(no subject)
Five months of pop culture, GO!
Orange is the New Black uses a typical protagonist (white, blonde, privileged) to tell stories about a bunch of non-typical characters (women of colour, bisexual/lesbian women, and a trans woman). The more I think about the season’s climax, the more I think it does the series a disservice, but the show as a whole is well worth watching.
Graceland took a nice cast (Aaron Tveit! Daniel Sunjata! A bunch of other people who are not white and/or male!) and squandered it away with stupid storytelling and cheap T & A.
Arrow is way better than you might expect, if your expectations are mine and you’re not really into superheroes. Good characters, good storytelling. The biggest problem is the female lead, who is both badly conceptualised and poorly acted, but there’s a bunch of other women who are awesome, including a blonde, glasses-wearing, delightfully awkward hacker girl.
You do need to get through the first half-dozen episodes, which are the very definition of patchy. Around episode three, I thought, “You know, this writing is pretty good,” after a particularly nice bit of dialogue; literally thirty seconds later, somebody infodumped with, “Have you forgotten your brother died doing [plot thing]?” (To which I would’ve loved it if the responding character had said, “OMG! I had forgotten!”) But there’s a lot more good than bad here, and I love that they’re trying to build a larger world and not just do monster of the week episodes. It actually reminds me quite a bit of Buffy - not as witty, not as clever, but possibly better acted.
Does Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. get any better? Even my love of Ming-Na Wen and hackers couldn’t keep me interested.
The Bling Ring (non-fiction book) is fascinating. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola movie) is stylish but empty. The Bling Ring (Lifetime movie) is surprisingly not horrible, but nobody would call it good. Somebody’s going to tell the definitive fictional representation of this story, I hope, but neither of these are it.
Before Midnight was a huge disappointment, with uneven storytelling, terrible pacing, and a male lead who’s never called on his crappy behaviour. Before Sunset is one of my favourite movies, which made this one all the more frustrating. I cannot understand how this film is topping so many end-of-year Best Of lists, and nobody was primed to love it more than me.
Enchanted is a lovely twist on the Disney princess story, and Amy Adams is so winning. I’d forgotten how much I liked it.
You’ll notice there’s hardly any books mentioned above. That’s because I ended up somewhat impulsively becoming a student again, so everything I’ve been reading the last four months has been assigned. I’m studying novel writing, which has been exhilarating and wonderful and terrifying all at once. Exhilarating and wonderful are probably self-evident; terrifying because it feels like this might be my now or never moment. I’ve always had problems with plotting, and have hundreds of thousands of words of mess to prove it. If I cannot learn how to do it even when I’m taking an entire course dedicated to it, I fear I never will.