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Recent watching
Apr. 8th, 2011 05:21 pmSo I've fallen down on posting again. The last few weeks I've been going back to a local Art Guild where I had dropped off attendance months ago and have been enjoying it, but I won't say much about that right now.
Mainly I wanted to post about stuff I've been watching recently; the pace has slackened on that, too, but still.
After much foot-dragging I finally finished Kino no Tabi with the second movie. I enjoyed the series a lot, in all its fragmentary, morally ambiguous glory, and its sometimes simplistic but often incisive takes on the human condition. (I found myself thinking this series was doing the Vonnegut schtick better than Vonnegut*; KnT is at least less cocksure about morality and human nature and at least sets up a context in which this stuff is believable.) The only one I remember not caring for was the "Country of Books" episode, which just yanked the rug out from under me so many times it turned into mush (although the little story within the story about encountering the tank was poetic and I liked it), and the second movie, when I finally watched it, was so-so; it reminded me a little of Star Trek: Insurrection, that same feeling of watching a middling-fair episode of the series that didn't even quite grasp the series aesthetic, plus lots of overuse and misuse of CGI. The first movie was much more successful, like a good episode of the series with especially high stakes (I'm still not sure what Master was thinking or if what she did there holds any kind of ethical water, but it's Kino no Tabi, I'm used to moral ambiguity...).
I also took it in my head to watch Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, and this is the point where I confess that, to the best of my memory, I have never read a word of Tolkein in my life. Yes, I know, he's like the Osamu Tezuka of the English-language fantasy genre (I was once fortunate enough to see Terry Pratchett at a convention and he had a nice bit of snark about "the people who were influenced by the people who were influenced by the people who were influenced by Tolkein" and their "wiggly river method" of writing fantasy novels**), but partly put off by the overselling, I just never had gone there, and now finally thought, well, I'd heard the movies were pretty well done, it'd be nice to know basically how the thing goes. I got the first one from the library, but then some other patron cleaned them out before I could get the other two, and I ended up turning to Amazon's on-demand service for the first time; it's actually kind of neat (I could just have reactivated my Netflix, but for some reason didn't feel like it).
As of this writing, I've seen Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, but not Return of the King yet. Fellowship of the Ring I heartily enjoyed. There were a few places where it came across as a little ridiculous or vague (Saruman and Gandalf telekinetically throwing each other around comes to mind, and the scene with Galadriel could maybe have been a bit less trippy), but for the most part it did a really good job of introducing the characters and the world and endearing them to me and interesting me in the conflict and the stakes --- simplistically Manichean, hell yeah, but beautiful. The Two Towers wasn't as enjoyable; it felt more like it was grinding its way through a bunch of story events that weren't as well grounded and thus involving as in the first one, and maybe that allowed me to see some of them as fairly weak. The influence of the Ring is an issue at the start of The Two Towers and is still an issue in the end, so there's not the sense of it developing as a threat as effectively as in the first one. In one scene Saruman incites some people I don't know to attack some other people I don't know; the first group is never adequately explained (and a later scene perhaps would have been more awesome if it hadn't made me so curious whether Saruman hadn't been a dumbass to build his fortress below a dam and where the dam came from to start with and who maintained it and why). What happened with Gandalf had a really transparent reveal and seemed to land on a cusp of "meh" in between "awesome" and "absurd" (but I at least get the joke with Torgo now). Etc.
The contrast between how the two played for me brought something else to mind: awhile ago I heard or read something in passing, a commentator wondering if superhero movies really need to keep re-telling the origin stories over and over again, I guess because it's not like the audience doesn't know most of them already. My own thought, though, is that it's not so much whether the audience needs to be told as that a superhero's origin is usually the most interesting thing about them, so why not keep going back to the good part? Maybe the flip side of getting a story off the ground is, well, loss of contact with the ground; to properly support the thing after that can be challenging.
But as for LOTR, I still have to see how it all comes out---probably Sunday at the earliest (I need to try to get FYMV 37 posted Saturday). It's not filling me with desire to run out and read the books (which I've heard are kind of a slog anyway), but overall I'm enjoying it.
*Yes, I know he's supposed to be some effing genius, and yes I admit I'm basing my opinion on two short stories ("Welcome to the Monkey House" and "Harrison Bergeron") but those two strike me in hindsight as the work of a hack who claimed the license of sci-fi without doing the actual work of thinking through his settings, but just bluffly made shit up that would support his crackpot misogynistic worldview and put it over on the reader by dint of sheer chutzpah; ask yourself whether people would ever really act like that or create a society like that and the whole thing falls apart. (I could maybe post sometime about writers who use the suspension of disbelief on which fiction operates to put crackpot ideas over on readers and the resulting need to be circumspect about deriving life lessons from fiction and the tendency of same to merely reinforce existing worldviews, but I actually haven't thought much beyond just raising the issue...)
**Wherein you start by drawing a map to put on the flyleaf, with bumpy mountains and a wiggly river.
Mainly I wanted to post about stuff I've been watching recently; the pace has slackened on that, too, but still.
After much foot-dragging I finally finished Kino no Tabi with the second movie. I enjoyed the series a lot, in all its fragmentary, morally ambiguous glory, and its sometimes simplistic but often incisive takes on the human condition. (I found myself thinking this series was doing the Vonnegut schtick better than Vonnegut*; KnT is at least less cocksure about morality and human nature and at least sets up a context in which this stuff is believable.) The only one I remember not caring for was the "Country of Books" episode, which just yanked the rug out from under me so many times it turned into mush (although the little story within the story about encountering the tank was poetic and I liked it), and the second movie, when I finally watched it, was so-so; it reminded me a little of Star Trek: Insurrection, that same feeling of watching a middling-fair episode of the series that didn't even quite grasp the series aesthetic, plus lots of overuse and misuse of CGI. The first movie was much more successful, like a good episode of the series with especially high stakes (I'm still not sure what Master was thinking or if what she did there holds any kind of ethical water, but it's Kino no Tabi, I'm used to moral ambiguity...).
I also took it in my head to watch Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, and this is the point where I confess that, to the best of my memory, I have never read a word of Tolkein in my life. Yes, I know, he's like the Osamu Tezuka of the English-language fantasy genre (I was once fortunate enough to see Terry Pratchett at a convention and he had a nice bit of snark about "the people who were influenced by the people who were influenced by the people who were influenced by Tolkein" and their "wiggly river method" of writing fantasy novels**), but partly put off by the overselling, I just never had gone there, and now finally thought, well, I'd heard the movies were pretty well done, it'd be nice to know basically how the thing goes. I got the first one from the library, but then some other patron cleaned them out before I could get the other two, and I ended up turning to Amazon's on-demand service for the first time; it's actually kind of neat (I could just have reactivated my Netflix, but for some reason didn't feel like it).
As of this writing, I've seen Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, but not Return of the King yet. Fellowship of the Ring I heartily enjoyed. There were a few places where it came across as a little ridiculous or vague (Saruman and Gandalf telekinetically throwing each other around comes to mind, and the scene with Galadriel could maybe have been a bit less trippy), but for the most part it did a really good job of introducing the characters and the world and endearing them to me and interesting me in the conflict and the stakes --- simplistically Manichean, hell yeah, but beautiful. The Two Towers wasn't as enjoyable; it felt more like it was grinding its way through a bunch of story events that weren't as well grounded and thus involving as in the first one, and maybe that allowed me to see some of them as fairly weak. The influence of the Ring is an issue at the start of The Two Towers and is still an issue in the end, so there's not the sense of it developing as a threat as effectively as in the first one. In one scene Saruman incites some people I don't know to attack some other people I don't know; the first group is never adequately explained (and a later scene perhaps would have been more awesome if it hadn't made me so curious whether Saruman hadn't been a dumbass to build his fortress below a dam and where the dam came from to start with and who maintained it and why). What happened with Gandalf had a really transparent reveal and seemed to land on a cusp of "meh" in between "awesome" and "absurd" (but I at least get the joke with Torgo now). Etc.
The contrast between how the two played for me brought something else to mind: awhile ago I heard or read something in passing, a commentator wondering if superhero movies really need to keep re-telling the origin stories over and over again, I guess because it's not like the audience doesn't know most of them already. My own thought, though, is that it's not so much whether the audience needs to be told as that a superhero's origin is usually the most interesting thing about them, so why not keep going back to the good part? Maybe the flip side of getting a story off the ground is, well, loss of contact with the ground; to properly support the thing after that can be challenging.
But as for LOTR, I still have to see how it all comes out---probably Sunday at the earliest (I need to try to get FYMV 37 posted Saturday). It's not filling me with desire to run out and read the books (which I've heard are kind of a slog anyway), but overall I'm enjoying it.
*Yes, I know he's supposed to be some effing genius, and yes I admit I'm basing my opinion on two short stories ("Welcome to the Monkey House" and "Harrison Bergeron") but those two strike me in hindsight as the work of a hack who claimed the license of sci-fi without doing the actual work of thinking through his settings, but just bluffly made shit up that would support his crackpot misogynistic worldview and put it over on the reader by dint of sheer chutzpah; ask yourself whether people would ever really act like that or create a society like that and the whole thing falls apart. (I could maybe post sometime about writers who use the suspension of disbelief on which fiction operates to put crackpot ideas over on readers and the resulting need to be circumspect about deriving life lessons from fiction and the tendency of same to merely reinforce existing worldviews, but I actually haven't thought much beyond just raising the issue...)
**Wherein you start by drawing a map to put on the flyleaf, with bumpy mountains and a wiggly river.
