KJ

Ever since this movie was announced, I've been both excited and afraid. Excited, because of course I was excited. Even though I'm not super familiar with the Wonder Woman mythos (probably my strongest exposure was from the 1970s and '80s Super Friends Saturday morning cartoon), and I don't have the deep connection with the character that many of my friends share, I'm well aware of her stature in the mainstream superhero canon and her importance as a feminist icon. But precisely because of her iconic nature, and also the habit of Hollywood to use the failure of high-profile superhero films with female leads as an excuse not to make more, there was an awful lot of pressure to get it right. Not to mention the way that Hollywood blockbusters tend to misunderstand and objectify female characters. There were good signs -- a female director, promising previews, Diana being hands-down the best part of last year's Batman vs. Superman -- but I didn't want to get my hopes too far up, especially given the lack of high-profile marketing in comparison to other DCEU films (although ScreenRant presents an interesting counter-argument).

Then the buzz from pre-release reviews started building. Between rapturous comments from people who'd gotten an early look at the film and the sky-high Rotten Tomatoes rating (96% pre-release, which made it the highest-rated superhero movie in RT history; it has since settled at 93%, which puts it just behind Iron Man and The Dark Knight), it was impossible not to get at least a little hopeful. I saw the film yesterday, with T and three friends, and I am thrilled to report that my hope was warranted. Wonder Woman is a solid movie, one of the best examples of the mainstream comic book superhero genre so far. I had fun watching it, I walked out of the theater happy, and even after a day of reflection, I can't find much to complain about. (Not nothing, of course; it was by no means a perfect movie. But it doesn't need to be a perfect movie. Its average rating on Rotten Tomatoes is around 7.5 out of 10, a respectable score for an action blockbuster, and that feels about right to me.)

Some non-spoilery thoughts: Gal Gadot was fabulous, perfectly cast as Diana, able to pull off all the emotional beats as well as the action and a number of fish-out-of-water moments (some funny, some poignant) that hit all the right notes. The rest of the cast were also great; I particularly liked Robin Wright as Amazon war leader Antiope (and how fantastic was it to see a middle-aged lady in such a strong action role?) and Lucy Davis as Steve Trevor's secretary, Etta Candy. Both of these roles were fairly small, but they stuck with me in a good way. Chris Pine was a fine Steve, too, acting alternately as Diana's support and as her foil as circumstances dictated. The action sequences, mostly set pieces that could have been lifted from any modern superhero film, did get a little draggy in places. The film's action was at its best when it focused on Diana: her strength, her agility, her determination, and the high-quality fight choreography that showcased all of these things. Apparently Gal Gadot undertook extensive martial arts training for this role, and it shows. Maybe more than anything, though, is that Wonder Woman is a superhero movie that takes a solid point of view: on the horrors of war, on the twin pillars of goodness and evil that are innate in humanity, on finding a reason to fight the darkness without and within. I also appreciate how little Diana was sexualized, and for the most part neither were the Amazons. Instead, they were presented as images of female agency and power. I suspect Patty Jenkins, the film's director, should take credit for this achievement. What a difference it makes, not to have a male gaze behind the camera's lens.

( And now for some spoilers )

In conclusion, it was awesome. Not perfect, but what film is? And it shouldn't need to be perfect -- Hollywood should also have room for mediocre superhero movies featuring female leads, and it sucks that Wonder Woman needed to be twice as good to get half the buzz. That said, the opening weekend has been strong (at $100.5 million domestic and $200 million worldwide, it shattered the record for opening day take for a female director), and between the finances and the solid reviews, I have to expect that a sequel is on the horizon. And maybe now we can start getting all the other female heroes we ever wanted. Give me Black Widow, give me Ms. Marvel, give me Oracle, give me Storm. Give me all of them, good and bad and everywhere on the spectrum in between. You can do it, Hollywood. I have faith.

I wrote an overview of my year in reading and watching stuff for ladybusiness. You can find it here. I also set some annual reading goals for the first time ever; we'll see how that goes.

Although you can likely infer some of my choices :) this is not a proper Hugo recommendation post. Look for one of those later this month, after I've got more short fiction under my belt. But considering this your reminder that 2017 Hugo nominations are now open!

I thought it was pretty great! Maybe this is an understatement. I need to see it again.

( Some thoughts, no specific spoilers )

( Major spoilers for the ending )

I've been anticipating this movie since I randomly saw the first trailer as a YouTube ad a few months ago. An intelligent-looking science fiction movie about language, starring Amy Adams, based on a story by Ted Chiang? Sign me up. So we went to see it today, and I was more than satisfied. Amy Adams was phenomenal, the story was smart and thoughtful, the visuals were effective, the music set the mood perfectly. It's a meditation on memory, and the blessing and cure of foreknowledge. If you're interested in a sci-fi movie that's heavier on the thinking and lighter on the explosions, I definitely recommend it.

I hadn't read the short story, "Story of Your Life", so I decided to read it this evening. It was quite different, and less to my taste than the movie -- the story went into much greater detail on the linguistic details of language structure and language learning, and it also spent quite a bit of time on physics, which the movie barely touched on. I feel like that level of detail would have bogged down the movie, which moved as a fairly slow pace as it was. Not too slow -- it actually felt just about the right length -- but any slower and it probably wouldn't have worked. As it was, I think Arrival does a good job of taking the main ideas of the text and transforming them to film.

( Spoilers, for the story and the movie. )

Good movie. Go see it. Strong contender for best SF/F film of 2016, for sure -- you can bet that this will be on my Hugo ballot.

I haven't done much in the way of best-of lists in the past, but it seems like a good idea, especially if I decide I want to make a more thorough list at the end of the year. It would be a lot easier to write these kinds of posts if I remembered to update Goodreads in a timely fashion. Maybe making regular list posts will get me into the habit. All releases are 2016 unless otherwise noted.

( Books and Comics )

( Movies, TV, and Other Media )

Captain America: Civil War was an excellent Avengers movie -- much better, certainly, than Age of Ultron. It was also a great Iron Man movie and a pretty good Winter Solider movie. It was even, as some have pointed out, a much better Batman vs. Superman movie than the one we actually got. But was it a good Captain America movie? On that question, I feel like the jury is still out.

( Cut for spoilers. )

Maybe a month or so ago, T got an email announcing a pre-sale of tickets to "An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson". It sounded like fun, and we had no known conflicting plans, so we decided to go despite the lack of details about what, specifically, the evening might enail. The show was tonight, and it was just as great as we hoped it might be.

The first thing Dr. Tyson did after taking the stage was point out how trusting we were, to buy tickets and come out to the theater based on such a vague program title. The second thing he did was take off his shoes. And then, sock-foot, he introduced the topic of his talk: "An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies." It was a fun journey through the science of film, television, and a surprising number of beer commercials, what they get wrong, and what they get right. He talked about some of his more infamous run-ins with Hollywood and fandom -- his tweets about science errors in Gravity and The Force Awakens, getting James Cameron to change the erroneous night sky in Titanic for the 3D rerelease (although he tells the story somewhat differently) -- but there were some unexpected topics, too, like the topography of underwear in Zoolander, clever uses of surface tension in A Bug's Life, and how a mathematical equation helped enhance The Expendables 2. And he was hilarious throughout, as well as informative. If you ever get a chance to see him, I recommend it highly.

In short: I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it quite a lot.

( Cut for those people who want to know literally nothing, but there are no plot spoilers within. )

I'll write a more in-depth, spoiler-laden reaction later, when more people have seen it and we can have detailed discussions. For now, I'm happy just being happy. There are complaints I could make, but I don't want to spend a whole lot of time making them yet. I'm too busy wanting to go see it again.

Just a cold, but a bad enough one that I missed three days of work and didn't have energy for much beyond lounging around the house. So what did I do? Consumed a bunch of media!

1. Read comics: Nimona, the latest Captain Marvel collection (Chewie!), and the first three volumes of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye. I've had the Hawkeye books for awhile, and I actually bought and read the first one when it first came out. But then I put off getting the second, and then when I did get it I wanted to re-read the first one before reading it, and then I didn't get around to doing that either. So I read them all in one fell swoop yesterday. And they were great, although predictably I liked the Kate Bishop volume the best. Is the next one out yet? I know it's ending soon, or maybe already has, but there must be at least one more (that was quite a cliffhanger). Nimona was delightful. I don't know whether its initial publication as a web comic messes up its Hugo eligibility, but if not, it's definitely in my first round of nomination picks for next year.

2. Caught up on the last few months of PBS Idea Channel, which I hadn't watched since March or so. Or almost caught up, anyway -- I decided to take a break after the video that discussed Lewis's Law. One of the things I've always appreciated about the host, Mike Rugnetta, is how unapologetically feminist he is, and how he refuses to debate the validity of feminism as a philosophy. So when he spent his entire comment response to that episode pandering to "egalitarians" whose poor feelings were hurt when he compared them to MRAs, I was pretty disappointed. (I don't think egalitarianism, in and of itself, is necessarily a bad philosophy, but those egalitarians who set themselves up in direct opposition to feminism are 1. missing the point of feminism, especially intersectional feminism, and 2. not taking privilege into account.) I get wanting to keep your community open to a wide range of viewpoints, and I concede he may have worded his comparison clumsily, but there's nothing wrong with setting the terms of the debate. I hope this doesn't mean that he either avoids feminist topics in the future, or starts treating them all with kid gloves in order not to offend. Honestly, I'm not sure which would be worse.

3. Picked up my Dragon Age: Inquisition replay. I left my Trevalyen warrior stranded in Halamshiral for months, so I started by finishing up there, and then I played through the remaining Grey Warden quests (as well as a bunch of sidequests in the Western Approach, a few in the Hinterlands, and Varric's companion quest). ( Some spoilers. )

4. Watched a good chunk of Season 2 of Star Trek: Voyager. I never watched all of Voyager, and not long ago I was struck with the idea of revisiting it. I had remembered watching it for a few years, then getting bored when it became The Seven of Nine show, and most of the first season episodes were familiar, but the second season has been almost entirely new to me. I vaguely remember the business with Seska, and a couple of other things, but either I actually didn't watch it regularly or have blocked the whole thing out. It's been enjoyable to rediscover how much I loved Captain Janeway and B'lanna and Harry and the Doctor, and there's no one I dislike (although I prefer Neelix in small doses). It'll be interesting to see when it starts getting familiar again -- I know I was watching when Seven joined the cast, but I don't remember exactly what season that was, and not much about what was happening before that.

5. With T, watched Jupiter Ascending (which was bananas, but a fun kind of bananas, but I didn't fall in love with it as deeply as many of you did -- probably my expectations were dialed way too high), the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself (which was lovely, and if you have any interest in Ebert -- and can handle watching a man in slow decline, since it was filmed over the last few weeks of his life -- I recommend it), and the first episode of Sense8 (promising, although I don't think I'll be able to binge on it).

Back to work today -- I don't usually work my part-time gig on Mondays, but I fell far enough behind this week that I want to at least start catching up. Fortunately I think I'm up for it, although I am a bit sad to end my mini media feast.

Now that the second season of Agents of SHIELD is up on Netflix, I've decided to pick up this project where I left off, with my third viewing of Guardians of the Galaxy.

This is not a particular favorite of mine -- it's a fun ride, easily the most humorous of the MCU films, and I enjoyed it while I was watching. Chris Pratt is always charming, and like everyone I fell totally in love with Groot, but the film's frat-boy attitude gets wearying, fast. Basically, I stand by everything that I said the first time, except that Ronin has grown on me as an antagonist. In particular, I would no longer say that Ronin was a worse antagonist than Maeferoth: he might be a bit annoying and over the top, but he has a much stronger personality, and I got a better feel for his motives the third time around. I still wish we had gotten more on Nebula and the Collector, and I hope we see them both in later movies.

( Cut for Agents of SHIELD spoilerish stuff )