omg squee.
May. 8th, 2009 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaI have not yet seen the new Star Trek movie - my whole family's going to see it together tomorrow, natch, we are all Trekkies together - but I love it already, if only because it has sparked a whole lot of reruns of other Star Trek movies on TV. SciFi showed First Contact yesterday (and is showing it right now, actually, I think), which I kind of love, even if the Borg Queen's twitching spine gives me the creeps.
This is probably not going to be great meta, because I'm biased. I freely admit it. I have been watching Star Trek since before I fully understood what a television show was; it is less a fannish interest than it is simply a reality. I'm not kidding. I have an entry in my diary from when I was seven years old discussing the pilot episode of Star Trek: Voyager. I'm most familiar with TNG and DS9, but I have read the TOS compendium back-to-front more than once; the only Star Trek I don't have a pretty good grasp on is Enterprise.
TNG, though, is the Star Trek of my heart. It's the one I've watched most, and the one I know best, and I'm probably incapable of any really good analysis of it on issues of gender and race, because I just love it so much. Geordi was always one of my favorite characters, which I will admit was partly because he was the Reading Rainbow guy, and I loved Reading Rainbow; I used to take my mother's hair-clips, the funny curved alligator-toothed ones, and put them over my eyes, pretending I had a VISOR. Troi, I liked because she had long, dark hair, and so did I; looking back now, yeah, okay, some of her uniforms were really ridiculous, and she got some pretty terrible lines - but then most of them did, especially during the first season and change.
As for Star Trek: First Contact, well. I have a mad girl-crush on Lily, and she got a number of what I think are the best lines in the movie; Troi got a fair bit of snark, and also got to get adorably drunk, and the little snippets of her friendship with Riker made me smile like an idiot; and Crusher's conversation with the EMH is one of my favorite parts.
So the only gender meta I'm going to be any good for has to do with the Borg Queen and Picard. Yes, it grates in a number of ways to make the villainous woman hypersexualized, and they certainly didn't spare either overt or covert skeeve in illustrating her relationships to Picard and Data both. But the sexualized text and subtext were interesting in other ways: the text is that she violated Picard's mind and body with cybertech, with a subtext of female-to-male rape, which is a little unusual. Granted, this plays into the powerful-sexy-woman-is-evil trope, but I do think it qualifies as somewhat non-standard to portray the hero of a sci-fi flick as a victim of rape who is attempting - and failing, in a few places - to deal with the trauma of the experience. Especially an older man in a position of social and martial authority. That was an interesting thing to notice upon rewatching.
I also found myself suddenly drawn back into Tin Man, for no particular reason. The first time I watched it, I immediately started shipping Glitch/Cain. Glitch's fight scene, plus the exchange about him saving Cain from hypothermia - because fandom has taught me where that always leads - and I was sold.
Obviously there are problems with that source text - making the only character of color a servant and part-time traitor who shapeshifts into a dog (and is called related names because of it) was ... a mistake, I think, to put it very lightly. However, I did like the ways in which the original story got twisted around and re-imagined - the backstories for Cain and Glitch and Raw, what happened to Azkadellia, Ahamo, and all that. However, I do wish they'd made it a full-on AU retelling, instead of sticking the real Dorothy Gale in there and making it something that happened x number of years after the original story. I think it would have worked a lot better that way.
I recognized Callum Keith Rennie almost instantaneously, and pretty much entirely from Due South icons, as I have never actually watched even a single episode of Due South. I did look up caps once, the first time I realized that whole buddy-breathing thing was actually from canon, but that's about it. It was a very peculiar experience, knowing his face so unbelievably well without actually having watched anything he's been in. Also, the musical theme is extremely reminiscent of the music from the opening credits of SG-1; there's one batch of notes that's exactly the same, as far as I can tell, and then it diverges. It was driving me crazy for the first hour or so.
All told, it's been a very fannish couple of days. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to ease my way back into the real world this weekend, so that I can get everything relating to my thesis research sorted before my job starts. Augh.
ETA: I forgot to add a couple other commentaries. I did what could perhaps be termed some excessive movie-watching today. First Contact was yesterday, and Tin Man I'm just bibbling a few notes about because it was on my mind today, not because I watched it.
What I did watch today was:
Tristan &/+ Isolde. IMDb uses "+", but that might be because it has some kind of issue with using the ampersand symbol in titles, I don't know. Anyway, it was ... watchable? I don't know, I walked away with the general impression that it was kind of hilarrible. Not that there aren't moments of awesome to be had in something that is approximately 50% James Franco with long hair being sweaty and dirty and fighting people with swords by volume, but.
Sophia Myles and James Franco were both ridiculously pretty, although there were times when James Franco's hair was kind of working against him. Whoever the guy playing Melot was, he was beautiful, and there were pretty much NO moments when his hair was working against him. I mean, damn. I think he was the same guy who played Humphrey in Stardust, he looked vaguely familiar, but he was even prettier in this. Melot and Tristan had a fair amount of brothers-but-not half-envious tension that involved a lot of gripping each other's biceps and staring at each other, so, needless to say, I started shipping them on about the first five minutes' worth of their canon interaction. Partly, I couldn't resist the pretty, and partly, I just found Tristan and Isolde annoying.
Individually, I like them. I'm a little sick of the oh-noes-an-arranged-marriage trope as motivation for female characters in movies like this, but I liked that Isolde was kind of a book nerd, and that she was decent about keeping up pretenses with Marke. And Tristan was that kind of Big Damn Hero type that I tend to go for, all noble and spending all of his time and energy fighting for the dream of a united England - which wouldn't be under himself, but under Marke, to whom he is unendingly loyal. It's the same kind of dynamic that exists between Belisarius and Justinian in the Oblique Approach books, except Marke actually deserves Tristan's loyalty.
But together? Blegh. I like love stories, I am all over true and pure and inseparable lovers, but this story felt really selfish to me. Isolde is married to Marke in order to help stop a war, as a step on the way to that dream of uniting England; the love between Tristan and Isolde is thus set up in opposition to that dream, and so all I could think every time Tristan and Isolde snuck off to mack or held hands in the marketplace was, "... and the deaths on both sides that will pretty much undoubtedly result if you guys are caught at this don't matter to EITHER of you? REALLY? ... I kind of hate you both."
So that was the terrible half of the hilarrible; the hilarious part was a combination of some of the lines with the transparency of parts of the plot. As soon as I learned that Tristan was going to fight as Marke's champion in the tournament, I pretty much knew exactly where the movie was going after that, even without the help of the brief unit on "Tristan et Iseult" that we did in one of my French classes.
And then there was also Casanova. I've seen this movie before; it's squishy and fun to watch, if not exactly a work of genius. I really like Francesca Bruni, she has a lot of moments of awesome. I also found some aspects of it very pleasing, in a meta sense: that Bishop Pucci and his cronies would think it natural and obvious that Casanova was Bernardo Guardi because both of them "glorify women", and are unable to perceive that their attitudes are actually - as Francesca points out during a conversation with Casanova - diametrically opposed strikes me as ... actually pretty feminist. Go figure.
And, of course, Charlie Cox was awesome. I love him as Tristan in Stardust, and he was adorable here - where he was also trying to win the love of a woman named Victoria, as it happens.
I also liked the treatment of Paprizzio; instead of staying dreadful and one-note, he fell in love with Francesca's mother, and by the end, I liked him very much, which is unusual for the men on the wrong end of the oh-noes-an-arranged-marriage trope. (The guy on the wrong end of it for Isolde? Died.)
... That ETA was crazy long, yikes. I can really yammer when I get going, I guess. :D
This is probably not going to be great meta, because I'm biased. I freely admit it. I have been watching Star Trek since before I fully understood what a television show was; it is less a fannish interest than it is simply a reality. I'm not kidding. I have an entry in my diary from when I was seven years old discussing the pilot episode of Star Trek: Voyager. I'm most familiar with TNG and DS9, but I have read the TOS compendium back-to-front more than once; the only Star Trek I don't have a pretty good grasp on is Enterprise.
TNG, though, is the Star Trek of my heart. It's the one I've watched most, and the one I know best, and I'm probably incapable of any really good analysis of it on issues of gender and race, because I just love it so much. Geordi was always one of my favorite characters, which I will admit was partly because he was the Reading Rainbow guy, and I loved Reading Rainbow; I used to take my mother's hair-clips, the funny curved alligator-toothed ones, and put them over my eyes, pretending I had a VISOR. Troi, I liked because she had long, dark hair, and so did I; looking back now, yeah, okay, some of her uniforms were really ridiculous, and she got some pretty terrible lines - but then most of them did, especially during the first season and change.
As for Star Trek: First Contact, well. I have a mad girl-crush on Lily, and she got a number of what I think are the best lines in the movie; Troi got a fair bit of snark, and also got to get adorably drunk, and the little snippets of her friendship with Riker made me smile like an idiot; and Crusher's conversation with the EMH is one of my favorite parts.
So the only gender meta I'm going to be any good for has to do with the Borg Queen and Picard. Yes, it grates in a number of ways to make the villainous woman hypersexualized, and they certainly didn't spare either overt or covert skeeve in illustrating her relationships to Picard and Data both. But the sexualized text and subtext were interesting in other ways: the text is that she violated Picard's mind and body with cybertech, with a subtext of female-to-male rape, which is a little unusual. Granted, this plays into the powerful-sexy-woman-is-evil trope, but I do think it qualifies as somewhat non-standard to portray the hero of a sci-fi flick as a victim of rape who is attempting - and failing, in a few places - to deal with the trauma of the experience. Especially an older man in a position of social and martial authority. That was an interesting thing to notice upon rewatching.
I also found myself suddenly drawn back into Tin Man, for no particular reason. The first time I watched it, I immediately started shipping Glitch/Cain. Glitch's fight scene, plus the exchange about him saving Cain from hypothermia - because fandom has taught me where that always leads - and I was sold.
Obviously there are problems with that source text - making the only character of color a servant and part-time traitor who shapeshifts into a dog (and is called related names because of it) was ... a mistake, I think, to put it very lightly. However, I did like the ways in which the original story got twisted around and re-imagined - the backstories for Cain and Glitch and Raw, what happened to Azkadellia, Ahamo, and all that. However, I do wish they'd made it a full-on AU retelling, instead of sticking the real Dorothy Gale in there and making it something that happened x number of years after the original story. I think it would have worked a lot better that way.
I recognized Callum Keith Rennie almost instantaneously, and pretty much entirely from Due South icons, as I have never actually watched even a single episode of Due South. I did look up caps once, the first time I realized that whole buddy-breathing thing was actually from canon, but that's about it. It was a very peculiar experience, knowing his face so unbelievably well without actually having watched anything he's been in. Also, the musical theme is extremely reminiscent of the music from the opening credits of SG-1; there's one batch of notes that's exactly the same, as far as I can tell, and then it diverges. It was driving me crazy for the first hour or so.
All told, it's been a very fannish couple of days. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to ease my way back into the real world this weekend, so that I can get everything relating to my thesis research sorted before my job starts. Augh.
ETA: I forgot to add a couple other commentaries. I did what could perhaps be termed some excessive movie-watching today. First Contact was yesterday, and Tin Man I'm just bibbling a few notes about because it was on my mind today, not because I watched it.
What I did watch today was:
Tristan &/+ Isolde. IMDb uses "+", but that might be because it has some kind of issue with using the ampersand symbol in titles, I don't know. Anyway, it was ... watchable? I don't know, I walked away with the general impression that it was kind of hilarrible. Not that there aren't moments of awesome to be had in something that is approximately 50% James Franco with long hair being sweaty and dirty and fighting people with swords by volume, but.
Sophia Myles and James Franco were both ridiculously pretty, although there were times when James Franco's hair was kind of working against him. Whoever the guy playing Melot was, he was beautiful, and there were pretty much NO moments when his hair was working against him. I mean, damn. I think he was the same guy who played Humphrey in Stardust, he looked vaguely familiar, but he was even prettier in this. Melot and Tristan had a fair amount of brothers-but-not half-envious tension that involved a lot of gripping each other's biceps and staring at each other, so, needless to say, I started shipping them on about the first five minutes' worth of their canon interaction. Partly, I couldn't resist the pretty, and partly, I just found Tristan and Isolde annoying.
Individually, I like them. I'm a little sick of the oh-noes-an-arranged-marriage trope as motivation for female characters in movies like this, but I liked that Isolde was kind of a book nerd, and that she was decent about keeping up pretenses with Marke. And Tristan was that kind of Big Damn Hero type that I tend to go for, all noble and spending all of his time and energy fighting for the dream of a united England - which wouldn't be under himself, but under Marke, to whom he is unendingly loyal. It's the same kind of dynamic that exists between Belisarius and Justinian in the Oblique Approach books, except Marke actually deserves Tristan's loyalty.
But together? Blegh. I like love stories, I am all over true and pure and inseparable lovers, but this story felt really selfish to me. Isolde is married to Marke in order to help stop a war, as a step on the way to that dream of uniting England; the love between Tristan and Isolde is thus set up in opposition to that dream, and so all I could think every time Tristan and Isolde snuck off to mack or held hands in the marketplace was, "... and the deaths on both sides that will pretty much undoubtedly result if you guys are caught at this don't matter to EITHER of you? REALLY? ... I kind of hate you both."
So that was the terrible half of the hilarrible; the hilarious part was a combination of some of the lines with the transparency of parts of the plot. As soon as I learned that Tristan was going to fight as Marke's champion in the tournament, I pretty much knew exactly where the movie was going after that, even without the help of the brief unit on "Tristan et Iseult" that we did in one of my French classes.
And then there was also Casanova. I've seen this movie before; it's squishy and fun to watch, if not exactly a work of genius. I really like Francesca Bruni, she has a lot of moments of awesome. I also found some aspects of it very pleasing, in a meta sense: that Bishop Pucci and his cronies would think it natural and obvious that Casanova was Bernardo Guardi because both of them "glorify women", and are unable to perceive that their attitudes are actually - as Francesca points out during a conversation with Casanova - diametrically opposed strikes me as ... actually pretty feminist. Go figure.
And, of course, Charlie Cox was awesome. I love him as Tristan in Stardust, and he was adorable here - where he was also trying to win the love of a woman named Victoria, as it happens.
I also liked the treatment of Paprizzio; instead of staying dreadful and one-note, he fell in love with Francesca's mother, and by the end, I liked him very much, which is unusual for the men on the wrong end of the oh-noes-an-arranged-marriage trope. (The guy on the wrong end of it for Isolde? Died.)
... That ETA was crazy long, yikes. I can really yammer when I get going, I guess. :D
