Whatta Fiasco

Although it wasn’t as good as the first of the series, it was still an entertaining film. But, oh, the misogyny. Yes, I know it’s a comic book film, based on a comic that theoretically pandered to an adolescent male audience. Still. Every single adult woman in the film who exhibits both power and desire gets her comeuppance in one way or another. No matter which side of the conflict she’s on. The basic message was that a woman who expresses her desire is the most dangerous power in the universe and must be controlled at any cost. It left a sour taste in my mouth. And that’s before we get into the whole sexuality subtext. But that one’s easier for me to deal with if only because it’s a much more muddled picture. Going into either topic in the detail I’m tempted by would take more time and energy than I want to devote at the moment and would be horribly spoilerific. Feh.

I’ve been hemming and hawing around reading some Nalo Hopkinson for at least a year. I’ve read a lot of good books in that year, but I need not have waited. We’re in a near future Toronto where the inner city has been abandoned to lawlessness. Our protagonist is a young woman who has returned to live with her grandmother, a traditional healer, there to raise her child. And then things get interesting. If you can’t stand written dialect, you’ll be missing out on a good story.

Would I enjoy a story about a gay duelist for hire in a highly stratified feudal society enmeshed in intricate political maneuvering executed at a Trollopian level of detail? When it’s written this well, yes! Bonus points for the way the swordplay was described. But I still need to track down a copy of Thomas the Rhymer.

Wow. I had known Alan Moore was good. People have been saying so for years. Now I’m saying it too. Dang. The weirdest thing about reading this book was realizing just how much it served as a jumping off point for The Incredibles, even though they’re entirely different stories for very different audiences. My favorite detail? Nixon with a metallic football handcuffed to his wrist. Grimly funny. Good stuff.

Plenty of good stuff in here, but tread carefully with an eye toward the bias, that of a feminist, Buddhist psychotherapist. Maybe I tend to be too left-brained and cynical, but I don’t like seeing evidence skewed about sloppily. (Most shoplifters are women, therefore the cause of shoplifting must be related to gender. Ow. Or the opposite of secular is spiritual. Double ow. And watch out for the bias of your humble typist while you’re at it!) On the other hand, making the point that independence and autonomy are not synonymous is well worthwhile. And sovereignty is not the same as getting everything you want. But understanding your needs and wants, and then communicating them doesn’t make you a monster. But then there’s the basic problem of self-help style books that pretend they’re going to be providing answers but end up only shining a flashlight into the corner of the problem. There’s a reason I don’t read very many of these at all.

So, the good news is that Kenneth Branagh is bringing Mozart’s The Magic Flute to the big screen. Yay? Except…

Speaking to The Times at the Cannes Film Festival, on a brief visit to meet distributors, he said that foreign languages in operas had been an insurmountable barrier for him. “If you don’t understand the words, you feel excluded.”

Which is why he’s had the libretto translated into… English. Mr. B is all kinds of wonderful, but this is one blind spot I was not expecting. He’s also under the impression that acting in opera is uniformly terrible. Sigh. That his singers have all had acting lessons isn’t a bad thing, but I think he hasn’t been to much good opera. The conflict comes when I find out that Stephen Fry is the person who wrote the English libretto. Sigh reprise.

Yes, I will be seeing it when it’s released. (Look for it in Cannes next year if you happen to be in the neighborhood.) Please,pretty please, can Stephen Fry have a cameo?

This is Derek Jarman’s version of the Christopher Marlowe play about the downfall of a homosexual king. In case you had any doubts about the director’s viewpoint, all is made clear in the opening scene where an opening dialog takes place on and near a bed where two naked sailors are engaged in a boy-on-boy scene. Once your mindset is properly adjusted, things go swimmingly. It’s dark. It’s anachronistic. It veers into the disturbingly brutal a few times. Tilda Swinton as the ice queen, Isabella, is wonderful. A sneering Andrew Tiernan (as the loathed Gaveston) looks like a Buffyverse vampire. (Seriously.) And then Annie Lennox shows up as herself. Lots of dark entertainment.

Considering I spent several years wanting to go into physics as a career but ended up spending the last thirteen years working around the edges of financial services, this seemed a pretty natural book for me to read. He does a decent job of depicting work.life balance issues he faced and it’s an interesting viewpoint on how the US financial services companies coped with changes from the mid eighties through the end of the century. And even though he covers a variety of arcane topics (theoretical physics, computer language development, and complex options valuation in one book – yikes!) he does an admirable job of presenting them all in an understandable way. I really enjoyed his admission that his largest impact while writing code for a trading desk, was in designing a better user interface for the traders (listen up, code monkeys!) as well as his dry dissection of how corporate politics can work. Dry but good.

Yes another Bollywood version of Jane Austen, although this time it’s Sense and Sensibility instead of Bride and Prejudice. It’s fun and flirty while still being much grittier than I would expect from my (limited) experience with Bollywood movies. The male leads are pretty darned insipid, but that doesn’t seem out of place here. The music in Bride and Prejudice is better, but this one is a slightly better. more consistent movie.

Ok. That was fun, in a rum-buttered popcorn kind of way. Kevin Spacey does a wonderful broken sleaze. John Cusack as a stand-in for the viewer gets tiresome fairly quickly, even if if it does get made use of later. The movie as a whole has some threadbare spots but the palette of characters makes up for other deficiencies. Much fun.