Of a Sunday (walks and TV)
Jun. 11th, 2017 05:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureIt's a stunning Sunday evening: the blue-violet sky is still hours from sunset; in the sunlight white paint is burning like tungsten; and insistent birdsong corkscrews through the still air.
I'm preparing for work tomorrow -- marking, musing, making things up -- and waiting for Episode Six of Twin Peaks to drop. I'm intrigued by "I know where she drinks."
So far, the show is sort of an anthology of experimental film-making techniques. I feel like I'm in a brilliant seminar about the possibilities of visual and sonic form. It has such scope, depth, and weirdness --
[Looks up a bunch of measures of intensity]
-- It rises to the top of the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. The watts per m2 shatter glass. All the candelas are lit and blazing.
Stuff like that.
However -- I'm really unhappy about and disappointed in the way the returning series has dealt so far with the female characters and their physical being. As in, they are always naked and they get killed a lot. You could argue that this might have something to do with the rules of this world and its brutality, or that this trope makes some kind of critical/aesthetic statement -- I hope that's how it turns out, but I suspect laziness.
I'm hoping for a payoff in the end, but I hoped for that with True Detective, too, and I did not get it. (Though I loved many things about the first season of that show.)
Ok, why not -- True Detective.
I felt like with True Detective I finally understood the difference between direction and writing.
The cinematography, the sound design, the actors' chemistry -- amazing.
Yet I think if I had the script in front of me as bare text, it would read weak.
Apart from Rust's arias, which I loved, (I was all like "finally someone on TV who speaks the truth!") the dialogue isn't actually very good -- instead, it's illuminated by the way the words are performed and articulated.
Further, the plot is full of loose threads, and the show raises, then forgets about, all kinds of essential ethical questions, yet the whole always looks and feels like something full of meaning and revelation.
Season 2 -- same writer/showrunner, different directors -- utter pants.
Resolution: Fukunaga, not Pizzolatto, made Season 1 a work of art -- which I think it is, though deeply flawed, and in some of the same ways Season 3 of Twin Peaks seems to be.
Now. I'm just going to walk down to the store for marking/viewing snacks.
My first walk today was a loop down a beat-up minor artery flowing by irregular ways to the sea, then along the ocean and back inland to commit some mundane errands.
The solstice will be here -- then past -- before I can prepare any ceremony worthy of it (and anyway it might be cloudy), so I'll celebrate today. Hurray.
{rf}
I'm preparing for work tomorrow -- marking, musing, making things up -- and waiting for Episode Six of Twin Peaks to drop. I'm intrigued by "I know where she drinks."
So far, the show is sort of an anthology of experimental film-making techniques. I feel like I'm in a brilliant seminar about the possibilities of visual and sonic form. It has such scope, depth, and weirdness --
[Looks up a bunch of measures of intensity]
-- It rises to the top of the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. The watts per m2 shatter glass. All the candelas are lit and blazing.
Stuff like that.
However -- I'm really unhappy about and disappointed in the way the returning series has dealt so far with the female characters and their physical being. As in, they are always naked and they get killed a lot. You could argue that this might have something to do with the rules of this world and its brutality, or that this trope makes some kind of critical/aesthetic statement -- I hope that's how it turns out, but I suspect laziness.
I'm hoping for a payoff in the end, but I hoped for that with True Detective, too, and I did not get it. (Though I loved many things about the first season of that show.)
Ok, why not -- True Detective.
I felt like with True Detective I finally understood the difference between direction and writing.
The cinematography, the sound design, the actors' chemistry -- amazing.
Yet I think if I had the script in front of me as bare text, it would read weak.
Apart from Rust's arias, which I loved, (I was all like "finally someone on TV who speaks the truth!") the dialogue isn't actually very good -- instead, it's illuminated by the way the words are performed and articulated.
Further, the plot is full of loose threads, and the show raises, then forgets about, all kinds of essential ethical questions, yet the whole always looks and feels like something full of meaning and revelation.
Season 2 -- same writer/showrunner, different directors -- utter pants.
Resolution: Fukunaga, not Pizzolatto, made Season 1 a work of art -- which I think it is, though deeply flawed, and in some of the same ways Season 3 of Twin Peaks seems to be.
Now. I'm just going to walk down to the store for marking/viewing snacks.
My first walk today was a loop down a beat-up minor artery flowing by irregular ways to the sea, then along the ocean and back inland to commit some mundane errands.
The solstice will be here -- then past -- before I can prepare any ceremony worthy of it (and anyway it might be cloudy), so I'll celebrate today. Hurray.
{rf}
