Monday Media Musings - 9/30/19

[owlmoose]

Late Night: Not perfect, but delightful in many respects. I'll watch Emma Thompson in pretty much anything, and she did not disappoint at all. Mindy Kaling is clearly drawing on her own experiences with being the only woman and/or person of color in the room, and both the script and her performance pulled out many incisive moments. She and Emma Thompson also had excellent chemistry, and that alone could have carried the movie, but they didn't depend on that -- I liked most of the other performances, too, especially Reid Scott as the dudebro who wanted Mindy's job to go his younger brother, and then their relationship grows into one of respect, mostly due to his own personal growth. I felt like neither Mindy's character nor Emma's was forced to gently shepherd him along; instead, he figured it out by himself. I agree with most reviewers that the third act twist was neither necessary nor helpful, but in general I would recommend this one for sure.

Ad Astra: How can a movie about a daring space rescue be this boring? Normally I'm fine with Brad Pitt as an actor, but he gets nothing to work with here: a lifeless script, the science is ridiculous, he makes some decisions that no reasonable human could possibly understand, there's almost no one interesting to play off of, and there are too many closeups where he just sits there and emotes. No intentional humor, the action scenes are more ridiculous than gripping, and not even the tremendous visuals can save it. I even liked Interstellar better than this, and you don't want to get me started on all the problems I have with that. It baffles me that it's gotten such high critical praise.

Arrowverse: I'm a little more than halfway through the most recent seasons of Arrow and The Flash, and now that I'm past the crossover I think I'll stop watching Legends and Supergirl since I've only got about a week left to catch up. I watched the Elseworlds episodes when they originally aired, but as usual I picked up on a lot more of what was going on -- in particular, the fact that Oliver made some sort of deal with Mar Novu to take out Deegan, although we never learned the terms of that deal during the crossover and we still don't know what it is. I have a feeling we'll find out by the end of the season, though, and it may well be key to setting up the Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline that media buzz tells me is coming.

Oliver's time in prison was, not surprisingly, very hard to watch, and I'm glad they didn't drag that out too long. I've just gotten to the episode where Diaz is killed (finally geez) and Dante is revealed at last to be the big bad of the season. This season of Arrow feels like it's juggling more storylines than usual, but for the most part it's working for me. The future thread is interesting, but I hope it's somehow undone, because as futures for these characters go, it's awfully bleak, and I'm not entirely sure I buy it. In particular, it was just revealed that William never talked to his father again after he went to live with his grandparents, and while I can believe that the Claytons did their best to cut Oliver out, it's harder to accept that Oliver believed that William just wasn't returning his calls.

The reveal that Nora West-Allen is working with Thawne is equal parts fascinating and frustrating -- the universe keeps going to such trouble to erase Thawne from existence, and yet somehow he keeps coming back. Cicada isn't bad as villains go, and I'm particularly excited by the reveal that 2024 Cicada is almost certainly his niece. It was only a matter of time before anti-meta sentiment reared its ugly head. The bit with the metahuman "cure" is also interesting -- and it can't be a coincidence that these things are happening at about the same time.