Continuing with the feminism theme

Since Sarah talked about Brave in passing on Monday, I thought I'd follow up with an interesting experience I had with the movie.

I generally pride myself on being able to think through my opinions reasonably, tell you why I think the way I do, and change my ideas if it seems I'm incorrect. You know, basic Nerdfighter intellectual honesty stuff. I'd been very excited to see the movie, but just a couple of days before I went, someone whose opinion I think highly of tore it apart due to claimed misogyny.

(mild spoilers ahoy)
As I went into the theater with my friends, I tried really hard to put aside the review I'd read to judge for myself. But throughout the movie I had a hard time distinguishing whether I was noticing the points the review brought up because I would have actually noticed them, or because they were already in my mind.

I loved some parts of the movie - her kid brothers were awesome (even without saying a single word!), I liked that Merida worked hard to get her great archery skills, the family interactions were hilarious, there's no real "bad guy" but instead a situation that needs to be remedied, and showing that the queen is the one that really runs the show was great as well.

But instead of sitting back and enjoying the movie, I found myself trying to distance myself from it to analyze it and my reactions to it; I won't argue the merits of it here, since that's not the purpose of the post, and I'm still not really sure what I think of it. And that's a really strange feeling for me, especially because now I'm wary to jump into any discussions of it because I'm not sure what's my opinion and what's either confirmation bias or being primed by reading the review first.

Maybe the lesson I'll take from this is: don't read spoiler-y reviews before I see something, just go off the Rotten Tomatoes score or something :P

Hocus Pocus

One of my favourite Halloween traditions is watching the movie Hocus Pocus.  This was a tradition that two of my friends and I started back in junior high, and carried out through high school.  We were having a sleepover at my place one year and it happened to be the weekend before Halloween, so my friend Sarah brought Hocus Pocus with her so that we could watch it.  She had seen it a bunch of times, but Lindsey and I had never seen it before, so she had already assigned who was which character.  (This was a thing that we did at the time.  Not just us, but our entire class.  We'd assign all the characters in movies and books and things to be people we knew, usually based on what was the most hilarious.  There were two people in our class who were especially prolific at this, there were a bunch of different movies and things that they did for everyone in the class.  When they did Harry Potter I was Moaning Myrtle, and in Finding Nemo I was the anglerfish.  This is a long aside.)

Since the main characters of Hocus Pocus are three witches, and there were three of us, Sarah had decided we were the witches.  She was Winnie, the bossy one; Lindsey was Mary, the kind but clumsy one; and I was Sarah, the ditzy one.  While we watched the movie we assigned all the other characters to be the rest of our friends.  It became a tradition, and we watched it around Halloween every year for three or four years in a row.

Hocus Pocus isn't the greatest quality movie, but it's pretty hilarious, and it always reminds me of my friends.  Even though it's been quite a while since the three of us watched it together, and we don't even keep in touch very much any more, I still watch it every year if I have time.

Pet Peeves in Movies

I wasn't sure what we were doing for a theme this week so I decided to just carry on with picking one of the ones that had been suggested like we've been doing the last few weeks.  Also, we're starting to run out of those...

I can't really think of very many pet peeves I have in movies, but I think the worst one is when there are twist endings that don't really fit at all with the rest of the movie.  The worst example of this that I can think of is the movie Knowing.  SPOILERS if you haven't seen it, but it was actually a pretty decent movie up until the end.  It's about this girl who was psychic and predicted all these catastrophes and put a list of them in a school's time capsule, and then it was dug up just before the last one happened, which was a solar flare that killed everyone.  Then at the end aliens showed up to save some kids from the solar flares, and it was the aliens who "sent a message" to the girl so she could predict these things.  So, yeah.  Aliens showing up out of nowhere at the end of a movie for no reason is something that bothers me.

That's actually really the only one that I can think of right now, so I guess this will be a short post.

DFTBA!

Movie/TV Pet Peeve

You know those pet peeves that just make you facepalm (or worse) whenever you see them?

One of my big ones is centered around media, and TV shows and movies seem to be the biggest offenders.

I hate the easy out of tying up plot lines by revealing that everything has been a dream/hallucination/some other thing that changes the entire story. If it wasn't used so much it might still be original, but now I just roll my eyes when it shows up in something.

I wrote a long, rambly bit about the latest season finale of House, but I think instead I'll sum it up this way: sometimes, this cliche works. There have been hints throughout, or if it's a drug overdose induced hallucination (hence the House reference), it's in character and we've seen the signs that this might be coming.

But when used as a quick fix because a) the writers tried to solve everything because they thought they were getting cancelled, but then got renewed, b) the story's been written into a corner, or c) everything needs to be tied up quickly, the sloppiness shows. It's hard to use this twist well, and it will probably remain a pet peeve of mine.