Sunday, December 03, 2006
Hello again my beautiful children. These are the words of your saviour. Read them. Devour them. Then go out and seek bloody beauty. Oh yes.
Things have been a-changin' recently and, like most of my blog buddies I've been going through some ennui and dissatisfaction. I've had a fairly fallow period in the last month or so in cultural terms, never did get round to seeing Children of Men while I'm hoping to find some time to see Pan's Labyrinth. The books I'm reading at the moment don't particularly inspire me to write about them or their themes (I'm currently slogging through The Shape of Things to Come by Greil Marcus and finding it not as fun as his mighty Lipstick Traces). I may try and write a post at some point to explain why I spent around four days depressed after reading A Christmas Carol but I suspect that would just depress me more.
I did take advantage of the weak American economy to get ahold of Alan Moore's Lost Girls but was eventually unimpressed. Moore's script is all right but I just did not enjoy the artwork of his partner Melinda Gebbie at all. The vast majority of her panels come off as flat and don't give any sense of depth at all, so much so that I'm still in two minds about whether it's actually supposed to look like that or whether it's some clever metatextual commentary on the one-dimensional nature of characters in pornography. But all the characters, with the exception of the plump Monsieur Rougeur, seem to be cut from the same body template, quite often it's only the hair colour that distinguishes between the three main characters, despite the fact that Dorothy is in her late teens, Wendy her late thirties and Alice somewhere past fifty.
Televisionwise I'm finding Heroes to be entertaining and fun, after a strangely unengaging pilot. It's great to see a show that can support a large cast, even if it means that individual stories run as slowly as a typical episode of Lost . I'm only up to the fourth or fifth episode so am hoping that as I watch the rest and catch up that we'll actually get some backstory and explanation for exactly what is going on, that we're not in for another Lost -style 'going round in circles'-jerk. But of course it's Battlestar Galactica that is front and centre in my affections at the moment. For the first and early parts of the second season I was insistent that there needed to be an overarching plan for the entire show or else it would be rubbish. Since then it's become obvious that they are making things up as they go along and, strangely, I'm prefering that. The free-form approach does have some drawbacks, namely in those middle-block standalone episodes, but I'm coming to realise that having a five year or seven year show bible that details exactly what happens when is no more a guarantee of good stuff than doing it on the fly. For more BSG-related discussion, check out the Read Less, More BSG vlog. Show-related critique and gender theory through fluffy animals.
Things have been a-changin' recently and, like most of my blog buddies I've been going through some ennui and dissatisfaction. I've had a fairly fallow period in the last month or so in cultural terms, never did get round to seeing Children of Men while I'm hoping to find some time to see Pan's Labyrinth. The books I'm reading at the moment don't particularly inspire me to write about them or their themes (I'm currently slogging through The Shape of Things to Come by Greil Marcus and finding it not as fun as his mighty Lipstick Traces). I may try and write a post at some point to explain why I spent around four days depressed after reading A Christmas Carol but I suspect that would just depress me more.
I did take advantage of the weak American economy to get ahold of Alan Moore's Lost Girls but was eventually unimpressed. Moore's script is all right but I just did not enjoy the artwork of his partner Melinda Gebbie at all. The vast majority of her panels come off as flat and don't give any sense of depth at all, so much so that I'm still in two minds about whether it's actually supposed to look like that or whether it's some clever metatextual commentary on the one-dimensional nature of characters in pornography. But all the characters, with the exception of the plump Monsieur Rougeur, seem to be cut from the same body template, quite often it's only the hair colour that distinguishes between the three main characters, despite the fact that Dorothy is in her late teens, Wendy her late thirties and Alice somewhere past fifty.
Televisionwise I'm finding Heroes to be entertaining and fun, after a strangely unengaging pilot. It's great to see a show that can support a large cast, even if it means that individual stories run as slowly as a typical episode of Lost . I'm only up to the fourth or fifth episode so am hoping that as I watch the rest and catch up that we'll actually get some backstory and explanation for exactly what is going on, that we're not in for another Lost -style 'going round in circles'-jerk. But of course it's Battlestar Galactica that is front and centre in my affections at the moment. For the first and early parts of the second season I was insistent that there needed to be an overarching plan for the entire show or else it would be rubbish. Since then it's become obvious that they are making things up as they go along and, strangely, I'm prefering that. The free-form approach does have some drawbacks, namely in those middle-block standalone episodes, but I'm coming to realise that having a five year or seven year show bible that details exactly what happens when is no more a guarantee of good stuff than doing it on the fly. For more BSG-related discussion, check out the Read Less, More BSG vlog. Show-related critique and gender theory through fluffy animals.
Labels: Alan Moore, Battlestar Galactica, fiction, Heroes, pornography, Television
