Last night, I watched The Master, which…I just don’t know. Most of the acting is terrific, even when it’s in service of emotion more than character or plot. Watching the camera hold tight as a range of emotions play out across Joaquin Phoenix’s face is affecting, even if it’s sometimes difficult to understand what he’s saying or what exactly is playing out between the characters. I don’t know that I could say I enjoyed it, but I also don’t know that it’s a movie designed to be enjoyed in quite that way. There is a lot to like about it, however, and I’m glad I watched it.
I wish I could say the same for last week’s episode of Community, which I also watched. The week before, with their “puppet episode,” the show really seemed to finally cross the line into unwitting parody of itself — the sort of thing that, on the surface, is exactly the sort of thing the show’s fans say we love. Didn’t we all love Abed’s Christmas episode, where they all turn into stop-motion animation? Well, yes, but not because of that. Here, this year, it was all surface, and the execution left so much to be desired. This week, though…it was just trying way too hard for very few laughs. It goes off in a direction I really, really hope isn’t the season’s end game, and just feels like an empty shell of the show I used to love.
I also watched an episode of the Syfy Channel show Continuum, which surprised me by being pretty decent. It’s on Netflix now, and full of time-travely intrigue, so I’ll probably keep watching. Earlier in the week, I’d watched the first episode of their newer show Defiance…which you can sort of tell came into being simultaneously with a video game set in the same universe. The show — and I don’t necessarily mean this as a bad thing — is like one long cut-scene that the game developers forgot to stop rolling. I liked that the show doesn’t spend a lot of time on exposition…and yet, at the same time, I actually kind of wanted more, which is a rarity in the genre. The show has a deep back-story that it’s not all that great at explaining.
Sometimes that’s for the good. I get stories all the time for Kaleidotrope, for instance, where the narrator spends several pages just explaining how the world he or she inhabits got like it is — “in 2071 the robots took over” or whatever — to an audience who’s theoretically also in that world. Unless they’re explicitly leaving a document for the future, there’s no reason for them to assume the reader is unfamiliar with the world too. It’s tricky, of course, because the actual reader is unfamiliar with it, so some exposition is going to be needed. But it’s a lot better to show the world through observed detail than to lay it out as “this happened, then that happened.”
While I like that Defiance just kind of lets its world be — its characters don’t need every alien explained — it’s not impossible to get a little lost.
And of course, all that being said, while I found some things to like about the show, I’m not desperate to revisit it. As a fan of Farscape, I enjoyed seeing the name Rockne S. O’Bannon among the creators…but the man’s also been responsible for some clunkers (like SeaQuest). But we’ll see.
Then there was the new Doctor Who, which was a significant improvement over the past couple of weeks. If nothing else, it was nice to see the show being genuinely scary for a while.
And then today, I went to see Oblivion. It’s okay, passable entertainment.
And somewhere in all that — it really wasn’t all that, and it was actually right before the movie — I wrote this:
The war, if you could call it that, only lasted ten hours. But after that, we spent a whole week picking bomb fragmentation out of the northern wall, salvaging what we could and repairing damage wherever salvage was not an option. Mad King Helfud’s forces had been easily repelled, driven back into the wastes, or driven to their collective knees, and most of the dead who were left behind were the king’s own famed shadowtooth brigade. These were supposedly the finest soldiers the frozen death lands to the north of us had ever seen, if you were to believe Helfud’s own incessant ravings, but that hadn’t stopped our armies from trailing them from as far back as the Tsirich Sea, or Helfud himself from rotting in our dungeons once those armies actually engaged him and his soldiers in battle. The shadowteeth had been pulled, that’s what everyone was saying; and though I thought some of the young lads belabored the metaphor — our armies were the dentist, the field of battle the bloody, tooth-freed gums — there was little doubt throughout the kingdom that we had been victorious.
And yet, that wall wasn’t going to repair itself.
It was almost surprising how much damage one madman could do in less than half a day. And I suppose the loyalty he inspired in his troops — if not the fear they say lurks deeper in his subjects’ tired eyes — was remarkable, even inspiring, after a fashion. I sometimes wish I could inspire half that much loyalty in the layabout boys they send me to till the gardens or pull the weeds…or repair the walls. Bur I am a humble groundskeeper, not a tyrant, and while Helfud may indeed look resplendent in his northern gold, I know as well as anyone that it was bought for with the blood and bones of those who — till now at least — had dared defy him.
Perhaps it was just as well, then, that I had been born to a simpler life. And just as well, too, that Helfud, they say, was to be transported back to Earth.
I don’t know about the sci-fi turn it takes near the end. But there’s definitely the hint of A Game of Thrones in there. Have I mentioned that I’ve started watching it again? I think, actually, that’s what I may go and watch right now.