hnestlyonthesly

It took James Cameron 13 years to plagiarize the plot of one beloved young adult book series and the cinematography of Wakanda Forever, which is to say, either he spent the first twelve and a half of those years spitballing failed ideas before discovering Tamora Pierce or he had never once considered the fact that the audience who went to see the groundbreaking 3D, motion capture spectacle of his first film might have changed in its tastes, sensibilities, and politics in the intervening time. Much has been written about the cringe nature of having Kate Winslet and Sam Worthington hoot, holler, and ululate alongside a race-blind cast of blue Na’vi. I don’t have much to add except for the exquisite weirdness of seeing Kate Winslet stick out her tongue in displeasure takes me back to the days of witnessing the discovery of a local football team’s pregame warm up dance by the rest of the country, and the way that fetishcization of Pacific Island culture for Western masculinist culture felt so uncomfortable, even while so many other aspects of Pacific Island masculinity were mocked and criticized as effeminate and/or obscene. But that’s what we do, right? We pick and choose the things that we like and ignore the things that don’t fit into our preferred vision of what the world should look like. It’s why James Cameron can feel so bold about depicting pregnant Na’vi hunters while also prompting the question, why is everyone in Pandora so straight? There are so many aspects of representation and racial tropes that one could find themselves mired in while discussing this movie, that it seems more useful to just assume that we’ve all turned our brains off for three hours about the oddities of such a big budget franchise assuming no development around concepts of colonization, presenting no self-critique, and doubling down on a lot of the stereotypes that were maybe forgiven back in a time when not every video game had the same quality as Cameron’s SFX. Today there are fewer excuses. Avatar: Way of the Water takes the original **** plot of Company-Wants-to-Extract-Nondescript-Natural-Resource-So-It-Invents-Cloning/Mind Control-Technology by adding (spoiler) the ostensibly brilliant complication of Humanity-Has-Ruined-Earth-and-Needs-A-New-Planet, but this movie is not actually about that, because if it were, it would have to pit the native Na’vi against the remaining survivors of climate catastrophe, a band of innocent women and children who have no where else to go, two equally sympathetic sets of stories which necessitate coexistence or genocide. That plot would require some delicacy. Instead, this movie is more about rehashing the literal final battle scene from the first movie, but spread over a couple hours, with the character development of several youngsters to set up future films. And weirdly, talking whales? The uncanniness of experiencing full conversations in voice over, or, as is the case in WotW, subtitles–which is even more confusing because it’s unclear whether the subtitling is for the Na’vi sign language that the youngster is signing or the… whale…talking–was the first true WTF moment of this movie. The audience was palpably disturbed. Friends and I leaned out of our lounge chairs to confirm that we had all just shared the same moment. I whispered to Friend about how she was going to have to explain this deeply disturbing moment to her husband when he got back from the bathroom (the first bathroom break he had taken in a movie in the entirety of 2022). “I was on board for everything until this moment,” she said to me, or everyone in the theater, unclear, because at this moment it was obvious that everyone was reassessing their motives for having come to see the movie. Paolini’s Eragon was supposed to be a morality tale in the hubris of allowing a spoiled child publish without edit his unadulterated thoughts and feelings through the prism of fantasy. But Cameron took both of these notes presumably and then doubled down hard on talking whales. The use of telepathy as communication between rider and beast was widely described as clumsy and stupid (and I have my own preferences for why it doesn’t work). The problem is that James Cameron didn’t invent the concept of talking whales. What’s worse is he didn’t invent the concept of hyper intelligent talking whales who’ve taken a vow of pacifism which leads to an outcast. For that, you’d have to go to the author Tamora Pierce. Daja Kisubo (right) is marked as unlucky after a tragic event kills the rest of her people through no fault of her own and she fights the stigma of her misfortune throughout her story, and in yet ANOTHER Tamora Pierce book series whales are featured with the gift of speech and internal politics that prevent them from attacking ships, I am told by Tamora Pierce fan, Wife. So so much more to say but I'm hitting the character limit.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is Guy Ritchie’s latest project and in many ways it follows the formula that has made his films such a treat in the past: a star-studded ensemble, witty dialogue, and very impressive brawling. It also happens to have some twists and turns that allow you to root for the baddies from time to time and to hiss at the goodies, which is fun. Aubrey Plaza holds her own against the boys by rolling her eyes whenever she can. Jason Statham never, ever takes a punch, as if he’s contractually not allowed to, which basically amounts to him beating the **** out of an endless parade of special ops guys dressed in plain clothes like Mario having ingested a star plowing through his enemies to get to the ever-wandering McGuffin of the film, a briefcase containing… something? dangerous? (The actual threat to humanity that’s being sold at the steep, steep price of $10b is trendily stupid and the evil geniuses plot is similarly pretty dull – I mean, hey, it’s not buying up all the world’s aquifers and then making it really hot dumb, but it’s not dissimilar to that.) Really the only person who has a difficult time of it is Bugzy Malone, who gets stuck shooting people from afar like my Brother playing Call of Duty for the past ten years. Bugzy spends a lot of the movie saying stuff like, “Sounds good, boss,” and “Do you want me to get the car started, boss?” which is no way to steal the show. Josh Hartnett’s role as an action hero used as a honeypot for a criminal kingpin fan weirdly twins the plot of another film in recent memory, where x plays an action hero used as a honeypot for a criminal kingpin fan. After a little bit of online sleuthing the only two movies I can find that follow this pattern are from 2022, The Lost City of Z and more so the Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. But Friend after I mentioned this at the movie supplied Ocean’s 8 as having a similar plotline, and TVTropes talks about casting stars as stars and metacasting quite a bit, though none of them are the exact match that I am thinking of at the moment. Criticisms of the weirdnesses of the plot aside, the way in which Ritchie toys with genre scenes, the heist, the banter between the team and the banter between the rival teams, and ultimately the twist in allegiances make for a satisfying watch. The script is positively buoyant, effervescent, even. Ruse is more concern with sounding clever than being clever, which is not a knock so much as a signature of Ritchie’s later work.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

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[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

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Marlowe's script is disciplined under two hours, runs at a clip that just slightly outstrips your ability to comfortably follow, leaving you working out the character you've just met or the circumstances into which you've just been dropped. It does not treat you gently. It does not waste its breath with overlong explanation or trauma plot background. It does not always even wait for the laughter to die down before it launches itself into another brilliantly lumbering fight scene, another exquisitely weird car confessional, another unexpected meeting at a place you thought you'd never see again. For months, Friends, Wife, and I have been playing a board game which pits three detectives against a game master who controls the testimony of every NPC on the board in 1930s LA. Wife has been reading mystery novels compulsively for years, contains the motives of hundreds of paperback criminals and the B plots of dozens of dimestore novels. Everyone (except Wife) puts on terrible noir accents and grouses about the number of hats we've given to our suspects (a symbol for how well we've been able to detect their lying). We cheerfully brag about the evidence we have stashed in the trunk of our cars and ignore the complaints from one Friend about how many turns we've wasted at variously dirty-sounding nightclubs operated by the mob. So when I saw that there was going to be a film staring Neeson which might remotely capture all of that magic, I assembled the team. The corona of that shared experience hangs around our movie going experience. Phillip Marlowe (played by Liam Neeson) is an old dog, a private **** staring into the office of a much busier, better furnished office in the very first scene of the movie. The way we learn more about him is through the little we hear from his various contacts in law enforcement who caution him against pursuing this case. That slow drip of backstory is so rewarding to gather and pool as you watch him dig deeper into the rabbit hole. It reminds me in some ways of another film that took an aging actor and very consciously situated the action in the man's twilight years, Ian McKellan playing a Sherlock Holmes on his final case. For Neeson's Marlowe, his advanced years don't stop him from fighting altogether, so much as slow him down from beating the crap out of younger goons who underestimate his ability to throw a punch. Think Batman in Batman Beyond. For a noir junkie, Marlowe has everything you could want and finds ways to twist some of those standard tropes: some interesting commentaries on sexuality and race, red herrings, McGuffins, action that bears an R rating, and a plot that does not lose itself in the final act. There are no dull moments and no dead time. Upon further reflection, I know that there is inevitably going to be a measured and thoughtful critique of the Latino representation in this film: the fact that Mexico is erroneously portrayed as the crime-ridden source of sex workers and hard drugs, that the only two instances in which racial slurs are used in the movie are reserved for Latino folks, that the only Mexicans portrayed are particularly nasty thugs or the victims of those thugs. Myopic takes on southern borders should take care to note that they are inviting more circumspect writers to pull the same kind of shenanigans by shifting story locations a few thousand miles north to the 49th parallel. Would the movie have been better if it had found a way to de-center the nastiness of those flat stereotypes? Definitely, but--and I know that "but" is doing more work than some people are going to be willing to tolerate--I hope that some of the people who would otherwise be turned off by the thinness of some of the characterization of Marlowe might take interest in a subtextually **** reading of the film.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

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[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]