shallowness

I rewatched Black Widow in prep, and as Yelena and Alexei are funny and entertaining in it (and I followed who and what Taskmaster was better in this rewatch), it was probably worth it. ( Brief review. )

About fifteen people in my showing, with less than half leaving early, but the rest of us stayed until the post-credits scene. Among the trailers, Mission Impossible (which has been getting lots of free promo in the British news this week), Superman (i, did not realise that was coming out this summer, ii, unenthused about Krypto, iii, pretty leads, iv, willing to trust James Gunn up to a point) and Fantastic 4: First Steps (skipped the second iteration of F4. Going retro is going to make for comparisons with The Incredibles...but, fine, make the Silver Surfer female.) Am more enthused about Superman than Fantastic 4.

As for Thunderbolts*, overall, yes, it's an entertaining iteration of the scrappy team of powered people having done bad things learning to work together and maybe do good. It has the sense to know that Florence Pugh is the star, making Yelena Belova (who has the least powers) its heart and leader. Some of it is stuff we’ve seen before, deliberately so in some ways, but it’s better and more cohesive than Suicide Squad (backhand compliment though that is.) It has a nice line in being self-deprecating before the audience can be, and is consistently amusing, if not laugh out loud funny, while dealing with damaged, grieving people and continuing the touching relationship of a grown-up child assassin and her embarrassing adoptive dad hankering after glory days that never were first seen in Black Widow.

( tl;dr, spoilers, references to Trump )

In the cinema:

Companion is, arguably, a film you should know as little as possible about before going to see, (I had seen the trailer, which maybe gave too much away) although I’d say it’s probably not a date move and it got a 15 certificate in the UK, mainly for violence. I thought the script was excellent. ( spoilers ) It was scored by Hrishikesh Hirway of The West Wing Weekly, and the song choices are very good.

I posted about Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy here. I laughed and I cried and thought bits of it were a mess. I should perhaps issue the trigger warning that the first thing on screen is the Miramax logo (ew), which speaks to when the first Bridget Jones movie was made.

On streaming (Prime):

I watched Modern Persuasion (2019) and enjoyed it and as it’s the kind of thing I’d rec if it were a fic, I thought I’d reference it here. Yes, the title is clunky, but accurate: Persuasion is transferred to twenty-first century NYC but lets the premise breathe there. I loved most of the translations to the new setting ( Read more... ) So, if watching a Persuasion modern day AU by people who love the original appeals to you, it’s worth a look. (Admittedly, it’s no Clueless or Lizzie Bennet Diaries.)

The Wanting Mare (2022) was described as sci-fi, and I suppose it is, but not hard sci-fi, they use modern-enough tech (electricity, modes of transport, guns) and the folk tale elements are stronger. You could just as well call it science fantasy. It’s way more about the atmosphere than the plot, and though you get some answers, it sticks to its mysteries, and the ending left me with a completely different interpretation of what we’d seen. I found it really powerful. The trailer gives you a good sense of the mood, but a misleading sense of what will happen. (It’s rated 16+, mainly for brief but graphic injuries.) Give it five or ten minutes after the mumbling opening scene, and see if the sound of the sea, the use of montage and the glimpse of horses have drawn you in.

Thanks to everyone on my reading circle/friends list who is doing the Snowflake Challenge, I've updated my profile.

I saw no films in the cinema in October – a particularly horror-obsessed month. But in late November, I went to see Blitz, and as the reviews said, it was somewhat old-fashioned, except from a Black British perspective. There’s also modern FX bringing the scale of the Blitz to life, and some handheld camera work that is sometimes immersive, sometimes baffling. It focuses on one family, as 9-year-old George decides to jump off the train evacuating him from London to go home, which starts off as a Boys Own adventure, then goes a bit Dickensian. His single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan, as good as you’d expect. Also, she sings. I didn’t know she sang!) tries to carry on without him, until she finds out he’s gone missing. The kid has a presence.

Mark Kermode said he thought this was aimed at adolescents, which explains the broad characterisations. You’d want to have a think about how your twelve year old would react to seeing a film about a child facing things no child should experience, I imagine, because much of this really happened (and similar is happening in parts of the world now.)

I only heard about at the end of last week, but I badly want to see Your Monster (it sounds idtastic in a way that would appeal to me, but with emotional intelligence), however it wasn’t showing anywhere near my neck of the woods.

Instead I went to see Wicked part 1, I haven’t seen the show (nor read the book), but I’ve acquired a lot of knowledge about it over the years, and heard a lot of various versions of the songs. Take a bow, Jon M. Chu and everyone involved, I expect production and costume design to get nods at the Oscars. I loved the scale, the old-school nods to ‘The Wizard of Oz’, but the translation from stage to screen was really good, ( tl:dr spoilers )

In short then, this is pretty great – Erivo is brilliant, Grande good (heh) and the number of good songs are pluses. I can see myself trying to go to see it in the cinema again, and I haven’t felt that pull since Dune part 2. Also, nobody sang in the screening.

It almost looked as though I wouldn’t go to the cinema at all in May. There were a couple of films that I might have gone to see if they hadn’t been released in an inconvenient week, and I had intended to go see Dune part 2 again, but mistimed it.

But I sneaked in The Beast. ( Read more... )

In under 24 hours, I went to see Hit Man, ( Read more... )

It took me a few more days to see Slow, ( Read more... )

Should be noted that the three films (which I saw in a week) were all rated 15 and focused on a central male-female relationship. The audiences varied from four to about twenty, FWIW, given that there’s an anguished debate about cinema audience figures.

Monday was a bank holiday, so I reposted a fic: Career Day, Sky High, G. Magenta, Layla, Warren, Larry, Zach. Canon pairings, Warren/Layla implied. Magenta’s POV. 2,348 words. Summary: ‘Plan for a Super Tomorrow…Today!’ Magenta-style. (February 2007)

I added a clause for clarification and deleted a couple of spaces. In the notes from 2007, I had written, ‘This is another case of a ficlet becoming something longer.’ Now I’m boggling at the ‘another case’. As it’s over 2,000 words, I’m delighted this will bump up my word count average on AO3. Rereading it, I was pretty happy with it, as I think I used Magenta’s POV effectively, although I suppose my notes don’t reflect how important Magenta and Layla’s friendship is to the fic, but I was able to add a tag for that at AO3.

Also, I watched Fallout 1.1 The End

( Read more... )I only really care about a third of it, feel middling about a third and am unenthused by the other bit.

I only just learned that the British rights to air the Oscars had returned to free to air on Saturday, I think. The last time I was invested enough to stay up and watch was The Return of The King days (it may even have been on Sky then, in that brief time I had access to it.) As I’m not in my twenties and had work the next day, I went to bed, got an idea of the winners over the next day (but didn’t go clicking beyond headlines) and caught up with the coverage in my own time.

( Read more... )

Happy new year!

( Read more... )

I’ve fallen behind on most of my shows, mainly because I’ve been watching and catching up on the gymnastics world championship. Simone Biles is amazing, isn’t she? I mean, they all are (says the woman who’s only done a few so-called ‘cartwheels’ in her life) but she’s outstanding and seemed to be in such a good place.

Ghosts was one of those shows. There seems to be an outpouring of love for it, which I’ve been avoiding for spoilers, because this fifth series will be its last. (Sob, but also respect.)

5.1 Fools

( Read more... )

I reposted a ficlet over the weekend. Home (Smallville) G. Whitney Fordman (background Whitney/Lana, Clark/Lana). 250 words. Summary: Whitney never got to find out who sent him the copy of The Torch.

I’m on holiday and realised I should try to repost some fic here and at AO3 (past experience tells me I might run out of steam before I run out of fic to repost. I’ve been trying to do this since I joined Dreamwidth.) This ficlet is from the time when I was posting way more fic (June 2006), but it’s only been available on my LJ and ff.net. I probably said on the former that, because I was shipping Chloe/Whitney then, in my mind, it was Chloe who sent Whitney the copy of The Torch, but there’s no canonical justification for that, and it would have been a nice gesture for anyone from Smallville to do so.

In other news, Sanditon series 3 will be on ITVX this week! Despite its ridiculousness, there’s no denying I’m invested.

Over the past few weeks, I watched In The Heights (on Amazon Prime), and I enjoyed its energy and dancing a lot, but…there wasn’t really a standout song, and it was probably too long with too much crammed into it. Did it need the framing device AND the timestamp? ( spoiler? )

I loved Everything, Everywhere All At Once. It's a multiverse movie about a Chinese-American mother with a grown daughter and caring for her father living a disappointing life! And, obviously, MICHELLE YEOH stars in it. (I bet everyone doing a fight scene in this film practiced very hard.) I was so impressed by how clear its throughlines were (Ke Huy Quan did a particularly fine job) and delighted by how odd it was ( examples ) It’s surely one of the oddest Oscar-bothering movies ever.

I also watched Dune, and while it is a movie best seen on a big screen, I couldn’t when it was out, and that’s that. I enjoyed it a lot and hope to see part 2 (in the cinema). The production values were immaculate and it did a fairly good job of keeping the plot strands clear given that visions played such a big part. I've always avoided 'Dune' in the past because of a gut reaction to the concept of sand worms. ( spoiler? ) I simultaneously liked how Villeneuve handles communication and thought there were some mumbly bits. If I watch it again, I’m putting on the subtitles (and delighting in the fact that that’s an option for me.)

And then I went and checked and, yeah, Rebecca Ferguson isn't old enough to biologically be Timothee Chalamet's mother. Oscar Isaac is barely old enough to biologically be Timothee Chalamet's father, and even if Chalamet was playing younger than his age and blah de blah far future ageing technologies for the Great Houses, that's just typical Hollywood.

I’ve also just read and really enjoyed ‘From Darkness Into Light’, the follow-up to The Memoirs of Lady Trent. I loved that it wrestled with the implications of the big reveal in ‘In The Sanctuary of Wings’ for the generation after. Audrey was a chip off the old block (i.e. Grandmama Isabella. I could have done with more of her mother.) I enjoyed the narrative device of telling the story via various media – especially the translations (and the footnotes/commentary). Having been slightly disappointed by ‘In The Sanctuary of Wings’ (not the big reveal, but the scaffolding around it, I suppose), I loved how this follow-up expanded the world.