Yuletide! Movies! Stuff!
Dec. 30th, 2012 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaReally belatedly: I received andata e ritorno, which is Armando/Vittorio out of basso's Orso e intelletuale series, which I'm going to shriek about now because THIS SERIES! which I never expected to get matched on ever! To be fair it is also a Lazio-biased football story so there are maybe three of you (YES YOU) this could be, and I cast so broad a net only because IDK who signed up for Yuletide. XD;
Nota bene: Alessandro Nesta currently plays in Montreal. I DON'T KNOW EITHER.
Mine should be easy to dig up, should anyone want to bother: medium-sized fandom for Yuletide, multiple medias, recent (past year or two), not very long or spectacular. Kara said she guessed it from the author's notes. XD;
***
Silver Linings Playbook: #insert imaginary gif of PSY screaming at Jennifer Lawrence’s butt
#believe me if it had not been imaginary I would have found it
The best approach to this film is to go in expecting a romcom centred around a dance competition, rather than a srs bzns drama about major mental health issues. That being said, this is arguably the least ableist movie I’ve ever seen, by virtue of the fact that the aforementioned major mental health issues transform the protagonists’ lives and drive the plot but in no way prevent them from being the leads of a romcom centred around a dance competition, improbable feel-good and well-turned predictability and all. In fact, everyone in the film is living with Teh Crazy, whether situational or a medical illness (the line being just as unclear as in life), treated or undiagnosed, as a family member trying to cope… and it’s not Girl, Interrupted, it doesn’t take place in an institution, it’s just out there in Real Life where 25% of everyone has a mental health concern but people don’t talk about it because stigma.**
An alternate take is that romcom is the genre where characters are most likely to be crazy (objectively viewed) without the narrative ever admitting that they are, and so this is a piece of formal subversion and a blessed relief.
Alt-alt take: by virtue of the central conceit all the actors were required to actually act, and this being a cast containing Robert De Niro and Jennifer Lawrence, raised the bar as a happy side effect.
Alt-alt-alt take: wish I’d gone to see it before Farrah Abraham ran on The Singles Jukebox, because it would’ve given me a great “in” to that blurb, which I didn’t have (and so didn’t write).
** Disclaimer: for a while I did web strategy for the Canadian Mental Health Association, and they get about half of my charity dollar every year.
***
Les Misérables: I’ve never seen the musical staged, though sometime during the 90s my dad had done his usual thing i.e. tape the numbers he liked off the cast recording and play the tape instead of the album, so I knew about half of the songs. I can’t judge the execution against an ideal, though, because the ideal isn’t in my head. Most of the roles came off all right. Russell Crowe seemed out of his depth vocally, which gave his Javert an odd vulnerability I thought was interesting but not the intent of the character as written. Meanwhile Anne Hathaway was like STOP DROP AND ROLL BITCHES IT’S GOLDEN GLOBE TIME. Helena Bonham Carter maybe needs to start looking into not being typecast. Eponine was very good, especially since I thought Samantha Barks was Demi Lovato for a while, despite the accent, and when I said this after the movie my sister claimed Taylor Swift had auditioned for Cosette which made for acutely hilarious mental imagery. As Katherine noted there was a sort of “we could maybe go for the Occupy parallel… nah” vibe, although this is a DNGAF from me because of how eerily the event in 19th century French history as described by Hugo parallels the event in recent Chinese history known as Tian’anmen Square (eg. the deathbed vigil for the one guy in gov’t who was perceived as “a man of the people”).
(I did read the book — every word of it, in French, back in the day when I was too dumb to realize that people skipped boring parts in novels.** Thanks to which the pacing of the musical will always seem extremely condensed to me — the novel makes you earn every emotional climax with reams upon reams of 3rd person omniscient musing re: politics, character backstory, the nature of the Parisian urchin, the French tendency to give their kids wacky nicknames, etc.)
** I still don’t skip; if a book bores me that much, I find a more interesting book. But at the time I didn’t know this was even a thing people did.
***
The Hobbit (the inevitable post, aslabingi put it): I didn’t approach The Hobbit at all like The Return of the King, which fell afoul of the tyranny of small differences: I couldn’t forgive Peter Jackson for not making the movie that existed in my head, shot by shot, frame by frame, music cue by music cue. I love The Hobbit (book) just as much, but not in that way.
In fact I’m in principle on board with the idea of making a leisurely old-skool-BBC-esque 8-hour miniseries from the thing, padding the adaptation out with more varied antagonist time and plot material from the appendices; at which non-goal Jackson et al seem to have succeeded despite themselves. You can see the logic — why even produce a theatrical cut if people are going to see it in droves regardless of the length, then marathon the director’s cut from the DVDs thereafter? So this isn’t a theatrical cut at all, although it’s more polished than a first cut — which is always three hours long for any movie, before the director and editors sit down and are like, “OK real talk, 25 minutes of this Radagast claptrap* need to go.” It’s paced like expensive TV; looks like expensive TV too — rather, that’s the closest heuristic my Western-media-trained eye could dredge up for the HFR.** If it’s ten times dearer than the dearest BBC miniseries, well; I’m not the one who holds the purse strings. But the initial trailers’ unexpected jolt of cinematic power has nigh-disappeared from the finished product.
Weirdly enough, I don’t even mind that much. The Hobbit is an intimate book, and the successful moments in this film are those of greatest intimacy — arising from the performances of the Freeman/McKellen/Serkis trinity in particular. It kind of doesn’t matter that they’re surrounded by trappings of failed epic; it’s akin to casting one’s eyes over the sweeping grandeur of the New Zealand landscape, just taking in an impression.
Anyway. Critics have harped so much on these points that I would bet on the next two films being far more tautly edited. So maybe, unlike LotR, I’ll like this trilogy better as it goes on. It’s already succeeded at making Thorin more sympathetic than in the original, via the tried-and-true method of hott blue-eyed dude suppressed manpain; I may actually be sad when he kicks it. Although we’re talking 2014, so the world could have ended by then.
* Apart from Saruman’s “Look Gandalf I know you smoke up and all but RADAGAST IS HEAVILY INTO PSYCHEDELICS” line, that one can stay.
** My sister has an intriguing theory that 3D/HFR/mo-cap combined may eventually represent a shift in the type of talent that makes it big, much as the moves from silent to talk to colour were (though less drastic); certain actors have a physiognomy or a physicality that are more appealing in 3D than in 2D, or a charisma that becomes apparent with the paradoxically increased theatricality of HFR (in the sense that HFR gets you closer to the feeling of watching live theatre). This would be easier to sort out in this movie if half the characters hadn’t been digitally de-aged to boot; as it is there were five separate reasons why everything looked eerily airbrushed. I have to say Sir Ian survived the format change with aplomb, and it was wunderbar to see Jackson caught in the same cheap-laugh trap as Sherlock, i.e. stick a perpetual camera on Martin Freeman and show his reaction shot to everything. Martin Freeman’s face, man.
***
Because people have asked and stuff: I went back and saw it in 2D at 24 fps, and could not believe how much more enjoyable the movie was. I don’t mean it was easier on the eyes, I mean my entire perception of the pacing and emotional content changed. You can definitely still tell it was shot digitally, not on film, and that the CG elements are in some ineffable way not optimized for the experience you’re having, but all that together is not nearly as problematic as the HFR. I’m one of those people who quite enjoy 3D movies, but I’ll be on the TALKIES RUINED EVERYTHING side this time. Probably if you are under 15 and do not have much experience with cheaply-shot HFR video (eg. terrible mainland Chinese TV soaps) you’ll be all right.
***
I've written more about the movie, in comments here and there, but I'm too lazy to compile them right now. Instead I'm going to write the AU in which Bilbo works as a code monkey for Palantir, Belladonna Took was a famed MIT hacker,Benedict Cumberbatch Smaug is a notorious cyberterrorist, Erebor is a failed state, Radagast used to kick it with Timothy Leary, and Galadriel is Hillary Clinton. Sorry I'm not sorry.
Nota bene: Alessandro Nesta currently plays in Montreal. I DON'T KNOW EITHER.
Mine should be easy to dig up, should anyone want to bother: medium-sized fandom for Yuletide, multiple medias, recent (past year or two), not very long or spectacular. Kara said she guessed it from the author's notes. XD;
***
Silver Linings Playbook: #insert imaginary gif of PSY screaming at Jennifer Lawrence’s butt
#believe me if it had not been imaginary I would have found it
The best approach to this film is to go in expecting a romcom centred around a dance competition, rather than a srs bzns drama about major mental health issues. That being said, this is arguably the least ableist movie I’ve ever seen, by virtue of the fact that the aforementioned major mental health issues transform the protagonists’ lives and drive the plot but in no way prevent them from being the leads of a romcom centred around a dance competition, improbable feel-good and well-turned predictability and all. In fact, everyone in the film is living with Teh Crazy, whether situational or a medical illness (the line being just as unclear as in life), treated or undiagnosed, as a family member trying to cope… and it’s not Girl, Interrupted, it doesn’t take place in an institution, it’s just out there in Real Life where 25% of everyone has a mental health concern but people don’t talk about it because stigma.**
An alternate take is that romcom is the genre where characters are most likely to be crazy (objectively viewed) without the narrative ever admitting that they are, and so this is a piece of formal subversion and a blessed relief.
Alt-alt take: by virtue of the central conceit all the actors were required to actually act, and this being a cast containing Robert De Niro and Jennifer Lawrence, raised the bar as a happy side effect.
Alt-alt-alt take: wish I’d gone to see it before Farrah Abraham ran on The Singles Jukebox, because it would’ve given me a great “in” to that blurb, which I didn’t have (and so didn’t write).
** Disclaimer: for a while I did web strategy for the Canadian Mental Health Association, and they get about half of my charity dollar every year.
***
Les Misérables: I’ve never seen the musical staged, though sometime during the 90s my dad had done his usual thing i.e. tape the numbers he liked off the cast recording and play the tape instead of the album, so I knew about half of the songs. I can’t judge the execution against an ideal, though, because the ideal isn’t in my head. Most of the roles came off all right. Russell Crowe seemed out of his depth vocally, which gave his Javert an odd vulnerability I thought was interesting but not the intent of the character as written. Meanwhile Anne Hathaway was like STOP DROP AND ROLL BITCHES IT’S GOLDEN GLOBE TIME. Helena Bonham Carter maybe needs to start looking into not being typecast. Eponine was very good, especially since I thought Samantha Barks was Demi Lovato for a while, despite the accent, and when I said this after the movie my sister claimed Taylor Swift had auditioned for Cosette which made for acutely hilarious mental imagery. As Katherine noted there was a sort of “we could maybe go for the Occupy parallel… nah” vibe, although this is a DNGAF from me because of how eerily the event in 19th century French history as described by Hugo parallels the event in recent Chinese history known as Tian’anmen Square (eg. the deathbed vigil for the one guy in gov’t who was perceived as “a man of the people”).
(I did read the book — every word of it, in French, back in the day when I was too dumb to realize that people skipped boring parts in novels.** Thanks to which the pacing of the musical will always seem extremely condensed to me — the novel makes you earn every emotional climax with reams upon reams of 3rd person omniscient musing re: politics, character backstory, the nature of the Parisian urchin, the French tendency to give their kids wacky nicknames, etc.)
** I still don’t skip; if a book bores me that much, I find a more interesting book. But at the time I didn’t know this was even a thing people did.
***
The Hobbit (the inevitable post, as
labingi put it): I didn’t approach The Hobbit at all like The Return of the King, which fell afoul of the tyranny of small differences: I couldn’t forgive Peter Jackson for not making the movie that existed in my head, shot by shot, frame by frame, music cue by music cue. I love The Hobbit (book) just as much, but not in that way.In fact I’m in principle on board with the idea of making a leisurely old-skool-BBC-esque 8-hour miniseries from the thing, padding the adaptation out with more varied antagonist time and plot material from the appendices; at which non-goal Jackson et al seem to have succeeded despite themselves. You can see the logic — why even produce a theatrical cut if people are going to see it in droves regardless of the length, then marathon the director’s cut from the DVDs thereafter? So this isn’t a theatrical cut at all, although it’s more polished than a first cut — which is always three hours long for any movie, before the director and editors sit down and are like, “OK real talk, 25 minutes of this Radagast claptrap* need to go.” It’s paced like expensive TV; looks like expensive TV too — rather, that’s the closest heuristic my Western-media-trained eye could dredge up for the HFR.** If it’s ten times dearer than the dearest BBC miniseries, well; I’m not the one who holds the purse strings. But the initial trailers’ unexpected jolt of cinematic power has nigh-disappeared from the finished product.
Weirdly enough, I don’t even mind that much. The Hobbit is an intimate book, and the successful moments in this film are those of greatest intimacy — arising from the performances of the Freeman/McKellen/Serkis trinity in particular. It kind of doesn’t matter that they’re surrounded by trappings of failed epic; it’s akin to casting one’s eyes over the sweeping grandeur of the New Zealand landscape, just taking in an impression.
Anyway. Critics have harped so much on these points that I would bet on the next two films being far more tautly edited. So maybe, unlike LotR, I’ll like this trilogy better as it goes on. It’s already succeeded at making Thorin more sympathetic than in the original, via the tried-and-true method of hott blue-eyed dude suppressed manpain; I may actually be sad when he kicks it. Although we’re talking 2014, so the world could have ended by then.
* Apart from Saruman’s “Look Gandalf I know you smoke up and all but RADAGAST IS HEAVILY INTO PSYCHEDELICS” line, that one can stay.
** My sister has an intriguing theory that 3D/HFR/mo-cap combined may eventually represent a shift in the type of talent that makes it big, much as the moves from silent to talk to colour were (though less drastic); certain actors have a physiognomy or a physicality that are more appealing in 3D than in 2D, or a charisma that becomes apparent with the paradoxically increased theatricality of HFR (in the sense that HFR gets you closer to the feeling of watching live theatre). This would be easier to sort out in this movie if half the characters hadn’t been digitally de-aged to boot; as it is there were five separate reasons why everything looked eerily airbrushed. I have to say Sir Ian survived the format change with aplomb, and it was wunderbar to see Jackson caught in the same cheap-laugh trap as Sherlock, i.e. stick a perpetual camera on Martin Freeman and show his reaction shot to everything. Martin Freeman’s face, man.
***
Because people have asked and stuff: I went back and saw it in 2D at 24 fps, and could not believe how much more enjoyable the movie was. I don’t mean it was easier on the eyes, I mean my entire perception of the pacing and emotional content changed. You can definitely still tell it was shot digitally, not on film, and that the CG elements are in some ineffable way not optimized for the experience you’re having, but all that together is not nearly as problematic as the HFR. I’m one of those people who quite enjoy 3D movies, but I’ll be on the TALKIES RUINED EVERYTHING side this time. Probably if you are under 15 and do not have much experience with cheaply-shot HFR video (eg. terrible mainland Chinese TV soaps) you’ll be all right.
***
I've written more about the movie, in comments here and there, but I'm too lazy to compile them right now. Instead I'm going to write the AU in which Bilbo works as a code monkey for Palantir, Belladonna Took was a famed MIT hacker,
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 10:08 pm (UTC)what are the moments of intimacy you had in mind? i ask because the movie fell very flat emotionally for me, i couldn't figure out what i was supposed to get invested on. so every time i come across an excited tumblr post about the many "~feels" this movie inspired, my mental response is always, "... about what?"
It’s already succeeded at making Thorin more sympathetic than in the original, via the tried-and-true method of hott blue-eyed dude suppressed manpain
ACCURATE
no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 11:51 pm (UTC)loooool yeah, that was the second-best scene in the movie for sure.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 11:57 pm (UTC)J pointed out that the One Ring analogue would need to also slowly corrupt the user, so the best I've been able to come up with is, like, Bilbio steals from Misty Mountains Laboratories some kind of cyberpunky neuromancer-esque interface (that you can wear like a very large ring on your head, okay) that lets you neurally port into databases without having, you know, a single physical location, so it's KINDA SORTA LIKE BEING INVISIBLE. But it's a prototype or whatever so it will slowly burn your brain out if you use it too much. Okay I dunno either, but I just thought I would contribute this XD; LOOKING FORWARD TO THE FIC.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 05:35 am (UTC)(Also I am highly amused because Gibson's response to Shadowrun -- a cyberpunk + fantasy kitchen sink D&D kind of thing -- was "the admixture of cyberspace and, spare me, *elves*, has always been more than I could bear to think about." I know *you* are not writing actual elves but his immediate visceral reaction just makes me laugh ... ... ... sorry Gibson)
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 05:57 am (UTC)* Gandalf and Bilbo's conversation before the fireplace in Bag End
* actually the whole bit with the dwarves singing the Misty Mountain song, I have massive feels about the theme because it sounds just like the stuff I came up with when I was 14 and trying to set Tolkien's songs to original music, i.e. melancholy and vaguely Eastern European (I had the idea that it should all be like Dvorak's 9th's largo)...... except that Howard Shore is, like, a real composer who is competent, and I was not. Wow this is possibly the most #nerdlife paragraph I've ever written, and not for lack of competition
* Gandalf and Galadriel in Rivendell
* the conversation in the goblin cave where Bofur tries to persuade Bilbo not to leave (James Nesbitt killing it)
* Riddles in the Dark -- the entire passage through Bilbo's sparing of Gollum, and his statement to the dwarves for why he came back
Interestingly, most of these aren't even canon to the book? But the selling point for me was always going to be Martin Freeman's Bilbo. Like, the thing about Jackson and my reaction to his Tolkien movies is that my deal-makers and -breakers are decisions that would have been made early, like casting and art direction and high level thematic script choices. From experience, 4 out of 5 of these decisions it's like I was the one calling the shots. 1 out of 5, or even 1 out of 10, I violently differ.
After seeing it twice, setting aside the fact that the running time needed to be tightened by 30 minutes, I thought what Jackson is trying to do is provisorily clear. There is Bilbo's bildungsroman, which is the "there and back again" of Bilbo growing into his full potential, and Thorin's Greek tragedy, which is the noble hero led to death by an inner flaw (in Thorin's case, pride and possessiveness). That's why Thorin's kingliness needs to be made srs bsns, and why there needs to be an explicit emotional arc to Bilbo and Thorin's relationship, and why he needs three acts -- even if he makes two movies, he'll still have three acts, because the crux of the second act is the destruction of Smaug but the crux of the third act is Bilbo and Thorin's (perceived or real) betrayal of each other over the Arkenstone. Then you have the third storytelling strand, which is the Gandalf-driven "LotR prequel" piece essentially. But in the first movie all you have is a whole lot of rising action.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 06:05 am (UTC)There were, like, way more weed jokes than I expected.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 05:22 pm (UTC)Yeah, I really enjoyed all the close-up of Sir McKellen's cragly face as he puffed away contemplatively. And Bilbo's snide remarks, as if the hobbits aren't the biggest stoners of all.
Also Radagast's hair being an actual birds' nest! With bird poop dripping down the side of his face! Was that in the book?
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 05:24 pm (UTC)Though I'm not sure one could go the opposite direction, putting cyberpunk into high fantasy doesn't seem to work. Well, I write that, but maybe steampunk is the answer that I'm looking for here. XD I think the thing is that overall cyberpunk has higher ... dimensionality??? than high fantasy, and you can transform lower dimensional objects into higher dimensions without losing anything; but you can't collapse down without discarding components.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 06:33 pm (UTC)High fantasy is missing the hardware infrastructure. XD You worry enough, in Tolkien, about what lembas bread is made out of -- do silvan elves plant wheat? Or is it ground acorns or something? Steampunk is the canonical solution, but I've always had the self-consciousness problem with it too. It's why I can't really say I love steampunk.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 06:35 pm (UTC)FUN FACT (I may have snagged a $6 Tolkien dictionary out of the Chapters bargain bin this week): pipe weed was discovered by a Longbottom.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 07:37 pm (UTC)I can't really get into steampunk either, it's just a little too incongruous for me. Look if you're going to have XYZ Technology, you have to have the power/infrastructure/transistors, I can't negotiate on that one. Not that I can't see the appeal, and I can stomach it if done interestingly enough, ie China Mieville wrote it XD (HE at least has the honesty to call it straight-up "thaumaturgy" XD)
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 12:34 am (UTC)I agree that Helena Bonham Carter needs to look into not being typecast. A friend observed the other day that her career seems to go in waves of typecasting. She used to do nothing but the severe, intense young woman who stares at you earnestly and never smiles. Recently, she seems to do nothing but, well, this. It's made for a curious career path... but a successful one by many measures.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 06:09 pm (UTC)