Non-cringing humour

My tolerance for embarrassment humour has fallen quite a lot. I'm not especially fond of it even in when it's done very well (eg. Fawlty Towers??) And I was questioning why Home (nee The True Meaning of Smeckday) worked for me when many films don't.

I think it might be that it felt compassionate to both sides. Early on in the film there's characterisation of Oh, who is constantly trying to make friends with the other aliens, who are constantly avoiding him. Which is the sort of thing that's usually just painful to watch, and was the point that came closed to cringe-worthy-ness (and may have exceeded it for some of my cinema companions).

But partly, it wasn't doubling down on how awful it was: it was sad, but it didn't get MORE and MORE humiliating. And partly, I empathised with Oh (who was genuinely trying to be nice to people) and also the people he knew (who were being forced into a social situation they didn't want).

That's just a guess, but I find it hard to explain what I want in humour (lots of it but not excruciating) and I keep introspecting about it...

Other media

Book: Secret Water

One of the later Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome. I remember enjoying S&A and swallowdale a lot, and having mixed feelings about a lot of the middle ones, but liking this one. I loved the feeling of setting forth to explore in a realistic but constrained sandbox.

Alas, unsurprisingly, the Racism Fairy has left some deposits in it since I last read it. Much about cannibal tribes as seen by explorer-obsessed children of the time :(

Ender's Game

A fairly faithful adaptation of the book. I was surprised how much of the original they managed to keep. The space battles didn't feel appropriately tactical -- more like just a mass of spaceships thrown at each other -- but the bits in the command centre and battle school did feel right.

And how different it is when you're looking from outside and see Ender as a child, rather than looking out through his head and knowing why and how he does the things he does. The times ender physically attacks someone are lot more gruesome when you see a child doing it, I'm a lot more shocked by that now :( :( :(

Arietty

Studio Ghibli did a very good adaptation of The Borrowers! It didn't completely grab me, but it was often beautiful and usually true to the book in spirit even when the details were changed.

It was also a very strange thought to see it in a partly contemporary setting. That we're very close to the point where someone upgrade their mobile and drop the old one with a broken screen behind a filing cabinet where a borrower might be able to inch it into a mousehole... And maybe, maybe not, at the point there's a usb charger small enough they could splice it into the mains under the floor. But if so, that changes the story completely, it's no longer them isolated apart from families in the same house, they could sit under the floor and IM other borrowers on the other side of the world!

If they can find a way of finding each other without tipping humans off :)