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surpriserose · 2 years

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Chris can u pretty pretty please fan cast X/1999 🥺🥺🥺🥺

I hate this i hate that i woke up and was like yeah ive got ideas >:(

Kamui is timothee chalamet everyone's favorite edgeboy and nothing else kamui is just all edge here hes not allowed to develop as a character or be nonbinary sorry i got attached to agender kamui so much

Fuuma is everyones second favorite edgy boy Robert Pattinson who is literally giving it his all and thats probably too much so honestly? He can probably pull of fuuma theyre both weirdos

Kotori probably still dies but there are so many cringey romantic flashbacks with her and kamui as kamui is training (in a montage set to like imagine dragons or something) so like fuck it lets go with kaitlyn dever the dear evan hansen lady again she can get her check and get out

Hinoto oh god im trying to avoid spoilers for these but like....im actually putting reese Witherspoon here because i remembered who i wanted for karen so BUT ANYWAYS they do it its split its every bad DID movie youve ever seen im so sorry

Arashi okay i have a vision here this time they swap arashi and soratas genders arashi is now a dude and sorata is a lady for pretty much no reason but omg sword? Lets make arashi a man so they can be another stoic edgy boy for the collection. I think they get simu liu fress off the marvel presses and he gets absolutely nothing to work with because they looked at arashi and were like okay theyre just 😐 100% of the time and thats theyre only deal

Sorata is awkwafina because they do let sorata be comic relief but also thats all they are now but also theyre not funny at all </3 except theyre also kamuis new love interest 🥺🥺🥺 and they kiss at the climax where the power of love saves the day and everyone hugs it out and like idk they solve climate change. Also they let sorata be bi but its in blink and you miss it stuff like the shit they pulled with loki and everyone calls it amazing representation

Karen is anya taylor joy and they cannot handle her being a sex worker well AT ALL she has to be saved by motherhood to nataku 🥺🥺🥺🥺 where she quits her job and like idk starts a daycare or some shit in the epilogue

Subaru god i just want to cast nick Robinson from love simon again sorry hes typecast as milquetoast white gay to me which is what they make subaru his entire personality is pining after Seishirou like hes not even really kamuis brother figure hes just some guy here :(

Yuzuriha and aoki dont exist sorry they have to make cuts somewhere </3

Nataku is brianna hildebrand because when you suggested the hollywood nonbinary is a cis girl with a buzzcut she came to mind because she was negasonic teenage warhead in deadpool so xyqvzu1vziwjs they probably let nataku be nonbinary but they dont say it and probably use she/her pronouns more than half the time and they definitely 100% have karen call them her daughter at some point

Seishirou is armie hammer hes got experience with predatory age gap gay relationships after call me by your name so hes getting typecasted now too and because timothee chalamet his former co star is on the cast kamui...kamui x Seishirou becomes popular online :(

Kanoe....and this is the big one...kanoe is scarlett Johansson who is managing somehow to whitewash harder than the rest of the white cast. I think they keep all her sexy dresses and flirting with ppl and shit but like...and this one hurts...they make her a predatory lesbian stereotype with satsuki and shes the big bad irredeemable villain they kill to solve climate change or whatever and then satsuki marries yuto and they live happily ever after in a big old nuclear family

Satsuki is kristen wiig basically just being cheetah from wonder woman 1984 all over again and its worse this time and shes basically just there so kanoe can be a big old evil lesbian to a cishet woman and they definitely make jokes like just because i have short hair doesnt mean im a lesbian 🤪🤪🤪 and everyone insists this cant be homophobic because they made seisub canon and thats gay so!!!

Yuto is here i was gonna cut him but hes satsukis love interest and he definitely defects out of love for satsuki and he wants to kill kanoe to get her away from satsuki and its portrayed as really heroic. It doesnt matter who he is he sucks so like lets go with chris evans. Also they make a ton of aquaman jokes.

They cut the rest of the dragons of earth sorry

Other points

They completely cut all the references to shrines and stuff like sorata being Buddhist and basically just make it a standard magic system EXCEPT for arashi because they didnt whitewash them which ends up being worse than if they never tried at all

I do think m night shyamalan would kill to direct this

No one dies except kanoe and maaaybe fuuma if fuuma dies he redeems himself right before the end so its so sad like think kylo ren or some shit

Takes place 100% in new york

Add your own to make it worse :)

#Clamp #X/1999 #Ask to tag #Im so sorry #Fancast #Idk i feel like i should have a tag for these since ppl keep asking me for them wy2vswinslq

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charliejrogers · 3 years

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Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - Review & Analysis

Here’s a non-controversial statement: 2017’s Wonder Woman is a legitimately great film (if you discount the last act’s boring battle). A fun, yet emotional anti-war tale with a great period aesthetic. What elevated it from greatness was its starkly bleak reveal that Ares does not start man’s wars, but he merely gives humans ideas for how to instigate them. Ultimately, it is Man who holds responsibility for our own destruction, and despite this Wonder Woman still chooses to help us poor creatures. Cool themes, cool hero, cool movie.

Wonder Woman 1984 shares the main character from its 2017 forerunner, as well as its dedication to recreating a particular period aesthetic (here the 1980s), but the brilliant writing from the first film is gone. The main themes are essentially… “be careful what you wish for” and “winners never cheat; cheaters never win.” Not the most grand and interesting follow-up to the prior film’s genuine insight into human nature.

But that’s OK. I’m really not sure why this movie is getting so much flak online. If DC’s recent prior history with filmmaking should have taught us anything, it’s that 2017’s Wonder Woman was a fluke. Remember that this is the same studio that brought us the outstanding climax to Batman vs. Superman where one grown man learns that another grown man’s mother is also named Martha. Oh, and did we all just forget that Justice League is one of the worst movies we have all collectively ever seen?

So let’s not be too hard on WW84 for not meeting the quality of 2017’s Wonder Woman. Few comic book movies can. In the more fair comparison to other movies in the DCEU, it sits below Shazam! and Aquaman, and just a smidge below Birds of Prey, but certainly above Suicide Squad, and then literally leaps and bounds over every other movie they’ve made.

Let’s start with the good. Honestly, despite my gripes about the themes of the movie not being very profound, I found the story to be interesting. The movie centers around Diana Prince (Gal Gadot in her role as an archaeologist for the Smithsonian and not as Wonder Woman) stumbling upon an ancient stone whose inscription invites people who hold the stone to make a wish. No one takes it really seriously at first, so two people make wishes without thinking they could come true. The first person is Diana herself who wishes to bring her boyfriend (whom she only knew for about a week, mind you) from the dead. As a reminder from the first film, her boyfriend Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) had died nearly 70 years prior to the start of this film in a dramatic, sacrificial, world-saving act. Apparently, Diana hasn’t moved on at all from the 1910s and still considers her short-time lover to be her forever lover. She’s not really a human and did not grow up a human, so I think we can forgive her for not moving on… but it is weird to imagine that Diana somehow works at the Smithsonian (without going to college? Or did she?) without developing any friends or interest in life. Wouldn’t she have moved on... like a little bit?

Anyways, she wants her boyfriend back, and that’s wish #1. Wish #2 comes from new character Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig… who I am shocked to find is 47 years old! She looks fantastic and far younger in this film). Were Barbara a man, the way she is treated by her colleagues would put them in the stereotypical role of a future school shooter. Barbara is a brilliant gemologist for the Smithsonian, but goes completely unrecognized for her brilliance. She is shy and unconfident, and subsequently people frequently forget that they have even met her. Add on to that the fact that she has to work in the same office as Wonder Woman, and her loneliness and subjective feelings of unattractiveness increase as male employees drool over Diana while they ignore and mock Barbara. Therefore, we would forgive her for having a chip on her shoulder. Yet, for all this, Wiig avoids playing her as an angry, emo goth. Barbara kinda has this air about her of “Well, this is just how life is, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.” Given the character’s lack of self-confidence and lack of social grace, it at times seemed like Wiig was just reprising her old SNL character, Penelope, the socially awkward one-upper. But that’s not fair to her character. Wiig portrays Barbara with an earnest goodness to her. She’s one of those people who when allowed to talk one-on-one proves to be more eloquent and interesting than you could have imagine. Far from being angrily envious of Diana’s confidence and beauty, she’s more sadly jealous. Naturally, then, she wishes on the stone to be more like Diana… unaware that this wish might have some unintended benefits.

But then, there’s a third key character to the film (and a third wishmaker), the main villain Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal). I cannot tell you if this was a good character or not… and I cannot tell you whether the imperfections of the character are more due to the film’s writing or Pascal’s performance. Lord is another loser, and like Barbara, his “loser” status is the result of being a victim of America’s prejudicial attitudes. But whereas Barbara fell victim to sexism, Lord falls victim to racism. Hispanic in origin, Lord grew up in America with an abusive father at home and racist classmates at school. Beaten down from an early age, all he wants in life is to make a name for himself, to prove he’s not a loser. In a clever twist, Lord (the person who originally ordered the wish stone to come to America before it was confiscated by the FBI and sent to the Smithsonian for analysis) does not simply use the stone to wish for riches and power… he wishes to BECOME the stone. That way, he can get nearly infinite wishes so long as he can con the people around him to wish things for him.

The scenes of Max Lord as a flawed human who just wants to not be a loser show Pascal giving a great performance as a human being at the ends of desperation. The scenes of Max Lord the supervillain are… not good. In a long string of over-the-top, eccentric, hyperconfident supervillains in countless superhero movies, Pascal’s Lord is just not interesting. In fact, he is literally a weak character. He cannot fight for himself as his body is crumbling (a side effect of wishing to become a stone). Furthermore, his initially grounded motivations to finally be respected and successful seem to be just utterly lost by the end of the film when he just wishes for world chaos… only then to turn around and declare undying love for his son. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Failure to understand a character’s motivations casts a shadow over Barbara’s character arc as well. It is explained that the wish stone takes something in return for granting someone their wish. So as payment for bringing Steve Trevor back to life, Diana loses some of her strength. Still… this strains to fully explain why Barbara, after gaining Wonder Woman-like strength, turns into a walking humanoid cheetah (complete with bad CGI like she walked straight out of the cast of 2019’s Cats.) Like I get that she lost some of her humanity and morality in exchange for strength… but Cheetah girl seems like a little much. And though initially it is fun to see Wiig get to play Barbara as a confident and sexy woman who fights back against the patriarchy, the movie (I think) unfairly pushes her into the villain role. In my opinion, she should be treated as a tragic character, something akin to a Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, as her villainous tendencies are not really her fault. She literally had the part of her that cares about other humans taken away from her when she naively and innocently wished to be like Diana. Instead, the movie has Diana lecture her that she shouldn’t be so evil. She literally can’t, lady! Stop being so hard on her! In any case, it seems like a failed opportunity to generate sympathy for a genuinely likable character who tragically becomes a villain not through her own accord.

That failure to create genuine emotions extends to Diana’s story as well. As soon as Steve is resurrected, you know by the movie’s end he will be dead again. There’s no other way this movie ends. Yet, the fact that Diana is so stubborn in refusing to give up Steve makes it hard to sympathize with her. She is simply being selfish, making her eventual decision to say goodbye to Steve feel more like her finally doing the right (and obvious) thing, and not some heartbreaking decision. Also the fact that seemingly Diana hasn’t even tried to move on in the last seventy years doesn’t help matters for me: it more just feels like a lazy way to write in Chris Pine’s popular character into the second movie. The move certainly weakens the idea of Diana as a strong, independent woman by making her emotionally stunted and crippled for the last 70 years. It would have been a much more satisfying (and daring) choice if Diana had moved on from Steve emotionally and had to deal with the guilt of having brought him back by accident, particularly if he didn’t want to go back to being dead. Instead... Steve knows he has to go back and Diana feels no guilt keeping him around. It’s weak character writing.

These poor choices I contrast with two of my favorite TV shows that demonstrate perfectly how former lovers who miraculously reunite eventually have to say goodbye for good: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jane the Virgin. For risk of spoilers to those still watching Jane, I’ll stick to the Buffy example. There’s an episode of Buffy (though technically an episode of the spin-off show Angel) where Buffy and her vampire lover Angel are fresh off their recent and tumultuous break-up, but through some dark magic that neither seeks out, they are given the opportunity to live a life where Angel isn’t actually a vampire and their love can be fully expressed. Yet, in the end, Angel opts to give up his life as a human and return to being a vampire. The choice is so moving precisely because (due to circumstances I cannot begin to explain) in choosing to give up his life with Buffy, he saves her life as well. Whereas in this movie, Diana choosing to let Steve go is really just her choosing to undo her choice to essentially cheat death. Angel, however, is actively choosing to give up a life of happiness he never wished for but was just given on a silver platter, and will now live in a world where his lover will never know his selfless act and will go on hating him. It’s heartbreaking in a way Wonder Woman dreams it could be.

And not to get too Buffy-heavy… but that show also deals with the emotional consequences of being ripped out of the afterlife much better than this movie. Steve just kinda unrealistically adapts to being alive again in all of five minutes. If, perhaps, from the start he questioned why he was there and hinted to Diana that something was wrong, the emotional aspect of this story, the doomed nature, the feeling of “this is the last chance we’ll have together” could have made this a stronger movie. I wanted to find myself crying when Diana finally says bye to Steve, and I was no where close to that. Gal Gadot shares at least part of the blame. She’s a pretty wooden actress. It’s something I noticed in 2017’s Wonder Woman, but in that movie she was supposed to be a fish out of water so her stilted presence seemed appropriate. Here, where she’s supposedly become an assimilated American for 70 years… it is just bad acting.

Anyways, another aspect of this film that was lacking were the visuals. The bad CGI of Barbara as Cheetah is just scratching the surface here. The opening flashback to Diana as a girl performing in the Amazonian Olympics just… looks fake. I don’t know. The reliance on CGI over practical effects is clear and distracting. It’s only worse in the subsequent scene where Wonder Woman stops a theft from occurring in a mall. The effects are just bad. Like passable for a film in the 1990s or early 2000s. But for a 2020 blockbuster, it’s noticeably bad. And already the scene where Wonder Woman is running towards the camera with a weird green screen behind her seems to have become a meme given just how weird it looks.

And yet, for all the negatives I’ve listed, this is a decent action flick. There’s even some nice set pieces like the one in the White House. As little as I liked Max Lord as a supervillain, I found figuring out the other half of each of his various Monkey Paw wishes (i.e. the downside of each wish) to be clever. unfortunately, each of the main three characters fails to have a story line that takes full advantage of their emotional potential, or they are just poorly acted. With few exceptions, the film eschews “fun” in favor of “seriousness.” Really the only exception is, as in the first film, the chemistry between Pine and Gadot. Their chemistry makes for some of the movie’s best moments, like when Wonder Woman makes the plane they’re flying in invisible and the pair flies over fireworks on the fourth of July. But that sense of whimsy in their scenes is largely absent from the rest of the film. This is particularly true of the action sequences, especially those at the climax. The seriousness makes them rather boring. Really, I’m comparing these action scenes with the last half hour or so of Birds of Prey which really set the bar for superhero movie fight choreography. So in the end, it’s overall an OK movie. It certainly isn’t as bad as others make it out to be, but I cannot believe I’m saying this… in 2020 if you’re in the mood for a fun superhero movie, you’re better off with the Suicide Squad sequel than the Wonder Woman sequel.

**/ (Two and a half stars out of 4)

#wonder woman #ww84 #wonder woman 1984 #gal gadot #patty jenkins #chris pine #kristen wiig #pedro pascal

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shadowlineswriting · 7 years

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L’Engle

Madeline L’Engle is one of the most interesting authors I’ve come across. She died a few years ago (awful!) but her legacy will last for decades, maybe centuries, to come. She’s written a ton of books, but perhaps her most famous is her Time Quintet, which is the series we’ll discuss today.

It consists of the following books:

A Wrinkle in Time

A Wind in the Door

A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Many Waters

An Acceptable Time

That’s the order in which they are supposed to be read, but generally I switch A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters so things are chronological.

A brief overview:

The book is about the Murry family. The father and mother are both PhDs; Mr. Murry is a physicist and Mrs. Murry is a biologist. They have four children: Meg, twins Sandy and Dennys, and Charles Wallace.

Meg takes her responsibility as the oldest sibling very seriously. She struggles a lot with her life because she has no friends and she’s terrible at school. She questions everything and grows frustrated with inadequate answers. Her only real friend is her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, even though they have almost a decade between their ages. Later, we learn that the reason Meg struggled so much with school is because she’s also a genius--she knows the end answers, but can’t show how to get there and has absolutely no common sense, hence the trouble with school. You need her to solve an equation using quantum mechanics when she’s 11 years old? No problem. Need her to remember a song lyric? Better ask someone else.

Sandy and Dennys are the only “normal” people in the family. Even though they have a high level of intelligence as well, they tend to play sports and hang out with friends and play with their dog like normal boys do. In the real world they’re considered unusually smart, but in comparison to their parents and Meg, they’re just average. They like it that way, though. The boys are very sweet and stick up for their family on numerous occasions.

That brings us to Charles Wallace. He actually puts his parents to shame with his intellect. Many people in their little town believe Charles Wallace is mute, but Charles Wallace stays quiet in public because at four years old, he has the vocabulary of a graduate student. He doesn’t like to make people uncomfortable...so, he just doesn’t really say anything. Charles Wallace is very sensitive to his family, especially his mother and Meg, and there are frequently times when he can sense what they are feeling (though he’s quick to say that he CANNOT read minds. He can just...feel them).

One of the reasons I love this series is because you get a strong sense of characterization. However, even though we’re dealing with a family of prodigies, L’Engle writes them in a way that they are still totally human and they act like a normal family. In fact, if they didn’t have such vast vocabularies and discuss the space/time continuum at the dinner table, you’d never know they aren’t normal.

The Murry family go on a ton of adventures in this series. A quick synopsis of each book:

A Wrinkle in Time--This is my favorite of the books so I may get carried away. The book begins with the family being a little depressed because Mr. Murry is gone. And I don’t mean on vacation. He was there one day and simply wasn’t the next. It’s been over a year (possibly two, I can’t remember) since he left. They haven’t heard from him in all that time. No one knows where he is, not even his coworkers, not even his wife. This is very hard on the family, but they maintain that he didn’t leave them leave them and that he’s coming home soon, despite what those pesky neighbors think.

One day Charles Wallace announces that he met and befriended a strange old woman who’s just arrived in town. Her name is Mrs. Whatsit. On a dark and stormy night (that is, literally, how the book begins) she comes in to get shelter from the rain. When she sees Mrs. Murry, almost the first thing she says is, “By the way...there is such thing as a tesseract.” Mrs. Murry almost faints. As you can imagine, the children demand an explanation the next day.

Turns out Mr. Murry was working on a project that involved traveling the space/time continuum only by using your intellect and not a machine or any other earthly help. He figured if you could go from point a to point b without using a straight line, you really wouldn’t need outside help. A wrinkle in time. A tesseract. And it worked. So he’s out in space somewhere and they have no way to reach him.

Except Mrs. Whatsit isn’t an old lady, of course (really, if you’ve ever read any book at all, you should know to suspect the elderly!). In fact, Mrs. Whatsit and her friends Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which take Meg and Charles Wallace on an epic journey across the galaxy to rescue their father. Along the way, they learn that their father really is fighting an enemy--an actual darkness, true evil, that is deepening its hold on their planet. They can’t defeat it, exactly, not as long as bad people are in the world. But they can certainly fight it enough to hurt it.

This story is so fun for so many reasons! It’s about family, for one thing. It’s about learning that faith and science will always be connected, no matter how many people want them to separate. And it’s about what love can do on planes and dimensions you’ll never even see.

A Wind in the Door--This book is TOTALLY different from the first. Charles Wallace is a little older, but he’s suddenly gotten very sick. Meg goes on a journey through Charles Wallaces’s mitochondria to discover the source of his illness and fix it.

Many Waters--This is my second-favorite of the books. Sandy and Dennys accidentally go in their father’s lab while there’s an experiment in progress and are sent back to the time of Noah before the flood. This is one of the most fantastic religious retellings I’ve ever read. L’Engle manages to keep the original power of the story while creatively (and legitimately) filling in a lot of the gaps in the tale. The only thing not really mentioned is the animals, but...I mean, I assume the animals were fine, since we still have them. So who needs that explanation anyway?

A Swiftly Tilting Planet--In this book Charles Wallace is 15. He goes through different occurrences throughout the past to solve a problem the future is facing. It’s creative and fun if you like genealogy!

An Acceptable Time--This is probably the only one I don’t particularly love. It’s about Meg’s oldest daughter, Polly, and her own time travels. However, this book is 150 pages longer than the others and it really shows. The story is good, but very slow, and nothing even really happens until you’re over halfway through. It is also not a story about redemption like the others. So on its own it’s fine, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I just don’t feel it fits too well with the rest of the series.

Anyway, they all stay! And now, some fun facts about A Wrinkle in Time:

For over a decade, this book was #23 on the list of Most Frequently Challenged Books. L’Engle incorporates a lot of science (obviously) into this story but she also incorporates a lot of faith--some subtle, some not-so-subtle, but it’s an essential part of the story nonetheless. Christian audiences generally hate it (some churches even banned it!) because they didn’t feel you could adequately explain faith and science together. The secular world hated it, too, for exactly the opposite reason--they didn’t feel you could adequately explain faith and science together, either, because they believed faith should be left out of the equation, so to speak.

In my opinion, the only people who “get” this book are those who can take faith and science and allow them to live together. Without that foundation, you’ll hate the book one way or another.

A couple of fun quotes to prove my point:

"But it seems the only explanation." "Do you think things always have an explanation?" "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist." "I like to understand things," Meg said. "We all do. But it isn't always possible."

"And we're not alone, you know, children," came Mrs. Whatsit, the comforter. "All through the universe it's being fought, all through the cosmos, and my, but it's a grand and exciting battle. I know it's hard for you to understand about size, how there's very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy...You can be proud that (we’ve) done so well." "Who have our fighters been?" Calvin asked. "Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs. Whatsit said. Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." "Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why of course, Jesus!"

I like controversial books, but I especially like this one.

On a fun note, they’re making it a movie (again) set to come out in April of 2018. The first version of the movie was well done because it stuck to the book and the cast matched their characters perfectly. In fact, the boy who played Charles Wallace really was a genius. He was admitted to UCLA at age 13 and graduated from Harvard Law School--as the valedictorian--at age 18. So that was a nice little touch.

I have hesitations about the movie but that’s only because I love the book so much. Interestingly, this will be the first movie to ever be directed by an ethnic woman who had over $100 million in the budget. They’re going to make the Murrys a mixed family instead of the pale redheads they are in the book, which obviously isn’t a problem but it’s going to mess with the picture I have in my head of them.

The cast is going to be fantastic, though. Chris Pine will play Mr. Murry, Oprah will be Mrs. Which, Reese Witherspoon will be Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Who will be played by Mindy Kaling. Also in the movie will be Zach Galifianakis (though his part in the book was female, so I don’t know if he’s literally playing a woman or if they’re changing that character to a man in the movie), Michael Pena (in a role made up for the movie, which is not a good sign), and Levi Miller (who was in the latest version of Peter Pan) as Meg’s boyfriend Calvin. Overall, I’m excited! I have trepidation, but I’m excited.

I don’t love the entire series the way I love the first book, but they do have a special place in my heart!

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