Reviews for 2022 Bingo

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Books

i started reading this book in summer 2017 (picked it up at an inn we stayed at while visiting the western half of the country during the eclipse) and have finally finished it, unless i forgot finishing and restarting it somewhere in there but i'm fairly certain i didn't. tpratchett's later work flows like a dream - i finished maskarade in 3 days and it's probably thrice the width of this one - but this was just. i mean. obviously it was a slog. took me like 5 years. i've seen the movie, which has the added disadvantage of continuing to move forward at a consistent rate of one second per second which makes it even more incomprehensible because you can't take a break, but does mean that i finished it in one go. (this was before i started reading the book, don't recall when).

i think the best way to put this is that tpratchett has this thing he does where he will start a sentence and will surprise you with the ending of it, through an odd turn of phrase or an unexpected new element, but it's all very cohesive and snappy. and in the color of magic, that process takes an entire paragraph at best and an entire narrative location at the worst, and there's really no cohesion i could find at all, and so by the time you get to the punchline you're confused and kind of over-explained but also none of it matters anyway

got this book at the library, it was propped up by the front desk and the cover looked cool. i found it extremely middle-of-the-road for YA - i finished it, but i can't say there was any particular thing it did that i liked that was the reason i kept reading.

my favorite character was alice, and im so much more organically taken with her and Ellie's relationship in her last moments (well, until the very end of the book) than i am with Ellie and Morris's. i rly kinda didn't buy into morris as a romantic lead. something about him was just off. it felt like morris's feelings for ellie kept butting into the story and getting in the way of them actually interracting. i like them as friends, but i feel like if they weren't into each other that dynamic would be a lot more interesting. like, morris at the beginning feeling enthusiastic about the book and wanting to discuss it and music with ellie? fuckin loved it. morris towards the middle and end just having ellie tell him stories instead of reading them himself so they could discuss them, and relating every song he likes back to them? where's the FLAVOR. where's the COMRADERIE.

the romantic dynamic felt like it kind of kneecapped ellie as a character as well, especially towards the end after they got together and when they got really into the 'fated lovers' dynamic. they just became this perfect, really flat couple, where morris was like mr perfect boyfriend and ellie was miss bookish nerd projection stock type and they got super dull

anyway enough about that i wanna talk about the gender. this book operates under a universal gender trinary that makes no damn sense and seems not to have been thought about at all. first of all, it's a gender trinary! the third gender is just called nonbinary, which is exactly the kind of lack of thought that i'm talking about, because despite this, there doesn't actually appear to be any kind of acknowledgement of the fact that the gender binary is fake; it's just that you can either be male, female, or nonbinary. all nonbinary people have roughly the same gender, which, as little as its portrayed, seems to be a relatively agender one, and this gender trinary exists across both humanity and the two alien species that we meet. the closest we get to any proper gender diversity is angel, our token nonbinary human, who appears at one point and is referred to as an "enby". beyond this, and their cool ass name, they don't appear long enough to get a sense of if their gender is any different than the nonbinary aliens we meet. as far as i can tell, the existance of the nonbinary gender in this story is nothing more than a vague knowledge that nonbinary people are real, exist, and are valid, and thus ought to be in stories, with no actual realization of what "nonbinary" means for gender as a system and as a whole. it's just a third option.

the one thing that i really did enjoy was morris's brother, brixton's twist. brixton is a fascinating character with an incredibly well-handled background arc, properly foreshadowed without being obvious or completely out-of-the-blue, with his relationship with morris being quite well-written in its few moments, even if the thing about him sort of being morris's dad was kinda weird. it's a great parallel to real-world situations of siblings living with abusive parents & the fact that being the favored child does NOT mean you're not being hurt. i'd love to see him and morris repairing their relationship and connecting as siblings once their out from under their dad's thumb.

Movies

this movie is so good. this was a spontaneous rewatch and goodness. i adore it. the mc is so sweet and awkward and the detective is so fun and i love their homoerotic friendship dearly. it's so funny. the detective just adores mc's work so much that he simply won't suspect him, and even once he figures it out he's still like, aw, you know, i'll let this one slide.

also kinda wack that russian text fucks with this page editor's cursor placement

i don't think i like superhero movies very much. like it was good but only in spite of it being a superhero movie and battinson being an autistic wet cat and selena being a cool dyke didnt make up for the fact that so much of it was a superhero movie like the end was just ALL SUPERHERO MOVIE (except bat/selena's sendoff hearts hearts that was good)

i have now watched this movie TWICE with my boss and half my coworkers

this is the first time i've ever watched a horror movie and actually enjoyed it for being a horror movie.

cabin in the woods i liked despite it being a horror movie, and get out i didn't enjoy at all even though it's really good, but this one was actually really fun. i watched it for devon and joaquim wolfson, because i know of their actors from queer media, and they were a fucking delight. every bit character in this movie is a work of comedic & tropairy genius and they're all phenomenal in their roles whenever they're on screen. cecily rules, and i was so totally surprised by the ending that i didn't actually get the reveal at first. also love that joaquim's cultural lore of werewolves is apparently the canon explanation for them? since they don't appear to infect one another within the movie's lore.

another thing i really appreciated about this movie was the kind of subversion of the genre convention of horror monsters "punishing" the protagonists for transgressions or harms they commit, by instead having it be the monster attempting to coax them or trick them or manipulate them into committing the initial transgression, and rather than being the one to inflict punishment, having everyone else inflict the punishment on one another. a fascinating critique of the assumptions and morals the horror genre works with and embodies. the day is saved by the people resisting those tricks and trusting one another, being neighborly rather than falling to the manipulations of the monster's attempt to tempt them away from neighborly behavior.

i kind of wanted to go to bed when we started this movie, and i kind of wish that i had when we ended it. not egregarious or anything, it was just kind of. a movie. also it was terribly sexist. the entire movie is about these two vain bitches getting their just desserts for wanting to be prettier than they are and appear younger than they are - with no damn self awareness. they aren't warned that the potion will make them etermally mobile. it's not their faults they die. the only reason they WANT to be pretty in the first place is because of society - they've both dated a plastic surgeon for gods' sakes! this movie is furious at them for wanting to be pretty while staring in the face the reason why they feel they need to be. honestly, they should have just run off and become weird eternally mobile dead girlfriends in the woods. who gives a shit if you're grey. you're also GAY and ETERNALLY MOBILE. you can BREAK YOUR BACK to try new SEXUAL POSITIONS or something idk what sex is.

oh yeah they were obviously in hate with each other. fucking obsessed. they wanna fuck each other so bad.

it's also really weird about fat people and honestly there's not anything i can really say about it that you won't get from just watching the interim clips where helen is fat. like what the fuck man

this movie does nothing to challenge the supremacy and valuation of beauty; only villifies the women in it for succumming to it

went to a movies in the park event with my mom to see this one. it was pretty alright. the music was good but not particularly catchy (exception of we don't talk about bruno, of course), the plot felt a little all over the place, and it kind of seemed like the writers didn't know how to cope with the number of characters they had made? which, like, there's a lot of them, so understandable, but it still felt kind of like even the ones they did try to make time for kind of only got their song moment in the spotlight and other than that barely existed. like i was dropped in without ever meeting these characters, like they thought the "here's everone's powers!" song was enough introduction for me. i barely get to meet luisa before she's having her little breakdown, isabela and mirabel's bad relationship feels more told than shown (the characters saying they don't like each other rather than showing they don't like each other), and it makes everything about what else can i do feel really abrupt. which it is, narratively - mirabel hasn't earned this moment with her sister, nor has her sister earned this moment with mirabel; it's literally forced, by prophecy, to happen, and there's no actual, like, reckoning with that fact - the movie needs to finish with a reasonable runtime, so let's get this show on the road!

like, if you wanted that to work, mirabel needs to fail to reach out to her sister in that moment because she's not doing it out of a genuine desire to connect with her as a person, just out of a desire to preserve the miracle - once again valuing powers over people. they can't hug because mirabel accidentally pushed isabela to suddenly start gushing her feelings at her even though she has no reason to share with her - and they especially can't when the movie hop-skips past the perfect chance to make this abrupt shift work by keeping mirabel's stupid "ok great love you LET'S HUG TO SAVE THE MIRACLE" thing going even after her sister has actually started to open up and share with her.

also, isabela was 100% the aggressor in that relationship and mirabel having to be the one to be the "bigger person" is narratively unsatisfying. i know i've been going on about mirabel not earning isabela's confidance but isabela also didn't earn mirabel's sympathy. i don't think she necessarily needed to in order to get it or anything, but nothing about their relationship as shown previously would indicate mirabel has anything to apologize for.