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Reviews
Fire Island (2023)
A waste of the time I spent watching it.
Okay. I'm definitely the target audience for this film. I love slasher flicks, even cheesy ones, and I'm a trans woman, so the Queer Horror aspect is generally appreciated very much!
I'll start with the reason I even gave it 2 stars:
The acting and what special effects there were? Pretty good. The characters were generally pretty believable, if unlikable at times, and it had a few genuinely good jump scares and a few moments of well built tension, as well.
I was actively rooting for the final girl and final boy to survive, as they were the most likeable of the five main characters.
But this movie made very little sense and felt like it strung 2-3 different scripts together to try and tie everything together. Again, I LOVE slasher flicks, even cheesy 80s ones where they didn't always know what they're doing, but this was just...
For a second, I thought it was jumping back and forth in the timeline because the older gay couple in their nice place seemed to mention something about a body being found out in the water a year prior, and with the ending, it could all tie together in a weird way...
But no, it really was just about someone "driven crazy" by isolation and murdering people.
I ended up having to watch this movie over a couple days because I'd invested 15-20 minutes into it already and wanted to give it a chance, but despite finally being able to manage the attention span, until the last bit I really didn't find myself wanting to finish it.
I was, as I said, rooting for the final boy and the final girl, but rather than let the hero escape, he dies and the killer moves on to keep killing again, meaning the police... never found all the bodies in that hotel?
Add in all the bad sound editing, and I do mean BAD (at one point I thought it was my iPad not being able to handle something, but it was just as bad on our TV) and the visible time code at the end, and it's clear that this was a movie that has only been released because of the writer and actor strikes.
I feel like with a couple quick reshoots, some better sound control and tighter editing and this could be a really good movie, but we'll likely never see those changes.
I hope this movie doesn't stop actual GOOD Queer Horror from being made because it was a flop.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
I haven't enjoyed a movie this much in years!
Anyone who knows me knows how much I love Michelle Yeoh, who was my main draw for wanting to see this. An entire multiverse of Michelle Yeoh? Yes, please.
And this movie doesn't disappoint. It's funny, it's charming, and it has real heart. I saw it at the drive in with my roomie, my first outing in public since before the Bad Days of early 2020. Unfortunately, some of the subtitles were a little hard to read and blurry on the screen, which wasn't helped with the distance we were at, but despite only knowing a few words in Cantonese and Mandarin and with sorely outdated glasses I was still able to follow the gist with the careful sprinkling of English, body language and tone, when the captions were too blurry.
I have chronic pain and fatigue and managed to stay mostly motionless and comfortable in my seat because I was utterly engrossed in this ridiculous, wonderful film.
When it's released on digital next month, my roommate and I will be buying a copy immediately to rewatch.
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)
A bad movie, go see something else in the cinema.
Badly written plot, poorly directed, an absolute slog to get through, I cannot believe the theaters greenlit this dreck. It's got twice the characters it needs, the ONLY Jewish character with lines in the entire franchise got removed without even a recast, and the titular character's romance with the man he supposedly loves isn't even explored in ANY way in the film, except two little lines of dialogue totaling 6 seconds.
Two throw away lines does not representation make.
Halfway decent acting does not a good movie make.
A mediocre children's author doesn't a screenwriter make.
The script needed gutted and retooled but because it was written by the franchise owner, nobody was willing to tell her 'no', and now she's killed her own franchise with this movie.
I loved the HP movies, enjoyed the first FB movie, was slightly disappointed with the second and I want a refund after seeing this one, and I didn't even PAY to see it, a friend had a spare ticket when her girlfriend couldn't go.
There was literally somebody else in the audience a row over that was ASLEEP.
Seinto Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac (2019)
Are there missing episodes?
My roomie and I binged this series this morning. As each episode's only about 22 minutes long, it took about two hours.
I kind of want those two hours back.
Other shows like Dragon Prince, the new Voltron series, and the rebooted She-Ra manage to pack a lot of story and plot in short episodes.
This series feels like there are missing episodes, like it should have been 8 or 12 episodes, and every other episode has been misplaced.
The animation style's okay, and fairly fluid, and the voice acting is... okay, I guess? With good actors, you can forget they're acting. Everything came across as slightly stilted, and there was a lot of verbalized exposition from characters explaining things that were very obvious.
And then there's Shaun.
Okay. I watched the original show as a child in the early 90s, and while I don't remember a lot, one of the things I have vivid memories of is the character of Shun. I was all of 8 or 9, and I remember being confused as to why Shun was a boy, when he was so pretty. Then I realized that meant boys could be pretty, and that it was okay that *I* wanted to be pretty. I also loved how he was pacifistic and preferred not to fight, because I also didn't want to fight.
The character also had a romantic relationship in the original series with another male character, which ALSO let me know that boys could love boys. This meant a lot to me as I struggled with both sexuality and gender.
As my older brother is gay, I suspect this is why we watched the series.
In the new show, Shun has been replaced by a doppelganger, Shaun, who looks very similar, but is a woman.
The problem with this is that Shun's character was subverting gender stereotypes by placing a feminine soul in a male body. By making the character a girl, all you've done is lean into tropes about women being delicate things who can't really fight. Had they really wanted to challenge stereotypes and make a knight a girl, there were other knights they could have chosen and it not mattered.
I'm not going to cry that my childhood is ruined, like others may have, but I'm sad that a new generation of kids, gay, straight, trans or non-binary all have been robbed of a potential rolemodel that ironically MY generation had.
They decided to straightwash a queer coded character and a queer relationship, which makes no sense with Netflix, who are a very Queer positive company. Look at the Voltron series!
Combined with all the other issues, the disjointed storytelling, etc... I'm not expecting to see this show get a second season.