Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2023-09-02 09:27 pm
lannamichaels) wrote2023-09-02 09:27 pm
Entry tags:
Books and movie
- Crush by Richard Siken: this poetry collection is so incredibly 2005. I don't know how else to describe it. It is the essence of 2005. The copyright page says 2005 and it's like, yep, it sure is. It's 2005. It won an award in 2004? Very well, I will allow that is also incredibly 2004.
- The Muppets (2011): 1) Based on what I saw of the next film (Muppets Most Wanted), this is much better, especially since it did not make the bizarre choice of sending Kermit to the gulag, good job in not doing that. 2) Wow, this is not the Muppets.
Okay, so, my osmosised knowledge of this film was that it was driven entirely from Jason Segel wanting to be in a Muppet movie, and so he basically did everything he possibly could to get the Muppets doing movies again, so he could be in it, because he loves the Muppets so much. Whether or not this is accurate, I do not know, but watching the movie made me believe this even more.
Jason Segel plays this like the Muppets are the Most Wholesome Children's Entertainment Ever. He is more wholesome than Mr. Rogers is. Not a single emotion goes on his face without him thinking to himself, "I'm in a movie that I've wanted to be in since I was a child, wheeee!!!"
The plot is that Walter, Jason Segel's brother who is a muppet, imprints on the Muppets and ends up getting the band back together to Save The Muppets. Walter himself is a fairly strange character and can only be described as Jason Segel's Character But Happens To Be A Puppet (He's Not Much Of A Muppet).
Amy Adams has nothing to do in this movie. Sorry, Amy Adams. You deserve better.
This isn't a particularly bad movie (Muppets Most Wanted is a bad movie and I only saw maybe 40% of that one) but it's heavily nostalgia-driven and that makes it fail entirely at being The Muppets.
They say never meet your heroes? Well, never become big enough in Hollywood where you can hire your heroes and have them perform as themselves in a self-insert movie out of your childhood dreams and then release it as a film. - All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie: Read off of skygiants's rec. This is excellent. It reads exactly like a translation, keeping its sentence and prose structure to mimic the original, but throwing in various slang or modern terms to convey nuance that's in the original or make it accessible to the reader. The reason you know it's not a translation is because there's no footnotes and no map.
This is one book that could really have used a map. If I'd gone and kept googling what various places corresponded to, I'd probably have gotten more out of the geography. But as I didn't, it still worked fine. It's just, like, you know *handwave* that part of the world. You know. Around there.
The plot is about an Icelandic guy who joins a trading caravan ran by a Jew from Khazaria and ends up in Mongolia where he meets a ghost and also gets horses. There is light narration by the Christian scribe from three hundred years later, named Jor, who is the one actually writing this. The book is completely unsentimental and not interested in emotions, adding even more to its feeling of being in translation and not a book written for the audience of a Tor book.
I feel like this book is both "must a book have plot? Can it not simply be a mood?" and also successfully has a plot, which is well-done in a book that's a hundred pages long.
Does anyone know if this author is in fandom and is open about their username? I was also going to say "if you like Specific Author's fic, you will love this, because it has some of the same mood" but then it occurred to me that I might be unintentionally making a correct connection and outing someone.
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This sounds fascinating.
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I highly recommend not watching that movie!
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Yeah, it has all the hallmarks of Baby's First Self-Insert Fic, in that the self-insert isn't even a fully realized character. I've read so many better self-inserts.