mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2022-10-09 08:04 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2022-10-09 08:04 pm
Entry tags:
Media roundup:
A media roundup, for this week... ish!
Things I've read:
- Hmmm... Dracula Daily hit a couple long days, lol.
- Taylor and I read the novella that accompanied Spelunking Through Hell, "Sweep Up the Wood". I very much enjoyed it - the story is placed along the Buckley timeline, and covers the time in which [redacted] dies, and Alice and Thomas (finally!) get together for the first time. (This is sort of the "conclusion", I think, to the timeline that the previous novellas and short stories cover, even if there's currently still something of a gap.)
I enjoy Alice and Thomas at that point in their personal timelines, and it is satisfying to see them finally get on the same page(ish) with each other, after knowing they've spent years having their relationship thwarted.
Thomas 100% going all-in on the idea that Alice was actually a werewolf trying to hide her lycanthropy from him was A+ and quite cute actually.
As a side note, I really did enjoy reading all the short stories tracing the family prior to the main-series generation.
- I also read Be the Serpent's accompanying novella, "Such Dangerous Seas".
The Luidaeg is always my fave, so I enjoy getting to find out more of her history through the novellas, and this was definitely a big one. Hard not to get spoilery, but I still love The Luidaeg, and I still very much hate Evening by every name she goes by. Her mom ain't great, either.
- Since then I've started (if barely) a re-read of Sparrow Hill Road. Typically I try to not read THAT much by the same author in a row, unless it's a series, but this one is research on the canon!
Things I've played:
- I played Bioshock for a few hours one night, because Alex said he wanted to watch me play it, ha.
Though this time I convinced him it wouldn't really be too much for him to play if he wanted to, and while I'm glad for him to give it a go, it feels like just a slight bummer that he doesn't "need" me to play it now, haha.
Oddly, both the night I played it, and the following day when Alex did, Broccoli Cheddar Bomb got VERY talkative. Apparently he'd like to play, haha.
Things I've watched:
- Alex and I went to see Smile in the theater. I thought it was fairly decent, though I've got a few thoughts about it, and can see some of the reasons some people didn't care for it.
It was well-acted, and the production values are good. The cinematography is noticeable - there are a lot of either very long (as in duration) shots, and a few that play with perspective with shots that go upside-down or spin in some way. I liked it well enough, though I don't know that those choices accentuated anything in particular with the story, beyond a general disorientation.
Okay, so the main plot of the movie (not a spoiler: it's clear from the trailer) is that there's a curse of some variety that passes from person to person, ultimately causing them to kill themselves, and pass it on to someone else.
[For what it's worth, I liked It Follows better for the "contagious curse" plot.]
AND HERE ARE THE SPOILERS:
It becomes relatively clear, that the curse (and the monster/entity that ultimately seems to be responsible for it) is sort of a metaphor for trauma. It's stated as much - that in order for the curse to be passed on, there has to be trauma to the witness who will become the next victim.
This treads a little close to the "mental illness as horror" which is a trope that I'm really not a huge fan of, and definitely gets overutilized. But personally, I didn't have an issue with it in Smile. The trauma-as-monster isn't the same as "oooh, scary, someone is ~crazy~." Sometimes I LIKE the idea of getting to represent big, *real*, awful horror in a way that can be seen. Personifying terrible, formless things is one of the things I think is BEST about what horror can offer. That this IS a monster, that trauma CAN be all-consuming, etc.
(I also get tired of the idea that any sort of metaphor or symbolism has to be direct 1:1 with some real-world thing. It can be representative of trauma without it having to be exactly equivalent to trauma.)
[ALSO, a thing that wasn't ever explicitly stated in the film, but I assumed would be, so was surprised when it was never really addressed... all the victims that we find out much of a past for experienced non-supernatural trauma before they were targeted by the curse. The main character saw her mother die when she was a child, the girl who died before her mentions that she saw her grandfather die, another victim's wife mentions he'd lost his brother in an accident... so the trauma the characters experienced was not just this evil entity's doing. This is only brought up again for the main character, deciding to confront her memory of her mother's death, but never connected to the other characters.]
Now... I can see why there are some people who feel like the evil being a personification of trauma is still Unfortunate Implications. It has a sort of "being a traumatized person means you will traumatize others" feel from a certain angle, and I can see why plenty of people are sick of that, even if I don't think that was really the intention. I'm personally more bothered by the downer "attempts at escape are futile, no matter what you try to do" ending than I am the "contagion" aspect. Not that I expect my horror movies to have a happy ending (especially as the idea of the "Final Girl" is a trope to be subverted, these days), but it IS a pretty resolute downer, in the broader meta sense in addition to the story sense.
Anyway. It was fine? Not one I'm going to rush to own or anything, but it was fine.
One additional warning: I didn't notice any real strobe-y effects throughout, but for SOME reason the fucking title has a really dramatic blinking strobe effect that was obnoxious to ME, and I'm not typically sensitive to that sort of thing. I genuinely do not understand why they went for that, because it was annoying and had no relevance to the themes or style of the film otherwise.
- Alex and I watched Absentia, which I enjoyed! I hadn't heard of it before, and didn't realize until after Alex picked it that it was Mike Flanagan as director, again. Apparently I do mostly enjoy his stuff. This one was a kickstarter film, I believe, so done on a pretty low budget, but even so, managed to be better than a lot of things with more money behind them.
The main plot is that one of the main characters has just reached the point where she has declared her husband, missing for years, dead in absentia. The other main character, her younger sister, is visiting her for the first time in a long while, after having done a stint in rehab. The younger sister meets a strange man (PLAYED BY DOUG JONES. FUCK YEAH, YOU WEIRD CONTORTIONIST MAN.) in a tunnel near the house, though he vanishes when she goes back to see him again. Then the day after the missing husband is declared dead... he (the husband, not Doug Jones) returns, claiming to have been held captive for years "underneath." The younger sister begins to suspect the tunnel is responsible for many disappearances over the course of decades, if not centuries.
- We watched the first few episodes of the new season of The Handmaid's Tale. I hadn't heard great things from critics who pre-screened the first several episodes, and it seems more damning that *I didn't realize any episodes had come out yet.* (Alex really likes the show, and has been excited for the next season, and we didn't realize it had started!)
I... was not terribly impressed. I haven't much loved the last couple of seasons, even as I did really think the first two were very good. This one... I guess it's been better-received than last season, but I didn't care for it much. My complaints were similar-ish to some of the critical ones I'd seen - like... can something happen, please? Stop posturing and DO SOMETHING.
But I think my issue was more... Gilead doesn't feel like Gilead? Suddenly they're taking Serena (relatively) seriously, there are handmaids-in-training talking back, wives are thanking the handmaids who gave birth to their children (if semi-reluctantly and covertly).
The unending brutality and totalitarian nature of Gilead, including the extreme hierarchies that allow NO deviation, the extreme punishments for minor transgressions, was part of what made the story what it is... blunting that, in a season that is shaping up to include a plotline in which Serena is trying to serve as an ambassador for Gilead and why it's good actually to the rest of the world... kind of feels like the series itself is trying to do that for Gilead. Even as there's less overt brutality on-screen it feels skeevier, as if it's trying to say "well, it's not actually THAT bad." I get the general point of not wanting the bad guys to be cartoonishly evil, but that was one of the things the first part of the series and the book before it did well! It was extreme, but not implausible. I absolutely bought the idea that the people supporting Gilead and their conservative Biblical world believed it was for the best and did not view themselves as monsters. The glimpses of humanity were enough to add complexity without excusing what they were doing, and made characters actually rebelling in big and small ways feel impactful... now it feels like it IS trying to make this seem like a conflict where "both sides have a point, and both sides have done bad things". I really don't like that. (We'll still probably watch the rest of the season, and maybe those issues will diminish. That was just what I came away with a few eps in.)
- We also watched the first seven episodes of The Patient, a show about a serial killer who kidnaps his therapist in the hopes of having constant access to therapy so as to prevent himself from giving in to his homicidal urges.
This one I enjoyed reasonably well so far. Alex was binging it, so my attention was wavering (I really can't watch one thing for that long, ha.) But it's well-acted (Steve Carell in serious roles is still surprisingly good.)
- Grizzly Rage, a SyFy original about a very un-sci-fi bear taking revenge on a car full of college kids who hit and killed her cub, was very bad. Even from the "I love revenge, go fuck 'em up!" perspective it was bad. Bad effects, bad acting (and worse writing.) Felt like a first draft.
Things I've read:
- Hmmm... Dracula Daily hit a couple long days, lol.
- Taylor and I read the novella that accompanied Spelunking Through Hell, "Sweep Up the Wood". I very much enjoyed it - the story is placed along the Buckley timeline, and covers the time in which [redacted] dies, and Alice and Thomas (finally!) get together for the first time. (This is sort of the "conclusion", I think, to the timeline that the previous novellas and short stories cover, even if there's currently still something of a gap.)
I enjoy Alice and Thomas at that point in their personal timelines, and it is satisfying to see them finally get on the same page(ish) with each other, after knowing they've spent years having their relationship thwarted.
Thomas 100% going all-in on the idea that Alice was actually a werewolf trying to hide her lycanthropy from him was A+ and quite cute actually.
As a side note, I really did enjoy reading all the short stories tracing the family prior to the main-series generation.
- I also read Be the Serpent's accompanying novella, "Such Dangerous Seas".
The Luidaeg is always my fave, so I enjoy getting to find out more of her history through the novellas, and this was definitely a big one. Hard not to get spoilery, but I still love The Luidaeg, and I still very much hate Evening by every name she goes by. Her mom ain't great, either.
- Since then I've started (if barely) a re-read of Sparrow Hill Road. Typically I try to not read THAT much by the same author in a row, unless it's a series, but this one is research on the canon!
Things I've played:
- I played Bioshock for a few hours one night, because Alex said he wanted to watch me play it, ha.
Though this time I convinced him it wouldn't really be too much for him to play if he wanted to, and while I'm glad for him to give it a go, it feels like just a slight bummer that he doesn't "need" me to play it now, haha.
Oddly, both the night I played it, and the following day when Alex did, Broccoli Cheddar Bomb got VERY talkative. Apparently he'd like to play, haha.
Things I've watched:
- Alex and I went to see Smile in the theater. I thought it was fairly decent, though I've got a few thoughts about it, and can see some of the reasons some people didn't care for it.
It was well-acted, and the production values are good. The cinematography is noticeable - there are a lot of either very long (as in duration) shots, and a few that play with perspective with shots that go upside-down or spin in some way. I liked it well enough, though I don't know that those choices accentuated anything in particular with the story, beyond a general disorientation.
Okay, so the main plot of the movie (not a spoiler: it's clear from the trailer) is that there's a curse of some variety that passes from person to person, ultimately causing them to kill themselves, and pass it on to someone else.
[For what it's worth, I liked It Follows better for the "contagious curse" plot.]
AND HERE ARE THE SPOILERS:
It becomes relatively clear, that the curse (and the monster/entity that ultimately seems to be responsible for it) is sort of a metaphor for trauma. It's stated as much - that in order for the curse to be passed on, there has to be trauma to the witness who will become the next victim.
This treads a little close to the "mental illness as horror" which is a trope that I'm really not a huge fan of, and definitely gets overutilized. But personally, I didn't have an issue with it in Smile. The trauma-as-monster isn't the same as "oooh, scary, someone is ~crazy~." Sometimes I LIKE the idea of getting to represent big, *real*, awful horror in a way that can be seen. Personifying terrible, formless things is one of the things I think is BEST about what horror can offer. That this IS a monster, that trauma CAN be all-consuming, etc.
(I also get tired of the idea that any sort of metaphor or symbolism has to be direct 1:1 with some real-world thing. It can be representative of trauma without it having to be exactly equivalent to trauma.)
[ALSO, a thing that wasn't ever explicitly stated in the film, but I assumed would be, so was surprised when it was never really addressed... all the victims that we find out much of a past for experienced non-supernatural trauma before they were targeted by the curse. The main character saw her mother die when she was a child, the girl who died before her mentions that she saw her grandfather die, another victim's wife mentions he'd lost his brother in an accident... so the trauma the characters experienced was not just this evil entity's doing. This is only brought up again for the main character, deciding to confront her memory of her mother's death, but never connected to the other characters.]
Now... I can see why there are some people who feel like the evil being a personification of trauma is still Unfortunate Implications. It has a sort of "being a traumatized person means you will traumatize others" feel from a certain angle, and I can see why plenty of people are sick of that, even if I don't think that was really the intention. I'm personally more bothered by the downer "attempts at escape are futile, no matter what you try to do" ending than I am the "contagion" aspect. Not that I expect my horror movies to have a happy ending (especially as the idea of the "Final Girl" is a trope to be subverted, these days), but it IS a pretty resolute downer, in the broader meta sense in addition to the story sense.
Anyway. It was fine? Not one I'm going to rush to own or anything, but it was fine.
One additional warning: I didn't notice any real strobe-y effects throughout, but for SOME reason the fucking title has a really dramatic blinking strobe effect that was obnoxious to ME, and I'm not typically sensitive to that sort of thing. I genuinely do not understand why they went for that, because it was annoying and had no relevance to the themes or style of the film otherwise.
- Alex and I watched Absentia, which I enjoyed! I hadn't heard of it before, and didn't realize until after Alex picked it that it was Mike Flanagan as director, again. Apparently I do mostly enjoy his stuff. This one was a kickstarter film, I believe, so done on a pretty low budget, but even so, managed to be better than a lot of things with more money behind them.
The main plot is that one of the main characters has just reached the point where she has declared her husband, missing for years, dead in absentia. The other main character, her younger sister, is visiting her for the first time in a long while, after having done a stint in rehab. The younger sister meets a strange man (PLAYED BY DOUG JONES. FUCK YEAH, YOU WEIRD CONTORTIONIST MAN.) in a tunnel near the house, though he vanishes when she goes back to see him again. Then the day after the missing husband is declared dead... he (the husband, not Doug Jones) returns, claiming to have been held captive for years "underneath." The younger sister begins to suspect the tunnel is responsible for many disappearances over the course of decades, if not centuries.
- We watched the first few episodes of the new season of The Handmaid's Tale. I hadn't heard great things from critics who pre-screened the first several episodes, and it seems more damning that *I didn't realize any episodes had come out yet.* (Alex really likes the show, and has been excited for the next season, and we didn't realize it had started!)
I... was not terribly impressed. I haven't much loved the last couple of seasons, even as I did really think the first two were very good. This one... I guess it's been better-received than last season, but I didn't care for it much. My complaints were similar-ish to some of the critical ones I'd seen - like... can something happen, please? Stop posturing and DO SOMETHING.
But I think my issue was more... Gilead doesn't feel like Gilead? Suddenly they're taking Serena (relatively) seriously, there are handmaids-in-training talking back, wives are thanking the handmaids who gave birth to their children (if semi-reluctantly and covertly).
The unending brutality and totalitarian nature of Gilead, including the extreme hierarchies that allow NO deviation, the extreme punishments for minor transgressions, was part of what made the story what it is... blunting that, in a season that is shaping up to include a plotline in which Serena is trying to serve as an ambassador for Gilead and why it's good actually to the rest of the world... kind of feels like the series itself is trying to do that for Gilead. Even as there's less overt brutality on-screen it feels skeevier, as if it's trying to say "well, it's not actually THAT bad." I get the general point of not wanting the bad guys to be cartoonishly evil, but that was one of the things the first part of the series and the book before it did well! It was extreme, but not implausible. I absolutely bought the idea that the people supporting Gilead and their conservative Biblical world believed it was for the best and did not view themselves as monsters. The glimpses of humanity were enough to add complexity without excusing what they were doing, and made characters actually rebelling in big and small ways feel impactful... now it feels like it IS trying to make this seem like a conflict where "both sides have a point, and both sides have done bad things". I really don't like that. (We'll still probably watch the rest of the season, and maybe those issues will diminish. That was just what I came away with a few eps in.)
- We also watched the first seven episodes of The Patient, a show about a serial killer who kidnaps his therapist in the hopes of having constant access to therapy so as to prevent himself from giving in to his homicidal urges.
This one I enjoyed reasonably well so far. Alex was binging it, so my attention was wavering (I really can't watch one thing for that long, ha.) But it's well-acted (Steve Carell in serious roles is still surprisingly good.)
- Grizzly Rage, a SyFy original about a very un-sci-fi bear taking revenge on a car full of college kids who hit and killed her cub, was very bad. Even from the "I love revenge, go fuck 'em up!" perspective it was bad. Bad effects, bad acting (and worse writing.) Felt like a first draft.