Movies and stuff

[petronia]

Trying to put together a group to go see X-Men: First Class (I hear it's good but it could have been a terrible movie, tbh, I was sold on the concept - which just demonstrates why the filmgoing audience can't have nice things). It looks like it might be a go tonight! Am currently typing this at the kitchen table while having a baffling conversation with my mother, in which I am gradually discovering that she remembers a lot about the X-Men. I mean, for her. My mom couldn't get through two of the four great classical Chinese novels because they were "too unrealistic", that gives you a sense of her taste in media. But she remembers the X-Men are not the X-Files, and Wolverine and Storm and Professor Xavier and what they look like, and the associated film actors, and that there were at least three movies. "They have great marketing," she says. "You have to make the characters' appearances memorable." She doesn't remember Magneto or associates because "Why bother to remember the villains". XD;;

The Hurt Locker: a really tough movie to watch when you don't know what's going to happen. Probably the only way I could have gotten through it was piecemeal, on multiple long plane rides, one of which aircraft was running out of fuel. Though, having now seen it once, I'd have no problem watching it again; but the first time demands a stiff drink. At the same time, I suspect an inured first-person-shooter fan who came in expecting a thrilling action movie would be bored by the string-of-vignettes structure and the general novella-ish feel (at moments I could hear The Voice Of Coles Notes, yanno: "Do you think James was mistaken about the boy's identity? What does this represent for his attempt at emotional connection?"). It misses out on masterpiece status: the characters could have been better developed, but they are genuinely that bad at aforementioned emotional connection (even unspoken), so they never get anywhere with each other and the viewer never gets anywhere with them. Which is as much to say, Kathryn Bigelow is not Minekura Kazuya. XD; But they operate within the same general framework.

flemmings had a lot to say over the years regarding Minekura's use of violence, as a lot of ink as been spilt over Bigelow's fascination with same, and in both cases it seems somehow essential to their paradigm, though the why is more obscure. Well. It makes perfect sense to me, though I can't explain it either. Unlike Minekura, and rather like Bigelow, I'm a fascist regarding unity of space - heck, I'd settle for coherency of space - in action sequences. Hong Kong has a better chance of doing this well nowadays, and Hollywood astoundingly poorly given the primacy of the blockbuster action movie, but the divide isn't East vs. West, it's good filmmaking vs. bad filmmaking. It's a hobby horse, I'm apt to rant about it in video store clerk style. XD; But this is actually my #1 criterion for judging the quality of a film (as opposed to, holistically speaking, whether I "enjoyed" it or not): it's a visual medium, its adherents should rise or fall on visual storytelling. By the way, if Dorothy Dunnett had been a film director she would have been AWESOME at this.

I've actually never seen any of Bigelow's other movies, though I respected her rep. Reading the blurbs, they sound like 1) the sort of films I'd make, if I were to make films, and 2) 18 months of hypothetical SSBB themes, which is as close as I'll ever get to directing that kind of collective artistic output. XD; Thus The Hurt Locker's reviews are in equal parts hilarious, exasperating, and validating, because the critics (mostly male) don't quite know how to file Bigelow. They respect her technique and taste, and are bowled over by her apparent ability to plumb the inner crevices of masculinity - but also in some inexplicable way it's not a male gaze. It just isn't, any more than Minekura's is. And that you don't get in the movies. Most of all ppl don't get the why - why does Almodóvar make movies about women? - well, there's a tradition of male directors making movies centred around interesting heroines, even if Hollywood believes no one wants to see that nowadays, and Almodóvar likes to explain himself, and anyway he is a gay dude, everyone knows gays love their moms or something. Whereas Bigelow has clearly learned to troll interviewers, and the other factoid everyone knows about her is that she used to be married to James Cameron, which only serves to cement her status as a woman of eccentric motivations.

In conclusion: if there was ever any doubt, it's a better movie than Avatar. But I would probably do myself a Kathryn Bigelow DVD retrospective before making any other sweeping pronouncements. BTW on the basis of her Oscar cred I hear she's going to make her next film about the storming of Osama Bin Laden's compound, ROTFL AMAZING

Next up: Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Which feels oddly, depressingly/hilariously contemporary - culture warz of mis/dis/information on the intergalactic Internets! - or maybe we haven't changed that much since the 1980s, and the world is not in fact ending, as Delany's characters themselves fear. I haven't read Dhalgren, and that's the one everyone else read, so I can never really have a conversation about Delany. Except with dubdobdee. And sub_divided, who can be assured this is a way better book than the earlier ones, even if Marq Dyeth meanders as all gets out.

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

He's actually not that great at description, is he! In the earlier stuff it was worse, everything was, like, bits of crystal in primary jewel-tone colours. XD And the normal cues one relies on, like GRAMMATICAL GENDER, dude likes to fuck with. I realized eventually the visual information is all there, but that Delany is a Delacroix-Rubeniste as it were, if you want OUTLINES and SOLID FORMS you have to fill them in yourself, mentally.

I don't think Dhalgren is the same universe! although Delany's stuff tends to cross over with each other in intertextual ways (eg. this book exists as a book written by a character in another 'verse, etc.)

Edit again - how far along are you in it? Not that spoilers are a huge issue with this one, I suspect. XD

that was me ^^;;

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

All the adjectives were colors! Like I bet you could count them up and they'd be like, 70% colors, 30% other adjectives. Also he tried to put in some anthropological, sociological discussion, but it totally fell apart because he'd imagined this world where even basic social structures, the kind that even a total outsider like me could see were necessary, hadn't been invented. But I've been told that the later books are much better.

...Sorry, you kinda called my name like Bloody Mary, so I had to show up to rant. XD;;; I'm not a very visual person either - I generally skip physical description in novels, I only feel lost when I can't situate actions in TIME - but even I am better than early Delaney.

Hurt Locker is really suspenseful. Because of the music. It never resolves, so you can never really relax. Even in horror movies, the music will tell you it's okay, the danger has passed, before the slasher jumps out from behind a bush or something. But the theme for the Hurt Locker just simmers for the whole movie. Probably my favorite part of the music, 'cause that's what it would be like to be in Iraq, right? ...Except that they do actually go back to the base in Bagdad, which has swimming pools and shit, and is all about decompression.

You read the Crisis of the Black Leading Man article, so you know that Anthony Mackie keeps losing out on roles to Jeremy Renner. -_-

Re: that was me ^^;;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's not just you, that's what reading Delany feels like for me as well, and I think it's the intended effect. XD; (Well, the main theme of the book is culture shock and cultural divides.) dubdobdee said once that Delany was exhausting because he never turns OFF, it's this hyper-intelligent all-observing eye that keeps on and on, which works better in short stories than in novels (most Delany novels are relatively short). You never get a section that's just the narrator kicking around or whatever. I mean, there's a lot of kicking around in Marq's POV, actually, but you-the-reader are working desperately in the meanwhile to understand what's going on.

Re: that was me ^^;;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Hence Delacroix-Rubeniste (which sounds pleasingly like something that'd be in an actual Delany novel XD). You have got to read the later stuff, the sociological whatever gets waaaaaay better. Even if, uh, unsubtle conservative vs. liberal analogy. Also at a certain point dude just kind of goes "fuck it" and starts writing exclusively to his moé, which I appreciate because it makes the text way more Fandom-flavoured, rolling. Like I can actually get on board with Delany's moé because it's all about My Special Person, and the interrelationship between macro-societal-power and micro-kink-power which is how I construct it myself. However sometimes chara A would be like "can has sexxor nao" and chara B would be like "no, 300 pages of semiotics and deconstruction will ensue".

Re: that was me ^^;;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

ALSO SUBDEE DO YOU THINK JAMES WAS MISTAKEN ABOUT THE BOY'S IDENTITY

It took me 1.5 Bourne movies to get me through all of The Hurt Locker. XD;

[ampersandals.livejournal.com]

X-Men: First Class was fun because of the X/Magneto foeyay and their respective actors (I spent most of the movie alternating between staring dreamily and grinning like a madwoman while my brother was just all "meh" beside me XDDD), but it has a lot of LOLWHAT moments with... the 3 women and 1 black man in the show. I loved the premise as well, and I know that with superhero comic adaptations you shouldn't expect much - and anyway I know next to nothing about the comics - but I felt slightly betrayed by Mystique and had no idea what exactly Emma Frost was doing there. It's just not just the WHY of it (she gets the telepathy and diamond powers by default? Really?), but her actress was also terrible.

Sorry for the tl;dr!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yes to all this. XD I just made a separate post with a rambly rant, actually (although I know what happens to Mystique later, and I think Emma Frost is congruent to this part of the mythos - but omg her actress inorite).