primeideal

I like the musical very much and so my feelings about the movie were positive, but I don't think it added much that wasn't already in the musical, and didn't really need to be as long as it did for act one.

-At the beginning, there's a rainbow appearing over the waterfall when the instrumental plays the "Unlimited" theme...which is a deliberate homage to "Over the Rainbow" (Stephen Schwartz taking as many notes as he could before it ran afoul of copyright laws).

-I think in the courtyard at Shiz, there's a tile with a picture of the wizard. Elphaba's burst of magic inadvertently destroys it, and it looks like the mosaic of the talking animals is underneath.

-This isn't anything new, but just reminded me: despite a few Elphaba traits, I am actually more of a Fiyero. (The reasons why are part of the *angry keysmash* tangle of neuroses where it's hard to tease out just one tl;dr without writing a whole angry manifesto, so I'll spare you, probably.)

Around this time of year people sometimes make posts revealing the Yuletide fics they wrote and discussing the writing process. This is not that post. (That one's coming.) This is the post about "a bunch of stuff that happened over winter vacation visiting my family, much of which is sort of Yuletide-adjacent so I didn't want to spoil it." Under a cut not because it's particularly awful, just rambling.

( Read more... )

Anyway, a fun break overall, and hopefully I won't be too listless/frustrated trying to get back to work. (But it's me, so no promises.)

Visiting extended family for a long weekend. The other night some of them wanted to watch a movie, and based on the summary/genre mashup I was like "this is not going to be my thing, but I'll just hang out and play on my phone if I'm not interested." Sure enough, some of it was "beautiful shots of the wildlife of the southern US," okay, lovely, I like a nature montage. A lot of it was misery porn, which I tuned out.

Then the next night, we're like:

( flippant discussion of very bad things )

Many compromise options proposed/vetoed. Among them a documentary about a psychiatrist (cousin: "maybe my dad would be into that but it sounds boring"); I voted for RRR because it's been compared to Les Mis ("we wouldn't have to watch all three hours!" my aunt: "yes we would, we'd get stuck and unable to quit"); and a stupid-sounding sequel to an extremely stupid Christmas movie (I vetoed that one). The compromise...a director who, from my experience, is annoying and full of himself. /o\ At that point I just kept quiet because we'd taken long enough already. Film was less terrible than I feared, so there's that.

I first read Dune when I was pretty young and going through a "read lots of classic SF" stage. My mom had read it long before and was like, "there's so much dust. No water. Only dust, they have to recycle their urine and stuff. Gross." So I read it and my memory was, "look, there's not only dust, there's also political intrigue!"

Then, at Capclave last month, I saw a used copy on the freebie table, and was like, "hmm, new movie coming out, I barely remember the book, apparently it was one of the inspirations behind 'Crying Suns' which I'm really into right now...I'll snag it." And read 100 pages.

I really enjoyed Blade Runner 2049, and while I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" Arrival exactly, I felt feelings from it. (Some of my linguistics nerd buddies were not impressed with the way the alien linguistics came across there, but I was fine with it.) So I had high expectations for another Denis Villeneuve SF movie. I don't live within walking distance of a movie theater so I had to rideshare over, definitely for the first time since the pandemic.

And, it was fine? Pretty, nice cinematography, but...fine?

( Spoilers for Dune, also Arrival )

I get that there are some things that make sense to change in an adaptation, and I get that delving into interspecies theology bickering is probably not a great hook for a Disney movie.

But it is pretty funny that instead of the sisters and the grandmothers, the message of "Under the Sea" is "living in the ocean is better than on land because...you know what, forget mermaid problems, we are sentient fish and we like it here because the humans don't try to eat us." (And then later in the movie, the humans do try to eat the crab, because everybody knows crabs can't talk.)

Like, I don't really think they're addressing Ariel's concerns, there.

Every once in a while there's hand-wringing in papers and on the internet about "oh noez baseball is dying because the average age of the fans is getting old." Which, no. I am a young baseball fan, lots of my baby cousins play baseball/softball, lots of people are casually engaged with "oh the Cubs were in the World Series that one time, better watch!"

However, the average age of one demographic is disconcertingly high, and that is the age of people who go to movies about professional baseball players who were also World War II spies. I was at the movie with my parents the other day and I brought down the average age considerably!

It was a very good movie, after the first couple minutes of intro talking heads being like "this guy is important" "yes he is" "so patriotic." And the general format of "authors taking turns reading things" felt kind of unnecessary--like it was cool to hear from people close to the action like Berg's brother and his cousin, but some of the "let's bring in all these different authors and give them all a chance to quote things because they wrote about Moe Berg" was not necessary.

Very good though. Snippets of Babe Ruth's dramatic life, Werner Heisenberg's son talking about his father dodging assassination, Princeton eating clubs and their discriminatory policies, and a whole lot in between. There was a nice touch about the two brothers and the different paths they took in serving their countries, "what does it mean to be an American" and so on, which felt timely as I ponder my own future. Fortunately I think that no matter where I wind up my dad will be more supportive of my choices than Moe's was.

I just got back into the Martian fandom for, uh, reasons (which may be a post of their own someday, maybe not). It's not on Netflix so I decided to watch Apollo 13 instead. I know I'd seen it before at some point, not when it came out (I was kind of little then), just...someday.

Anyway, it felt a lot bloatier than I remember? Like the run time is 2 hours, 20 minutes, and I feel a lot of that could have been cut because it was pointless Cut To Concerned Family/Man Really Into A Thing With Wife Who Doesn't Get It/Did You Know We Are In the Seventies shots. I did however like the "here is a guy whose wife always makes him a fancy vest for missions, and the rest of the mission control being like 'lol, vest guy has his vest, we can go now'."

(Edit: also they compared the apollo 11 guys to Christopher Columbus [twice!] And Charles Lindbergh. This would never get made today because Problematic.)

But it was worth it because there was a "steely-eyed missile man" namedrop! And I learned that didn't originate here but is actually an Apollo 12 allusion both this and The Martian took and ran with.

Current Mood: moved

( In bullet points (tee hee hee). )

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Entries tagged with movies

Wicked (2024)

Troll the ancient Yuletide carol

Why do neurotypicals

Dune

The Little Mermaid

The Spy Behind Home Plate

"It's one bigger than 12"

Les Miz movie review (vaguely spoilery)

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