The Canyons, on sororial unit's Apple TV. Through the first scene you're like "Wow what have I gotten myself into," but then you keep watching. It's completely ludicrous and morbidly compelling, which I guess makes it a successful Bret Easton Ellis movie -- actually, of the ones I've seen, probably the best at conveying the mood of a Ellis novel (it never was a novel). It must be said that Lindsay Lohan is one of the greats.
I've wondered why I give Ellis the time of day, given complete ludicrousness etc. and came to the conclusion that dude basically writes non-supernatural horror. I mean, sometimes I have thoughts like, maybe the acting is terrible because the ppl dude writes about really are that stunted IRL, how would I know, but it's like asking The Cask of Amontillado to be sociological commentary on 19th-century Venetian nobility.
***
Twelve Years a Slave. I don't find Steve McQueen clinical and frankly kind of judge people who do; that suggests to me that you require some sort of Vaseline smear between yourself and reality, because McQueen is simply intensely present, in both senses of the word. It's been said that Hell is an eternal present, and so McQueen happens to be very good at portraying inventive flavours of Hell, to add to his obvious interest in the exercise. Allotment of spoons being what they are, it's OK to not see this movie because you don't want to squat in Hell for two hours. But he's also good at, I dunno, creeks. Creeks are very present things too, as Annie Dillard noted.
As McQueen's career continues I look forward to plotting his Hells on a matrix. XD; This one is decidedly non-self-made, meaning it is political. The mainstream reviews have combined into a mega-slab of Liberal White Guilt(tm) but none of the ones I read captured how McQueen digs to the heart of the horror; it's not that the protagonist is relatable, but that the story is correctly Kafkaesque. Slavery is absurd -- a terrible and absurd thing to do to a person. The main character falls into his situation absurdly and abruptly, and falls out of it just as absurdly and abruptly (OH HAI CANADIAN BRAD PITT). Alice in Wonderland, Odysseus and the Lotophagi -- you're never more intensely present than when you're stuck in a nightmare you can't wake up from, and for some reason Benedict Cumberbatch is there too.
I also really liked the gazebo. (It's hard to explain without spoilering the structure of the entire thing.) This movie seemed more museum-piece arty to me than Shame, actually; there were a lot of highfalutin' arty choices, like how the white supporting cast is a rampaging horde of "name" actors doing accents and how the slaves spoke to each other, not in the language that 20th/21st historical fiction might put in the mouths of slaves, but... something else. Maybe an early 19th-century novelist who had never been to the South and/or had no interest in simulating it. Maybe this was the language that Northup's memoir attributes to these people (I haven't read the book).
***
Switching gears, Thor 2: The Dark World, which I wrote up on Tumblr and in Kristin's LJ comments. Probably not going to do it again here. XD I will say in addendum that I liked the "Ta-da!" bit. That felt really Comics Loki.
***
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red. Read this probably more quickly than I should have -- it's a long prose poem, but a short novel. If I had to specifically pin it to a genre I would call it a present-day non-superpowered m/m AU of Greek myth, but... yeah. It is not technically wingfic because the character had wings in the canon too. It was just a thing.
DON'T GIVE UP: YOU, TOO, MAY LIVE TO SEE YOUR PRESENT-DAY NON-SUPERPOWERED M/M AU TECHNICALLY NOT WINGFIC OF GREEK MYTH PRAISED BY ALICE MUNRO AND MICHAEL ONDAATJE ONE DAY. NOT SUSAN SONTAG THOUGH BECAUSE SHE IS SUPER DEAD.
As with Bret Easton Ellis, everyone returns in a later book, older and not wiser!
I have figured out how to add the footer on a crosspost! Go me! /rollsalot (Original post is here:
http://petronia.dreamwidth.org/58021.html)