Hudson Hawk, Steven Universe
Jan. 25th, 2016 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackHudson Hawk
A film with Bruce Willis as a once-famous cat burglar just getting out of jail, blackmailed into taking several Leonardo Da Vinci related heists. I once played a very good 8-bit platform game based on it, which captured the feel of catburgling quite well for the time. It was one of the first games I actually finished, which was really exciting.
A few bits are really fun, when they sing the same song to time themselves and keep themselves in sync as they go around different parts of the building. And the introduction of the gang with candy-bar codenames. But then it descends from heist movie into slapstick action movie and I mostly lose interest.
Steven Universe
One of the animated children's TV shows which lots and lots of people have been very excited by recently. The crystal gems are three gemstone-themed alien people who protect the earth from various monsters, aided by half-human half-gem Steven.
A lot of people praise the handling of emotional themes, eg. Greta Christina on episode 5: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2015/12/10/steven-universe-episode-5-frybo/ on how one of Steven's friends disappoints his father. It's generally a good role model, having lots of examples of flawed people who are not all good or bad and easily-accessible examples of complicated emotional stuff.
The episodes mostly about some of the humans don't hit my emotions as hard as they do other people, but I also liked a lot else about it.
The gems are all aliens who, it seems, don't have two different sexes, but are all coded as "female" in the show, whatever their role in society. Which I think works very well, considering the number shows which have used "male" as if it were equivalent to "default, no marked gender".
Steven's emotional maturity and skill with his gem powers are shown growing really realistically. It's not always a straightforward "he learns how to do this, and then can do it henceforth", but there's a clear sequence of "he can't do this", "he can do this some of the time and is excited when it works", "he makes a lot of effort and isn't sure if he'll succeed", and finally "he does this fairly reliably". I think, if you watched episodes slightly out of order, it would still work nearly as well, but there's a definite benefit to watching the whole series mostly in order.
And in many ways, the "struggling to learn how to do it" is more realistic than having a "one episode where he learns it". It's very moving to watch Steven progress from automatically being left at home during missions, to being automatically included in the team.
The worldbuilding is great. The early episodes do a very good job of painting the general situation, the gems, raising Steven, protecting the world, etc. But as we slowly learn more, learning about the gems original homeworld, and where the monsters come from, and the history of Steven's mother, we learn a richer story that doesn't contradict what we learned. And it's all sufficiently consistent, it's possible to speculate and be correct, and things introduced in later episodes don't make nonsense of the earlier episodes where they weren't established yet.
I'd rather have MORE of that, but then, it's not aimed primarily at me.
A film with Bruce Willis as a once-famous cat burglar just getting out of jail, blackmailed into taking several Leonardo Da Vinci related heists. I once played a very good 8-bit platform game based on it, which captured the feel of catburgling quite well for the time. It was one of the first games I actually finished, which was really exciting.
A few bits are really fun, when they sing the same song to time themselves and keep themselves in sync as they go around different parts of the building. And the introduction of the gang with candy-bar codenames. But then it descends from heist movie into slapstick action movie and I mostly lose interest.
Steven Universe
One of the animated children's TV shows which lots and lots of people have been very excited by recently. The crystal gems are three gemstone-themed alien people who protect the earth from various monsters, aided by half-human half-gem Steven.
A lot of people praise the handling of emotional themes, eg. Greta Christina on episode 5: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2015/12/10/steven-universe-episode-5-frybo/ on how one of Steven's friends disappoints his father. It's generally a good role model, having lots of examples of flawed people who are not all good or bad and easily-accessible examples of complicated emotional stuff.
The episodes mostly about some of the humans don't hit my emotions as hard as they do other people, but I also liked a lot else about it.
The gems are all aliens who, it seems, don't have two different sexes, but are all coded as "female" in the show, whatever their role in society. Which I think works very well, considering the number shows which have used "male" as if it were equivalent to "default, no marked gender".
Steven's emotional maturity and skill with his gem powers are shown growing really realistically. It's not always a straightforward "he learns how to do this, and then can do it henceforth", but there's a clear sequence of "he can't do this", "he can do this some of the time and is excited when it works", "he makes a lot of effort and isn't sure if he'll succeed", and finally "he does this fairly reliably". I think, if you watched episodes slightly out of order, it would still work nearly as well, but there's a definite benefit to watching the whole series mostly in order.
And in many ways, the "struggling to learn how to do it" is more realistic than having a "one episode where he learns it". It's very moving to watch Steven progress from automatically being left at home during missions, to being automatically included in the team.
The worldbuilding is great. The early episodes do a very good job of painting the general situation, the gems, raising Steven, protecting the world, etc. But as we slowly learn more, learning about the gems original homeworld, and where the monsters come from, and the history of Steven's mother, we learn a richer story that doesn't contradict what we learned. And it's all sufficiently consistent, it's possible to speculate and be correct, and things introduced in later episodes don't make nonsense of the earlier episodes where they weren't established yet.
I'd rather have MORE of that, but then, it's not aimed primarily at me.