I forgot how awesome reading books is

[lunabee34]

I don't know why, but I haven't read very many books this semester, so it has been wonderful to start reading them again. What I have mostly been doing with my spare time since Christmas is reading FFA (not even commenting really, just reading the finished posts) instead of reading books or fic or writing it myself or posting something here. It's become a habit I want to break, I think. I successfully quit going to fandomsecrets several months ago, and it's been a relief to have that time back. Everyone in the comm was very nice to me; I had great interactions there, but I spent a great deal of time there and didn't get a lot of conversational return out of it. I'm starting to feel the same way about going to FFA. What I really want to be doing is talking to y'all and writing fic; I don't know why I keep wasting my time passively reading something rather than actively creating material myself.

So, to serve those interests, let's talk about books, baby, and also two movies.

I just finished:

Ancillary Justice and Sword
I love these books. Like hardcore OMG I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL OCTOBER FOR THE NEXT ONE love them. I devoured them both in two days.

I love the world building. I love Lecke's descriptions. I love that she isn't afraid to be ambiguous or to say something without explaining it. I love all the little details of this universe that aren't explained but just *are* and which add up to form this rich and compelling environment.

Lecke's writing reminds me so much of Ursula K. Le Guin's. They have an interest in similar themes and there's a kinship to their prose although I think Lecke's writing is warmer than Le Guin's. I sometimes feel a kind of lovely and implacable distance emanating from Le Guin's narrators.



So naturally I had to pick up the Le Guin I've had waiting on my night stand for maybe a year for comparison purposes. The Telling is fantastic--set in the same universe as The Left Hand of Darkness, it's full of beautiful and lush prose, and this narrator is not at all distant. Le Guin writes such exquisite sentences, like little poems. I think the book is a bit slow to open, but once it hit its stride, I wished it was much longer.


Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
This I just finished re-reading today in preparation to read the sequel. I had forgotten how dark and violent the book is and how wonderfully, terribly sad. I think the photographs the book is built around could have easily felt gimicky, but it doesn't read that way to me. I think the photos add a really cool dimension. I'm looking forward to reading the next book.


Jurassic Park
We re-watched this last night with Emma watching for the first time in preparation for Jurassic World.

Y'all, I cannot believe how well this movie has held up. It's more than 20 years old, and the special effects really hold up. Nothing looks hokey (probably because everything in the movie is actually real for animatronic values of real and not CGI).

Sam Neill makes the best crazy eyes, the kids are adorable, Samuel L. Jackson works IT, and Jeff Goldblum spends a not insignificant portion of the movie lounging around like a wounded Fabio.

Can't wait for Jurassic World.


Mad Max
We saw this today, and I enjoyed it. The movie is visually stunning. The props and costuming people should totally win Oscars; the level of detail there is amazing. The score is awesome.

I was surprised by how funny the movie is. I think I expected unremitting angst, but it was so ridiculous and over the top that I laughed the whole way through the movie, possibly at places that weren't meant to be funny.

I was super stoked to see Noranti from Farscape as a badass old woman hoarding a handbag full of seeds. LOL

This is not a movie I'm going to want to re-watch again soon or often, but it was a fun time.

Comments

[kore]

Oh man, the bit where Max is FRANTICALLY FILING AWAY AT THE MASK? It was so awful (poor Max!) and yet so fucking hilarious. And the polecat guys swinging over the flames! GUITAR GUY. I am 100% convinced guitar guy was there for levity. (most of the humour was at the guys' expense, come to think of it, and I loved it)

I always feel this frisson of glee when actors from things I have loved show up on my TV or in my movies. Noranti was a wonderful surprise.

I might have whisper-screamed "NORANTI!" to my husband when I recognized her.

[lunabee34]

Yes! That was the part where I giggle snorted because it looked so much like he was frantically scratching an itch.

I did that same thing and Josh whipped his phone (we were pretty much alone in the theater) to check that I was right.

[kore]

Max was seriously reminding me of the poor Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. He gets pounced on! Strung up by his heels! Strapped to the car! altho what I really loved was when he goes off for his big asskicking scene.... we don't see it. He goes off and comes back and then Furiosa uses him as a fucking rifle mount. I LOVE YOU GEORGE MILLER.

[lunabee34]

LOL

You are not wrong.

I hadn't thought about how almost all the ass-kicking we see is communal effort. I love it.

[kore]

Yeah! Particularly right at the end, when Furiosa's going over and Cheedo's doing her thing and Max is at the....joiny part of the truck (I fail mechanics forever) and so on. There was a refreshing lack of One-Guy-Wards-Off-All-Evil-With-His-Fists (or Five-People-In-A-Circle-Fight-Off-Armies etc.).

Also, SPLENDID. Arguably the most badass moment in the entire movie, whih is saying something. People in the theatre audibly went "Holy shit" when I saw it. (And she's doing that to protect someone else and is being held up by probably two other people!)

[lunabee34]

The scene in your icon? Yeah, that was fucking badfuckingass.

About the only part in the movie that was really uncomfortable for me was the part with her baby. That was upsetting. I really hated that she and the baby died, but it's realistic that some of the wives wouldn't survive.

[kore]

YEAH

I have this whole rant about how unfuckingbelievable it is that she takes her social status as property and the baby as property and turns it into this enormous FUCK YOU at the guy who thinks he owns her while doing this nonviolent resistance total call-your-bluff move. It blew my mind the movie took the typical pregnant-woman-as-human-shield cliche and flipped it into this feminist moment of badass choice. Blew. my. mind. Wait I guess I ranted it anyway. I could talk about the reversal-of-tropes stuff in this movie for DAYS.

.....yeah, I hated that she died, and actually I had gotten mistakenly spoiled (foiled?) or got her name wrong or something before seeing it, so I thought she lived, so I was doubly upset.

T actually made me feel a little bit better by pointing out she was the prophet figure in the movie, and in narratives they typically don't make it down off the mountaintop to the promised land -- John the Baptist, Moses, Elijah, King, Gandhi, and so on. Plus she went out on her own terms and Evil Horrible Warlord Daddy didn't get the baby. It still broke my heart, though. Also, I loved Miller for not showing the gruesome details, because I don't think I could have really loved the movie if it'd done that. But he was -- the camera eye was -- very respectful of her, even while the pigs onscreen were treating her like a thing.

(That's a whole OTHER rant, about how this movie SUCCESSFULLY portrays rape and torture and abuse and slavery as really terrible without being this complicit passive eye, you wanna see depiction without acquiescence/approval or whatever it's called, dude moviemakers? IT LOOKS LIKE THIS) (ahem)

[lunabee34]

Yes, yes, yes to everything you're saying here.

I think what also undercuts that scene for me is that the brother seems to be genuinely mourning the loss of his brother, not the loss of control or property.

[kore]

Yeah! I didn't like that character at all, but then all of a sudden the macho dudes are going "aww and he was perfect"....There was some beautiful writing about Nux's journey too, along those lines -- when the movie starts off, he's an abductor, a thug, a thing, and then we care about him, and when _he_ dies it's the same kind of triumph/tragedy (a GUY in my theatre row was crying, no really). (I bet people did not expect to sob going into that movie. I sure as fuck didn't, anyway.) And Max makes that journey back, too, trusting people and learning how to act human again, BY HELPING THE GIRLS. YEAH. I think the only people we don't get any personalization for are the warlords, which is entirely right, since they're all about turning people into things. But like IIRC 90% of all the other Mad Max movies was pretty much Max fighting just those kinds of warlord dudes! It's seriously like Miller turned the genre he helped invent inside out.

[lunabee34]

I had somehow gathered from the trailers that Nux was gonna be the bad guy Max is fighting and was so pleasantly surprised when he ended up being so endearing and sweet.

[kore]

I was unspoiled for most of the movie (except 'Splendid's not going to die,' LOLWHOOPS //sob) so I had no idea his arc was going to go like that. I thought he was going to be a minor baddie who dies fast like in every other Mad Max film, and then I thought when he was on the truck he'd keep trying to get them, but no! and then what he actually chose to do was even better. A film where agency -- choice -- is like the turning point of all the characterization. In a desert with working flamethrower guitars. THEY MADE IT FOR ME

Just, that moment when Capable is like "Where did you come from?" (I think that's what she says) and he responds, it's such a tiny little human moment. In the middle of this war rig in the desert on a desperate escape run. With working flamethrower guitars.

[lunabee34]

Yes! I love that none of the wives or Furiosa blame him for initially trying to recapture him and that they instantly take him into their fold.

[kore]

Yes! He gets that wakeup moment -- when he realizes what's been done to him, how he was used, and now he has the choice, to do what he wants, for maybe the first time ever. (The women are already awake. Oh yeah.)