Category: Film

Don’t Look Up- Instead, Watch No Tomorrow

~ Metacrone

I considered writing a review of the Adam McKay/Netflix film Don’t Look Up, but I can’t be bothered to review things I dislike. (Here’s a mini review- Don’t Look Up is another expensive, cynical, misogynist, racist, classist “white bros win again, no matter what” film, dressed up as a climate change satire. Not what I was looking for or what anyone needs to watch right now. Or probably ever. Rich, powerful people, stop flaunting your privilege and wealth and competing to see who can be the worst. Get your acts together and actually save the world instead, okay?)

If you are interested in watching a show with similar themes which delivers on its promises, has charming, talented stars, and is an actual romantic comedy/gentle dark comedy-satire, I have just the show for you. No Tomorrow, starring Tori Anderson and Joshua Sasse, ran for 1 season on The CW in 2016 and is currently available on Netflix.

This review was originally written in November, 2016, 6 episodes into No Tomorrow’s 13 episode season, right after we started Metawitches.com. It’s lightly updated.

Recaps for all episodes can be found at the tag. (Listed out of order, because that’s just how I roll. 😉)

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Farewell, Anne Rice: Interview with the Vampire, the Monster Within and Surviving Emotional Apocalypses

~ Metacrone

Plus, a Revisit to My Previous Post “A Brief, Non-Exhaustive Tour Through My Favorite Romantic Vampire Media“

Rest in peace, Anne Rice, 1941-2021.

As I note below in my vampire romance essay, my love of vampires didn’t start with Anne Rice. But my lifelong love affair with romantic vampires was brought into full bloom by her first book, Interview with the Vampire. I read Interview with the Vampire as soon as it came out in paperback when I was a teenager. I haven’t read all of her books, but I’ve read most of them, including some from each of the genres she wrote in. The vampires will always be my favorites, but I also love her witches, mummies, Servant of the Bones and Exit to Eden.

Perhaps due to the amount of suffering and loss she went through in her own life, Ms Rice has a way of expressing the emotional imperatives of her stories that are rivaled only by apocalypse and war stories. Her monsters, whether human or supernatural, are sympathetic because she knows that, no matter what our lives look like to others in the moment, many of us live our internal lives in an emotional apocalypse which requires the strengths and weaknesses of a monster to survive.

We are put through the emotional wringer in Rice’s introduction to her vampires – there is no mistaking what is most important to them, and it’s not blood. These vampires have deeply passionate feelings about everything, especially each other. The beauty and intensity of a vampire romance (or any monster romance) lies in admitting that we are the monster and can also love the monster in another, that opposite extremes exist in us at the same time and we can love, or at least accept, both ends of that spectrum.

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The Handmaid’s Tale and Its Film Noir Influences

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

Handmaid's Tale S3Ep11 Femme Fatale June

As The Handmaid’s Tale has shifted away from its season 1 dependence on the original book’s plot line, it’s frequently drawn from the dark, mature themes of the 1940s and 50s films of the Film Noir genre. Nick, June, Fred and Serena in particular tend to be involved in Film Noir plotlines, with an emphasis on mystery, crime, betrayal, murder, loyalty, regret, femmes fatales and sinful excess.

In an old school Film Noir, Nick would be the main character- his role as an Eye is close to the typical role of an investigator. He has connections in the community, a morally ambiguous, mysterious past and is conflicted in the present, making him the perfect Film Noir anti-hero. June would normally serve as the love interest or femme fatale who needs Nick’s help and either saves him or leads him astray- or possibly both.

The other characters frequently treat her as if she is a femme fatale, a seductive woman who leads her admirers into actions they wouldn’t otherwise take.

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A Blast from the Past: Avengers Fireside Holiday “Yule Log” Videos

~ Metacrone

A peek inside the Avengers’ apartments during the holidays as we hang out by their fireplaces.

I posted these Marvel Fireside Heroes videos back in 2016 (between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War in the MCU timeline) and just came across them as I was looking at old holiday posts. They’re so much fun, I decided to share them with y’all once again, since most of us are on lockdown this holiday season and have been staring at the same screens for months. They are like Yule log videos, but instead we’re sitting in Steve Rogers’ apartment, listening to swing jazz versions of Christmas carols for an hour as we watch his fire, or on the Guardians of the Galaxy’s spaceship watching Baby Groot dance next to the fire.

Each video is filled with tiny details, like the pictures of Bucky, Peggy and his mom that Steve has next to the fire, and his original USO tour shield hung over the mantel. One chair leg is held up by a stack of books, because Steve is still a thrifty Depression era guy at heart. The apartment furnishings look like they could be straight from the forties, just like Steve himself. It’s a lonely looking place, from a lonely time in his life, but we could totally join him and make it better, right?

Captain America’s Brooklyn Apartment Fireside video. The close up version is above:

Under the cut: Thor, Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, the Guardians & Deadpool

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Movie Review- Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror

~ Metacrone ~ 1 Comment

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Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror * 2019 * Not Rated (Suggested 16+) * 1 Hour 23 Minutes

😸😸😸😸😸 5/5 Happy Lap Cats

Horror Noire is a documentary feature film that traces traces the history of African-American people in horror settings, starting with the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which used white actors in blackface to portray the African-American characters. Horror Noire continues to cover the history of African-American involvement in horror films in front of and behind the camera up to the time of the film’s completion, including the 2017 film Get Out, which was written and directed by Jordan Peele, who went on to work on a Twilight Zone reboot and HBO’s Lovecraft Country.

Though it had a theatrical premiere, Horror Noire is normally available exclusively on the Shudder network. It’s currently included free with Amazon Prime membership until 10/31/20. The film is based on the 2011 book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present by Robin R. Means Coleman, PhD. The documentary was directed by Xavier Burgin, produced and written by Ashlee Blackwell and Danielle Burrows, with cinematography by Mario Rodriguez, for Stage 3 Productions.

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Movie Review and Analysis: I’m Thinking of Ending Things

~ Metacrone

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things * 2020 * Rated R * 2 Hours 14 Minutes

😸😸😸🌑🌑 Rated 3/5 Happy Lap Cats

I’m Thinking of Ending Things focuses on a young woman whose name changes throughout the film, so she’s billed as “Young Woman”. We’re introduced to her as Lucy, so I’m going to refer to her as that, because I hate it when major characters are treated like objects. Lucy is played by Jessie Buckley, who was amazing in the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries Chernobyl last year (2019) as Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the pregnant wife of a firefighter with severe radiation exposure.

Lucy has a newish boyfriend, Jake, played with understated creepiness by Jesse Plemens of Black Mirror: USS Callistor and Breaking Bad. Plemens is good at what he does, making it hard to separate the actor from the character. Plus, for attentive viewers, the first glimpse of his character shows him watching Lucy in the street from a 2nd floor window, with some strange, mumbled dialogue playing in the background. The sinister stalker vibe is established immediately.

An elderly man (Guy Boyd) is seen from the window first, who then turns into Jake. Before long, brief scenes of the elderly man working as a janitor in a high school where the musical Oklahoma! is rehearsing are intermittently inserted into the main storyline.

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Movie Review: The Farewell

~ Metacrone

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The Farewell * 2019 * Rated PG * 1 Hour 39 Minutes

😸😸😸😸½  4 1/2 out of 5 Happy Lap Cats

In The Farewell, writer-director Lulu Wang tells the true story of a giant fiction her family created together as a kindness toward her dying grandmother. It’s a complicated story, full of truths and lies and messy family relationships that aren’t easily pinned down into simple words, beyond the word “real”. Despite the fact that this is a story about lies, Wang’s film is painfully honest, showing the love that went into the decisions her family made when her grandmother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

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Movie Review: One Child Nation

~ Metacrone

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😸😸😸😸½  Rated 4 1/2 out of 5 Happy Lap Cats

One Child Nation is a very personal documentary, made by director Nanfu Wang when she had her own first child and began to seriously consider, for the first time, the implications of China’s one child policy, which she had been born and raised under. Wang had relocated to the US years before her son was born, so her pregnancy was unaffected by the harsh government program, which was in force from 1979 to 2015. But the internalized trauma from growing up in that environment, from events she didn’t even realize she’d absorbed, began to affect her attitude toward her own pregnancy, so she set out to examine the wide-ranging effects of China’s long-term push to gain control of its population size.

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Movie Review: The History of Time Travel

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

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The History of Time Travel * 2014 * Ages 13+ * 1 Hour 11 Minutes

😸😸😸😸🌑 4 Happy Lap Cats

“One small step for Russia, one giant leap for Communism.”

The History of Time Travel is a quiet, low budget fictional documentary that asks the question, “What would happen if time travel were developed secretly, for personal reasons, by a single family of scientists? Would anyone notice the changes?” It answers the question as the documentary is being made, in small increments, that require the viewer to keep up with the details of the storyline. Easter eggs abound, as the story plays out on both the intimate scale of a family drama and the large scale of 20th century history.

The story is told through fake interviews, staged photographs and stock footage. The science of time and time travel are explained early on. We’re introduced to physicist Dr Edward Page (Daniel W May), who’s assigned to work on the secret Indiana Project during World War 2 after President Roosevelt is informed that the Germans are disturbingly close to developing time travel. Dr Page works diligently on the project throughout the war, becoming obsessed with his subject and ignoring his family.

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Daenerys Targaryen and Natasha Romanoff: Two Powerful Women Meet Demoralizing Ends

~ Metamaiden ~ 2 Comments

In the Age Old Choice for Female Characters Between Powerful or Good, Wh*re or Madonna, Modern Writers Frequently Land on a Third Choice: Insane or Suicidal, Then Dead

When Joss Whedon’s dream came true and Natalia Alianovna Romanoff willingly flung herself to her death, I felt nothing. I knew from the moment she and Clint went off for the Soul Stone that she would die, but, stupidly, I didn’t quite get to the realization that she would be the one to kill herself – one of the few decisions she’s made for herself in her time in the MCU.

There aren’t a lot of options for women and girls to look up to as role models in media – not female ones, anyway. Growing up, I was always looking for female role models in media, and I frequently ended up in love with the ones who had agency, above all else. The “powerful or good” dichotomy that I wrote about in a post in response to the Frozen musical details the struggle I’ve always found in female characters. You can be powerful or good, have agency or compassion, intelligence or charm, be sexy or moral – wh*re or madonna.

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