Birds of Prey (2020)
Trailerwatch: MULAN! This made my heart sing. I also saw the Wonder Woman 1984 trailer, which felt like scattered bits from a very rough cut, but I loved the music, flashes of colour and Diana’s home. Kirsten Wiig’s character seems to have a touch of Selina Kyle’s arc in Barman Returns. Obviously the big mystery is how Steve comes back (and I want a better answer than nobody stays dead in comics).
Birds of Prey: And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
They should have picked a shorter title for this movie. The cinema listed it as Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, which was actually even more confusing. Yes, the full title is fun, but someone should have made the realistic call and insisted it was called Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey.
Anyway, it was fun, at times, a lot of fun, and hurrah for that. Please let DC have moved on from the Zach Snyder era, thinking their movies had to have serious import. This film made its feminist points and moved on, on rollerskates. It was trashy and owned its trashiness.
It didn’t always flow, mainly because it was being told by its chaotic antiheroine. But when it did - like, I loved the scene where Harley got a baseball bat in hand at a police locker, with Black Betty on in the soundtrack and, er, cracked on. I also enjoyed the big fight scene where the Birds of Prey all had their moments of cool before starting to gel as a team. By this point, the fact that tiny little women could lay waste to multiple henchmen while not getting a graze on exposed skin had been long established.
I enjoyed Robbie’s Harley at the centre of it all, crazy, yes, allowed to own her the PhD in psychiatry as well as the junk food eating (I empathised over THAT sandwich), maladjusting to a post-break up world. Of course she does roller derby in her free time. I loved that she called her hyena Bruce. Don’t know if I approved of her mentoring pickpocket Cassandra, but that’s Gotham.
I’m also currently feeling sorry for Robbie, because her name cropped up as this year’s designated blonde to get nominated twice for an Oscar when actors of colour got slammed out. What was she supposed to do? No campaign for her films? Where she has had power, like her producing gig here, she’s pushed forward women of colour.
I particularly liked Jumee Smollet-Bell (new to me) as Dinah Lance, who was the one struggling the most with her morality. Harley and Cassandra kept making things more difficult for her, and Dinah using her powers was the Chekhov’s gun of the movie. Helena/Huntress was great, both cool revenge-y fighter and socially awkward former traumatised kid, but she had less of a role than I expected. Ewan McGregor was using no restraint at all - it was that kind of film - and the mix of Mask/organised criminal worked.
The film worked too hard on the women as birds metaphor at times. But I enjoyed the OTT violence, I enjoyed the arc of the women doing it for themselves and Harley, of all women, being the one to see they needed to work together to stay alive. But is it going to last? It clearly hasn’t appealed to enough people - I always meant to see it, but I was in no haste. But hey, it might be this generation’s Tank Girl and it will be interesting to see Harley return in a Suicide Squad movie directed by James Gunn.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/416366.html.
Birds of Prey: And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
They should have picked a shorter title for this movie. The cinema listed it as Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, which was actually even more confusing. Yes, the full title is fun, but someone should have made the realistic call and insisted it was called Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey.
Anyway, it was fun, at times, a lot of fun, and hurrah for that. Please let DC have moved on from the Zach Snyder era, thinking their movies had to have serious import. This film made its feminist points and moved on, on rollerskates. It was trashy and owned its trashiness.
It didn’t always flow, mainly because it was being told by its chaotic antiheroine. But when it did - like, I loved the scene where Harley got a baseball bat in hand at a police locker, with Black Betty on in the soundtrack and, er, cracked on. I also enjoyed the big fight scene where the Birds of Prey all had their moments of cool before starting to gel as a team. By this point, the fact that tiny little women could lay waste to multiple henchmen while not getting a graze on exposed skin had been long established.
I enjoyed Robbie’s Harley at the centre of it all, crazy, yes, allowed to own her the PhD in psychiatry as well as the junk food eating (I empathised over THAT sandwich), maladjusting to a post-break up world. Of course she does roller derby in her free time. I loved that she called her hyena Bruce. Don’t know if I approved of her mentoring pickpocket Cassandra, but that’s Gotham.
I’m also currently feeling sorry for Robbie, because her name cropped up as this year’s designated blonde to get nominated twice for an Oscar when actors of colour got slammed out. What was she supposed to do? No campaign for her films? Where she has had power, like her producing gig here, she’s pushed forward women of colour.
I particularly liked Jumee Smollet-Bell (new to me) as Dinah Lance, who was the one struggling the most with her morality. Harley and Cassandra kept making things more difficult for her, and Dinah using her powers was the Chekhov’s gun of the movie. Helena/Huntress was great, both cool revenge-y fighter and socially awkward former traumatised kid, but she had less of a role than I expected. Ewan McGregor was using no restraint at all - it was that kind of film - and the mix of Mask/organised criminal worked.
The film worked too hard on the women as birds metaphor at times. But I enjoyed the OTT violence, I enjoyed the arc of the women doing it for themselves and Harley, of all women, being the one to see they needed to work together to stay alive. But is it going to last? It clearly hasn’t appealed to enough people - I always meant to see it, but I was in no haste. But hey, it might be this generation’s Tank Girl and it will be interesting to see Harley return in a Suicide Squad movie directed by James Gunn.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/416366.html.