media consumed
Aug. 6th, 2016 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupPenny Dreadful
This has been on my to-watch list for a while, but it just turned up on Netflix a week or so ago. Eva Green is as wonderful as everyone promised, and I am unexpectedly charmed by Josh Hartnett and Billie Piper and their characters.
However, I think I might be done with the show for now. It's dark in a way that's not really appealing to me. The gore, for one thing. I feel like someone's id is very clearly on display, here, but unfortunately it's just a step too far from my id to be enjoyable. :( Also, the lack of women interacting with each other is really sapping my enthusiasm.
Conflict of Honors, by Lee and Miller
This is the first book of the Liaden series that I've read. It's space opera firmly in the Baen vein, which is to say plot and characters over ideas or worldbuilding.
I... did not get on very well with it. It's wish fulfillment in the extreme, with a protagonist who was cast out of her own society and declared dead for being too heroic and powerful, who has been on a spaceship with employers and coworkers who badly mistreated her, who is abandoned on a planet with her record unfairly tarnished, and who is then hired onto the Best Spaceship Ever with the Kindest, Smartest People who see her for Who She Truly Is. I am not generally a person who minds stories about people being nice to each other, but the wholesome healthiness of everyone on this ship was enough to make my skin crawl. It's hard to explain, but it verged on creepy, like the book wouldn't allow these people have any flaws beyond "working too hard" and "caring too much."
Also, there is canon femslash, but it's a benefits-between-friends kind of thing that's so inconsequential that the book doesn't bother to tell us when it stops; we only assume it has because the protagonist has become so thoroughly fascinated by the captain, who is just as extraordinary a person as she is. And so the two really special people on the ship fall in love with each other, of course.
It is hard to articulate why exactly I bounced so hard off this book, when it seems to have so many things I like - female-protagonist SF! Women having adventures! Femslash! But man, I really did.
I'd very interested to hear from other people on this.
For a Good Time, Call... (2012)
Two high-school acquaintances who did not get along end up sharing an apartment and starting their own phone sex line. Recced to me as a sex-positive movie about female friendship. I didn't finish it. :( The comedy was too broad, and some of the specific joke set pieces just didn't work for me at all.
4th Man Out (2015)
A guy comes out to his dudebro friends, who try to be supportive and are really bad at it at first. This was THE CUTEST. I rec it so hard. Obviously YMMV for this kind of subject material, but I felt that the movie touched on a lot of the potential pitfalls of this kind of situation with a really light touch. It's laugh-out-loud funny, the cast is great, everyone is adorable. There's even about five mins of fake-engagement between the protagonist and his BFF.
Also, I think there's going to be a few requests for it for Yuletide this year, judging from discussion I've seen elsewhere.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. (
DW replies)
This has been on my to-watch list for a while, but it just turned up on Netflix a week or so ago. Eva Green is as wonderful as everyone promised, and I am unexpectedly charmed by Josh Hartnett and Billie Piper and their characters.
However, I think I might be done with the show for now. It's dark in a way that's not really appealing to me. The gore, for one thing. I feel like someone's id is very clearly on display, here, but unfortunately it's just a step too far from my id to be enjoyable. :( Also, the lack of women interacting with each other is really sapping my enthusiasm.
Conflict of Honors, by Lee and Miller
This is the first book of the Liaden series that I've read. It's space opera firmly in the Baen vein, which is to say plot and characters over ideas or worldbuilding.
I... did not get on very well with it. It's wish fulfillment in the extreme, with a protagonist who was cast out of her own society and declared dead for being too heroic and powerful, who has been on a spaceship with employers and coworkers who badly mistreated her, who is abandoned on a planet with her record unfairly tarnished, and who is then hired onto the Best Spaceship Ever with the Kindest, Smartest People who see her for Who She Truly Is. I am not generally a person who minds stories about people being nice to each other, but the wholesome healthiness of everyone on this ship was enough to make my skin crawl. It's hard to explain, but it verged on creepy, like the book wouldn't allow these people have any flaws beyond "working too hard" and "caring too much."
Also, there is canon femslash, but it's a benefits-between-friends kind of thing that's so inconsequential that the book doesn't bother to tell us when it stops; we only assume it has because the protagonist has become so thoroughly fascinated by the captain, who is just as extraordinary a person as she is. And so the two really special people on the ship fall in love with each other, of course.
It is hard to articulate why exactly I bounced so hard off this book, when it seems to have so many things I like - female-protagonist SF! Women having adventures! Femslash! But man, I really did.
I'd very interested to hear from other people on this.
For a Good Time, Call... (2012)
Two high-school acquaintances who did not get along end up sharing an apartment and starting their own phone sex line. Recced to me as a sex-positive movie about female friendship. I didn't finish it. :( The comedy was too broad, and some of the specific joke set pieces just didn't work for me at all.
4th Man Out (2015)
A guy comes out to his dudebro friends, who try to be supportive and are really bad at it at first. This was THE CUTEST. I rec it so hard. Obviously YMMV for this kind of subject material, but I felt that the movie touched on a lot of the potential pitfalls of this kind of situation with a really light touch. It's laugh-out-loud funny, the cast is great, everyone is adorable. There's even about five mins of fake-engagement between the protagonist and his BFF.
Also, I think there's going to be a few requests for it for Yuletide this year, judging from discussion I've seen elsewhere.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. (
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Date: 2016-08-07 12:19 am (UTC)...that said, I admit I read Conflict of Honors early enough in life that I absolutely LURVED it. Once I got over the fact that it had "teh ghey" in it. Ah, youth.
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Date: 2016-08-07 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-07 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-08 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 03:04 am (UTC)