I love love love this film. It’s been haunting me and I’ve seen it a few times by this point giving me to time to really simmer with my thoughts before my review for Vulture you can read here. I dig into the acting, visual and narrative playfulness, and the nature of coming of age works centered on women. Excerpt below:
“It would be too easy to label Julie — forever pawing for new men, new art, new experiences — a “messy woman.”…
hated having to write this pan. i wanted some joy instead i got a hollow story with terribly shot action and one of the most nonsensical plot lines i’ve seen in a while.
“Sadly, all that glittered in the franchise’s first outing is gone in Wonder Woman 1984. The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre in film, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole.” read my review at vulture.
“You can’t get away from it, Jasmine. It’s everywhere.”
The use of “it” does a lot of work in the conversation between ‘’Master” Bishop and Jasmine after her fall from her dorm window. They never say racism or anti-blackness or white supremacy but these ideas hang in the air between them. This scene is a great example of the issues with the film — it’s at once heavy handed and undercooked. The characters are thinly drawn ideas, but Regina Hall…
An ecstatically rendered work that is at its best when it leans into a playful energy.
What the fuck was this mess? Starts off fun but falls apart when it reaches toward something meaningful and revealing to say about the way men use and abuse women. Devolves into a “damn, bitches be crazy” story that obliterates the good will it engenders. Also, kinda chuckled at the framing of Thomasin Mackenzie’s lead character as quiet, yearning, and picked on by vapid mean girls. (And not a good chuckle, mind you.) Anya Taylor Joy innocent.
It’s a shame…this…
“I am tired. I am tired of pop-cultural artifacts that render Black people as merely Black bodies onto which the sins of this ragged country are violently mapped. I am tired of suffering being the primary lens through which we understand Black identity. I am tired of being so hungry for Black joy and Black representation that scraps feel like a meal. I am tired of films about slavery refusing to acknowledge the interior lives of Black women even as…
