Posts Tagged ‘movie reviews’
[REVIEW] X-Men: Apocalypse
I finally caught X-Men: Apocalypse Wednesday, sitting down in the VIP theatre at the Yonge-Dundas Cineplex Cinemas for more than two and a half hours with a pint and plenty of expectation.
How was it? Broadly, I agree with Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men called when they call X-Men: Apocalypse as a a “heartily enjoyable train wreck”. I liked Apocalypse and his horsemen, but I found the threat from Apocalypse depersonalized and unsatisfying. The heart and energy of the film lies in the characters, in Jean Grey and Cyclops and Nightcrawler and Storm and even Jubilee. (This last deserved more coverage.) We see how these young people end up coming to terms with their mutantcy and coming together as a team.
Plus, Quicksilver’s requisite of high-speed wackiness is great. Props to Singer for including “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”!
One thing I especially liked was the emphasis on Jean Grey’s agency. For too long, in the comics and even in the movies, Jean Grey is depicted as a victim of her powers, as someone who needs to have her powers controlled by others. No spoilers, but in X-Men: Apocalypse we see her embracing her powers, not being left to be made a victim of them as other characters (men, mainly) watch. This is refreshing.
[LINK] “Imperator Furiosa: The Hero We Need”
Science-fiction author David Mack, known especially to readers of Star Trek novels, posted yesterday on his blog an excellent extended analysis of the story of Mad Max: Fury Road. He makes the argument that this film is exceptional, not only for the character of Imperator Furiosa, but for the way it builds its story.
mperator Furiosa towers above most other action-movie heroes because her character and the story of Fury Road subvert a longstanding, worn-out Hollywood action-movie paradigm—but not the one you might think. The real genius of Fury Road isn’t that its hero is a woman. It’s that the hero is the one actually driving the story in the first place.
Furiosa’s prominence in the movie has been making some “men’s rights activists” (MRAs) apoplectic, leading them to complain the Mad Max franchise was hijacked for a feminist agenda, that they were tricked by cool explosions and a freak with a flame-throwing electric guitar into watching a feminist manifesto in which Max has been emasculated. They’re at least partly wrong.
A key factor in what’s perplexing the MRAs is that Imperator Furiosa is the protagonist and hero of Fury Road, but here’s the catch: she is not the movie’s main character. Max Rockatansky (played by Tom Hardy) is not a sidekick in Fury Road, contrary to this post by Rob Bricken on io9. Max is undeniably Fury Road’s main character, its point-of-view character. He is the only character to whose inner life we are privy; he is our narrator. That said, it is true he is neither the protagonist nor the hero of Fury Road, but these aren’t bad things. They aren’t even uncommon in movies.
Excellent stuff. I really must go see this one myself.
[CAT] “Cats’ world domination continues With TIFF’s Just for Cats Fest”
NOW Toronto Aidan Johnston reports on an upcoming cat-themed film festival here in Toronto, on the 17th of April.
Humanity has a long and storied history of giving cats an adoring amount of attention for accomplishing absolutely nothing. From Egyptian worship to the subject of the second longest-running Broadway musical of all time, a musical called Cats about cats singing about other cats, we just can’t seem to get enough of our oddly endearing feline overlords.
Now that the internet has become a litter box of cats doing silly things, cat videos have become a new art form unto themselves. But the genre is cluttered. That’s where TIFF programmer Magali Simard, who will be presenting the Just for Cats Film Festival on April 17 in partnership with the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, comes in.
[. . .]
The selected videos for the festival come from submissions to the Walker Arts Centre in Minneapolis, where the festival debuts. “It will go on to tour other cities in Canada after a week launch here,” Magali explains. “It’s a full event. There’s a red carpet with cats up for adoption from the Humane Society.” The event is also a fundraiser.