What would you do... for your celebrity crush? Read boring novelisations, apparently.
Right, time for a big post o' random.
Books
Yeah, this is embarrassing. No Dostoyevsky for me! Let's see, there was Dead Ever After and Deadlocked (the last two books of the Sookie Stackhouse vampire mysteries by Charlaine Harris). I'm not even watching True Blood anymore, because when you start desperately wishing people would put their clothes BACK ON in favour of some actual storyline, the magic is gone. However, I had to compulsively finish the books. They pretty much met my expectations - lightly entertaining without being particularly memorable. I ended up reading them in the reverse order because I initially hadn't realised I'd missed one.
I also read The Big Mo (Mark Roeder), which was about the power of momentum in current society - which he sees as being behind things like the global financial crisis, climate change, instant celebrity and so forth, and the main idea is that people tend to hold the traditional belief that a system left untouched will eventually return to equilibrium, but given the increasing speed and deliberate removal of inbuilt 'friction' in financial/social/cultural mechanisms (such as the deregulation of the banks, the adoption of the Euro, instant global communication and the 24-hour news cycle), things have a greater tendency to spiral out of control instead. It's a bit of a scary book in that sense.
I'm currently ploughing desultorily through the novelisation of Star Trek Into Darkness (Alan Dean Foster) which I mainly bought because of the cover (don't judge me). It would probably be better used as a bulky mini-poster rather than a book; it's pretty much a straightforward narration of the film, but without the explosions, lens flare, and closeups of BC. So very dull. Yes, I know who Alan Dean Foster is, and no, I don't care. Nor am I convinced Kirk would think, "[b]ut that was a long time ago, and that bitch reality kept poking him in the side with the ugly stick of immediacy". Are you my Star Trek? If I can get through it, I'll finally start on Joyland (Stephen King). I hope it's worth it *g*
Theatre
Saw The Maids (Jean Genet) on Saturday, partly for the story, but mostly for the star power of Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert. They played the 'maids' in question - unhappy sisters in a strange, vaguely incestuous relationship, who plan to kill their female employer, played by Elizabeth Debicki (who played Jordan Baker in Gatsby). It was a complete mess, as far as I was concerned - I think they all interpreted their roles quite well in their respective ways, but it was as though they were each the star of three completely different productions, and the director was on another planet yet again.
Cate Blanchett played with shifting levels of her Australian accent (in dressing up as her employer vs being the maid), and her acting veered from flamboyantly dramatic (playing dress-up) to subtly restrained (as the maid), while Huppert's unavoidably heavy French accent was difficult to understand at times, and she was mostly composed of either huge, expressive, childlike gestures or surly reticence, and of course she's petite and dark in contrast to Blanchett's tall blondeness, so the overall combination was very odd indeed, especially for women playing sisters. Debicki's character appears to be written as older than the maids, treating them as 'her little girls', with her arch, glittering character subject to huge mood swings, but she's at least 20 years younger than either of them, which made the dialogue very surreal at times. The almost non-stop use of 'fuck' and 'cunt' and variations thereof also made a bizarre contrast to the lyricism of some of the language in the play, as well as the historical feel to certain aspects, such as where the employer prides herself on giving them money to put on the plate at church. The language doesn't intrinsically bother me, but it was incredibly jarring in context. Then on top of that the director thought it'd be cool to have a huge screen as a backdrop showing live feed from various cameras situated about the stage, so we'd get a close-up of some flowers, or various dramatically held poses of the actors from side-on, or above, or below, or whatever in addition to what was happening on stage. There were glimpses of an actual (and fascinating) PLAY in there somewhere, about murder and betrayal and love and hate and servitude, but it got completely lost in the scrimmage.
The only way I got through it was by mentally recasting the 'maids' as Iris (Mark Gatiss) and Judee (Reece Shearsmith), and imagining them performing the dialogue (not terribly difficult, seeing as the skit in The League of Gentlemen Live with the alarm clock going off was essentially a parody of the first scene anyway). It worked much better that way.
Film
Last month I also saw Comrade Kim Goes Flying at the Sydney Film Festival. This is I think the first North Korean international film co-production ever (with the UK and Belgium), and I'd already heard a fair bit about it because the English co-director (Nicholas Bonner) happens to be the founder of the tour company we went there with last year, and a couple of the (UK) guides also helped on the movie, so it was mentioned a couple of times in passing. It was a really fascinating film in that it was like... idk, a communist retro fairytale is about as close as I can get. Comrade Kim, a tireless worker in the mines, dreams of being a trapeze artist, and travels to Pyongyang to fulfil her dream. She is beset with the usual challenges - people laughing at her ambition, humiliating failures, disapproving father, various setbacks, but in the end her "worker spirit" triumphs and she achieves her dream. Noticeably lacking was any direct mention of the Dear Leader, which was interesting, and apparently extremely progressive for a North Korean film (they do have a film industry; in fact, they have a film festival!).
It was also interesting to see what a nation 'fetishises', by which I mean what they choose to emphasise in their movies differently from what I'm used to. Food was a huge thing - every time the family had a meal together, the rice bowls were huge, and filled to the top, and there was always a noticeable excess of food shown at every opportunity. Another very distinctive thing was children - they put children in pretty much every scene it was reasonable to put a child in. As expected, the workers were humble and devoted, and the officials wise and supportive, although there was a very interesting segment where a factory foreman agrees to build Comrade Kim some practice equipment if she can best his oldest employee, youngest employee and himself in arm wrestling. Through not-strictly-kosher means, and using the power of her charm, she succeeds. At one point she also lies sweetly to a kind driver to get where she needs to go. I found that kind of light-hearted moral flexibility rather surprisingly contemporary *g*. Anyway, I really enjoyed the movie not only for the extremely fanciful glimpses of North Korea (the entire movie, including the heroine, has the wholesomeness perkiness of a breakfast cereal commercial) but also the sentimental prettiness of the "fairy-tale" it presents. It's like a Disney movie without the villains. I - uncharacteristically - went up to say hello to Bonner (after he'd done the Q&A) just to say how much we enjoyed the film and appreciated the experience with his tour company, and he gave me one of his stash of cute lenticular postcards and asked me to mention the film on social media, which I was going to do anyway. But hey, postcard *g*
Click to viewSo... what are you reading/watching/doing?