Thanksgiving Weekend Movie Trifecta

This year marked the first paid Thanksgiving holiday of my life, and it was glorious.  Seriously, restaurant industry?  Screw you right in the face with a chainsaw.  You made me hate the holidays but no longer!  I still twitch when I hear Christmas music, but who doesn't these days?  Anyways, I had an amazing weekend - spent time with family, played some games, bought myself some clothes, and saw three movies in the theater.  A 4-day weekend seemed like the logical choice for catching all the movies I wanted to see but didn't have time in my normal daily life.  I started on Black Friday by promising myself I could see the new Hunger Games if I braved the hordes at Macy's for new work pants, and then on Sunday caught Frozen and Thor: The Dark World back to back.  Since these movies all fell into genres I love - Disney Musicals, Marvel Movies, and Movies With Jennifer Lawrence In Any Capacity - it was a given that I would like them all.  But here are my expanded thoughts on the three.

Thor: The Dark World

Did I say expanded thoughts?  What is there really to say about this movie?  If you like the first Thor you will like this movie.  If you hated the first one, you'll still like it.  Its a Marvel movie, in my opinion they have yet to make a bad one.  Loki finally gets to be more of an antihero, which is true to the comics, and Christopher Eccleston is great as the Dark Elf Malekith.  They really pulled out the stops naming this guy to be an obvious Bad Dude.  As far as I can tell his name means "bad friend".  This guy is Not To Be Messed With.

Instead, permit me get all nerd-righteous for a moment about how I loved the character of Loki before all the Tom Hiddleston gifs started popping up.  No really.  My very first experience with the trickster god was reading a miniseries written from Loki's POV.  Not only did the story give me all the emotions, the art is just magnificent.  But it was reading Seige and the lead-up to it that really made me fall in love with him.  I loved that Loki came back from Ragnarok as a lady and I was sad when he went back to being a dude.

***Spoilers for Seige!***
After Ragnarok (I'm fuzzy on how that happened - I'm a Marvel fangirl but there's so much to read) Thor brought Asgard back to life in the mortal world.  In a field in Oklahoma I believe.  Anyway, Loki conspires with Norman Osborn to take it down because he honestly doesn't think Asgard should be in the mortal world at all.  He's fighting for what he believes in!  Poor guy doesn't realize that he's making deals with a lunatic whose got an even bigger lunatic on a tenuous leash.  That would be the Sentry, who I think its Marvel's answer to Superman.  Except with the phenomenal cosmic powers comes THE CRAZY.  The Sentry believes he is in constant battle with his archnemesis, the Void - except the Void is just his own split personality.  Once Loki realizes how batshit his allies are he repents and uses the Norn Stones to boost the Avengers' powers because the Sentry has become the Void and things are occurring.  The Void "kills" him (hahaha Marvel, you're not as bad as DC but we all know he ain't staying dead) and the Avengers are inspired by his sacrifice to win the day.  Norman Osborn is removed as head of S.H.E.I.L.D (yep, that was a thing that happened), Steve Rogers takes over and the Superhuman Registration Act is abolished.
***End Spoilers***

In closing, to the people in the theater who left as soon as the credits started - FOOLS!  Who leaves Marvel movies at the beginning of the credits anymore??

I love comics.

Frozen

This one started out on the wrong foot for me, and not because of the content of the movie itself.  Disney is apparently trying to do what Pixar did with animated shorts and they're doing about the same job as a kid who's used to being the center of attention trying a flip off the monkey bars after another kid did it with grace and pizzazz and stole his limelight.  It is exactly as painful and awkward as that, I know this because I invented a new unit of measurement with which to scientifically express this equation of horror - the cringemitator.  I have determined that both these things have about 3.21 cringemitators of sympathetic embarrassment each.  The short is half drawn in ye olde Disney animation style and half in whiz-bang computer animation and features the systematic and repetitive beatdown and humiliation of Pegleg Pete via a gimicky switch between the two animation styles after he once again tries to kidnap Minnie for clearly nefarious purposes.  (hahaha, try reading that whole sentence in one breath!)  Clearly nefarious, you ask?  Well, and I am not making this up, Pete sees Minnie dancing on the cart and gets an eyeball boner.  An eyeball boner that wilts upon the sight of Clara playing her udder as a bagpipe.  I'm right there with you dude, my boner would scamper the hell away from that too.  If I was a parent I might be writing a stern letter.  Altogether it was dumb and an unnecessary delay to what was a solid movie.

I suppose I understand all the anthropomorphic snowman advertising attached to this movie - many boys won't go see a movie about a Queen or a Princess.  Jerkfaces.  I have it on good authority though that several little boys exist who love this movie.  And if a talking snowman is what it takes to get the little monsters into a movie where the protagonists are girls then so be it, I say.  That being said, when I saw the snowman I wasn't inclined to see Frozen at all, and only went after I heard he actually plays a pretty small role in the movie.  This is true, and even more surprisingly he's actually well written - basically he was brought to life by some stray magic and now he's obsessed with experiencing summer.  His little song, and the human characters' reactions to it is just priceless.  I haven't read the story of the Snow Queen in a really long time so I can only guess just how loose this adaptation is.  Probably pretty loose.  And you know, I don't really care.  I enjoyed it, the songs were good, and I loved Elsa's introverted Snow Queen character.  At first I was disappointed in the music, but I think I was hoping for something closer to Beauty & The Beast caliber and its definitely not that good.  But there are some charming numbers, including a ventriloquism duet between a man and his reindeer.  And after listening to the soundtrack a few times its really grown on me, and "Let It Go" is my personal anthem at the moment.  I feel bad now for hating Idina Menzel's Glee character - just watch the video and you'll see.  I got a tingly feeling in my scalp.  Sorry you had to follow that, Demi Lovato.  It was a valiant effort.  Not all of us can be divinely anointed mezzos.



One last musical note - the opening number "Frozen Heart" reminded me very much of "Fathoms Below" from The Little Mermaid.  Frozen also had a touching twist on the idea of an "act of true love" being the only thing that can break a curse, which I won't go into because I don't want to spoil it.  And for those of us who like to complain about the antiseptic nature of computer animation and long for the hand-drawn days of yore, I can assure you that the characters in Frozen are very real and distinctively their own selves.  The contrast between Elsa and Anna does a lot to help the viewer empathize with both their situations.  Its not the best Disney movie since Mulan as a reviewer I sometimes trust claimed, but it was a good movie with obvious heart and appeal for adults as well as children.  I appreciate that Disney didn't give the story a cynical undertone to try to grab the adults - I didn't stop liking straight up fairy tales when I got older.  Clearly.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

I think one's enjoyment of Catching Fire is more dependent on what you expect going into it than many other movies.  For instance, my brother didn't really like it because he was expecting more action and kids murdering each other.  My words, not his.  And I wouldn't recommend going in hoping for an insightful commentary on sociopolitical inevitibilities.  Having read Catching Fire I already knew there wasn't much action in the second chapter, and the first movie didn't scream "deep insight on our societal direction" but something else.  To me, The Hunger Games is the story of what happens to a person who needs to save everyone when they are placed in a situation where that is categorically impossible.

I got that feeling quite a bit from the first movie, but its even more present to me in Catching Fire.  I'll admit I didn't read the first book, so it could very well be that Jennifer Lawrence read the character and just decided that was what the story was going to be about.  If that's the case, who are we to argue with the whims of The Immortal Golden Tide of Awesome?  We should be forever grateful to Lady Lawrence because if this movie was supposed to be some kind of relevatory glimpse on the future of our decadent and materialistic society it would be more ham-handed than the Goon and far less intelligent.  I mean, look at these mitts.

Written and illustrated by Eric Powell.

Katniss isn't a badass heroine in the way some people think of her in my opinion.  Yes she's good with a bow and she's smart but I think her real power is in her empathy.  She exits the Games and finds herself, as any normal person would, with a wicked case of PTSD.  But her fears aren't for herself, but for the people she cares about.  Its the fact that she genuinely gives a shit that makes her so attractive to the masses, and so easy to craft into a symbol.

***Line break spoiler warning for Catching Fire!***

At the end of the movie its pretty clear to me that this revolution is going to break Katniss down, mostly because of her empathy.  Her scene with Gale where he's getting all excited about fighting back is a reinforcement for that - the way she looks at him its pretty clear she's thinking that he just doesn't get it.  And he doesn't - you can't relate to an experience like the Games without having been there.  Gale's all fired up about taking back their country, but all Katniss sees is every single life that will be lost.  And she agonizes over it.  She's a great symbol, but she would make a terrible revolutionary leader because the only loss of life she can really accept is her own.  The people around her realize that and they keep the plan to get her out of the arena from her.

***Line break spoiler warning for Mockingjay!*** 

The third book pretty much nails down my above opinions, especially the resolution of the "love triangle".  Although I prefer to think of it as the "Will you both please stop having your feelings at me for one SECOND?!" subplot.  The ending wasn't happy, but it was the right ending.  She marries Peta, has a decent life with some children, but never really gets over what happened.  She and Peta help each other through the aftermath of two Hunger Games and a war.  People don't go through what she went through and get a truly happy ending.  Combine that with Katniss losing the one person she wanted to save above everyone else, and there's no "happy" for her.

***END SPOILERS***

All in all I thought the movie was better than the book, which a weird thing for me to say and have be true.  But the movie got to explore perspectives other than Katniss', and honestly I found her inner monologue to be a little bland.  In the movies her emotional guardedness is a slowly cracking dyke between her and the torrent of horror and hopelessness her situation forces on her.  In the book that doesn't come across as much, which is odd because we are inside her head.  I guess what I'm saying is that without Jennifer Lawrence these movies would be just a Battle Royale ripoff.  I cared about book Katniss because of movie Katniss - I honestly don't know if I would have finished the series if I didn't see movie Katniss first.  Sorry, author lady.