(no subject)

[raincitygirl]

Young Miss Weaver is still on her enforced diet of special (read: expensive) food that you can only buy at the vet. It must be really bland because she's only eating 2 of the itty-bitty cans a day, when the vet said she was supposed to be eating 4. But I got tired of putting the food out and watching it spoil, especially when it costs so much. On the bright side, she's stopped throwing up, and she's getting her energy back. She went racing madly around the apartment yesterday night, in a way she hasn't done since she got sick. Only a week and a half more until I can start reintroducing her regular food, and see if she's better.

Have The New Yorker's hilarious review of Fifty Shades of Grey. I haven't read the book nor seen the movie (not trying to be a snob, they just don't especially seem like my kind of thing), but damn, the review is so funny. Movie reviews are always better when the reviewer didn't like the movie.

And commodorified riffs hilariously on names right here.

Comments

[raincitygirl]

Anthony Lane has written a book, Nobody's Perfect, you know. Well, it's not a book so much as his collected reviews and other essays from The New Yorker. I'm going to think for a while before I buy it, because $23 Canadian is a lot of money, but I'll probably buy it in the end. If his other writing is as funny as that review, I suspect it'll be money well spent. Or maybe it's available from the library.

[sanguinity]

I do know; we already own it. :-)

(Or I assume that's the one own; I'm not at home to check. Although I would have guessed it was earlier that 2002? Eh, my memory is lousy for these things.)

[raincitygirl]

Of COURSE you already own it!

And the Vancouver Public Library has several copies, so I won't have to shell out the $23. Yay!

[sanguinity]

From what I can tell from here, you guys have an excellent library. I sometimes end up at their website when I'm looking for the website of the Vancouver-across-the-river-from-here library. (Hee, the Vancouver WA in the Lane review!)

grrlpup thinks it's a crying shame that Lane didn't do the Jupiter Ascending review; she thinks he would have gotten it. (Which is possibly distinct from liking it.) Me, I'm not quite prepared to risk the possibility that he wouldn't get it; it would tarnish my love for Anthony Lane, if he didn't.

[raincitygirl]

We do indeed have an excellent library. Certainly much better than the library in the Vancouver suburb where I grew up.

I haven't seen Jupiter Ascending, I'm afraid.

[sanguinity]

Ah, when you linked to the Chicago primer for fic writers, I thought you might have.

For context, then: Jupiter Ascending is absolutely ridiculous in the way that all the best space opera is ridiculous. It is not intellectual, and it is an unabashed, no-pretensions romp. Which in and of itself is not a crime: normally when a film does that, reviewers shrug and say that it's satisfying enough for what it is. But Jupiter Ascending has been getting panned by male critics who come in with the assumption that space opera is for boys, about boy-things and boy-dreams, and then find that Jupiter Ascending really really isn't. A lot of male reviewers have been unable to find a ready-at-hand pov to access the film from, and thus have been declaring the fault to be in the film itself.

[Not really a spoiler, but references a scene from the movie: the guy I went with came out of the theater acutely embarrassed that he had been asked to empathize with the bride in an OTT Princess-Di-like wedding scene. A bride who had reservations about whether this was a good idea but still got overwhelmed with the pomp and splendor of it, who got briefly blindsided by and caught up in the fantasy of a royal wedding. The film asks you to admit that yeah, whatever cold-light-of-day knowledge you might have about royal weddings in reality, you can still empathize with how one might get momentarily swept away by finding yourself smack-dab in the middle of one. But the guy I had gone with found that scene acutely embarrassing: he had been asked to find it inside himself to acknowledge the wonder of a frothy white dress, and to do so straight-up, no mockery, no irony, no wink-and-nod-we-know-frothy-white-dresses-are-embarrassing. He's normally a very cool guy who I have immense respect for, who normally isn't about defending his masculinity, but that was a step too far for him.]

Anyway, there's been a resultant gender split on how one should judge the movie, if it's objectively bad-bad, or if it's merely an unintellectual frolic that is committing the sin of not giving a good goddamn if it speaks to straight-male fantasies.

Getting back to Anthony Lane, and our feelings about him not having been assigned that review: It would break my heart if Anthony Lane came down on the wrong side of that debate, so I'm glad we'll never know where he falls. While grrlpup thinks that Anthony Lane might be one of the few male reviewers who would get it, and regrets not having the opportunity to see the deliciousness that would come forth.

[raincitygirl]

Interesting! I was thinking about seeing JA in theatres, but my f-list/dwircle was dramatically divided on it. Half of them loved it and half of them hated it. With money a bit tight right now I didn't want to go and see a movie that I might hate. It does sound intriguing, though, that whole action movie as told through the female gaze. I will definitely watch it on Netflix when it comes out.

[sanguinity]

I enjoyed it immensely; it slotted into my brain in ways that a movie hasn't really done since... forever, maybe? The "this is for the 12yo girl in you" scuttlebutt going around beforehand had made me a bit wary -- a lot of prototypical "stuff for girls" doesn't work that well for me -- but as it turns out, it spoke to my grade-school self who had indeed plastered her room in unicorn dreamcatchers and written a fantasy novel with a boss learning-to-waltz-at-the-elf-ball scene. It spoke very loudly and clearly.

But I think you're making an excellent choice to see it in a way that you are sure that you won't regret. Going to see a movie should be a treat, and it'd be a shame to spend the money and time and come out wishing that you hadn't.