(no subject)
Oct. 5th, 2018 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA Simple Favor
Mystery thriller starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, directed by Paul Feig. EXTREMELY gay subtext. Fun and mostly engaging, but with occasional lulls and some headscratching plot twists. But mostly if you want to watch a movie where Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively flirt with each other, you should check this out. Highly recommended on those grounds.
The Good Wife Season 1
Enjoyable, thoughtful legal drama, with a really smooth balance between arcy stuff and case of the week. I mean smooth like a whiskey metaphor- the case of the week stuff helps the arc stuff go down smoothly. On really arcy shows I'm sometimes anxious because I know something will resolve unpleasantly but I don't know if I'm going to be anticipating it for one episode or ten, and that really bothers me. I thought The Good Wife would be like that, but it's thus far been reliable at balancing out that anxiety by giving you reliable case of the week happy resolutions. It's a show full of anxiety-causing material deliberately designed to minimize those anxieties.
I knew from osmosis I'd love Alicia and Kalinda and Diane and Will, but nobody prepared me for likingLogan Cary. But I do! Matt Czuchry is such a perfect casting, he plays privileged jackass so well. Every move he makes says I went to Harvard, but because Czuchry gives Cary a humanity too, that privilege foils Alicia's dark edges really effectively.
I particularly appreciate how carefully the show sets up that Alicia is constantly aware that other people are watching her and having opinions about her. From the opening shot of the series, periodically revisited, of Alicia performing the role of The Good Wife, the show explores her awareness of others' awareness in so many different, subtle ways. But it's almost never a topic of the show's dialogue, this is a theme the show explores exclusively in blocking and camera angles and meaningful glances. Which is really cool and filmic.
I'm also really enjoying the judge stunt casting. It's a neat calculation the showrunners made, that those sort of former star actors who are having a career lull either on purpose or by the vicissitudes of the industry would love to take on a guest role as a judge that doesn't take up much time that'd risk them losing out on other work, but lets them push themselves as actors. Peter Riegert, Ana Gasteyer, Joanna Gleason, etc... It's fun.
Slow Burn Podcast
Not exactly what it sold itself as: The show introduces itself by claiming it's going to be about stepping through the Watergate scandal as it was experienced by people as it unfolded, rather than in the retrospective way that history books/movies convert it into a narrative. But Watergate is simply too complicated and multifaceted to actually step through in any kind of meaningful step by step way... I knew that going in, and had hoped that the podcast would revel in that sprawling glorious chaos, but it only had eight half hour episodes to work with, so that was never going to happen. Rather than retelling Watergate, Slow Burn is about taking a close look at eight key figures or events in Watergate that aren't usually reported in detail. By looking at these smaller narratives, the podcast implicitly (and explicitly, eventually) asks that central question: How does the strange, chaotic, unpredictable flow of news and events that people are struggling to process as they come out somehow converge and convert itself into a set of composed narratives that are transmitted as history? Are individual moments inevitable as they seem in those composed narratives, or were they subject to the unpredictability of human whim?
I wanted something more sprawling, which I had thought was promised by the opening, but the podcast itself was ultimately satisfying and illuminating for what it turned out to be instead.
Season 2, about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is coming out now and I'm finding it equally fascinating. There's a great, gripping moment in episode 4, which I just listened to, where a female reporter recounts the details of Lewinsky's growing relationship with Clinton, and as she relates a set of details that wouldn't have been out of place in a romance novel, she lets out a giggle. Then she recoils at herself, recalling that it's now 2018. "This isn't funny," she says. "But I can't help but laugh." As a nation, we are rethinking once again the relationship between sex and power, and it's really interesting to rethink the Lewinsky scandal through the new lens, and to watch the people who grappled with the scandal back then have to force themselves to reexamine everything they believed.
It's also great to set the two seasons besides each other... The Lewinsky scandal exists, almost definitionally, in comparison to Watergate. Every early scandal of the Clinton era got a Gate name- Travelgate, Troopergate, etc... The notion of a special prosecutor and their wide purview to investigate stems from Watergate. The way all the figures interviewed knew and told each other at the time that the coverup was worse than the crime... Watergate is the story of this unthinkable thing happening, of a president being brought down by a scandal when everyone involved told each other that it could never happen. Clinton's scandals take place in a landscape where everyone knows that it's possible for scandal to take down a president.
Mystery thriller starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, directed by Paul Feig. EXTREMELY gay subtext. Fun and mostly engaging, but with occasional lulls and some headscratching plot twists. But mostly if you want to watch a movie where Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively flirt with each other, you should check this out. Highly recommended on those grounds.
The Good Wife Season 1
Enjoyable, thoughtful legal drama, with a really smooth balance between arcy stuff and case of the week. I mean smooth like a whiskey metaphor- the case of the week stuff helps the arc stuff go down smoothly. On really arcy shows I'm sometimes anxious because I know something will resolve unpleasantly but I don't know if I'm going to be anticipating it for one episode or ten, and that really bothers me. I thought The Good Wife would be like that, but it's thus far been reliable at balancing out that anxiety by giving you reliable case of the week happy resolutions. It's a show full of anxiety-causing material deliberately designed to minimize those anxieties.
I knew from osmosis I'd love Alicia and Kalinda and Diane and Will, but nobody prepared me for liking
I particularly appreciate how carefully the show sets up that Alicia is constantly aware that other people are watching her and having opinions about her. From the opening shot of the series, periodically revisited, of Alicia performing the role of The Good Wife, the show explores her awareness of others' awareness in so many different, subtle ways. But it's almost never a topic of the show's dialogue, this is a theme the show explores exclusively in blocking and camera angles and meaningful glances. Which is really cool and filmic.
I'm also really enjoying the judge stunt casting. It's a neat calculation the showrunners made, that those sort of former star actors who are having a career lull either on purpose or by the vicissitudes of the industry would love to take on a guest role as a judge that doesn't take up much time that'd risk them losing out on other work, but lets them push themselves as actors. Peter Riegert, Ana Gasteyer, Joanna Gleason, etc... It's fun.
Slow Burn Podcast
Not exactly what it sold itself as: The show introduces itself by claiming it's going to be about stepping through the Watergate scandal as it was experienced by people as it unfolded, rather than in the retrospective way that history books/movies convert it into a narrative. But Watergate is simply too complicated and multifaceted to actually step through in any kind of meaningful step by step way... I knew that going in, and had hoped that the podcast would revel in that sprawling glorious chaos, but it only had eight half hour episodes to work with, so that was never going to happen. Rather than retelling Watergate, Slow Burn is about taking a close look at eight key figures or events in Watergate that aren't usually reported in detail. By looking at these smaller narratives, the podcast implicitly (and explicitly, eventually) asks that central question: How does the strange, chaotic, unpredictable flow of news and events that people are struggling to process as they come out somehow converge and convert itself into a set of composed narratives that are transmitted as history? Are individual moments inevitable as they seem in those composed narratives, or were they subject to the unpredictability of human whim?
I wanted something more sprawling, which I had thought was promised by the opening, but the podcast itself was ultimately satisfying and illuminating for what it turned out to be instead.
Season 2, about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is coming out now and I'm finding it equally fascinating. There's a great, gripping moment in episode 4, which I just listened to, where a female reporter recounts the details of Lewinsky's growing relationship with Clinton, and as she relates a set of details that wouldn't have been out of place in a romance novel, she lets out a giggle. Then she recoils at herself, recalling that it's now 2018. "This isn't funny," she says. "But I can't help but laugh." As a nation, we are rethinking once again the relationship between sex and power, and it's really interesting to rethink the Lewinsky scandal through the new lens, and to watch the people who grappled with the scandal back then have to force themselves to reexamine everything they believed.
It's also great to set the two seasons besides each other... The Lewinsky scandal exists, almost definitionally, in comparison to Watergate. Every early scandal of the Clinton era got a Gate name- Travelgate, Troopergate, etc... The notion of a special prosecutor and their wide purview to investigate stems from Watergate. The way all the figures interviewed knew and told each other at the time that the coverup was worse than the crime... Watergate is the story of this unthinkable thing happening, of a president being brought down by a scandal when everyone involved told each other that it could never happen. Clinton's scandals take place in a landscape where everyone knows that it's possible for scandal to take down a president.