Over the past few days I’ve been archiving lots of older stuff (from the bits of my old tumblr/twitter/facebook that the Internet Wayback Machine caught.) After all, the clue’s in the OVERLY DEVOTED Archivist name. So I thought I might post links to some choice older nonsense here, meticulously labelled, for your viewing pleasure.
Note that these are (mostly) not what I consider the BEST films of the decade. Honestly I don’t even get to go the movies all that much, so the best ones I might not have even seen. But they are the ones that made me the happiest.
Like my favourite TV shows of the decade list, this is in alphabetical order and packed with aesthetically pleasing gifs for your viewing pleasure.
10 Cloverfield Lane
My GOD this film. It was claustrophobic, creepy, gnaw-your-own-arm-off terrifying… and a FANTASTIC power fantasy. Michelle, the protagonist of this film, quickly became one of my favourite sci-fi heroines ever. She suffers a lot of trauma during the movie, unimaginable things (but nothing graphic/titillating/male-gazey) and comes out the other side swinging. Then she downs an entire alien spaceship using nothing but her wits. God I love her and this film so much. I could write essay after essay about female empowerment as portrayed in this flick.
Detective Pikachu
When I was a child I dreamed they would one day make a Pokemon live-action film, and they DID, and it was better than I ever imagined. It was sweet, it was funny, it was packed with references to the Pokemon lore (Pokelore?) that would have gone over most people’s heads but was included anyway, and Bill Nighy was in it. I loved this film so much and I can’t wait to show it to my future children.
Ghostbusters
Okay here goes: I never saw the original Ghostbusters. I never saw the sequel movie either, or any of the cartoons. Why’d I like this so much then? Well… honestly… because it was all women. Funny, smart, main-character women, the mere existence of which apparently drove some people into teeth-gnashing mania. And that was it. That’s enough, right?
The Greatest Showman
It stills surprises me that this film got such bad reviews on release. Audiences apparently disagreed because not only did it get really high audience ratings it ALSO made a ton of money AND everyone I’ve ever shown it to liked it! I know some of the songs within it ended up massively overplayed (especially This Is Me, thanks a bunch Simon Cowell) but when you see them being performed in the movie they really do seem raw and real and touching.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2
I have absolutely no idea if GOTG2 is a good movie or not and honestly, there’s a part of me that doesn’t even care. It fills me with such insane joy every time I watch it. I love the friendships between all the main characters, I love Yondu’s redemption, I love how the music ties into the story, I love Baby Groot. And I especially love how the film is mostly about different forms of abuse and how we all have it within ourselves to overcome them.
Les Miserables
Les Mis is a very good movie, but it’s actually on this list not so much for itself but because its existence introduced me to the book, which transpired to shape my entire life. That being said I do really mean that it’s a very good movie (and quite faithful to the book as well it turns out), it thoroughly deserves to be on everyone’s Best of the Decade list. Don’t be put off by the fact that Tom Hooper’s next musical was Cats.
The Lego Movie
I wasn’t expecting much from The Lego Movie. Was anyone?! I thought it was a cheap, cynical cash grab. MAN was I wrong. Instead it was an amazing story about the power of imagination and the importance of childhood. The final speech (“You are the most talented, most interesting, and most extraordinary person in the universe…”) is one of my favourite speeches in any movie, ever. It makes me think of a parent talking to a child and it captures the spirit of Lego perfectly.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Is there anything to be said about Mad Max: Fury Road that hasn’t already been said? It’s been called the greatest action film of all time, a feminist masterpiece, one of the best movies of its era… and all the people claiming those things are 100% right. I don’t think it’s technically perfect but it’s damn close. And special-effects wise it’s a staggering achievement. (All those people REALLY WERE climbing poles on motorbikes, holy heck.) I hope it’s celebrated for years to come.
Pacific Rim
I love Pacific Rim not because it’s a bonkers, brightly-coloured monsters-vs-robots movie (though that definitely helps) but because how utterly adamant it was that teamwork, collaboration and in some cases love would help humanity save the world. God, the whole movie seems like a relic from a totally different time, doesn’t it? The less said about the sequel the better.
Paddington 2
Apparently Paddington 2 is the highest-rated film ever on RottenTomatoes, and despite what you think of RottenTomatoes the site (I personally am not a fan) HOLY HECK IT DESERVES IT. This is a children’s film about a cute teddy bear who lives among humans and loves marmalade sandwiches and somehow it was more hard-hitting, beautiful and poignant than a lot of the “serious” movies released the same year. Hugh Grant deserved an Oscar for playing such a fantastic baddie/hilariously exaggerated version of himself. The whole damn film deserved an Oscar. (As it happened, The Shape of Water won that year. They got the wrong Sally Hawkins Forms A Relationship With A Non-Human Character Resulting In An Emotional Underwater Scene film.)
Honourable mentions: (my god there are a lot) Toy Story 3, Avengers: Endgame, Black Panther (most of the MCU honestly), The Rise of Skywalker, Belle, Their Finest, Big Hero 6, Frozen II, Aladdin, Batman vs Superman (yes really), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the entire Hunger Games series, SO MANY
#1 Use a different movie for each prompt #2 Add photos and/or explanations of how your choices fit the prompts #3 Tag a few friends to play along
Let’s see what we got.
1. A Partridge in a Pear Tree — movie that involves agriculture
OH NO. Okay… Hmm. WAIT! My husband just HANDED ME the most obvious answer. The Martian, a space movie which I love, all about a guy who survives on Mars by growing potatoes. (It’s much, much more interesting than I make it sound there.)
Home to a really good line about humanity and the world:
“Every human being has a basic instinct: to help each other out. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.”
2. Turtledoves — movie about a long-lasting relationship
Back in 2007 this movie ripped my heart out, stamped on it, put it back in, then kicked it upwards through my brain and out my head.
I speak of course of Atonement, the tale of a doomed romance and some beautiful, beautiful dresses. In the end, Robbie and Cecilia can’t survive World War II or the British class system. (Yeah, the British class system, not Briony, is the villain of this story.) But Briony ensures via her writing that they have a long-lasting relationship anyway, and I cry.
3. French Hens — movie that takes place in France
Okay, it’s a toss-up between two movies here, both based on works by Victor Hugo: Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables. And… despite the fact that it has virtually nothing at all to do with the book… I think Hunchback juuuust takes it, because it’s a gorgeous, interesting, progressive-for-Disney film, and I love it.
I can’t even choose one shot from this movie so just have the opening one. And hey! The titular church didn’t burn down this year! It’s still there!
4. Calling Birds — movie where people talk on the phone
Okay, I’m gonna stretch the definition of “phone” a bit here and show you something from The Phantom Menace:
I’m sorry I knoooooow Love Actually probably isn’t really all that great as a movie and it’s so cheesy and corny and up-itself but I love it. It’s like a warm Christmas hug. (And I don’t even really like Christmas, so…)
6. Geese A-laying — movie with a birth or that features babies
So before there was Baby Yoda, there was this equally adorable fella:
And I think his presence is enough to qualify Guardians of the Galaxy 2 as a film that features babies. No births though, unless you count the birth of a god or the birthing chamber stuff on the gold planet or various “rebirths” of characters. Wait… GOTG2 is surprisingly birth-metaphors-heavy actually. Who knew.
7. Swans A-swimming — movie where someone goes swimming
Okay, so maybe this isn’t so much “someone goes swimming” as it is “someone tries to swim and nearly drowns” but…
I can still remember the music from that bit in Fellowship of the Ring after all this time. My god, the last quarter of that movie kicks all kind of ass and tramples on my feelings, I love it so.
“I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. A promise. Don’t you leave him, Samwise Gamgee. And I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to.”
8. Maids A-milking — movie with cows
Okay, this can only be Children of Men. (A film that I very nearly put at #6.) Why? At the film’s pivotal moment we get this beautiful, striking scene featuring a whole lotta cows.
I think it’s meant to be reminiscent of Mary in the manger. And I love it so much. Please watch Childrenof Men, it’s so harrowing but so good, it’s amazing, I promise.
9. Ladies Dancing — movie with a dance scene
AM I GONNA DO IT? YEAH I’M GONNA DO IT. I’m gonna put Spider-Man 3 in here. Yes, that one.
But not for that dance scene… or even that one. You know the much-derided ones I mean. The one I like is this one:
Harry Osborn (in his various incarnations) is my Second Favourite Fictional Character Of All Time, and Mary Jane is pretty high up the list as well, so it was nice to see them have a moment of happiness before one of them dies. Honestly, that’s it. (I unapologetically love Spider-Man 3, even if only for Harry. I admit it. I’m sorry. No wait, no I’m not.)
10. Lords A-leaping — movie about athletes
Aw dang… I’m not good at this genre. But I do really like Noel Clarke’s Fast Girls and no-one else seems to have seen it, so I’m putting it here. I really need to watch it again actually. It suffers from Unnecessary Forced Heterosexual Romance In An Almost All-Woman Film Syndrome but eh, what doesn’t.
(Yeah, the Noel Clarke from Doctor Who. And yes, that is a pre-mega-fame Lily James.)
11. Pipers Piping — movie with someone playing a musical instrument
Wait, NOW I can get Les Miserables in here. During the very start of the “Drink With Me” scene Grantaire (my First Favourite Fictional Character of all time) starts running his hands over a broken piano.
It doesn’t make any sound of course, but that’s so much more poignant than if it had.
12. Drummers Drumming — movie with characters in the military
I don’t really get to go to the cinema much these days but one film I did see this year was Tolkien, which kinda delves in a little into how Tolkien’s experiences in the First World War inspired his writings.
It didn’t get very good reviews, to my surprise, and I suppose the dispute with Tolkien’s descendants definitely didn’t help, but I liked it. It definitely didn’t shy away when depicting the horrors of World War I.
And that’s that…
You should definitely do this meme if you want to! In fact, please do!
Disney+ released in the USA today, I hear! But not the UK, we don’t get it til March. And since Disney still does not comprehend how the non-corporate internet works or how fans will react upon deliberately being excluded, I have watched the Endgame deleted scenes on YouTube. Or the ones I’m interested in, anyway. (i.e. the Guardians ones)
It took me til now to realise that Peter and Rocket didn’t actually have a reunion scene in Endgame. Here they have… approx two lines. The fistbump is nice though, assuming that would’ve been CGIed in later.
This I like better, except that everything that’s happened to Gamora is written off and undermined once again. “This one?” Shouldn’t Peter be making somewhat more of a distinction between the Gamora who loved him and is dead and the past version of her? Y’know what I mean, right? Plus how does he even know why and how she’s alive? Is this meant to be before or after the bit where she kicks him in the balls? Oh, I don’t know, but I don’t like it.
I do like the rest of the scene, where everyone bands together. Well done for breaking up Tony’s fight and helping with the plan, Peter, you are treated with more respect in this deleted scene than you were in the whole rest of the movie.
Finally Okoye gets more lines. And Valkyrie seems to approve of Mantis, and I approve of that. (It’s all that confirmed that Valkyrie will shortly be the MCU’s first (finally) LGBT character but I really hope Mantis will be another one.)
Anyway! My problems with these scenes are the same ones I had about the whole of Endgame, a) things that should be serious are played for laughs b) Gamora’s arc is given absolutely no thought whatsoever when the whole story should have been about her and c) Honestly… this whole movie is basically just “Iron Man 4 feat. some other people”. Gah, I try not to be bitter about it, I did have an absolute blast watching Endgame, but MCU-wise the only movies I’m really interested in for the future are GOTG 3 (obviously), Black Widow, Black Panther 2, probably about half of Thor 4 and maybe the third Spider-Man, even though I still can’t connect with him because that particular spider-verse is so far from the one I intitially loved. (Far, far too much Iron Man, again, for starters.) But we’ll see.
God, Disney. I’m being left out of Disney+ and I’m still going to end up making you richer. You owe me.
Okay this looks really interesting, especially since I gather it’s about Pirate Yondu meeting his ancestor Original Yondu, and that multi-universe relation fix was a lot of people’s headcanon back in the day. But on the other hand Kraglin appears to be dead in this one, so eep, and also there’s no Peter and honestly the thing I care about most re Yondu is his relationship with Peter. (And also Michael Rooker’s performance, which obviously cannot be contained in a comic.) So… we’ll see! There’s quite a few comics I want to pick up next time I get the chance.
So you probably know that I had a couple of issues with Endgame, especially what happened to Gamora, and this is my attempt to fix them. (Pay attention, James Gunn.)
Title: A Scar on the World Fandom: MCU/Guardians of the Galaxy Characters: Gamora, Natasha Summary: Gamora is trying to come to terms with being alone and displaced in time. Luckily, the universe isn’t done with either her or Natasha Romanoff.
So it was afewdaysago o’clock that I learned Sean Gunn filmed some scenes for Endgame, and they got cut! I consider this an epic injustice. Look at this green-screen bit from the behind the scenes doc on the DVD. We almost got Peter and Kraglin fighting side-by-side!
And check out his look! He’s got a new fin and looks badass!
Here’s a shot of him aboard a space bike. (The Twitter account that first posted this has mysteriously gone, did the Mouse get them?)
Whether Kraglin was supposed to be besides Peter for the whole scene or on the space bike, I’m not sure. Apparently you can just about make out a space-bike-riding blob in the finished cut of the movie:
So maybe the scene of him on the battlefield was cut early on. I’d have really, really loved to see him there, though. Not only do I like the relationship between Peter and Kraglin and wanna see more of it, if the intention was for Kraglin to be wielding the Yaka Arrow (and he does look a bit like he’s whistling in the top image) that would have meant a part of Yondu was sort of present beside Peter in that battle as well. And that breaks my tiny GOTG-obsessed heart.
This is material ripe for fanfiction! After I’ve finished working on the post-Endgame fic I’m going at the moment, I reckon I’ll give something with Kraglin a whirl. I love that boy (and Sean too, meeting him at ComicCon was a true delight).
So the other day I was watching Louis Theroux’s new documentary, Surviving America’s Most Hated Family, all about the more-or-less collapse of the Westboro Baptist Church. The WBC were essentially the boogyman when I was a teenager. My 14-year-self, crouched in a corner with a laptop watching them scream homophobic slurs, could barely think of anything more evil than them.
Well, obviously my 14-year-old self was very, very wrong. But anyway.
Theroux spends a lot of this documentary being charmingly, Britishly baffled at the actions of the Westboro members who remain. At one point, he’s told he lacks compassion by a man holding a sign saying “WHY DID GOD DESTROY SODOM?” That’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with here. It’s almost funny, and I think Theroux expects that we’ll laugh, but it’s also crushingly sad.
Theroux also spends some time interviewing the people who’ve left Westboro. At one point he drops into the house of Fred Phelp’s granddaughter Rachel Hockenbarger, who absolutely DOES NOT look like a member of WBC anymore.
I liked Rachel from the moment I saw her. She let Theroux in and showed him her tattoos. One of them in particular stood out, and the camera lingered on it so we could all see what it said: “Whatever nightmares the future holds, are dreams compared to what’s behind me.” That was a line from Guardians of the Galaxy, Rachel explained, said by Zoe Saldana’s character Gamora. She was a hardened assassin and killer until she changed her ways and became a good guy.
I’m a massive Gamora fan. Huge. However I think Rachel, rainbow-clad Rachel, is the person who deserves the accolade of her number one fan. She handed Theroux a drink in a Gamora-shaped mug. “Does that mean anything to you?” he asked of her tattoo. “Yeah,” she said simply. “Just trying to move forward.”
Is it fair to say superheroes helped rip Westboro apart? When Megan Phelps-Roper left the church and denounced it, she quoted Catwoman to explain why she had done so. “There’s no fresh start in today’s world. Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what you did. Everything we do is collated and quantified. Everything sticks,” was the opening line of her public statement. “Don’t act surprised that I’m quoting Batman.” Catwoman was a thief and a villain until, wait for it, she changed her ways and became a good guy.
In Megan’s first ever non-Westboro statement she explained how the church used pop culture for its own ends. “At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses – and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context,” she wrote. But luckily for Megan, and unluckily for the cult she belonged to, you can’t keep a good comic book story down.
The transformative power of fandom has been spoken about many times, by far smarter people than me. People see themselves reflected in the hero, or the villain who becomes the hero, and act accordingly, spurred on by the thought that hey! Maybe the world finally sees them. That’s why we today make so much of the importance of representation. There will always be black children who need a noble king in T’Challa, Polynesian girls who need a steadfast adventurer in Moana, and so on. Favourite characters turn into little voices in your head telling you go on, you can do it, I did.
It was Gamora and Catwoman, lady villains-turned-heroes who aren’t even the main characters of their respective franchises, who transpired to be the things girls like Rachel and Megan needed to see. I find something so, so satisfying in that.
So the dust has settled on Avengers: Endgame now, and I’ve had months to turn my problem with it over and over in my head. Really, I think most of my negative feelings are encapsulated in one scene: the one where Thor leaves his people behind and gets aboard ship with the Guardians in the end.
Bear in mind everything that’s happened to these characters at this point. Thor’s lost his brother and spent five years in a haze of bad mental health. Peter’s lost Gamora, thought he got her back, and lost her (in a different way) again. Drax has wanted to kill Thanos since the first movie he was in, Thanos is now dead, and… nothing. Rocket lost all his friends for half a decade and suddenly they’re back. And so on. No-one gets to react to any of this. Like, not anything. Instead they hang around and laugh while Peter and Thor have a pissing contest over who gets to be leader.
Like… that’s it? That’s where you think these characters should be right now? Really?
It’s all the worse because that scene should be about Gamora. She was the cog the whole of Infinity War spun around, hell she was the cog the whole Thanos story spun around, and what happens to her? She gets thrown in a pit, brought back from the past, allowed to fight a little and then more or less forgotten about.
Does Gamora get even a reaction shot when Thanos, her tormentor, the person who’s haunted her and brutalized her for three damn movies, dies at last? No, she does not. Okay, my slightly infuriated thoughts went at the time, perhaps maybe the last scene with the Guardians might be aboutherand where she is and how her friends will start the search for her? Nope! Instead it’s about… Thor. Bad luck.
So yeah. I wanted to stop short of saying “It’s sexist” but I can’t because really none of the important women in Endgame get their due at all, not just Gamora. Captain Marvel got built up and built up, but she’s in the movie for like… five minutes, and we don’t get to learn her thoughts and feelings about anything going on. (She has close friends on Earth, we learned in her solo movie, but she doesn’t even mention them or worry about their fate.) Black Widow gets agency in her sacrifice at least, but then – not unlike Gamora actually – she’s forgotten about. While Tony gets the massive funeral and the tributes, Hawkeye remembers Natasha in one line at the end. Nothing the Avengers did in this film would have been possible without her but she’s not getting any of the accolades.
Nebula is a strange case, because she does get a lot of agency and depth in this movie, but I can’t forgive the scene where she kneels over Thanos – the man who abused her and murdered her sister – and closes his eyes. That makes no sense. It’s bewilderingly out of character and if it was supposed to make her more palatable as a heroine, or something, it doesn’t. The best Nebula line is in the second Guardians movie, I think, when Gamora tells her she could help all the little girls in the world who are suffering like they used to. “I will help them by killing Thanos,” Nebula says, and that’s the line which turns her from a sympathetic villain into (finally) a crusader against injustice and abuse. To have her show a shred of tenderness against her father takes all that away, and it’s so, so baffling to me that apparently the writers couldn’t see that.
Then there’s the women the movie appeared not to have time for, like Okoye. She was prominent on the poster but got maybe two lines in the movie. There was time to follow Hawkeye’s Adventures in Murder but not time to check in on her? Especially since her storyline – let’s assume she was left essentially the leader of a whole, suddenly devastated country since the royal family were dead – would have been really interesting. Come to think of it Natasha falls into this category too, since she was supposed to have a great subplot that ended up on the cutting room floor, because of course it did.
Some of the MCU women who’re bit players in this one – think Valkyrie, Pepper etc – actually do get treated well in the movie, credit where credit’s due. Pepper’s last scene with Tony hit really hard, for example, because it’s played straight. And I mean that sounds ridiculous, of course the death of a major character in one of the biggest franchises of all time is gonna be played straight you’d hope, but there were moments where I wondered, because this movie is so incapable/terrified of believing people would take it seriously. When Thor bids goodbye to his mother and leaves her to die, after the heartfelt I love you’s she tells him to eat a salad because he’s fat now and that’s funny and we’re meant to laugh. When Gamora finds Peter again and no longer knows who he is, which is a tragedy for both of them, she kicks him in the balls and he rolls around in pain making a quip and that’s meant to be funny too. Is it not realistic that Tony’s death might have been interrupted by someone falling over, or a fart joke? Is it weird I’m almost surprised that it wasn’t?
Anyway. Wait, why did I hate Thor for a little bit? Well, I can’t bring myself to hate him really, or even dislike him, he’s an adorable golden retriever of a man. But that scene with him and the Guardians at the end is teasing Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and that is the last chance anyone has to give Gamora her due, to make her story and her constant victimization mean anything. And with that scene, suddenly her importance was pushed to one side to make room for Thor. Who despite his many good qualities is still a white straight able-bodied male superhero, not exactly an underrepresented group. And he’s also one who has three movies bearing his name already, plus major roles in all the Avengers films. Who looked at Thor, looked at Gamora, and decided he not she was the one the audience should have more of? And that Gamora is so unimportant that in the scene where her friends should be discussing how to find her, they are instead trading jokes with him, because the one BIG thing Endgame can’t take seriously is its women?
You’re great and I like you fine, Thor. Honestly. And you didn’t deserve those fat jokes. But you’re done. Now take your hammer, and your snazzy axe thing, and just… go away for a bit.
