Sunday media blogging: Chéri

 1 Response »
Jun 282009
 

I done earned myself some serious Spouse Points this weekend, as I volunteered to go with Samwise to watch a romantic movie based on a classic French novel.  (Sorry; romantic film.)

Despite the fact that nothing blows up, at least not physically, in this movie, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s certainly pretty, and the acting is wonderful. Lea (Michelle Pfeiffer) is beautiful, but the movie makes absolutely no attempt to hide her age, or the physical differences between Lea and her much younger lover. It’s based on a French novel, so of course there is Drama, but it is not stupid drama. One of the reasons I really loathe romances (aside from the lack of boom boom pow and all that) is the creation of artificial obstacles, usually by the device of having the characters act like they have the IQ of warm jellyfish. Here, nobody is stupid – not even Edmee, the very young and innocent wife – and the obstacles are very real, not simply things that would vanish if people stopped being foolish.

Rupert Friend is, of course, the eye candy, but by jingo he can act.  As can everyone else in this movie.  It’s not often that a movie that would be watchable with the sound off is a thousand times better with it on.

 Posted by mythago at 9:31 am

Knew, or should have known

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Jun 272009
 

Since it’s Pride weekend -

When did you know you were queer? Or when, looking back, should you have figured it out?

Some people say they always knew; others figured it out later in life, very suddenly; some of us took a little while to get it all sorted.

I should have known one night when we were at home, for reasons I can’t recall watching the Grammies; I think that my grandmother wanted to see them, and we watched a lot more TV back before the Internets were around.

And then there was this video.

I vaguely remember my family arguing about whether it was a man or a woman – this was the Rust Belt in the 1980s, people, not exactly a hotbed of genderqueer awareness – but I wasn’t paying them any attention. I knew that I was enraptured by the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, even if it took me a long time and a lot of wasted effort to figure out exactly what that meant.

You?

 Posted by mythago at 12:41 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Goodbye, Granny

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Jun 232009
 

My mother called me tonight – I already knew, I think, because there’s no other reason she would be calling me at well-past-bedtime Eastern.

Her mother, my grandmother, my last living grandparent, died in the hospital this morning. It wasn’t terribly unexpected; she was 95, she’s been in pretty ill health for a while and she’s been in the hospital. Still.

I don’t have a clever title.

 Posted by mythago at 9:32 pm

Miracle on Father’s Day

 1 Response »
Jun 212009
 

The Queen, who a) believes her father to be a cruel tyrant with the sole motivation of making her life miserable, and b) hates cooking (up to and including microwaving a TV dinner), spontaneously made breakfast in bed for her dad on Father’s Day.

Okay, it was toast and Grape Nuts, but there was no sarcasm or eye-rolling involved. Best Father’s Day present ever.

 Posted by mythago at 3:59 pm  Tagged with: , ,

SCOTUS: pro and con

 3 Responses »
Jun 162009
 

Pros:

  • Cool architecture.
  • The bench is only slightly raised, instead of being higher than God as is not uncommon in many courts. Apparently the Justices do not have something to prove.
  • Their cafeteria food is actually pretty decent.
  • Marble, and plenty of it.
  • Just admitted Mythago to the Supreme Court bar.

Cons:

  • Supreme Court gift shop contains extremely limited variety of swag.
 Posted by mythago at 2:52 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Sunday entertainment blogging: Up

 1 Response »
Jun 072009
 

I didn’t think this was going to be one of Pixar’s better movies, but you know, from time to time I am wrong.  Well worth paying theater ticket prices to see.

 Posted by mythago at 1:29 pm

It’s okay, honey. We’re safe here in California.

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Jun 042009
 

I love Portland, but it does have that pretentious thing going on, which is also why I love Cat and Girl.

 Posted by mythago at 11:36 pm  Tagged with: ,

The work surpassing the creator

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Jun 042009
 

Ursula LeGuin has a funny essay cautioning against actually meeting the writer behind the breathtaking works of genuis that you love to read, because you might find out that the creative genius is kind of a weirdo who mumbles and has bizarre theories about tungsten poisoning.

Well, Jonathan Tweet just managed to prove LeGuin right. Robin Laws tries to moderate the dumbth of this post a little, but good grid, I thought the “but girls just don’t naturally WANT to play D&D cuz they’re girls!” thing was something most gamers got out of their system after, oh, losing their virginity or so. I didn’t realize there was a kind of middle-aged Saturn Return on this one.

I already commented on Tweet’s blog, but for the slow or LJ-averse: “they just don’t want to” is a convenient excuse. It means never having to think about whether something about, I don’t know, behavior puts females off gaming; much less stressful to pretend instead that was fixed in our genes for all time hundreds of thousands of years ago, as Early Man strode across the savannah with his spear in a Museum of Natural History-approved manner, hunting for wildebeest. (No doubt these thrifty hunters carved primitive 20-siders from animal bone.)

I’m old enough to remember when gaming-store owners gave me funny looks, instead of helping me find the latest Trail of Cthulhu supplement; when I literally had guys crowd around my gaming table at a con staring at me, not because I had a nice rack or killer boots, but because I was a female DM and such a thing had never before been heard of. I rather like not being the only girl in the room. I just wish clueless dorks would quit fucking that up with their half-assed evo-psych intellectual masturbation.

 Posted by mythago at 11:33 pm  Tagged with: , ,
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