media round-up
Jun. 5th, 2023 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sideways• Mum leant me a copy of Water for Elephants, which I read during my trip into the mountains. She liked the colourful writing style, and it did have that! It also hit unexpectedly close to home during the elderly Jacob's reflections - we've been going through the process of moving my grandmother into aged care, and my lower lip may have done some quivering. It otherwise seemed fairly standard mainstream book club fare, if with at least one moment that genuinely upset me. I can't say I particularly liked most of the characters save Walter, who deserved better.
• The Greatest Showman had a far more romantic take on circuses, including a list of foot-tapping songs and some fun choreography. They titled the movie well, though - it's not about the circus or family or class struggles, and it's certainly not about the burden of discrimination or a group of outsiders finding a home. It's about Hugh Jackman getting to prance around as the star of the show, flawed but so, so, so good-hearted, really, look how much he loves his children and he was poor once so he's not really exploiting anyone, right? Right. I'd almost rather they'd just owned the shallowness of the motivations rather than trying to bake weak meaning into it.
• Speaking of gratuitous male flexing, I got about nine episodes into Suits and had to bail. Couldn't do it. The cases were interesting, but the narrative positioning of the majority of the women was so off-putting, and instead of using Mike's status as the underdog outsider to interrogate an established system of rich and powerful people, it was mostly used to emphasise how Cool and Awesome it is to be rich and powerful. What. Why.
•weirderwest and I had a movie night reliving the joys of Pacific Rim. I think the funniest thing was both of us confirming how hard Tumblr gaslighted itself in some respects - can we all now finally admit Raleigh is a poorly acted blank space of a character who sucks up screentime that should have gone to Mako, the vastly more interesting protagonist? Still, the wish fulfilment of PacRim is at least fun, and there is ample glee to be had in its shameless love and indulgence of the appropriate tropes. The giant robots? Epic. The giant monsters? Even more so. Worldbuilding? Cool. Drift compatibility? Great concept. Music? SLAPS.
• I stubbornly dragged my ass back to the first season of the His Dark Materials TV show and successfully, if not enthusiastically, finished it. I'm sorry. I really tried. The visuals are on point, I'll cop to that without reservation; it was seeing some lovely gifsets that lured me back, in fact, and the second and third season title openings are as incredible as the first. The show's interpretations of the characters are often very different to the books, however (though I quite liked what I saw of Will), the depiction of dæmons remained clunky and inconsistent, the pacing was all over the shop, and the dialogue was just... awkward, to me. I know there is a lot going on in the setting, but like. C'mon. The books are literally right there.
• In contrast, I had a marvellous time re-reading and re-watching Watership Down! Now there's an adaptation that knew what it was doing, and I say an emphatic fie to all those reviewers of the time who dared suggest it would have been better to do it Disney style. Things get lost, of course - most of the supporting cast gets flattened out, for one thing, but you can tell the writers still clearly understood who they were meant to be. The condensing of plot events are logical, the physical depictions of the characters are striking, and they fit in as much of the lore as they can manage. The only really questionable decision is the amount of time we spend on Fiver's weird Bright Eyes fever dream.
• The Greatest Showman had a far more romantic take on circuses, including a list of foot-tapping songs and some fun choreography. They titled the movie well, though - it's not about the circus or family or class struggles, and it's certainly not about the burden of discrimination or a group of outsiders finding a home. It's about Hugh Jackman getting to prance around as the star of the show, flawed but so, so, so good-hearted, really, look how much he loves his children and he was poor once so he's not really exploiting anyone, right? Right. I'd almost rather they'd just owned the shallowness of the motivations rather than trying to bake weak meaning into it.
• Speaking of gratuitous male flexing, I got about nine episodes into Suits and had to bail. Couldn't do it. The cases were interesting, but the narrative positioning of the majority of the women was so off-putting, and instead of using Mike's status as the underdog outsider to interrogate an established system of rich and powerful people, it was mostly used to emphasise how Cool and Awesome it is to be rich and powerful. What. Why.
•
weirderwest and I had a movie night reliving the joys of Pacific Rim. I think the funniest thing was both of us confirming how hard Tumblr gaslighted itself in some respects - can we all now finally admit Raleigh is a poorly acted blank space of a character who sucks up screentime that should have gone to Mako, the vastly more interesting protagonist? Still, the wish fulfilment of PacRim is at least fun, and there is ample glee to be had in its shameless love and indulgence of the appropriate tropes. The giant robots? Epic. The giant monsters? Even more so. Worldbuilding? Cool. Drift compatibility? Great concept. Music? SLAPS.• I stubbornly dragged my ass back to the first season of the His Dark Materials TV show and successfully, if not enthusiastically, finished it. I'm sorry. I really tried. The visuals are on point, I'll cop to that without reservation; it was seeing some lovely gifsets that lured me back, in fact, and the second and third season title openings are as incredible as the first. The show's interpretations of the characters are often very different to the books, however (though I quite liked what I saw of Will), the depiction of dæmons remained clunky and inconsistent, the pacing was all over the shop, and the dialogue was just... awkward, to me. I know there is a lot going on in the setting, but like. C'mon. The books are literally right there.
• In contrast, I had a marvellous time re-reading and re-watching Watership Down! Now there's an adaptation that knew what it was doing, and I say an emphatic fie to all those reviewers of the time who dared suggest it would have been better to do it Disney style. Things get lost, of course - most of the supporting cast gets flattened out, for one thing, but you can tell the writers still clearly understood who they were meant to be. The condensing of plot events are logical, the physical depictions of the characters are striking, and they fit in as much of the lore as they can manage. The only really questionable decision is the amount of time we spend on Fiver's weird Bright Eyes fever dream.
