#i admit i gawained him a little bit. and i morganed the fay.

[bisclavret]

part 1 of sir gwaine quits his job is up on ao3!

[jadelotusflower]

Roundup - November 2021

This month: The Remains of the Day, The Sixth Wife, The Babysitters Club (season 2), The Green Knight, Squid Game, Free Guy, Official Secrets, Wonder Woman 1984, Tick Tick Boom

Reading

The Remains of the Day (Kazou Ishiguro) - I love the film but have never read the source material, and honestly it was such a bittersweet read and I very much recommend it. If Downton Abbey is the quintessential rosy-eyed glorification of the British class system, The Remains of the Day is the restrained yet striking critique of it. Told entirely through the pov and reminiscing of Stevens, who has devoted his life to serving the Lord of Darlington Hall, waxes lyrical about dignity and what it means to be a great butler on his way to visit one time colleague Miss Kenton (with whom he is in love, hut has never been able to admit it).

There is a pomposity in Stevens, and yet Ishiguro does not make him a figure of fun - rather the prose deftly elicits sympathy for him, a tragic figure as he slowly unravels and realises his life of service and restraint has meant little as it has subsumed his very identity, leaving him little to enjoy in the evening of his life.

Katherine Parr: The Sixth Wife (Alison Weir) - I've read all the preceding books in this series about the six wives of Henry VIII and enjoyed them - Weir's prose is certainly nothing to write home about, and she's had some odd takes (the Anne of Cleves book was certainly...a thing), but the details of the day to day Tudor life is one of her strengths (it is very obvious she is a historian turned novelist, not the other way around).

Despite being the one who "survived" Katherine Parr didn't much get to enjoy the aftermath of being the final wife - in love with but betrayed by odious child molester Thomas Seymour and dying in childbirth (Weir posits a partially retained placenta) less than three years after Henry. Still, it’s engaging enough and a fitting end to the series.

Watching

The Green Knight (dir. David Lowery) - Was finally able to watch this after waiting an absolute age - I know the reactions have been somewhat divisive, but as someone with an appreciation for but no strong attachment to the original tale, I really enjoyed it. It’s really an atmospheric, mood piece and the most beautifully shot film I’ve seen for a long time (every frame is art), and Dev Patel is just so regal and beautiful even if Gawain is a wastrel on a subverted hero’s journey. In interesting choice is for this to rely entirely upon foreknowledge of Arthurian legend, and yet refuses to actually name anyone - Sean Harris is billed as the King, even if we know it’s Arthur, Sarita Choudhury as Gawain’s mother is simply Mother rather than Morgan Le Fay (not Morgause, apparently).   

I’ve seen accusations of style over substance, and there certainly is a lot of style, but it’s also dense in metaphor and meaning - albeit delivered with deliberate ambiguity and requiring genuine work by the viewer to answer for themselves the questions raised - was the Green Knight summoned by Gawain’s mother to make him king, or send him on the quest to become a knight? Gawain fails every test until the last one - but is everyone he meets along the way versions of the Green Knight, his mother (or perhaps both), or projections of his own failings/flaws? Is his final fate to accept his death/punishment, and die a knight rather than live a coward (accepting in return the fatal blow he chose to deliver rather than a scratch), or to (as in the original tale) be given a reprieve and return to Camelot a good man? Throw in man vs nature, good vs great, the value vs cost of chivalry, and you’ve got a lot to parse in this film.

It does require attention even if seemingly little is happening on screen, and I do feel like I missed quite a bit (my very bad habit of sometimes scrolling through my phone while watching) - but I’ve been really interested by doing a deep dive on various interpretations and feel it will certainly benefit from rewatching.

Ultimately, though, I think this is a film based on what you bring to it, rather than take away. Or rather, akin to Gawain’s bargain with the Lord (nice to see you, Joel Edgerton!) and the rules of the Green Knight’s game, the viewer must return what is given - and it’s really up to us what that is.

The Babysitters Club (season 2) - I loved this just as much as the first season - this show is just brimming with the genuine love and care of writers for the source material, able to dip into the nostalgia well and yet also update for a modern audience. I never thought an adaptation would work as anything other than a 90's pastiche but I was wrong - almost every adaptive choice in this series is pitch perfect (although I am sad they have excised Shannon Kilbourne), in many ways improving on the original books I absorbed as a child. The parentals aren't just one note figures, but often the highlight! In particular Marc Evan Jackson (the notecards!) as Richard Spier and Mark Feuerstein as (charming doof) Watson Brewer continue to delight, and new addition this season Brandee Steger as Janice Ramsey has a great scene and I wish we'd seen more of her. With so many characters to juggle, along with their home lives and guest babysitting plots, my one criticism is the show needs room to breathe beyond eight episodes.

But am just so impressed with the young actresses who are really just embodying these characters (although their dialogue at times has that Dawson's Creek-esque meta maturity), I do hope they continue making this and allow these characters to achieve what their static book counterparts never did - age into high school students, since let’s be frank, a great deal of the later novels had absolutely ludicrous plot unbelievable involving 13 year olds, and would work much better for mid and upper teens.  

Squid Game (season 1) - What to say about this show that hasn't already been said? I appreciated it (since enjoy seems to be the wrong word, given the subject matter) - it's compelling and disturbing and artistic allegory. I didn't mind either of the reveals at the end (they were hardly surprising), but they both felt somewhat anticlimactic - one in particular needed greater exploration because it felt like a very hasty wrapping up of what was a pretty big subplot, and if that was all there is, why spend so much time on it? Perhaps it will be addressed if there's another season, but to be honest I think overall it works better as a standalone series.

But it's so heavy and terrifyingly realistic despite the fantastical nature of the premise that it does make me uncomfortable to see the gleeful engagement of some of the surrounding fandom - Halloween costumes of the guards and contestants for example, reminiscent of the tone deaf marketing around The Hunger Games with "Capitol" eye shadow ranges and other such nonsense. Events where you can "play the Squid Games for real!" seem so completely obtuse and Missing the Point I find it all very disturbing - on a meta level, we're not that far from the odious VIPs.

But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.

Free Guy (dir. Shawn Levy) - And now for something completely different. I mean, there's something to be said for being able to switch off your brain and watch something that isn't necessarily good, but mildly entertaining. The plot is fairly thin - Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is an NPC (non-player character) in a popular online game where he exists only as fodder for the players who rampage through the city setting, but seems to gain sentience after a chance encounter with Millie (Jodie Comer, if you can believe it), who wrote the original source code for a utopia-style interactive experience she’s sure was stolen by CEO Antwan (Taika Watiti at full improv) to create Free City, and spends her days in the game searching for it. There’s also plenty on gaming in-jokes that I’m sure I didn’t get and cameos by gaming streamers who I don’t know.

It’s not wildly funny, and it doesn’t really seem to have anything in particular to say (there’s a stab at the ramifications of AI developing free will but it doesn’t really go anywhere profound), but hey, it’s a perfectly enjoyable way to spend two hours without having to think.

Official Secrets (dir. Gavin Hood) - An excellent film fraught with tension, about events I had no knowledge of until now - the story of whistleblower Katherine Gun, who in 2003 leaked a memo detailing a US/UK plot to spy on (and possibly blackmail) UN diplomats into supporting the invasion of Iraq, and was subsequently charged under the Official Secrets Act. I find Keira Knightley hit or miss as an actress, but very much enjoyed her in this role and she really carries the film, although the supporting cast is also uniformly excellent, including Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans, and Ralph Fiennes.

A timely reminder of a shameful period of recent history, the illegitimacy of war, and the secrets kept from and lies told to the public to pursue political agendas. I really recommend this one.

Wonder Woman 1984 (dir. Patty Jenkins) -  Finally got around to seeing this after hearing ad nauseam that it’s terrible, the worst movie ever, etc, and honestly I feel in pop culture an idea forms around a piece of work as The Worst that there’s very little nuance in the ongoing discussion (see: the Matrix Sequels, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call).

I…didn’t think this movie was that bad? Let’s be clear, it wasn’t good - it’s overwrought, at least 40 minutes too long, and there’s seriously questionable story choices, namely Steve inhabiting the body of some dude who is where exactly while Steve is using his body to have sex with Diana and put himself in mortal peril? But who cares…certainly not Steve or Diana! Why complicate this already complicated plot when we’re talking ancient stone magic that could have easily materialised Steve out of thin air and sidestepped the consent issues. Especially when the immorality of Diana keeping Steve means that this guy is in limbo forever is never even a factor in her (eventual) decision to renounce her wish.

Max Lord and Cheetah pulling double villain duty just overloads the film so neither gets a compelling arc - I would have preferred if they’d just had Barbara/Cheetah as the big bad, or keep the Max Lord plot and set up Barbara as Diana’s ally for now and save Cheetah for a subsequent film, because I really did enjoy their dynamic, it was just undercooked (I do ship them a little bit, at least Diana and dorky!Barbara, the sapphic vibe was there. I mean, she made her laugh again!)

But there were moments in this film that doesn’t make it a complete write off for me - the opening sequence on Themyscira (make a movie about little Diana and the Amazons please!), the Diana/Steve goodbye scene (I cry at the drop of a hat these days, this really got me), and Diana learning to fly.

Tick Tick...BOOM! (dir. Lin-Manuel Miranda) - An adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s musical/rock monologue, i.e. the one he wrote before Rent, about the writing of the musical he wrote before TTB. There’s meta on meta on meta here - reframing Larsen’s own words and music through a posthumous lens - that his greatest success would come not through the work in focus here (the futuristic sci-fi musical Superbia) but the next work Rent, a success Larsen would never see, dying suddenly the night before the off-broadway show premiered. The title and the opening song 30/90 are especially prescient, knowing Larson at the closing of the film has less than five years of life left (not to forget that the show was written in an age when Larson’s friends and colleagues were dying all around him in the middle of the AIDS epidemic).

Miranda brings his encyclopedic knowledge and unabashed, unrestrained love of musical theatre - particularly in the number Sunday, Larsen’s tribute to Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, itself a work about the making of art, packed to the brim with Broadway greats as diner patrons being moved into a tableau by Larson, much as George moves his characters into the final painting in Park - this is art (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande) begetting art (Sunday in the Park with George), begetting art (Tick Tick Boom). Sondheim also makes a voice cameo in the film (depicted earlier by a grizzled Bradley Whitford) leaving an encouraging voicemail, particularly poignant given his recent passing and the fact he re-wrote the dialogue.

This really is a tour de force by Andrew Garfield - he is wonderful and has quite a lovely singing voice, and the songs are pleasant if not quite as memorable as those of Rent - but you can certainly hear the connective tissue in both the lyrics and music. I find Miranda’s screen presence ofttimes cloying but he acquits himself well as director - it’s a little frenetic but never overwhelming, playing around with the framing device - Garfield as Larson on stage performing the work, often inter cutting with flashbacks to the story being told so we never forget this is a work of fiction depicting a work of fiction (the film opens with “this is a true story - except for the parts Jonathan made up”)

I really did find this film quite affecting, as someone who loves musical theatre but for whom Rent would be far down on the list of favourite works (although I do like it) - because ultimately it’s not about the work itself, but the creation, summed up beautifully by Jonathan’s agent Roz (a wonderful, unrecognisable Judith Light):

“You start writing the next one, and after you finish that one, you start on the next. And on and on, and that’s what it means to be a writer, honey”

Writing

Against the Dying of the Light - 6826 words, Chapter 14 posted, Chapter 15 finished and to be posted soon. Finally complete!

2021 is to be the year of finishing unfinished fics (I know I say this every year, but this year it’s somewhat true). I still have the last chapter of The Lady of the Lake to write and post and that’s December’s goal. Turn Your Face to the Sun is also unfinished but I’m a way off that so that will probably get moved to 2022, along with Here I go again (aka my Smallville fic) which will be my focus in January.

I’ve also been making a concerted effort to work on my novel, doing some serious editing on what I’ve already written, which has comprised mainly of taking words out rather than putting them in, so nothing to add to the count yet. My plan is to finish editing part I by the end of the year and really get cracking on finishing the rest of the first draft next year.

So going into December, the yearly totals stand as follows:

Debrief (complete) - 8149

Against the Dying of the Light (complete) - 18802

The Lady of the Lake  - 10261

Here I go again (on my own) - 12948

Turn Your Face to the Sun - 3617

The Faerie Ring (novel, working title) - 1484

Total: 55,261