The Marci Rating System

“It’s lovely, it’s practical, and you can hide a sword in it.”
-Joshua Johnson, The 1A Movie Club Sees ‘Wonder Woman’

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Totally non-spoilery review coming up!

1. Totally awesome. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen. Gal Gadot was amazing. 11/10 would watch again.

2. Surely I was not the only one to walk out of the theater thinking, ‘Was that Remus Lupin?’ And yes, yes it was. David Thewlis (Sir Patrick in Wonder Woman) also played Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter movies.

3. For those who watched the scene in the trailer where Diana wears an evening gown and appears to have her sword tucked into the back of her dress, and thought, ‘Now *that* is where I draw the line on believability,’ fear not! She has her armor on *under* the dress!

4. So it looks like Chris Pine’s wildly inconsistent character representation in every Star Trek movie is not his fault? Because I thought he was great in this! Much more likable character than I expected!

5. It appears that the Justice League movie will not feature Wonder Woman as the main character, which seems like a mistake. How much do I want a movie where Diana, Lois, Martha, and Alfred meet up for coffee each morning and save the world, all while sending Bruce and Clark on increasingly improbably quests to remote places in the world? SO MUCH.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Going to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2 today. (Volume 2? I’ve just been calling it Guardians2 in emails, even though that makes it potentially confusable with a bunch of other movies. Which reminds me of that great ‘this trilogy makes no sense’ post from back when the first one came out*.)

My prediction for this movie: somewhat garbage, but not 100% garbage.

Why that makes me want to see it more: there’s no pressure — the most disappointing movies for me are when I want them to be amazing, and they’re just not, so this is much more fun. I basically just want it to be moderately entertaining for two hours, give me something to talk about on the internet, and be an excuse to get DBOX tickets (rumble seats!). So far, winning on all fronts.

(*I did look for it. Briefly. Anyway, it was the movie posters for Legend of the Guardians, Rise of the Guardians, and Guardians of the Galaxy, with the caption “This trilogy makes no sense.” There seem to be quite a few variations of it floating around the internet at this point, but I couldn’t find the exact one I was thinking of.)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Preview review: at no point in the movie did we see Zack do martial arts and/or a superhero pose on a train. Nor did we ever see all of them except one stand on a car and look at the night sky (ie. the poster). (But the poster is still cool, and based on their absolutely terrible decision-making skills when in cars, I’m totally okay with the omission.)

Movie review, based on the four things I said I wanted to see:

1. There’s no juice bar, but I’ll accept starandrea’s suggestion of either the detention room or the mine. A bunch of kids hanging out at a mine — not even an abandoned mine! — was super weird, but I did really like that everyone except Jason had seen each other there before. It’s like the non-sports-star students all have lives too! And do stuff! (Granted, they hang out illegally at an active mine, but whatever.)

1a. Way to go Billy being the only one (apparently) with a social group of actual supportive friends and acquaintances!

2. Flinging notes at each other was absolutely the cutest thing ever, and an acceptable replacement for the jump in the air, which would have seemed very weird in this movie-verse.

2a. Seriously, though, and not entirely related — I feel like they would run into trouble relatively quickly with Jason’s house arrest thing. You can fool the technology, but he lives with three other people; by the end of the movie at least one of them had figured out that he was nowhere he was supposed to be, since his dad was driving around looking for him.

3. I would say that the coins are harder to keep track of then a watch, but they seem to keep track of themselves — very convenient! They also seem to have the happy side effect of making phones waterproof.

3a. This raises a lot of questions for me about what Jason was doing at the end with his probably-not-called-a-spiral-saber thing. Did they keep the coins? Did the coins keep them? Can Jason just not figure out how to make his weapon go away with his suit? I AM CONFUSED.

4. The zords were specifically called dinosaurs, but they were not individually named, and none of them looked like a sabre-toothed tiger (which I know isn’t a dinosaur, but that never stopped them before). I am generally in favor of More Cats, but I would have been worried about them the whole movie, so at least there were no cats in peril?

4a. I liked this movie! Way more than I thought I would!

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

I have mixed feelings! Because on the one hand this is clearly the best of the TNG movies, and on the other hand it’s one of those problematic faves. (If one had four hands, the third would be ‘of course we’re not worried about continuity, this is Star Trek’ and the fourth would be ‘has there ever been a more goofy plot shenanigan than the manual control joystick on the bridge?’)

Okay, so first: fun movie! Clearly this was written by someone who (like me) was highly influenced by ‘The Sound of Music’ when it comes to what makes an exciting story. (Evacuation in the middle of the night into the mountains!) And especially compared with the reboot movies, there was very little death in this movie. (Not none, but not the enormous casualties of some of the others.)

Second: It was actually a little creepy that the Ba’ku were all white. And what was up with the whole ‘oh, we don’t use machines’ schtick? Gosh, I guess we better get rid of this loom, then! And this irrigation system!

Third: I mean, I don’t know how much continuity is really expected, so that’s whatever. But even just within the bounds of the movie, it felt like there were a lot of loose ends that were never resolved and didn’t even make much sense to begin with.

Fourth: Goofy plot shenanigans everywhere! I loved them all.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Yesterday I planned a Star Trek movie marathon of the three TNG movies (Nemesis doesn’t count, I’m ignoring it forever). I only made it through Generations and First Contact before I started dozing off, which I guess means I’m now officially a grown up.

Here’s my question: seat belts. The reboot/Kelvin timeline is all about seat belts. TNG doesn’t even have chairs that stay bolted to the floor when they crash the ship into a planet.* (Who designed that?!)

So what gives? Is this a social/cultural shift, that now seat belts are considered more standard and so it makes sense that movies made today would include them? Is it a deliberate in-universe callout to the differences in how Starfleet views spaceflight in the Kelvin timeline? Is it just because they came up with a neat special effect and wanted to use it?

[*I had my movies all confused, and I thought Insurrection was the one where they crashed the ship into the planet, and then I figured I should probably just go watch them all.]

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

I liked it! It has been a long time since I saw a movie in a theater that wasn’t an action movie. I can’t actually remember how long? LONG.

But ‘Hidden Figures’ was awesome! Very engaging, lots of like-able characters, good music, didn’t feel too short or too long.

Favorite part: That this was a movie based on real events, and there were just — women, everywhere! Not just three main characters and then a sea of men in the background. Which makes sense, because in the actual world, there are lots of women! And lots of men! And you see them! Everywhere!

Anyway, yeah, I liked it. (!)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

I think I would like to see this movie again, but probably not till I can fast forward over the parts I don’t want to watch and rewind the parts I want to see a couple times in a row.

But I have a couple questions:

1. Why did Galen send a hologram video confession instead of something way more helpful? (Like the plans! Or the latitude and longitude of the target! So many options!)

2. Who decided that firing the Death Star at Scarif was an A+ plan? It was an Imperial planet! Full of Imperials! And super important documents! It was important enough to warrant a scientifically improbable shield, but as soon as a few rebels landed it was all ‘just obliterate everything, we’ll sort it out later.’

One can only imagine the conversation that must have taken place:

Some sort of Imperial Officer: “Sir, there’s some rebels down there.”

Tarkin: “Are they winning?”

IO: “No. There’s only a few left. Bad news is they’ve they’ve already stolen the plans.”

Tarkin: “Shoot it with the Death Star.”

IO: “But — there’s like two of them. The entire rest of the population of the planet is our people. Also that’s the backup data for every Imperial document ever scanned.”

Tarkin: “Shoot it with the Death Star.”

IO: “We couldn’t just send down some TIE fighters to clean up the mess?”

(And then they shot it with the Death Star, in what was arguably one of the worst strategic decisions ever made in a Star Wars movie.)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

I finally watched the trailer for the new Power Rangers movie, and I have a few questions:

1. Do we have confirmation yet that the pitch meeting included the phrase “it’s Breakfast Club meets Power Rangers”?

2. Can we please stop pretending they’re in high school? The combination of “let’s make things gritty” and “let’s cast adults as all the students” gives it a weird prison vibe.

3. Sure, the new Billy is smart, but can he hear things on the moon?

4. Oh man, are we getting the dino zords back? Are they going to yell the dinosaur names?

5. How cool is that teaser poster? I mean, weird, definitely, but visually very cool.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.