No one is ever always fortunate

[sovay]

1. I want particle physics knitwear.

2. I do not want to see The Imitation Game (2014) if these reviews are accurate. Historical infidelities aside, it really isn't helping that my mental casting for Turing now is Russell Tovey, so every time I see a picture of Cumberbatch, there's just an extra automatic nope.

3. In 2012, I wanted to see more of Sheila Vand. Apparently she is now starring in an Iranian vampire film. So I'd watch that.

4. I don't think I am capable of re-reading David Eddings' Belgariad (1982–1984) and Mallorean (1987–1991), because everything I can remember about those books suggests that Eddings' guiding principle was worldbuilding through ethnic stereotypes, but I encountered them in late elementary/middle school and every now and then—as last night, when it suddenly crashed into my head how much about the terrible worldbuilding I remember—I think about re-reading to see if the weirder parts hold up, before I think better of it. I have fond memories of Beldin and Vella. I should probably leave them that way.

5. Giulio Aristide Sartorio. I'd never heard of him. That siren. That blog, by the way, is a timesink.

A curious side effect of seeing Theatre@First's devastatingly beautiful production of Euripides' The Trojan Women with my mother on Friday night: I saw it with a grandmother. My niece was born eleven months ago. We were sitting at J.P. Licks afterward when my mother commented thoughtfully that she could not see herself handing over her grandchild to be killed, thrown down from the walls of her city, even if it was the end of the world and all her children were dead and there was nothing left: she would have held Charlotte tight to her breast and told her not to be afraid and leaped down from the walls herself. And I believed her.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

You should totally absolutely avoid re-reading Eddings.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I actually did re-read the Eddings books about six years ago (preparatory to moving; I re-read a lot of things in order to determine whether I was willing to get rid of them), and yeah, lots of ethnic stereotypes. Mostly not in ways that are directly offensive, but there's definitely the Viking country, and the Roman country, and the Nobody in the Real World Was Like This But Everybody Here's a Spy country, and so forth. And there's an echo where the Angaraks are not only Other but Eastern Other, which is more unfortunate in the first series (where the Angaraks are only the enemy) than in the second (where Eddings goes back and starts humanizing them).

On the other hand: I would (and did) happily read thousands of pages wherein the characters ride across the landscape being snarky at one another. I will put up with a lot for snarky characters I enjoy, apparently.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

I'm with your mom on that issue.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Regarding Benedict Cumberbatch being cast as *everyone*, someone remarked, tongue in cheek, that they'd heard he was being cast as the lead in a Paul Robeson biopic (remark did double duty as a comment on whitewashing in casting).

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I gotta say, I kind of love how wonderfully polite James Grime is being, in that second review, to A) his hypothetical interviewer and B) the film/filmmakers it/themselves. "No, it is a very good film, it's just that it's wildly inaccurate about the most basic facts of everything it purports to be about. Otherwise, spot-on filmmaking!" As Guillermo del Toro pointed out at The Devils last night, there's a big difference between deliberately mistranslating the facts to make a visual point which is nevertheless faithful to the emotional tone of the era (no, the Sun King never dressed Protestants as blackbirds and shot them; yes, Protestants were essentially treated like animals who deserved to die) and misrepresenting the facts because you think no one will care and, to some degree, it just doesn't matter whether they care or not, so long as everybody involved gets an Oscar clip moment.

[tommy50702.livejournal.com]

I just saw The Imitation Game. Not a fan of Cumbercatch but I love History. I thought the film was exceptionally good.