Tag Archives: transcendence

Movies

Annihilation and Female Scientists on Film

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
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In Annihilation, a group sits around a table discussing the people who will be heading on a dangerous mission into a logic-defying mystery box they call The Shimmer. There’s Anya, a paramedic; Josie, a physicist; and Dr. Ventress, a psychologist. “All women?” someone asks. “Scientists,” one corrects. Yes! And they’re unlike any other female scientists in films I’ve seen—not just because they carry guns, but because they work as a team of all women.

This post started, as most things do, with a complaint. The object of my ire was another recent sci-fi outing with a female lead: The Cloverfield Paradox. There was much discussion about the movie after it made its sudden Netflix debut following the Super Bowl. Most of it centered on the marketing: Was it a shrewd move of Netflix to generate buzz with an unexpected release? Or was it another case of the streaming platform burying an acquisition that should’ve been given a theatrical run?

Instead of weighing into that fray, my post-Paradox reaction was this: Oh, great, another female astronaut with dead kids.

There were dead kids in The Cloverfield Paradox. There was a dead kid in Gravity. There were dead kids in Arrival. And, if female scientists weren’t motivated by children (either the desire to have them or the grief over losing them), it was absent fathers (think Contact, Twister). Meanwhile, when Capa sends his last message back to Earth in Sunshine, he sends it to his sister, and talks about saving the world.

Of course, when I brought this up on Twitter, people started chiming in right away with more examples and counter-examples. So I tried to be semi-scientific about it, and collect data points that either prove or disprove my hypotheses about the portrayals of female scientists in film. Who is allowed to save the world for altruistic reasons, and who has to be motivated by a dead kid or dad or spouse? Who are the engineers and physicists, and who are the biologists and language experts?

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Movies

God Help the Girl Brings Back the Musical

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Jesse
Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse
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God Help the Girl, the new film by Belle and Sebastian mastermind and first-time writer-director Stuart Murdoch is, however improbably, the best movie musical I’ve seen in years.

And I’ve been seeing some musicals. It’s been more than a decade since the likes of Moulin Rouge! and Chicago made a concerted effort to bring back the genre that had been sleepy, borderline nonexistent, for much of the eighties and nineties. In that time, there have been several hits the genre: Les Miserables, Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, and Dreamgirls all made good money, which is probably why both Into the Woods and a new Annie get the big-screen treatment this Christmas (though their trailers still don’t seem comfortable with the notion of selling them in their actual genres).

Cinematically speaking, though, a lot of these movies are uninspired, at least in terms of reasons to get excited about the long-dormant genre. The big hits have all been adaptations of Broadway shows, mostly clumsy; Les Miserables came the closest to applying an actual audio-visual strategy to its material, and in the style of director Tom Hooper, it pretty much hit its marks (extended-take close-ups, recorded-live singing, CG sets for scope) over and over, wearing a rut in the floor.The better recent musicals have been outliers of sorts, whether due to the more musical-friendly medium of animation (Frozen, which has a song-heavy opening and the near-instantly iconic “Let It Go,” but relatively few songs in its second half) and family entertainment (the excellent revival of the Muppets series, with its witty, catchy Bret McKenzie songs), a focus on dance performance rather than songs (the Step Up series), or a choice to stay on the non-integrated style of in-movie performance whenever possible (the masterful kinda-musical Inside Llewyn Davis; the less masterful but HBO-friendly Pitch Perfect).
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Fashion, Movies

How Come No One Is Talking About Transcendence’s Weird Clothes?

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
Latest posts by Marisa (see all)

By now, everyone knows the deal with Transcendence: Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp), while making strides in the field of artificial intelligence, is killed by anti-AI loonies, forcing those who love him to upload his consciousness and connect it to the internet.

This premise invites obvious comparisons to last year’s Her. It deals with the repercussions of giving AI access to the culmination of human knowledge through the internet, and it explores how a person–in Transcendence‘s case, it’s wife Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall)–could be in love with a bodyless, all-knowing entity.

But there’s one way that these movies are similar that no one seems to be talking about: They both have super weird fashion choices. In Her‘s case, it’s intentional. The movie’s affininty for high-waisted pants show that we’re not exactly in the here-and-now. With Transcendence, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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Movies

Fans Should Never Get What They Want—Myself Included

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
Latest posts by Marisa (see all)

So, I’ve said on this site a few times that creators should be brave enough to stand up to their fans. I’ve begged Sherlock‘s Stephan Moffatt, for example, to keep the focus of the show away from the Sherlock/Watson bromance—their love for each other is only moving if commented on sparingly—and I’ve stated that Veronica Mars works best when Veronica’s love life isn’t the centerpiece of the action (again, a little goes a long way). If I could add a third example to complete this triumvirate, I’d say that Marvel should be wary of giving in to fans’ luuuurve of Loki. Like everything else mentioned above, Loki is great, but most effective in a subplot or as a side-character. He’s charismatic, yes, but he’s not a hero—making him one would diminish what’s interesting about him.

Anyway, at SportsAlcohol.com, we’ve created a shorthand for the idea that fans shouldn’t get what they want: #TeamPiz. I’ve learned that this makes some people on the internet very, very angry.

I think part of the anger is the idea that I’m telling other people that they shouldn’t get what they want. As someone who is more interested in mysteries than romance, who am I to tell people who are into epic love stories that they shouldn’t have their romances?

In reality, though, I developed my “people should never get what they want” theory based on something I did to myself.

Let me Tell You My Tale of Woe (Though You Might Have Heard This One Already)

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