De rigueur objects of media consumption
Aug. 5th, 2010 01:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaI haven't seen Inception yet. I don't think this would have been on my radar at all if it weren't for the cross-board raving, so I don't know anything about it other than it has something to do with Leonardo DiCaprio and lucid dreaming. Spoiler me and die. XD
I have seen the new BBC Sherlock, I just went and started a meta discussion on the value of kink memes rather than post viewing notes. XD;; I adored the first ep and thought the second one was meh, so will wait for the third before rendering judgment - tbh, since the installments seem to be written by three separate people, the already-aired bits probably mapped out the high and low extremes of the concept's potential.
The main intertextual pleasure of "A Study In Pink" is akin to that of a good modern-dress staging of Shakespeare - the tracking of what was kept, what was cut, what was updated or interpreted, and how. (Moffat missed a gimme: he didn't make the American cab passenger a Mormon.) I'd worry more about how much of this stuff I have memorized if I hadn't re-read basically all of ACD in January. Besides, I used to remember everything I read with this level of granularity, before I needed parts of my brain to hold other information; not just Doyle, Tolkien, and Shakespeare. XD;;
I had these non-conclusive thoughts on the structure of the Moffatian Gay Joke(tm) if only because it recurred so often - something like, it's always a rug-pull from under social assumption, a series of mistaken deductions based on available evidence, and Holmes is even allowed the honour of the first - in fact everything in the episode is constructed that way: the in-jokes a matter of copping to fake-outs, which are played straight and which are reversals. You can watch it, sunlit-Watsonian, trying to solve the puzzles by keeping up with Sherlock; or, shadow-Doylist if that path lies open to you, by basing yourself on what you known of canon (in which case you wonder for an hour who it could be other than the cabbie XD;;;). All of which echos the final confrontation between Sherlock and the killer. It's like the town in Uzumaki that's full of spirals everywhere you look.
The second ep doesn't have nearly that level of fiddly lacework, and I couldn't get into the lurid Yellow Peril plot (which is par for canon but yanno, there's a reason it didn't turn out to be the FLDS** in the last one). My tolerance for orientalism is high but there was something really... nineties... about the treatment here, like that one X-Files episode, back when China didn't yet hand out visas like a normal country and no one went there on holiday. XD; And unfortunately it committed the one faux pas that drives me bonkers, which is to play an "Asian-sounding" music cue whenever an Asian person appears on-screen. It's the cinematographic equivalent of the Nihao Pickup, isn't it? The Doctor Who movie did it too, I remember it well.
Other than that I found it interesting that they didn't so much armchair-diagnose Holmes as just wrote a version of him with antisocial personality disorder. XD;; But he has acceptable emotions where Watson is concerned, clearly! It's like the DSM-IV variant of "I'm not gay but I love you"... Given which Sherlock is a manipulative jerk toward women, which is sadface, as book!Holmes thinks he hates women but is actually better with women than like 97% of Victorian dudes probably? He can't help treating them like rational, sensible, courageous, and self-determining individuals, which per the standards of his society is doin it rong.
** I'll admit, there is a part of me that would have found this epically hilarious.
I have seen the new BBC Sherlock, I just went and started a meta discussion on the value of kink memes rather than post viewing notes. XD;; I adored the first ep and thought the second one was meh, so will wait for the third before rendering judgment - tbh, since the installments seem to be written by three separate people, the already-aired bits probably mapped out the high and low extremes of the concept's potential.
The main intertextual pleasure of "A Study In Pink" is akin to that of a good modern-dress staging of Shakespeare - the tracking of what was kept, what was cut, what was updated or interpreted, and how. (Moffat missed a gimme: he didn't make the American cab passenger a Mormon.) I'd worry more about how much of this stuff I have memorized if I hadn't re-read basically all of ACD in January. Besides, I used to remember everything I read with this level of granularity, before I needed parts of my brain to hold other information; not just Doyle, Tolkien, and Shakespeare. XD;;
I had these non-conclusive thoughts on the structure of the Moffatian Gay Joke(tm) if only because it recurred so often - something like, it's always a rug-pull from under social assumption, a series of mistaken deductions based on available evidence, and Holmes is even allowed the honour of the first - in fact everything in the episode is constructed that way: the in-jokes a matter of copping to fake-outs, which are played straight and which are reversals. You can watch it, sunlit-Watsonian, trying to solve the puzzles by keeping up with Sherlock; or, shadow-Doylist if that path lies open to you, by basing yourself on what you known of canon (in which case you wonder for an hour who it could be other than the cabbie XD;;;). All of which echos the final confrontation between Sherlock and the killer. It's like the town in Uzumaki that's full of spirals everywhere you look.
The second ep doesn't have nearly that level of fiddly lacework, and I couldn't get into the lurid Yellow Peril plot (which is par for canon but yanno, there's a reason it didn't turn out to be the FLDS** in the last one). My tolerance for orientalism is high but there was something really... nineties... about the treatment here, like that one X-Files episode, back when China didn't yet hand out visas like a normal country and no one went there on holiday. XD; And unfortunately it committed the one faux pas that drives me bonkers, which is to play an "Asian-sounding" music cue whenever an Asian person appears on-screen. It's the cinematographic equivalent of the Nihao Pickup, isn't it? The Doctor Who movie did it too, I remember it well.
Other than that I found it interesting that they didn't so much armchair-diagnose Holmes as just wrote a version of him with antisocial personality disorder. XD;; But he has acceptable emotions where Watson is concerned, clearly! It's like the DSM-IV variant of "I'm not gay but I love you"... Given which Sherlock is a manipulative jerk toward women, which is sadface, as book!Holmes thinks he hates women but is actually better with women than like 97% of Victorian dudes probably? He can't help treating them like rational, sensible, courageous, and self-determining individuals, which per the standards of his society is doin it rong.
** I'll admit, there is a part of me that would have found this epically hilarious.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 08:39 am (UTC)Of course, the writer who can work out a way to handle this will
rule the Sevagramreally make us happy. ;)no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 01:36 pm (UTC)Hope 3rd ep >>> 1st ep, if it's going to be the final episode!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 02:14 pm (UTC)It's the audience, too. I dunno that I'm prepared to shiver at the thought of an alien and malevolent Other these days, unless they actually are aliens from outer space. And even then.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 02:29 pm (UTC)I will note another homage in this episode, though -- if I recall correctly, the numbers-for-words-in-book code is straight out of The Valley of Fear:
Again Holmes flattened out the paper upon his unused plate. I rose and, leaning over him, stared down at the curious inscription, which ran as follows:
534 C2 13 127 36 31 4 17 21 41 DOUGLAS 109 293 5 37 BIRLSTONE 26 BIRLSTONE 9 47 171
"What do you make of it, Holmes?"
"It is obviously an attempt to convey secret information."
"But what is the use of a cipher message without the cipher?"
"In this instance, none at all."
"Why do you say 'in this instance'?"
"Because there are many ciphers which I would read as easily as I do the apocrypha of the agony column: such crude devices amuse the intelligence without fatiguing it. But this is different. It is clearly a reference to the words in a page of some book. Until I am told which page and which book I am powerless."
"But why 'Douglas' and 'Birlstone'?"
"Clearly because those are words which were not contained in the page in question."
no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 10:46 pm (UTC)I'm pretty sure the plots will continue to be ridiculous, as that is the actual appeal, but yeah - you have to slot in a pretty fine-grain filter for racefail if you wanna modernize something like this.