Doctor Who Christmas special and so on
Dec. 30th, 2010 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaIs this episode actually called A Christmas Carol: ...You have to admit, that was slightly uncanny. Some incipient crossover... To be honest I think "Sherlock is not part of the Whoniverse" is to Moffat what "Holmes and Watson are not gay for each other in all incarnations" to Gatiss i.e. more a question of not wanting to deal with the impact ripples than anything. There is a role for fanfiction on the Internet, and there it is.
I loved A Christmas Carol as a child. We're talking six, seven here?** I read it constantly, not just at Christmas, despite the fact that I had zero understanding of what was going on, eg. why Scrooge's "surplus population" comment was awful; why Tiny Tim was going to die in the first place; what any of this stuff looked like, from shillings to waistcoat buttons to mistletoe. But the emotional journey made sense. It introduced me, I suppose, to the idea that adults lose touch with their younger selves and need to be reminded, which concept recurs often in children's literature (and from the other side of the hump, I'm not sure that's a great thing - introduces an unnecessary aspect of dread to the proceedings).
Also it contained lots of loving descriptions of food... What can I say.
I downloaded the DW special and watched it on Boxing Day evening, IIRC, with a cup of mulled wine, and my mental rating of it has since gone through an inverted bell curve. It seems to have allowed everyone to pin down what their niggle with Moffat's writing is, if only because it's such an exemplary specimen - punchy, coruscating, full of fridge logic. And not particularly character-centric, in the sense of organically allowing characters to react to situations even if it creates a mess. Mind you, if Eleven is characterized as a dude who is going to focus on the given task and not simultaneously worry about freeing all the iceboxed debt slaves, fairy nuff. But I suspect Moffat just wanted to keep his structure orderly, whereas Davies would've called someone at the Beeb and been like "Tennant must give stirring speech and lead bloodless proletariat revolution, need another 15 minutes and IDGAF where it's coming from". And I am starting to experience nostalgia for those sanctimonious snitfits of Ten's. No better time than Christmas, yanno? XD;
I had a lot of fun watching it nonetheless. Amy and Rory, dying, I have seriously read this?! It was a Star Trek fic. Five times James Kirk didn't have time to pull on his uniform before rushing onto the bridge, something like that. I particularly appreciated that they were simultaneously cosplaying different eras. And I loved the fish. UN POISSON. The opera singer and the shark bit broke my cheese-o-meter; if we have to go with demagogic your-grandma-loved-it-on-Youtube music I still prefer Kylie. (To return to the book for a second - how well I remember it! - although Abigail actually was the Platonic Dickensian heroine cypher, Scrooge's love interest wasn't. She just plain dumped him because he was turning into an asshole. And she wasn't ha-ha fridged, either.)
TRON Legacy: I have never seen the original TRON, although G rewatched it in preparation and reports that it does not stand the test of time. XD; Also multiple flisters have warned that the best way to frame this one is as a two-hour multimedia Daft Punk listening party, which, well, I am down with that. I downloaded the OST afterward, and it's not particularly satisfying through iTunes and a computer soundcard - all 2:30 snippets of string arrangements, a proper soundtrack rather than a proper Daft Punk album. But in the theatre it was majestic, darkly crystalline, a perfect symbiosis with the blacklight visuals. Neon smears that shatter like glass, glass buildings that dissolve into digital arrays. I would have given a lot to have seen this projected on the wall at a warehouse party rather than a movie theatre; that's about the level of attention the "plot" needs, anyway. The fembot eye makeup was nearly worth the elevated price of entry alone.
** People my age who were in the US public school system in the 80s: there was this book catalogue. What was that? It came something like biannually, and listed all the Newberys and Victorian classics. Beverly Cleary. George MacDonald. You ticked off the books that looked interesting, your parents wrote a cheque (I assume; I never saw this part), and the books just appeared after that. I don't even remember if they came to the school or the apartment. No memory of a limit on the number of books, or reading level. If I ever heard the words reading level while in elementary school it was spoken by adults above my head.
I loved A Christmas Carol as a child. We're talking six, seven here?** I read it constantly, not just at Christmas, despite the fact that I had zero understanding of what was going on, eg. why Scrooge's "surplus population" comment was awful; why Tiny Tim was going to die in the first place; what any of this stuff looked like, from shillings to waistcoat buttons to mistletoe. But the emotional journey made sense. It introduced me, I suppose, to the idea that adults lose touch with their younger selves and need to be reminded, which concept recurs often in children's literature (and from the other side of the hump, I'm not sure that's a great thing - introduces an unnecessary aspect of dread to the proceedings).
Also it contained lots of loving descriptions of food... What can I say.
I downloaded the DW special and watched it on Boxing Day evening, IIRC, with a cup of mulled wine, and my mental rating of it has since gone through an inverted bell curve. It seems to have allowed everyone to pin down what their niggle with Moffat's writing is, if only because it's such an exemplary specimen - punchy, coruscating, full of fridge logic. And not particularly character-centric, in the sense of organically allowing characters to react to situations even if it creates a mess. Mind you, if Eleven is characterized as a dude who is going to focus on the given task and not simultaneously worry about freeing all the iceboxed debt slaves, fairy nuff. But I suspect Moffat just wanted to keep his structure orderly, whereas Davies would've called someone at the Beeb and been like "Tennant must give stirring speech and lead bloodless proletariat revolution, need another 15 minutes and IDGAF where it's coming from". And I am starting to experience nostalgia for those sanctimonious snitfits of Ten's. No better time than Christmas, yanno? XD;
I had a lot of fun watching it nonetheless. Amy and Rory, dying, I have seriously read this?! It was a Star Trek fic. Five times James Kirk didn't have time to pull on his uniform before rushing onto the bridge, something like that. I particularly appreciated that they were simultaneously cosplaying different eras. And I loved the fish. UN POISSON. The opera singer and the shark bit broke my cheese-o-meter; if we have to go with demagogic your-grandma-loved-it-on-Youtube music I still prefer Kylie. (To return to the book for a second - how well I remember it! - although Abigail actually was the Platonic Dickensian heroine cypher, Scrooge's love interest wasn't. She just plain dumped him because he was turning into an asshole. And she wasn't ha-ha fridged, either.)
TRON Legacy: I have never seen the original TRON, although G rewatched it in preparation and reports that it does not stand the test of time. XD; Also multiple flisters have warned that the best way to frame this one is as a two-hour multimedia Daft Punk listening party, which, well, I am down with that. I downloaded the OST afterward, and it's not particularly satisfying through iTunes and a computer soundcard - all 2:30 snippets of string arrangements, a proper soundtrack rather than a proper Daft Punk album. But in the theatre it was majestic, darkly crystalline, a perfect symbiosis with the blacklight visuals. Neon smears that shatter like glass, glass buildings that dissolve into digital arrays. I would have given a lot to have seen this projected on the wall at a warehouse party rather than a movie theatre; that's about the level of attention the "plot" needs, anyway. The fembot eye makeup was nearly worth the elevated price of entry alone.
** People my age who were in the US public school system in the 80s: there was this book catalogue. What was that? It came something like biannually, and listed all the Newberys and Victorian classics. Beverly Cleary. George MacDonald. You ticked off the books that looked interesting, your parents wrote a cheque (I assume; I never saw this part), and the books just appeared after that. I don't even remember if they came to the school or the apartment. No memory of a limit on the number of books, or reading level. If I ever heard the words reading level while in elementary school it was spoken by adults above my head.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 01:42 am (UTC)My parents wouldn't buy me anything else, not candy nor toys nor clothes (to be fair, we were q. poor at the time and I wasn't brought up to ask XD;). But books were limited only by desire. This resulted, figure it for a psychology lesson, in a personality that doesn't hoard books at all.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 06:57 am (UTC)** If I'd been born in the US I would've had to wait until September - I actually have no idea why The Authorities did this? My parents must've told them that I'd done 4-year-old kindergarten and that I should start learning English rather than hang around at home. Then I was tested halfway through second grade and sent to the third grade after Thanksgiving break. So when I say I was six or seven, I meant I was in the third grade, by which point it wasn't weird for my peers, the children of Cornell professors, to be able to handle Scholastic Book Club material. I wasn't ready for Dickens, strictly speaking, but my grandparents' idea of appropriate reading material for 4-year-olds was newspapers, Tang dynasty poetry and Conan Doyle, so I was used to guessing every third word from context. XD;;
The next November we moved to Canada, and I mourned my aging brain bitterly when it took me the whole rest of the school year to graduate from the welcoming class. XD; I was way advanced in math (it was kind of an inner city school), but that just meant I had to do fifth grade math twice.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 07:12 am (UTC)I've never thrown away a book because that's how I was brought up. Bound and printed material doesn't leave this house once it's entered. XD;; My dad, who is the most laid-back person otherwise, doesn't even lend his books. I lent an old textbook to
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 12:51 am (UTC)Scholastic was monthly and delivered to the schools (the schools got a small cut of the proceeds, and the teachers used the 10 percent to buy books for our classroom). It might have been a different company, since I think there was several doing it... I believe Scholastic also had the infamous Traveling Book Sale....
Why no, I wasn't a book geek at all.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 02:24 am (UTC)With the Scholastic free posters it was always a choice between, like, majestic horse or fuzzy kitten.
Still have not even downloaded Doctor Who nrgh.
HOWEVER I DO REMEMBER THOSE POSTERS OMG
Date: 2010-12-31 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 04:10 pm (UTC)Orcs 'n' elves I was pretty late to. Tried The Hobbit in 5th grade and somehow found it deadly boring, which put me off (poss. I just didn't care about Bilbo? ahaha); after repeated recs from my dad I skipped to FotR and had a much better time with that.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 08:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 08:15 am (UTC)I too read A Christmas Carol off-season and repeatedly; I remember being quite disappointed in jr high we were assigned Great Expectations and it proved to be nowhere near as awesome as I'd expected from Dickens, based on that single previous experience. (now have copyright-free Carol on my Kindle...)
Complete agreement with Who; was much snappy fun, and if Moffat's stories are totally plot-driven, at least they're clever sparkly plots. Still, I miss the emotional variance of RTD's characters. If only their respective egos wouldn't bar them from writing together; really a meld between them would be the ultimate Who for me.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 09:14 am (UTC)We had the Scholastic Book Club back in the Sixties. I remember that it was run by Scholastic Book Services. I have a great memory for things I don't need to know (as opposed to recalling where I put my address book).
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 11:59 am (UTC)I don't know... to me it's timeless due to its pretty unique look. It was strange then and it's strange now, but I wouldn't say it got better or worse with time.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 06:18 pm (UTC)*) well, "TOO LITTLE COMPANIONS" aside, anyway. And I won't front about giving a proper little squee about Arthur Darvill's name ~*in the credits*~, haha.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 06:34 pm (UTC)Haven't really felt inclined to see the new one until it hits home video, but -- would you recommend this one as a must-see on big screen? I hate 3D screenings, but I know how it is with effects-heavy films (especially ones where the effects are the main attraction, ha)... :/
no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 12:32 pm (UTC)*nods*
whereas Davies would've called someone at the Beeb and been like "Tennant must give stirring speech and lead bloodless proletariat revolution, need another 15 minutes and IDGAF where it's coming from".
LOL! Oh, he totally would have.
popped in via
no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 10:04 pm (UTC)