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My books at Amazon.com

Essays on the Lord of the Rings Draining the Amazon's Swamp Wendy and Lucy, Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings (and free at scribd.com: Essays on Lord of the Rings , Draining the Amazon's Swamp )
Recent posts

Film review list, to be updated (missing last year of reviews)

Avengers: Infinity War You're Not Really Here Ready Player One Unsane Isle of Dogs Black Panther 15:17 to Paris Downsizing Star Wars: the Last Jedi Thor: Ragnorok The Snowman Mother It Logan Lucky / Patterson / Hell or High Water (discussion) Beguiled  (discussion) Detroit Dunkirk  (further discussion) Dunkirk  (discussion) War for the Planet of the Apes Spider Man: Homecoming The Mummy Wonder Woman Baywatch Alien Covenant King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Guardians of the Galaxy 2 The Circle Zookeeper's Wife Life Beauty and the Beast  (second of two essays) Beauty and the Beast  (one of two essays) Kong Island Logan Get Out Nocturnal Animals Fantastic beasts and Where to Find Them Arrival Loving The Witch Hacksaw Ridge Dr. Strange Moonlight Inferno Keeping Up with the Joneses The Accountant Birth of a Nation Girl on the Train The Mag

Notes on "Us"

There is actually very little in "Us" that doesn't amount to a perverse sort of wish-fulfillment... until the very end. Adelaide WIlson suffered a terrible trauma as a young child, but as Barbara Streisand recently took advantage about us to say about Michael Jackson's child victims in order to recover Michael's reputation, since she ended up with a loving husband and a handsome family, and as well, affluent, underneath our assessment of her is base sense that it couldn't really have been that bad. If I could have everything she had, I'd undertake her trauma, pretty much in a blink, is what we say to ourselves. Not only that, without it being explicitly delineated for us her being a person OF trauma seems to lend her aspects which would camouflage well, almost of depth, particularness: when we compare her with her "friend," Kitty Tyler, the wife of the family they pair up with a lot for social occasions, her knowing trauma is linked, as is her

"Captain Marvel" forgets there are some sorts of marvels we tend to background and assume

There is a part near the end of "Captain Marvel" where a supreme being of the Kree tries to undermine Captain Marvel's current cause against "her" by reminding her of how badly she needs the current Kree structure--it's what saved her, by teaching her about competency and self-success, from feeling like an essential, an-always victim: so don't rail against what you can't live without, sister! The audience for a moment is reminded that, oh yeah, we were shown memories of her in positions where she was certainly encouraged to doubt her ability to thrive all by herself; and we likely cooperate with the film in agreeing that the narrative is one of someone who'd once been maligned by being made to doubt her ability to succeed by herself, denied being possessed of that kind of due self-love, who emerged into someone who knew without doubt this was a lie--she's got a kick-ass core, in a dual sense. This said, like the saying goes... "the