shallowness (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shallowness) wrote2018-09-03 12:35 pm
shallowness) wrote2018-09-03 12:35 pm
Writing. Films. Telly.
I posted a double drabble yesterday Just after the Rain Hits. Gotham. PG. Catwoman (Selina Kyle), Batman (Bruce Wayne). Summary: It’s almost as if the falling rain can wash away the stench that’s been building up in the city.
It’s not directly inspired by the ep ‘One Bad Day’, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't have narrowed it to being about Gotham, but that ep affected my mood in writing it. I love the smell of petrichor, and I was delighted to find out there was a name for the phenomenon. Perhaps after writing this, the word will stick in my brain.
Two films I've seen recently: The Spy Who Dumped Me passes the Bechdel test by being about two best friends Audrey (Mila Kunis) and Morgan (Kate McKinnon) who, thanks to Audrey’s secret spy ex, get dragged into spy shenanigans across Europe. It’s entertaining, though I would say that Spy covers similar ground better and if you want to see McKinnon on even funnier form see the Ghostbusters remake first. There was a trailer for A Simple Favor from ‘the darker side of Paul Feig’ who directed the last two movies before this film started, and it looks intriguing.
Another 15-rated film I saw recently and enjoyed so much I plan to buy it on DVD was Upgrade. I was sold from the poster: Logan Marshall-Green kinda becomes a cyborg. But it’s actually good, clever and nasty sci-fi set five minutes in the future. The gory violence skirted the edge of my tolerance levels, but it’s got great fight scenes and uses modern anxieties about technology to good purpose. This is not going to be the autonomous vehicle industry’s favourite movie! I’ve admired (fancied) Logan Marshall-Green since catching some of Dark Blue, but he was really impressive here, given the range of physicality he had to convey.
Bodyguard episode 3
Bizzarely introduced by some bragging from the continuity announcer – 9 million of you watched this last week! Stay in the club and say ya boo to ITV (adapting Vanity Fair. My feelings on which are ‘eh’. I read the book too young, probably, but I’ve never worked up any enthusiasm for an adaptation as a resut.) It’s as if catch-up TV wasn’t a thing.
Anyway, the show in question:
While the explosion didn’t top the previous two episodes for visceral effect, it did make me jump. It was a great job in defusing David’s and therefore our tensions. It leaves many questions – the state of Julia after it (did I miss something crucial that made that clear? I’m guessing ‘not quite dead’) and who’s behind all this and why.
There is always the possibility that we haven’t seen everything David’s done and that he’s not fully aware of everything he’s doing – a stretch, even for the whole strangling Julia whilst not quite awake. But I don’t think he was the one who gave ‘Adrian Smith’ and others the info about ‘Lavendar’s movements, although he’s surely going to be suspected of it before the end.
It seems like it could be her Cabinet colleagues and party apparatchiks (the white aide definitely stitched up his Asian junior) except that they tend to go in for metaphorical knife-jobs of the type Julia managed on the PM. (I felt very proud of working out that was who the security services were briefing her on, which is to say I think the show is mostly doling out info at the right level.) The security services might benefit more, because such attacks feed into their power-grabbing agenda and this could be a punishment to Julia for acting intemperately on their info (arrogant), but the fact that she’s been targeted twice now and that all the attacks seem somewhat linked suggest that the bombing should be considered in the context of everything else. Was it the (probably vetted and up to now hapless) aide knowingly being a bomber? And the bomb can’t have been in the case or David would have seen it, right? Which makes the other aide seem innocent. So many possibilities…
And David has barely started processing the fact that he failed at his job, failed to protect his principal, and even if she was the one who banged on about that, he had been protecting her to a large extent.
This followed a lot of murky developments as David was blackmailed into spying on his ‘principal’ and lover, and it’s not as if their relationship wasn’t complicated enough that when Julia, having presumably got the PM to do what she wanted, decided to call it a relationship (Yep, that’s the response after your clearly troubled lover nearly strangles you because you startled him. Suddenly Vicky’s treatment of David makes even more sense.) my eyebrows raised. Como off it, he’s not future Prime Minister’s significant other material.
As for the other stuff David had done, well, duh they were going to at least put a picture of your assassin mate out and investigate him hard and your interaction with him. Don’t think your luck will last on keeping the link quiet. Someone’s going to recognise him.
There was a bit about the ownership of Montague’s spying charter legislation that I didn’t believe, and neither did I believe the total media shutdown on what had happened to her. But those are minor quibbles.
It’s not directly inspired by the ep ‘One Bad Day’, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't have narrowed it to being about Gotham, but that ep affected my mood in writing it. I love the smell of petrichor, and I was delighted to find out there was a name for the phenomenon. Perhaps after writing this, the word will stick in my brain.
Two films I've seen recently: The Spy Who Dumped Me passes the Bechdel test by being about two best friends Audrey (Mila Kunis) and Morgan (Kate McKinnon) who, thanks to Audrey’s secret spy ex, get dragged into spy shenanigans across Europe. It’s entertaining, though I would say that Spy covers similar ground better and if you want to see McKinnon on even funnier form see the Ghostbusters remake first. There was a trailer for A Simple Favor from ‘the darker side of Paul Feig’ who directed the last two movies before this film started, and it looks intriguing.
Another 15-rated film I saw recently and enjoyed so much I plan to buy it on DVD was Upgrade. I was sold from the poster: Logan Marshall-Green kinda becomes a cyborg. But it’s actually good, clever and nasty sci-fi set five minutes in the future. The gory violence skirted the edge of my tolerance levels, but it’s got great fight scenes and uses modern anxieties about technology to good purpose. This is not going to be the autonomous vehicle industry’s favourite movie! I’ve admired (fancied) Logan Marshall-Green since catching some of Dark Blue, but he was really impressive here, given the range of physicality he had to convey.
Bodyguard episode 3
Bizzarely introduced by some bragging from the continuity announcer – 9 million of you watched this last week! Stay in the club and say ya boo to ITV (adapting Vanity Fair. My feelings on which are ‘eh’. I read the book too young, probably, but I’ve never worked up any enthusiasm for an adaptation as a resut.) It’s as if catch-up TV wasn’t a thing.
Anyway, the show in question:
While the explosion didn’t top the previous two episodes for visceral effect, it did make me jump. It was a great job in defusing David’s and therefore our tensions. It leaves many questions – the state of Julia after it (did I miss something crucial that made that clear? I’m guessing ‘not quite dead’) and who’s behind all this and why.
There is always the possibility that we haven’t seen everything David’s done and that he’s not fully aware of everything he’s doing – a stretch, even for the whole strangling Julia whilst not quite awake. But I don’t think he was the one who gave ‘Adrian Smith’ and others the info about ‘Lavendar’s movements, although he’s surely going to be suspected of it before the end.
It seems like it could be her Cabinet colleagues and party apparatchiks (the white aide definitely stitched up his Asian junior) except that they tend to go in for metaphorical knife-jobs of the type Julia managed on the PM. (I felt very proud of working out that was who the security services were briefing her on, which is to say I think the show is mostly doling out info at the right level.) The security services might benefit more, because such attacks feed into their power-grabbing agenda and this could be a punishment to Julia for acting intemperately on their info (arrogant), but the fact that she’s been targeted twice now and that all the attacks seem somewhat linked suggest that the bombing should be considered in the context of everything else. Was it the (probably vetted and up to now hapless) aide knowingly being a bomber? And the bomb can’t have been in the case or David would have seen it, right? Which makes the other aide seem innocent. So many possibilities…
And David has barely started processing the fact that he failed at his job, failed to protect his principal, and even if she was the one who banged on about that, he had been protecting her to a large extent.
This followed a lot of murky developments as David was blackmailed into spying on his ‘principal’ and lover, and it’s not as if their relationship wasn’t complicated enough that when Julia, having presumably got the PM to do what she wanted, decided to call it a relationship (Yep, that’s the response after your clearly troubled lover nearly strangles you because you startled him. Suddenly Vicky’s treatment of David makes even more sense.) my eyebrows raised. Como off it, he’s not future Prime Minister’s significant other material.
As for the other stuff David had done, well, duh they were going to at least put a picture of your assassin mate out and investigate him hard and your interaction with him. Don’t think your luck will last on keeping the link quiet. Someone’s going to recognise him.
There was a bit about the ownership of Montague’s spying charter legislation that I didn’t believe, and neither did I believe the total media shutdown on what had happened to her. But those are minor quibbles.