When my fingers like ice fall onto your silk
I am covered in Lyft Febreze, but I had a very nice weekend.
Last night![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks showed me the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending (2015), which did not in any way deserve the critical lambasting I remember it getting. We diagnosed that it has a genuine script problem in that the dialogue needed either a unified register or more significantly marked shifts and instead it snaps around tonally to match whichever of the eight genres in a trenchcoat the plot is currently passing through and gives the viewer a bad case of Elfland to Poughkeepsie, but it's brilliantly worldbuilt, visually a treat, not in fact stupidly plotted, and if anything it could have used another half-hour to hang out in its universe where everyone clearly has an interesting history and if the film had been novelized in the 1980's where its particular spectrum of id-driven science fantasy metaphysically hails from, we'd have gotten to read all of them. I have never seen a film with more visible Cordwainer Smith in its DNA—it's not quite set in the Instrumentality of Mankind, but it was functionally impossible for me not to think of the "splices" as underpeople and admire their variety. I don't understand the hostile response from even sf critics when it managed to invoke chariots of the gods without the normal bake-in of racism and provide a rather nastily convincing answer to Fermi's paradox in addition to the expected sweep of space opera. It has a sense of humor and leans so hard on its favorite tropes, it occasionally falls out the other side: I particularly enjoyed how the romantic interest went around collecting archetypal features from every genre he found himself in until there was nothing left but urban fantasy and that was when the film deployed his wings. I was charmed by the number of character actors who turned up in greater or lesser roles and extremely pleased by the survival of Sean Bean. Overall it is the kind of movie I encounter much more as a novel and wish I had gotten to see in theaters where its space vistas were obviously designed for scale; it should have been a summer blockbuster, not a late winter burial. The Terry Gilliam cameo was exquisite. There was so much room for sequels. The class critique has only gotten more on point in the last six years.
On my way home in the aforementioned Lyft, my godchild called out of the blue to tell me about the building of their family sukkah and their recording of an audition tape for the school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, for which they chose Titania's "Out of this wood do not desire to go" and said they would take any part offered them. Their friend group is basically the mechanicals, so I'm biased in terms of thinking where in this show they would thrive, but mostly I hope they get cast and have a wonderful time. The production will be set in the '90's, which I guess is a thing people do now. One of the crew has the job of assembling a suitably historical soundtrack.
I like rediscovered films and I like anti-fascist films and I really like this announcement: "Rediscovered 1931 film Europa to get world premiere in London."
I don't think I had known that Laurence Harvey was the original choice to play Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom (1960); he would have produced a very different effect than Karlheinz Böhm. I don't want to lose this universe's version, but I do want to be able to rent the alternative from the next universe over.
Excuse me while I take a very hot shower. I really hate Febreze.
Last night
rushthatspeaks showed me the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending (2015), which did not in any way deserve the critical lambasting I remember it getting. We diagnosed that it has a genuine script problem in that the dialogue needed either a unified register or more significantly marked shifts and instead it snaps around tonally to match whichever of the eight genres in a trenchcoat the plot is currently passing through and gives the viewer a bad case of Elfland to Poughkeepsie, but it's brilliantly worldbuilt, visually a treat, not in fact stupidly plotted, and if anything it could have used another half-hour to hang out in its universe where everyone clearly has an interesting history and if the film had been novelized in the 1980's where its particular spectrum of id-driven science fantasy metaphysically hails from, we'd have gotten to read all of them. I have never seen a film with more visible Cordwainer Smith in its DNA—it's not quite set in the Instrumentality of Mankind, but it was functionally impossible for me not to think of the "splices" as underpeople and admire their variety. I don't understand the hostile response from even sf critics when it managed to invoke chariots of the gods without the normal bake-in of racism and provide a rather nastily convincing answer to Fermi's paradox in addition to the expected sweep of space opera. It has a sense of humor and leans so hard on its favorite tropes, it occasionally falls out the other side: I particularly enjoyed how the romantic interest went around collecting archetypal features from every genre he found himself in until there was nothing left but urban fantasy and that was when the film deployed his wings. I was charmed by the number of character actors who turned up in greater or lesser roles and extremely pleased by the survival of Sean Bean. Overall it is the kind of movie I encounter much more as a novel and wish I had gotten to see in theaters where its space vistas were obviously designed for scale; it should have been a summer blockbuster, not a late winter burial. The Terry Gilliam cameo was exquisite. There was so much room for sequels. The class critique has only gotten more on point in the last six years.On my way home in the aforementioned Lyft, my godchild called out of the blue to tell me about the building of their family sukkah and their recording of an audition tape for the school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, for which they chose Titania's "Out of this wood do not desire to go" and said they would take any part offered them. Their friend group is basically the mechanicals, so I'm biased in terms of thinking where in this show they would thrive, but mostly I hope they get cast and have a wonderful time. The production will be set in the '90's, which I guess is a thing people do now. One of the crew has the job of assembling a suitably historical soundtrack.
I like rediscovered films and I like anti-fascist films and I really like this announcement: "Rediscovered 1931 film Europa to get world premiere in London."
I don't think I had known that Laurence Harvey was the original choice to play Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom (1960); he would have produced a very different effect than Karlheinz Böhm. I don't want to lose this universe's version, but I do want to be able to rent the alternative from the next universe over.
Excuse me while I take a very hot shower. I really hate Febreze.
no subject
I just wish it had translated into the film being less of a commercial flop! I feel like a misunderstood movie can survive failing on either the critical or the commercial front, but both and it's going to take years if not decades to recover. I didn't realize until I checked just now that Jupiter Ascending was the last feature film of the Wachowkis until the announcement of The Matrix Resurrections. I know they spent some of the intervening years in TV with Sense8, but still; it hurt them.
I recall the leads being somewhat surpassed by the supporting actors
I actually liked Jupiter as a protagonist and it is still rarer for me to like protagonists than supporting characters; I didn't find her too much of a lens or a stand-in and [rot13 for anyone who still cares] V unq arire frra nalguvat yvxr ure zbeny qrpvfvba ng gur pyvznk bs gur svyz. Lbh rkcrpg ure gb noqvpngr gb fnir ure snzvyl—rira jura vg'f boivbhf gung gur qrivy ba gur bgure fvqr bs guvf onetnva pna'g or gehfgrq, gur rzbgvbany chyy vf fb fgebat naq genqvgvbany—naq gura or fnirq ng gur ynfg zvahgr. Lbh qba'g rkcrpg ure gb haqrefgnaq gung gurl'er nyy qrnq rvgure jnl naq ng yrnfg guvf jnl gur Rnegu fheivirf. (Naq gura Pnvar pbzrf penfuvat va yvxr n irel ovgrl zrgrbe naq vg'f svar, ohg fur unf ab ernfba gb rkcrpg uvz: fur znxrf gur qrpvfvba jvgubhg oryvrivat gung nalbar vf pbzvat sbe ure. Gur Noenfnk ner fb hfrq gb crbcyr jub jvyy qb nalguvat sbe zber gvzr, gurve bja gvzr. Whcvgre jnf jvyyvat gb tvir nyy bs uref hc.)
You just have to squint to ignore the plot. And the chimp.
Of course, now I'm curious about the chimp.
Speaking of festivals, the 2nd Annual Brooklyn Sci Fi Film Festival has just started. Most of it is online, and those films are free.
Oh, neat! Anything you would especially recommend so far?
no subject
Re: Brooklyn Sci Fi film festival:
It is still early, and there are a lot of films, but of what I've seen, these stand out:
*The Desert*—5 minute animated film about robots existing in a post-human world. Made me reflect on how “culture performs us more than we perform culture”.
*The Simulation* and *Love & Co.* are shorts that comically juggle SF conceits, while interrogating the alienating ways we seek comfort in technology/consumerism.
*West Planet* is a feature from Japan; it is one of those experimental films that cropped up in 2020 when film makers had lots of free time and leaned into the pandemic as a creative constraint. I don’t know if I’d recommend watching the whole thing, but it is worth sitting with the first ten minutes, and seeing how you like the experience.