#2,386: Wind River

The Mars Generation - ★★½☆☆
I like to do a joke where I say that I bet there was one week each year at Space Camp when every kid there was a Double Dare champion. Like, you'd want to keep those game show winners away from the serious space kids seen in this movie.

The problem, of course, is that for younger audiences nothing about that joke makes any sense. The smart thing to do would be to tell a different joke. But what I usually do is try to dig my way out of the hole by explaining it to them. Space Camp, I'll say, doesn't exist anymore, but it's a place where you used to be able to send fancy children so that they could pretend to be a part of the Space Program, which doesn't exist anymore, but used to be a scheme organized by the government to shoot United States citizens. At the moon. And it worked! Except that some people don't believe it, they think it was all a hoax put on by Stanley Kubrick, who is a filmmaker that doesn't exist anymore...

Somewhere around this time I realize that the college kids or whoever are just staring at me, having learned nothing because I started in on the wrong part of the sentence, and for some reason I start again. Double Dare, I'll say, is a game show that doesn't exist anymore, where the grand prize (so named for its size compared to the other prizes) was a trip to Space Camp. Of course, I'm talking about original, proper Double Dare, not Family Double Dare, Super Sloppy Double Dare, or Double Dare 2000, because as we all know, the grand prize of these latter-day Doubles Dare is a trip to Universal Studios Florida, also known as: the place where Double Dare was taped.

That's right! If you somehow got on to one of these shows, played your ten-year-old heart out and won? You got to go outside. To the theme park you already paid to enter, so that you could be on Double Dare.

What I'm trying to say is that I learned from this movie that Space Camp still exists. It looks like it's pretty fun if you're into that sort of thing.

20th Century Women - ★★★★½ 
Wow, Annette Benning is great in this. I hope she won a prize for it. I would have given her a prize. Wow.

Wind River - ★★★★☆
Hawkeye continues to mentor the Scarlet Witch (here using the winking pseudonym "Jane Banner"), this time in dealing with the casual horror regular humans are capable of perpetrating on one another. It's a little unclear whether this takes place before or after Civil War, although my money's on before if they're operating under the auspices of the federal government.

It's refreshing to have one of these smaller, quieter side stories without Robert Downey Jr. zooming in to save the day every few minutes. Sometimes a regular man with impeccable target shooting skills is enough.

#2,381: Spider-Man: Homecoming

Alien: Covenant - ★★★☆☆
This is a movie that draws a lot from its heritage. Even the disappointing stuff like killing off the non-returning cast off-screen is kind of in keeping with the traditions of the series.

I was on board for the chunk that's just a re-telling of Alien (and all of them, really). The part where we just throw away all of the ideas from Prometheus is a little bit of a drag though, and I'm not sure how it's all meant to connect to the other movies anymore. I know it's nerdery to worry about inter-film continuity, but I'd rather think that if someone's going to go to all this trouble that it's done with intention. If everything in the other movies is still true, it could be that David is just plain wrong, that he's not shaping the monsters, they're taking their inevitable form.

The movie itself ends up in a way that is not so much surprising as inevitable.

War for the Planet of the Apes  - ★★★★☆
I think I said this about the last one, but this doesn’t feel at all like a summer movie. I wanted to see it because I knew it would be good, but I also had a little bit of dread because I knew it wasn’t going to be fun.

Dunkirk - ★★★☆☆
The further away I get from this movie, the more I like it, I think. I understand why the layering the stories works better than telling the whole thing chronologically, but I still found some bits in the middle confusing. I think the trouble is that the stories don't cross one another at the same point in the movie. I bet there are good practical reasons for this, but I think that's what tripped me up. (Also, I don't understand why the pilots would rather land in untenable situations than bail out. Maybe jumping from those lower altitudes is super dangerous.)

Spider-Man: Homecoming - ★★★★★
This might not be a perfect movie, on a second viewing it leaves me excited for the future of the MCU. It's an odd thing to say, but I'm really excited about the possibilities that are in front of us for a sequel. We skipped the origin story, right? So this is already kind of like a "part two" movie, which of course, is the 'oops, lost my powers!' movie. BUT! We've already done that too! And we improve on the concept when Peter doesn't lose his powers, he loses that Stark suit, and uses his powers to the max. So we a) get around that boring trope and b) don't have to put off a potentially interesting story until the third movie, in which the cast is bored, expensive, and ready to move on. Bravo!

#2,378: Fate of the Furious

Prometheus - ★★★★☆
I think I liked this more than the average bear the first time around, and I'm sticking to that. Even though the plot of every Alien is more or less the same, it's the best looking of the bunch and broadening the scope makes for some fun and interesting ideas that it's a shame nobody is going to explore.

Tickling Giants - ★★☆☆☆
Bassam Youssef's story is fascinating, but this doc doesn't do it justice. I understand the story just kept on going, probably past the point the filmmakers thought they'd be done, and probably continues today, but as a movie it could have used more structure.

Spider-Man: Homecoming - ★★★★★
What a relief. I couldn't believe it when we reached a point in history where Hollywood was actually making new Spider-Man and Star Wars movies, and I didn't want them to. Now, it seems almost as unbelievable that we've come all the way around and they're good.

I can quibble with things– less Stark tech in the suit please– but this movie gets so much right. I thought it was great that it uses fans' extra knowledge against them, and I wonder if the moment that was a big surprise to me would have seemed more obvious to a movie fan who isn't also a spider-fan.

The Fate of the Furious - ★½☆☆☆
I thought this would be fun to watch, but I was wrong about that. About the fun, I mean. I found myself alternating between being impressed at how efficient the story telling was and dismayed at how laborious the storytelling was. I'm not even sure how this movie rates on the Dom-has-super-powers scale of the previous films. It just seems unmoored from reality.

#2,375: Cars 3

Alien: Resurrection - ★☆☆☆☆
Ah, now here's a lousy Alien movie! It's kind of fun to see a prototype of the Firefly crew. This whole movie feels like a bootleg copy of an unaired pilot, which is kind of cool to see because it wasn't intended or fully completed for public viewing, except apparently this was released to movie theaters.

Finding Dory - ★★½☆☆
Kind of a Pixar weekend for me. Finding Dory is basically fine (even if the moral seems kind of weird), but I wish some kind of curse, or maybe a hex, had been placed on, let's say John Lasseter, and for fear of being consumed by powerful magic, his company never produced any sequels to their films.

And really, what IS the message of this movie? Disabilities are just in your head? You can overcome them by wishing hard enough? 

Baby Driver - ★★★½☆
I don't know man, I liked it. I thought the beginning was kind of corny, and it's a shame the girl didn't have much to do except be the girl, but there's no doubt it's the movie it wants to be. It's an old movie made with new technology.

Cars 3 - ★★★☆☆
This is a much better, and maybe more human, story of empowerment and achievement for women than Wonder Woman.

#2,371: Wonder Woman

Alien³ - ★★★☆☆
For years, we called one of our friends "35" because that's how tall he guessed a hundred foot flagpole was. But it was also kind of a reference to '85' in this movie, which had just come out, I think. My point is Alien³(: Director's Cut) was much less bad than I was led to believe. It's a big left turn from the previous entry, but as far as James Cameron followups go, it's way less damaging to the series mythology than Terminator 3.

Plus, three movies in, we had a good time playing 'guess thesynthetic,' which isn't much of a game in the Terminator franchise.

The Big Sick - ★★★½☆
I thought it was an interesting choice for this movie to be set in the past, but not in the year the actual events took place. Like, Kumail is an Uber driver, and his car has the old Uber logo, so you know it's not NOW, but also Uber wouldn't exist until a few years after they got married.

The supporting cast is great, but Kumail kind of makes the same face for 'touched, deep sadness' as he does for 'flirty and aroused' as he does for 'indignant and frustrated.'

Water & Power: A California Heist - ★★½☆☆
Attended a free screening and learned about just how badly California is being screwed over in the name of ubiquitous pistachios. Like a lot of message docs, it wanders a little bit somewhere in the third quarter, but it's still impressive how impassioned the movie is, given how detached the director seemed to be.

Wonder Woman - ★★★☆☆
It feels like it would be very unpopular to not gush over this, but I thought it was kind of average.

I mean, obviously, we're all grateful they didn't do that "I am no man" thing again, and like any good superhero movie there were some terrific moments, but as a story it's pretty unsatisfying. Like Circle, this is a movie where the main character is just correct about everything from the get go, and so she doesn't learn or grow in any appreciable way. I think the story would have been a lot more powerful if there were no Ares, just... men, and the world turns out to be more complicated than it seemed.

However, if we can't have that ending because all DC movies must end in a fantastic show of light and noise, it would have been really nice if Wonder Woman had triumphed through the application of some skill or lesson or something that we'd seen at any point earlier in the movie, instead of random magic. When all the shrapnel takes off in her direction, I was engaged in the action. I didn't know exactly how she would weather the attack– had we seen evidence that her skin was Superman-tough? But if the solution is just going to be 'she uses brand new powers we didn't know about,' why even bother creating the danger?

Certainly, it seems like there was some other ending originally planned, because I can't believe that moment where Diana forgets her sword and has to be like 'oh, uh, wait here a moment, okay?' to the baddie while she goes back for it was anything but a patch, hilarious though it may be.

More generally, it seems like Marvel has had such a lead on DC that DC should be able to easily spot things that happened in a similar Marvel movie ten years ago and then not do those things. Why does Steve Trevor have to have the Steve Rogers ending to the war movie? For that matter, why is Steve Trevor so useless? I guess it's neat that, unlike Diana, he remembered something he saw earlier in the movie when he wants to give her a boost, but honestly? The four foot of height he gives makes that much difference to her 60-foot vertical? (Which probably should have smushed them when she leapt?) I'd like to see Chris Pine become the Sean Bean of his generation, as long as his characters' deaths in each movie always stem from their own clumsiness and ineptitude.

I'm not sure that the idea that all of the men are ineffectual to highlight Wonder Woman's strength really tracks through the whole movie. Maybe if Dr. Poison (!) had been the villain. Or even if she'd been Ares.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to the Etta Candy and Sameer spin off movies.