The World of Insufficient Light

Merry Little Batman - A very cute holiday adventure mostly starring 8-year-old Damian Wayne learning to be a tiny Batman. They mostly used the villain character designs from the Burton/Schumacher live-action Batman movies, which was an odd choice but it goes with the level of seriousness involved. And whoever did the soundtrack loves British punk music. Cute, entertaining; don’t think too hard about it.

We rewatched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves with ARR (who loved it) and also watched all the DVD extras. The best bit from those is Justice Smith talking about how he came with creative hand motions for all his spells to see how the VFX guys would draw the magic around them, and it cuts to the head VFX guy just looking long-suffering. But it’s also clear how much the creators cared about D&D and making the movie fun. I hope they get a sequel.

The Marvels - For all the usual “worst movie ever” bullcrap in the reviews, this was pretty good. Ms. Marvel got the memo and was having a great time. At 90 minutes, this was much less bloated than most of the other recent fare. I’d argue it was a little repetitive to Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel (it assumes you’ve watched those and WandaVision so you know the characters and what’s going on, but still repeats many of the jokes) but still fun, because Nick Fury herding cats and Kamala’s parents being ridiculous but loving is never not fun. And regarding the stinger, I would LOVE to see Kamala, Kate Bishop, Cassie Lang, and Yelena doing Young Avengers nonsense, but I don’t think it’ll actually happen.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - This was a delight, full of great lines and Easter Eggs for longtime fans...right up to the point it became clear it was only half a movie, despite how long it was. Yes, I’m going to watch the third one regardless, but I’m going to be salty about it.

Poor Things – “What the fuck was that?” Okay, what it was is a modern retelling of Frankenstein, where the original novel was really gay (Mary Shelley was the original “fanfic writer with a queer friend circle”), but this is very, very straight. And terrified of feminism but convinced it’s inevitable. It gets a horror-movie ending where the monster wins and society is cowed before her, but the monster is feminism. Ah, well. Emma Stone acted the hell out of it and Mark Ruffalo seems to have had a really good time.

Madame Web - I went out of my way to see this because the “usual suspects” on the internet were declaring it the worst Marvel movie ever (which they do any time there’s a prominent female character or a character of color, which this has in abundance). It is, in fact, pretty terrible. There was a rumor this was a test of an AI-written script: This was waaaay too coherent (despite being formulaic) to have been written by AI. I might accept that it was "written" by AI and "edited" (read: basically thrown out and re-written from the bare bones) by underpaid humans. But my guess is that it was written by a committee, under-directed, then badly edited. There are some genuinely good actors in this film, but their performances smack of being given a terrible script that had been rewritten eight times since the table read and then filming everything in a week so the footage could be rushed off to the CGI artists. Except off-brand evil Spider-Man. He's a genuinely terrible actor.

The Super Mario Bros Movie - I loved the parts that were specifically for me (the commercial at the beginning, the dozens of direct video game references) and thought Jack Black was spot-on as Bowser. Chris Pratt was forgettable but acceptable as Mario, which is better than I feared. I was mildly annoyed that the Leaf gave Mario a full Tanooki suit.

Nimona - Though it was streamlined and formula-ified, I discovered on re-reading the original book that it did hew pretty closely to the source material. And it managed to make it even gayer—the main pairing is explicit in the movie and there’s an easy reading that there are no straight people in the entire film. And it’s very cute and the animation is very good, especially in the big shapeshifting battle sequences.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods – A lot of the shenanigans can be forgiven by the fact that the characters are all teenagers and the Wisdom of Solomon is explicitly on the fritz. And they do an entertaining job of writing around the fact that they can’t call the character “Captain Marvel” but he can’t introduce himself as “Shazam” either—the news reports call the six of them the “Philadelphia Fiascos”, which is really delightful. This is nothing brilliant; it’s fairly formulaic, but it’s got some wit and it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s entertaining. But this should never have been a movie; this should have been a streaming miniseries so they could actually dedicate time and a subplot to each of the six kids. As it stands, they have time for the A-plot with the Daughters of Atlas, Billy’s growing up/being a leader crisis, and Freddy’s love life. Everybody else is a one-note side bit at best. If they ever made a sequel (they won’t), I don’t care about Mr. Mind’s evil plans or Billy joining the Justice Society and confronting Black Adam. I care about whether Pedro gets a boyfriend or if Mary finds college friends or if Darla turns Tawny the kitten into a magical talking tiger.

The Flash – This movie was, what, a decade in the making? And in the interim, Grant Gustin’s Flash did everything we see here, better on a lower budget. (It’s Flashpoint, just with a bunch of the details changed. Barry goes back to save his mom, totally breaks history, and has to come to terms with it.) The CGI is…not actually that great. (And the extensive random lightning raises more questions than it answers.) This Barry goes for “sporadically-competent goofball” and the tone doesn’t really work because you never really get to like him but you also don’t admire him. Ezra Miller doesn’t have the charisma Zach Levi uses to pull off the goofy superhero thing (and Barry doesn’t have the excuse of being a teenager than Billy Batson does), but he also lacks the heartfelt, deeply hopeful stupidity Grant Gustin presents. I think Keaton was doing his best trying to save this movie with his extremely competent Batman, but none of the other supporting characters I would have liked to see more of (Supergirl, Iris, Patty, the Justice League, even Zod) got enough to do because 90% of the movie’s interactions are just Barry and himself. And the multiverse twist (despite my appreciation for various Superman cameos) has been thoroughly done to death at this point. I hope that whatever DC movie continuity they come up with next, they figure out that everybody’s tired of the current formula.

A Christmas Winter Song - A fairly standard Lifetime Christmas movie that’s an excuse for Ashanti to sing a lot, which we watched specifically because my cousin plays the husband. (It’s not a romance; Ashanti’s character gets over the death of her father and rediscovers her love of Christmas by helping a homeless man.) The first half-hour drowns you in exposition, but there are a couple of cute moments and clever bits later. You don’t need to go out of your way for it if you don’t have a family member in the cast.

Enola Holmes 2 - Brown is entertaining and the supporting cast is clearly having a good time; the plot is a little dodgy and relies on the evil genius basically doing everything for funsies. And it’s a bit longer than it probably needs to be. But I was entertained. I look forward to more movies in this style as Sherlock Holmes comes fully into the public domain.

Black Adam - So, on one hand, Johnson’s charisma is unmatched, Brosnan does an excellent Dr. Fate, and the supporting cast is in general quite good. There are some totally fun action sequences. They managed to make a strongly anti-colonialist, anti-US-in-the-middle-east story and quietly fly it under everyone’s radar. But the movie…isn’t great. It’s way too long. Atom Smasher and Cyclone are only there so the “Justice Society” is more than two guys. Several plot points (such as Black Adam being hurt by Eternium) are explicitly established but then nothing is done with them. The attempts to link it to the larger DCU via Amanda Waller are clunky, especially because they deliberately don’t link it to the Shazam movies it directly connects to via the character backstories. I don’t regret seeing it, but it’s not going to get rewatched.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Oh, this was a delight. Maybe not quite as good as the first one (it’s still ultimately a sequel, at the end of the day), but just as intricate and clever and it’s littered with nods and cameos. I give them a lot of credit for Blanc being the only connection between the two movies and not the real driver of the events—in both movies, he’s there as an observer and to sum up the plot for the audience, but he doesn’t do the dirty work. The “outside detective” story is a genre for a reason; and it works. And boy, Musk’s Twitter meltdown couldn’t have been better-timed for this, eh?

Thor: Love and Thunder – Not a particularly good movie, but an entertaining one? The balance of goofy stuff to serious stuff didn’t work quite as well this time. The Jane plotline pissed Jethrien off. Russell Crowe’s accent as Zeus was weird, inconsistent and absolutely not Greek. I did enjoy the point where Thor realized the extent of his power and used it well (sharing the Power of Thor with the kids in the climax was the best example), but by the same token the ability of Stormbreaker to summon the bifrost was new and kinda random.

League of Super Pets - Krypto the Super-Dog is jealous that Clark has Lois in his life and needs to learn to make friends; Lex Luthor’s hyperintelligent guinea pig utilizes a new kind of kryptonite to give animals superpowers; hilarity ensues. The plot is formulaic and exactly what you’d expect; there are some witty bits and in-jokes but it’s not amazing in that regard; but boy, did they get a star-studded cast to ham it up. The Rock and Kevin Hart and doing their usual thing, of course. But Kate MacKinnon as the evil guinea pig! Keanu Reeves having a glorious time as Batman!

Luckiest Girl Alive – A woman on the cusp of the “perfect” wedding to the “perfect” man has all the trauma in her past catch up to her and she has to figure out how to deal with it and what she really wants. I’ll admit to a general weakness for Mila Kunis, despite her shaky hit rate. This is a clever but serious film, in some ways treading similar ground to Promising Young Woman, but with less movie-horror and more realistic horror, if that makes sense. Trigger warnings for graphic violence and sexual assault; but it also ends happily and in a satisfying way for the victim.

I’m Totally Fine – When her best friend and business partner dies suddenly, a woman goes out to the house they had rented for an (obviously-cancelled) celebration to clear her head...and an alien scientist appears wearing her friend’s body. Low-budget sci-fi doing what low-budget sci-fi does best: Making you think about it. (And it is indeed low-budget; there are five onscreen actors total—three of whom only get one or two scenes—and one real set, one instance of CGI, and only enough budget for one late-90s hit song. Though one of those actors is the always-delightful Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows.) It's a mix of comedy and poignancy; a musing on grief and mourning dressed up with a sci-fi premise. Not amazing, but well-done for what it is.

Do Revenge – The good: The cast is fabulous. Veronica from Riverdale, Robin from Stranger Things, Sansa Stark (in a wonderful scene-stealing cameo), and Sarah Michelle Geller. There’s a lot of casual queerness and the movie has the overall sensibilities of a 90s teen comedy but a tongue-in-cheek awareness of that fact. Also, it has the layers of twist double-crossings that you’d expect from a high-quality spy thriller. Cons: The script is not quite up to par; there’s a lot of “kids today talk like woke Tumblr posts, right?” going on. And a bunch of the plot threads get a little overly-tangled and characters do crazy-evil things…just because teens are crazy? (Also, a major twist relies on a character forgetting an event from four years earlier, which YMMV on whether it was a “for me it was Tuesday” sort of acceptable moment or a genuine plot hole.)

Scooby-Doo (2002) - I felt the urge to rewatch this and see how well it held up and to remember how much “not for kids” stuff they managed to sneak in. It was 100% aimed at people around my age, who’d seen the various Scooby-Doo shows in re-runs all through our childhoods and who all hated Scrappy-Doo; but also went with a bunch of gross-out humor that was aimed for actual kids (and possibly intended to be shown in 3D). The cast was amazing—several of them went on to voice the characters in later cartoon adaptations—but the CGI is painfully dated. Like, low-quality greenscreening, characters obviously acting against empty air, completely incorrect lighting on cartoonish monsters, and completely inconsistent levels of realism on Scooby. (It would have been better if he always looked like a cartoon, but he sometimes looks almost like a real dog and sometimes goes super-cartoony.) So a mixed-bag bit of nostalgia I’m glad I watched but I’ll probably give another 20 years after this.

Zoey's Extraordinary Christmas - The finale/wrap-up movie following season 2 of Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, which clearly crammed all of their major ideas that would have been season 3 into an hour and a half of movie…and actually works pretty well. Mo learns more about dating someone with kids. The family has a better resolution to Mitch’s death. (Some of the characters were clearly just there “doing their things” and would have gotten real plotlines if they had 10 hours of season to fill, but the office staff got a song and Bernadette Peters got a song and Simon got to be helpful; so it was fine. I still miss Lauren Graham.) Max and Zoey got a better handle on their relationship; Max learned an important lesson from getting to hear Heart Songs and then the powers went away; and Zoey concluded that God/Time/Fate gave her the powers because she needed to go out and interact with the world. While the series didn’t need this ending, it was a nice solid one and I’m glad they got it out there.

Jagged – A biography of Alanis Morrisette featuring a lot of archival footage, home movies and recent interviews with her. She…did not have an easy time of things, and we got amazing music from that, but she had to live it. (The internet claims that Glen Ballard, Morrisette’s longtime songwriting partner, was married to a woman for a while. Seeing his interview clips I have a very hard time believing that man is straight. Which may also be why Morrisette was so comfortable working with him, given the way most men in her life were treating her.) The phrase “shot out of the fame cannon” is a great takeaway from this.

Spider-Man: No Way Home – The need to have seen the earlier movies is pretty real, here. Granted, I saw them all and I was really happy to see Maguire and Garfield in the suits again, not to mention all the returning villains. Also, this is clearly the last Spider-Man movie they intend to have Holland headline, given that they broke all the toys so that no one else could play with them. Completely cut off from his entire supporting cast, Spider-Man is now only good for supporting roles in other films…or yet another reboot. Maybe Miles Morales and/or Spider-Gwen this time? (Jethrien noted that Holland is growing into his babyface and becoming less suited for the role, which is fair.) Spectacular for big Spider-Man fans and ongoing MCU fans; for anyone else I’d send them to watch Into the Spider-Verse instead.

…And then I got covid, so I decided to watch a lot of stupid movies in a row.

Eternals – One of the best Justice League AUs I’ve seen in a while. An alien god sends Superman, Wonder Woman, Indian Green Lantern, Steel, Martian Manhunter, Gypsy, gender-swapped Flash and Firestorm, and generic-strongman Gilgamesh to Earth 7000 years ago to destroy evil alien monsters; and they gradually discover the truth of both their origins and their mission. The whole thing has a Jack Kirby style to it; similar to Thor in the sense of “He wouldn’t have drawn this, but he’d think it was really cool.” Oh, wait, this was actually a Marvel movie that was supposed to fit into the MCU? Yeah, that part doesn’t work at all. The worldbuilding opens up a ton of giant plotholes and doesn’t mesh with the cosmology established in Thor or Moon Knight; or even the portrayal of Ego (a Celestial!) in Guardians 2. It’ll be interesting to see where they go from here, because they were clearly expecting a sequel but I’m going to guess they won’t get one and will have to shove the plot points into a bloated teamup movie down the line.

Wonder Woman 1984 – Wow, this movie has no goddamn idea what it’s trying to be. Is it a comedy? A dramatic superhero story? A romance? The 80s? Diana’s competence (including her people skills) is all over the map, the “Steve as fish out of water” doesn’t work at all, they can’t decide how sympathetic to make any of the villains. Cheetah wasn’t actually necessary for the movie and she muddled the message; she went off the rails in order to make the fight scenes work and really should have gotten some dénouement with Diana, but the movie was already too long. The overall synopsis feels like it should have worked, but the tone and the characters never really gel. It feels like the actors were filming scenes for half a dozen different movies at the same time, and couldn’t keep track of which they were in at any given point. If I had to guess, it’s that Patty Jenkins was left alone to make the first movie, but this one was designed, written, directed, and edited by a committee.

Red Notice – It’s a shame this wasn’t made during the era of NES movie tie-in games, because this would have made an excellent multi-genre NES action game. Plot-wise, it’s total fluff heist/action film, with the three leads taking turns being pretty and badass as they team up, betray each other, and team up again.

The Adam Project – Where the heck did they find this amazing mini-Ryan Reynolds? Like, the patter is perfect, you could really believe this kid was Reynolds at age 12. The plot is relatively standard timey-whimey action, but the emotional beats are solid and I’m a sucker for father-son reconciliation stories (which this turns out to be, in a complicated way). And yeah, the wisecracking is really that good.

Suicide For Beginners - I watched this specifically because my cousin is in it, but it’s also a horror/comedy film of the style I often enjoy, which was a nice bonus. It’s about a grievously incompetent man who kidnaps and attempts to murder the woman he had a crush on, but repeatedly fails on all fronts. (He eventually does manage to murder a lot of people but, spoiler, barely any members of the main cast.) Low-budget but it generally doesn’t feel cheap; the fact that it doesn’t take itself at all seriously is the main attraction.

Sonic the Hedgehog – I finally gave up on ARR wanting to watch this with me and just watched it. It’s the best attempt to make the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie for Sonic, completely ignoring any resemblance to actual video game (and comic, and cartoon) continuity in favor of “Hey, let’s make a movie with the blue fast guy!” The guy who plays Dewey on Ducktales is great as Sonic (Ben Schwartz, who also plays Leo in TMNT—he’s consistently the cartoon blue guy.) and Jim Carrey, who was paid to chew scenery, earned his keep. I think it’s aimed at people my age who owned a Genesis but never watched the Sonic cartoons and their children; nostalgia value plus hokey kid-friendly comedy. And it’s good enough at that, but I still have a bag of the Archie comics somewhere in the basement and a list of differences between the two cartoon continuities rattling around in my brain.

The Fare (Movie, Amazon) – As noted in plenty of other posts, I’m a sucker for a good Groundhog Day loop, and though this film was clearly made on a shoestring budget, they do a shockingly good job with it. There are basically only two characters and one set; but they make it work. The twist is clever and works well.

The Mummy (Movie, HBOMax) - This is adorable, only mildly terrifying depending on what phobias you have, and totally holds up. There’s a reason snippets from it keep appearing on my Tumblr dash, more than 20 years after it came out.

Dynasty Warriors (Movie, Netflix) – Ridiculously compressed, but also ridiculously slow-moving. Mostly a collection of video game cutscenes, both the talky kind and the high-speed action kind. The Shu characters have magic powers even before they get their magic weapons from the mysterious woman at Sword Castle. They resolve absolutely nothing, not even the Lu Bu/Dong Zhou plotlines. The dub can’t be bothered to keep names consistent. It’s terrible, but having enjoyed many generations of the video games and also read the original novel, I had fun with it.

Black Widow (Movie, Disney+) – A pretty standard Marvel movie without any real surprises. Entertaining but ultimately forgettable. The timeline is a bit suspect, though: If the opening is in 1985 and the rest of the movie is 21 years later... was Civil War really in 2006? Because this is clearly right after Civil War, before Scott and Clint got moved to house arrest. (I need to look up the moving pieces between Civil War and Infinity War.) I also have no idea why the Red Guardian seemed to think he had a rivalry with Captain America if he'd been in prison since the 80s and Steve was on ice until right before The Avengers.

The Suicide Squad (Movie, HBOMax) – We accidentally watched the first 15 minutes of the original Suicide Squad movie when we went to watch this, and hoo-boy what a difference. This does indeed have a Guardians of the Galaxy tone (which was a stated goal), but with more cursing and ludicrous gore. And a giant Starro the Conqueror that keeps comic-original coloration, so it’s both cute and also totally gross. The actors are clearly all having So Much Fun, including and especially the cameos (like Taika Waititi as Ratcatcher I and Nathan Fillion as a renamed Arm-Fall-Off Floyd). This is delightful fun that is absolutely not for kids.

Gunpowder Milkshake (Movie, Netflix) - This is some Grade-A B-Movie right here. It knows exactly what it is, and that’s the story of a woman with a terrible boss who doesn’t appreciate her skills, so she rediscovers the people who actually appreciate her and forms a new family with them. With an absurd amount of murder. (The body count just from the main gang that’s after Sam seems to be around 70 dudes.) Also: This movie is beautiful, the design approach made me think of Frank Miller’s Sin City, and they got really clever and creative with the action sequences.

Immortals – Wow, this is an amazing mess. (Jethrien had seen it in the theater when it came out and apparently was in the mood to inflict this hot mess on others. The things I do for love!) The Greek myths referenced are so different from the originals it honestly would have been better to set the whole thing in Westeros and name the gods Whipsy, Hammer, Trident and The Girl. Really, the only thing in-character for Zeus is that he manages to screw up everything. (And he’s probably Theseus’ father.) The plot often feels more like some’s attempt to string together a series of unrelated paintings than an actual script, and the characters’ actions all seem to just be stringing the plot along, no matter how little sense they make. Despite dying, the bad guy succeeds in 100% of his goals. And don’t get me started on the hats. I’m hoping this is the worst movie I see this year.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure - This is extremely 80s and features an extremely 80s future and a lot of actors having the time of their goddamn lives. It’s a period piece and a product of its time, but it also holds up remarkably well. And there are bits that you just assume get dealt with off-camera: Ted’s teacher convinces his dad not to send him to military school; Rufus gets IDs and such for the princesses; and there’s an explanation for “San Dimas Time” that Rufus knows better than to try to explain. Hell, there are potential deep theories of time travel, given the movie shows 100% stable time loops, but there’s absolutely no reason for the film to go into them and it’s better for not doing it!

Bill and Ted Face the Music - In theory we probably should have rewatched Bogus Journey to get the callbacks to it, but we remembered enough to manage. They clearly realized that the original movie was very white and very male and did their best to correct for that, with the entire new generation being female (including Rufus’ daughter); though I’ll admit some annoyance that they recast the Princesses with younger actresses. This doesn’t stand on its own and is missing some of the simple charm of the original, but it’s still super-fun and we enjoyed it. Also, everything Kid Cudi says is an indication that my theory about Rufus just not bothering to explain anything to Bill and Ted holds up neatly.

(Side theory: Bill and Ted, remembering that they met themselves in the "bad future", deliberately set up the three days they visited when they reach that time normally, so despite their lives being fine, the future matches what they saw. Their wives see the setup in addition to the bad future act, which is likely why they stay.)

Friendsgiving - Malin Akerman and Kat Dennings…do some stuff at Thanksgiving? This is very much a “a bunch of wacky stuff happens, people do some soul-searching, very little gets resolved, and there it’s much of a plot” sort of movie. It honestly feels more like an episode of an ongoing soap opera than a standalone movie. And the script just isn’t there. Jane Seymour chews scenery; Chelsea Peretti is herself; hell, Wanda Sykes and Margaret Cho cameo for one scene as Fairy Gay Mothers...and it’s kinda flat? Lots of potential but it never quite worked. Alas.

PG: Psycho Goreman - Another of the horror comedies I tend to appreciate. Lots of splatter, no jumpscares, and no real worry of how the story is going to end up. Credit to both the writer and the lead actress: The “little girl given control of a demon” is spot on; really the appropriate level of blasé craziness you expect from an eight-year-old. (The writer most certainly has children.) Also, the fate of the universe is decided by a game of Calvinball.

Easy A - Inspired by the late-90s trend of doing classic literature as teen drama but late enough to be even more meta about it, we have Emma Stone doing modernized The Scarlet Letter. This is super fun. Stanley Tucci makes everything better and never plays a character who is 100% straight. As an example of it being clever: A boy asks out the main character and references Sylvia Plath. She comments that if they run out of things to talk about, they can stick their heads in an oven. The fact that he doesn’t get it foreshadows the entire next scene perfectly.

Happiest Season - It’s not the queer holiday movie that we wanted, but it is absolutely the queer holiday movie we deserved. That is, I’m not making any arguments that it’s particularly good. It’s a by-the-numbers Hallmark-channel Christmas romcom, just the main characters are all gay, and I think that’s dandy. (I approve of representation in mediocre mainstream media!) Also, it’s got Kristen Stewart, Allison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Victor Garber, the brother from Schitt’s Creek, the mom from Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist; and the whole thing was written and directed by Clea DuVall. I mean, that’s as star-studded a cast as you can get for something like this!

Mr. Peabody & Sherman - A terribly formulaic CGI cartoon based on the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show shorts that manages to very carefully avoid having a meaningful message despite all the pieces being right there. To whit, the villain is a social worker convinced that Mr. Peabody, being a dog, has no business adopting a human boy, despite his other world-class qualifications. There is a wonderful racism analogy right there that would be the point of creating that entire relationship (in the original cartoons, the “boy and his dog” relationship seemed to imply that there were also other human parents) in a movie that had any interest in exploring it. I mean, Ms. Grunion’s zealotry actually works if you’re reading it as bigotry rather than any interest in protecting children. But the movie kind of glosses over that in favor of her just being nutty and/or evil and requires Peabody to act out of character to give her any power at all. (If you personally won a landmark court case allowing you to adopt, when a racist social worker gleefully announces they want to take your child, you lawyer up and don’t let them enter your home! A genius with legal training should know that!) It did have a bunch of the classic Peabody history puns, so there’s that. (I wanted a movie that didn’t require much brainpower. This fit the bill.)

Over the Moon - Much of more a “series of things that happened” than a really coherent narrative (there are a lot of shaggy dog bits and goofy unnecessary moments), but it’s very pretty. Credit to them for the cartoon food porn as much as anything. The songs are fun, but forgettable. It feels on-par for a Dreamworks CGI film.

The New Mutants - This was a perfectly capable “superpowered teenagers in more trouble than they realize” film, which ended up functioning as a coda to the X-Men franchise rather than the new kick-off it was clearly planned as. Despite the trailers, it’s not so much a horror film as a moderately scary superhero action film. (There aren’t really any “twists” that you can’t see coming from the very beginning.) There are lesbians who don’t die, and they randomly watch clips of Buffy that foreshadow things that happen in the film. Nothing amazing, but perfectly decent.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix - On one hand, this was a much better adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga than the muck they mixed into X3. On the other…it’s still not great. Scott and Jean have no chemistry, Mystique gets fridged, Quicksilver gets sidelined early, the aliens are plot devices that only ever get unreliable exposition, the overarching “public opinion of mutants” thing is badly managed and kinda unnecessary to the rest of the film (and basically means that Xavier’s only legacy was the long list of people he got killed). Logan was an ending to the Stewart/McKellen X-Men timeline that was both an excellent movie and a perfect closing note. This left the McAvoy/Fassbender timeline to end on a whimper rather than a bang. (As a side note, I’m hoping that mutants and the X-Men don’t get mixed into the MCU proper; even though I’m reasonably certain they will be. That universe is too damn busy already and the metaphor that mutants represent will be lost in a world that has aliens, gods, superheroes and “the blip” already inflicted on it.)

Holidate - A holiday romcom with the modern self-awareness that’s reasonably standard at this point and a moderate amount of gross-out and “adult” humor. It stars Emma Roberts (a poor man’s Kristen Wiig) and Luke Bracey (a poor man’s Hemsworth), but the real star power is Kristin Chenoweth as the hilarious slutty aunt. Perfectly cromulent romcom; with the common inadvertent message that you should date people who have similar interests and you’re able to be friends with.

Yes, God, Yes - A late-90s period piece about a Catholic girl discovering her sexuality and dealing with the common confusion over it that American Christian society inflicts. (She’s not even gay or anything. Just a hormonally-charged teenager.) Fortunately, she sneaks away from Christian camp and a helpful lesbian at the local bar sets her straight. The film, as far as I can tell, is heavily autobiographical on the part of the ex-Catholic writer/director. I suppose it was only a matter of time before autobiographical period pieces from people younger than me started appearing…

Naked - Rob wakes up the morning of his wedding naked in an elevator with no idea how he got there…and an hour later he’s magically back there again. I’m not generally a fan of any of the Wayans brothers, but in this case, my love of Groundhog Day loops overcame it. And it’s actually a decent script with a well-paced mystery. Loretta Devine gets to sing some gospel, which is delightful. Minka Kelly (Dawn from Titans) has a random uncredited cameo. Honestly, the biggest problem with it is that Marlon Wayans mugs like a goddamn cartoon character and I just don’t find him funny.

(There may end up being a couple more this week, but this was already really long.)

A Knight’s Tale, aka “Renn Faire: The Movie”. It’s a 90s teen sports movie, just about jousting knights in Anachronism Stew Europe. The hero is a moron, but that’s okay, because the love interest is clearly moronsexual. At 2+ hours, the movie is too long for what it is, and Jethrien complained of being bored and successfully predicted the entire last act with 45 minutes left to go. Also, I love getting Alan Tudyk a paycheck, but this was clearly before he hit his stride and they don’t give him quality material.

Venom - I can see why this movie spawned so much fanfic. The CGI is decent and the action scenes are fun, though cartoony in a similar way to the Transformers movies. (Though Riot really should have been a different color from Venom; it would have made the fight sequences with the two of them MUCH less confusing.) And it was bold of them to make Venom without Spider-Man. Really though, Tom Hardy holds the entire damn thing together: This movie wouldn’t have worked without him, because he’s one of the few actors who can sell a love story with an alien symbiote.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold - Dora has been living in the jungle with her parents and a monkey named Boots her whole life; at age 16 she joins Diego at a proper American high school and is, unsurprisingly, a giant weirdo. It works out, though, because she’s kidnapped by mercenaries who want to use her to steal her parents’ discovery of a lost Incan city (on the wrong side of the continent for Incans). This is hilarious and, while I’m not quite clear who the audience was, it works as long as you have a passing familiarity with the original show from when you or your child was a preschooler. I also found it amusing that, until the very end, the entire thing could have been “real” except for the presence of Swiper, because the mercenaries inexplicably have a talking, masked fox working for them. Jethrien’s theory is that Dora hallucinated everything after eating a ten-year-old candy bar. A Tumblr review called this “the best worst thing since Spy Kids”, and I can get behind that.

Evil Dead - The original, non-comedy low-budget baby Bruce Campbell extravaganza. Honestly, while I give them credit for making something that lasted out of a schlocky, trope-filled concept and no money…it’s not actually very good. The acting is wooden, the special effects are pretty awful, and somebody gets raped by a tree. This makes me wish there was a filmed version of the musical, though.

But I’m a Cheerleader - A bright and cheerful satire of gay conversion therapy camps, and it’s really, really queer in all the best ways. (I mean, “girl doesn’t realize she’s gay until she’s sent to ex-gay camp” is a pretty solid basis for satire, here.) This is a late-90s star-studded movie…in retrospect. Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall are the official stars (as is RuPaul) but Michelle Williams and Dante Basco are standouts in retrospect. I remember seeing this when it came out, and despite being a ridiculous mélange of stereotypes, it holds up remarkably well 20 years later.

Jennifer’s Body - This feels oddly 90s to me for a movie made in 2009; or at least the early-aughts era where indie punk rock was a thing and some people (but hardly everyone) had flip phones. I hadn’t realized Diablo Cody wrote this, but it fits very well with that I’ve seen of her style: The plot is a hacked-together mess of well-worn tropes, but it’s littered with solid dialogue and there’s probably a women’s studies thesis to be plumbed from the metatext. And while I’m not qualified to write that, I suspect it would note that the movie only needs a little light editing (basically, a ten-second scene of each murdered boy being a douchebag) to completely change the audience’s sympathies. The choice to make Needy the protagonist and Jennifer the antagonist defined the style of horror in the movie: The victims were “innocent”, so Jennifer was a monster. But at the end, no less a murderer, Needy is a hero.

The VelociPastor - Now that’s what I call schlock! It’s as terrible as you could hope for and clearly made on a $10 budget, and some of the dialogue has to be heard to be believed. That said, I’m not sure (and I don’t think the filmmakers were sure) exactly how bad they were expecting this to be, and I think that kinda hurts it. It definitely feels like something drunk college kids would make and think was brilliant enough to try to sell, but are they trying too hard or are they just right? I don’t know, that’s a decision for hooker-doctor-lawyers and the velocipastors who love them.

Equilibrium is terrible, but not good-terrible. It’s “let’s make it look like the Matrix but without any real concept behind that” terrible.

Jupiter Ascending (which I had seen before) is the product of teenage Lana Wachowski’s id with all the absurdity that produces, but remains delightfully terrible. Also, I hadn’t realized until this viewing how many cast members from Sense8 were involved.

The Lovebirds, on the other hand, is actually worth your time. The plot is fairly by-the-numbers “normal couple gets involved in a ridiculous conspiracy” comedy, but the leads are very funny people who play off of each other delightfully.

Also this weekend, since we were in Farmingdale with my parents, I pulled a bunch of circa-1996 DC annuals and prestige books to read. Most of them remain fun comics; some are clearly better-written than others. I see, in retrospect, a bunch of political subtext that was lost on me when I was 15. Also, that exercise outfits and swimsuits of the 1980s very heavily influenced comic artists of the 90s. (And JLA: Act of God, while a solid concept, remains an example of the most out-of-character “imaginary story” for practically every DC hero—like, ignoring both core character traits and also established reactions when they were depowered in-continuity.)

(I've started in on the various CW DC shows, but I suspect it'll be awhile before I finish and can review them.)