Fireside Friday's #8 (2/23/18)
What I am excited about: A bunch of rad friends and I are doing the Peddling Paths for the Blind bike ride tomorrow. I highly recommend it. Will you be there? Do you want to join us next year?
Purchase I'm enjoying: MoviePass
On a hot tip from my friend, we got ours at Costco in January (though it looks like they are sold out now), but MoviePass is running a deal on their own site now that is comparable to what we paid. The basics: pay $8-10/month and see one 2D movie each day for free. There are some logistical complications, but nothing we have found to be a deterrent to FREE movies! We have seen 10 movies and are ahead like $50+. Also there are some hilarious articles coming out about MoviePass, get a load of this headline: "There's a new dilemma in modern romance: What to do if your date doesn't have MoviePass" Do you have MoviePass? If not, have you considered it? Is MoviePass here to stay? More on that here, here, here and here.
All the things Black Panther (Cont.): OMG the current box office total is approaching $292M and even though we have seen it twice already, we cannot wait to go again. The theater has been sold out consistently. It makes me giddy.
So you want to be a member of the Dora Milaje? Me too! This is a great article about their history.
I wanted to talk about representation, but it is hard to articulate what I want to say. This excerpt from this Briana Lawrence article gets to a bulk of my thoughts on the lack of queerness in Black Panther, and why I'm not mad about it.
“I’m gonna level with you, as someone who’s been squinting through heteronormative romance to try and find a whisper of queerness: Okoye and Ayo flirting with each other ain’t enough for me anymore. It’s the bare minimum of queer representation—the table scraps—especially if it’s two women, and especially if those two women are attractive.
Let’s be real: T’Challa and Nakia are getting whole-ass scenes that go beyond, “I looked at you, then you looked at me.” That’s what I want more of in my queer representation, especially considering the source material that people were referencing when discussing Okoye and Ayo: World of Wakanda.
Written by Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey, this story is about Ayo and another Dora Milaje named Aneka (who doesn’t appear in the movie, but people suspected Okoye had taken her place as a love interest). In the book, Ayo and Aneka are the focal points, and they’re allowed to develop as both characters and lovers with each turn of the page.”
The key thing is only one of the queer women (Ayo) from the comics is in the movie, and just barely. As much as we desperately want representation, we cannot expect one medium, one creator, etc. to give it all to us. It just means we need to keep our foot on the pedal of diversity, keep supporting these works and putting our money where our mouth is.
I talked about Kendrick Lamar's work last week. Don't sleep on the film score either. I cannot get over how amazing the music is. Streaming for sure on Amazon Prime Music, not sure about the others.