Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

In theaters:

The Green Knight (English w/German subtitles): Very pretty, very lush, very much did not care if the viewer understood it. Recommend.

The Father (English w/German subtitles): Very well made, deserving of its Oscars, extremely disorienting on purpose. Recommend with a hanky.

Dune: Big splosions go boom. I don't like big bushy beard on Oscar Isaac. I thought Timothee would have a French accent, lol. Some people hate his face; I have no opinion. I thought he pulled off "carelessly arrogant and haughty" with aplomb. My previous knowledge of Dune can be summarized as follows: What's in the box? Pain. Fear is the mind-killer. The spice must flow. The 80s version had Sting in a silver speedo. There's a space empire, the Harkonnens are evil, Paul Atreides is special. This movie made enough sense to me. Recommend.

I might see the new James Bond next week. I would like to see Venom 2, because I liked the first romcom.

On streaming:

Hotel Artemis: Not terribly coherent as a story, though each individual thread was fine and the individual actors did fine.

The Witcher: Curse of the Wolf (or something like that): it was entertaining. It sets up Vesemir's backstory. People on twitter complained about killing your gays. Eh. It's the Witcher; people damn die.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (Netflix co-production): clearly part 1 of X. Sets up the principal protag-antag conflict and stops. It's part of the UC continuity, some 10 years after Char's Counterattack, and some things would probably be more meaningful if I'd ever watched that. But if you know who Bright Noa is and why Hathaway Noa would thus be a famous person in that universe, you should be fine. That's about the level of knowledge I went in with. (Even if not, they drop background info throughout.)

I feel like I've watched more than that, but I guess a lot of it was series, not movies.

My trip to Readercon began inauspiciously. I got to the airport in plenty of time and sat at my gate. A plane came in. We were supposed to leave at 9:45. Around 9:30, the gate attendants told us there would be a delay because our flight crew hadn't arrived yet. Around 10:30, she told us that the crew that was supposed to be on our flight hadn't made it in at all Wednesday night because of weather, so we would have to wait for another crew. There would be one getting in from Detroit at 11:30, which meant we could leave at 12:30. Ish. So we all got $25 credit card vouchers, good for 24 hours. (I used mine toward the hotel room.)
( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

( Monday )

My flight was uneventful. Ben picked me up, we went home, and I took another shower to get the sweat stink off. Then we went to see Pacific Rim.

PACIFIC RIM. It was really good. The plot wasn't super deep or anything, and a few of the plot points were easy to predict (though not telegraphed). But the characters were fun, and there were giant robots smashing giant monsters. I really dug the song that played during the action scenes. Idris Elba gave a Crispin's Day speech. It was awesome.

If I've never mentioned it before, I love this movie. Even if I had to give up and turn the subtitles on because actors mumble or the sound effects are too loud or they use words I just don't know. It's really hard *not* to look at subtitles when they're there. (If there'd been an option to have it subtitled in German...)

This time, I noticed that Udo, the second Stasi guy, spoke Berlinisch. Ick, uuf, jut, meen.

So I have a page of notes that I plan to organize and break down using The Hollywood Formula (TM), to find out more about the character motivations &c. I'm not sure who's the protagonist & antagonist here, though. When I make the post, I'll invite anyone who's seen it to weigh in and argue with me about the thoughts I have. It's a fairly complicated fillum.

And I've managed to stay up later than I intended. Hrm.

Ben & I went out for dinner and a movie last night (Margaret's and X-Men). We went to dinner a little early, perhaps, but if we'd have gone a little later, the place would have been busy, and we'd have gotten stuck in a torrential downpour on our walk over to the theater.

I really liked the movie, though they just had to kill off the brother early on, and the women got some short-end of the stick (or were pastede on yey). Kevin Bacon can't do accents for shit, but the little British kid playing young Erik was quite good. (And the German was grammatical! Holy shit!) Also, Michael Fassbender (Erik) is really hot. (And Charles/Erik is so fucking canon. Their love is so tragic.)

X-Men has always been a blatantly obvious metaphor for how society treats the Other: LGBTQ, racial or ethnic minorities, the disabled, etc. This movie highlights how two people with relatively invisible differences (telepathy and magnetism) from very different social statuses interact with the world. Erik (Magneto) had a second invisible difference: being Jewish.

Xavier is the high socioeconomic status one, with a background made entirely of privilege. He believes (at least initially) that mutants and humans can live together, because they can all just get along.

Erik is a concentration camp survivor, whose background was probably working class at best. He's seen humanity at its worst, and his belief that humans fear mutants is based on his experience. His motivation is revenge, and his power was initially born in fear and rage.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Xavier's naive idealism is crushed. His school and its secrecy in future canon is evidence of that.

I wonder if the racefail (all the bad guys on Shaw's team are racial minorities) is a meta commentary on the privileged idealist's perspective in comparison to the disprivileged's perspective. After all, someone who's had experience with being treated like shit because they're different on the outside knows just how much bullshit Xavier was spouting. (I doubt the director was being that conscious of it, and it's certainly more likely that they fell on the usual tropes. It's an interesting thought, though.)