movie: Epic
Sep. 20th, 2014 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI haven't been writing up every movie I watch with the kids (the Ice Age franchise: nifty prehistoric megafauna do not make up for the endless gender stereotypes) but I quite liked Epic. Gorgeous animation, plus I'm a sucker for bigs&littles (the Borrowers, the Littles, etc) especially when someone's soulmate turns out to be two orders of magnitude different in body size. (I love a good doomed-by-circumstances romance, especially when there's that sort of lingering wistful thread of hope that maybe someday someone will come up with a solution, or circumstances will be different. Arrietty will do her part for the Borrower population with the wild boy and come back to spend her twilight years in a gentle retirement with Sho, Lalo will finish his dissertation and go traveling with Niesta, etc. I mean, I also love people cheerfully surmounting similar obstacles - a certain kind of porn is actually great for that, see half of Xxxenophile, or fanfic where Logan tells Rogue about his new latex fetish - but anyways.)
I also really liked the unusual writing of a female character in the Gandalf role. While a cynic could argue that Queen Tara is just handing off the plot coupon much as the mom in Ice Age exists only to hand off a similar item, I felt that narratively she's much more of a Dumbledore, the wise figure who so clearly overpowers everyone else in the movie that she has to be taken out for there to be able to be tension in the plot. (And I thought they did a clever job of Obi-Wanning her back onstage for the giving of sage advice post-death, too.) I can hardly think of another narrative where we get a woman in that role - after racking my brain I eventually came up with Avatar (the blue cat people one, not the cartoon) which, as little as I like to give that movie points for anything in its writing, did in fact have a lady dying-mentor-figure. Can anyone think of any others?
I also really liked the unusual writing of a female character in the Gandalf role. While a cynic could argue that Queen Tara is just handing off the plot coupon much as the mom in Ice Age exists only to hand off a similar item, I felt that narratively she's much more of a Dumbledore, the wise figure who so clearly overpowers everyone else in the movie that she has to be taken out for there to be able to be tension in the plot. (And I thought they did a clever job of Obi-Wanning her back onstage for the giving of sage advice post-death, too.) I can hardly think of another narrative where we get a woman in that role - after racking my brain I eventually came up with Avatar (the blue cat people one, not the cartoon) which, as little as I like to give that movie points for anything in its writing, did in fact have a lady dying-mentor-figure. Can anyone think of any others?
