SeanC

Zutara = Zuko/Katara, a super-popular fan pairing in the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. The writers of the show liked to tease the fans of that pairing at a couple of points, but the canon main pairing in that show as Katara and Aang, and Zuko had his own love interest. It was never going anywhere, despite how worked up over it a lot of fans got.

The character is being sarcastic in-universe, but the screenwriters included it to have that extra layer of meaning.

I saw it a third time tonight (I compiled my complete ranking of the 36 films from 2015 that I've watched so far, of which TFA currently ranks in 10th position -- yet I never felt the need to see any of the nine films I rank ahead of it more than once or twice in cinema; I could write a whole different post about to what degree watchability should be balanced with assessment of the underlying narrative, etc.). On Rey's origins, this is the first time I noticed that Rey's initial line to BB8 on being told that his background is classified is "Oh yeah, me too. Big secret.", which I imagine is a knowing reference to the fan speculation being invited over her. Depending on what we learn in subsequent films about who she is and who knows/suspects it and when, it will be interesting to see how various characters' reactions in this movie will seem in retrospect. Because there's multiple moments from different characters that hint they know more than they say onscreen; Kylo Ren's initial furious reaction on being told that Finn and BB8 were accompanied by a girl, for instance, seems oddly pointed; and, of course, Maz; but also, and this is never discussed, why is Rey the one they send to go find Luke? Parts of this movie reminded me of something that I idly wondered about back when I saw ROTS for the first time: what is the legal status of droids, precisely? I was first wondering about C3PO's memory being casually ordered erased at the end of the prequels; the droids have "owners" who they usually address as "master", as BB8 refers to Poe here; but all of them seem pretty clearly sentient to me. If this was Star Trek I would expect there to be some ethical questions about ownership of these things.

The moral of the story: when your best girl heads back home for a visit, be sure to get her to marry you first. That'll be your trump card if things get tough. Things are going to be going south in Brooklyn over the next few decades anyway, starting with Tony's beloved Dodgers leaving. I agree with the above comments that Eilis marrying Tony beforehand kind of tips the movie's hand as to what will happen, though her falling back into Irish society is kind of presented as a gradual series of attempts to keep her there, Jim's obvious sincerity aside. I did think it was a bit of a reverse of the stereotype that the Irish guy was clearly the more erudite of the two (sure, he just owns a bar, but he's clearly more sophisticated than Tony; in a lot of movies, the American suitor would be the slicker of the two). That aside, I thought it was a great movie. Loved the colours (movies set in the present rarely use colour palettes like that), and, of course, Ronan.

A comedian transitioning over into dramatic roles in search of greater respectability is a common Hollywood trajectory; somewhat less common is the case of Jay Roach, the director of the three Austin Powers films who has since the mid-2000s become primarily a director of HBO prestige TV movies on political topics. Trumbo could easily fit into that canon, particularly as Roach and star Bryan Cranston indeed have another TV movie, the Lyndon Johnson biopic All the Way, due out next year. It's hard to identify anything egregiously amiss with this film. Cranston, as the Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, gives a customarily good performance. The supporting cast is fine, even if the roles could largely be said to be underwritten (Diane Lane is unfortunately stuck in as The Wife, and not a particularly strong example of this stock biopic character). There's always a particular challenge whenever contemporary actors are called on to represent yesterday's stars; Dean O'Gorman does a pretty good Kirk Douglas here, while JAG star David James Elliott is a fairly weak John Wayne. The film most comes alive in the scenes depicting Trumbo's time working at the bargain basement film studio King Pictures, aided by the boisterous presence of John Goodman as the John Goodman-esque studio head. Much of the rest is competent, but it rarely sings at the level it aspires to, the level its subject wrote at when he was at his best.

This seems like it's going to go down as the film that broke Russell's streak with critics and the Academy -- I can understand why, though in some respects I'd argue it's a better film than American Hustle. The often bleak portrayal of Joy's economic situation is well-done, and Lawrence, given the solo spotlight in a Russell film, is fantastic. Some of the best scenes are those set at QVC, which really get you invested in the whole business and make it seem like an art. Conversely, and this isn't something I've ever associated with Russell's films before, there's some really bad dialogue in this (DeNiro, especially, has a bunch of lines toward the end that are so on-the-nose I was wondering if this was some sort of parody dream sequence), and the attempt at showing Joy dealing with the initial complications of success becomes a bit bogged down. Among Russell's recent films, The Fighter and The Silver Linings Playbook both featured families of varying degrees of quirky cantankerousness, but who were ultimately loving; thus, that informs how one initially expects to see the family here, but in fact Joy's family is substantially comprised of unlikeable leeches.

On closer examination, the branch behind Bran in that image appears to have leaves, which would back up the "vision" theory.

Bloodraven explicitly said he would never walk again. In any event, this may be part of a vision. I'm glad that terrible wig is no more.

He's been set up as a major character that key figures are meant to have an emotional stake in. I doubt that redemption is off the table, narratively; partly because the character is kind of limited in terms of development in the future, and more generally because it's more in keeping with the way the series has conceived of the conflict between the Dark Side and the Light.

Adam McKay adapts Michael Lewis' 2010 nonfiction account of the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage bust, primarily from the POV of the individuals who predicted the collapse of the housing market and used credit default swaps to take advantage of it. Starring Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, and a remarkable array of unflattering hairpieces. The trailer for this didn't do much for me, and while I've enjoyed some of his comedy films, I wouldn't have thought of Adam McKay as somebody suited to this sort of story. After strong reviews, I opted to give it a shot. The result is pretty good, I think. It's done in a somewhat eclectic style that at times resembles what Scorsese did with The Wolf of Wall Street, at other times presented like a documentary (e.g., the cutaways at various points where random celebrities deliver exposition on assorted financial instruments). There's a heavy reliance on humour in delivering all this; whereas Scorsese sort of breezily (and amusingly) blew off the details, McKay clearly wants to educate any ordinary theatregoer who opted to give the film a shot. But underneath the humour, it's a very angry movie, much of the time not very subtle about it. I think the most successful aspect of the movie is the way McKay initially frames it as a story about prophets in the wilderness, but in the final third gradually peels off the distorting effects of the POV and shows that ultimately these guys are just looking to cash in on people's misery (this actually could have gone further; in promoting the use of credit default swaps, Burry and co. arguably made it worse). They didn't cause the underlying problem, of course, but they aren't in any sense trying to fix the problem or even (with one exception) call attention to it.

Anna Karenina was quite interesting, too (certainly a total stylistic novelty).

I just finished reading William Faulkner's Collected Stories. I don't remember precisely when I started reading this (it would have been a year or two ago, I expect); I set it aside with 609 of its 900 pages read, and the prospect of returning to it was sufficiently daunting that it took a long while before I did so. Faulkner is always work, whatever enjoyment you ultimately get out of him. Amongst the last 300 pages, "Golden Land" was my favourite story of the bunch; "Mountain Victory" was also quite tense (sort of the like the arty forerunner of a backwoods brutality film), though marred by the one time I thought one of Faulkner's black characters crossed the line into basically minstrelsy. I'm now reading Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. I have a long-term project to read something by every Nobel Laureate, and she's this year's winner (once I finish this book, I'll be up to 69 out of 112; I haven't crossed anybody off the list since I read Günter Grass' The Tin Drum back in May).

Begin Again wasn't a romantic comedy; Seeking a Friend..., maybe, though a highly atypical one (most don't end with the entire world dying). In any event, the former was a great movie; the latter was interesting, if not wholly successful.

Whatever you think of Knightley's costume dramas (I think she's been in several great ones), she's hardly known for romantic comedies.

I saw it for a second time (in 3D this time, because the 10 PM 3D showing was the only one not sold out by the time I got around to ordering tickets). I don't think a second viewing has really altered my thoughts overall; the derivativeness of much of the plot bothered me less, perhaps since I was already familiar with it. Abrams has stated that Poe died in the earliest drafts, and honestly, it kind of feels like he should -- not that I don't like Oscar Isaac or anything, he's great, and I'm glad he's got a big franchise part like this, but purely speaking as a movie his return in the third act feels pretty random (also, if those three are meant to be the new "big three", it's weird that I don't think he interacts with Rey at all). My single-biggest nitpick, which I noted on first viewing but forgot to write about earlier: when Rey and Finn are planning to ambush the people they think are Stormtroopers, Finn claims that gassing them will work because "their helmets filter out smoke, but not toxins." Why the fuck would anybody design a helmet to do that? This never gets used, but still.

He was the voice of Kirk's stepfather over the radio in the first Trek. I don't know about Super 8. Edit: The IMDb lists him as "Sitcom Actor" in the latter, so presumably on some TV in the background.

Greg Grunberg appears in basically everything J.J. Abrams does.

Mad Max, Star Wars and The Martian will definitely get in. Unsure about the rest. Ideally there's room for Ex Machina, which delivered very high quality stuff on a much lower budget than most of the competition.

I hope this finally kills the Chipmunks movies. Everyone involved with those should be tried for crimes against humanity.

Yeah, that was my only problem with her performance. Her voice is so flat an affectless at this point that it feels very out of place in most of her scenes, particularly when she's discussing highly emotional matters. I feel bad about noting this, since it's a result of all the crap she's had to deal with in her life, but it took me out of the movie.

While it's obvious to the audience, it doesn't seem to have occurred to Rey at all, which is more suggestive that it's not that sort of twist.

I forgot to mention in my initial comments: the movie makes a pretty determined effort to re-mystify the Force, which is a good idea, after the prequels inexplicably decided that it needed some sort of scientific explanation.

I would hesitate to call this a truly great movie, because I can identify many problems. While the Prequel Trilogy, if nothing else, surely established that political intrigue is not what general audiences were looking for from these movies (or, at least, that George Lucas had no idea how to make political intrigue [or anything else, for that matter] interesting), the context given for the political situation of the galaxy far far away in this movie is so threadbare that it barely warrants mentioning. As with Abrams' Star Trek the movie runs heavily on references, but perhaps due to Abrams' greater fandom, at times it dips too close to Star Trek Into Darkness in its relentless referencing of virtually every plot element of A New Hope in some form. Granted, Lucas himself was already borrowing pretty heavily from the climax of that movie by the time he made Return of the Jedi, and that was 32 years ago, but still; and for that matter, the movie seems rather uninterested in its third version of the Death Star. Compared to A New Hope's meticulously-orchestrated ticking clock, this one is quite haphazardly conducted, and it feels rather perfunctory. I would actually argue that the climax would have worked better had it been omitted entirely and focused solely on the character dynamics of the smaller-scale mission taking place contemporaneously. The characters are the movie's main strength. As has already been expounded at length in many quarters, the Prequels were crippled by Lucas' atrophied skill at creating believable characters and directing actors (if you have not seen American Graffiti, you owe it to yourself to watch it, and contemplate how the man who directed that could ever have ended up where Lucas did by the 2000s). The duo of lead characters introduced here (it has been marketed in some quarters as a troika, but in truth Oscar Isaac's role is much smaller) are both played by fresh, likeable actors who bring both gravitas and humour to the parts, and in both cases they feel well-developed -- even if, in Daisy Ridley's case, she's suffering from an acute case of a backstory being teased for future sequels. The returning legends from the Original Trilogy are all handled well, with Harrison Ford's Han Solo take centre-stage one last time; rather like Sylvester Stallone in Creed, this is Ford's best work in a while, accomplished while returning to his oldest hit character. On a minor note, was there a requirement this year that year-end blockbusters hire Gwendoline Christie for a bit part? Now that the first installment has obligingly cycled through many of the tropes of the original film, I am interested to see where this new phase of the saga will go.

They were rumoured to be filming at the location used for Runestone last year, so I think we will see the Vale, but probably just in the context of Baelish rallying the troops to go North.

I saw that cancellation on the site, but I find it bizarre that he had to cancel a show over what should have been a date set down months ago. Did they have to do some sort of emergency reshoot?