Why does she feel like she has to choose?

Magic Mike's Last Dance — 1.5/5

The first ten minutes and I'm like yes, fuck yes, it's back, this stupid wonderful thing that I somehow love. And then it squanders every bit of goodwill that first ten minutes builds. For as much as these movies have been built for (and I can only guess here) the female gaze—sexy guys with sexy abs having sex via the feminine quality of dancing—the movies' most attractive parts have always been the friendships. Magic Mike's magical magnetic quality was always his ability not to make women fall in love with him, but to attract a group of likeminded people into his world—specifically, bringing men into his world. My friends—it's always been about da boyz. And here, da boyz have been stripped back to pure dance machines, names barely registered, no personality to speak of—not even dance styles altogether distinct from one another. They are, finally, just pieces of meat; a parody of the world that's been built in the past two movies. Instead, it's all built around the male-female relationship, which have always been part of the Magic Mike universe, but never the center. Just the asteroids coming in and out of his life. Here, it's built up like it's the sun, all passion, all fire—but the heat never reaches you. The two never really connect except in that first scene. Everything else that happens just looks distant and cold from all the way out here. 

Oh my god, we're a team.

The Marvels — 3/5

It's low-stakes high-stakes. Big cosmic stage, light comedy. Planets in peril and we're making JOKES?? Yes!! And all the better for it. As she showed in Ms. Marvel, Iman Vellani (and her family) is a fucking delight (and I hope she takes advantage of the next ten years to star in every high-school comedy about an international girl in love with the popular white guy). She carries comedy and drama well—which I can't say as much about with her co-stars. The emotional connection between Teyonah Parris and Brie Larson never connects, and we never really feel the weight that Captain Marvel carries for her past mis-deeds, nor quite the extent of the glorious purpose of her villain. And I am in full 'forgive that' mode because someone cut twenty to forty minutes out of that storyline to make a breezy, fun, 105-minute movie that drops you in the action and just says 'fuck it' from then on out. Planets where everyone sings! Cats that eat people in order to save them! Stealing our sun! It's a superhero movie. It's having fun, and the people inside seem to be having fun. Quelle tragédie. I think this will get looked back on years from now as low-key one of the best Marvel movies in terms of pure rewatchability. 

Aesthetic

criminals.

Glorious purpose

Loki Season 2 — 4/5

The current Marvel discourse has been interesting to watch. "A few relative failures and the whole thing's doomed." My friends, it has always had bad parts. There have always been mediocre parts. My preferred Marvel Universe ethos was laid out at the entrance, at the end of the first Iron Man. "Hey, what if we introduce the Avengers?"—ie, let's say something aloud and see if someone can make something out of it later. It was throwing out threads. Here's a character, here's a line, here's a motivation. Let's see what happens. And the beauty of these movies has been when all of those threads seem to so intentionally collide in moments like Captain America finally saying "Avengers Assemble" in Endgame. And bros? My dudes? My ride-or-dies? Number one movie-going experience I've ever been a part of. There's a type of storytelling experience that is only achievable through longform storytelling. It's the feeling of things coming together; threads crossing over and under and through the years to lead to moments that feel like magic. It's the feeling of being rewarded. In exchange—sometimes those moments go nowhere. Sometimes it's just a loose thread, a false story to follow. I think the lie of the Marvel Universe is how much of it is planned versus how much they've just flown by the seat of their pants and hoped someone could make sense of it. And of course the more they get it "wrong," the more pressure there is to step in and make that plan more solid—less random, less chaotic; less open. Fortunately, Loki was finished before that conversation stepped up it's PR campaign because wow, what a fucking ending to a character. Loki gets his throne he no longer wanted; only through understanding the burden of the crown can one wear it. Loki ascends from the God of Lies to the God of Stories, not weaving them like Anansi but holding each creation up as worthy of being told. Each tangent, each breach, each variation leaves room for being worthwhile. He is Atlas of the libary, carrying our stories on his shoulders, cataloguing all of the books on the shelves without passing judgement on their contents. He is the firmament that all can stand on, free to move. From villain to anti-hero to Marvel's greatest hero—the series' final episode is the end result of all these tangents, these random lines and images, coming together to make something that we never saw coming, that all fits with what we've seen; the throne he thought he deserved; the only person he could love enough to become a hero for ended up being himself (in a way). As Marvel is busy learning another lesson about best-laid plans, here is the antithesis to that: as Sylvia and Loki both understand, the more calculated the Sacred Timeline—the more calculated the Marvel Universe becomes—the less we want it. The show had a decent amount of flaws in getting here, particularly in not making things clear when they could have been more easily explained, but the emotional resonance it earns in that final episode, the threads it weaved and tied together—again, there is a type of storytelling experience that is only achievable through longform storytelling, and here it is again. As long as the possibility of that exists, I'll keep signing on for more.

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder.

How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm … in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

— Father Daniel Berrigan, “No Bars to Manhood”

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance:

how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

— W. H. Auden in Musee des Beaux Arts

For us, there is only the trying.

The rest is not our business.

— T.S. Eliot

Are you poor now?

Our Flag Means Death S2 — 4/5

The first half of this was great, it was acting like a show with nothing to lose, and it didn't care if a S3 order came in. They're in love, and isn't it great, and isn't that the end. But it doesn't end there! And then it's just them coming together and leaving and coming together and leaving. But while that gets tiresome, the surrounding characters find ways to remain interesting—almost each of them in love in different ways, all presented without judgement or comment. It's easy to be in love when no one around you particularly gives a shit. No outside weight added on it, so it can just float, light as a balloon. Stede and Ed carry the burden of 'reputation,' and so are overly concerned with what everyone thinks. But Stede to others, and from all around him, they have that same non-judgemental sweetness that Reservation Dogs has—so given his participation in both, this might just be the quality which Taika Waititi brings to a project. No one is weird when you've found each other. Special mark to Izzy Hands who was just a remarkable actor, and the subtle main character throughout this season. And special mark for, with every new character added, another departs. Keep it tight, boyos. 

The ones who stayed.

Reservation Dogs S3 (but also the whole thing) — 4.5/5

And so ends the slow crawl from comedy to drama, and the path its drawn is beautiful and sweet and something I think, combined with things like Ted Lasso and Our Flag Means Death and The Bear, starts to approach again the new religion, the old religion, one called "all we have is each other." Believe in me as I in you and together we shall rise. If the first two seasons of Reservation Dogs were about escaping the bonds of where you're from, this final season 180s it—they searched for a larger world if only to say goodbye to it. "How beautiful to never search for who you are. Everything you need is here, in the millenniums of certainty." The trust in the aunties and uncles and shitasses and the ancestors, the spirits, that every step was a step forward, and in all the chaos of the universe, the random assortment of atoms traversing eternities, in life and death, they found each other, here, in this place, at this time. They came together. And then the hard part becomes staying together. Though some do leave, and maybe later even more will, I think this show ultimately does something which I'm not sure I've seen before—it celebrates the ones who stayed. The ones who make up the home you return to. The constants. Their small lives, infinite in size. The ones who believe in you, who collectively do their part to fill the god-sized hole inside you. The people in this show touches something in me. I will miss them now that they're gone, and I hope they come this way again. 

Children

are distant things.

Resentment is drinking poison

and expecting someone else to die.

— Geri Halliwell

How beautiful to never search for who you are. Everything you need is here.

In the millenniums of certainty.

— Bucky, Reservation Dogs, Season 3, Episode 5

I'm an idiot.

Shazam: Fury of the Gods — 2.5/5

I think it's better than the first one! Here is why: the movie's biggest problem is still Zachary Levi. Specifically, how he and his kid alter-ego are not actually anything alike. Captain Marvel is an 8-year old kid who wants friends and verbalizes it excessively, and Billy Batson is a moody too-cool-for-school teenager who wants friends but keeps it to himself (like any self-respecting teenager should). Everytime it switches between them, there's a huge shift in tone. What the movie gets right this time is essentially sidelining Billy to focus on Freddie—who, in another world, is a much better Billy Batson! But actually I'm thankful he's not because this means that Freddie can interact with Captain Marvel in ways that Billy never could. It feels like a kid interacting with that kid with superpowers. And so it's fun! And there's a stable tone throughout this thing. And I pretty much forget all the bits and pieces outside of that. Not sure if the other superhero family members actually did much? Except to serve a story about family that was mostly about two members of the family? Anyway, more fun was had. Huzzah. 

I just feel like you're pretending.

Honor Society — 2/5

I went into this hoping for two things — a clear successor to the easy likeability of 'Easy A,' and the ascendance of Angourie Rice, who I am fond of because 'The Nice Guys' continues to be one of my most rewatched modern movies, and I wish her to succeed outside of it. She does okay! The movie has a rhythm, it moves steadily forward, it has charms—but my god, is it so fucking grey. It's dreary. It's made in the few minutes between deluges of rain on either side of the scene. It makes any lightness sopping wet. And then a weird fucking sociopathic twist and a weird fucking creepy teacher thing. Somewhere in here is a brightly-colored movie, and a decent story about how the road to heaven may be paved with bad intentions, but it's lost in this fucking downpour.

Everyone’s gotten really good

at the same thing.

— Lorde