movies/shows

I finally saw this movie. I honestly thought it was going to be more of a space opera, since they talk about visiting multiple planets, but they straight up just visit one planet and then another one later, briefly. It also does not make a ton of sense that they visited said planet--why would you put humanity on a planet that is inside the pull of a black hole and is thus experiencing severe time dilation? Doesn't that imply that the planet is going to immenently be sucked into the black hole, thus stranding humanity forever?

That said, I liked a lot of the sci-fi elements in this movie, story was good, the visuals are super awesome, the surprise Matt Damon appearance is crazy, and overall I enjoyed myself watching it. It is interesting to me the extent to which this movie is a product of its time--a very Reddit kind of wow, space! science! NASA! kind of movie. Which isn't a bad thing, it is just really far from our cultural moment where we have kind of accepted that technological progress has stopped improving people's lives and started making it worse.

I am worried people will get the wrong message out of this movie. I think the point of the movie is not, this lady is actually an alien and Jesse Plemmons was right about everything. I see it more similar to the South Park Scientology episode, where there is running text under the screen that says "This is what Scientologists actually believe".

I thought the disabled actor did a great job. I thought basically everyone was really great in this movie and it was a lot of fun to watch. I did like how ideologically neutral Jesse was in this movie--he had no sexual intentions, had no resentment towards women, he just simply hated the hell out of aliens. I thought this was probably the least realistic part of the movie but it also made it a lot more fun to watch, since the social commentary was relatively limited to class and disability stuff.

Finally saw this because I was not about to watch Oppenheimer on the plane. Have to say I kind of started to predict that Barbie's muse was going to be a disaffected adult millenial woman about fifteen minutes early, but I was still surprised when it was confirmed. Also the movie promptly turning into a massive GM ad was a little disappointing. There was a ton of actually funny moments, it was good to see Will Ferrell have something to do again, the costars both did a great job, Kate McKinnon was well-cast, and the worldbuilding was nice.

That said I think the feminism in this movie runs along pretty familiar territory and is probably not going to capture a lot of hearts and minds. It left me asking who the movie was for--I think it's for adults who were familiar with Barbies as a kid (like the protagonist lady) while still keeping the movie brand safe enough to bring kids to and have them get something out of it. I think the millenial woman is the true protagonist of the digital age in media (New Girl, The Mindy Project, etc.) and this movie might mark the natural conclusion of that era as millenials pass the torch. Before watching this movie I was sure that women could do anything, and after watching, well, I'm still sure.

This I randomly saw on a plane. I do like when someone is sad and mumbling in a movie instead of over-acting the way people are expected to do nowadays. It helps that Dakota Johnson is naturally a very neutral kind of actress. I think the trope of the protagonist having a (often Asian) female best friend who is more outgoing than them is kind of overdone--in a lot of ways this retreads a lot of the territory that Emily in Paris worked on, just with the more interesting and difficult theme of queerness.

Anyway, I liked this movie, because it didn't force an ending, it didn't force a friends-to-lovers story, it just showed some flawed people figuring out the way their love for each other should be expressed during a difficult time in their lives. Which is in a lot of ways the kind of stuff I want to write about. That said, I'm not about to sit my friends down and make them watch this.