Reviews, reviews, and more reviews
Oct. 22nd, 2007 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSaturday was Collegium, always a must-do for me. There's often a significant pressure to locate Collegium somewhere other than "central Bay Area" or Sacramento so that folks in more outlying areas don't always have long drives. All I can say is that it would happen more often if more local folks actually show up when a kingdom-level event is held in their back yard. Still and all, I had a good time. There were two people for my discussion on applying mental spaces and conceptual blending analysis to the inherent conflicts in historic re-creation between re-creating historic artifacts/activities and re-creating the relationship that medieval people had to those artifacts/activities. I think the framework worked the way I'd intended it to, and we had a nice discussion, although it would have been nice to have a few more people involved.
For the rest of the day, I hung out in the 'research for the Perfectly Period Feast (tm)' track. (For the non-local readers, this is an event planned for next Spring's collegium that I've taken to describing as "feast as performance art" where the idea is not only to have the dishes themselves be researched, but the entire physical and behavioral presentation to be equally well researched.)
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klwilliams bugged out on the movie plans for Sunday, scotica and I went back to the original notion of seeing The Seeker: The Dark is Rising rather than the new Elizabeth flick. Now I'm a major Susan Cooper fan, and scotica to the best of her recollection hasn't read the series at all. Even having accepted in advance that this movie was not connected with Cooper's story in any but the most trivial "faintly inspired by a vague recollection of" way, and having determined to evaluate it solely on its own independent merits, my conclusion as the credits rolled was that it was the moral equivalent of raping kittens. scotica disagreed. She felt that it wasn't quite as bad as the moral equivalent of raping kittens.
To start with, the decision to make the Stanton family transplanted Americans not only wasn't dramatically necessary, but it created a massive sense of confusion in the opening scenes where we're simultaneous being dragged from what gives the impression of being a generic American urban high school and a cluster of clearly American siblings, to quaint rural English village. Except I guess the school was supposed to be English -- for which the American film audience is given zero cues. Absolutely no background explanation is ever given for the American family's presence there -- even the vague hints at 'Daddy's been having trouble holding down a teaching job' provide no useful explanation of why there. (And all this is leaving aside the issue that, in the original book, it was a key characteristic that Will Stanton was of that location and had known the revealed-to-be-supernatural actors all his life. But we aren't comparing this movie to the book. Really we aren't.)
Our young protagonist is left to his own devices far too long before being given critical information -- you'd think that magical mentors would have learned this lesson somewhere along the line from their compatriots' spectacular failures in other storylines. Never leave your child-savior in ignorance of his True Nature a moment longer than absolutely possible. No good will ever come of it. And when Will is made aware of his own status as an Old One and the attendent magic powers, the most significant use of those powers we are shown is a firey temper tantrum. Thereafter, at all moments when the powers could conceivably be of practical use, they are conveniently forgotten.
And let's talk about that long-lost twin. (I warned you there were massive spoilers.) I can accept that Will's parents Don't Want To Talk about a baby who mysteriously disappeared from his cradle in the first weeks of life. But Will is 14 and his oldest brothers are well into (or past) college age, which means they were quite old enough to have been aware of what was going on. And in all this time nobody has let anything slip about an abducted twin? Nobody? (Now the story I'm curious to hear about is poor little returned-to-his-family Tom Stanton who not only has been a prisoner of The Dark for his first 14 years, but gets a twin brother who not only has been basking in their family's love and support during that time, but is a powerful magician to boot. Talk about sibling rivalry! But I digress.)
And the kitten? What's with the kitten? Was the kitten really necessary? (Note: despite my pronouncement above, only metaphorical kitten-rape is involved in this movie.) Surely having your kid sister about to be hacked up by Viking raiders is sufficient motivation without having her go chasing off after kittens? Oh, and note to the effects people: if you step into a boat that is sitting in the water, there is NO WAY that a person in that boat will be oblivious to your presence. Get a grip.
Alas, my teeth are now gnashed down to nubbins and I must move on. Final judgement: This movie fails to move past "awful" into "so tragically horrible that it's vastly entertaining" (as, for example, the Sarmatian-King-Arthur movie). It's just awful. I think I must now pull Cooper from the bookshelf and rinse my brain off.
The movie wasn't playing in all that many places in the South Bay, so we found ourselves seeing it at the Great Mall of Milpitas. (This is the proper name of the place, not a personal endorsement.) This created an opportunity for a delightful stroll, working up some appetite for dinner, but a distinct lack of attractive shopping opportunities. One forgets how solidly your average mall instantiates the stereotype of California mall life. (Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the highlights of my collegium class was getting to use the verb "instantiate" at least twice in casual conversation!) After a brief consideration of the culinary delights of the Outback Steakhouse, we drove one freeway exit further north to the small strip-mall across the street from the hotel that we've been holding Consonance at for the last several years, which I knew had an abundance of good Asian food.
The Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant offers a delicious alternative to your standard Chinese cuisine. (In response to one of our questions about the dishes, the waiter explained that they specialized in Cantonese, so I guess my ideas about the "default" Chinese menu may be based firmly in Szechuan and the like.) For our usual movie tie-in, we settled on dishes representing the Dark and the Light, with a fluffy crab and egg-white dish representing the latter, and a dish of steamed greens (maybe bok choy? but it looked different) and black mushrooms weighing in for the former. We started with a combination appetizer plate which featured baby octopus, jellyfish, seaweed salad, and some rather bland thinly sliced pork and beef with somewhat vague seasonings. All the dishes were quite tasty, with the jellyfish getting the prize for "dish never before tasted that we were most startled to enjoy" and the crab-and-egg-whites winning the day over the Dark, if only for its very subtle flavor and unexpectedly light texture. We'd been planning to order the dessert-of-the-day (unspecified in the menu) but were forestalled in this by being presented unasked with bowls of sweet red-bean dessert soup (which likely was the dessert-of-the-day). I suspect this was by way of apology for the rather loud wedding party with the malfunctioning sound system in the room next door (we were seated right by the door), although this explanation only occurred to me well after the fact, since we'd found the wedding party more amusing than annoying. Edited to add: The soup actually leapfrogged the crab-and-egg to top spot and I have the assignment of tracking down recipes for it. At the time, I interpreted the basic composition as sweet red beans and chestnuts, but it seems I was mistaken in the second ingredient because most recipes list lotus seeds. More later.
I've been meaning to get caught up on some other reviews, in particular, Alma Alexander's Hidden Queen/Changer of Days not-quite-duology, but it's the end of lunch break, so that will have to wait.
For the rest of the day, I hung out in the 'research for the Perfectly Period Feast (tm)' track. (For the non-local readers, this is an event planned for next Spring's collegium that I've taken to describing as "feast as performance art" where the idea is not only to have the dishes themselves be researched, but the entire physical and behavioral presentation to be equally well researched.)
Since
klwilliams bugged out on the movie plans for Sunday, scotica and I went back to the original notion of seeing The Seeker: The Dark is Rising rather than the new Elizabeth flick. Now I'm a major Susan Cooper fan, and scotica to the best of her recollection hasn't read the series at all. Even having accepted in advance that this movie was not connected with Cooper's story in any but the most trivial "faintly inspired by a vague recollection of" way, and having determined to evaluate it solely on its own independent merits, my conclusion as the credits rolled was that it was the moral equivalent of raping kittens. scotica disagreed. She felt that it wasn't quite as bad as the moral equivalent of raping kittens.To start with, the decision to make the Stanton family transplanted Americans not only wasn't dramatically necessary, but it created a massive sense of confusion in the opening scenes where we're simultaneous being dragged from what gives the impression of being a generic American urban high school and a cluster of clearly American siblings, to quaint rural English village. Except I guess the school was supposed to be English -- for which the American film audience is given zero cues. Absolutely no background explanation is ever given for the American family's presence there -- even the vague hints at 'Daddy's been having trouble holding down a teaching job' provide no useful explanation of why there. (And all this is leaving aside the issue that, in the original book, it was a key characteristic that Will Stanton was of that location and had known the revealed-to-be-supernatural actors all his life. But we aren't comparing this movie to the book. Really we aren't.)
Our young protagonist is left to his own devices far too long before being given critical information -- you'd think that magical mentors would have learned this lesson somewhere along the line from their compatriots' spectacular failures in other storylines. Never leave your child-savior in ignorance of his True Nature a moment longer than absolutely possible. No good will ever come of it. And when Will is made aware of his own status as an Old One and the attendent magic powers, the most significant use of those powers we are shown is a firey temper tantrum. Thereafter, at all moments when the powers could conceivably be of practical use, they are conveniently forgotten.
And let's talk about that long-lost twin. (I warned you there were massive spoilers.) I can accept that Will's parents Don't Want To Talk about a baby who mysteriously disappeared from his cradle in the first weeks of life. But Will is 14 and his oldest brothers are well into (or past) college age, which means they were quite old enough to have been aware of what was going on. And in all this time nobody has let anything slip about an abducted twin? Nobody? (Now the story I'm curious to hear about is poor little returned-to-his-family Tom Stanton who not only has been a prisoner of The Dark for his first 14 years, but gets a twin brother who not only has been basking in their family's love and support during that time, but is a powerful magician to boot. Talk about sibling rivalry! But I digress.)
And the kitten? What's with the kitten? Was the kitten really necessary? (Note: despite my pronouncement above, only metaphorical kitten-rape is involved in this movie.) Surely having your kid sister about to be hacked up by Viking raiders is sufficient motivation without having her go chasing off after kittens? Oh, and note to the effects people: if you step into a boat that is sitting in the water, there is NO WAY that a person in that boat will be oblivious to your presence. Get a grip.
Alas, my teeth are now gnashed down to nubbins and I must move on. Final judgement: This movie fails to move past "awful" into "so tragically horrible that it's vastly entertaining" (as, for example, the Sarmatian-King-Arthur movie). It's just awful. I think I must now pull Cooper from the bookshelf and rinse my brain off.
The movie wasn't playing in all that many places in the South Bay, so we found ourselves seeing it at the Great Mall of Milpitas. (This is the proper name of the place, not a personal endorsement.) This created an opportunity for a delightful stroll, working up some appetite for dinner, but a distinct lack of attractive shopping opportunities. One forgets how solidly your average mall instantiates the stereotype of California mall life. (Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the highlights of my collegium class was getting to use the verb "instantiate" at least twice in casual conversation!) After a brief consideration of the culinary delights of the Outback Steakhouse, we drove one freeway exit further north to the small strip-mall across the street from the hotel that we've been holding Consonance at for the last several years, which I knew had an abundance of good Asian food.
The Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant offers a delicious alternative to your standard Chinese cuisine. (In response to one of our questions about the dishes, the waiter explained that they specialized in Cantonese, so I guess my ideas about the "default" Chinese menu may be based firmly in Szechuan and the like.) For our usual movie tie-in, we settled on dishes representing the Dark and the Light, with a fluffy crab and egg-white dish representing the latter, and a dish of steamed greens (maybe bok choy? but it looked different) and black mushrooms weighing in for the former. We started with a combination appetizer plate which featured baby octopus, jellyfish, seaweed salad, and some rather bland thinly sliced pork and beef with somewhat vague seasonings. All the dishes were quite tasty, with the jellyfish getting the prize for "dish never before tasted that we were most startled to enjoy" and the crab-and-egg-whites winning the day over the Dark, if only for its very subtle flavor and unexpectedly light texture. We'd been planning to order the dessert-of-the-day (unspecified in the menu) but were forestalled in this by being presented unasked with bowls of sweet red-bean dessert soup (which likely was the dessert-of-the-day). I suspect this was by way of apology for the rather loud wedding party with the malfunctioning sound system in the room next door (we were seated right by the door), although this explanation only occurred to me well after the fact, since we'd found the wedding party more amusing than annoying. Edited to add: The soup actually leapfrogged the crab-and-egg to top spot and I have the assignment of tracking down recipes for it. At the time, I interpreted the basic composition as sweet red beans and chestnuts, but it seems I was mistaken in the second ingredient because most recipes list lotus seeds. More later.
I've been meaning to get caught up on some other reviews, in particular, Alma Alexander's Hidden Queen/Changer of Days not-quite-duology, but it's the end of lunch break, so that will have to wait.
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Date: 2007-10-22 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 08:54 pm (UTC)As for that last line of yours, AARGH! You do realise that now I'll be compulsively checking LJ for the rest of this week...? [wry writer's grin]
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Date: 2007-10-22 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 04:20 am (UTC)