Media log
Catching up on quite a few things here...
Television
• Killjoys. This is the Canadian television series that stormed Yuletide last year. It is basically as close to a Firefly ripoff as (presumably) the makers could get without being sued, only not particularly good.
e_pepys and I have been watching it together, and most of the time it's pretty entertaining viewing, but not much more than that. It has some interesting bits of worldbuilding - and in particular does more with immigration and work permits than SF tends to - but disappointingly fails to follow through on the consequences of what it sets up. (How on earth can the RAC be considered independent when the Company and the Nine probably put out 95% of warrants?) If I tell you that this show has a red-headed female doctor, but that I feel no desire to request it for Yuletide, you will know all you need to know.
• Manhattan. Also been watching this with
e_pepys. It's a drama series about the Manhattan Project, with mainly fictional characters. It has great production values and was obviously filmed on location, or close. It's also interesting in that it pays quite a bit of attention to its female characters, mostly wives but also one physicist. Having said that it's clearly already on the verge of tipping over into soap opera melodrama. There has been so much whining about secrecy and so much gossip about the real reason they're out in the middle of the desert. And this is where period dramas often fall down - it's relatively easy to get the clothes and the cars right, but so difficult to capture the mindset convincingly. People really did, in general, have more respect for authority in the 1940s - think of Bletchley Park where wartime workers kept silent about their experiences for decades, in some cases even after they'd been told it was all right to talk. Here you never really get a sense that the characters realise the fact that it's wartime means there may be a reason for all the secrecy. (And yet on a blackboard they're tracking the number of US war dead as it ticks upward. Maybe someone actually did this at Los Alamos but it seems a bit BSG in reverse...)
Movies
• The Program. Docudrama about the life of Lance Armstrong and his final unmasking as a drug cheat, very little of which is actually about cycling (as opposed to doping). Hilariously the journalist who goes after him is played by the actor who played the imaginary friend in Moone Boy, lending his scenes (for me) a weird sense of unreality. The main issue with this film is that it's basically everything that happened to Lance Armstrong between 1993 (?) and 2013, re-enacted briefly and in order. There's no real sense of a narrative arc because they try to fit so much in - and this is saying something given that the story has, naturally, an extremely dramatic rise-fall-rise-fall structure. Also I feel that they went to fairly great lengths to establish Lance Armstrong as a sympathetic character, which I find dubious. He was a pretty despicable person and the film would have been far more interesting (IMO) with him as a love-to-hate character. Nonetheless it was a good, interesting hour and a half. The main critique from actual cyclists seems to be that "the cast are too fat to be pro cyclists," which is probably true, but says a lot more about pro cyclists than the cast.
Books
• The Hobbit. Still working my way through this in Icelandic. Last year I found it very tough going and stalled on the riddle chapter, which is telling as it's the best chapter in the book. This year I've picked it up again - and now it's fun and fairly compulsive reading! (Although I still don't understand everything.) I've been paused for a week or so, because I wanted to focus on my fiction writing, but previously I was sneaking pages of it while on the Tube. Definitely will finish.
• Summer Will Show. Having really loved Lolly Willowes I thought I would try some other Sylvia Townsend Warner. This is a novel set in the early 19th century, about a woman who decides to go to Paris to confront her unfaithful husband after her children die of smallpox. Instead she ends up falling in love with his mistress, who is Jewish and a left-wing radical. They end up on the barricades together in 1848. I had to read this one out of sheer curiosity! Unfortunately I've stalled having reached the Parisian part. I don't know whether this is because I lack the appropriate revolutionary instincts or whether it is actually less vivid and compelling than the first, English, part. We shall see.
• Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?. Next in my queue, this is a novel mostly set in the Faroes, if not by a Faroese author. There's an extract online. Also it was made into a TV miniseries, which is on YouTube. Should be interesting.
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/628696.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Television
• Killjoys. This is the Canadian television series that stormed Yuletide last year. It is basically as close to a Firefly ripoff as (presumably) the makers could get without being sued, only not particularly good.
e_pepys and I have been watching it together, and most of the time it's pretty entertaining viewing, but not much more than that. It has some interesting bits of worldbuilding - and in particular does more with immigration and work permits than SF tends to - but disappointingly fails to follow through on the consequences of what it sets up. (How on earth can the RAC be considered independent when the Company and the Nine probably put out 95% of warrants?) If I tell you that this show has a red-headed female doctor, but that I feel no desire to request it for Yuletide, you will know all you need to know.
• Manhattan. Also been watching this with
e_pepys. It's a drama series about the Manhattan Project, with mainly fictional characters. It has great production values and was obviously filmed on location, or close. It's also interesting in that it pays quite a bit of attention to its female characters, mostly wives but also one physicist. Having said that it's clearly already on the verge of tipping over into soap opera melodrama. There has been so much whining about secrecy and so much gossip about the real reason they're out in the middle of the desert. And this is where period dramas often fall down - it's relatively easy to get the clothes and the cars right, but so difficult to capture the mindset convincingly. People really did, in general, have more respect for authority in the 1940s - think of Bletchley Park where wartime workers kept silent about their experiences for decades, in some cases even after they'd been told it was all right to talk. Here you never really get a sense that the characters realise the fact that it's wartime means there may be a reason for all the secrecy. (And yet on a blackboard they're tracking the number of US war dead as it ticks upward. Maybe someone actually did this at Los Alamos but it seems a bit BSG in reverse...)
Movies
• The Program. Docudrama about the life of Lance Armstrong and his final unmasking as a drug cheat, very little of which is actually about cycling (as opposed to doping). Hilariously the journalist who goes after him is played by the actor who played the imaginary friend in Moone Boy, lending his scenes (for me) a weird sense of unreality. The main issue with this film is that it's basically everything that happened to Lance Armstrong between 1993 (?) and 2013, re-enacted briefly and in order. There's no real sense of a narrative arc because they try to fit so much in - and this is saying something given that the story has, naturally, an extremely dramatic rise-fall-rise-fall structure. Also I feel that they went to fairly great lengths to establish Lance Armstrong as a sympathetic character, which I find dubious. He was a pretty despicable person and the film would have been far more interesting (IMO) with him as a love-to-hate character. Nonetheless it was a good, interesting hour and a half. The main critique from actual cyclists seems to be that "the cast are too fat to be pro cyclists," which is probably true, but says a lot more about pro cyclists than the cast.
Books
• The Hobbit. Still working my way through this in Icelandic. Last year I found it very tough going and stalled on the riddle chapter, which is telling as it's the best chapter in the book. This year I've picked it up again - and now it's fun and fairly compulsive reading! (Although I still don't understand everything.) I've been paused for a week or so, because I wanted to focus on my fiction writing, but previously I was sneaking pages of it while on the Tube. Definitely will finish.
• Summer Will Show. Having really loved Lolly Willowes I thought I would try some other Sylvia Townsend Warner. This is a novel set in the early 19th century, about a woman who decides to go to Paris to confront her unfaithful husband after her children die of smallpox. Instead she ends up falling in love with his mistress, who is Jewish and a left-wing radical. They end up on the barricades together in 1848. I had to read this one out of sheer curiosity! Unfortunately I've stalled having reached the Parisian part. I don't know whether this is because I lack the appropriate revolutionary instincts or whether it is actually less vivid and compelling than the first, English, part. We shall see.
• Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?. Next in my queue, this is a novel mostly set in the Faroes, if not by a Faroese author. There's an extract online. Also it was made into a TV miniseries, which is on YouTube. Should be interesting.
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/628696.html. Please comment there using OpenID.