (who lost a hard-fought race to Ayanna Pressley, a progressive city councilwoman, in September). For now, Evans feels obligated to do what he can, even if it turns his social media mentions into a garbage fire.

"You don't want to alienate half your audience," says Evans. "But I'd be disappointed in myself if I didn't speak up. Especially for fear of some monetary repercussion or career damage — that just feels really gross to me."

His willingness to call bullshit on anyone abetting the disintegration of our republic extends to his home state's favorite sons. When we talk, Tom Brady is two days away from leading the New England Patriots to a sixth Super Bowl win; when I ask if the chance to play Brady in a biopic would bring him out of non-retirement retirement, he looks grim.

"I don't know," he says. "I really hope he's not a Trump supporter. I'm just hoping he's one of those guys that maybe supported him and now regrets it. Maybe he thought it was going to be different — and even that bothers me — but maybe there's a chance now he just thinks Trump's an absolute dumb shit, which he is. If he doesn't, if he's still on that Trump train, I might have to cut ties. It's really tough."

"I think maybe a couple of years ago," he continues, "I might have tried to pull some, like, mental gymnastics to compartmentalize, but I don't know if I can anymore. So I'm just hoping he's woken up."

Evans has a platform and he's using it. But like a lot of straight white men seeking to consciously and conscientiously navigate a tumultuous moment in the history of straight white male-dom, he's learned that shutting up is important, too. At Slate's urging, he read Rebecca Solnit's The Mother of All Questions, a collection of essays about the insidious side effects of patriarchy, and took away a great deal. "You have to understand that you don't understand," he says. It's not the most action-heroish way to look at things — but that may be the secret of his appeal as a movie star.

"At the root of it, he has true humility," says Robert Downey Jr., who's played Tony Stark against Evans five times. "I think it's the reason he was able to kind of come to the front and be our team leader in the Avengers. I think a lot of his theater experience helped, too. Because it was like, 'OK, I'm going to dress up, I'm going to go out, and I'm going to tell the truth.' It's very kind of old-school Spencer Tracy. Although I guarantee you Spencer Tracy never would've put on that getup."

Unsurprisingly, Evans blows off discussion of his own goodness. "The characters I play do a lot of that heavy lifting. If people knew me — I'm just an asshole."

He seems a little uncomfortable. I change the subject by asking him to tell me what happens at the end of Avengers: Endgame. Evans laughs. "Yeah," he says. "I wish I could. Uh, it's — I mean — it's a good one. It's a real good one. I saw, like, the first hour of it."

So you watched it up to the point where Cap dies?

"Right, exactly," Evans says. "After I die by Tony's hand, I just said, You know what? I can't watch this."

I should make it clear that this is a joke, even if it feels like the kind of joke that could turn out to be true. "I can't believe they even cut together a trailer," he says, "because so much of it is a visual spoiler. You'll see. A lot of the characters have"—

He stops, covering his mouth.

"Probably shouldn't have even said that," he says.

READ REST HERE...

[eremji]

Thoughts on Infinity War, and Thanos' Motivation

Disclaimer: I'm not a Marvel expert. Some of my information on comic plots was collected from wikis and secondary articles, due to a lack of access to a primary source or the simple inaccuracy of my own memory. I also mostly enjoyed Infinity War, and any criticism herein should not be taken as decrying the whole.

Spoilers behind the cut. Please close your eyes and scroll super fast, block tags, duck and cover, etc. if you’re on mobile, because, seriously, spoilers.

An extremely simplified version of movie production:

From a production standpoint, Iron Man was a huge risk for the studios fronting the money for it. After critical and box office flops from 90s Batman films and other various superhero action flicks, studios typically found comic book movies to underperform in comparison to budgetary requirements for good visuals, making them unattractive. Marvel has taken a large step away from making comic book movies, to making comic book adaptations, because what works on the page doesn’t work in a moving picture.

Marvel Studios’ cinematic success has almost nothing to do with how compelling the source material is – because some of Marvel’s library is pretty much slush pile garbage. This was before your average artist or consumer realized you can get pretty literary while still having cool pictures on a page. They’re valuable because they propelled the comic industry to widespread success, but the source is best examined with a critical eye towards tone deaf and anachronistic viewpoints on race, sexuality, gender, and pretty much everything else. Marvel Studios has done a fairly consistent job of divorcing the cinematic canon from the original medium’s baggage, to which I attribute a large portion of the films’ success in comparison to very lukewarm iterations of DC or X-Men.

As media consumers, we’re accustomed to having a finished product to hold and analyze. When considering story, in terms of plotting and pacing, I personally believe it’s most helpful to compare the scope of the MCU production to be similar to that of a television show, rather than a traditional movie or movie series. It may be startling to know that even very successful television shows, like Breaking Bad or Stranger Things, often don’t even have all the episodes completely written out prior to beginning filming of a season.

Marvel Studios’ movies have been in production for ten years, with many, many different hands in the pot, and earlier scripts don’t always set up the best planting and payoff of character or plot elements later in the continuity. (For visual learners, Lindsay Ellis has a very layman-friendly example using clips from Mad Max: Fury Road.)

You can see where this might start to cause some consistency issues.

Crossover event comics and the necessary sacrifice of emotional development:

For anyone walking in to expecting Avengers: Infinity War to have a lot of character development, I’m very sorry for your loss.

There was never going to be a grand emotional reunion for Steve and Bucky, and there was never going to be whole hours dedicated to bonding and witty bickering and new friendships that weren’t absolutely vital to the plot. That we got things like the Steve-and-Bucky hug, the jealous Star-Lord vs. Thor moments, and Steve introducing himself politely to Groot were for the benefit of the audience more than advancing the plot, which is a huge victory in terms of crushing as much as possible into a theatrical cut.

A film production has a finite amount of screen time to allocate before a movie becomes bloated. When people joke about Infinity War being the most ambitious crossover event, I don’t think some of them realize how on the mark that is from a production standpoint. Hard decisions have to be made between what isn’t vital to advancing plot in a compelling way and what was retained to meet audience expectations. Infinity War often felt like it tried to recapture that Joss Whedon-ish sassy-but-kinda-flat comedy from the first Avengers, and that meant punchlines for jokes sometimes land at emotionally inappropriate times because characters just don’t have cinematic space for witty banter between shooting aliens and losing everyone they ever cared about.

There’s a difference in author-audience expectations of what’s important in these team-up movies, and also gaps between fans actively participating in fandom because they love the characters and casual moviegoers looking for a blockbuster. It all comes down to how much each party in the creative transaction is willing to settle for. Traditionally, Marvel has set up the character-driven plots and subplots in individual comics with occasional crossover cameos for a few issues when another character or baddie is relevant to the plot. The large crossover events, like Civil War, Contest of Champions, or Infinity are almost always plot-heavy and character-light.

This is so much easier in comic book format, where multiple series can be coordinated in regular, paced releases, and different comic issues may happen parallel or directly before/after the event crossovers. Movies take a significantly larger amount of time to produce, through pre-production, filming, post-production, marketing, and distribution.

A brief (I’m serious, they’ve been making comics since the 1939) explication of source material:

One of the largest disconnects for me, as a fan of both the comics and the movies, was the change in Thanos’ motivation, but not his mission. For those who aren't aware of the origins of his character, he essentially wants to murder people to impress a girl – Mistress Death, to be specific. He wants to kill half of all life in the universe so that he can be her equal and win her affection. 

Dorkly did a pretty solid breakdown of some of Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet story and the innate misogynistic slant of his character, including comic panels from the original source material, that paints comic!Thanos an internet Nice Guy™. (Feel free to skim the article; it's a bit slow to get to the point.) Perusing the comic panels, you can see Thanos is hella into negging and is spiteful when Mistress Death shows interest in another dude (spoilers: it’s Deadpool). He clearly believes love is possession, and if he can’t have what he wants, then, good golly, no one can.

He’s also really off the rails – dubbed the Mad Titan even before his objectification mega crush on a badass corpse with a wicked bod – and is personally responsible for destroying Titan. He’s not a villain that believes he’s the hero, and this shift away from his motivation being dangerous-and-horrible to dangerous-and-misguided casts the first shadow on the premise.

My (very personal) opinion on the execution:

MCU essentially played keep away with some of the more supernatural elements of the source material, at least until introducing Dr. Strange. In doing so they had to construct Thanos’ motivation for a comic-book-inspired task out of whole cloth. There is no Mistress Death. Secondary characters that were discrete entities are often pulling double duty*.

(*Or triple. See also: Bucky Barnes, who is wearing the backstory of Captain America's gay best friend Arnie Roth and now White Wolf. If you were previously unaware of this factoid, please enjoy the irony that Marvel’s biggest pro-American propaganda piece had an openly gay best friend circa early 80s but Civil War ham-fistedly had to work in that awkward-as-fuck smooch between Steve and Peggy Carter’s hot young romantic surrogate niece.)

So, okay, they have to reinvent Thanos, who we've only seen in a handful of post-credit scenes and vicariously learned, through Loki in the first Avengers movie and then Gamora in Guardians, is a conqueror and also really Bad News™.

I buy everything so far. And why not? Black Panther made me love Killmonger and his rage, and the parallels to contemporary issues made him fairly empathetic without highlighting that his perspective was necessarily the ‘correct’ one. Similarly, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s villain, Vulture, was believable in the sort of suffering everyman-turned-desperate way, highlighting the fallout of the Space Invaders vs. Avengers destruction without suggesting the audience should root for Vulture.

In general, I am on board for these movies going straight for the throat on the big baddies of the comic universe because movie production is lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming. Dear Marvel Studios, Give me Avengers vs. Dr. Doom. Love, Me.

A villain can be built up over the course of a single movie (or two). Armed with this optimism, and heartened by recent Marvel Studios successes in characterization, I walked into Infinity War expecting as much gratuitous violence, universe-cleansing genocide, and genuine fear of Thanos as I could possibly expect from something Disney-adjacent.

I knew people were going to die. Let me say – there was no way to spoil this for me. The Infinity Gauntlet comic series starts with half the universe dying. I expected there to be ‘casualties’ and even though the Russo bros said that this wasn’t two parts of the same movie, it’s certainly serial. At minimum, I was expecting Thanos bent on conquering the cosmos, worshiping at the altar of death in the abstract, if not groveling for an inevitable-cosmic-force-turned unattainable woman.

And yet. And yet.

We got the purple version of the Kool-Aid man with some seriously unaddressed parent-child issues (mirrored in Tony Stark’s loss of Peter Parker) and a wholly unimaginative motivation. I won’t go too far much into the movie’s alarming efforts at framing Thanos as a sympathetic character despite his genocidal and horribly abusive tendencies, because I am A) not an expert at identifying film technique and B) the push for Thanos to be an empathetic villain has been analyzed elsewhere.

Phenomenal, limitless cosmic power and all you want to do is break shit? For all the immaturity of it, Thanos’ comic book motivation was more believable.

To those arguing that the his motivations in the movie are predicated off of him being the Mad Titan and therefore not rooted in logic: The film did not explicitly plant the idea – except in the way that we know genocide is bad due to an innate sense of morality – that he was unhinged and power-mad, nor did they really give the audience any payoff.

Instead, we get, ‘I don’t really want to do this, but I must.’

There was a point where I started wondering why the hell he wasn’t just being steadily roasted by the Avengers for not receiving some sort of basic education in the evils of wealth disparity and resource distribution.

As an audience member, was I meant to believe this incredibly powerful entity at the center of a massive fleet, accompanied by a group of talented and sycophantic followers, couldn’t think of a better way to bring ‘balance’ to the universe?

Perhaps Thanos’ justification is simply the conceit of the way the universe operates, required to propel a plot forward. However, this is also poorly explained. There are many unanswered questions: Why is it a given that killing half the universe will create balance? What does balance look like? Is this state permanent or is it a routine, necessary evil in order to stop entropy? Is balance a socioeconomic state, or does it have some greater cosmological significance? We know that Titan fell after rejecting Thanos’ extreme solution, but would the population have actually endured and flourished if his plan had been carried out?

For a movie that did so well at handling a cast so phenomenally large as the one involved in its production, Infinity War really didn’t go in very hard on selling Thanos. I would have been perfectly happy if Marvel Studios had taken the risk to lean in hard on making the movie Thanos-centric, given Thanos even more screen time to develop his character, motives, and the rules of the universe – and then make Avengers 4 about, you know, the actual avenging.

Parting notes:

What are we left with?

Infinity War gifted us with some badass action clips, a fairly jarring death performance by Tom Holland, Cheerful Goatherd Bucky Barnes, and emotionally traumatizing bubbles. It never really sells the conundrum it sets up via Thanos. You'll never hear me insist a peice of art or entertainment is required to carry some sort of social commentary or moral message, but I feel like this could have been, tonally, a vastly different film had it considered the core of Thanos' motivations the same way it considered Vulture's or Killmonger's.

Also, where the hell is Adam Warlock (set up at the end of GotG: Vol. 2; revisit planting and payoff) to shit talk Thanos’ lack of villainous veracity when we need him?

[old1ddude]

Fame’s Burning Flame

Harry Styles has always been a very sensitive sort - a kind, empathetic soul.  Apparently, he was born with this irresistible magnetism and charm.  It seems that his life goal has always been to entertain and make people happy.  At 16-17 he was, for the most part, an open book, emotionally.  He didn’t really have a shell - that self defense most of us develop before our teen years.  While emotionally open, he always kept his private business to himself - never really divulging any important facts about himself, his friends, or family (that may be one thing that saved him.)  All of these factors helped him to become a huge star - it was his destiny - his life ambition and dream - and it nearly destroyed him.

I was struck by Harry’s choice of words in his album documentary:   “It felt like a little secret. It’s fun to feel like no one knows where you are. It made such a difference, from being in a busy city.” (BTA 4:46) “I just, I really enjoy being private more. Starting the way that everything started. I get to kinda claw a little bit of that back. I don’t feel like people know everything about me, now. And there was definitely a time where I felt like people knew everything about me and I realized I didn’t like that.” (BTA 7:43) "I kind of also wanted to let the work do the talking a little bit. I mean, definitely, part of my ego wanted to see if I could write something that people liked without knowing everything about me.” (BTA 8:17)  (Special thanks to  @cuethetommo for providing these quotes and a sounding board.)

Harry had never been one to complain, but those who know him well could probably tell you the invasion of privacy tortured him.  If I’m right in my interpretation of Only Angel (that the angel, the “bad girl” and the singer are all pieces of Harry) crawling across the floor and breaking a finger from knocking fits the “claw a little bit of that back” image.  (Only Angel post here)  Harry has been fighting a war to keep hold of himself, both internally and externally.

The first time I saw the video of Harry crying on Twit-cam, I was amazed at his inner strength.  (He had run out of breath during What Makes You Beautiful and Googled, “Harry shit,” because he was so disappointed in himself.)    Crying over internet hate, on a public forum, may not be considered “manly” but hiding is always easier for fragile egos.  I believe this was Harry’s first epiphany on the true nature of fame - especially the type of fame he was headed for.  In the early days, all his band-mates talked about how sensitive he was.  I believe it was Niall who just recently said Harry is the one most likely to cry (then emphasized that real men are not afraid to cry - good for you Niall.)  Unlike many sensitive people, Harry did not hide behind a shell, or false front.  He had the inner resolve and character to be himself, but the burning heat of fame would force him to hide, soon enough.

The iron closet, along with Swifty for him and Eleanor for Louis was the beginning of the end for open Harry.  Harry (and Louis) were told they couldn’t be themselves any more.  What they were wasn’t “good enough” to make it in the boy-band business.  One Direction was a phenomenal success.  The boys were having a great time on stage, but the work load was highly burdensome.  Everything they did was under a microscope - the fans on one side, 1DHQ on the other.  They were all under enormous stress and pressure.  Front-man Harry was very often on duty (either being very dangerously mobbed by fans, or getting papped with his latest “love interest”) when the other boys had a much too short break.  All the boys did their best to shield sensitive Harry during interviews, etc, but it was his burden to carry.  Too often, the fans only wanted to devour him as if he were a piece of cake.  They would happily take, take, take until there was nothing left of him save a hollow, albeit pretty, shell.  (No wonder the lads so appreciate fans who only want to nurture and support them.)  Thanks to 1DHQ, the Harry they “loved” was little more than a pack of lies.  Take a very sensitive, gay, emotionally open, people pleasing, teenage boy.  Tell him that who he is isn’t good enough.  Hide his true form - wrap him up in a bunch of heterosexual bacon (strongly signaling his female fan base that he wants to have sex with them) and dangle him in front of a huge, starving wolf pack.  What you have is a perfect recipe to create a self-loathing, hollow, messy, emotionally stunted, self absorbed, distant, cynical, disillusioned jerk. 

Harry began to build a thick shell around his heart and emotions.  He compartmentalized his professional life from who he really was inside.  I believe he also began to have a battle within himself that remains to this day.  Harry loves to entertain - there is no drug capable of replacing the high he gets on stage.  In order to be on stage, however, he has to participate in fame and celebrity life - a life that was eating away his very soul.  He never really changed.  He never gave up his soul and there are several reasons why he was able to survive the ordeal as a pretty well adjusted person:

Inner strength, resolve, character and a powerful sense of self.

A loving, nurturing, supportive partner in Louis, his “Sweet Creature.”

He always kept a healthy sense of humor - ability to poke fun at himself - not taking himself too seriously.  (This applies to the other lads too.)

He always kept his personal life, business, and that of his loved ones, private - even when he was still very open, emotionally.

Supportive band-mates (brothers really) who understood exactly what he was going though.  I well remember Liam saying he would be. “Mr. Harry Styles” for a day to give him a break.

Niall, Liam, Louis and Harry all remained dedicated to each other.  They maintained a strong, unified purpose and identity, even after Zayn left.  They were working for the good of their brothers, not only themselves.

Harry poured much of his angst into his art and songwriting - he had a creative outlet to help him process everything.  Harry needs this in particular, because mere words fail him for getting to the very heart of a matter.  “Sometimes it’s easier to say something to an instrument.”

Harry has written a number of songs that are specifically about his negative experience with fame.  While many of his songs make allusions to fame, I think those listed below are quite pointed:

Don’t Let Me Go  (The demo is so early, his voice hadn’t even fully matured yet.)

Two Ghosts  (More grown up and better written version of Don’t Let Me Go.)

Stockholm Syndrome (The love interest is fame - love/hate, trapped, etc.)

Only Angel  (Crawling and clawing to get back to himself - to accept himself.)

Kiwi  (I just know the seductress is a metaphor for fame and Simon Cowell.)

Ever Since New York  (Empty, false, facades, etc.)

Woman  (Forced to watch his lover out with the beard - jealousy.) 

Of course I miss Harry’s wit on Twitter, his beautiful photography on Instagram - but I very much appreciate why he’s trying to have a much different experience with fame this time around.  He’s still in the closet (and he is welcome to stay there as long as he and Louis want or need to.)  He’d rather error on the side of revealing too little than too much right now.  Many of his music idols have cultivated mystery and it has helped them to maintain healthy ownership of their personal lives.  As far as connecting to fans:  I’ve never felt a stronger connection to him.  90% of his documentary is Harry as I’ve always seen and known him.  Just watching him perform is intimate and captivating - he pours himself out, body and soul.  If the first thing I ever knew of Harry Styles was watching him perform Two Ghosts on Corden - I would be hooked.  Oh yeah, that connected - hard.  

Whatever Harry needs to do, in order to stay true to himself (and avoid becoming a raging, messy, jerk) while he navigates a career in the public eye is okay with me.

[briangroth27]

You’re a Wonder, Wonder Woman!

I was skeptical. I've never been a huge Wonder Woman fan; I didn't dislike the character, but she never really clicked with me. The recent DC films haven’t thrilled me either: I left Man of Steel without feeling hopeful or inspired; prerequisites for Superman stories. I didn't like Batman V Superman. Suicide Squad was fun, but a mess. Then the Wonder Woman trailers appeared and my interest was piqued. I wanted it to be good, but that was cautious optimism. Then reviews came out, the great word of mouth swept me up in the hype, and I couldn't wait to see it! Still, I’m sure my excitement didn’t compare to that of someone who'd grown up loving Wonder Woman and knew all about her; who’s inspired and empowered by her existence. Outside Lynda Carter's show, Justice League/Justice League Unlimited, and some animated movies, Wonder Woman’s had considerably fewer appearances than heroes like Batman and Spider-man, so I’d imagine this is a massive deal for her fans. With the unreasonable pressure of being the bar by which Hollywood will measure the bankability of not only female-led action and superhero films, but female stars and directors, this movie not only had to please the fans who’d waited so long, but it had to be a critically loved financial hit. Fortunately it’s all those things and more: Wonder Woman is outstanding! Go see this now!

Gal Gadot is fantastic, taking Diana (the best part of BvS) back to the past to show us who she is and how she came to be. Her Diana is charming, hopeful, new to Man's World but wise, empathetic but fully willing to silence those who'd hurt others, and aware of the great responsibility the Amazons have to the world, but still able to revel in her power. That last point is something we absolutely need to see more of in female superheroes: too often, the only women having fun with their abilities are the villains and "bad girls." It's great to see Diana grinning at her ability to do things like scale a wall with her bare hands; who wouldn't be overjoyed to accomplish these feats? We see a lot of sides to Diana as she goes from eager Wonder Tot (Lilly Aspell) to headstrong Wonder Girl (Emily Carey) to facing the horrors of Man's World during the First World War, and Gadot does it perfectly (the younger two actresses are great as well). Diana’s transition from thinking it’s cool to fight to witnessing the reality of war in trenches and gassed towns is extremely well-conveyed. Even so, Diana’s the inspirational, hopeful hero I’ve been wanting from the DCEU. Gadot also brings a wonderful sense of exuberant fascination with the perks of Man’s World, like the first baby she’s ever seen and her very first ice cream cone. Gadot, Chris Pine (Steve Trevor), and Lucy Davis (Etta Candy) have a great sense for screwball comedy as they play male and female social mores of the period for laughs, giving the characters a classic feel. Others have compared Gadot’s Diana to Christopher Reeve’s Superman and I’d say that’s dead-on: in much the same way Reeve brought Clark Kent and Superman to life, Gadot is Wonder Woman.

Gadot is backed up behind the camera by Patty Jenkins, who directs this beautifully. The action is clean and crisp; even periodic slow-motion fight highlights, which I'm generally not a fan of, are woven in nicely. Her pacing is great, taking time to breathe in each environment and to touch on each character without sacrificing the story’s momentum. Most importantly, Gadot is never exploited by the camera; if you want to see what a movie shot without the male gaze looks like, see this. Jenkins gets a great balance of humor and stakes from all of her actors and instills a Richard Donner Superman quality in Diana and Steve's relationship that feels timeless. I would've thought this and the period setting would feel at odds with the bombastic Zack Snyder-styled fights in the climax, but Jenkins blended the styles really well. The climax does look a little too CGI—it was noticeable but not enough to take me out of the movie—but it was still fantastic. There were two minor moments where the editing confused me for a second; not enough to create a plot hole, but more like the scene had been trimmed and I had to connect the dots about a minor sequence of events. Again, nothing egregious. There’s no reason Jenkins shouldn’t be getting offers to direct all the action movies now! I’d love to see her take on Man of Steel 2 (along with many more Wonder Woman sequels, of course!).

Chris Pine was charming and funny as secret agent Steve Trevor. I loved how constantly thrown by Diana he was and I'm glad he wasn't played or written as a cliché suave "ladies man" spy. He wasn’t made a fool by Diana either; the film knows how to make her great without making him incompetent. In fact, Pine and Gadot built one of the best-developed romances in comic book films with their fantastic chemistry. When they disagreed, it felt natural and relevant to the movie’s themes. Etta Candy was pure, undiluted fun and I'd love to see further adventures between her and Diana. Steve's mercenary friends brought some good texture and diversity to the film as well. My favorite was Sameer (Said Taghmaoui), who provided some great comic relief and truths about life plans. I also liked the Chief (Eugene Brave Rock), a Native American, especially when he drew a connection between the Germans and Americans for Diana, showing her all sides have evil in their past. Ewen Bremner’s Charlie, a sniper who can’t shoot, was interesting as a guy who wanted to be a hero but simply couldn’t. As author Zack Stenz pointed out on Twitter, all of these men (and Steve) kept fighting the good fight in the face of a world that had damaged them. I like that message a lot.

Connie Neilson's Hippolyta was a smart, idealistic queen of the Amazons and her idealism coming partially out of fear for her daughter's safety was an interesting, understandable twist. That's a cool facet to her role as wise ruler, and a testament to Neilson’s ability that she never came off as selfish for prizing Diana above everyone else. Robin Wright's Antiope was a pragmatic counterpoint to her queen: live in peace, but train (and train Diana) for war in case it happens. I enjoyed her training sessions with Diana and wish we’d seen more of how she and Hippolyta interacted outside of this issue. Ann Wolfe’s Artemis fell between Hippolyta and Antiope’s outlooks, backing up Diana’s assertion that they should hear Steve out, and I hope we see more of her in the sequel (in the comics, she too ventured to Man’s World and even took over as Wonder Woman; I wonder if she will at least visit her sister on screen). When war came to Themyscira's shores, the Amazons were awesome, effortlessly badass fighters! I’m sure their natural athleticism comes from the cool idea of using actual female athletes from all over the world to play the Amazons. I hope we get to see more of them in future installments!

Dr. Maru/Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya) was a great, creepy villain; another character I wish we'd seen more of. I didn't need to know why she was obsessed with poison or anything, but I wanted to know what other mayhem she could cause with her variety of chemicals. She felt like she was ripped directly from the early pulp comics and that was awesome! Danny Houston's villainous German General Ludendorf was as imposing as he needed to be to drive the film’s villainy. He and Maru get an incredible, unexpected moment of mustache-twirling glee involving an ineffective gas mask that I wish we'd see more of from onscreen villains.

World War 1 proved to be a great setting. It was refreshing to visit a time often overlooked in movies and superhero stories, usually in favor of World War II. That the war was compounded and exacerbated over previous treaties between nations isn't pointed out in the film, but I think that's an interesting indication of just how inhumane man can become over something as innocuous as an alliance. In hindsight, it also strengthens Ares’ theory. WW1's trench warfare also plays an important role, displayed in the instantly iconic "No Man's Land" sequence (which was insanely almost cut!). Someone online said it looked like she was fighting war itself, and that’s the most perfect expression of that sequence I can imagine. Diana rising out of the trenches and walking into battle to make her debut as Wonder Woman was astounding!

I loved the use of color in the movie, something I've not been a fan of in the washed-out Man of Steel and Batman V Superman. Themyscira was bright and vibrant, and those colors carry over to the dreary, smog-choked London and the haze-filled trenches via Diana's Wonder Woman armor. While her suit isn’t as bright as Lynda Carter’s was, it's as though she literally brings color and life into Man's World. The score was good and felt period-appropriate. I had a giant smile on my face whenever Diana's awesome theme from BvS came on; if that doesn't make you pump your fist and cheer for Diana, I don't know what music would. Well, maybe the Lynda Carter one; it's a shame they didn't at least reference that here. I wish they’d found a way for someone to say something like "all the world is waiting for you."

I hope Wonder Woman opens real-life doors for more female directors and convinces studios that women can headline action films. A $100+ million opening weekend and one of the smallest second-week drops in superhero movie history should shatter the lame excuse that female superheroes make bad leads, and the 52% female audiences should prove that superheroes aren’t just a guys’ hobby: they’re for everyone. Since the population of the country is roughly 51% female and 49% male, that audience stat would seem to indicate the film is resonating evenly across the board. I hope Captain Marvel (along with Batgirl, Gotham City Sirens, and Sony’s Silver Sable and Black Cat film) continue this trend, but just four DC/Marvel female-led movies in the next several years isn’t enough. Marvel Studios has no excuse not to finally give the already Box Office-proven Scarlett Johanssen a Black Widow movie. They should cast Gina Torres as She-Hulk and make the solo movies they apparently can’t with Hulk. Fox should capitalize on their female X-men. Can Sony still get Emma Stone to do an alternate universe Spider-Gwen?? It’s fitting Wonder Woman proved there’s an audience for female superheroes, given she was the first, but she shouldn’t be the last and it should’ve happened much sooner.

I’m not a skeptic anymore and this movie’s had me hunting down Wonder Woman comics for the past two weeks. For me, Wonder Woman is the best DC movie since Batman. That, Richard Donner’s Superman, and this are their best live-action films and WW is certainly one of the finest superhero films ever! I hope it meant as much to Diana’s fans and those she inspires. It’s absolutely worth seeing in theaters!

  Full Spoilers...

I was worried with the way the creators had described Diana as a "retired hero" preceding BvS that she'd end this movie victorious but hopeless. I was very happy that didn't happen and instead, she ended the flashbacks knowing that love is the way to save the world. This was the hope Man of Steel left me wanting and I'm glad Diana finally brought it to the DC films. I can't believe a Diana who's realized this was simply inactive for all those decades (there's no way she sat out World War II), so I have to assume she (with Etta as her handler?) has been a secret hero ever since. I'd love to see those stories!

Like Lois Lane for Superman, I liked that Steve showed Diana humanity's potential, even though he was also connected to our worst impulses via the American treatment of Native Americans. I wish we could get another period film to see more of Gadot and Pine together; his death was sad and I'm sorry he won't be in future sequels.

The movie isn’t explicit about it, but I read Steve’s arrival through the barrier to Themyscira as a direct result of Diana’s first experience with her godkiller potential. I think that energy blast weakened the barrier; otherwise, how could Steve be the first person to ever stumble onto the island? I like that Diana’s first taste of her true power literally opens a larger world for her, bringing her into contact with all the good and evil of Man’s World.

Though Antiope’s death is somewhat cliche in the “dead mentor” sense, I liked that Diana wasn’t driven to action simply because she’d lost someone. She always wanted to go help and Antiope’s death didn’t change or inspire that part of her. If anything, it was the first wake-up call to how serious battle actually was.

I thought it was a little random that Diana was unable to return to Paradise Island, though maybe Hippolyta's "If you go, you may never return" was supposed to mean "you might die." If that wasn't my misunderstanding, then Diana trying to reconnect with her people and possibly lead them into the world could be a cool premise for a sequel.

I really liked that Ares wasn't who he seemed to be, or even the second-most obvious option (I thought he was Dr. Poison for most of the movie). Making him an unassuming good guy (David Thewlis) was a great twist, foreshadowed in hindsight by Diana's admonishment of the generals who'd hide in their offices. Plus, as I saw pointed out elsewhere, he's totally right about the armistice leading to worse horrors in World War II. I think that's a neat corruption of the idea of peace, which is a nice counterpoint to the seeming contradiction of waging war to establish peace. I enjoyed Ares' belief that war brings out the "best" in man; that it's the truest expression of our nature. What a great counterpoint to Diana's belief in our inner goodness, and a perfect way to stage their final battle as an argument! I do wish he hadn’t worn his comic book armor; that’s what made the climax look a little too CGI.

I thought it was interesting that the movie essentially boiled the Greek pantheon down to analogues for the Christian God (Zeus) and Devil (Ares), right down to Ares giving humanity knowledge of evil rather than making them do anything. Diana's fatherless birth also makes her a Greek spin on Jesus (kudos for keeping the classic claymation origin!). I think it would've been better if Aphrodite had granted Diana life instead of Zeus to increase the girl power and to go along with the “love is the way to save the world” idea (Aphrodite also brought Diana to life in the original version of the story). Ultimately, however, this revision didn't bother me as anything more than a missed opportunity. As much texture from the pantheon was lost to backstory (unnecessarily; there's no reason they couldn't have just been locked out from this realm), it's a cool way to twist the afterlife of the DCEU. Will they follow the New 52 comics to introduce Darkseid and Co. as rising "New Gods" in Justice League?

I hope they continue to unpack Diana's mythological heritage in the sequel. The gods are unfortunately gone, but there are a ton of other beings out there. Let's see classic Wonder Woman villains like Circe, Cheetah, and even Giganta! Doctor Poison would be fun to bring back too. And of course, Diana’s got to get her invisible plane!

Whatever the sequel brings, I can’t wait to see it!

[cryptoriawebb]

War for the Planet of the Apes: review

*Captain Kirk voice* “CAEEEEEEEEEEEESERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”

There was a lot I loved about this movie. A lot. That isn’t something I say so easily. Especially with trilogies. Over the last couple of years, sequels and “threequels” as they say haven’t have been all over the movie map. Some have leapt levels above their predecessors, while others miss the mark by such length it’s all you can do not to cringe. Still, some hang squarely in the middle, neither good or bad, memorable or forgettable. This is especially true for reboot films: X-men, Star Trek and now Star Wars come to mind. Ironically, all three serve both as reboot-prequels to three iconic franchises. You can argue til the cows come home which of these is more successful (much less which are better in terms of content and characters) and maybe one day I’ll write up my own thoughts: I think it’s pretty obvious who the winner is.

I mean, of course, Planet of the Apes (like I said, one day I’ll do a comparison; that day is not today.) I don’t know how these movies manage to maintain their ongoing success…I mean, I do, but it’s so rare to see in Hollywood these days.  So many movies rely on the same, tired plots, conflict and cardboard character chemistry. More often than not I find myself walking into a sequel on eggshells: will it be good? Will it maintain its predecessor’s pace? Will it exceed my expectations? Will I remain engaged and attached to these characters? This movie checks off every box. Well…most of the boxes, but even so, this is the one trilogy I trust to deliver the same excitement promised in its trailers. I’m honestly awed by that, even all these years later. So many of their predecessors got it wrong: the original sequels, Burton’s remake…how, I wonder, how have they managed to get it right after so long?

(I ask because I’ve lost a lot of faith in Hollywood, not because I don’t understand creative mechanic.)

Right, staying on track—this is about War, not the franchise overall.

I absolutely adored the opening text sequence. Paired with the ambience, it was so subtle and eerie and immediately sucked you into the mood. The lingering words (rise, dawn and war) didn’t feel corny or excessively enforced, either. Actually, the summaries themselves remained on screen long enough to read through without rushing—I would know, I rushed through the last segment fearing it would fade before I finished. It didn’t, so shout out to the editor.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of opening a movie with battle sequences but it works very well for this setting and storyline, especially given how the last one ended. It didn’t last too long either. In my opinion, fight scenes and battle sequences should be like cinnamon to French toast: included to enhance the flavor without overpowering it.  I will say it took me a little while to figure out why there were apes fighting on the human side but that’s probably because I haven’t seen the previous film in some time. I really liked the whole ‘donkey’ concept, too…although ‘like’ isn’t the right word. Sad, maybe, to see how these traitors chose to survive and knowing despite what they’ve been told they likely won’t be spared.

That’s an odd thing about this movie: yes there were a few standard Hollywood plots but the way they were presented prevented them from feeling stale. To watch Caesar struggle with the death of his wife and son, this empathic leader who never wanted war…it’s so different from watching, say, Magneto give in to heartache, or Logan, or Spock in the new Star Trek films. Caesar carries himself with a different weariness, one that isn’t guarded or hesitant and mistrusting. He’s a different kind of survivor, a leader aware of his importance without letting it go to his head. He’s good. Genuinely good and despite the biblical parallels circulating these movies that goodness feels grounded, tangible and vulnerable. Capable of wavering if pushed too far…yet even when it was, it never shattered completely. I felt I could see the conflict swarming him throughout this movie: that part blinded by rage and grief that seemed to give up on everything but revenge, and that goodness that kept him going, kept him from falling completely into self-centered destruction.  I’m in awe of Andy Serkis; each time he takes on Caesar his performances get better and better. While I must confess there were a few times I felt the camera lingered a little too long on his face (which of course isn’t his fault), he never wavered, and gotta throw a shout out to the visual effects department because they outdid themselves again. We might still live in an era where CGI characters look distinctly computerized, but technology has come a very long way, and each year past closes that gap a little more.

Maurice definitely came into his own as well. He was starting to in the last movie, from what I remember, but here I really felt like I learned who he was as an individual. Like Caesar, he too, possessed an emotional heart, yet more rational and empathetic, able to maintain a neutral outlook when needed. Doing this helped highlight Caesar’s diminishing ability to do so as time went on, and while, again, it brought up points used often in films, it worked without feeling tired. The more I think about it, the more I realize these tropes actually help this budding world: a second civilization rising to prominence, dealing with self-doubt and personal loss and shaken loyalty—humans have dealt with for centuries. I adored his relationship with Nova. It reminded me a little bit of Zira and Taylor from the first film, although with far less strain and a lot more trust. It’s both sweet and sad, knowing where the relationship with apes and humans will ultimately go—where it’s heading already. On a slight side note, part of me worried Maurice would die; I’m glad he didn’t, he’s always been one of my favorite side characters.

Speaking of Nova, I’m super curious about her character and possible future development. I’ve heard more films are in the works, I’m just not sure how far ahead they’ll jump. I hope not too far. I want to see this new civilization before we launch to Charleton Heston’s time, and like I said, I want to see what happens to Nova. Will she regress into a primitive state? I’m not sure how long Nova lost her voice before the apes found her. The Colonel devolved so quickly part of me wonders if Nova might be some kind of exception. If not, then she’ll probably become the first example of apes coexisting with animalistic humans.

I’d also like to see what happens to Cornelius. One thing I can’t tell about these films: if these names (Bright Eyes, Nova, Cornelius) are designed as a throwback favor to fans or if these characters are meant to grow into the ones we see in the original movie, however closer to modern time it is. Maybe their significance are important to characters and become popular and circulated in their society centuries after their original use…I hope the former is true, only because this new world is a little more interesting than the popular 1960s “NUCLEAR WAR DESTROYED ALL THE THINGS” post-apocalyptic settings.

I think if there’s any character I’m iffy on, it’s Bad Ape. You know, the hermit who learned to speak while living in a zoo. I did find the outsider angle interesting—we really don’t know how apes in other parts of the world have evolved since the Simian Flu outbreak. I also loved the nod to their future society’s uniforms (which I initially didn’t catch; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the first film.) I just wasn’t sold on the humor. It felt very out of place in an otherwise intense movie. I kept getting a “Disney dopey sidekick” vibe from his antics—added to lighten a mood I don’t believe needed lightening. I mean, it wasn’t so jarring it completely severed the tone, just nudged at it, created a small ripple and I didn’t particularly like it. I liked Bad Ape as a character, though. His past, like I said, made him unique and an outsider in different ways than Koba’s followers. He and Nova both stand as interesting parallels: she can’t speak but understands (at least somewhat) sign language, while Bad Ape doesn’t understand it but can speak almost as well as Caesar.

As far as characters go, I think the Colonel is the last one worth nothing. I only vaguely remember Rocket from the last film and I have no recollection of Luca or Winter. Blue Eyes, I had hoped, would play a larger role, given his significance in the last film, but I suppose his character arc could only go so far without fading to the background or losing someone close to him…at least in the Hollywood handbook. Even for a franchise like this one. Although the love interest, side note, I kinda felt was shoe-horned in there. I realize two years have passed, but it’s hard to engage in so short-lived a relationship, on-screen.   There was one soldier I took interest in, too, the survivor at the beginning of the film. What was his name, Preacher? I thought he’d play a larger role, apart from the wary observer. Perhaps that’s all he needed to be. Either way, I’d have liked to see more development.

I’d like to go back to the Colonel again: he, too, followed the same “similar yet different” pattern the rest of the characters maintained. I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, and ‘General Badass who believes the different species is expendable’ is no stranger to the silver screen (Avatar, anyone?) I almost wrote him off, during that scene he spoke with Caesar. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s cardboard villains (alright there are a lot of things I can’t stand but this really irritates me.) Imagine my surprise when I learned the intent of his to-be wall. He wasn’t the commanding force of all or most survivors at all, but rather the boxed in outsider trying to survive. I don’t agree with his methods of course, much less the treatment and execution of his men but it was interesting, from that sort of psychological perspective: how far fear will push someone. Fight or flight and all that.

His final scene with Caesar broke my heart. I knew what had happened of course—admittedly not as early as I’m sure others did but certainly from “where the hell is he?” I also admit I thought he was going to use his remaining humanity to kill Caesar (both at first and then when Caesar put his gun down.) Begging for death and killing himself spoke more of his own humanity, and I use that term in reference to the humanness in him, rather than compassion towards others. The tight shots of their faces didn’t help. Part of me wonders if that was intentional, beyond capturing the emotion. I believe it was the Colonel who noted that Caesar’s eyes were almost human: in those final scenes, the eyes were front and center and you could see the almost animalistic terror in the Colonel’s, while tortured conflict filled Caesar’s. I still maintain the close-ups lingered too long but it was an interesting contrast nonetheless.

I’m not sure how I feel about the Simian flu reverting people to animalistic creatures. It’s certainly an interesting take, but it almost feels like a plot device, as opposed to regressing naturally which I believe happened in the original film? The more I consider it the more I wonder if these reboot prequels will shorten the distance between present day and ‘Planet of the Apes.’ Instead of, what was it, two thousand years, crunch it down to two hundred, if that. This does, admittedly, heighten the horror, and I do like that…but I also like my continuity (ignoring the original disastrous sequels.) I guess we’ll see what happens.

Let’s see, what else…

I took particular note of the score, something I don’t always do. One of those things where, at least in my case, it tends to weave its way through the brain as part of the mood, subconsciously. Rarely does a score jump out at me unless it’s either unusual (Tron Legacy, for example) or I make a point to listen. I’m not sure what about the music stood out to me, this time around. I will say now that I have noticed I found the choice for the more humorous elements worked—not too subtle, not too loud or excessive—but still felt a little out of place.

The set design, too, I feel worth mentioning. While I haven’t watched any behind the scenes I’m assuming it was, in large part, computer-generated. I tend to be partial towards practical sets; it speaks to the creative individual in me, always marveling over how it manifests in others. That isn’t to say I didn’t appreciate them as they were, especially as someone with a fascination towards abandoned buildings. The gift shop stands out as my favorite of the ‘human’ sets, although my favorite overall has to be the ape society before the ambush. Not only did I love the design, but found it practical and appropriate for the skills developed by the apes since the flu broke out; still primates, but more and more human with each day gone by. It’s amazing and fascinating to see how they’ve developed and knowing where they’re ultimately headed.

I think the last thing I want to mention is Caesar’s death. I thought Blue Eyes said the distance from their home to the desert was a long one…I realize since then they resumed their journey from a different location, but I find it a bit odd Caesar managed to survive with a bleeding wound. If their new home is far enough away from human life, how far did they have to go from the facility? It really is just a minor quibble I have; I wouldn’t have had him go any other way. I’m going to miss him though. Caesar and his journey are half the reason I enjoyed these films, he’s such a compelling character. I hope whatever comes next can hold together without him.

All in all, really liked this movie, would definitely recommend. I think the first two were better, but I was far from disappointed. RIP Caesar, I’ll miss you.

[xavierfiles-blog]

Christina Strain's Generation X is a Bunch of Weirdos Written By One

Christina Strain’s Generation X is one of the most anticipated titles of the upcoming RessurXtion line up. Christian was perviously a colorist before chaging gears and writing for SyFy’s THE MAGICIANS. 

XF: X-Men means a lot of things to a lot of people but what is X-Men to you?

CS: The X-Men were probably, aside from Batman, the first superheroes that I really latched onto. It was like reading a book about a bunch of misfits in high school, which was exactly how I felt. So it was a book that was really easy to identify with. So for me, X-Men was the book the made me a little more OK about who I was. I think that’s pretty much what that book was made to do and I just want to keep that going.

XF: So let’s talk about Generation X specifically. You’ve got quite a cast. What made you go with such an out there cast?

CS: I love that you asked this question after the previous question. There’s a very specific reason we have loving referred to them as the lovable losers. In the beginning, I told Daniel [Ketchum, editor] right away that one of the things I noticed about comics recently is that they’ve become such a mainstream thing. You have all of these X-Men that are just so cool and they’re so spectacular. When I was growing up one of the things about comics was that only nerds read them. Nobody knew who Iron Man was, let alone Tony Stark. Now you have people that know exactly who that is. So what I wanted to do was go back to the root of what I loved about X-Men in general and work with characters who didn’t fit it. To go back to the thing I emotionally latched onto.

Quentin and Jubilee are everywhere for sure but at the same time, they are still misfits. Everybody else on the team is the same way. They’ve were created before I showed up, but they aren’t particularly well known or frequently used characters. I wanted to give them their moment to shine and highlight that even though they are different they are just as special as every other X-Men character.

It’s so funny, but every time I see someone negatively react to Gen X and say “Who the hell is this cast?” I’m like, “that’s the point!” I’m so excited about using characters that maybe we’ve all forgotten. You don’t expect it.

XF: You’re never gonna have a cast that satisfies everyone, but those 4 people who really love Nature Girl are going to be so pumped to see her in the spotlight.

CS: I am actually surprised that she isn’t more popular. First of all, she’s way more useful than I realized when I first started and secondly, her design is fantastic. Amilcar [Pinna, artist] has been adorable. He loves drawing her. I just feel like she is so easy to cosplay and at the same time fun to draw so I am kinda surprised she’s not bigger than she is. But good for me, I got her.

XF: On that same note, who have you been most excited to write in this whole thing.

CS: I gotta be honest, I love them all which is a terrible freaking answer. I do love Quentin; who I know is a very polarizing character. My favorite version of Quentin is the one who can’t admit what he really wants so he’s just dry and sarcastic. But deep down he’s like the Grinch, he’s got a tiny pink center somewhere in there. Which is fun to write because he’s so bad at being good.

I’ve also had a good time writing Nathaniel, who’s new. He’s kinda based on a friend of mine, who I love dearly. It’s kinda like I’ve been writing a love letter to my friend which starts with “hey buddy, guess what, you’re in a book!”

I’ve also really enjoyed Benjamin Deeds. He’s weird, a little bit of a marshmallow, but at the same time he’s the glue of the team which I didn’t see coming. He’s been a very good empathetic character— which I was expecting to be Trevor (Eye-Boy) but Trevor’s coming out a little goofier than I expected him to be.

XF: Wait, wait, wait, he’s a little goofier than a guy covered in eyeballs would be expected to be?

CS: [Laughs] The thing with Eye-Boy’s abilities is that he should be the most empathetic character that completely understands everybody, but the way that I’ve been writing him is that he is overly focused on certain things. Like, he’ll understand the motivations behind a character’s actions, but not that he shouldn’t say what those motivations are out loud. As I’m writing him, I’m realizing that he “sees all” but really understands very little. Which has been a lot of fun.

And then again Nature Girl, I’ve put a little spin on her that I don’t want to say too much about. They’ve all been a good time. And oh, Bling! Oh my god! I have a lot of feelings about Roxy but I won’t go into that. No spoilers.

XF: The Purifier’s are solicited as the antagonists of the first couple of issues. What got you thinking of using the Purifier’s again?

CS: So they’re not a huge threat in Generation X. We wanted a villain that the school’s prepared to deal with. This isn’t a group that they haven’t run across before. In Kitty’s mind (she’s now running the school) the future X-Men are prepared to deal with this group, so they should be fine. But this book isn’t about them. This book is about our lovable losers and how they maybe screw that up. We just wanted a starter villain to show the pros and cons of what our team could do and the Purifiers seemed like a pretty natural choice for that.

XF: You mentioned the future X-Men. Any hints of who that might be?

CS: To be honest I haven’t sat down and divided the whole school up yet, partially because I want the focus of this book to be on our kids. So the majority of what’s going on with the future X-Men and future ambassadors you’ll see in certain roles in the periphery and sometimes their paths will intertwine, but that’s about it.

I’ll straight up say Broo’s a future ambassador. Pixie, Greymalkin, they’re future X-Men. Shark-Girl also a future X-Man. These classes will kinda come in and out and there will be a few issues where you get more students than others.

XF: You previously were a colorist, pretty famously on Runaways, and now you’re writing. What has that transition been like?

CS: Oh it’s been weird! In a good way. I think the weirdest part about the whole thing is, if you told me at the beginning of my career “hey gurl you gonna be writing!” I’d be like “what dot dot dot huh?” It’s been crazy! And I’m one of those people who feel very compelled to work until they feel like they’ve “earned it,” so that’s a whole thing. Maybe it’s because my mom’s given me a complex about working in comics instead of being a doctor, so I’m just trying to prove a point to her? I don’t know. Anyway, transitioning’s been interesting because I know getting hired as a writer at Marvel is a very difficult thing to do, but I already sort of had an in, but I didn’t want to exploit it. But, because I landed staff writing job on THE MAGICIANS before I was offered the White Fox story I did with Sana Takeda for Civil War II: Choosing Sides, a lot of that pressure was alleviated. I felt like I had earned it.

When Gen X came up I was super excited because Daniel was like “do you wanna do something similar to Runaways?” and if you ask me that I will always say yes. Regardless of what I’m working on, if anything has a Runaways feel to it I am down to clown. I love me some teen drama. So I feel good about the environment, but the actually job itself? It’s great, but still a little foreign. Like, if you handed me some pages so color, I’d look at it and go “I know exactly what I’m doing with this,” because I was so comfortable with coloring. But with writing, I’m still felling some stuff out because I’ve still got a lot of room to grow as a writer.

XF: Speaking of Runaways, how is Molly Hayes not in this book?

CS: OK look, she was the first person on this list to put in this book. You know we’re internally calling these guys the lovable losers, to me Molly Hayes was kinda the star of Runaways. She was the best. I love her so dearly. It was funny because when we were talking about it, Jubilee was the first character we picked and the next person was definitely Molly. Daniel was like “really?” And I was like “you’ve got a good point, she might be too cool for this book.” I’m surprised she’s not the star of her own book in all honesty, Molly is just the best character. The only character in Runaways I was ever terrified of dying was Molly. I was just like, if she dies I’m rage quitting this book. So yeah, Molly is too cool for Generation X.

XF: Just to wrap it up, what do you want fans to be most excited about in this book?

CF: I think just get excited to have some fun. My goal is to have a Runaways tone to it. I wouldn’t say it takes itself overly seriously. It’s not a deep, dark, dramatic book. It’s a bunch of weirdos hanging out written by a human weirdo. So get ready for some weird fun.

Thanks again to Christina for talking with us about Generation X. Make sure to check it out this May! Oh and check the cool new pages for the first issue below!

Christina Strain’s Generation X is a Bunch of Weirdos Written By One was originally published on Xavier Files

[chavalahh]

My BookTube Top Tens Tag List!

Too long for the description box in my video! :P (found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz99uxvKbkc&t=5s)

#1: DAPHNE'S BOOK by Mary Downing Hahn: Yes, a book that I first read when I was eleven probably shouldn't be in first place anymore. :P  But screw it.  The author is a prolific children's writer and Maryland librarian, and she wrote this one the year that I was born.  I named the protagonist in my second published short story as an adult (plus took the general struggling-with-relationships-and-big-questions theme) from this protagonist and book.  Also, do you remember that "You've Got Mail" joke about how "The Godfather" movies answer all of life's questions?  This is that book for me. :P

#2: MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins: Yes, I read this popular YA novel when I was well into my adulthood.  In many ways, it was a case of reading it at the right place/time.  I was struggling with how to deal with the trauma of war, and understanding how people who start off as the underdog/oppressed "good guys" don't always stay there.  In fact, war makes sure that they don't.  The author meant for this series to be a commentary on war, and the final installment, and the least liked by most fans, covers it most directly.  This series has duped a lot of people, but I stand firm--Katniss is NOT a superhero.  A critical reading shows how "The Mockingjay"(also "The Girl on Fire" and "The Star-Crossed Lovers")  is not real--it's propaganda used by adults to sidle into or fortify their own power.  This is the book that covers post-traumatic stress, (what I call) "angry young man syndrome," and the importance of fostering real, empathetic human relationships to survive.

#3: STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel: My attempt at being less cynical about the impending apocalypse. :P  Yes, most of the planet is wiped out by a vicious disease, but society remakes itself--and it embraces art! :D  I love the artistry in the author's story construction--the enclosed feel of performing "King Lear" as the virus hits vs the open-air production 20 years later.  I love the parralels between the comic book, "Station Eleven," vs the aftermath in the novel.  I love the tribute to our wonderful, technological world, and also to the spirit of survival in the wilderness.  Finally, I love the characters and what they show us about humanity as humanity moves into a new age.  Metaphorically speaking. :P

#4: WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte:  For awhile, I worried that loving this book would be akin to loving a Victorian version of TWILIGHT. :/  I remember, as a teenager, reading to classmates from the section where Cathy professes her undying love for Heathcliff over her changeable love for Linton--entranced, I tell you! :P  But something else I've always felt since secretly reading this book in Spanish class--I identify most with Nelly.  I suppose that she offers a safe, if still involved, distance from passion and its pitfalls.  I can fall for these characters, and hate them sometimes, and also realize that they're doomed. :P  (Maybe the kids a little less so, save for dearly departed Linton Heathcliff.)  Emily Bronte weaves such a spell!  I can't not be drawn in.

#5: PLANETFALL by Emma Newman: My most recent read on this list, I believe!  Science fiction about civilians in space, unreliable narrators with mental illness, traumatic backstories, falling in love with charismatic leaders who turn into prophets scaling a proverbial mount sinai, communal sins of the past that sneak up slowly for revenge, finally grasping the mechanics of 3-D printing, sorta...this book has "me" written all over it. :P  But what made me listen to it twice in a row was the protagonist's relationships (with herself and others) and that balancing act between science and faith.  The author made me feeeeel.

#6: ANNE FRANK: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL by Anne Frank: When I first read this for school when I was about Anne's age, I was blown away by her insights.  She dug into all of my secret and not-so-secret thoughts about my relationships and my body. Of course, discussing this in class with a bunch of awkward 14-year-old girls meant that their commentary was mostly a bunch of "eeeew, she's gross!"  As a hypersensitive gal myself, I was crushed.  Now that we're in our thirties, I wanna take my old classmates aside and say, ADMIT IT, ANNE WAS RIGHT!  She was my first role model.  She was wise beyond her years.  Her loss isn't more tragic than anything else that happened in the Holocaust, but I truly believe that she would have been one of literature's foremost thinkers as an adult.  I long to know what she would have made of the Jewish religious and cultural future, to start.  She'd run circles around the men who put stupid caricatures of her in their books, that's for sure.

#7: EMPEROR MAGE by Tamora Pierce: My favorite childhood fantasy novel--aka my street cred in this genre. :P  Right now I'm eagerly awaiting new installments in the prequel series!  Man, YA fantasy writing has changed since I was a kid (it's grown a looooot longer.)  But this book still had enough meat on the bones to draw me in.  I loved the colorfully described world, the Tortall delegation who were fish out of water in Carthak, hints about Numair's backstory (see prequels), the magic, mystery and action.  But mostly, I loved Daine and saw her as my type of gal superhero.  Not a fighter, but someone connected by magic to animals.  Behold, the power of empathy!  So much this author did to draw me in.

#8: INTUITION by Allegra Goodman: I think this one has to bump KAATERSKILL FALLS by the same author from its pedestal! :o  Still love that book, but don't remember all of it nearly as well.  This novel, like that one, is the author's signature of studying a small, enclosed community of people.  A bunch of postdocs in a science lab!  Plus a small handful of familiars.  What do I know about science: nothing!  But I do get the stresses of having to prove yourself, communally and as an individual.  I get that people and their motivations are complicated, and they can take you down paths not intended.  I loooove well done interior monologue--the author excels at that, and is one of my favorites in the literary genre.

#9: THE CASUAL VACANCY by JK Rowling: I belieeeve that Katie from Books and Things put to words what is so great about this novel--it has well developed characters AND a plot!  And I don't usually get behind plot! :P  This one drew me in with the death of a parish councilor leading to political infighting about an impoverished suburb.  Themes include classism, drug abuse, and lines between personal responsibility and systematic victimization.  I really loved the middle-aged female characters and their personal struggles--such an underrepresented group!  The ending for one of the teen characters stabbed me in the gut after getting so embroiled in this world.  Kind of like the ins and outs of a magical school, the author brought this small, English community alive. :P  It's strange, really--the HARRY POTTER series influenced my life, maybe more than most anything I've read.  I've made friends, I've had experiences and am now writing a novella because of them.  But this book re-ignited my love for literary fiction, now my most-read genre.

#10: THE LOWLAND by Jhumpa Lahiri: Perhaps this author is the most accomplished lyricist on the list.  She's another of my favorite literary writers.  Her writing floooows.  Her characters and their world are a lurid, swirling soup of realism and deep emotional output.  She can even do it in short stories, but I admit that novels are easier to remember!  I love her second in particular for the Indian history that it entails, and because of characters who make complicated choices that engender a lifetime of consequences.  The female protagonist, in particular, eschews the suffocating role of "the good Indian mother/wife," and abandons her family to embrace her own happiness.  Makes me want to cheer for AND shake her!  Lahiri's writing is so relateable that I've always felt a (not completely deserved, I think) correlation between her Indian characters and my sense of Jewish characters. :P  What's great about this book is that no one stays in their lane.  So yes, there is a universal theme to human experiences, buried amidst specific people and happenings.

[lorettalivingston6911]

Fans Of The Old Roseanne Need To Read This…

how I looked younger without plastic surgery

We've seen a lot of think pieces about Roseanne being canceled.

But this is more of a feel piece.

Related: Roseanne Cancels Interview, Goes 'Radio Silent'

After teasing earlier in the week he had something to say about her and Donald Trump, Roseanne's old friend Michael Moore posted to his Facebook a thoughtful, empathetic take.

See what he says about her past and present issues -- and how Trump is taking advantage of a lot more people than just her (below):

I have known Roseanne Barr for over 25 years. I've known her as Roseanne Barr, Roseanne Arnold, just "Roseanne", then back to Roseanne Barr. I've spent time in her home, criss-crossed the country with her to help remove George W. Bush from the White House, appeared on her shows, been there for her when she needed something, and connected her with one of my producers who did an insightful, one-of-a-kind documentary into the genius and the tragedy that is Roseanne Barr.

On Tuesday Roseanne posted hateful, slanderous tweets directed at four people: George Soros, Valerie Jarrett, Chelsea Clinton and me. A few hours later, she was fired by ABC.

For the past few years, Roseanne has been posting the craziest stuff on Twitter, like claiming Hillary was part of a child sex abuse ring being run out of a DC pizza place. She's claimed that the Clintons have murdered people. And anyone who criticizes Benjamin Netanyahu is a "nazi."

Roseanne seems to be suffering from some sort of madness. It's more than just saying she's a racist. She operates in the same sewer of lies, conspiracy theories and bigotry that's been rising in America for years and that has now succeeded in electing our current president. Totally nuts.

Here's who's not crazy: Donald J. Trump.

Trump, though he shows all the signs of being absolutely bonkers, is not insane. He's the real deal. His racism and hate is real, it's well thought-out, he's the true master of manipulation, a brilliant performance artist, and an evil genius. He outsmarted a nation of liberals and Democrats and won the White House by losing the actual vote of the people. He neutered and then destroyed the Grand Old Republican Party. He knows exactly what he is doing.

Roseanne, on the other hand, is a person who long ago broke through and brought an authentic voice of working women and men to television via one of the greatest TV series of all time. It was groundbreaking because the TV industry had historically either ignored, ridiculed or patronized those of us who grew up in the working class. Roseanne changed that.

But she is also a damaged soul. Most people don't know that she has suffered her entire life from a massive head injury she received during a serious car accident when she was a child. Her brain injuries were immense and she spent months in the hospital struggling to recover.

I also have no idea what it was like to grow up, as she did, as a Jewish girl in Salt Lake City. Not a tolerant state, to be sure. She told me how her parents, who owned an apartment building, were asked by the U.S. government after World War II if they would be willing to house Holocaust survivors who had come to the U.S. as refugees. Her parents took dozens in, and Roseanne's childhood was spent with these survivors as her "family." "The stories they told me," she said, "were filled with unimaginable horror. I've always wondered what effect that had on me as a little girl."

Now, sadly, for the past few years, Roseanne has been in a downward spiral, ranting like crazy on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories, attacking the people she used to love, supporting Trump, and being just an outright hateful and racist person. It has been a difficult decline to witness. She has repeatedly attacked me, and on Tuesday, after calling George Soros a "Nazi" (he's a Jew and a Holocaust survivor), Valerie Jarrett an offspring "of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes," and saying that Chelsea was "married to" a Nazi relative of George Soros, she then retweeted a disgusting new word for me because I have spoken out against the Netanyahu government and its killing of Palestinians -- "#JewHater". Nonstop insanity and sickness.

I guess there might be 20 million Americans (out of 320 million) who probably agree with her. She has thrown down with the lowest of the low, and who knows if she'll ever recover from this descent into her own personal hell.

To close, I want to say just how great the new Roseanne show was. It was funny but brutal to watch because it showed how our system of greed has hurt millions of families like the Connors of Illinois. On the final episode last week, Roseanne was addicted to opioids because she couldn't afford the knee surgery she needed, so she suffered along in agonizing pain. Dan, her husband, in order to raise money for her surgery, decided to take a non-union job -- and Roseanne berates him for doing so and letting his union brothers and sisters down. There are a couple quick knocks on Trump, making it clear that the real Roseanne was not writing or running this show. For the past 9 weeks, the new Roseanne show has shined a powerful and necessary light on what it means to be working class in 2018. Her blended family on this new series was white and black and LGBTQ, and her generous neighbors next door were Muslims who forced her to confront her own bigotry.

If only her art could have helped her in her real life.

(Also, let me say this: There's no reason the show has to go just because she's gone. Over the years, TV has found ways to bring Bobby Ewing back from the dead on "Dallas", forced us to accept the two Darrins on "Bewitched", and found ways for hit shows to survive when their stars bolted after a year or two [David Caruso on "NYPD Blue", Pernell Roberts on "Bonanza"]. The smart people who were writing this Roseanne series can surely find a way to let the non-bigoted portion of the America's working class [which I can tell you is the VAST majority] have their voice heard on network television. Why should it be silenced by one lost soul?)

Wow. What do YOU think of this take?

[Image via ABC.]

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Fans Of The Old Roseanne Need To Read This…

We've seen a lot of think pieces about Roseanne being canceled.

But this is more of a feel piece.

Related: Roseanne Cancels Interview, Goes 'Radio Silent'

After teasing earlier in the week he had something to say about her and Donald Trump, Roseanne's old friend Michael Moore posted to his Facebook a thoughtful, empathetic take.

See what he says about her past and present issues -- and how Trump is taking advantage of a lot more people than just her (below):

I have known Roseanne Barr for over 25 years. I've known her as Roseanne Barr, Roseanne Arnold, just "Roseanne", then back to Roseanne Barr. I've spent time in her home, criss-crossed the country with her to help remove George W. Bush from the White House, appeared on her shows, been there for her when she needed something, and connected her with one of my producers who did an insightful, one-of-a-kind documentary into the genius and the tragedy that is Roseanne Barr.

On Tuesday Roseanne posted hateful, slanderous tweets directed at four people: George Soros, Valerie Jarrett, Chelsea Clinton and me. A few hours later, she was fired by ABC.

For the past few years, Roseanne has been posting the craziest stuff on Twitter, like claiming Hillary was part of a child sex abuse ring being run out of a DC pizza place. She's claimed that the Clintons have murdered people. And anyone who criticizes Benjamin Netanyahu is a "nazi."

Roseanne seems to be suffering from some sort of madness. It's more than just saying she's a racist. She operates in the same sewer of lies, conspiracy theories and bigotry that's been rising in America for years and that has now succeeded in electing our current president. Totally nuts.

Here's who's not crazy: Donald J. Trump.

Trump, though he shows all the signs of being absolutely bonkers, is not insane. He's the real deal. His racism and hate is real, it's well thought-out, he's the true master of manipulation, a brilliant performance artist, and an evil genius. He outsmarted a nation of liberals and Democrats and won the White House by losing the actual vote of the people. He neutered and then destroyed the Grand Old Republican Party. He knows exactly what he is doing.

Roseanne, on the other hand, is a person who long ago broke through and brought an authentic voice of working women and men to television via one of the greatest TV series of all time. It was groundbreaking because the TV industry had historically either ignored, ridiculed or patronized those of us who grew up in the working class. Roseanne changed that.

But she is also a damaged soul. Most people don't know that she has suffered her entire life from a massive head injury she received during a serious car accident when she was a child. Her brain injuries were immense and she spent months in the hospital struggling to recover.

I also have no idea what it was like to grow up, as she did, as a Jewish girl in Salt Lake City. Not a tolerant state, to be sure. She told me how her parents, who owned an apartment building, were asked by the U.S. government after World War II if they would be willing to house Holocaust survivors who had come to the U.S. as refugees. Her parents took dozens in, and Roseanne's childhood was spent with these survivors as her "family." "The stories they told me," she said, "were filled with unimaginable horror. I've always wondered what effect that had on me as a little girl."

Now, sadly, for the past few years, Roseanne has been in a downward spiral, ranting like crazy on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories, attacking the people she used to love, supporting Trump, and being just an outright hateful and racist person. It has been a difficult decline to witness. She has repeatedly attacked me, and on Tuesday, after calling George Soros a "Nazi" (he's a Jew and a Holocaust survivor), Valerie Jarrett an offspring "of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes," and saying that Chelsea was "married to" a Nazi relative of George Soros, she then retweeted a disgusting new word for me because I have spoken out against the Netanyahu government and its killing of Palestinians -- "#JewHater". Nonstop insanity and sickness.

I guess there might be 20 million Americans (out of 320 million) who probably agree with her. She has thrown down with the lowest of the low, and who knows if she'll ever recover from this descent into her own personal hell.

To close, I want to say just how great the new Roseanne show was. It was funny but brutal to watch because it showed how our system of greed has hurt millions of families like the Connors of Illinois. On the final episode last week, Roseanne was addicted to opioids because she couldn't afford the knee surgery she needed, so she suffered along in agonizing pain. Dan, her husband, in order to raise money for her surgery, decided to take a non-union job -- and Roseanne berates him for doing so and letting his union brothers and sisters down. There are a couple quick knocks on Trump, making it clear that the real Roseanne was not writing or running this show. For the past 9 weeks, the new Roseanne show has shined a powerful and necessary light on what it means to be working class in 2018. Her blended family on this new series was white and black and LGBTQ, and her generous neighbors next door were Muslims who forced her to confront her own bigotry.

If only her art could have helped her in her real life.

(Also, let me say this: There's no reason the show has to go just because she's gone. Over the years, TV has found ways to bring Bobby Ewing back from the dead on "Dallas", forced us to accept the two Darrins on "Bewitched", and found ways for hit shows to survive when their stars bolted after a year or two [David Caruso on "NYPD Blue", Pernell Roberts on "Bonanza"]. The smart people who were writing this Roseanne series can surely find a way to let the non-bigoted portion of the America's working class [which I can tell you is the VAST majority] have their voice heard on network television. Why should it be silenced by one lost soul?)

Wow. What do YOU think of this take?

[Image via ABC.]