(no subject)
Feb. 22nd, 2015 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA thing I realized recently... when I was about seven or so and obsessed with the reruns of Adam West Batman on WPIX 11, my parents threw me a Batman birthday party. My grandmother sewed me a Batman costume, which I would regularly put on for the next several years when I wanted to feel awesome. And my mother... in addition to the Batman themed decorations and the cake and whatever else she did for the party, my mother wrote a Riddler-style puzzle hunt where we solved rhyming clues that brought us all over the house to catch the Riddler.
And I just realized that as an adult, I go up to Boston nearly every year to (sometimes dress in costume and) compete in the MIT Mystery Hunt, but Batman (and my mother) is responsible for my first puzzle hunt experience. And I'm pretty grateful for that.
---
Thoughts on recently consumed media:
-Kingsman was a pretty hard no. The problem wasn't gratuitous violence, it was the film's attitude toward the gratuitous violence. I was revolted by the scene in the church, which compromised a major character's morality while trying to have its cake and eat it too by fetishizing the moment.
-The Last Five Years movie was delightful, though my relationship with that musical is so tied up in the people who I've shared it with that I can't really give it any kind of honest review. I loved it because I was going to love it no matter what. Anna Kendrick's "I Can Do Better Than That" was a particular treat, and though I think I've seen "The Schmuel Song" performed better than Jeremy Jordan did, I've never seen it staged better.
The movie struggled at times with staging the more surreal moments in the the play- "The Next Ten Minutes" didn't quite sell the overlap for me, chiefly, but overall I thought it was well shot, but this was a movie that was all about the music, and both Jordan and Kendrick did a very good job with the material, and Kendrick in particularly is obviously a superstar.
And... here's a picture of Every Shapiro in Washington Heights!
-Jupiter Ascending was a lot of fun to watch. I don't think it was as well-crafted or well-plotted as Guardians of the Galaxy, but I admired it a hell of a lot more. The originality of the visual universe felt almost like A New Hope in its hidden depths. I'll tell you what- I would really enjoy a sequel where Jupiter has come into her own as a secret space princess. I liked her a lot in this movie, and she was obviously smart and brave and kind, so it was disappointing that she was thrust into a universe where she defaulted to damsel because there was too much she didn't know for her to possibly make the right choices. I want a movie where Jupiter can wage a subtle war of soft power against Titus and Kalique, and not be overwhelmed by their familiarity with the ground rules. (Having seen the second Matrix film, though, I'm not certain the Wachowskis are the directors to give us that growth.)
In general, I admired the movie for building a universe on a massive scale and then not trying to bore us with all the tedious details. There is so much detail in that movie that passed me by, so much density and volume to the movie, that it was remarkable.
And I just realized that as an adult, I go up to Boston nearly every year to (sometimes dress in costume and) compete in the MIT Mystery Hunt, but Batman (and my mother) is responsible for my first puzzle hunt experience. And I'm pretty grateful for that.
---
Thoughts on recently consumed media:
-Kingsman was a pretty hard no. The problem wasn't gratuitous violence, it was the film's attitude toward the gratuitous violence. I was revolted by the scene in the church, which compromised a major character's morality while trying to have its cake and eat it too by fetishizing the moment.
-The Last Five Years movie was delightful, though my relationship with that musical is so tied up in the people who I've shared it with that I can't really give it any kind of honest review. I loved it because I was going to love it no matter what. Anna Kendrick's "I Can Do Better Than That" was a particular treat, and though I think I've seen "The Schmuel Song" performed better than Jeremy Jordan did, I've never seen it staged better.
The movie struggled at times with staging the more surreal moments in the the play- "The Next Ten Minutes" didn't quite sell the overlap for me, chiefly, but overall I thought it was well shot, but this was a movie that was all about the music, and both Jordan and Kendrick did a very good job with the material, and Kendrick in particularly is obviously a superstar.
And... here's a picture of Every Shapiro in Washington Heights!
-Jupiter Ascending was a lot of fun to watch. I don't think it was as well-crafted or well-plotted as Guardians of the Galaxy, but I admired it a hell of a lot more. The originality of the visual universe felt almost like A New Hope in its hidden depths. I'll tell you what- I would really enjoy a sequel where Jupiter has come into her own as a secret space princess. I liked her a lot in this movie, and she was obviously smart and brave and kind, so it was disappointing that she was thrust into a universe where she defaulted to damsel because there was too much she didn't know for her to possibly make the right choices. I want a movie where Jupiter can wage a subtle war of soft power against Titus and Kalique, and not be overwhelmed by their familiarity with the ground rules. (Having seen the second Matrix film, though, I'm not certain the Wachowskis are the directors to give us that growth.)
In general, I admired the movie for building a universe on a massive scale and then not trying to bore us with all the tedious details. There is so much detail in that movie that passed me by, so much density and volume to the movie, that it was remarkable.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-22 11:01 pm (UTC)That is really charming. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-22 11:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-23 12:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-23 01:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-23 01:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-22 11:50 pm (UTC)Yeah, agreed. Guardians was very nice, and basically, like, expertly crafted, but this felt kind of different in some unquantifiable way, and I really like different and interesting things far more than perfectly executed, but boring things. This felt a lot like great art, if not necessarily in the genre of 'movies'. I heard that the Wachowskis set out to 'make an original SF story', and I had a lot of trouble reconciling what I saw with that, until I realized that what they care about, when they care about SF is different from what I care about. It is like, I have a friend who is a musician, and when I listen to songs, I hear lyrics, and when he listens to songs, he hears melodic harmonic things that are completely unquantifiable to me. I wonder if when Wachowskis think of space opera SF, they think of FLYING ROLLERSKATES and RED SPOT OF JUPITER LIZARDS, in an entirely different way than I conceive these things, and that's amazing.
Also, I think I went into it having been semi-spoilered to consider the idea that the entire thing might be her hallucination, and, damn, I liked it. In some ways, Jupiter is like Shea LaBeouf in Transformers -- weak and human and terrible at flirting. But it is nice to have a gratuitous wish-fulfillment movie for women, and it is nice to have that movie for women whose fantasies are 'fly through space and fight bad guys' rather than 'marry a vampire' or 'date an obsessed, but sexy rich dude'! There isn't a lot of that out there. I have sung high praises of the female-gaze camera work in Cloud Atlas, and this was present here too, only without all the weird handwaving about the power of love, and that was great!
I also want a sequel where Jupiter stands up for some sort of justice in the galaxy, instead of going back to her life. It is a pity that this won't have a sequel, because I could watch a thousand sequels as whacky as this.
Writing this comment also makes me wonder if it is too late for the Wachowskis to hang out with Samuel Delaney because I wouldn't trust anyone to make any movies of his works, but maybe, I would, for them, because that was weird.
Also, I am going to take this fangirl moment to fangirl that Lana Wachowski got to film in Balmy Alley for parts of Sense8 (which is their Netflix TV series)! Balmy Alley is a famous alley full of murals in SF, and it is basically owned by an arts collective that is extremely protective of their murals appearing in media. Almost nobody gets permission to film there! But Lana Wachowski is just awesome like that. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-23 12:43 am (UTC)I want all the sequels to this movie, because it sets up a number of characters for interesting second arcs, and because the world it opens up is so vast and interesting. It's really sad that it probably won't happen, but hey, there's always fanfiction.
I wonder if when Wachowskis think of space opera SF, they think of FLYING ROLLERSKATES and RED SPOT OF JUPITER LIZARDS, in an entirely different way than I conceive these things, and that's amazing.
Yeah, I think more than anything this movie was amazing for its visual worldbuilding. The ships don't look like the ships in any other SF movie. The costumes don't look like the costumes of other SF movies. The whole look of this movie was in a universe of its own, and it was all beautiful and intriguing.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-25 04:33 am (UTC)Above you say, "details of the craft of storytelling as opposed to the art of storytelling", which I think is super accurate. I think a part of me thinks that some of that stands in opposition, and the art somewhat benefits from the lack of craftsmanship. I guess, maybe, because I know what craft looks like, and it is nice to see it removed and have beauty remain.
Though, I guess the Matrix had art and acceptable craftsmanship, so I am sort of wrong.