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.
