(no subject)
oo1. Yesterday's National Geographic Photo-of-the-Day was adorable!
oo2. Last year I saw this wonderful documentary entitled Heavy Metal in Baghdad (which I wrote about here), about an Iraqi heavy metal band (the only Iraqi heavy metal band) in Baghdad where heavy metal was frowned upon and publicly wearing a heavy metal t-shirt was asking for a world of trouble. The documentary was an incredibly moving portrait of a group of West-loving young guys who struggle to survive - after a while, not even to play their music, but just to surivive - in a war-torn city. I remember walking out of the theater in tears because for me it was a film I could walk away from - but for them, it was their lives, and they couldn't turn it off, no matter how difficult or painful it was to live fearfully in Baghdad, and then later to be refugees in Syria. So when I saw this article yesterday in the NYT, I was thrilled to discover that their story finally has a happy ending, and they're getting a second chance to make music and hopefully have a happier life than they've had until now.
oo3. I recently saw Doubt, directed by John Patrick Shanley, and starring Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn. I loved it. Meryl Streep is magnificent - Hoffman is excellent, as per the usual, but Meryl Streep is something extraordinary. She creates a character full of ticks and mannerisms, full of personality, and she wasn't villainous as I was expecting from some of the preview clips, but rather her Sister Aloysius is fabulously human and real and made me forget that she's played by Meryl Streep. There are some actors and actresses that can never do that for me (Angelina Jolie, for example) - I can't forget who they are, and no matter how good they might be, they're not quite good enough to create a character that overshadows their own celebrity. But Streep does it in this film, and it's a terrific vehicle for her gifts.
Aside from her performance, the film is a wonderful tangle of certainty, doubt, self-righteousness, faith, tradition chafed by modernity and gender politics. I loved the moral ambiguities, particularly after a scene between Sister Aloysius and the mother of one of her students - what surprised me the most, I think, in that scene between Mrs. Miller (whose son Father Flynn is suspected of mistreating) and Sister Aloysius is Sister Aloysius's reaction to what Mrs. Miller acknowledges regarding her son's nature. I would have expected the traditional Sister Aloysius to express horror and disapproval at Mrs. Miller's veiled admission, but instead, her wrath remains focused squarely on Father Flynn. She even seems sympathetic toward both the boy (who suffers his father's beatings) and Mrs. Miller for the plight they're in - but not sympathetic enough to stand aside and let Father Flynn take advantage of him, which she firmly believes he is doing. All in all, I really enjoyed it.
oo4. Over the last week I've managed to zoom through Battlestar Galactica episodes 3x06-3x20, and I'm now up to 4x05. What is that, 15 episodes? (my brain is very full right now) I haven't seen Razor or any of the webisodes yet, however slowly but surely I am catching up! I sort of wish that I hadn't given up after "Collaborators" two years ago because while the first handful of S3 episodes just about killed off most of my already-waning BSG-love, if I'd stuck around until "Torn," I probably would have remained in the fold for a while longer.
I just can't do analysis right now, so here's a lovefest:
-I love the amped-up mysticism.
-I love the Cylons I really do! It's fascinating to see how they function together and individually, and how some of them embrace the idea of choice while others fall back on their programming. Some want to grow and evolve while others don't care. Some believe in God, while others don't. I want to know (like everyone else, of course) who made them, who programmed them, and why are they democratic? (until they aren't anymore) How does Cavil have the power to decide to box D'Anna's model? How is it that some models are more able to "resist" their programming than others and express free will, original thought, adventurousness. Cavil talks about following their programming, but the way he talks about it, it sounds an awful lot like choice to me, and his insistence on trusting in their machine-nature sounds like an excuse.
-I love Baltar's desperate desire to find out if he's a Cylon or not.
-I love the revelation of Cylon "projection" and how it seems to work almost the same way as Baltar's vivid experiences with the Six in his head.
-I love that Caprica Six has a Baltar in her head, and I love it when Baltar ends up with a Baltar in his head, too! :D Baltar can be utterly despicable sometimes, but I adore him for the zaniness he brings to the story.
-I love the camraderie between Roslin & Adama - the flashback to New Caprica and the whole smoking under the stars/talking about building a cabin thing was beautiful.
-I love "Unfinished Business." (I also cringed through it. Very, very painful in places.)
-I love Athena's unwavering allegiance to the humans.
-I love Lee's witness stand speech in "Crossroads, Part 2."
-I love the way that the human and Cylon mysticism aligns - the Temple of Five & the Final Five.
-I love the opera house imagery! D'Anna going there in the place between life and death and seeking out the faces of the Final Five, and also Laura, Athena & Caprica Six's shared visions/dreams as they chase after Hera in the Opera House.
-I love Bulldog, and I really hope we see him again.
-I love how it finally comes out that the humans instigated the Cylon attack and that Adama was right in the middle of it.
-I love the normalcy of the Tyrol family squabbles.
-I love the Hybrid. I really, really love the Hybrid.
-I love Roslin's stoic acceptance of her approaching death. (I loved her line to Adama when she went off to see Baltar in the brig: "I want him to see me.")
I'm happy to say that BSG still has wonderful moments, and there are some things about it that are glorious , but it can't be denied that the writing can also be heavy-handed, two-dimensional and preachy. It's probably good that I've begun watching again after all this time - I'm no longer so invested as I was in the beginning, and I lost my trust and faith in RDM & co. long ago, so now I can only be pleasantly surprised at how much I like. I find that if I marathon episodes like this, the bad parts generally fade away while the parts I enjoy stay at the surface of my appreciation. As a result, episodes like "A Measure of Salvation" and "The Woman King" don't bother me the way they seem to bother some fans. It helps that generally speaking I don't hate any character on BSG, and I happen to like Helo and Athena quite a lot (I also don't hate Cally, even when she's annoying, or Tigh, or Kara, even when they make me so angry with their self-righteous self-pity that I want to punch them myself, or Admiral Adama when he's being an idiot, or Laura when she's being an idiot, or Lee when he's being an idiot, or Anders, or Tyrol, or...well, you get the picture). I guess what I do hate is when the writers do something that shows a character as out of character, and part of what killed my BSG love was what they were doing to Lee in S2 and what they did to him at the beginning of S3. He remains my favorite character, I think - certainly the one in which I am most emotionally invested. Baltar is probably the character with whom I am most fascinated.
So in any case, I don't mind that episodes like "A Measure of Salvation" and "The Woman King" hit us over the head with the idea that genocide is wrong (it is, even if they are targeting other genocidalists), and I didn't mind that it wasn't more nuanced, and that Helo was cast as the moralizing voice - maybe it should have bothered me, and maybe if I'd had a week to stew over those episodes, maybe I would have been annoyed in some way. I'm not. And Helo's actions and choices were perfectly in keeping with his established character. He's a lot more black and white in some ways about some things, so his obstinance in both episodes makes sense to me.
Some questions & observations:
-Why does Cavil call the Centurions "Centaurians" (I swear this is what it sounds like to me every time!).
-So if Tyrol is a Cylon, then doesn't this mean that there are two half-Cylon, half-human babies? So Hera isn't special anymore? This just seems odd to me; I feel like when the writers decided to make Tyrol a Cylon, they forgot that he had a baby (until Tori mentioned it to Cally in the launch tube, anyway).
-And if Tori is a Cylon, then Hera ending up with the Cylons makes a lot more sense to me now (that is, if we believe that any of their Nebula-prior actions was the result of programming). If I remember correctly, didn't Laura entrust Hera's safety to Tori as well as the guards during the evacuation?
-How many Basestars are there? When Cavil began attacking, it sounded like they were in danger of true death, so does this mean that each model has their own ship? So there are only 7 ships? And if so, what happened to D'Anna's ship when her model was boxed?
-Does the Six really not see the danger in elevating the Centurions? Cavil (and the camera's) implication is pretty clear that the Centurions will turn on ALL the skinjobs. Six is naive to think that they won't chafe within the established class system. A point of curiosity: Six has the blahblah-"inhibitors" removed from the Centurions, which implies that they were designed to think for themselves and have this inhibitor to prevent independent thought. The raiders, on the other hand, develop a free will and have to be lobotomized (UNLESS they ARE responding to programming in recognizing the new Cylon sleepers in the human fleet, just not a programming that Cavil or the other Cylons are privy to - which makes me wonder if whoever programmed these Cylons deliberately engineered this situation (in which the identity of the Final Five is a secret and speculation over the Final Five as well as their relations with humans generates rifts among them) as a way of pushing them to evolve or destroy themselves. The whole situation is curious!
-Tigh is seriously creeping me out with his Six/Ellen obsession. And Tyrol's response to Cally's death doesn't seem that off-base to me, so I think it's a bit rich of Tigh to tell Tyrol to pull it together when he was a drunken wreck for ages.
-It makes sense to me that Tori would be the first of them to commit murder to protect their secret - which is not to say that Tigh wouldn't have done the same thing, because honestly? I think he would have airlocked Cally, too. But it's easier for them to have Tori take this step since she's the less known of the four of them. We've gotten to know the others so much better and we're meant to care about them, yes, even Anders, a lot more than Tori who has always been merely a functionary, not a living character (certainly not the way Billy was fleshed out).
-Baltar preaching about individual perfection is WAY creepy - the forgiveness part, I can understand a lot more. Perfection? Not so much.
Gah! I'm sure I had other points and thoughts, but this is already longer than I'd planned to write, so I'll leave it for now.