Fantastic Beasts, all over the place

(archived from tumblr)

Does anybody else ever think about how Fantastic Beasts would have been a much shorter movie with a much different ending if the villain hadn’t been such a drama king?  I mean, we eventually find out that he wants an obscurial because he wants to use them to trash the city in a big enough way that the wizarding community is outed good and proper, no going back. 

Of course, given that this is Prohibition-Era New York City, a cloud of black malice turned loose on the infrastructure and inhabitants is just as likely written off as some new chemical weapon or bomb by anyone not on-scene for it.

You know what’s not easily written off as either of those things?  A suitcase full of fucking monsters.

I mean, it’s not as grand or as poetic or as dignified as using the repressed power of an abused child to metaphorically bring magic out of the shadows, but snagging Newt’s briefcase as evidence and then hoofing it downtown to just flip it over and shake everything out into the middle of Times Square while yelling “Obliviate this, you bastards!” would do the trick just as thoroughly and with a lot more panache.

You’d have the added bonus of watching all the Junior Gestapo aurors flapping around trying to catch magic moths and herd huge glowing rhinoceroses and getting robbed blind by kleptomaniac echidnas while screaming “This isn’t real!  This isn’t really happening!” at stray muggles because you can’t take care of both things at the same time.

The Good Place

(archived from tumblr)

So pleased with that one little bit in the season one finale of The Good Place, where Eleanor, who’s been leaning on the weirdly-appreciative compliments toward Tahani all season, has that moment of honesty where she realizes and admits that okay, she actually might be into Tahani.  This might not just be her not knowing how to friend good or her going for physical compliments because she’s got the socialization skills of a rabid muskrat, this might be her finally learning how to recognize different shades in the close friendships and interdependencies she’s spent her entire life running from.

Like, I get the frustration with shows where a character is dead to rights bi or pan but “doesn’t like labels” or is just “working through some things” or whatever the chickenshit excuse of the week is, or has suddenly and dramatically switched orientations because the writers are hacks.

But there also needs to be space for honestly-written characters who are figuring things out about themselves or coming to grips with things they’ve wanted but never thought they could/should have as a facet of personal growth and narrative arc.  And I think The Good Place got it right this time.

Real mad about La La Land

(archived from tumblr)

I finally got around to watching La La Land, and I’m just extremely confused about everything. 

Like, I feel like I just spent two hours having a one-sided argument with a film written by an AI that was given a stack of musicals and late-’90s/early-’00s indie romdrams and no other reference material.

Like, I’m mad at the opening and closing musical numbers because they’re evidence that somebody on the project knew what the fuck they were doing, and I’m mad at the musical number that didn’t happen on the pier.

Like, I can’t believe how much screentime they devoted to Seb’s uninspired piano-playing and compared to Mia’s nigh-zero amounts of screentime actually acting. 

Not that I didn’t appreciate the climactic audition veering into an impressionistic interlude meant to convey the experience of watching her audition!  In a movie where we got to see her perform, or in a movie where every time Seb’s fingers hit the keyboard we cut to his internal state, it would have been a nice touch.  But we spend the whole movie watching him play as an objective observer, and we spend maybe a grand total of two minutes watching Mia act as the same, and every last second of it is to show us her professional humiliation.

I’m just basically mad about the whole thing, because I genuinely don’t know what the fuck the movie was trying to make me feel and I’m not sure the movie knew either.

fursasaida replied to your post: I finally got around to watching La La Land, and...

i’m sorry i’ll stop i just. hate it. also please note that chazelle cannot write his way out of a scene with escalating tension. he escalates and escalates and doesn’t know how to dismount so he just has there be a loud noise or a small fire to end it. he does it twice in la la land and it’s BUSH LEAGUE

Hahaha no, please, I spent two hours over dinner last night dissecting every single thing about this movie that either really disappointed me or that I hated and thought objectively sucked.

Like, why did the scene on the pier not turn into another full musical number with all the other couples dancing in the sunset?  That was set up to be a barn-burner echoing the opening number, and he just. walks. away.

Why have the Rebel Without A Cause film melt when they almost kiss instead of just transporting them right from a completed kiss into the planetarium fantasia number, which would help establish the film’s idiom of cutting from the actual to the moment’s emotional impression a la Mia’s Big Audition and Mia’s Big What-If Moment? (I cannot come up with a scene where the movie did this with Seb, which is now bugging me, because it means we’re again consistently objectively watching Seb while just getting cut-aways and fantasies for Mia.)

Why did the first ten minutes of the film follow Mia only to pull the rug out from under us and turn into Seb’s story?  If they were going to do that, why couldn’t they come up with better piano-playing in a movie that literally hinged on him being the absolute bestest jazz-pianoman in the state? 

If your male lead’s dancing is really uninspired and you don’t want to recast, why not do the obvious and litter the background with supporting dancers to help cover it up?  So many of the plot-point dance numbers are just them and it leaves him stranded and flopping like the emotionally detached asshole his character is, except it’s also visually unappealing which I have to assume was unintentional in a film that was 99% aesthetics.

I actually did like the smoke detector denouement to the relationship-ending argument that Seb is essentially having with himself because we’re never shown Mia doing 90% of the shit he accuses her of doing but it’s absolutely a fair description of his own insecurities? (Side point: Who’d have thought deciding that you’re the one who can fix a woman’s hatred of jazz would turn into an unallayed, lingering suspicion that she’s just humoring you when she says she loves it now?  Who. would. have. thought. it.  Hmm.)  I thought it was pretty fitting that he’s burning down whatever they had together without even seeming to notice it, then left dealing with the smoking wreckage while she just gets the fuck out of Dodge.  But I also feel like the performance didn’t necessarily incorporate the smoke detector going off as a lightbulb moment for him, like him realizing he just said something he couldn’t take back, so it didn’t land like it could have.

I also did appreciate the way Mia’s Big What-If featured him doing everything right--don’t blow her off when she tries to compliment you, don’t accept a gig you’re deeply conflicted about just to stew over it the entire time, hustle for her thing instead of treating it like a cute sideline until it’s too late--in a way we know he wasn’t capable of at the time.  I don’t know if that’s what they were trying to communicate, but that seemed like a readily available interpretation, the 20/20 hindsight where you realize you made things a lot harder for yourself than they should have been and ruined something that could have been great because you were too self-absorbed to realize what a dick you were being.

(Like Chazelle’s ex is watching it and going, “Yes, congratulations, if you’d been a completely different person instead of the self-sabotaging dickhead you were, we’d still be together.  Also, so long as we’re going back in time with our current knowledge, I’d have bought stock in Google and Amazon before they were big and we’d be billionaires.”)

Like, it’s a film that really could have been good, and it just left all that potential on the table.  I don’t understand what the fuck happened there at all.

Roaches

(archived from tumblr)

The worst thing about waking up in the middle of the night and going to do something and being confronted with a three-inch-long paleolithic monster roach is that that’s it.  There’s no going back to sleep. 

Either you

• a) refuse to deal with this because it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning and spend the rest of your night/week/life tensing and breaking into a cold sweat at every unknown rustle and crinkle and skritch because goddammit it’s the roach

or

• b) get into a fucking fight to the death with the damned thing that you’ll be lucky to get out of without it taking flight right into your face, but one thing’s for sure, you’re going to be too jacked to go back to sleep afterwards.

And the roach knows it. 

You can see it in the way they stare at you with their little roach eyes and wave their also-three-inch-long antennae at you.  You turned on the lights and spotted them licking your washcloth, and now it’s High Noon at the OK Corral and both of you are waiting for the other one to reach for it. 

Like, you’re Godzilla to their Samurai Jack, but you’re also flailing around an environment where you’re the one that suffers if anything breaks or gets damaged, and they’ve got six arms and wings and no problem going out in a blaze of glory.

And before anybody says “Well, you’re just exaggerating for comedic effect,” let me tell you something, buddy: I am not. 

This is a universal experience, when you live in areas with a certain sort of roach.  You wake up your roommates/loved ones/neighbors with a racket that’s only reasonable if you’re attempting to beat somebody to death with their own shoes and they say “What the hell?”, if your answer is “There was a roach!” the only further question will be “Well, did you get it?”.  God help you if the answer is no.