jay_walk

It is summer vacation, by brain is on standby. So here's some more opinion on stuff I read/watched recently.

Master and Commander: good book. A bit slow getting started but once the characters, themes, etc. get established, the time in between battles gets quite entertaining too. (My first thought on the whole thing is "nice, but it's missing dragons". Temeraire is actually very different in tone (easier too), and so much fun. Really, How does one come up with an idea like "this war totally needs more dragons in it", and why am I not having awesome ideas like that?)
And those are some well-written naval battles. I only understand enough to get the general idea of what's happening, but all the same it is riveting. I suppose I'll have to learn something more about ships, and about their artillery. (I presently only know about sailing small boats, which is enough to know what the wind is doing but not to know how 3 masts worth of sails work or how big these different things are).
Then there'S the characters, their relationships, the politics of the time, and odd bits of philosophizing thrown in. Stuff about music I don't understand or particularly care for. I feel like I, as the reader, am not being patronized and the author is not deliberately helping me keep up or understand anything. Which is great. Better too many opportunities for thinking than absolutely no thinking at all. I am regaining faith in entertainment literature.
And there's the science. Stephen Maturin is a naturalist and a surgeon. He is extremely competent, and then he does stuff like bloodletting. I love outdated science and the way things that seem rather ridiculous now were accepted reality sometime too (and mostly worked well enough).
And of course I learn stuff from this. I rather like knowing exactly how that war went. (My history class. Just as we were getting to Napoleon we go on a class trip. A few years ago, just as we were getting to Napoleon the teacher leaves for half a year. So frustrating.)

And there's about 20 of these books. I feel like I'll never run out of something to read ever again.

The movie: Great, but in a different way. Awesome like a movie about british people on a ship in 1800 in a war is awesome. It has all the expected omissions: Aubrey isn't fat, Maturin isn't starved-looking (at least that's how I imagine him), a few of everyone's personal problems understandably omitted in favor of combat...

Stephen Maturin is one of my favorite characters ever. Book version, that is. Movie version is cool too, he also gets really enthusiastic about the local fauna. Not at all the same character though.

Watched that (at about 3 in the morning.)
Certainly one of my favorite movies.
Everything about this is amazing. Characters, setting, everything. The kind of movie where I had a million different things to think every second of it and still don't know what it all means.
As good as the book, but in a completely different way.
Harrison Ford as Deckard, I did not imagine that from the book.
Rachel is essentially like in the book but more so. I was expecting a gratuitous sex scene to mar this otherwise great movie. There wasn't one. Awesome. Perhaps implied, but that was great, it wasn't the typical "make the two leads suddenly kiss because that's the standard procedure for a movie" thing. (Spoilers:)
Rather, Rachel was having exactly the type of facial expression a normal person would have if she just found out she's not real, she doesn't have four more years to live, and suddenly this guy who's technically supposed to kill her starts kissing her neck for no reason. They all have some serious problems and kissing is only making them more messed up. So there's a kissing scene which isn't pointless and annoying.
Pris was confusing in the book and less confusing in the movie, which made it clear she's mostly manipulating Sebastian. The replicants are oddly childlike, maybe they just don't realize it's not nice to be friendly to someone only because they need him.
Roy certainly was different from being the petty and brutish guy in the books. Someone like Frankenstein's monster or Lucifer, getting poetic in between ripping people apart, and it's sort of understandable he's upset at humans.
He and Deckard both kill people for very little reason, it's not a movie with a good side.
The issue of everyone not knowing who's real was more directly discussed in the book and implied in the movie. Both aren't ideal, I was shouting at my book a few times for not taking it far enough with the skepticism.
That ending fight scene was amazing, I still don't know what happened (did Roy just sit down and die?) and even less of what it means. Except he didn't really kill Deckard, and maybe he intended all along to only scare him. Which would make him oddly morally superior. (Except for that time he crushed Tyrell's eyes out, he entirely had his reasons but still that was not the saintly forgiving kind of thing to do.)
Awfully human, really. Not inhuman, superhuman.
The issue of empathy: In the book, it's obvious that that's not a practically valid criterion for humanity, and I don't believe the incident with the spider is as conclusive as the author seems to imply it is either. In the book, it seems to be that it turns out that that's how we can tell they really aren't human. In the movie: they kill more than spiders, but with more motivation than Deckard has.
I am missing the part where Deckard questions what he's doing, and the part where his colleague might be a replicant. Too bad he turned out to be human, too, that would have been interesting if he hadn't been. He was having quite an identity crises and Deckard was having a morality crisis, really that was a wasted plot opportunity.

Everything in that movie looks amazing.
And I'll say it again: the ending, I think it means something really amazing but I don't know what. Inconclusive, but not in a frustrating way. (Inception for example has an annoying and formulaic inconclusive ending). I'll have to watch it a few more times then.
The book also has an epically mystical ending which I don't know what it means, just in a different way, involving some type of spiritual hallucinations and the conclusion that he doesn't mind stuff being fake but he likes to know the truth about it.

Is made purely of cliches. And not in a good way.

Starts rather slowly and disney-movie-like, father-son conversations etc.
Sam Flynn, I do not at all like him. Well, from the character-establishing scenes I thought I was going to hate him for being the arrogant foolish Stu type, but the whole rest of the movie he displayed very little personality at all, so I'm only bored.
The created world: illogically anthropocentric.
The tron look. I saw a small part of the 80s version and it looked so mush better there. Then, the glowing lines were basically all that there was too see (possibly because of the primitive film technology, but I think it looked great). Now, everything (clothes, setting) looks a lot more solid. Like things that actually exist decorated with glowing lines instead of like virtual stuff. The vehicles all looked great for one second right before they solidified.
Halfway through every second scene started coming with that standard "this is an emotionally significant moment" string music. It didn't fit well with the dialogue and action it was with, it was irritatingly distracting.
Positive moment: fight scene in a club with Daft Punk music. The music seemed a bit oddly unfitting to the setting for a moment, but Daft Punk always shuts my thinking off in a pleasant way. I could have watched that for a while given a bigger screen and louder music.
"Clu can't create programs, only destroy or repurpose them"(probably not quoted correctly). I think that's Satan's problem too, or at least I know for sure it's Morgoth's. So, CLU is Lucifer? I am really desperate to find anything of interest in this movie. Rebelling against the creator etc..
Yeah, this was supposed to be an entertainment movie, not a purposeful movie.
Maybe it could be made entertaining by having a drink for every stock phrase uttered.
It vaguely reminds me of The Fifth Element, which is a cliche storm on purpose and meaningless entertainment, quite successfully. Just because they share the element of an odd plastic head covering on and evil person and the same archetype in Quorra and Leeloo. Except it all didn't work out in Tron.

I still want to see the original, though.