jack

Dear White People

A satirical film about several black students at an Ivy League university. The radio show host known for activism and her sarcastic "Dear white people" show. The pushed-to-succeed son of the Dean. The nerdy gay journalist who would rather be left out of things. Generally interesting and enjoyable, but even more pointed now than when it was made :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_White_People

Black Narcissus (1947)

Adapted from a Rumer Godden novel, apparently famous for some technological innovations: even now the colours and visuals of the abandoned stone palace, the steep valley, and the long views out from the Himalayas are striking.

Shortly before Indian independence, a group of nuns are invited by the local Indian ruler/general and colonial administrator to set up a convent including school and hospital in a remote Himalayas valley, and gradually fail because the locals don't really want them, they're completely isolated, the leader is sympathetic, driven and well-meaning, but doesn't have much experience solving problems when they all start to go off the rails from isolation, and generally colonialism is giant clusterfuck.

I'm not sure what to say about it, but it raised lots of interesting questions in me: how much did these characters actually want to be there, and how much was a convent their only life choice? How much of the descent into disaster was due to something environmental or supernatural, how much due to inexperience, and how much to being where they weren't really wanted? If sexual attraction had been less stigmatised, would they have avoided ending in a stew of jealousy, and murder? How much of Sister Ruth's problems are due to an unspecified mental illness, how much to being generally unlikeable, how much to being excluded and given no responsibility, how much to the situation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Narcissus

A-Team Movie

This was a generally enjoyable action movie, I was very pleasantly surprised. I've not seen the series to compare it to, but it did a good job setting up the team as doing spectacular but incisive and necessary violence, and their conflict with more sinister bits of the government.

Many of the action scenes were intercut between what's happening, and planning sessions or post-mortem sessions, which I felt worked very well, it felt much more interactive that just watching an action scene straight through from beginning to end.

The action scenes managed what I think is valuable but hard to evaluate, that it felt like competent characters dealing with complicated messy situations well, rather than people just wading through redundant outclassed opponents.

And I finally actually remember who all the four characters are and which is which.

Velveteen

Seanan McGuire's superheroine short stories, feely available online although the format is a little inconvenient. These are really fun, if you like that sort of thing at all they're well worth reading. Thanks to ghoti-on-lj for reminding me they exist and I should read them!

They're short and a bit tongue in cheek which suits SM's style well. Being a superhero has been branded, standardised, commodified and marketed by some firms, one of which now has an near-universal monopoly. The heroine, with her "animating stuffed animal powers" flees from her old employers, and doesn't find a quiet life.

There's a little bit of what I especially like, of exploring powers.

As with most of McGuire's stories, something about the consistency or worldbuilding just aggravated me, but much less so in these funny, human, and short stories.

Pendragon Protocol

These urban fantasy books reminds me a little of rivers of london, London-based procedurals about an organisation affiliated with the british state but not technically police or intelligence services, who are modelled after reincarnations (sort of) of the knights of the round table.

The main character is an established knight who gets in over his head when internal politics starts happening.

There's lots of "exploring the basic concept and how it turns out to be more complicated than people think", which is done well. It's a bit more complicated than "reincarnation of", it's a bond that can change, but that's enough to sell the idea.

Again, it's quite British based. Mentions of oxbridge colleges, non-white britons, class warfare, uneasy tensions between idealism and the establisment status-quo which are not handled perfectly, but better than many books.

Uprooted, Naomi Novik

Squeee! This is really good, I'm glad she tried writing something after Temeraire. Definitely read it.

Agneieszka, a young village girl, is unexpectedly chosen to serve the wizard called The Dragon who is lord of the valley, the greatest wizard in the country but retreated to this rural seat to take responsibility for holding back the ominous encroachings of the wood.

Lots of different sorts of magic, well world-built. Focus on Agneieszka rather than soldiers and experienced wizards, without idolising her. Realistic tensions between people with generally well-meaning goals but selfish or short-sighted or otherwise naturally imperfect. Peels back the world to slowly to reveal where the wood came from, etc, etc, in a way that most books save for the tenth sequel.

I like the way there's a distinction between an informal, intuitive sort of magic and a rigid formalised academic sort of magic, but unlike many books, it's not massively gender-essentialised.

Infidel

A film about a british muslim man who finds out he was adopted and born to a jewish family. It could have been excruciating, but Liv recommended that it was surprisingly touching. And captures a feel of british jewish society and british muslim society imperfectly but better than most films. It is embarrassing, but more towards the Evelyn Waugh/Monty Python end of the spectrum than the Adam Sandler/Reality TV end of the spectrum -- I found that a bit difficult, but it was clearly sympathetic to all the characters even when they were acting out badly. And it was really funny in places.

It fits my heretofore unmentioned heuristic "watch every film which features Leo Rosen's Joys of Yiddish" :)

(As usual I own most of the books but rented the film.)

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 :)

I had a rant prepared about "stop being so wet, I don't care if you're too shy to express them, but have an opinion about something!" and "your problem is not that you have new relationship energy with someone else, it's that you and your fiance have nothing in common".

But that's not true, is it? Shakespeare wrote awesome plays about "oh look, new relationship energy, lets make really unfortunate decisions" and "oh dear, I don't know what to do now, oh look, everyone's dead".

But more and more mainstream films just make me want to yell at the characters to pull themselves together, but that doesn't help because (a) me yelling at people is no more informative than other people yelling at me (b) everything already happened and (c) it's fictional.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

The first time I saw this, it seems boring, confusing and pointless. Now I had a lot more sympathy with it.

I liked Everret (Clooney/Ulysses) a lot, his language, and his intellectual give it a go ness. Did I not like this a few years ago? I really can't remember.

As with many films, knowing where it's going can actually help; something unexpected or dragged out can be aggravating when you don't know it, but fits when you know how to take it.

Has anyone seen it who knows the Odyssey? It is supposed to be a homage of some sort, but I only know a bit about the original. The same sorts of things (a succession of bizarre encounters and delays) seem to happen to somewhat different characters for very different reasons; lots of the scenes felt tacked on, despite constituting most of the film -- does someone who's read the Odyssey feel differently? Do you get a connection between Everret and Odyssius or not?

Get Real

Has anyone else heard of this? It was incredibly sweet!

It's the story of a gay boy at school, but just works. I love *him*, he takes life with a cheeky intellectual smile, even as school life is a right pain, and lets his problems blind him to his friends; which lends him an occasional assurance no-one as hopeless as him should be allowed :)

It's *funny*, always from nothing more than a turn of phrase or expression, but they always fit perfectly, and however awkward the situation is never painful to watch, unlike so many personal comedies.