I live?

[domarzione]

 It has been a week, peeps. It's been a couple of weeks, but this week has been a week. A week of anger and frustration with the world at large and the way even in this we have to be absolutist and you must embrace everything one side or the other believes or you are The Enemy. A week of curfews and sirens and helicopters not because of righteous anger at a murder, but because of all of the opportunistic shit that comes with protest. A week my union decided to fuck me over gang-style because now is exactly the time to arbitrarily change standards and what was good enough before is no longer so and we're gonna belittle you in the process. A week I lost my volunteer position of a decade because I wouldn't sign a waiver exempting them from liability for anything (illness/injury/death) even through their own negligence. A week of emotional and physical exhaustion because it's been three months of quarantine lockdown and a week of a curfew that managed to stop no looting but did ensure that I had to cut my exercise walks short and couldn't treat myself to takeout (haven't since this started) because everyone's gotta be home by eight. A week when school started and I had to introductions and there's no way to say "I have many interests and also relevant work experience, but it's all been stripped away from me and so I go walk around the edges of cemeteries and pretend not to notice the open graves" and not sound like you're having a breakdown. A week I didn't have a single drop of alcohol because I want booze to remain a pleasure and not turn into a coping mechanism. I don't think I've been this close to the end of my cope in a while. 


I didn't get much writing done. I didn't get much work done, either, but I tried hard with both. 


I did start watching The Expanse, which has been a good distraction even if I have to avert my eyes during the protomolecule stuff. I'm somewhere in the middle of Season Two, after Eros has crashed into Venus and right after Bobbie Draper gets told to go to Earth. The worldbuilding and details and politics are fascinating to me, but the characters are so comparatively underdeveloped and I don't know if this is also true in the books. I don't know if I should stop watching and go read the books instead or if the show developed book ideas to the better. Anyone? 

(I'm kind of glad the Miller arc is resolved for now. I liked Miller as a character a lot, possibly because I share his cynical 'a pox on all houses' approach to politics but also because he was such a classic noir character in a space opera and Thomas Jane playing just slightly off-kilter is what he's best at. But I'm not a fan of the 'detective falling in love with the missing woman' trope in general and the tendency toward stripping the woman's agency. Julie herself was a fully-formed character, a girl with daddy issues who did much and endured much and in the end just wanted to go home where it was safe. Miller's Julie was a fantasy who rewarded his inexplicable love and that's the one we spent more time with. She was already objectified by her father after her infection, that is enough.) 


It's after five on a Friday, I can cocktail if I wanna... 

Comments

[sian1359]

I don't remember your reaction to the first X-Men movie, though I'm sure there was one and that I read it since I've been a fan of yours in part because of your comics thoughts. I felt that Singer did a very good job of condensing and distilling the decades of the comic and all of the retcons, to put out a movie that felt very much like a good X-Men story to me (despite not liking all the characterizations/actor choices). I was originally going to say The Expanse was like that, but then didn't know if that would be a good or bad thing in your mind, so I chickened out. What I mean by that is that for television they distilled down a very richly crafted universe and stayed true to the overall emotion of source material. I think the core characters of the crew are close to their book counterparts, but without some of the nuance (though I think Amos is pretty darn close, and I think Alex works out a little better in the series than the books. Bobbi's story is changed a little (more in season 4), but the character is still Bobbi, and Chrisjen Avasarala feels more prominent and realized in the series, although she was quite present in the books too - I love Shohreh Aghdashloo as an actress and she just so there when she's on screen. Holden is maybe better explained in the books, and Naomi has a lot more back story that comes out in the later books, but I'm holding out that we'll see much of it in later seasons. I guess what I'm taking a lot of words to say is that I don't think you'll be unhappy with how the characters are being portrayed, but that you might enjoy the series more by reading the books. And that I don't think it would matter if read first and then watch, or the other way around.
I never could deal with Keanu as John Constantine. I really enjoyed Matt Ryan's portrayal, although what they've done to his and Astra's story in Legends of Tomorrow is just sad. Of course, my favorite John Constantine is from Gaiman's The Books of Magic series, so ... (and I stopped reading Hellblazer/most comics in the early 2000s).

[domarzione]

I was not actually in the X-men comics fandom at the time of the movie! My first x-fic was movie-fic because I found the movieverse people first and from there OTL and the comics peeps and then reverted to type. (My origin story should be retconned.) For the movies, I never liked what they did with Scott, but I never saw him as an annoying drip in the comics and so I might be in the minority there. But holy crap Xavier and Magneto and how they are introduced and how they interact and how they were portrayed and that alone was worth everything else. Well, maybe not everything, but it's a tradeoff for casting a hunky giant as Wolverine and we'll negotiate later for what they did to the Dark Phoenix arc.

I get what you're saying because I don't think I realized how many books there are and how big the The Expanse book universe is. Distillation is necessary after a certain point and if this is what they are doing, that reframes things in a way that's not bad or good but more clear.


Comics that I really love, I cannot suffer the way Hollywood destroys them the way I can when a mismatched writer gets on the book itself. Which is why I'm desperately grateful that Captain America: the Winter Soldier is a good movie. I was not impressed when they turned Lucifer into The Mentalist 2: Samael and I've never watched an episode. But I was (am) a huge Vertigo fan and John Constantine and I couldn't even figure out which part of that movie pissed me off most, the Americanization of it or the ruining of the best arc or Keanu (bless him, I've never had a bad thought about him as a person or as an actor) or whatever else. Matt Ryan's supposed to be a lot closer to the books, so good. And I will always (always!) pick Tim Hunter over Harry Potter. I made it through all of Books of Magic: Life During Wartime and only through the first HP book.

[kerithwyn]

Keanu is great, the John Wick movies are excellent ultra-violence. But Constantine he was not. Matt Ryan is fantastic and his show just got better as it went on; I was pissed when they ended it, and delighted when they imported him to Legends.