Reviewy bits and pieces
Short notes, due to Darth Real Life:
1.) Yuletide: finished my assignment, got it beta'd, posted it. Phew. I've also written a treat which was finished eons ago, but I had to refresh some canon and do some more research for the assignment , so that took longer. Anyway, it's done, and now I can start shaking presents, err, checking tags in order to guess what else will be available in the fandoms I'm interested in.
2.) Watched some vaguely rl related movies & series. To wit:
A Royal Night Out: pure fluff, which never pretends to be anything but, and hence is great fun. It's May 8th, 1945, and princesses Elizabeth and Margaret give their supervisors the slip to enjoy D-Day celebrations anonymously. The characterisations are all as expected for this kind of film (Elizabeth is the dutiful one, Margaret is the party animal ("it's not like I'll end up on the front page of the Daily Mail photographed drunk in the arms of a sailor at 2 am!"), the cynical soldier Elizabeth meets while trying to find Margaret reveals a heart of gold, etc.), and it's ideal to relax with on a cozy afternoon/evening.
Bridge of Spies: the latest one by Steven Spielberg. Tom Hanks is the earnest Capra movie like hero, standing for decency in the Cold War. Mark Rylance is his client, Soviet spy Abel, doing a lot of stillness and wry stoicism in his few lines of dialogue. Our own Sebastian Koch plays GDR lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Donovan is the type of role Hanks can do in his sleep by now, Spielberg's direction is as polished as ever, and the plea against hysteric xenophobia is endearing in its real life application, but it didn't really get to me emotionally, for some reason. Maybe it was the eternal US sunshine in the suburbs versus the eternal cold and bad weather in East Berlin (not symbolic AT ALL), and maybe I was distracted because half way through I thought, hang on, I've read about this story - only with Vogel (one of the supporting baddies here) as the main character and Donovan in a supporting role.
Marc Polo: visually gorgeous series, and with my journey through Mongolia only two years ago, I often felt a pang of wistful recognition (the landscape of Kazachstan, where they shot the Mongolia scenes, is really very similar to Mongolia), but hampered by wanting to be both a prestige series and a money maker serving the action movie clientele. So you have, along some great attempts to depict Song era Chinese and Mongolian culture (I love the reconstruction of Karakorum! And the fact they had both stone turtles there!), both separate and intermingling, a bunch of tiresome clichés (because we're in the Far East, there's lots of Kung Fu (can't have Asian locations without Kung Fu, can we?); naked concubines galore; and EVERYONE has daddy issues. The titular character is the sole European regular and actually used with restraint, i.e. while he learns kung fu, he doesn't win a single fight (i.e. he's not a White Savior), and there are entire episodes where he shows up only for a few minutes. If there's a problem, it's that even within said few minutes, he's bland, and the one talent he has to impress Kublai Khan with, the power of description, of bringing people and landscapes alive via word, isn't born out by the script. Sorry, scriptwriters, but Marco's lines when he's describing something are terrible, not poetic. (Oh, and Marco's storyline has nothing to do with what Marco Polo said about himself in the existing versions of Il Milione, but never mind that.) On the bright side, Jimmy Cho makes for a great Kublai Khan, and I love the Empress Chabi (smart middle-aged power players for the win!), and their relationship.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1127630.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
1.) Yuletide: finished my assignment, got it beta'd, posted it. Phew. I've also written a treat which was finished eons ago, but I had to refresh some canon and do some more research for the assignment , so that took longer. Anyway, it's done, and now I can start shaking presents, err, checking tags in order to guess what else will be available in the fandoms I'm interested in.
2.) Watched some vaguely rl related movies & series. To wit:
A Royal Night Out: pure fluff, which never pretends to be anything but, and hence is great fun. It's May 8th, 1945, and princesses Elizabeth and Margaret give their supervisors the slip to enjoy D-Day celebrations anonymously. The characterisations are all as expected for this kind of film (Elizabeth is the dutiful one, Margaret is the party animal ("it's not like I'll end up on the front page of the Daily Mail photographed drunk in the arms of a sailor at 2 am!"), the cynical soldier Elizabeth meets while trying to find Margaret reveals a heart of gold, etc.), and it's ideal to relax with on a cozy afternoon/evening.
Bridge of Spies: the latest one by Steven Spielberg. Tom Hanks is the earnest Capra movie like hero, standing for decency in the Cold War. Mark Rylance is his client, Soviet spy Abel, doing a lot of stillness and wry stoicism in his few lines of dialogue. Our own Sebastian Koch plays GDR lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Donovan is the type of role Hanks can do in his sleep by now, Spielberg's direction is as polished as ever, and the plea against hysteric xenophobia is endearing in its real life application, but it didn't really get to me emotionally, for some reason. Maybe it was the eternal US sunshine in the suburbs versus the eternal cold and bad weather in East Berlin (not symbolic AT ALL), and maybe I was distracted because half way through I thought, hang on, I've read about this story - only with Vogel (one of the supporting baddies here) as the main character and Donovan in a supporting role.
Marc Polo: visually gorgeous series, and with my journey through Mongolia only two years ago, I often felt a pang of wistful recognition (the landscape of Kazachstan, where they shot the Mongolia scenes, is really very similar to Mongolia), but hampered by wanting to be both a prestige series and a money maker serving the action movie clientele. So you have, along some great attempts to depict Song era Chinese and Mongolian culture (I love the reconstruction of Karakorum! And the fact they had both stone turtles there!), both separate and intermingling, a bunch of tiresome clichés (because we're in the Far East, there's lots of Kung Fu (can't have Asian locations without Kung Fu, can we?); naked concubines galore; and EVERYONE has daddy issues. The titular character is the sole European regular and actually used with restraint, i.e. while he learns kung fu, he doesn't win a single fight (i.e. he's not a White Savior), and there are entire episodes where he shows up only for a few minutes. If there's a problem, it's that even within said few minutes, he's bland, and the one talent he has to impress Kublai Khan with, the power of description, of bringing people and landscapes alive via word, isn't born out by the script. Sorry, scriptwriters, but Marco's lines when he's describing something are terrible, not poetic. (Oh, and Marco's storyline has nothing to do with what Marco Polo said about himself in the existing versions of Il Milione, but never mind that.) On the bright side, Jimmy Cho makes for a great Kublai Khan, and I love the Empress Chabi (smart middle-aged power players for the win!), and their relationship.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1127630.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.