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dottie-wan-kenobi · 4 years

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They're sort of a fandom but Batfam!

thanks guys!!! this got so long omg, I’m so sorry dsjkfhdskajh

my favorite female character: CASSANDRA MFING CAIN. She is simultaneously one of the most badass characters I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing about, while also being just……….so adorable. Like, I love that she can be the scariest and most competent Bat (she is absolutely 100000% the next Batman I do not take criticism) but also, she’s such a sweetheart. She really loves people (Steph and Duke especially so), she’s an amazing friend and sister, and she is just so authentically herself and does what she wants when she wants, and she works so hard for everything, and I just. Oh my god I love her so much.

my favorite male character: this is so difficult but I have to say Dick Grayson. I Must. He’s basically what started all of this!!! I mean yeah okay Bruce was first, but Robin/Dick is what made Batman interesting and was the first member of the batfam, the one that made it a real family. In addition to that, Dick is just??? So interesting?????? He was the first kid sidekick, he lead the Teen Titans teams, he’s always kind of existed in this place of being the lighthearted one with the Batfam, but the serious one in most other contexts. HE REBELLED FIRST. Nightwing is a fuck you to his dad!!!! I love that! Plus he’s beautiful and has some of the best love interests (I’m talking about Kory and Roy here folks). He’s imperfect and has such depth and I love him kdsjfhjkdshfah

my favorite book/season/etc: I actually really like all the stuff that comes after Bruce “dies”? Seeing them all struggle and fight with each other and everything is really interesting. I love Tim here especially, just bc he’s so fucked up and such a teenager. When characters seem to be having two totally different conversations are SO INTERESTING and that’s what was kind of happening here with Tim and Dick – Tim feels betrayed and hurt, Dick feels stressed and like Tim is ready to move on. And Damian is just an adorable little asshole ksdjfshkjhakjh

my favorite episode (if its a tv show) issue: look I’m a sucker for Dick & Jason feels and I really enjoyed their moments (however few there are) in NTT/Tales of The Teen Titans/etc. They’re pretty small but so cute – it’s really nice to see them trying to figure out how to be brothers!!

my favorite cast member: David Mazouz!!!! Perfect perfect perfect Bruce. I also did like Batfleck, more for the look of exhausted 40 year old man than the story/characterization, but David takes the cake. He does all the different facets of Bruce – traumatized child, obsessive teenager, Brucie the party animal, etc – so well, PLUS THEY HAVE THE SAME BIRTHDAY. It’s meant to be yall

my favorite ship: most of my Batfam ships are one batfam member/one non member (like Dickkory/Dickroy, Dinahbabs, Timkon, etc). the only one fully in the fam would be Bruce/Talia. When written correctly, they are so sweet and so tragic. The star crossed lovers trope has never looked so good as it does when its them.

a character I’d die defending: Damian!!!! Admittedly I do get annoyed by him,,,, a lot,,,,,, but really. He’s a child who’s been abused and manipulated and lied to. He was raised in such a dangerous, traumatic environment, and I fucking hate when people act like he’s always going to be the annoying, murderous brat he was when he was first taken away from that environment. He has to heal, and he IS healing. He loves animals so much, he learns to love Dick (and at least get along with the others), he makes friends, he doesn’t kill anymore. He is doing better. There’s no fucking way he ends up as cruel and cold-hearted as some people insist he will. If you don’t like him, just shut the fuck up

a character I just can’t sympathize with: Babs. It’s not that I can’t sympathize with her, it’s more that I just don’t like her lol. I find Batgirl!Babs really boring and regressive for literally everyone involved. The way Babs became Oracle was gross but it gave her such GROWTH and she got to be her own character as Oracle (and also tell people off for pitying her bc she’s in a wheelchair). Batgirl was passed on to Cass, who is both Asian and disabled rep, then to Steph, in a way that was much healthier for the Batgirls than how Robin was passed down. Babs being Oracle gives even more rep to disabled children/girls in wheelchairs, and she isn’t stuck in Gotham! She isn’t part of the Batfam, she’s a Bird of Prey!!!! So much more interesting!!!! Plus D*ckB*bs is boring as fuck and does a disservice to both of them. Let them grow and be their own people and stop making me see Batgirl!Babs alongside Robin!Damian. DC, that’s illegal!!!

a character I grew to love: Talia. I was sadly infected with the Grant Morrison bullshit when I first joined the fandom and I hated Talia. But I’ve read more comics and metas about her and I just. I LOVE HER. She is such a badass and I find her motives (when well written) to be really interesting!!! She’s loyal to her dad but wants the best for Damian, and does have genuine affection for Bruce and Jason. She’s not the heartless woman some people/writers make her out to be, she has compassion and drive. She doesn’t care what people think about her. I want to marry her sdkjhfjksah

my anti otp: Jason/Roy. In any context other than RHaTO, it makes no sense and does a disservice to both characters. Jason and Roy would not want to be together in most reboots of DC, because of the connection with Dick. Would you want to date your asshole older brother’s ex/best friend? Would you want to date your ex/best friend’s little brother? Would you like to date a man with that history who is also struggling with severe trauma/addiction issues (respectively) and doesn’t get help for it because of bad writing? Imagine Roy looking Dick in the face and saying “yeah, I’m fucking your little brother, who I sort of knew as a pre-teen”. In RHaTO, this is mostly fine bc Roy and Dick have no relationship at all, and Jason needs someone to take care of, and Roy is so incompetent that he fits that bill. But ANYWAYYYYY point is, I refuse to read fics with this ship in it thank you goodnight

send me a show/movie/fandom and I’ll answer these questions!!

#i am SO SORRY i cant believe how much i rambled #long post #ask games #batfam #i barely talked about duke and bruce. didn't mention alfred. didn't mention kate. ksdjhfkjsadh #there are too many damn ppl in this family #Anonymous #anti jayroy #anti babs gordon #whoops forgot to tag that #sorry :(

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mothermaidenclone-blog · 5 years

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Ad Astra or This Movie Was the Brad Pitts

Ad Astra was the worst movie I have paid to see since 2015’s Kill Your Friends, which is my least favourite cinema experience of all time. It was a dry and dreary story about emotionally stunted white men in a bleak and boring capitalist version of space, with jarring and superfluous Christian undertones. The plot and everyone’s motives were so non-existent that Brad Pitt had to narrate the whole thing in a monotone so flat and dead I literally screamed all the way from the cinema to the bus stop when it was over, partly out of a frustration so deep it was non-verbal, but also just to finally hear some pitch variation.

*Ad Astra spoilers follow*

There technically were women in this movie. Lots of women, particularly women of colour, occupied high ranking positions and were addressed by their titles, a touch I think is important and that usually tips the scales in favour of a good review for me. We were graced with Adjutant General Vogel (LisaGay Hamilton), Captain Lu (Freda Foh Shen), Sergeant Romano (Kimmy Shields), Tanya Pincus (Natasha Lyonne) and Lorraine Deavers (Kimberly Elise), as well as several unnamed female personnel (Kayla Adams, Elisa Perry, Sasha Compère and Mallory Low). I would like to particularly highlight Natasha Lyonne’s performance as apparently she was the only actor employed to play a human being and not a replicant. She was on screen for maybe twenty seconds, as is sadly the case with most of these women, but was a glorious breath of fresh air as the only character to simultaneously emote expressively and speak with inflection and enthusiasm. The only one! In a two hour movie!

All of these women appear to be respected and capable members of various illustrious teams, but are always outnumbered by men. There are two male generals alongside Vogel and Deavers is initially outnumbered 4:1 on her space craft by men. Tragically, whenever a team is being picked off, it is always the people of colour who die first. Not only is this obviously racist, it is just a disgusting cliché that we just don’t need to see anymore in movies. Deavers dies first when Roy (Brad Pitt) forcibly invades their vehicle, followed by Franklin Yoshida (Bobby Nish), an Asian man, and Donald Stanford (Loren Dean), a white guy, is the last to go. Roy cradles him in his arms and attempts to save his life. I hope it’s not just me that sees something wrong with the order of events there.

A similar scenario takes place in the lunar chase, which absurdly seems to occur in the same crapy looking buggies as the original moon landing, a confusing visual choice considering we’ve just seen a vast and impressive modern concrete moon base. The film takes the time to introduce us to Willie Levant (Sean Blakemore), a black officer who will be escorting Ray across the moon. As soon as we see he has a photo of his wife and child taped to his tablet screen I knew he was going to die - in the year 2019 I should not be able to predict that a black character is going to die because we saw a family photo. Can we just not anymore? Again, aside from the racism, that’s just shitty writing. I like to think that as a species, if we can conceptualise something as vast and seemingly impossible as solar travel, we can also move beyond basic and derogatory cinematic tropes.

I was most excited by the appearance of Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), a woman of colour who occupies a position of power on Mars and introduces herself assertively using her full name. Also, her whole look was excellent. However, this brief release of serotonin was very short lived as she literally walks Roy down a corridor then is immediately cut off and superseded by a white guy with a man bun. Lantos does return later, but alas, as an exposition machine to give Roy some plot news about his dad. Even as she explains that her parents were murdered by his, Lantos falls victim to the dire, emotionless monotone that I can only assume was forced on the entire cast of this film. Then, she is an actual chauffeur and drives Ray to a manhole so he can continue his dad quest. A character brimming with original potential is presented as nothing more than a device.

The final woman to mention is the first one we see, Roy’s ex-wife Eve (Liv Tyler). We see the blurry, out of focus back of her head in the background of a shot before we see her face, and this is incredibly telling, because that’s all Eve is, the simulacrum of a woman. She could be anybody - so why she is Liv Tyler defies belief, I can only assume they held her loved ones hostage - her story is untold and entirely irrelevant. Again, she is only a device, although this time not for Roy’s forward momentum, but this time seemingly to emphasise that Roy is a total sociopath with no emotions whatsoever. We don’t learn Eve’s name for another twenty minutes, and it is an hour and twenty minutes before we hear her speak. Even then, it’s not a live conversation, because god forbid this film have too many of those, but a voice recording explaining that their relationship is over. I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was, but everything she said was so generic I have no memory of it whatsoever. She is presented as a ghost, a blurry image on a screen, a memory fixed in time, not a real person with agency and personality. At the end of the movie we finally see her in real time, and that is when she has made the unfathomable decision to meet Roy for coffee. Even her face in that moment gives no emotion away, perhaps because Tyler had no idea how to act this entirely nonsensical decision. To our knowledge, she would not have seen any change in Roy, only received news that he survived a dangerous space mission, which is apparently enough of a reason to get back with this emotionless egg of a man?

I almost didn’t want to devote words to them, but I think it’s important to address just how dire Roy and his dad H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) are. This is their film, they are the reason that all of these women’s stories are passed over. It is made clear over and over again that both Roy and Clifford believe they are the only people capable of completing their various missions. Roy hijacks a ship and inadvertently kills everyone on board because he thinks that it’s his destiny or whatever to get his dad back, never mind that they were all highly trained space personnel who were arguably better suited to the mission precisely because it wasn’t their dad. Clifford straight up murders his whole crew because they are too “small minded” to fly off further and further into space forever on a mission that has yet yielded absolutely no evidence of their goals. A variety of talented human beings are destroyed because of the entitlement of white men, their delusional and unshakable conviction that they are at the centre of the universe and that no one else could possibly accomplish the lofty goals that kismet apparently calls them to.

The way they speak about themselves and to each other is absolutely psychotic. Roy’s solo musings include, “The flight recorder will tell the story, but history will have to decide,” and “In the end, the son suffers the sins of the father.” Clifford imparts his son with the delightful greeting of, “There was never anything there for me, I never cared for you or your mother or your small ideas.” In addition, they both physically flinch from human contact at various points in the move. Now, I totally understand that we live in a neurodiverse world and that many people experience emotions and social interactions in any number of ways, and that is a beautiful thing that makes our world so interesting to live in. However, that these men both abjectly state that they have no empathy is presented within the context of their megalomaniacal ideals that they must accomplish their god-given quests irregardless of how many people they have to kill along the way. It is a facet of their strangely two-dimensional, arrogant and narcissistic personalities, not one part of many complex features that make a complete and relatable human being.

Roy has to literally say out loud that he is a human being at the end of the movie; “I will rely on those closest to me…I will live and love,” which makes him sound more like a learning AI trying to pass a Turing test than anything else. The music swells as Clifford throws himself towards the surface of Neptune in an orchestral deluge that is unsubtly significant in this very quiet film, as though I’m supposed to start crying and think anything other than, “well thank fuck, it’s about time this murderer dies in the cold vacuum of space, I hope Roy stays spinning and screaming here forever too.” We are supposed to feel sympathy for them as the heroes of this movie, despite the fact that they show no care for anyone else throughout the whole thing and act entirely in their own self interests.

Overall, the women in this film are given about five seconds of potential as they introduce themselves variously as decorated soldiers and otherwise capable personnel, before being shoved to the side, or murdered, for Roy. This is obviously objectionable, but is made so much worse by the fact that Roy is an emotionless, entitled, empathy-less white man who doesn’t care if other people have to die for him to get what he wants. That is what these women are being passed up in favour of. I felt like I was watching a two hour long Voight-Kampff test. Space movies like this should be about what we can achieve if we work together as a species, not about how white men will still be the kings of dreary capitalism, even on the moon. We can do better than this.

And now for some asides:

What the actual fuck was the font at the beginning? I guess a red serif all caps should have alerted me to the fact that I was about to watch a horror movie.

As a lover of space horror, I was absolutely gutted that it was a bad CG angry baboon and not a cool gross alien. Also, what was that scene? “Hmm, we need to get rid of this loser because Brad Pitt is the best at space ships and he needs to be the captain. Uhh…what about…space monkeys? Yeah! Space monkeys on a deserted Norwegian ship. That makes sense.”

Can I just have a film bout those moon pirates fighting space capitalism please? I was more invested in them that anyone else in this garbage movie.

Credit for the Bradd Pitts joke goes to the talented and lovely Ed Cheverton

#ad astra #Film Review #movie review #feminism #sci-fi #scifi #science fiction #brad pitt #liv tyler #tommy lee jones #ruth negga #freda foh shen #lisagay hamilton #natasha lyonne

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jillmckenzie1 · 5 years

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Beyond, or: Daddy! Issues! In! Space!

We can all agree that Stephen Hawking was a pretty bright guy. He took a look at what humanity had been up to and was quoted as saying, “I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.”

If you’re in a pessimistic frame of mind, Hawking’s quote is easy to get behind. Due to pollution, environmental mismanagement, and climate change, bird populations in North America are plummeting. That’s only a single example of how our arrogance, selfishness, and ignorance damages the place we live in. Not to get too technical, but we humans can be pretty goddamn dumb.

Does that mean we’re doomed, and that the prudent thing to do is to hide under the covers until the end? Maybe not, because the rest of Hawking’s quote is, “But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.” He’s not wrong. For every moment of evil or idiocy we witness, there are just as many of grace and compassion.

Space travel provides the human species with more than scientific advancements and colonization opportunities. It allows us the chance to evolve, to embody the promise of what we can be. Filmmaker James Gray knows that space exploration is simultaneously external and internal, and his latest film Ad Astra explores that concept with intelligence and nuance.

There isn’t a whole lot that rattles Roy McBride (Brad Pitt). In the near future, he’s an astronaut, and he’s partially become a legend because his heart rate never rises above 80 BPM—even while he’s falling to earth. As McBride works on a gigantic space antenna, a power surge strikes Earth. Thousands are killed, the antenna is destroyed, but McBride manages to keep his wits about him and survive.

The other reason McBride is a legend? He’s the son of H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a fiercely intelligent astronaut who was the commander of The Lima Project. Their mission was to explore the outer reaches of the solar system and search for signs of alien life. McBride’s father has been off-planet for 26 years, and somewhere around Neptune, Earth lost contact with The Lima Project.

McBride’s BPM even stays under 80 when he’s given a mission. The surge originated near Jupiter, and it may have been caused by an antimatter device that McBride Senior was tinkering with. It’s possible that McBride’s father is alive. If so, is he behind the surge attack, and what are his intentions? Accompanied by Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), an old friend of his father, McBride must voyage to the Moon, Mars, the outer reaches of our galaxy, and the interiors of the human heart.

There’s been a bit of a renaissance in space cinema during the last few years. Films like Gravity and Interstellar have tried to provide a balance between hard science fiction and a meaningful emotional journey. For me, I waited for the Goldilocks Principle* to kick in, and I yearned for an astronaut movie that balanced out the emotional journey with astounding visuals. Ad Astra is precisely that movie.

Director James Gray isn’t quite a household name, and I imagine he prefers it that way. Take a look at his filmography and you’ll see that his interests lie in how experiences and exploration change people. He’s doing the same thing here as he did with The Lost City of Z, he’s just painting on a far bigger canvas. His film is handsomely shot and provides some mind bending visuals. While other directors would luxuriate in CGI, Gray frequently focuses on Brad Pitt’s face, providing us a window into his character. Before you worry that Ad Astra is going to be a cosmic snoozefest, I should mention to you the jaw-dropping set pieces that include a shootout on moon buggies and a zero-gravity fight between McBride and an extremely angry baboon. I should also mention the excellent set design, and Gray has taken great pains to depict what space travel is likely to look like in the near future.

Gray and co-writer Ethan Gross have written a smart and sophisticated screenplay with a great deal to say. Great art allows for a wealth of interpretations. You could certainly read it as a religious allegory, where a person journeys to meet their creator and discovers the truth of their purpose. I read it as more of an exploration of masculinity and how it’s affected by the bonds between a parent and child. A running voiceover by Pitt keeps the film’s point of view narrow, and that’s just as it should be. The more specific a screenplay is, the easier it is for everyone to relate.

The cast essentially exists to support Pitt at various stages, and that’s also just fine.** You’ll get Donald Sutherland for a few scenes as a grizzled ex-astronaut, a dash of Ruth Negga as a Martian administrator, and a pinch of Liv Tyler as McBride’s estranged spouse, all in service of illuminating different aspects of his humanity. 2019 is turning out to be a hell of a year for Brad Pitt, between this and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. He doesn’t often get the credit he deserves for acting skill, and as McBride, Pitt delivers career-best work. He’s playing a taciturn space jockey, but he never grandstands with his performance or becomes a stoic block of wood. Pitt’s McBride excels at emotional compartmentalization (as mandated by U.S. Space Command), yet discovers that emotions have a way of breaking free.

Ad Astra isn’t a CGI adventure perfect for date night, and it’s not a meditative rumination on the human condition playing in the cramped confines of an arthouse cinema. It’s more than that, a film made with impeccable craftsmanship, blazing intelligence, and emotional honesty. Ad Astra is a special film, the kind of film that isn’t made much now or back in the day. You owe it to yourself to see it.

*Nope, this isn’t some goofy term I made up. You can read about it here.

**I should also mention the quietly weird cameo appearance by Natasha Lyonne as a Mars gate agent.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/beyond-or-daddy-issues-in-space/

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