Recently read and watched
Jun. 26th, 2022 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThere have been a couple of articles in the Guardian, The Bourne Identity at 20 and Minority Report at 20 that have made me go, ‘huh, yeah, it IS 20 years.’ I had a short-lived thing where I made a point of watching films I own on DVD around their twentieth anniversary. The Bourne franchise feels more live to me because I’ve kept reading fic over the years, starting late, because I don’t think I’d begun reading fanfiction when I saw ‘The Bourne Identity’. The author tries to argue that Identity is the best despite the consensus that prefers Greengrass’s films. (I only feel strongly that ‘Bourne’ is better ignored.) I’m more of a Jason/Marie shipper, although I’ll read Jason/Nicky, and how ‘Bourne’ treated Nicky is one of my biggest beefs with it, so because of that, and simply by coming first, introducing us to this world and leaving an impression, it’s got a special place in my heart.
The Minority Report piece is framed by comparing Tom Cruise then and Tom Cruise now, but as I‘m one of the people who haven’t gone to see Top Gun: Maverick, I’ve got no opinion on that. I rewatched Minority Report about a year and a half ago, having not seen it since if first came out, and was impressed.
I have been taking the opportunity to watch films I never got around to seeing in the cinema on TV. One of them was ‘Radioactive’, a Rosamond Pike-starring biopic of Marie Curie. It was worth watching, but not great. It tried to do some interesting things with the biopic genre, some of which were more successful than others. I liked the mix of genres in the score, with the use of anachronistic electronica to capture how revolutionary the scientific discoveries were. I liked the vignettes of how radiation would shape the twentieth century, but SPOILER I hated the dying dream ending, given how vehemently Curie didn’t believe in the afterlife. /SPOILER. I liked that they showed her rough edges, and I didn’t feel irked, as I had with Colette, that here were all these British (English, even) actors playing French people. Well, Curie was originally Polish, although the film’s handling of anti-Polish French racism was very broad brush.
I also watched ‘What Maisie Knew’ which is based on a Henry James novella that I’d heard of, but never read, shifted forward to the early 21st century. It got to me emotionally. It leaned hard into being from Maisie’s POV. She’s a little girl (about six to seven?), living with her parents at the start of the film. Basically, they’re monsters of selfishness, who divorce, then treat her custody as another front for attrition. It was aiming for naturalism visually, but narratively, well, surely Maisie ought to have acted out in some way. Moore and Coogan lent their characters enough dimensions that they didn’t come off as caricatures, helped that they were bit players in Maisie’s life. All the adult actor had a ood rapport with the child actress, Onata Aprile.
Emotionally, I was ‘one true family shipping’ Maisie with the two people who love her like her parents should: Margo, the nanny who becomes her stepmother, and Lincoln, the near-stranger who becomes Maisie’s stepfather. I mean, I was side eyeing both their choices: Margo must have seen enough evidence of Maisie’s dad’s failings (but her daddy issues were such that she overlooked them??), and Lincoln basically married a freshly divorced woman he’d hooked up with a few weeks ago. Granted, said woman was a rock star, but still. But hey, Alexander Skarsgard was doing funny things to my ovaries in that film. And I realised how invested I was in the story when Maisie is in a far from safe space after her mother’s latest carelessness, so I welcomed the happy resolution.
Margo was played by Joanna Vanderham who I knew from Dancing on the Edge, which came out at about the same time as What Maisie Knew.
I’ve also been reading ‘Thick as Thieves’ by Megan Whalen Turner, the fifth in the Thief of Attolia series, which is YA fantasy if you don't know it, although I suspect most people in these parts will. And there I was, feeling smug because I knew who ‘the Attolian’ was because I was reading the book so long after everyone else that I knew going in it was Kamet and SPOILER‘s epic road journey, but it’s MWT, I should have known there’d be more surprises coming.
Apart from the expected, great sense of place, characterisation, the religious aspect and the apt descriptions, similies, mainly, that were so poetic that they made me hate my reliance on cliché, I really, really dug how Kamet’s short sightedness was an intrinsic part of how he experienced the world.
The Minority Report piece is framed by comparing Tom Cruise then and Tom Cruise now, but as I‘m one of the people who haven’t gone to see Top Gun: Maverick, I’ve got no opinion on that. I rewatched Minority Report about a year and a half ago, having not seen it since if first came out, and was impressed.
I have been taking the opportunity to watch films I never got around to seeing in the cinema on TV. One of them was ‘Radioactive’, a Rosamond Pike-starring biopic of Marie Curie. It was worth watching, but not great. It tried to do some interesting things with the biopic genre, some of which were more successful than others. I liked the mix of genres in the score, with the use of anachronistic electronica to capture how revolutionary the scientific discoveries were. I liked the vignettes of how radiation would shape the twentieth century, but SPOILER I hated the dying dream ending, given how vehemently Curie didn’t believe in the afterlife. /SPOILER. I liked that they showed her rough edges, and I didn’t feel irked, as I had with Colette, that here were all these British (English, even) actors playing French people. Well, Curie was originally Polish, although the film’s handling of anti-Polish French racism was very broad brush.
I also watched ‘What Maisie Knew’ which is based on a Henry James novella that I’d heard of, but never read, shifted forward to the early 21st century. It got to me emotionally. It leaned hard into being from Maisie’s POV. She’s a little girl (about six to seven?), living with her parents at the start of the film. Basically, they’re monsters of selfishness, who divorce, then treat her custody as another front for attrition. It was aiming for naturalism visually, but narratively, well, surely Maisie ought to have acted out in some way. Moore and Coogan lent their characters enough dimensions that they didn’t come off as caricatures, helped that they were bit players in Maisie’s life. All the adult actor had a ood rapport with the child actress, Onata Aprile.
Emotionally, I was ‘one true family shipping’ Maisie with the two people who love her like her parents should: Margo, the nanny who becomes her stepmother, and Lincoln, the near-stranger who becomes Maisie’s stepfather. I mean, I was side eyeing both their choices: Margo must have seen enough evidence of Maisie’s dad’s failings (but her daddy issues were such that she overlooked them??), and Lincoln basically married a freshly divorced woman he’d hooked up with a few weeks ago. Granted, said woman was a rock star, but still. But hey, Alexander Skarsgard was doing funny things to my ovaries in that film. And I realised how invested I was in the story when Maisie is in a far from safe space after her mother’s latest carelessness, so I welcomed the happy resolution.
Margo was played by Joanna Vanderham who I knew from Dancing on the Edge, which came out at about the same time as What Maisie Knew.
I’ve also been reading ‘Thick as Thieves’ by Megan Whalen Turner, the fifth in the Thief of Attolia series, which is YA fantasy if you don't know it, although I suspect most people in these parts will. And there I was, feeling smug because I knew who ‘the Attolian’ was because I was reading the book so long after everyone else that I knew going in it was Kamet and SPOILER‘s epic road journey, but it’s MWT, I should have known there’d be more surprises coming.
Apart from the expected, great sense of place, characterisation, the religious aspect and the apt descriptions, similies, mainly, that were so poetic that they made me hate my reliance on cliché, I really, really dug how Kamet’s short sightedness was an intrinsic part of how he experienced the world.
