RIP Sir Christopher Lee. TCM will be devoting 6/22 to his movies. [link]

Or to put it another way, it's Hammer time!

So, another book I read recently and loved is being made into a movie:

Ellen Degeneres to produce Naomi Novik's Uprooted

Nicholas Hoult did an amazing job in that role. Most seamless transition from child actor to adult since Christian Bale, really. He's got pretty remarkable range.

He seriously got the best story arc in the movie. Max's was kept enigmatic, and Furiosa's was pretty much there from the get go. But wow. From "What a lovely day!" to that last look at the red head bride (if I have one minor complaint about the movie it was getting characters' names straight - if you didn't catch them during the action, you were never going to catch them at all). That's a hell of a character - and acting - arc. And all great.

Capable. That's the bride played by Elvis's granddaughter.

Toast = Zoe Kravitz. Youngest wife = Cheedo. Hella blonde wife = the Dag.

Pregnant wife = The Splendid Angharad.

Splendid and Cheedo are the only ones whose names are actually spoken in the movie (and Splendid is alternately called Splendid and Angharad, but never Splendid Angharad).

Totally agree on Nux. Loved him and his arc.

Also The Dag is awesome.

This was the movie that reminded me that George Miller also directed Witches of Eastwick. Not necessarily a good movie, but OMG I do think it was a fun movie (apart from the horrid mistreatment of Veronica Cartright (sp?) and by association Richard Jenkins, but they did have to establish there was evil about).

Yeah, I wasn't going to see if I had Legit Welsh Name Angharad in my phone's autocorrect.

The Wives call her Angharad. Joe mainly calls her Splendid, but Angharad when he's especially rage-filled.

So...Jurassic World...it was basically fine and enjoyable, but I have rants both feminist and paleobiological. And, please note, script writers, that lampshading does not actually address the issue.

Because how cool would it have been if the raptors had had feathers? You can throw in a line about finding better genetic samples. Boom. Increased accuracy. And now everyone has to buy new toys.

Also, I do not believe that wearing those shoes (until the end of the fucking movie), she does not find herself some work boots somewhere.

I can't have been the only one who noticed that we knew the relationship status of every named woman in the script (unless you want to count the one lady on that initial containment team), right? That shit is not cool. It is sad when the 20-year-old entry in the franchise did better by its female characters, as a whole. This one maybe kinda passed the Bechdel...for about 3 lines in a conversation that generally didn't. Which is about the same level of dubious pass as the original. And, while the guys with lines were remarkably ethnically diverse (for this sort of movie), the women were not.

I'm pretty sure I could tell which crowd scenes were filmed in Hawaii by the ethnic makeup of the group.

So, with the resolution to the abominablesaurus, they pretty well put up a big flashing arrow when they introduced the Giant Ocean Creature What Eats Sharks. Because the ocean will fuck you up.

I realized during the big climactic fight that I was less invested in the survival of Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and the mini-Lois Lanes than that of the T-Rex. When the overgrown raptomeleon had it down on its side I felt like yelling at the screen for it to go after the human characters instead!

I am also skeptical that the overgrown raptomeleon could chase down and kill multiple apatosauruses in a single field as it did. Unless they also used starfish DNA to make it regenerate, a panicked tail-swipe from a 20+ ton animal would have left it with serious mobility issues after the first one that it failed to insta-kill.