Still alive and kicking
Dec. 30th, 2009 05:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia1) SSBB on schedule? I think? (Erin?) It's a big issue too, on top of it all - almost like the good bad good old days.
2) Where do I go to download more Doctor Who? XD 2008 Christmas special through this year's, plus the Confidentials from S3 on. Sororial unit is taking off so we probably won't be watching more before NYE but we have six episodes left to S4, it's kinda epic. One of the weirder fandom experiences: I get obsessive when I'm watching it - with huge gaps in between - but self-imposed spoiler lockdown, so basically I've been stewing gently in my own juices for a year. That being said spoilers have been impossible to avoid, because the thing is so culturally pervasive it's a bit like trying not to find out who won American Idol.
I have some compare-contrast notes re the Companions to make, now that I actually have a data set. Also someone requested a FST... Circa S1 I tried to build an FST using only the British pop music on my ipod at that exact moment. Got about seven tracks in. XD;;
3) Speaking of stewing, I made... well not boeuf bourguignon, it's missing half the ingredients (last minute), so I guess just a red wine stew? Whatev it tastes good.
4) Movies!
Up In The Air: well-cast, extremely well-written, topical only in a fleetingly clever way. A romantic comedy that's ambiguous in its stance vis romance, the one thing romantic comedies never are, therefore isn't one. A couple of plot dissatisfactions that are spoilers. I found it upsetting enough to write half an essay comparing it to The Princess And The Frog ahaha, the draft of which got eaten by Semagic. It only upset me because all three main characters hit close to home, though (I don't identify with Clooney's character, exactly, but I share his... philosophy? aesthetics?... of travel, literal and metaphorical, and it's always unsettling to encounter narrative fiction that articulates your self better than you have done). The actual film is more heartwarming than not, but you'd be watching a different film and taking away a different moral depending on the emotional assumptions you project onto it.
The Princess And The Frog: good movie that misses out on great. The middle section needed more surprises, perhaps; it felt perfunctory, as if by that point the script felt free to go down the list of "Disney animation" checkboxes. Helluva initial setup, though, sinking under the weight of its semiotics. XD The first proper animated Disney to textually deconstruct its own mythos, following up on Belle, the first to become a princess; and Mulan, who never was a princess at all, but is declared Princess post-facto by The Management, the exact moment that Disney Princessdom became an intrinsic property of the character self-actualization narrative rather than an extrinsic and unexamined property conferred by the king-father or prince-husband... And then this movie regresses a few steps only in order to examine said extrinsic property, with a vengeance, as if The Management's train of thought needed explaining. What exactly is Princessdom? Is it the dress that confers it, as the child Charlotte and the grown Naveen assume? (Semiotics! Admit it, you know it's the dress.) Is it the father? If Pocahontas is a princess by the standards of her society then isn't Charlotte one by hers? Or is it the husband? Et cetera. Then they got into the whole When You Wish Upon A Star bit and the part of my brain I should've remembered to turn off like my cell phone basically exploded. Oh yeah - the music was great, the best since The Lion King.
Sherlock Holmes: as truthful to the canon as any other adaptation, really, but made a point of playing down bits that have become screen/pastiche-canonical and playing up ones that haven't. I never cared for any screen adaptation of Holmes, they all had that uncanny-valley thing whereby they were sort of it but irritatingly not-quite, and this at least avoids that trap. XD To my unexpected gratification, the plot revolved around my big takeaway from reading the stories at age 4, namely that logic is a weapon and a shield against the terrors of the unknown. ...Picture not knowing any of the conventions of the mystery genre, nor indeed that there was such a thing as a mystery genre since A Study In Scarlet was probably the second novel I'd read in my entire life. A good approximation of the initial Victorian experience, probably; those stories were not the bubble-bath comfort they are now. The Little Dancing Men were as scary as any blood-smeared REDRUM message. But Holmes could turn inarticulate menace to meaning, and meaning to action, and he did it again and again. He was also a great imaginary friend - yanno, from the perspective of a 4-year-old - always waking you up in the morning full of beans and weird experiments and ingenious disguises. This is why I watch Doctor Who now, I suppose.
I want to see the movie again, but not in a "cool ride! let's go again" way, more in a nigglingly dissatisfied way - and I haven't pinned down why. Maybe that it moved too fast for me to follow sometimes. I wanted the camera to linger on London's grime, for Holmes and Watson to deduce a bit slower guys geez (how on the ball was this Watson?? ans: very). Or maybe, as with Star Trek (and it took me ages to figure that out), the serial associations are too strong and I'm grumpy because my brain won't accept it as a standalone story and insists it's a two-hour pilot to something.
I got this thing out of the library the other day: The Game Is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches, and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes. J.M. Barrie wrote one. Poul Anderson. Stephen Leacock. Fritz Leiber... btw if you guys missed it on my Tumblr, here is The Young Lord Peter Consults Sherlock Holmes, by D. L. Sayers.
2) Where do I go to download more Doctor Who? XD 2008 Christmas special through this year's, plus the Confidentials from S3 on. Sororial unit is taking off so we probably won't be watching more before NYE but we have six episodes left to S4, it's kinda epic. One of the weirder fandom experiences: I get obsessive when I'm watching it - with huge gaps in between - but self-imposed spoiler lockdown, so basically I've been stewing gently in my own juices for a year. That being said spoilers have been impossible to avoid, because the thing is so culturally pervasive it's a bit like trying not to find out who won American Idol.
I have some compare-contrast notes re the Companions to make, now that I actually have a data set. Also someone requested a FST... Circa S1 I tried to build an FST using only the British pop music on my ipod at that exact moment. Got about seven tracks in. XD;;
3) Speaking of stewing, I made... well not boeuf bourguignon, it's missing half the ingredients (last minute), so I guess just a red wine stew? Whatev it tastes good.
4) Movies!
Up In The Air: well-cast, extremely well-written, topical only in a fleetingly clever way. A romantic comedy that's ambiguous in its stance vis romance, the one thing romantic comedies never are, therefore isn't one. A couple of plot dissatisfactions that are spoilers. I found it upsetting enough to write half an essay comparing it to The Princess And The Frog ahaha, the draft of which got eaten by Semagic. It only upset me because all three main characters hit close to home, though (I don't identify with Clooney's character, exactly, but I share his... philosophy? aesthetics?... of travel, literal and metaphorical, and it's always unsettling to encounter narrative fiction that articulates your self better than you have done). The actual film is more heartwarming than not, but you'd be watching a different film and taking away a different moral depending on the emotional assumptions you project onto it.
The Princess And The Frog: good movie that misses out on great. The middle section needed more surprises, perhaps; it felt perfunctory, as if by that point the script felt free to go down the list of "Disney animation" checkboxes. Helluva initial setup, though, sinking under the weight of its semiotics. XD The first proper animated Disney to textually deconstruct its own mythos, following up on Belle, the first to become a princess; and Mulan, who never was a princess at all, but is declared Princess post-facto by The Management, the exact moment that Disney Princessdom became an intrinsic property of the character self-actualization narrative rather than an extrinsic and unexamined property conferred by the king-father or prince-husband... And then this movie regresses a few steps only in order to examine said extrinsic property, with a vengeance, as if The Management's train of thought needed explaining. What exactly is Princessdom? Is it the dress that confers it, as the child Charlotte and the grown Naveen assume? (Semiotics! Admit it, you know it's the dress.) Is it the father? If Pocahontas is a princess by the standards of her society then isn't Charlotte one by hers? Or is it the husband? Et cetera. Then they got into the whole When You Wish Upon A Star bit and the part of my brain I should've remembered to turn off like my cell phone basically exploded. Oh yeah - the music was great, the best since The Lion King.
Sherlock Holmes: as truthful to the canon as any other adaptation, really, but made a point of playing down bits that have become screen/pastiche-canonical and playing up ones that haven't. I never cared for any screen adaptation of Holmes, they all had that uncanny-valley thing whereby they were sort of it but irritatingly not-quite, and this at least avoids that trap. XD To my unexpected gratification, the plot revolved around my big takeaway from reading the stories at age 4, namely that logic is a weapon and a shield against the terrors of the unknown. ...Picture not knowing any of the conventions of the mystery genre, nor indeed that there was such a thing as a mystery genre since A Study In Scarlet was probably the second novel I'd read in my entire life. A good approximation of the initial Victorian experience, probably; those stories were not the bubble-bath comfort they are now. The Little Dancing Men were as scary as any blood-smeared REDRUM message. But Holmes could turn inarticulate menace to meaning, and meaning to action, and he did it again and again. He was also a great imaginary friend - yanno, from the perspective of a 4-year-old - always waking you up in the morning full of beans and weird experiments and ingenious disguises. This is why I watch Doctor Who now, I suppose.
I want to see the movie again, but not in a "cool ride! let's go again" way, more in a nigglingly dissatisfied way - and I haven't pinned down why. Maybe that it moved too fast for me to follow sometimes. I wanted the camera to linger on London's grime, for Holmes and Watson to deduce a bit slower guys geez (how on the ball was this Watson?? ans: very). Or maybe, as with Star Trek (and it took me ages to figure that out), the serial associations are too strong and I'm grumpy because my brain won't accept it as a standalone story and insists it's a two-hour pilot to something.
I got this thing out of the library the other day: The Game Is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches, and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes. J.M. Barrie wrote one. Poul Anderson. Stephen Leacock. Fritz Leiber... btw if you guys missed it on my Tumblr, here is The Young Lord Peter Consults Sherlock Holmes, by D. L. Sayers.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-30 10:46 am (UTC)!!!
Thank you; as an avid Sayers fan I've had an eye out for this literally for years. XD;;
no subject
Date: 2009-12-30 04:39 pm (UTC)I saw Up in the Air! There's some character analysis in this (http://sub-divided.livejournal.com/157012.html) entry, with spoilers.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-30 05:10 pm (UTC)Sherlock Holmes
Date: 2009-12-30 07:46 pm (UTC)Plus, considering the ending, I'm not surprised you'd feel a serial association. It seems almost every movie these days have elements that clearly show where a sequel would go. The problem that I have with that is that they typically do a poor job of wrapping up the story properly so that the movie is self-contained and stands on its' own merit.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-30 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-30 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:44 am (UTC)Re: Sherlock Holmes
Date: 2009-12-31 06:30 am (UTC)It'd slipped my mind that there was the whole setup with Moriarty!
I hear they're casting Brad PittRe: Sherlock Holmes
Date: 2009-12-31 05:18 pm (UTC)Really? It seems most writers can't have their Sherlock Holmes without Moriarty, not to mention that there were clues, so I wasn't surprised when his name made an appearance!
no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 08:24 pm (UTC)I thought Robert Downey Jr. was OK! He's too short but then the actors who play Holmes never look like him in my head. XD And he's a great actor, he never overplayed his hand.