Last three movies I saw recently were The Batman, Free Guy, and Turning Red.
The Batman was pretty good at first but ended up being way too long though I guess it has like a few interesting moments and there are some parts I was able to laugh at for being so ridiculous. Idk why people are saying this movie is too dark and gritty. It feels less grounded than the Nolan movies but in a good way and there's a lot of dumb scenes to laugh at too but maybe that's just me.
Free Guy was better than I expected. It kind of felt like a modern day Truman Show. Time will tell if it can actually predict the future. It also kind of tries to have this message of treating video game NPCs nicer but if you want to learn that lesson just play Undertale but that's the only part that kind of bothered me.
Now for Turning Red. Oof. I really wanted to like this movie. I feel like anyone who doesn't love this movie gets automatically branded as a racist, misogynist, or both. I guess I'll start with what I did like. First of all, it's Pixar so the animation was good. I also like the design of the Panda form like it's cute but it can be scary too when it needs to be much like Sully from Monsters Inc. The movie also has a really vibrant energy going on with the animation and some really good reaction faces and potential meme gifs. I'd be very disappointed if those moments don't get turned into memes. Finally, I liked most of the characters. Especially the dad. Unfortunately the dad is so cool and such a good character that…he makes the movie worse in my opinion, at least because him being such a good father kind of ruins what I wanted the movie to be.
You see, the dad being so cool is a problem because it just makes the movie wildly unrealistic to me. Yes it's weird to demand realism from a movie with girls turning into giant red pandas but I mean the movie itself is trying to be about the pressures of being a Westernized Asian. The main character is a girl who gets good grades and has to be on her best behavior all the time yes but it still feels like as far as Asian families go she's got it really easy. Yes she has to get good grades but this doesn't seem that difficult for her at all. Her mom is the one causing her stress but it really doesn't feel like the mom is relatively that bad, just somewhat embarrassing to deal with but Asian moms can be so, so much worse that the mom not being an outright villain in this movie (she is an antagonist but a sympathetic one) is kind of a slap in the face to any Asian looking to feel validated for having a shitty mom. Even the mom's mom is better than one would expect and the movie itself makes this clear. Also her dad is so chill it again feels kind of insulting to everyone whose dads beat them up just because they lied once about something or stayed up late for an hour past bedtime. I get that this is Disney and maybe they don't want to address hardcore abuse beyond the emotional kind but this is a kids movie with the words "crap", "sexy", "pervs", and "stripper music" in the dialogue. I don't think that in itself is wrong but if you've already gone that far why not go further?
Now enough of what I was hoping the movie would be about. What about the movie itself? Well the story is extremely predictable. There was only one major story moment that actually surprised me and even then it's just a part of the escalation for the climax and nothing groundbreaking that redeems an otherwise mediocre movie. Monsters University for example was a really run-of-the-mill college movie with nothing interesting until its final scenes which taught something unique and unseen in most movies so that alone redeemed the whole movie for me. Sorry, sorry, that's me going on a tangent again over what I wanted and not what we got.
So what did we get? Well, we got stripper music. We also got a lot of other bits that made me uncomfortable. Now I'm not talking about the period talk. This movie is getting praised as movie of the century alone just because there's a scene where they mention menstrual pads. That's fine, great even. That's not the part that made me uncomfortable at all because I live with two sisters. The problem is that this movie shouldn't be put on a pedestal just because it does something that should always have been okay. Also the period talk itself kind of stops once the actual movie takes off although you could argue that the transformation into a red panda is in itself a poorly executed metaphor for periods but I think it more just represents puberty itself. If this had been a family movie that was just about a girl actually getting her period with no other bells and whistles then that would have been a lot better honestly but a helluva lot less marketable I guess.
The parts that made me most uncomfortable were the 13 year old girls openly wanting to sleep with adult men. There's no way around it. They even say they want to go to a concert to become women with their crushes in a boy band so how else am I supposed to interpret that? I don't care that that's really how girls might be at that age but even if this were a group of boys wanting to go after adult women (which admittedly does happen a lot in movies), I'd still feel very disturbed by it at least with the way this movie portrays it. There's also a scene where a dude almost gets mistaken for a pedophile because the girls are so horny for him and that was just extremely cringey to watch. For a supposed feminist paragon movie it certainly fails the Bechdel Test in so, so many ways. There's another scene that also made me kind of uncomfortable when the red panda form gets mildly sexualized but maybe me being bothered by that just makes me a boomer and just as bad as her mom for being disgusted by it.
All in all I guess me not liking this movie despite being an Asian born and raised in the West myself still makes me a bigot of some kind and I guess all the more reason why I need to be dead.
