Stuff that I've been watching
Nov. 23rd, 2010 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficA fantastic show that I am terribly sad though not at all surprised was cancelled. (Seriously--someone greenlighted this for network TV?) Ian McShane is mesmerizing. David I was kind of meh about, but that's largely because I know David was not always so great a person in his later life, so it's hard for me to be the innocent neophyte hero act.
The disorienting thing was that a lot of the show was filmed at Sands Point, a place I have walked many times with my parents (and where the recent Renn Faire was). The inside of the Benjamins' house is there, as is the terrace overlooking the Sound. The most distracting bit was that they used part of the walking path, a little dell with a foot bridge, for all their scenes of the border of Gath. And I know that location so well it couldn't help but look like kids playing dress-up in their backyard to me. Like, oh, if you turn the camera just this way, you'd see the parking lot! I wonder if this is how people in Vancouver feel all the time.
I remember there being some dust-up on my f-list when this was airing about spoilers, but I can't remember who was upset or what the spoiler was and now I'm curious. Nothing in the series struck me as particularly earth shaking (and I say this with no deep knowledge of this part of the story in the Bible--I'm much more familiar with David's later life). In the commentary for the first episode, there was also a spoiler about a certain character getting killed...that wasn't killed. Unless I missed it. How odd.
Well, that was a crap film. I mean, that's what I expected. But it wasn't crap because it mucked about with the Iliad. I can deal with that. It was more that there wasn't really a main character. Or a main plot. I didn't care about anyone. It was just massive battle scene, some excuse to pause the action and have talky scenes (at one point, one of the people says, "I think that's enough for today," or something like that and both sides stop for the day which is just--what? seriously?) and then another massive battle scene. And since everyone knows about the Trojan horse, the movie had an inevitability that removed any possibility of dramatic tension.
Brad Pitt was awfully pretty in it, though. And I got a kick out of the fact that the Mycenaean throne room had the design from the Lion Gate blown up huge and over the throne. (One of my friends climbed on top of that gate, much to the horror of our classics professor chaperone.)
The thing about doing a movie about Troy is that this was the foundational story of the Greeks. After the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, there were a couple hundred years with no writing at all, and then when written works start appearing again, what are the first? The Iliad and the Odyssey. The story of Troy has so much richness, and says so much about how the Greeks viewed human nature and humanity's relationship to the gods, it seems impossible that with that story it could be turned into this flat, lifeless thing. And yet, there we go.
I've just started on Fringe--only five episodes in!--so please refrain from spoilers. So far it feels like an X-Files knock-off to me. I loved X-Files, but for its monster of the week episodes, not for its mytharc. And Fringe has the same hand-wavy, government conspiracy, let's jerk the audience around as much as possible and use "conspiracy" as an excuse for all our plot holes feel to it. Also, so far that monsters of the week have not been that thrilling and can barely help but be X-Files retreads. They seem to be trying for novelty by making them gorier.
And zero points from me for having a demon pregnancy in the second episode. It seems like an inevitability when there's a female lead. This is also terribly sexist of me, but I feel like male writers are way more obsessed with how horrifying pregnancy is than women. Don't get me wrong--pregnancy scares the shit out of me. But I'm kind of tired of being told how disgusting it is by male writers. It's like Stephen King's obsession with menstruation. Just stop it.
I also don't particularly like Olivia, but that's mostly because she is playing the wide-eyed newbie that we know is being naive and trusting the wrong people. I'm sure that will change and she will be less annoying once it does. I am terribly glad they fridged the strong-jawed boyfriend. I liked that actor on Boston Legal, but I was rather appalled by the prospect of watching him as an unironic leading man. This is also JJ Abrams' second TV pilot to fridge the heroine's boyfriend, so I give him props for inverting that trope.
I'm digging Walter and Peter so far, and there's enough mystery in their backstory to keep me coming back for a while. Also, the DVD's get kudos for putting warning labels on the special features that have spoilers for the season. Oh, would that other shows were as considerate (Deep Space Nine! *shakes fist*)
The disorienting thing was that a lot of the show was filmed at Sands Point, a place I have walked many times with my parents (and where the recent Renn Faire was). The inside of the Benjamins' house is there, as is the terrace overlooking the Sound. The most distracting bit was that they used part of the walking path, a little dell with a foot bridge, for all their scenes of the border of Gath. And I know that location so well it couldn't help but look like kids playing dress-up in their backyard to me. Like, oh, if you turn the camera just this way, you'd see the parking lot! I wonder if this is how people in Vancouver feel all the time.
I remember there being some dust-up on my f-list when this was airing about spoilers, but I can't remember who was upset or what the spoiler was and now I'm curious. Nothing in the series struck me as particularly earth shaking (and I say this with no deep knowledge of this part of the story in the Bible--I'm much more familiar with David's later life). In the commentary for the first episode, there was also a spoiler about a certain character getting killed...that wasn't killed. Unless I missed it. How odd.
Well, that was a crap film. I mean, that's what I expected. But it wasn't crap because it mucked about with the Iliad. I can deal with that. It was more that there wasn't really a main character. Or a main plot. I didn't care about anyone. It was just massive battle scene, some excuse to pause the action and have talky scenes (at one point, one of the people says, "I think that's enough for today," or something like that and both sides stop for the day which is just--what? seriously?) and then another massive battle scene. And since everyone knows about the Trojan horse, the movie had an inevitability that removed any possibility of dramatic tension.
Brad Pitt was awfully pretty in it, though. And I got a kick out of the fact that the Mycenaean throne room had the design from the Lion Gate blown up huge and over the throne. (One of my friends climbed on top of that gate, much to the horror of our classics professor chaperone.)
The thing about doing a movie about Troy is that this was the foundational story of the Greeks. After the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, there were a couple hundred years with no writing at all, and then when written works start appearing again, what are the first? The Iliad and the Odyssey. The story of Troy has so much richness, and says so much about how the Greeks viewed human nature and humanity's relationship to the gods, it seems impossible that with that story it could be turned into this flat, lifeless thing. And yet, there we go.
I've just started on Fringe--only five episodes in!--so please refrain from spoilers. So far it feels like an X-Files knock-off to me. I loved X-Files, but for its monster of the week episodes, not for its mytharc. And Fringe has the same hand-wavy, government conspiracy, let's jerk the audience around as much as possible and use "conspiracy" as an excuse for all our plot holes feel to it. Also, so far that monsters of the week have not been that thrilling and can barely help but be X-Files retreads. They seem to be trying for novelty by making them gorier.
And zero points from me for having a demon pregnancy in the second episode. It seems like an inevitability when there's a female lead. This is also terribly sexist of me, but I feel like male writers are way more obsessed with how horrifying pregnancy is than women. Don't get me wrong--pregnancy scares the shit out of me. But I'm kind of tired of being told how disgusting it is by male writers. It's like Stephen King's obsession with menstruation. Just stop it.
I also don't particularly like Olivia, but that's mostly because she is playing the wide-eyed newbie that we know is being naive and trusting the wrong people. I'm sure that will change and she will be less annoying once it does. I am terribly glad they fridged the strong-jawed boyfriend. I liked that actor on Boston Legal, but I was rather appalled by the prospect of watching him as an unironic leading man. This is also JJ Abrams' second TV pilot to fridge the heroine's boyfriend, so I give him props for inverting that trope.
I'm digging Walter and Peter so far, and there's enough mystery in their backstory to keep me coming back for a while. Also, the DVD's get kudos for putting warning labels on the special features that have spoilers for the season. Oh, would that other shows were as considerate (Deep Space Nine! *shakes fist*)
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Date: 2010-11-23 06:48 pm (UTC)Which of course led to a bit of "LOL HOW CAN YOU SPOIL FOR THE BIBLE", but my policy was hey, I can't stop you from doing what you do in your own LJ, obviously, but if you happen to know that in the story that X gets killed by Y, and this is based on that, it would be nice if people at large didn't put OH I WONDER IF JOE BLOE IS GOING TO GET KILLED LIKE HE DID IN THE ORIGINAL STORY outside the cut.
Which... I realize is a losing battle, but it was just a request I had for the length of time that the series was first run. People were also like, "YOU CAN TOTALLY LOOK IT UP WIKI SO IT'S NOT A SPOILER" but I was just like, hey, you can define your shit how ever you want, but in the context of a first run show with limited chances for me to watch unspoiled, it would just be *nice* if y'all gave me a fighting chance not to know where this story is headed.
Which... I got that I was going to be laughed at for even trying, but David and Jonathan isn't "Romeo and Juliet". Not everyone knows how it's gonna turn out, and I wanted to try to watch the show based on that story without knowing who died how and when in the original. And I didn't think that asking my Flist to consider putting the most major spoilers for (yes, commonly know, I know) the source under a cut was too much to ask.
But, yeah. Yay Kings! (which FWIW, is a significant inspiration for the worldbuilding in the originalfic I'm working on right now).
Oh, and if you've watched through the pentultimate ep, I've got a postep fic, if you're interested. http://svilleficrecs.livejournal.com/919512.html
no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 07:23 pm (UTC)(Also, as a side note, David--not a shepherd. The way Bronze Age titles went, he was something more like Minister of Agriculture. I find it so funny the ways that the modern meaning of Biblical stories are often soooo far from the original and what the original was meant to convey to its original audience, but that's a theological discussion for another time.)
What I was wondering was--what was the big surprise in the show? I found nothing about David and Jonathon's storyline really shocking. As soon as Jonathon told his uncle he was in, you knew it would go very badly for him. And with all the learning about Roman imperial politics I've been doing, I could call pretty much everything that happened. (Also, the spoiler in the commentary was that Ian McShane said his court biographer was killed off. And...that didn't happen. At least I didn't notice it, and I was paying attention.)
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Date: 2010-11-23 07:53 pm (UTC)As for the 'big surprise', It's been a while, but I think I remember something about how some stuff was planned for the last few eps, but once it became more than clear that they weren't getting renewed, certain storylines got tweaked so the show made more sense as a self contained single season. But It's been a while.
I had mixed feelings about the show. I really loved certain aspects of it, and I adored the actor who played Jack (loved him since I saw him on Gossip Girl way back when). But the David actor was so tremendously MEH to me, that it always hindered my enjoyment of the show. I get that playing the good boy hero is often a thankless job, but ... I really felt like if they'd had a better/more compelling actor in his place, the show would have been ten times better.
I never really felt chemistry between him and the sister (she was meh too, but she also wasn't given much to work with, so I felt like that was more forgivable.) I also had issues w/ the passivity on David's part for a lot of the plot twists around him, and them offscreening a lot of shit that would have been better onscreen (killing reporter-from-ironman chick offscreen was number one on that list).
But *oh* I did love a lot of other stuff, including much of the worldbuilding, and OH JACK. BB. It was just such an interesting, daring, *different* show, so of course it was destined to die, but I really do wish they'd gotten another season because I thought it was the kind of show that would have improved exponentially second season.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-28 12:33 am (UTC)