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[personal profile] labingi
My recent posts have pretty much been about RL, so I wanted to catch up with tiny thoughts on what I've been encountering in narrative.

Reading:

A Song of Ice and Fire (book 2): (It's hard to remember the name of the full series when the books don't actually put it on the cover.) I'm quite enjoying this series. I haven't read fantasy to speak of in many years and have grown to expect poor quality, but Martin is good. His prose is functional and uninspired--and occasionally incorrect, which is a bit embarrassing in text that purports to use a somewhat old fashioned English among educated characters. (It really shouldn't be too much to expect that he--or his editors--know the difference between "lay" and "lie" or what "lest" means.) That said, the story and characters are excellent. I like the dialogism inherent in the many sides of the conflict and moral ambiguity embodied in almost everyone. It gives a very real sense of quasi-medieval politics.

Watching:

Fate/Zero with a friend I'm not getting a chance to see very frequently, which is vexing because the series has grabbed me. I'm only a few episodes into this one, but if it keeps up this level of quality, it will be a winner. The series is advantaged by being a prequel about the parents of the characters in Fate/Stay Night. This means that the main characters are... parents (and uncles, etc.). This is amazingly rare in anime. Even those few series that are about adults tend to be about adults who don't have kids. Parents in anime almost always seen from their kids' perspective, i.e. semi-mystical beings who are there to be sweet or evil or make you do homework. It's intriguing to see a series that's actually from the perspective of people trying to manage their own lives/problems/feelings and be responsible for their young 'uns at the same time.


Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of those really famous movies I've managed to miss all my life. They don't make 'em like this anymore! The beginning is stronger than the end, which may suffer a little bit from years of The X-Files doing the exact same imagery for aliens. I expect it also suffers from the difficult problem of presenting transcendence when transcendence is a feeling you can't really grasp till you're there. The beginning is an excellent example of what more recent sci fi film has lost in the rush toward endless CGI and pulse-pounding action. The slow buildup of strange events and realism of encounters that really don't look like much more than hazily flashing lights gave a great sense of how people might actually respond to aliens descending among us: how creepy and amazing and incomprehensible it would be. (I caught all the cultural references far more ably than I would get the equivalents today, and it made me feel really old.)

Akira: I rewatched this other day, and it was a bit too soon. I was distracted, which is a sad thing to be during Akira. They don't make anime like this anymore either. In some ways, it's been superseded, especially some of the awkward, unproportioned character sketches you get when characters are shown at a distance. BUT so much of this art remains so superior to so much of what you see today (or back then). It's not really a question of whether your technology is state of the art; it's only partly a question of money. So much boils down to artistic skill and inspiration, and Akira has it in spades. It continues to hold up really well.

Grave of the Fireflies, speaking of sad anime. I'd avoided this one for years based on how depressing I'd heard it was. In fact, I was so prepared for it to be depressing that it came off as (comparatively) lighter than I imagined. Despite its very hard content of kids starving in war, it retains a certain Miyazaki children's film feel, which makes it both easier and harder to watch. It's not as overtly horrifying as it could have been, but placing it so skillfully into the kids' perspective, on another level, makes it more horrible. When I first saw it, I wasn't hit as hard as I expected, but it's stuck with me. It really sticks. The horror of the story lies in two main areas: one, for me as an American, is simply the realization that it was my country destroying these people's lives (whatever the underlying political complexities); the other was the very realistic portrayal of how people in need can become invisible when they are so numerous as to be common. In my town, we look past panhandlers in exactly the same way the people in Tokyo looked past these kids. It is, sadly, human nature.

Primer: This sci fi film is chiefly interesting as a very low budget first film that garnered a lot of acclaim (thus, a role model for me). It's about two young scientists' adventures with a technology that allows time travel (in a very delimited way). It's certainly more professional looking than my film will be. It does, however, show the marks of its budget, especially in poor sound quality. (My film will doubtless have that too.) Personally, I found the story very hard to follow, and I'm not sure how much of that is due to my brain not being good with this kind of mathemato-logical puzzle about timelines, how much is due to the poor sound, and how much is due to very complicated scripting--and how much is due to my Netflixed DVD being broken, with the result that I missed 5-10 minutes near the climax. Still, it was different and ambitious and warmed the part of my heart that likes stories about the excitement of doing science.
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