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Book/movie/play logging
Dec. 27th, 2008 10:18 pmJust finished Yojimbo; mostly it is still processing. The premise appeals to me: when two sides of an argument are both just people being horrible people, play them off each other. Tee hee.
Read the second and third Sookie Stackhouse books this week. Living Dead in Dallas was fantastic--two mystery plots, both highly engaging. I'm having a bit of trouble picturing Eric-from-True-Blood (which is how I now see Eric) doing all the ridiculous things Eric does in the book (and the next one, for that matter), because Eric in the show is all dignified 'n' shit. Club Dead, on the other hand, kinda pissed me off... there was a lot less intricate-murder-mystery FUN stuff, and mostly it was just alternating episodes of Sookie getting beaten up and then rescued by assorted ~manly mens~, and Sookie lusting after said assorted ~manly mens~. Eric, at least, is still a hilarious character. Alcide Herveux, on the other hand... Charlaine Harris just seemed to be going through a random phase of increased affinity for traditional gender roles (the bane of my existence, as you probably know). Alcide is pretty much introduced with "It's a big hairy manly man and he smells like MAN!" and then Sookie spends the rest of the book trying not to jump him. About two paragraphs after he enters the story she decides that he was "a proper man," which made me automatically sort of dislike him, but I tried to give him a chance until the conversation where he was talking to Sookie about the difficulties of dating girls in each various species (vamps v. werewolves v. shifters v. normal human girls) and the conclusion was that it sucks dating any of them but "I've got to date somebody." (No, you fucking don't. You need to shut up and find something useful to do with your life until (if) you find someone important enough to you that their species ISN'T what you base your choice on.) And it just keeps going... he's so MANLY and MASCULINE and MANLY and Sookie's having suchhhh a hard time resisting him! And then you get reactionary doozies like "real men always carry duct tape in their trucks." It doesn't help much that Charlaine Harris also seems to have forgotten that originally Sookie was with Bill because Bill is awesome, and has temporarily blanked on what could possibly be awesome about any male-creature other than Sheer Manliness, and Sookie's desire to go save him from torture and death and all that seems to hang exclusively on her body's "having gotten used to regular, spectacular sex." Classy. Where's the clever, resourceful, not-a-total-hobag Sookie from the first two books? Am very disappointed, Charlaine Harris. Next book had better be back on track.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard is just as hilarious and adorable as I would have expected. There is so much random snarkiness in "Dumbledore's commentaries" to each of the tales (including nasty comments about Mr. Malfoy!), and the 'tales' themselves are perfectly believable as centuries-old fairy tales, and emininently readable (as some old fairy tales are not).
I rewatched Mamma Mia! as I got it for Christmas. Total fluff, obviously. Now I have Abba stuck in my head, and will for the rest of my life. Somehow I really like that movie; it's so much *fun*, and unashamedly ridiculous. Also, Meryl Streep rocks, and Amanda Seyfried is adorable and kind of reminds me of Erin Partin.
Yesterday I went to see A Winter's Tale at the Shakespeare Theatre. Very good production, although the play has not aged well (or else I am overdoing it on the cynical liberal-hippie-ness). The setup is that the queen of somewhere like, talks to the king's best friend (who is king of somewhere else) so the king gets all paranoid and decides she's cheating on him, and imprisons her and abandons their baby to the wolves 'cos he insists it's not his, and ~blasphemes~ some oracle, and drives his oldest son to suicide, and assorted Good And Honest Subjects must Flee His Wrath, and the rest of the country is like OBVIOUSLY THE KING HAS GONE MAD; THE QUEEN IS GOOD AND PURE AND CHASTE AND HONEST AND STUFF, AND WOULD NEVER IN A BAZILLION YEARS DO SUCH A THING. And I'm like... "Why the fuck not, if she's married to a PARANOID, JEALOUS ASSHAT like that?" And then the child that's thrown to the wolves is raised by some shepherds in the next country and the crown prince of the land (who is the son of the king that was the friend of the king in the first country, ie, the dude the queen was supposedly cheating with) wants to marry her, and when the king finds out he throws a Royal Shit Fit because she is just a shepherdess, and is all like KEEP YOUR EVIL SEDUCING ENCHANTMENTS OFF MY SON, YOU HOOR because we all know that teenage boys are only ever attracted to girls by witchcraft, that shit never happens naturally. And then they find out that she's really a princess and it's all okay! Which, to me, is not a satisfactory ending, because being a modern person I think that the way of resolving cross-class issues is for everyone to grow up and deal, not to find a serendipitous loophole where it's not *really* cross-class marriage so nobody's prejudices are *actually* being challenged, yay! *eyeroll*
That said, their treatment of the play was about as awesome as it can get without rewriting it. Only STNJ can get me really excited about set design--part of the stage rotated, and the way they employed it was *awesome* and seamless and really hard to describe, so I won't even try.
Little Britain defies any sort of description or comment and I don't know if I like it or not. Just... WTF.
Read the second and third Sookie Stackhouse books this week. Living Dead in Dallas was fantastic--two mystery plots, both highly engaging. I'm having a bit of trouble picturing Eric-from-True-Blood (which is how I now see Eric) doing all the ridiculous things Eric does in the book (and the next one, for that matter), because Eric in the show is all dignified 'n' shit. Club Dead, on the other hand, kinda pissed me off... there was a lot less intricate-murder-mystery FUN stuff, and mostly it was just alternating episodes of Sookie getting beaten up and then rescued by assorted ~manly mens~, and Sookie lusting after said assorted ~manly mens~. Eric, at least, is still a hilarious character. Alcide Herveux, on the other hand... Charlaine Harris just seemed to be going through a random phase of increased affinity for traditional gender roles (the bane of my existence, as you probably know). Alcide is pretty much introduced with "It's a big hairy manly man and he smells like MAN!" and then Sookie spends the rest of the book trying not to jump him. About two paragraphs after he enters the story she decides that he was "a proper man," which made me automatically sort of dislike him, but I tried to give him a chance until the conversation where he was talking to Sookie about the difficulties of dating girls in each various species (vamps v. werewolves v. shifters v. normal human girls) and the conclusion was that it sucks dating any of them but "I've got to date somebody." (No, you fucking don't. You need to shut up and find something useful to do with your life until (if) you find someone important enough to you that their species ISN'T what you base your choice on.) And it just keeps going... he's so MANLY and MASCULINE and MANLY and Sookie's having suchhhh a hard time resisting him! And then you get reactionary doozies like "real men always carry duct tape in their trucks." It doesn't help much that Charlaine Harris also seems to have forgotten that originally Sookie was with Bill because Bill is awesome, and has temporarily blanked on what could possibly be awesome about any male-creature other than Sheer Manliness, and Sookie's desire to go save him from torture and death and all that seems to hang exclusively on her body's "having gotten used to regular, spectacular sex." Classy. Where's the clever, resourceful, not-a-total-hobag Sookie from the first two books? Am very disappointed, Charlaine Harris. Next book had better be back on track.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard is just as hilarious and adorable as I would have expected. There is so much random snarkiness in "Dumbledore's commentaries" to each of the tales (including nasty comments about Mr. Malfoy!), and the 'tales' themselves are perfectly believable as centuries-old fairy tales, and emininently readable (as some old fairy tales are not).
I rewatched Mamma Mia! as I got it for Christmas. Total fluff, obviously. Now I have Abba stuck in my head, and will for the rest of my life. Somehow I really like that movie; it's so much *fun*, and unashamedly ridiculous. Also, Meryl Streep rocks, and Amanda Seyfried is adorable and kind of reminds me of Erin Partin.
Yesterday I went to see A Winter's Tale at the Shakespeare Theatre. Very good production, although the play has not aged well (or else I am overdoing it on the cynical liberal-hippie-ness). The setup is that the queen of somewhere like, talks to the king's best friend (who is king of somewhere else) so the king gets all paranoid and decides she's cheating on him, and imprisons her and abandons their baby to the wolves 'cos he insists it's not his, and ~blasphemes~ some oracle, and drives his oldest son to suicide, and assorted Good And Honest Subjects must Flee His Wrath, and the rest of the country is like OBVIOUSLY THE KING HAS GONE MAD; THE QUEEN IS GOOD AND PURE AND CHASTE AND HONEST AND STUFF, AND WOULD NEVER IN A BAZILLION YEARS DO SUCH A THING. And I'm like... "Why the fuck not, if she's married to a PARANOID, JEALOUS ASSHAT like that?" And then the child that's thrown to the wolves is raised by some shepherds in the next country and the crown prince of the land (who is the son of the king that was the friend of the king in the first country, ie, the dude the queen was supposedly cheating with) wants to marry her, and when the king finds out he throws a Royal Shit Fit because she is just a shepherdess, and is all like KEEP YOUR EVIL SEDUCING ENCHANTMENTS OFF MY SON, YOU HOOR because we all know that teenage boys are only ever attracted to girls by witchcraft, that shit never happens naturally. And then they find out that she's really a princess and it's all okay! Which, to me, is not a satisfactory ending, because being a modern person I think that the way of resolving cross-class issues is for everyone to grow up and deal, not to find a serendipitous loophole where it's not *really* cross-class marriage so nobody's prejudices are *actually* being challenged, yay! *eyeroll*
That said, their treatment of the play was about as awesome as it can get without rewriting it. Only STNJ can get me really excited about set design--part of the stage rotated, and the way they employed it was *awesome* and seamless and really hard to describe, so I won't even try.
Little Britain defies any sort of description or comment and I don't know if I like it or not. Just... WTF.