Delusions of Grandeur
1) A cow thinks it might be a dragon, a cat thinks it's a snake, some kittens are wrestlers and another cat might be Batman, while this coyote and badger are Butch and Sundance. Meanwhile this panic at being on social media makes sense to me, though he might pick up chill tips from capybaras or this dog who is convinced it's a celebrity.
2) I watched Those Who Want Me Dead yesterday. I thought it was tightly written, very much like Greyhound in some ways. It keeps the focus narrow, and dispenses with any more back story than is needed to move the plot forward. Movies need to be like pop songs, burning from the first bar and trimming off anything else. Obviously creators can play with the dimensions however they like, but they often don't suit the format. Especially for something -- which we've been told all the past year - is designed to be seen in a theater with others, it's best for it to know what it is, what it is trying to do, and who the likely audience is.
I thought this film did all that well. Good roles for women too. Would recommend.
3) Speaking of roles for women, I watched the 4 eps of Mare of Easttown available so far. I just had no patience with the stories of the younger characters and forwarded through stretches of that. I guessed correctly based on the speed at which the story is unfolding that there were 7 episodes. I am hoping it is less straightforward than it seems to be, but we'll see.
One of the more interesting aspects to me is that we have Kate Winslet playing a grandmother at the same time as Leo DiCaprio continues to date models. Winslet was cast when 43, which with two teenage pregnancies is possible, but still seems to say something about our society.
Guy Pearce, 7 years older, appears as a love interest. What is interesting is that both the actors are allowed to look more or less their age. I think they actually look somewhat older than their characters presumably are, as Pearce in particular looks rather disheveled. This also stands out with Jean Smart, whose Hacks debut I just saw over the weekend as well. She appears far more glamorous there.
On the one hand, it's nice to see parents actually looking a parental age compared to younger cast members. On the other, I think I wouldn't have been so surprised to see them weathered 20 years ago when people were more likely to be allowed to look their age. I also appreciate the fact that characters are allowed to dress as people actually dress.
Overall the show reminds me rather a lot of Happy Valley, which I liked, though I think Sarah Lancashire's character was allowed to be more caring and less on edge. It's somewhat difficult to watch Mare's social bullheadedness, though there seems little doubt that it's an asset to her when a case needs doggedness.
4) I have just completed possibly the longest book I've read: …And The Ladies of the Club comes in at 1407 pages and I am impressed by the paperback spine that holds it together.
I particularly enjoy generational historical fiction because it gives me a particularly captivating feeling about the passage of time. It isn't just that we see time at a much wider angle but that the everyday life of one generation can be compared to another's (even if they're all well before our time). There is a tendency to see anything more than 50 years old as nearly synonymous with something 500 years old, but obviously the changes in our own lifetimes make clear how very untrue this is.
This story is told about a fictional small town in Ohio post-U.S. Civil War to the Great Depression, though another thing we see is how many smaller economic crises there were along the way. For obvious reasons what particularly struck me is that it barely mentions the flu pandemic. It does not skip it, but it gets folded into the end of WWI whereas a brief bout of polio in an earlier decade gets much more specific attention. Nowhere is there any sign of the upheaval that surely happened with mask wearing and businesses closing and the mass deaths that would have rocked the nation. There is a reference to the stacks of caskets sent to a military base, a hotspot for the disease, but that's almost all. By comparison the big dramatic disaster for the town is a flood.
What is particularly remarkable about this is that in a subsequent chapter the author even notes that what people remember is less events on the world stage than changes in their day to day lives and things like marriages, births, and deaths. But that was the whole point -- not only that people would have died, but that the event should have changed their daily routines.
Little wonder that so many dystopian and post-apocalyptic storytelling focuses on war or political upheaval, not on a tiny virus and how its effect can spiral out to all parts of a society. Perhaps it's because both so little can be done and what must be done is often to enact isolation and caution.
What also caught my attention was the ending, which is a device as common as the deus ex machine -- the author's self-insert as a character who decides to write the story we just read. In this case though, it seemed one with awfully specific motivations. Once I read about how the book came to be, it made more sense as I suspect those elements were put in as a way of tying off the story quickly.
However despite not knowing about Santmeyer, I suspected much of what formed the book while reading. For starters, the fact that the book had originally been published by an academic press made me think that she was an academic, which turned out to be true, and the book obviously focused on Ohio history. The second was that the way the book was structured suggested that much of it was drawn from historical sources such as newspapers and personal journals. There are certainly a great number of characters but most are thinly sketched and some are just barely mentioned again after playing some role. The focus on births, marriages, and deaths also suggests records, particularly since people die quite regularly in the story. This would have been particularly common before 1950 but is less so in fiction, because to get deeply involved with the characters they can't be dropping away so regularly. Instead a death is usually a big turning point.
However to some degree this is what makes the book unusual. The book is, for the most part, made up of the mundane, and this extends to its casual racism, its consistent classism, and its focus on the local with sporadic reference to broader affairs. Yet it does something much less often seen, which is a recurring focus on the broader economy of the U.S. and how it relates to small town manufacturing. Plus, because Ohio created so many relevant politicians of the time, how state politics tied into national ones and the interests of the wealthy. The personal is quite often political in this book, especially when it comes to religious differences which often seem baffling.
What is perhaps most curious about that is that at the time the book starts, the Republican party is the party of emancipation with an abolitionist wing which includes early efforts at gaining the vote for women. Nearly all the people in the book are Republicans. By the time it ends, it is with anger expressed at the election of FDR. What it means to be Republican has shifted, although the attitudes of people in the book show that social justice was never one of its concerns. I was reminded of Spielberg's Lincoln which, however ponderous and depressing a film, was nonetheless fascinating in revealing the ugliness of politics and how moral imperatives will never win out over entrenched interests. The fact is that very few care about the fate of former slaves and those who do have to compromise themselves to get a constitutional amendment that doesn't do nearly as much as they want. What everyone agrees is that the war needs to end, but in Lincoln's case, not end too soon.
To return to the book and author, I again find the omission of the flu discussion remarkable because she apparently lived through it, being of the same age as her stand-in in the book. Supposedly the book was written partially in response to her hatred of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street. Granted, I haven't read the book and the way something is told can make a big difference. But in the synopsis I've read, including the linked one, it seems to me that her book and his are largely in agreement. So I assume it was the political differences between them that was the real issue. Certainly they were both in nearly the same geographical area when writing the stories.
Her writing was clearly very autobiographical given her own life story as are the ones told in her other novels. It probably helped that she was nearly 90 at her death in the mid 1980s, because virtually everyone she'd written about was dead so there was less concern in depicting them.
5) Finally saw the Snyder cut of Justice League. It was a better movie, but it wasn't really a movie. The two things that were in its favor is that the movie seemed more tonally consistent and this helped the movie make more sense overall. Because the movie wasn't by turns ponderous and jokey one could better buy into the story and see the characters as, well, superhumans.
But I pity anyone who had to face this story and be given the task of making it both shorter and funnier. You simply can't run this 4 hour thing (even with the epilogue chopped off) in a theater, and to me the first 10 minutes were just death. It was so slow and dull. As I said above, a movie is a pop song and this was a jazz piece.
That meant that its perfect setting was the one it finally got -- as a form of miniseries on HBO Max. Except that given what must have been an astronomical cost, no one is going to make that sort of production for TV (at least, not make it only 4-5 episodes).
Frankly, I felt that the Epilogue also undercut the movie's ending. It was just trying to do too much linkage and in some ways it might hamstring the next film if that story ended up going a different route.
The movie also had the usual problem of having entirely too much of it filmed in near darkness so that you can't see what's going on, and that makes a big CGI fight even less interesting. Honestly, I don't see what WB execs could have done differently faced with this production other than not having hired Snyder in the first place after his previous films, which run more or less the same way in terms of tone and story telling.
What it makes me realize is that this film also had such an impossible load to carry. When the 2012 Avengers movie was made, almost all the characters had already been introduced in previous films (even though I'd argue that Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner and Ed Norton are practically different characters). We'd technically seen Hawkeye before but only for a moment. Otherwise they were all set up.
By contrast, Cyborg, Flash and Aquaman hadn't been seen until JL. That's half the main characters and you also have a big backstory for the villain and mission, which Diana has to narrate. And even with that narration they remain unknowable and dull. In Avengers, the villain is also known and the mission is pretty simple (at least so far as we know). You can get right to the team dynamics and the action.
So yeah, a financial disaster in the making but this all came from decisions made much earlier.
View poll: Kudos Footer-283
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
2) I watched Those Who Want Me Dead yesterday. I thought it was tightly written, very much like Greyhound in some ways. It keeps the focus narrow, and dispenses with any more back story than is needed to move the plot forward. Movies need to be like pop songs, burning from the first bar and trimming off anything else. Obviously creators can play with the dimensions however they like, but they often don't suit the format. Especially for something -- which we've been told all the past year - is designed to be seen in a theater with others, it's best for it to know what it is, what it is trying to do, and who the likely audience is.
I thought this film did all that well. Good roles for women too. Would recommend.
3) Speaking of roles for women, I watched the 4 eps of Mare of Easttown available so far. I just had no patience with the stories of the younger characters and forwarded through stretches of that. I guessed correctly based on the speed at which the story is unfolding that there were 7 episodes. I am hoping it is less straightforward than it seems to be, but we'll see.
One of the more interesting aspects to me is that we have Kate Winslet playing a grandmother at the same time as Leo DiCaprio continues to date models. Winslet was cast when 43, which with two teenage pregnancies is possible, but still seems to say something about our society.
Guy Pearce, 7 years older, appears as a love interest. What is interesting is that both the actors are allowed to look more or less their age. I think they actually look somewhat older than their characters presumably are, as Pearce in particular looks rather disheveled. This also stands out with Jean Smart, whose Hacks debut I just saw over the weekend as well. She appears far more glamorous there.
On the one hand, it's nice to see parents actually looking a parental age compared to younger cast members. On the other, I think I wouldn't have been so surprised to see them weathered 20 years ago when people were more likely to be allowed to look their age. I also appreciate the fact that characters are allowed to dress as people actually dress.
Overall the show reminds me rather a lot of Happy Valley, which I liked, though I think Sarah Lancashire's character was allowed to be more caring and less on edge. It's somewhat difficult to watch Mare's social bullheadedness, though there seems little doubt that it's an asset to her when a case needs doggedness.
4) I have just completed possibly the longest book I've read: …And The Ladies of the Club comes in at 1407 pages and I am impressed by the paperback spine that holds it together.
I particularly enjoy generational historical fiction because it gives me a particularly captivating feeling about the passage of time. It isn't just that we see time at a much wider angle but that the everyday life of one generation can be compared to another's (even if they're all well before our time). There is a tendency to see anything more than 50 years old as nearly synonymous with something 500 years old, but obviously the changes in our own lifetimes make clear how very untrue this is.
This story is told about a fictional small town in Ohio post-U.S. Civil War to the Great Depression, though another thing we see is how many smaller economic crises there were along the way. For obvious reasons what particularly struck me is that it barely mentions the flu pandemic. It does not skip it, but it gets folded into the end of WWI whereas a brief bout of polio in an earlier decade gets much more specific attention. Nowhere is there any sign of the upheaval that surely happened with mask wearing and businesses closing and the mass deaths that would have rocked the nation. There is a reference to the stacks of caskets sent to a military base, a hotspot for the disease, but that's almost all. By comparison the big dramatic disaster for the town is a flood.
What is particularly remarkable about this is that in a subsequent chapter the author even notes that what people remember is less events on the world stage than changes in their day to day lives and things like marriages, births, and deaths. But that was the whole point -- not only that people would have died, but that the event should have changed their daily routines.
Little wonder that so many dystopian and post-apocalyptic storytelling focuses on war or political upheaval, not on a tiny virus and how its effect can spiral out to all parts of a society. Perhaps it's because both so little can be done and what must be done is often to enact isolation and caution.
What also caught my attention was the ending, which is a device as common as the deus ex machine -- the author's self-insert as a character who decides to write the story we just read. In this case though, it seemed one with awfully specific motivations. Once I read about how the book came to be, it made more sense as I suspect those elements were put in as a way of tying off the story quickly.
However despite not knowing about Santmeyer, I suspected much of what formed the book while reading. For starters, the fact that the book had originally been published by an academic press made me think that she was an academic, which turned out to be true, and the book obviously focused on Ohio history. The second was that the way the book was structured suggested that much of it was drawn from historical sources such as newspapers and personal journals. There are certainly a great number of characters but most are thinly sketched and some are just barely mentioned again after playing some role. The focus on births, marriages, and deaths also suggests records, particularly since people die quite regularly in the story. This would have been particularly common before 1950 but is less so in fiction, because to get deeply involved with the characters they can't be dropping away so regularly. Instead a death is usually a big turning point.
However to some degree this is what makes the book unusual. The book is, for the most part, made up of the mundane, and this extends to its casual racism, its consistent classism, and its focus on the local with sporadic reference to broader affairs. Yet it does something much less often seen, which is a recurring focus on the broader economy of the U.S. and how it relates to small town manufacturing. Plus, because Ohio created so many relevant politicians of the time, how state politics tied into national ones and the interests of the wealthy. The personal is quite often political in this book, especially when it comes to religious differences which often seem baffling.
What is perhaps most curious about that is that at the time the book starts, the Republican party is the party of emancipation with an abolitionist wing which includes early efforts at gaining the vote for women. Nearly all the people in the book are Republicans. By the time it ends, it is with anger expressed at the election of FDR. What it means to be Republican has shifted, although the attitudes of people in the book show that social justice was never one of its concerns. I was reminded of Spielberg's Lincoln which, however ponderous and depressing a film, was nonetheless fascinating in revealing the ugliness of politics and how moral imperatives will never win out over entrenched interests. The fact is that very few care about the fate of former slaves and those who do have to compromise themselves to get a constitutional amendment that doesn't do nearly as much as they want. What everyone agrees is that the war needs to end, but in Lincoln's case, not end too soon.
To return to the book and author, I again find the omission of the flu discussion remarkable because she apparently lived through it, being of the same age as her stand-in in the book. Supposedly the book was written partially in response to her hatred of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street. Granted, I haven't read the book and the way something is told can make a big difference. But in the synopsis I've read, including the linked one, it seems to me that her book and his are largely in agreement. So I assume it was the political differences between them that was the real issue. Certainly they were both in nearly the same geographical area when writing the stories.
Her writing was clearly very autobiographical given her own life story as are the ones told in her other novels. It probably helped that she was nearly 90 at her death in the mid 1980s, because virtually everyone she'd written about was dead so there was less concern in depicting them.
5) Finally saw the Snyder cut of Justice League. It was a better movie, but it wasn't really a movie. The two things that were in its favor is that the movie seemed more tonally consistent and this helped the movie make more sense overall. Because the movie wasn't by turns ponderous and jokey one could better buy into the story and see the characters as, well, superhumans.
But I pity anyone who had to face this story and be given the task of making it both shorter and funnier. You simply can't run this 4 hour thing (even with the epilogue chopped off) in a theater, and to me the first 10 minutes were just death. It was so slow and dull. As I said above, a movie is a pop song and this was a jazz piece.
That meant that its perfect setting was the one it finally got -- as a form of miniseries on HBO Max. Except that given what must have been an astronomical cost, no one is going to make that sort of production for TV (at least, not make it only 4-5 episodes).
Frankly, I felt that the Epilogue also undercut the movie's ending. It was just trying to do too much linkage and in some ways it might hamstring the next film if that story ended up going a different route.
The movie also had the usual problem of having entirely too much of it filmed in near darkness so that you can't see what's going on, and that makes a big CGI fight even less interesting. Honestly, I don't see what WB execs could have done differently faced with this production other than not having hired Snyder in the first place after his previous films, which run more or less the same way in terms of tone and story telling.
What it makes me realize is that this film also had such an impossible load to carry. When the 2012 Avengers movie was made, almost all the characters had already been introduced in previous films (even though I'd argue that Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner and Ed Norton are practically different characters). We'd technically seen Hawkeye before but only for a moment. Otherwise they were all set up.
By contrast, Cyborg, Flash and Aquaman hadn't been seen until JL. That's half the main characters and you also have a big backstory for the villain and mission, which Diana has to narrate. And even with that narration they remain unknowable and dull. In Avengers, the villain is also known and the mission is pretty simple (at least so far as we know). You can get right to the team dynamics and the action.
So yeah, a financial disaster in the making but this all came from decisions made much earlier.
View poll: Kudos Footer-283
Comments at Dreamwidth
.