Winter 2022 Movies

The Matrix Resurrections (HBOMax) – Lana Wachowski didn’t particularly want to make this movie, so rather than making a real movie, she made a long string of Fuck Yous to a bunch of different people and institutions, starring all of the actors she likes. (Seriously, half the cast of Sense8 was in this.) It was also pretty surprising how little bullet-time there was in the action sequences; they were fairly generic. It was absolutely not necessary for this movie to exist and it doesn’t really add much to the original trilogy, but clearly some people had fun making it; and it’s inoffensive as such things go.

Soul (Disney+) - I think this was aimed at my generation; it certainly wasn’t aimed at kids. Not because there’s anything offensive in it, but because I don’t think anyone younger than college-age would get either the emotional beats or half the humor. It tried to do for music what Ratatouille did with food, and did an okay job with it; and had a general theme that appeals to lost 30-somethings who were sold lies about dream jobs.

Encanto (Disney+) - Lin-Manuel Miranda is the hot shit right now, and I just…don’t like his work that much? I mean, it’s generally good, I can see why he’s successful, but I don’t have the love for it that so many people do. There are good songs in this and I can see why it’s going to be the next Frozen as everyone refuses to talk about Bruno. But the songs didn’t actually stick in my head and I’m not interested in listening to the soundtrack repeatedly (which is the same reaction I had to Hamilton). Still, we could do a lot worse than a movie about a big latinx family where the moral is you need to actually talk about your needs and problems rather than hiding them.

The Road to El Dorado (Amazon, rewatch) - Tumblr loves this movie for being the most bisexual, polyamorous cartoon ever made. While there is, of course, zero text that Miguel and Tulio are actually lovers (while the "they're both interested in Chell" text is loud and clear and we're all just reading subtext), I’ll note that Miguel and Tulio get the standard breakup/makeup romance arc. I'm sure lots of people read a love triangle, but "do we stay in El Dorado vs go back to Spain" is the actual wedge between them, and Chell plays as much role in that as the goddamn horse does, as just being someone to represent a side of that divide. This is a poly movie especially because it divorces love for a life partner completely from sexual attraction. Whether or not Miguel and Tulio bang (and whether Tulio and Chell bang) is immaterial to their deep loving companionship, how well they know each other and work together and would clearly give up their own dreams to support each other.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Amazon) – A movie that knows what it is: A comic love story between a man and his alien parasite that happens to have a bunch of CGI fights and explosions. Ann and Dan do a wonderful job as the long-suffering but still caring ex trying to fix her boyfriend’s new relationship and her new boyfriend who doesn’t want to deal with the drama but does for her sake. The first movie wasn’t quite sure why the audience was there. This knew and really ran with it, and it worked.

Free Guy (Disney+) - A formulaic-but-fun “character in a video game becomes real” story that ignores a lot of things about the actual functioning of MMOs (and how servers work) but gets terrible video game studio management perfectly (played to a T by Taika Waititi). (There are several plot holes Jethrien pointed out that can be easily addressed with, “Antwan is an idiot.”) It’s a little longer than it really needs to be, but the cuttable stuff is mostly funny cameos and entertaining action sequences, so that’s forgivable. If you like watching Ryan Reynolds have a good time and appreciate humor in the form of sarcastic and witty asides, it’s a fun film. I’m glad I didn’t brave the theater at the height of the pandemic to go see it, though. It’s perfectly fine on a home screen.

Humble Comics Bundle – Dynamite Favorites and New Hits

Bettie Page #1 - I have to guess this started with somebody who loved Bettie Page pinup art and wanted an excuse to string together stories using pinup splash panels. It’s not bad for a first issue, it’s got a “Danger Girl” kind of pulp thing going, but I’m not excited enough about Page as the selling point to look for more.

Skin and Earth (volume 1) – It’s a comic illustrating a concept album; I didn’t listen to the music, but it honestly has the same problem a lot of storytelling albums do: The songs and individual scenes might work or not, but the whole thing strings together with only the most tenuous logic and the flow of the overall work is really rough. In this case, each emotional beat and plot reveal feels like whiplash from the last one. I’d have loved this when I was a pretentious 16-year-old wishing it was something I could make myself; but I’m 40 now.

Grand Passion – A ridiculous cops ‘n robbers story about a bank-robbing duo and the one clean cop in a town full of corruption. Kinda fun, in that it embraces a lot of the absurdity the story requires to function. Warning that it features instant love at first sight, a lot of phonetically spelled out southern accents, and someone getting shot in the head twice and walking around afterwards. (And nudity, but honestly, I feel like that bothers people less than the other three things.)

The Twilight Zone (volume 1) – Featuring the story of a banker who arranges an escape from his life just before it falls apart, this really captures the feel of the original TV show with modern trappings. Even the moral core of the story (the guy’s problems, before and during the story, were 100% of his own making) is fitting to the best TV episodes. Kudos to JMS for solid writing.

Chaos: Highway to Hel (volume 1) – A troupe of assorted supernatural creatures try to be the good guys saving humans from other assorted supernatural creatures. I could barely keep straight what was supposed to be going on in this bad World of Darkness fanfic / excuse to draw lots of big boobs.

Tales of Army of Darkness (one shot) – A set of short stories surrounding the events of the movie Army of Darkness. None of them are particularly noteworthy, especially since none of them manage to come up with any jokes that weren’t in the original movie.

Ash VS The Army of Darkness – On the other hand, this picks up after the original movie, with a brief recap and Ash getting fired from S-Mart. But the local high school is also having deadite possession issues, and the principal recruits Ash to pose as a teacher and investigate; and a mysterious government agency is sniffing around as well. This runs a single, complete story arc that’s a fun sequel to the movies and leaves room to continue. (I have no idea if it’s at all connected to the TV show, mind you.)

Bob’s Burgers (volume 1) – Like the TV show, I find this fun in small doses but I don’t like it enough to binge it. Also, this is aimed squarely at fans of the TV show who know the characters and the running gags already, which means that (having only seen half the first season), a bunch of it is lost on me. (Why does the frog story have randomly rhyming dialogue, for instance? I have no idea! It doesn’t seem to be one of the “musical” stories.) I kinda hope that later seasons of the show find other things for Tina to do than make up stories about Jimmy Jr’s butt, because those in particular got old fast.

Art of Atari – This isn’t a graphic novel, it’s a coffee table book, which is a weird thing to see in pdf form. Giant, colorful splashes of original game box and cabinet artwork, interspersed with stories about the creation of Atari and the development of the games. To their credit, box art mattered more to Atari than any other games company, because the games were so simple that imagination drove most of the play experience, and good box art sparked that. I mostly treated this like any coffee table book, flipping through to the games I recognized (I had a 2600 in elementary school and something like 20 games) and appreciating the variety of art as I went along.
This collection also included Undisputed Street Fighter, a similar style book about the fighting game series, but I was never big enough into it for that to catch my interest.

Nancy Drew (Issues #1-5) – Grown-up Nancy is drawn back to her hometown by a mystery, meeting up with her supporting cast she’d left behind and also Frank and Joe Hardy who are back for a visit. This is a fun little adventure that modernizes everything but has a pretty good sense of all the characters and their foibles. Joe Hardy even jumps through a window!

Masks (volume 1) - Alex Ross artwork and a team-up of pulp characters: The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Spider, the Black Terror, etc. Together, they fight a criminal network who have taken over the New York state government and terrorized the city with armored, faceless goons. This came out in 2012, but it’s shockingly relevant in the post-Trump era…a fact that I’m sure is lost on half the readers. (The best bit was when the goon army was sent to march on Washington and take over the country, and the heroes learn from radio reports that the army was stopped by New Jersey.)

Red Sonja (volumes 1 and 2) – Gail Simone clearly loves Red Sonja as a character, and is will to write her as the Conan-style barbarian badass she is. The first plotline is a dip into Sonja’s past that ties into current events, pairing her with a woman who had been tortured and forced to fight alongside her. The second arc is more episodic, with Sonja on a quest to retrieve the six greatest artisans in the land so a dying king will free 1,000 slaves. Both are totally good times.

The Last Temptation – So, this is a horror-mindfuck comic by Neil Gaiman, featuring Alice Cooper. (And I’m reasonably certain I’ve read this before, presumably from a different bundle years ago.) It’s a fairly standard temptation story; a teenage boy enters a mysterious theater that wasn’t there the day before and the demonic proprietor tries to convince him to give up on life and join the zombie cast. The interesting place it takes my brain is that a common interpretation of the musical Pippin (which I love) is essentially the same story; and in one production I was in the Leading Player was wearing basically the same makeup.

I was moderately interested in Swords of Sorrow until I realized it was a massive crossover of a lot of characters I was only vaguely interested in. I may eventually read it, but not feeling it now.

Overall: There were a fun mix of things in this bundle that I read over the course of a few months; many of them very different. I think Red Sonja and Nancy Drew were fun enough to recommend, of the lot.