De rigueur objects of media consumption
I haven't seen Inception yet. I don't think this would have been on my radar at all if it weren't for the cross-board raving, so I don't know anything about it other than it has something to do with Leonardo DiCaprio and lucid dreaming. Spoiler me and die. XD
I have seen the new BBC Sherlock, I just went and started a meta discussion on the value of kink memes rather than post viewing notes. XD;; I adored the first ep and thought the second one was meh, so will wait for the third before rendering judgment - tbh, since the installments seem to be written by three separate people, the already-aired bits probably mapped out the high and low extremes of the concept's potential.
The main intertextual pleasure of "A Study In Pink" is akin to that of a good modern-dress staging of Shakespeare - the tracking of what was kept, what was cut, what was updated or interpreted, and how. (Moffat missed a gimme: he didn't make the American cab passenger a Mormon.) I'd worry more about how much of this stuff I have memorized if I hadn't re-read basically all of ACD in January. Besides, I used to remember everything I read with this level of granularity, before I needed parts of my brain to hold other information; not just Doyle, Tolkien, and Shakespeare. XD;;
I had these non-conclusive thoughts on the structure of the Moffatian Gay Joke(tm) if only because it recurred so often - something like, it's always a rug-pull from under social assumption, a series of mistaken deductions based on available evidence, and Holmes is even allowed the honour of the first - in fact everything in the episode is constructed that way: the in-jokes a matter of copping to fake-outs, which are played straight and which are reversals. You can watch it, sunlit-Watsonian, trying to solve the puzzles by keeping up with Sherlock; or, shadow-Doylist if that path lies open to you, by basing yourself on what you known of canon (in which case you wonder for an hour who it could be other than the cabbie XD;;;). All of which echos the final confrontation between Sherlock and the killer. It's like the town in Uzumaki that's full of spirals everywhere you look.
The second ep doesn't have nearly that level of fiddly lacework, and I couldn't get into the lurid Yellow Peril plot (which is par for canon but yanno, there's a reason it didn't turn out to be the FLDS** in the last one). My tolerance for orientalism is high but there was something really... nineties... about the treatment here, like that one X-Files episode, back when China didn't yet hand out visas like a normal country and no one went there on holiday. XD; And unfortunately it committed the one faux pas that drives me bonkers, which is to play an "Asian-sounding" music cue whenever an Asian person appears on-screen. It's the cinematographic equivalent of the Nihao Pickup, isn't it? The Doctor Who movie did it too, I remember it well.
Other than that I found it interesting that they didn't so much armchair-diagnose Holmes as just wrote a version of him with antisocial personality disorder. XD;; But he has acceptable emotions where Watson is concerned, clearly! It's like the DSM-IV variant of "I'm not gay but I love you"... Given which Sherlock is a manipulative jerk toward women, which is sadface, as book!Holmes thinks he hates women but is actually better with women than like 97% of Victorian dudes probably? He can't help treating them like rational, sensible, courageous, and self-determining individuals, which per the standards of his society is doin it rong.
** I'll admit, there is a part of me that would have found this epically hilarious.
I have seen the new BBC Sherlock, I just went and started a meta discussion on the value of kink memes rather than post viewing notes. XD;; I adored the first ep and thought the second one was meh, so will wait for the third before rendering judgment - tbh, since the installments seem to be written by three separate people, the already-aired bits probably mapped out the high and low extremes of the concept's potential.
The main intertextual pleasure of "A Study In Pink" is akin to that of a good modern-dress staging of Shakespeare - the tracking of what was kept, what was cut, what was updated or interpreted, and how. (Moffat missed a gimme: he didn't make the American cab passenger a Mormon.) I'd worry more about how much of this stuff I have memorized if I hadn't re-read basically all of ACD in January. Besides, I used to remember everything I read with this level of granularity, before I needed parts of my brain to hold other information; not just Doyle, Tolkien, and Shakespeare. XD;;
I had these non-conclusive thoughts on the structure of the Moffatian Gay Joke(tm) if only because it recurred so often - something like, it's always a rug-pull from under social assumption, a series of mistaken deductions based on available evidence, and Holmes is even allowed the honour of the first - in fact everything in the episode is constructed that way: the in-jokes a matter of copping to fake-outs, which are played straight and which are reversals. You can watch it, sunlit-Watsonian, trying to solve the puzzles by keeping up with Sherlock; or, shadow-Doylist if that path lies open to you, by basing yourself on what you known of canon (in which case you wonder for an hour who it could be other than the cabbie XD;;;). All of which echos the final confrontation between Sherlock and the killer. It's like the town in Uzumaki that's full of spirals everywhere you look.
The second ep doesn't have nearly that level of fiddly lacework, and I couldn't get into the lurid Yellow Peril plot (which is par for canon but yanno, there's a reason it didn't turn out to be the FLDS** in the last one). My tolerance for orientalism is high but there was something really... nineties... about the treatment here, like that one X-Files episode, back when China didn't yet hand out visas like a normal country and no one went there on holiday. XD; And unfortunately it committed the one faux pas that drives me bonkers, which is to play an "Asian-sounding" music cue whenever an Asian person appears on-screen. It's the cinematographic equivalent of the Nihao Pickup, isn't it? The Doctor Who movie did it too, I remember it well.
Other than that I found it interesting that they didn't so much armchair-diagnose Holmes as just wrote a version of him with antisocial personality disorder. XD;; But he has acceptable emotions where Watson is concerned, clearly! It's like the DSM-IV variant of "I'm not gay but I love you"... Given which Sherlock is a manipulative jerk toward women, which is sadface, as book!Holmes thinks he hates women but is actually better with women than like 97% of Victorian dudes probably? He can't help treating them like rational, sensible, courageous, and self-determining individuals, which per the standards of his society is doin it rong.
** I'll admit, there is a part of me that would have found this epically hilarious.