Freckles & Doubt (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2012-11-08 06:12 pm
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2012-11-08 06:12 pm
Entry tags:
he sees further than they and he will bind them with ancient logics
It was a slightly madly busy weekend, which I'm only getting around to describing now because I've been spaced and elsewhere all week. Possibly because of actual alien abductions. There certainly seem to be moments when I look up and great tracts of hours at a time have passed without me noticing or actually doing anything in them other than desultorily reading fanfic. (Hilarious fact of the day: the Hawkeye/Coulson slash ship is known as "Bowtie". Hee.)
At any rate, we Salty Crackered on Friday, with mixed results. Then on Saturday we did another installment of the Great Me/Jo LARP-writing pact, which is causing that Wild West LARP to actually be written at a rate currently not one microsecond faster than two hours per week, but that's just under two hours a week more than it's been doing for about the last decade, so score.
Then on Saturday night we movie clubbed. Movie club was Jo's choice, and we watched Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs Evil, which is a strangely inevitable pairing requiring much bolstering of my nerves with booze and a monkey pillow behind which to cower fetchingly because I really don't do gore. Really. And there was a lot of gore. A lot. (Collapses on fainting couch in girly fashion at the mere horrible memory of all the sprays of blood). Cabin in the Woods is, of course, Joss Whedon (fangirlfangirlfangirl*) doing his usual genre-savvy, hyper-aware, meta sort of stuff, with enough panache and general out-thereness that I spent the first half hour of the movie going "WTF is he doing?" in tones of fascinated dread. It's a brilliant (if bloody) script and has a bloody brilliant cast, I'm really enjoying Chris Hemsworth's slightly tongue-in-cheek jock thing, and Fran Kranz is a weird and lateral acting deity all on his own.
And the film, apart from being self-conscious pervy genre-fondling of the most extreme type (and therefore making me very, very happy) is also a beautifully dark and incisive exposition of the night's theme, which was, of course, The True Nature Of Evil. (Jo thinks it was about Horror Cabins In Woods Revisited Ironically, but she's wrong, or at very least less right. If these films do anything, it's to insist that evil isn't what you think it is and, in particular, it may actually be what you're doing when you think you're fighting evil, something the American Republican party would do well to consider. And horror has, after all, absolutely the best box of tropes about confronting evil.) Whedon's take on this is intelligent and pointed enough that it made the efforts along similar (and more slapstick) lines of Tucker and Dale look like the semi-comic hackery I darkly suspect they actually were, Alan Tudyk and some reasonably funny lines notwithstanding. Possibly I am prejudiced against it because of the gratuitous stereotypes. And the woodchipper. Aargh. Woodchipper.
In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that the night's theme was The True Nature Of Evil As Explicated By Oblivious Teens In Gory Horror Cabins In Woods, Revisited Ironically By Joss Whedon And/Or Alumni. But it's a bit of a mouthful.
Sunday morning I did tea in Kirstenbosch with my sister and Da Niece, who just turned seven, good grief, and scored thereby Ursula Vernon art and various subversive works of kiddielit including Dragonbreath, just because. Then Sunday afternoon/evening we trotted out to Fish Hoek for a braai with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rumint in his ceremonial biennial visit to these shores, and it was lovely to catch up. But I am dead this week. Dead. I am not designed by nature to be a happy socialiser in any sort of extended format. And there's book club tonight. Oh, lord. *girds loins*. I love book club and its lovely ladies, but my socio-metre needle is quivering on "full".
At any rate, we Salty Crackered on Friday, with mixed results. Then on Saturday we did another installment of the Great Me/Jo LARP-writing pact, which is causing that Wild West LARP to actually be written at a rate currently not one microsecond faster than two hours per week, but that's just under two hours a week more than it's been doing for about the last decade, so score.
Then on Saturday night we movie clubbed. Movie club was Jo's choice, and we watched Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs Evil, which is a strangely inevitable pairing requiring much bolstering of my nerves with booze and a monkey pillow behind which to cower fetchingly because I really don't do gore. Really. And there was a lot of gore. A lot. (Collapses on fainting couch in girly fashion at the mere horrible memory of all the sprays of blood). Cabin in the Woods is, of course, Joss Whedon (fangirlfangirlfangirl*) doing his usual genre-savvy, hyper-aware, meta sort of stuff, with enough panache and general out-thereness that I spent the first half hour of the movie going "WTF is he doing?" in tones of fascinated dread. It's a brilliant (if bloody) script and has a bloody brilliant cast, I'm really enjoying Chris Hemsworth's slightly tongue-in-cheek jock thing, and Fran Kranz is a weird and lateral acting deity all on his own.
And the film, apart from being self-conscious pervy genre-fondling of the most extreme type (and therefore making me very, very happy) is also a beautifully dark and incisive exposition of the night's theme, which was, of course, The True Nature Of Evil. (Jo thinks it was about Horror Cabins In Woods Revisited Ironically, but she's wrong, or at very least less right. If these films do anything, it's to insist that evil isn't what you think it is and, in particular, it may actually be what you're doing when you think you're fighting evil, something the American Republican party would do well to consider. And horror has, after all, absolutely the best box of tropes about confronting evil.) Whedon's take on this is intelligent and pointed enough that it made the efforts along similar (and more slapstick) lines of Tucker and Dale look like the semi-comic hackery I darkly suspect they actually were, Alan Tudyk and some reasonably funny lines notwithstanding. Possibly I am prejudiced against it because of the gratuitous stereotypes. And the woodchipper. Aargh. Woodchipper.
In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that the night's theme was The True Nature Of Evil As Explicated By Oblivious Teens In Gory Horror Cabins In Woods, Revisited Ironically By Joss Whedon And/Or Alumni. But it's a bit of a mouthful.
Sunday morning I did tea in Kirstenbosch with my sister and Da Niece, who just turned seven, good grief, and scored thereby Ursula Vernon art and various subversive works of kiddielit including Dragonbreath, just because. Then Sunday afternoon/evening we trotted out to Fish Hoek for a braai with
rumint in his ceremonial biennial visit to these shores, and it was lovely to catch up. But I am dead this week. Dead. I am not designed by nature to be a happy socialiser in any sort of extended format. And there's book club tonight. Oh, lord. *girds loins*. I love book club and its lovely ladies, but my socio-metre needle is quivering on "full".
* obligatory