MY MOVIE SHELF: X-Men: Days of Future Past

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 1 Days to go: 3

Movie #439:  X-Men: Days of Future Past

X-Men: Days of Future Past is where the two separate X-Men franchises collide, and it is masterful. The characters we know from the first three X-Men movies (or some of them, at least, as well as a few we’ve never met before) come together in the future to stop an event from happening in the past — where most of the characters from X-Men: First Class are still running about — that will eradicate all mutants (and many humans) from the face of the earth. It plays with time, it plays with space, it plays with inevitability and free will and second chances, and I love it a whole lot. If not for a few complaints, it would easily be my favorite, but the things I find fault with are also the result of Days of Future Past‘s enormous ambition, which should be rewarded even if it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

In this film, the future is a war-torn dystopia and what few mutants remain are constantly on the run from weapons called Sentinels — transformative robots made from non-metallic polymers that can adapt to a mutant’s power to more effectively destroy it. Determining that the Sentinel program came from a moment back in 1973, the Professor (Patrick Stewart), who revealed he was alive again in the epilogue of The Wolverine vis-à-vis some sort of squirrelly magic that isn’t really explained all that well, and Magneto (Ian McKellen) convince Kitty (Ellen Page) to send Logan (Hugh Jackman) back in time in order to stop that event from happening and change the course of history. (Logan is the only one who can make such a trip, since he heals as fast as he’s torn apart and this journey of his consciousness will wreak havoc on his mind.)

So Logan’s consciousness goes back and he has to enlist young Charles (James McAvoy) and Hank (Nicholas Hoult) into helping him, which includes breaking Eric (Michael Fassbender) out of a prison beneath the Pentagon. For this they go to Quicksilver (Evan Peters), which I mention simply because it is my absolute favorite sequence of this or any X-Men movie, and it is entirely too short. Slowing everything else down to show Quicksilver working in his super-speed at a pace we can actually see is amazing CGI at work, and I want so much more of it. Why he’s not invited along to Paris or even just brought back at the end for their D.C. showdown is beyond me. He’s so great! Why would you introduce him, blow everyone away with his playful machinations, and then forget all about him for the rest of the film? It drives me crazy.

Not that the rest of the film doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to contend with without adding Quicksilver to the mix. Peter Dinklage (who makes everything better, let’s be honest) is here as Dr. Bolivar Trask, the scientist behind those nasty Sentinel machines, and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) aims to kill him. Unfortunately, when she does (in the past) it sets off a chain reaction of events in which her actions are used as proof of a mutant threat and her DNA is used to enhance the Sentinels. Logan’s troupe goes to stop her, of course, but the movie brilliantly plays with images so that some of the things we saw in the image of the past are duplicated in this scenes Logan is supposedly changing, raising the question of whether this is all happening as it always did, as it always was meant to. Hank brings up that question himself, of whether time is immutable and unchangeable — a common theme in time-travel tales — so somehow, some way, whatever happens will always happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Naturally, Charles takes a different view, because despite his current (1973) disillusionment, in which he treats himself with a serum to give him back the use of his legs in exchange for losing his powers of the mind, he’s still the optimist. He still believes in Mystique as a good person. He still mourns Eric’s insistence of distancing himself from goodness. And he still has faith in the human (and mutant) spirit, believing good will prevail if he only choose it.

Ultimately, the movie takes this view too, as it shows us Mystique changing her path and gives us a star-studded happy ending — incredibly, like, nearly EVERYONE is back and alive and awesome for this tiny little closing scene. At the same time, it also opens the door for ALL NEW STORIES about Mystique, about Jean (Famke Janssen), about Logan, et cetera. There are honestly not that many movies that can pull off something that impressive, and I give it a lot of credit. Meaning I forgive it a lot of its blurry areas — where things are most glossed over like LA LA LA DON’T ASK TOO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE — even though they annoy me personally. I choose for goodness to prevail.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Whip It

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 5 Days to go: 7

Movie #435:  Whip It

There was nothing to stop me going to the theater in October 2009 when Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut Whip It was released. A movie full of awesome chicks kicking ass? I’m in. And as my now-husband and I watched it together, what we experienced was a lovely, fun film — a coming of age tale for girls, which so rarely gets produced — full of super exciting roller derby to boot. Immediately, we believed the eight-year-old girl in our household would be perfect for the sport. Wild and lively, and a little bit reckless, she was a girl with a joyful ferocity. And she was pretty good on skates, too. How wonderful it would be to see her speeding along on a track, an athletic powerhouse. I even came up with a name for her on the spot. It was devastating to think she’d have to wait thirteen years (assuming the minimum age was 21, as the movie suggests). Oh, well.

In the almost six years since the film came out, naturally a lot has happened in that little girl’s life, not all of it good. For a while there she fell victim to the kind of self-doubt and loathing that plagues so many little girls in their tween years, and as much as we could tell her we loved her and were proud of her and thought she was smart and beautiful and amazing, it doesn’t always sink in. There are other influences in kids lives, and some of them are malicious and demeaning. Sometimes it’s the voices in your own head that hurt you the most.

A lot of times these sorts of things are phases you go through and grow out of, and part of them is no doubt due to hormonal swings common to all kids at this age, but she needed a change, so we made some. And through a series of serendipitous events, she found herself at a skating clinic where she met a junior roller derby coach, and that ignited a spark.

I didn’t know there was even such a thing as junior roller derby, obviously, but here it was, showing up in our lives right when we needed it, and through roller derby we’ve watched that girl thrive. She’s more confident, she’s more comfortable in her skin, she’s more athletic and she’s more fit. The roller derby I’ve experienced isn’t nearly as flashy or composed as Whip It would have you believe, but it’s been an absolute godsend in our lives, and when Bliss (Ellen Page) tells her parents, “I am in love with this,” it brings tears to my eyes.

The movie has a lot of joy with regard to all the derby, from great names like Smashley Simpson (Barrymore) to Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis) to Rosa Sparks (Eve) to Eva Destruction (Ari Graynor, who is a goddess and should be in everything), to a hundred more. (Plus it really feels like the food fight scene is something Barrymore has wanted to be able to orchestrate for years.) All the hits and the jumps and the checks are brutal and exciting, and supporting turns by Jimmy Fallon (as Hot Tub Johnny) and Andrew Wilson (the OTHER Wilson brother, as Razor) bring a lot of comedy to the thrilling competition. But the movie is about so much more than that.

Bliss doesn’t just learn to find herself in derby, she also learns to find herself in general. She learns that even though she doesn’t agree with her parents on things — she thinks her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) is living in the 1950s and her father (Daniel Stern) is oblivious to anything that doesn’t concern him — that she can find her own way without being a jerk to them and hurting their feelings (thanks to the stellar, gentle advice from Kristen Wiig’s Maggie Mayhem). She also learns that boys can disappoint you but that she, too, can disappoint her friends when she abandons BFF Pash (Alia Shawkat) as the derby warehouse gets raided by police. It’s a huge growing up moment for her, because she seems to hold herself to a higher standard after that point, and she doesn’t suffer fools either. To earn her time, you’re going to have to treat her with respect, which is a stance everyone should take but so many people forget. Plus she manages to really make her parents proud, because as stressful as that relationship can sometimes get, they aren’t her enemies and they want what’s best for her always. As all good parents do.

I don’t know how much Whip It really gets right about roller derby — I know for a fact that typical derby scores way more points than these bouts do, at least from what I’ve seen, and I don’t think there’s any way Bliss could’ve kept it secret as long as she did — but it gets a whole hell of a lot right about being seventeen, about wanting to be grown up, about thinking you know everything but being wrong because you’re still very much figuring stuff out. And it gets right how empowering derby can be, and how freeing, and how important it is to find the thing that makes you happy, whether you’re seventeen or in your thirties.

And it’s a sentimental favorite in our house, for obvious reasons.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Inception

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 81 Days to go: 56

Movie #359:  Inception

So here I am at the end of my Best of Warner Bros. 50 Film Collection, and I’m glad to close this part of the project with Inception. For not the first time in this collection, I’m faced with a  film I wouldn’t necessarily purchase for myself, but one that I nevertheless have a lot of respect for. It’s given me the opportunity to think about a lot of movies I haven’t seen a hundred times and haven’t thought about a hundred times, which I really enjoy. Thinking about movies, dissecting what I think about them, is one of my favorite things.

Inception is an ideal movie to think about. It’s very structure and concept is a puzzle, a maze, a challenge to decipher. The ending has been discussed by everyone. The movie itself is a mystery people have been dying to solve. I don’t know that there’s anything to solve, really. I take the movie at face value, and I feel pretty secure in that interpretation. I do, however, notice all the aspects of it that are deliberately oblique, that welcome interpretation and analysis. And I think those are pretty brilliant.

From the very beginning, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are in a dream playing like it’s reality, trying to manipulate Saito (Ken Watanabe). Then they all wake up from that one to supposed reality again, only it’s another dream. A dream within a dream. Once the film establishes that this is possible, that what seems like reality might not be, then every scene going forward comes into question. Like when Cobb goes to get Eames (Tom Hardy), it’s in another random exotic location, with more men chasing him — very similar to the opening scenes. And so you don’t forget any scene could be a dream, so you don’t get too comfortable, the film reminds you later on with Cobb and Ariadne (Ellen Page) at the cafe. She thinks it’s reality, he tells her it’s a dream. But he also ups the ante by pointing out that, in a dream, you always end up in the middle of somewhere with no idea how you got there. So now the audience is questioning every scene that’s already gone by, as well as all the ones to come. They always start in the middle of the action. You never see anybody go from one place to another.

I’ve also heard speculation about the ending, that the top wasn’t Cobb’s totem at all. It was Mal’s (Marion Cotillard). These theories claim, then, that Cobb’s totem was his watch, that he only wears it in certain scenes. But I’ve noticed the watch in dream scenes and non-dream scenes, so I’m not sure that tracks.

The main obsession, though, is with the end and whether the top falls. I don’t think it matters. I mean, I think it’s obvious the top is on the verge of falling when the picture cuts to black, but before that, Cobb sees his family. It’s the familiar image of his children, but it’s also different. His father (Michael Caine) is there, for one, and for another, he sees his children’s faces — the thing he’s wanted more than anything, the entire time we’ve known him. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all the proof we need that Cobb is home. Honestly, I’m much more interested in a Arthur-Ariadne rom-com spinoff sequel.

And that does it for the Best of Warner Bros. 50 Film Collection. Tomorrow we’ll continue on with the next movie on the shelf, and we’ll keep going until I finish all 81 that are left. Hopefully I can get them all done by my deadline. (If all goes according to plan, I totally will.)

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: Juno

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 218  Days to go: 219

Movie #159:  Juno

I dressed up as Juno for Halloween three years ago, when I was pregnant with my youngest. Nobody knew who I was, but one guy at work guessed “someone from a movie about teenage pregnancy,” so I counted that in the win column, but I was pretty disappointed in the rest of humanity, if I’m being honest. Juno was a pop cultural touchstone in the late aughts, and I feel like more people should be aware of that.

Diablo Cody’s manufactured jargon script got a lot of backlash (not enough for her not to win the Oscar, but enough), but I think if you get past that mildly annoying affectation, it contains a really sweet and touching story. Juno (Ellen Page, breaking into the big time) is a junior in high school who indulged in some beautiful chair sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and wound up pregnant. The movie takes us through the seasons as Juno’s pregnancy progresses and as she interacts and builds a relationship with the decidedly more upper class couple she’s chosen to be the adoptive parents, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner).

Page handles the quirky dialogue well without making it sound too rehearsed, and Cera being an adorable doofus is kind of his bread and butter, only this time he adds tangy organge tic-tacs to the mix. They make an awkward and clumsy couple, never sure how to act around each other now that their friendship has been strained by pregnancy and never able to be as vulnerable and loving with each other as they want to deep down.

Meanwhile, Bateman and Garner are excellent as an affluent couple who clearly want different things but haven’t discussed it. Vanessa is an open wound of desperation and heartbreak, so painfully in need of a child and terrified of never getting that chance. She grasps onto the hope that Juno brings, but also fears it, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mark, on the other hand, is the other shoe. He’s a big kid afraid of growing up, afraid of being responsible, silently blaming Vanessa for railroading him into something he isn’t ready for.

There’s a lot of pain, a lot of sorrow, and a lot of hope and optimism in the film. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney are snarky and supportive as Juno’s parents, not really putting up with any of her angst but loving her completely, making it perfectly clear they have her back no matter what. It has a great message about love and family, about finding someone who loves you for exactly who you are. It’s uplifting in that way, to the point where I honestly don’t even notice the forced quirkiness. I just notice the joy.

Because in the end, joy is what Juno is selling. Everyone should know that.