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Five Fictional Things Make a Post
May. 17th, 2014 01:49 am1. I've just watched the season finale of Agents of SHIELD. It's gotten rather good in the last month or so; you may recall that during the mid-season hiatus I said I wasn't sure if I cared whether I saw any more of it, but lately I've been hanging out for each episode. Elseweb I saw it described as "a decent six-episode miniseries with a tedious 16-episode prologue", which is a reasonable description of what it felt like. It's not that the first 16 episodes are unnecessary: in retrospect, they do a lot of character-building and plot set-up that pays off in the last 6 episodes. It's just that... well, put it this way: it makes sense for there to be a contrast when the series kicks up a notch for the run to the finale, but the contrast didn't need to be that big. (Given the standard episode count for an American series, among other things, I don't suppose there was ever a chance of the character and plot set-up being compressed into a smaller number of episodes.) Anyway, it's a lot better now, and I hope that now it's hit its stride it will keep the standard up; I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next season.
2. Which reminds me that I haven't posted about seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier yet. Fortunately, others have done that for me:
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daibhid_c said most of what I would have said, except that I would have added that I spent much of the first action sequence with a little voice in my head going "omg I can't believe they included that character in a serious Captain America movie and made it work".
glvalentine said some things I would never have thought of about the movie The Winter Soldier wanted to be and the movie it had to be, and how it negotiated the difference.
(Spoilers in both, of course.)
3. Also in recent movie-going, The LEGO Movie, which I had been looking forward to ever since the 1980s classic astronaut figure appeared in the trailer with exactly the kind of wear-and-tear the 1980s classic astronaut figure tended to get when you played with it a lot. As it happened, I tagged along with a friend who was being the responsible adult for a group of teenagers; she expressed surprise that someone my age would be interested, but as I told her I reckon I'm pretty solidly in one of the film's target audiences. (From what I remember, the other people at the showing we went to bore that out.) I enjoyed it every bit as much as I hoped to, and then some.
pedanther: The Lego Movie: two thumbs up.
poinketh: But Lego men don't have thumbs.
4. I mentioned a while back that one of our local theatre groups was doing a production of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, and I was interested to see how they managed it, considering that the play's staging requirements are challenging even for a professional company. I should therefore say that in the event, I feel they carried it off well.
There was one metatextually interesting moment: There is a key twist in the play in which a thing that appears to be genuine is revealed to be fake, to the astonishment not only of the character to whom it is being presented but also of the audience. In a professional production, the astonishment would be achieved by having the thing appear real; in this amateur production, it was obviously fake from the moment it appeared, but in a way that fit in with all the things on the stage that looked fake but were obviously intended to be accepted as real for the characters, so the revelation still worked for at least some of the audience. (One woman's whoop of astonishment could probably be heard throughout the theatre; during the rest of the play, I occasionally heard her speculating to her seatmate about what the next dramatic revelation was going to be. She was right at least once, too.)
5. My Re-Reading Liad continues; I'm currently a couple of weeks into Conflict of Honors. Which gives you an idea of how long I've been procrastinating on this post; I'd originally intended to make an announcement when I started it and suggest it as a place where people might be interested in coming on board for a while. Comments continue to be sparse, though there was a temporary bump a little while back when one of the co-authors of the Liaden series was kind enough to mention the project on her blog. (It was particularly kind of her considering I clumsily managed to upset her back when the project was starting out, and I wouldn't have blamed her in the least if she'd chosen to ignore it entirely thenceforth.)
2. Which reminds me that I haven't posted about seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier yet. Fortunately, others have done that for me:
daibhid_c said most of what I would have said, except that I would have added that I spent much of the first action sequence with a little voice in my head going "omg I can't believe they included that character in a serious Captain America movie and made it work".glvalentine said some things I would never have thought of about the movie The Winter Soldier wanted to be and the movie it had to be, and how it negotiated the difference.(Spoilers in both, of course.)
3. Also in recent movie-going, The LEGO Movie, which I had been looking forward to ever since the 1980s classic astronaut figure appeared in the trailer with exactly the kind of wear-and-tear the 1980s classic astronaut figure tended to get when you played with it a lot. As it happened, I tagged along with a friend who was being the responsible adult for a group of teenagers; she expressed surprise that someone my age would be interested, but as I told her I reckon I'm pretty solidly in one of the film's target audiences. (From what I remember, the other people at the showing we went to bore that out.) I enjoyed it every bit as much as I hoped to, and then some.
pedanther: The Lego Movie: two thumbs up.poinketh: But Lego men don't have thumbs.4. I mentioned a while back that one of our local theatre groups was doing a production of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, and I was interested to see how they managed it, considering that the play's staging requirements are challenging even for a professional company. I should therefore say that in the event, I feel they carried it off well.
There was one metatextually interesting moment: There is a key twist in the play in which a thing that appears to be genuine is revealed to be fake, to the astonishment not only of the character to whom it is being presented but also of the audience. In a professional production, the astonishment would be achieved by having the thing appear real; in this amateur production, it was obviously fake from the moment it appeared, but in a way that fit in with all the things on the stage that looked fake but were obviously intended to be accepted as real for the characters, so the revelation still worked for at least some of the audience. (One woman's whoop of astonishment could probably be heard throughout the theatre; during the rest of the play, I occasionally heard her speculating to her seatmate about what the next dramatic revelation was going to be. She was right at least once, too.)
5. My Re-Reading Liad continues; I'm currently a couple of weeks into Conflict of Honors. Which gives you an idea of how long I've been procrastinating on this post; I'd originally intended to make an announcement when I started it and suggest it as a place where people might be interested in coming on board for a while. Comments continue to be sparse, though there was a temporary bump a little while back when one of the co-authors of the Liaden series was kind enough to mention the project on her blog. (It was particularly kind of her considering I clumsily managed to upset her back when the project was starting out, and I wouldn't have blamed her in the least if she'd chosen to ignore it entirely thenceforth.)
