petronia

Left out a couple of items from last week's, actually:

Also watched the Rurouni Kenshin movie at Fantasia, finally. Loved it. It was better than the anime. And it's not even the Kyoto Arc! (Reality check, guys: by your 2013 standard, the first season of the Kenshin TV series is not good.) The condensed plot and action choreography were smartly executed, but the performances were what did it for me -- Satoh Takeru really nailed that combination of physical grace and weary gentleness that I think of as primordial to the Kenshin character (these days; I'm not sure I picked up on it in my callow youth). There's a transparency to him, like an old item of clothing that's spotlessly laundered but worn so thin it's nearly see-through, though you can tell the material was good quality once... Kaoru was very good, Sanosuke was very good, Saitou was very good -- though you have a little more leeway with Kaoru and Sano, and none at all with Saitou XD so I didn't expect they would screw up those characters, actually. But Kenshin himself is a tough one, both to cast and to act.

I'm not sure why they lost Aoshi and Misao, though? Unless the idea is a straight swap for Saitou being introduced here as opposed to the Kyoto Arc, which leaves both storylines cleaner and, well, lets them introduce Saitou in the first movie. *checks wikipedia* Hey, I was right!

Re-watched Prometheus with my family. I liked it better the second time around, actually -- the part of it that's classic SF is very strong. The Weyland-Meredith-David relationship, and then the David-Weyland-Engineer relationship: immortality of the body, dissolution of the body, genetic immortality, memetic immortality, relationship versus one's creator, relationship versus one's parent... The part of it that's Hollywood space action monster movie is still full of people doing inexplicably dumb shit. It pains me to say this, but even Idris Elba's and Charlize Theron's characters having sex was in context a really dumb thing to do.

Not really weekly reading/watching meme