I, despite several warning signs to the contrary, managed to be *so certain* that the Meat Loaf Farewell Tour concert that I bought tickets for in _December_ was tonight, May 19, that I did not check the tickets until I got to the concert venue tonight and nobody was there.
The concert was on Friday, the 17th.
Fuck.
And we didn’t get the house we were hoping to.
I’m going to go watch Sherlock and drown my sorrows now. *sigh*
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
I couldn’t post to LJ for the past 24 hours or so, so there’s a sudden rash of posts from me as things propagate. Sorry.
So far this week I’ve won tickets to FF6 and an upgrade to my Meat Loaf concert ticket. I clearly need to go buy lotto tickets tonight.
Young Indiana and I went to the Botanic Gardens the other day. A couple of kids around age 6 saw us and stood there grinning at us so hard I thought their faces would explode. It was a little freaky, actually. Just standing there grinning, they were. Finally I realized it was because I was SPIDER-MAN. I’m so used to wearing that hoodie I forget its effect on small children. :)
We finished watching s1 Arrow last night. HOLY CRAP! OMG! HOLY CRAP! HOLY CRAP! Then we had to watch an episode of Castle as a unicorn chaser. Fortunately it was the s5 Christmas episode, so it made an excellent unicorn chaser. *palipitations*
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
Picoreview: Moulin Rouge is still exactly the kind of thing you’d like if you like that kind of thing, and definitely not if you don’t.
One of the local cinemas is doing a Baz Luhrmann month running up to his Gatsby this week, so Ted and I went to see Moulin Rouge (still can’t type that without typing Rogue first) last night, for probably the 3rd or 4th time on a big screen for me, at least.
I’ve no doubt become more accustomed to Nichole Kidman’s voice through repeated listening to the soundtrack, so she seemed vocally much stronger to me than she did when I originally saw the film. Ted mentioned that too, so that was kind of a nice unexpected bonus. And it also kind of struck me this time, as (weirdly) it hadn’t before, that the fragile breathiness of her voice had a pretty good in-story reason for it. Indeed, every time she really belts it out she coughs or passes out, so yeah.
I always think of Kidman as a particularly reserved, ice-princessy sort of actor, which makes her flinging herself around squealing (Luhrmann must have just had everybody check their dignity at the door for that film. “Like A Virgin”, OMG. Still. Even knowing it’s coming, OMG. :)) in the first elephant scene just all the more agonizing. And funny. Ewan McGregor’s expression of bewildered horrorified embarrassment is just wonderful in that scene.
As is, of course, his sudden burst into song. The first time I saw it, the film already had me quite thoroughly by the time a bunch of old guys began singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (a song which I now feel basically exists to be snarled out by old men at brothels), but it was “This Is Your Song” that pretty much made me fall in love with the story. And with Christian, just as Satine does. :)
I also especially and particularly like “Roxanne” and the tango scene. It’s better in the DVD extras, mind you, because they have the whole uncut tango from all four camera angles, and although I think the cutting was very good and necessary for the structure of the storyline, I come from the Fred Astaire school of thought, which is I want to see the goddamned dance, stop screwing around with multiple camera angles and cuts. But the raw power of that scene just thrills me.
Kidman’s costume for “The Show Must Go On” is still one of the most gorgeous pieces of clothing I’ve ever seen. I found myself actually holding my breath in anticipation of seeing it. It may also be my favorite song in the film, although I didn’t even know it before seeing Moulin Rouge (Rogue) the first time.
Some of the super-fast-forward things bothered my eyes more than they did when I saw it in the theatre before. I don’t know if that’s because I was very tired, or because the theatre was smaller than the others I’ve seen it in so I was closer to the screen, or what, but a couple of times I was quite o.O over those bits. Overall, though, delighted to have gone and seen it again.
They’re doing a John Hughes retrospective next. Who wants to go see The Breakfast Club with me? I’ve never seen it on the big screen!
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
Picoreview: Fast & Furious 6 does what it says on the tin.
I won tickets to see a preview and Ted, who is a most excellent husband, told me to go ahead and go, despite the impracticalities thereof. So I wrangled up a friend and we went.
It is a completely ridiculous movie. There are moments of inhuman feats so outrageous one wonders when Vin & Crew got the Superhero upgrade. There are two epic lady fights. There are fast cars. There are explosions.
There are basically two white dudes in the movie, and one of them is the bad guy.
This, really, is the true reason I love the F&F franchise. I mean, the fact that Vin Diesel’s voice registers at the same frequency my hormones do doesn’t hurt, but I love these movies mostly because they’ve got the most diverse and interesting casts of anything I’ve ever seen out of Hollywood. In the last movie there were perhaps technically three white guys, but one of them had a beard to his eye sockets, making his ethnicity appear to be Caveman. The rest of the leads in this one are Vin and The Rock, whose ethnic backgrounds strike me as flat-out melting-pot American, two black guys, an Israeli woman, three Hispanic women, Gina Carano whose ancestry qualifies her strongly for Wonder Woman but I have no idea what it actually is (some smattering of Italian, she says, but beyond that, look, if she wants to say Amazon, I ain’t gonna argue with her) and a Korean dude. They look (aside from being unusually beautiful, but let’s not get hung up on that) like a bunch of people you’d see inside of half a city block in New York or San Francisco. It’s like a miracle of God, and in 2013, I feel like I shouldn’t have to be so delighted that this wee little miracle has occurred. The F&F movies are the only films out there that appear to be aimed at the mainstream white audience and yet dare to have a wide range of ethnic diversity in them, and I do not understand why more studios aren’t going ‘Oh look, this works.’ But I’ll keep going to F&F movies until Vin and I are both a hundred and five, as long as they keep giving me characters and faces that challenge the mainstream.
And then on *top* of that, they rate stupendously well in Female Leads Who Kick Ass, which they took that to a whole new level in this one. There are five women of note in this (against 7 men of note, which I think is pretty flipping awesome all by itself), and every one of them does something important. Some of those important things aren’t as over the top or dramatic as, well, okay, pretty much all the shit the guys go through, but even so, not one of them is relegated wholesale to Helpless Female Lead. And not once in the entire series have any of the women been so relegated, not even with Letty’s ashes-bitter death.
So in a nutshell: fucking awesome. Moments that made me laugh. Moments that made me gasp. A storyline that kinda didn’t go where I wanted it to, but wasn’t badly handled. Overall, for the win.
Stay through the first credits run, because there’s a teaser clip after a minute or two.
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
After last week’s post on genderflipped covers, my friend Flit dug up an article she remembered reading about a a bias study regarding female playwrights.
The article is well worth reading, but for the TL;DR folk among us (sorry, I only just learned that TL;DR meant “too long; didn’t read”, so now I have to use it at least once), the take-away is “in an as-controlled study as is possible, it turns out women discriminate against female playwrights more strongly than men do, even though plays written by women make more money.”
That doesn’t really do the article justice, but it’s as close as I can get in a sentence-long summary. Go read it, really, if you’re at all interested in the topic at hand.
The reasons behind the above two take-aways are complex. It appears that women discriminate against women more strongly because they percieve that if they don’t, when they bring too many womens’ work to the table, the men around them will dismiss it/them. So they’re culling early. And it appears the reason womens’ works make more money is that people will take a chance on a promising young male playwright and produce his play, but will tell a promising young female playwright “Now all you need to do is write a hit!” and only after a truly remarkable script has been written will it be produced.
The latter in particular seems to me to fall in line with what I’ve read any number of times regarding women submitting material to anthologies/editors/conference papers/etc: that women are accepted in higher proportion relative to the percentage of submissions, because the work is of higher quality. This is due, evidently, to women being taught that they have to be perfect before they can risk trying, because anything less will fail.
This is not saying men will throw any old shit to see if it sticks, but evidently that they’re trained to believe that they should try, whereas women are less so trained.
So that may in effect be the answer to the Great Social Experiment I’d like to try, the one of writing two series of the exact same type, one under a male name and one under a female name. (Although to properly balance it I couldn’t even write one under CE Murphy, because that’s a name with a known quantity and reader base, which would skew the results. They’d have to be two equally unknown (or known) names, which makes it an even more impossible project.) Or perhaps that actually has no reflection at all on what the results of a Great Social Experiment might be. But it does feel like it all ties together, although of course the way it ties together most basically is “Society: it am broked.” @.@ :)
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
Picoreview: Emma (Kate Beckinsale tv movie version, 1997): flawed, but not quite in the right ways.
I just re-read EMMA last year, so the narrative is fairly fresh in my mind. The real problem with Kate Beckinsale’s Emma is that with one painful exception, Emma doesn’t come across as nearly as awful as she is in the book. Too much of her meddling and the emotional turmoil thereof is left off the screen for brevity’s sake, so I was left feeling she was more…misguided, rather than downright dreadful, which she honestly is in the book.
Really, the only reason the book is bearable is that Emma is *so* awful but *so* well realized that it’s impossible to not recognize what a tremendously talented writer Jane Austen was. Everybody knows somebody like Emma (not necessarily in the matchmaking aspect, but the rest of her awfulness), and there can be no doubt that yes, people really do behave like that. Just not usually the heroines of books.
The somewhat skeevy-to-a-modern-reader relationship between Knightley and Emma is mitigated enormously by two things in this film: one, Knightley is played by Mark Strong. This in and of itself is sufficient to mitigate nearly any skeevy factor, because Mark Strong. However, he’s also only ten years older than Kate Beckinsale, which means when his Knightley held her as a 3 week old, he was also a child himself. This is a significant difference to the impression in the book that he’s twenty or twenty-five years her senior. If they’d met as adults and he was that much older, eh, okay, but watching her grow up from his own position of adulthood and still falling in love with her always struck me as igh. So that bit was good.
The supporting cast was very good, particularly Mr Wodehouse, who played his fussiness with a sweet charm that made him loveable, if exasperating. Really, it’s a perfectly fine film, but more than the P&P versions I’ve seen recently, it just felt like *so much* had to get left out that I found it a little disappointing.
Now I’ve got to re-watch Emma Thompson’s Emma, and I am informed by Reliable Sources that I’d better watch the Ciaran Hinds Persuasion. Which I’m not sure I’ve even read, so I should do that too. :)
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
