A Fan's Playground

I have watched just SO many bad movie musicals in the months since March. After everyone started staying home, each weekend I now spend time with a group of friends watching a bad movie musical in sync and chatting about it on a group chat. We started with the 2019 Cats and have actually managed to go downhill from there. (I think Love Never Dies is the worst one so far but there are options. There are strong cases to be made for multiple other movies.)

Anyway as part of this experience, we watched all three of Disney's Descendants movies. And I must say, they're actually.....fun? Like. Terrible in many ways, but they manage to be enjoyable in a way that, say, the 1967 Dr Dolittle could never hope to achieve. That one is INTERMINABLE.

Descendants is a franchise about the kids of the various classic Disney characters, with focus on the kids of the villains. All the villains and their kids have been imprisoned on an island that has been enchanted to prevent the use of evil magic, but over in the good kingdom of Auradon, King Beast and Queen Belle and their son Ben decide to invite 4 teens from the evil island to come to high school in Auradon to see if they are redeemable!

So the four invited VK's (or Villain Kids, and yes, they do frequently use the term "VK" within the movies, it's weird) are our main characters. We've got Evie (daughter of the Evil Queen), Mal (daughter of Maleficent), Jay (son of Jafar), and Carlos (son of Cruella de Vil). Every single character in the younger generation has a name that starts with the same letter as whatever their most famous parent is known as and it's weird. Oh, except for Lonnie, who's Mulan's daughter, and honestly that name choice is even worse than Evie for the Evil Queen's daughter.

Anyway. Over the course of the series, we discover that EVERYONE no matter their parentage can have GOOD OR EVIL within them, and you can make your own choices about what to do! A surprising moral, I'm sure.

We also discover that the lead VK, Mal, has more sexual tension with literally every single other female character than she does with her designated love interest Ben, and honestly everyone in this movie comes across as extremely queer. Despite the series being textually Very Heterosexual. Prime ship options include Mal/Evie (vibe: BEST FRIENDS), Mal/Uma (vibe: EXES WHO ARE MAD AT EACH OTHER BUT STILL INTO EACH OTHER), Jay/Harry or possibly Jay/Gil (look I kept getting Harry and Gil confused with each other and I still don't remember which is which, I'm sorry!) (vibe: JUST REALLY CUTE), and so much more. Every time a new ship option came up in one of the movies I would hop over to AO3 to look at what the fandom's doing and report the stats back to the group. I was impressed with the sheer variety AO3 has on offer for this fandom, I didn't think it would be as big as it is.

Mostly the songs in the Descendants movies are boring and forgettable, but a couple of them are bops. The best song though is Kristin Chenoweth as Maleficent having an absolute blast hamming it up in "Evil Like Me", and it's AMAZING. Kristin Chenoweth living her best life!

The movies as a whole are overly simplistic, with fairly bad writing and cheap special effects and some fairly uncreative decision making. But I found myself invested despite myself. I haven't read any of the fic yet because I don't know how to winnow the good stuff out of the chaff in this particular fandom, but I wanna. I'm here for this collection of delightful weirdos!

Ever since I heard about the new Little Women movie that was coming out I was very excited about it, because it looked like it was going to do interesting things with the adaptation.

So I decided I needed to reread the book in preparation for going to see it, since it's been a few years since I've read it. I grew up on Little Women and its sequels and love them all dearly (in full recognition of their various imperfections), but my memory is not good and I wanted to be sure that I would be able to catch what the movie was doing with respect with its choices about what to maintain/alter/remove in its adaptation.

Little Women the book is a challenging one to make a movie of, because it's so long and so many things happen in it, without there really being a single overarching plot that it can be distilled down to because it's so episodic, and I think the movie made a lot of great choices in how to make that jump from page to screen.

The thing is. The thing is! I grew up with this book, right, so of course there are very specific things that I imprinted hard on emotionally, and a movie that interprets those things differently from me is never going to work 100% for me as a viewer.

Which honestly kind of disappoints me? Because like, a) a lot of ways the movie adapts the book are SO GOOD and I was delighted by these things, and b) the thing I'm maddest about is one that, in isolation, is a narrative choice that would very much make me happy if it was about different characters than the ones I grew up with.

OKAY let's get to the spoilers!

( Read more... )

I keep trying to write a post about rock climbing but I can't make it flow smoothly. Too many different things to say, I guess. But this is my blog so I can write things that aren't perfectly framed if I want to! (I don't want to. I want to write the perfect post about my current feelings about rock climbing. But perfection is apparently out of my reach right now.)

I picked up rock climbing as a hobby a few months ago, and I've been really enjoying it. I've never exactly been a sporty type or a gym-goer or even, like, physically coordinated. But this turns out to be a type of sport that I'm capable of really enjoying doing on a regular basis. It's like you're solving a puzzle with your body, and the only competition is against your own self, your knowledge of your abilities and your goals. It's fun to do by yourself and it's also fun to go with a climbing partner, so it's very flexible.

And it's exciting seeing myself get noticeably stronger and more capable! When I started climbing I was so noodle-armed that just going down a regular vertical, runged ladder was genuinely hard work.* Now I can climb routes rated 5.9, which is GREAT for someone who only really started climbing in September.** And I have palpable biceps for the first time in my life! First step to maybe even having visible biceps someday!

Because climbing has become my latest obsession but I can't actually go to the gym THAT much, I've been doing a lot of reading about rock climbing too. Mostly things that are irrelevant to my personal experience as a beginner doing gym climbing, but it's all still interesting to me. Why yes, DO please tell me about the controversies surrounding whether a bunch of outdoor routes in this one region were altered by the developer beyond what's considered good style!

And recently I watched that documentary Free Solo, about a guy (Alex Honnold) who climbed El Capitan (a ~3,000 ft rock face) with no gear, no protection, no rope.

And can I say: WHAT THE FUCK. I get enough alarmed enough by the thought of lead climbing, since any kind of safety system other than toproping can still involve significant falls in potentially dangerous conditions.*** But free soloing is a whole other ball game. If you make any mistakes while free soloing, you die. Even if you don't make any mistakes at all you can still die!

The movie was a fascinating look into the mindset of the kind of person who approaches these ideas of risk totally differently from me. I'm reminded of when I read Ernest Shackleton's memoir South, about the kind of person who willingly subjects themselves to the dangers of an Antarctic expedition. But free soloing seems even more wild to me than Antarctic expeditions, because there's a difference between deciding to do something dangerous, and deciding to do something dangerous deliberately without the available protective measures. Shackleton and crew geared up as much as possible for the Antarctic!

After watching Free Solo I spent a possibly-unreasonable amount of time googling for and reading articles related to climbing deaths and....oh boy. What a hobby I have found for myself. Gym climbing is extremely safe (safer, in fact, than a lot of sports!) and depending how you do it outdoor climbing can be safe too. But different people make different safety-related choices based on what they value in life, and as a highly risk-averse person I really do not understand the choices some people make.

Anyway, my other take-away from Free Solo is that--well, this was my first time seeing video footage of climbing outside on real rocks instead of plastic gym handholds. And okay, fine, I GUESS outdoor climbing seems pretty appealing! Like. I do not have any desire to replicate any of Alex Honnold's life choices. I would only want to do routes that can be toproped, for safety's sake. (Or, I suppose, really short bouldering problems with good flat space for lots of crashpads beneath would also be okay). But I have spent pretty much my entire life loving to clamber about on rocks and all of a sudden I am making what should have been an obvious connection to rock climbing. I don't know how or when or if I can/should/will make this happen, but... I'm dreaming now, just a bit.

But outdoor climbing is for some uncertain possibly-future time, right now is about gym climbing! And honestly I started this at a rather unfortunate time in my life, because in 42 days I am having top surgery (NOT THAT I'M COUNTING), and it's going to be a bare minimum of 3 months and possibly lots more before I can climb again after that. So I'm going to lose, like, all of the wee bits of strength I've managed to develop. I'm less than thrilled about this. I'm putting in all this work to, like, have any extant arm strength at all, and to develop the finger muscles to be able to use more awkward/smaller/slopier holds, and so forth, and it's all for basically nothing? It's all going to wither away, and then come next spring/summer when I can climb again I'm going to be back to struggling up the boring beginner routes again. URGH. My goal: to send a 5.10a wall before it's top surgery time and I have to start from scratch again.

___


* When you surmount the bouldering wall at my gym, to get back to the floor you go down a ladder at one end. It still amazes me every time I go down that ladder now how EASY it is to descend, when I genuinely dreaded each time I had to go down it when I first started.

** I read an article talking about how making the transition from 5.9 to 5.10 is something many climbers do in their first five years, and I already have hopes of maaaybe sending a 5.10a sometime soonish! Although also grades are kind of meaningless because there's no objective measure of what's a 5.10a, so I gather there can be regional variation on what difficulty a particular grade really is, and I don't know how my gym's scales compare to other places.

*** Rock & Ice magazine has a whole regular segment where it posts videos of people's falls! One recent one has someone faceplanting the rock after a drop of many feet! Many of them in the description talk about how major injury was barely avoided! In one description of a fall I read, the BELAYER got a concussion because the climber fell on them! THIS IS DANGEROUS!

I saw Captain Marvel the other night! A fun movie. I really loved Carol, and her storyline of finding herself and freeing herself.

I also loved her interactions with Fury, their whole dynamic was AMAZINGGG, plus also her friendship with Maria was lovely and also Monica! And I want to know more about Mar-Vell, she seemed super cool too.

Also I think Carol is my not-having-to-smile-spiration. I really liked the things she did with her face. And something about this made me feel, like, weirdly comfortable in myself on my way home from the movie.

( cut for brief discussion of antisemitic tropes )

A while back postmodernismruinedme and her partner recommended the movie "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" to me and I am happy to report that it lives up to everything I was promised.

In this movie, four teenagers (the jock, the nerd boy, the bluestocking, the popular girl) accidentally get pulled into the world of a video game! To escape the game our group of main characters, none of whom really like each other to begin with, must win the game's objectives through the power of teamwork!!

To make things more complicated, each character ends up in the body of an in-game avatar that is very different from their real life self. The jock ends up in the body of the sidekick zoologist, the nerd ends up in the body of the heroic and muscular team lead, the bluestocking ends up in the body of the sexy fighter girl, and the popular girl ends up in the body of a pudgy middle aged male cartographer. They are all varyingly uncomfortable with this, and the cross-gender avatar of the popular girl is handled remarkably well for a mainstream movie. (Jack Black truly IS Bethany and I was duly impressed.)

This movie is funny and charming and about TEAMWORK and FRIENDSHIP and LEARNING TO RECOGNIZE YOUR STRENGTHS.

The two female characters have a really frank conversation early in the movie about why they don't like each other, and then after that they're just....friends who support each other and accept each other! They end up having the least fraught relationship of any of the characters! I was so pleased with this.

I was also really intrigued by the relationships of each of the characters with the bodies they ended up in. It's differently challenging for all of them, and Bethany (the image-obsessed popular girl who's put in a male avatar) honestly handles it the best of all of them. She's just unapologetically herself and for the most part doesn't let herself get awkwarded out by how she would be perceived in this other body.

Meanwhile Fridge (the jock) clearly feels emasculated by the very-non-jock body he ends up in. And Spencer (the nerd boy) seems to enjoy being in the body of Dwayne The Rock Johnson but also feels disconnected from the body: he knows it's not him, and admires it in a way that's clearly seeing the body from the outside rather than truly inhabiting it. And Martha (the bluestocking) has no clue how to handle the sexy persona she's been put into and hates how naked she feels in her costume.

So it was all a really interesting exploration of embodiment and what it means to feel at home in your body and how much is your body really you versus just being the vessel you're housed in. While still being a fun ridiculous actiony movie!

When I finished the movie, I of course immediately went to AO3 and was pleasantly surprised that there's actually more than just a couple extant fics in the fandom. So I was able to find a number of fics I enjoyed! HOWEVER, what I ended the movie wanting most of all was something that I only found a very tiny amount of in one short fic.

( cut for spoilers as I describe the plot point in the movie that leads to what I want from fic )

Ocean's 8 is everything I ever wanted out of a heist movie: the whole team is women, everyone is very good at what they do, there are large quantities of gay vibes, and the plot wasn't too stressful. Delightful and satisfying.

(Also: THANK YOU MOVIE for giving everyone different enough looks that even though I'm pretty faceblind I could TELL THE CHARACTERS APART. I mean, mostly. Daphne and Debbie are both white women with long brown hair so there were a couple scenes when I was confused about which character I was seeing, but I recognize that this is a me problem.)

I saw Black Panther last night, and yup, everyone's right, it's amazing. I went to see it with both my mother and my father, and I honestly don't remember the last time there's been a movie where the three of our tastes intersected (me and mom will watch historical movies about women, me and dad will watch action movies, mom and dad will watch biopics and documentaries.) Mom decided to go see this movie despite the action because of the African content which she'd heard great things about, and she ended up enjoying it! She said she likes movies with good characters and good morals and that this one held up on those fronts.

And yeah I agree with her about the good characters and morals! It was greattt. So many fascinating characters who it was really fun to see play off each other. Shuri was my favourite, and I absolutely loved the clear sibling relationship between her and T'Challa. I also unexpectedly adored M'Baku, who I totally wasn't expecting to have as much of a role as he did. And Okoye and Nakia were amazing. I want to know more about all of the women in this movie because they were all GREAT.

And the moral questions the movie was struggling with are real and important ones. ( cut for spoilers )

On a more frivolous note, it was really cool to be watching a movie where Basotho blankets are heavily featured. My family lived in Lesotho for a few years when I was a wee kid so to us these blankets are normal, but they are literally never depicted anywhere in popular media and culture. I actually own one myself: the maize design, in blue, with yellow pinstripes. I don't think I saw anyone in the movie wearing exactly the same design as the one I own, but some came very close!

Also the existence of those blankets within Wakandan fashion makes me VERY CURIOUS about the specifics of Wakandan history, because the blankets only began to be a thing in Basotho culture in the late 19th century, long after Wakanda was founded and settled, so how did this late-developing piece of traditional clothing make its way into Wakanda? I JUST REALLY WANT TO KNOW.

So I saw the star wars movie and I have conflicted feelings.

Before going, I'd seen a lot of disparate reviews: some people loved it, some people despised it, some people were conflicted, some people thought it was okayish. Even after trying to analyze based on who was saying what, I was unable to triangulate what I would actually think of it all myself. I had no clue where I would fall in that spectrum.

Well, now I know. Sigh. I was really hoping it would be a movie where I could just be happy with it. There were a lot of things it did well! But a couple things kind of ruin the movie for me.

( things I didn't like )

( things I did like )

I am not really cut out for caring about WIP canons. Too much chance to feel betrayed by the narrative, especially if it's a canon with multiple PTB instead of just a single author/creator whose choices you can (hopefully) learn to trust over time (or at least learn to know what kind of choices to anticipate from that author/creator). But in a canon like Star Wars there's endless room for the canon to do new things I don't like.

Only ever joining old dead fandoms has its problems too (few people to squee with, little-to-no new fannish content) but at least the entirety of canon is already there, lumps and all, for you to know what you're getting into before you get overly attached.

(Honestly Les Miserables book fandom was the best. Zero new canon is possible because the author is extremely dead, new adaptations can provide things to draw from but also things you can feel free to reject because they're not really canon, and the 2012 movie caused a large resurgence in fellow fans to fan with.)

I hadn't really been planning on going to see Wonder Woman because I've been feeling kind of burned out on superhero movies, but then the reactions started to get posted over the last few days, and seeing so many people be enthusiastic about this movie made me go WELL FINE and go and see it.

AND LO IT WAS GREAT.

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This weekend was a bachelorette weekend for a friend of mine. It was great fun! And of course we watched some movies of the sort that one watches at events like this. Namely: the two Magic Mike movies.

I'd been kinda interested in seeing them for a while, given the type of reaction I saw a lot of people having to these movies, but also it didn't ever seem like a priority. I mean, I'm not exactly the correct audience for a pair of movies where a great deal of the point is to watch men being sexily mostly-naked.

So hey, now I've seen them. And turns out I did mostly like them!

The original movie, Magic Mike....well, people are right in saying it's not as good as the second one. There's a lot more angst and drama and attempt at a plot. I spent most of the movie wanting Adam to just shut up and go away, and he's one of the main characters, and the main driver of plot. But I did care a lot about Mike (and about Brooke) despite myself.

( cut for thematic spoilers but not really plot spoilers )

The second movie, Magic Mike XXL is not nearly so confused about what point it's trying to make. This is a movie where stripping is unapologetically great if that's something you want to be doing. And you know what, watching the stripping was enjoyable even though I have no personal interest in naked bodies or sex - I like watching people be competent at things, and there were some pretty competent strippers in these movies!

HOWEVER: The best thing hands-down about this movie to me is definitely Rome. She's just so great? Completely poised and in control of every situation she finds herself in. Apparently the role was originally written for a male actor and CAN I JUST SAY how glad I am that they decided to switch that up. Good work movie, A+ secondary character choices here.

But also, all through the movie I just kept finding myself giggling in delight because I couldn't believe that the kinds of things this movie chose to focus on were things that a real life actual hollywood movie would choose to focus on. It was an experience. And one I'm glad to have had.

(even though I have no real interest in ever rewatching either of these movies.)