Wednesday grab bag

[bironic]

News: Excited to see Joshua Oppenheimer (who made the brilliant documentary The Act of Killing; the next film from that project is coming out soon here) and Alison Bechdel (of the Bechdel test) on the list of MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipients this morning.

Music: Tuned in to my favorite NYC folk & indie station yesterday because the office was noisy, and promptly picked up some new favorite songs. Now listening to Hozier's From Eden on repeat. Love the chord progression in the chorus, especially when he adds harmony at 2:09.

Movies: I keep meaning to do proper posts about these. That doesn't seem to want to happen. So:

- I really enjoyed Tiger Eyes, based on a Judy Blume novel I actually hadn't read. It may not be anything new, but it's an earnest movie about being young and powerless and misunderstood and frustrated and dealing with grief and growing up and maybe falling in love, and it struck some chords with me, even not having gone through an experience as difficult as the main character's. There was this one scene with her little brother that achieved that special move feat of making the simplest domestic event feel like a universal tragedy. Also nice that she broke out of the white bubble of her town and school. I think the movie did a decent job of featuring Native American characters and actors without exoticizing them. As the review linked above pointed out, it was kind of mind-bending to watch a soon-to-be-deceased Russell Means and his son Tatanka play... a dying father and his son.

- While I enjoyed the experience of sitting through Guardians of the Galaxy well enough, the more I thought about it afterwards, the more disenchanted I felt. The complaints list would take more time than I want to spend right now, so here are some points in its favor: the makeup, a space movie with a multitude of cultures, Vin Diesel, a character who takes things literally and has fun diction, Benicio del Toro being weird. I mean, the moviemakers did everything in their power to make viewers like Groot, so it doesn't even feel like it required work on my part to "decide" to like Groot. *shrug* I'm glad people are having fun in the fandom, though.

Here, have an article that tries a little too hard to read Groot as an environmental allegory.

Fic: Does reading this stuff make me feel angsty, or do I gravitate toward it because I'm feeling angsty, or do they feed on each other? Whichever, I was re-re-reading that old Hermione/Remus WIP and poked around on the AO3 again in case something new had appeared.

Ended up browsing Remus/Tonks, a pairing I'd never really explored before. No surprise that penknife's stories were great; I read Worldly Goods (actually, more [past] Remus/Sirius than Remus/Tonks) and Easy to start. Right now I'm enjoying Grow in the Openings by mindabbles, which has Remus/Tonks in it but is really Remus/Sirius. It's nice.

Checked out the Twelve/Clara tag (Doctor Who), too. Not much there yet, unsurprisingly. It may be tough to find what I'm looking for even as the collection fleshes out; in addition to having strong personalities and voices, there's a certain frisson they've got, a certain way I'd want to see the tension break into action, that I can't even quite articulate yet but is often hard to find in pairings that don't have a large volume of fic, because half the stories seem to be well-written, well-characterized, non-explicit or gen fic and the other half seem to be generic or OOC jump-right-into-it sex. Not that I don't also love those categories; it's just that sometimes you want something that combines the best of both. For now, Into the Deep by kassrachel will do just fine.

Any recs for any of the above media?

Comments

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

♥

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Oh, and re OOC jump-right-into-it sex, I am so tempted to do something with that line from the most receipt episode -- the one where he plunges her hands into the TARDIS' telepathic matrix and then tells her not to think of anything rude because it would wind up on all of the screens. God, somebody has to do something with that. The possibilities are so delicious.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

That was so -- mm, shivery disturbing sexy all mixed together. Like, I've had nightmares about people using devices to see shameful things in my brain, and that scene brought it all right back, but with a splash more deliciousness.

And then later when they edited the scene to make it look like he was watching Clara and Pink with a TARDIS camera...! Clip it out of context and you barely need to do any work to make it fill a "voyeurism" square for Kink Bingo.

[daasgrrl.livejournal.com]

1. Groot is just a variation on Swamp Thing (whom I love - ha, I just remembered that you already know that *g*)

2. Regarding GotG's flaws (well, at least one of them), I think you would enjoy this article: http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/

[bironic.livejournal.com]

2) Yes, that would be one of the complaints! Thanks, that was a nice addition to the Strong Female Character takedown collection.

1) I do recall this. My image of Crystal City is forever shaped by a certain fic. :D