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Feb. 21st, 2024 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretLittle Sydney Sweeney double feature in recent weeks...
Anyone But You
I texted R early into the film "Oh, the romantic leads are named Ben and Bea, and it turns out Bea is short for Beatrice. I get it!" So yup, it's a modern take on Much Ado, with a breezy plot set at an Australian lesbian wedding (Claudio has become Claudia). There are some winking Shakespeare quotes in the background of scene transitions, for the Shakespeare nerds out there. There is some nonsense involving falling off a boat in Sydney harbor that my Aussie friend says is not how things would work. But it was fun and Sydney Sweeney had good chemistry with the male lead.
Madame Web
Way better than the reviews led me to think it would be? I don't get why everyone hated this movie? Dakota Johnson is good, Adam Scott is a good Young Uncle Ben, the baby Spider-Women including Sydney Sweeney were adorable. There was good SF stuff about the future and choices and how knowledge of how the future might be imparts responsibility to think about how to change it. There's lots of canon neepery if you're a Spider-man nerd but none of it felt essential to the story. My sense is that's why critics didn't like it, because it did all this nonessential canon setup work in the background and if you had canon setup detectors going the way you do in an MCU movie, you probably hit a point of confusion or irritation. Just tune it all out, dudes. If they make a sequel that uses some or all of these characters again, fun! They would fit in nicely with the long-prophesied Sinister Six movie. If not, the movie works just fine on its own.
I really liked Madame Web as a character! Johnson gives her a really fascinating blend of altruism and selfishness. And maturity. I liked that she starts this movie as a grownup and while she solves some mysteries about her past and definitely grows as a person, she's not growing from unformed personality into a hero. There's something about the way Cassie Webb was written and performed that that meant that she kept surprising me by her choices, in a good way, without feeling like she's just doing things randomly. But that combined with the sense of maturity made it feel like she's already been on a journey to heroism long before the movie started, so the movie feels like a window into one part of a longer journey. Which again also is consonant with the movie's themes of looking back at the past and looking forward to the future!
Anyone But You
I texted R early into the film "Oh, the romantic leads are named Ben and Bea, and it turns out Bea is short for Beatrice. I get it!" So yup, it's a modern take on Much Ado, with a breezy plot set at an Australian lesbian wedding (Claudio has become Claudia). There are some winking Shakespeare quotes in the background of scene transitions, for the Shakespeare nerds out there. There is some nonsense involving falling off a boat in Sydney harbor that my Aussie friend says is not how things would work. But it was fun and Sydney Sweeney had good chemistry with the male lead.
Madame Web
Way better than the reviews led me to think it would be? I don't get why everyone hated this movie? Dakota Johnson is good, Adam Scott is a good Young Uncle Ben, the baby Spider-Women including Sydney Sweeney were adorable. There was good SF stuff about the future and choices and how knowledge of how the future might be imparts responsibility to think about how to change it. There's lots of canon neepery if you're a Spider-man nerd but none of it felt essential to the story. My sense is that's why critics didn't like it, because it did all this nonessential canon setup work in the background and if you had canon setup detectors going the way you do in an MCU movie, you probably hit a point of confusion or irritation. Just tune it all out, dudes. If they make a sequel that uses some or all of these characters again, fun! They would fit in nicely with the long-prophesied Sinister Six movie. If not, the movie works just fine on its own.
I really liked Madame Web as a character! Johnson gives her a really fascinating blend of altruism and selfishness. And maturity. I liked that she starts this movie as a grownup and while she solves some mysteries about her past and definitely grows as a person, she's not growing from unformed personality into a hero. There's something about the way Cassie Webb was written and performed that that meant that she kept surprising me by her choices, in a good way, without feeling like she's just doing things randomly. But that combined with the sense of maturity made it feel like she's already been on a journey to heroism long before the movie started, so the movie feels like a window into one part of a longer journey. Which again also is consonant with the movie's themes of looking back at the past and looking forward to the future!
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Date: 2024-02-22 05:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-02-22 01:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-02-22 04:04 pm (UTC)