Finished The Queen’s Gambit. Loved it and hope there might be more, although I’m not 100% sure where they’d take it. I have to admit I found the last ten minutes quite emotional.
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- Mar 2008
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- Tyne 'n' Wear (emphasis on the 'n')
- Dundee Utd, Gladbach, Atleti, Napoli, New Orleans Saints, Elgin City
Olly Alexander/Ritchie looked like a young Tom Hanks. A bit.
And I'm glad for once to see people finishing a series after me (still on The Deuce... Small Axe...Six Feet Under...)Last edited by Felicity, I guess so; 03-03-2021, 07:48.
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Originally posted by Uncle Ethan View PostI have discovered that Disney's new Star offering has every series of Hill Street Blues. I may be gone for some time.
Glad to see that they have a load of Wes Anderson films on there, I've just made a cup of tea and am about to settle down to the Grand Budapest Hotel. Lush.
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Originally posted by Mr Delicieux View PostI've been looking through that, as since subscribing to Disney+ I've only watched the Mandalorian and Wandavision - which I'd seen within the first 4 weeks - so am now effectively paying to catch up with old episodes of the Simpsons.
Glad to see that they have a load of Wes Anderson films on there, I've just made a cup of tea and am about to settle down to the Grand Budapest Hotel. Lush.
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Originally posted by diggedy derek View PostIt's A Sin was really great. I'd be interested in other peoples' takes.
The rest of my post contains many SPOILERS.
In general i don't get on with Russell T Davies. i bailed out quickly from Years and years and the 5-a-day squilogy. To me, what he writes is Young Adult tv, and perhaps because i completely missed out on cultural youngadulthood (to the extent that it even existed in the late 1980s), i just don't get it.
The first couple of episodes of It's a sin reinforced my fears: the set-up is pure YA, Teenagers With Agency doing adventures in a world where the adults are ogres roaring at them one-dimensionally from the wings, brandishing bibles and chintz. (There is the odd fairy-godmother exception, a gentle but powerless figure showing Us Kids how They Grown-Ups ought to be.) The overuse of montage, which you mention, is a YA trope for fast-forwarding through time and bundling character. Mustn't dare to lose the kids' attention! But the key sequence, which recurs in the early episodes, is the gang galloping through the corridor of their flat towards the camera, talking excitedly into the back of each others' heads – or to us. In these moments i felt i was watching Press gang, or even the Famous five.
The problem is exacerbated by not having a clear sense, initially, of what, or whom, the series is for. On the one hand, it's a recreation of a time and place by a man who was there or thereabouts. On the other, it forms part of a general drive by marginalised groups to give the youth a sense of what went before them, to write their forerunners into history. In that respect, it occasionally feels like it belongs in a museum. Broadcast to coincide with LGBTQ+ History Month, at times i found the educational content heavy-going, notably in the clever but rather incongruous sequence where Ritchie, trailed by his gang, struts along the narrow pavements of 1980s Londchester reciting what is almost a poem of denialist argument and conspiracy.
Here, i think, Davies, the most immanent of writers, explicitly sets out to swerve the legacy of contemporary AIDS fiction. Angels in America is epic, because how else to reflect the enormity of that carnage and wastage and public indifference? Edmund White's writing about AIDS is more like a canvas, soft and still, intense white light blurring a danse macabre in the background; while Philadelphia is all stirring solemnity, driven skyward by Atticus Hanks and, um, Antonio Banderas in a sailor suit. They all tap into the language of mythology and im-morality play: characters are spirits and wisps and (sometimes dirty) seraphim; they break out of themselves and float, even as they decay.
Davies writes his characters as YA. They may hurt terribly and be wracked with fear, but they are in essence solid; they remain themselves, if not quite unflappable then at least untranscendant. They go on an extraordinary, terrifying journey which affects them, changes them, but does not reshape them. They are anchored to themselves and to each other, to the gang, to this strange and i think excessively YA-ified conception of the capital-C Community.
This brings up another problem. Davies, in seeking to memorialise such a vast and diverse community over a longish period of time, has no choice but to write an ensemble piece with multiple lead characters. But because he resolutely refuses to give them any mythological significance, they feel, at the beginning at least, generic: the fey one, the square one, the devil-may-care one. (And, in a curious twist, the SBF: Straight Best Friend.) Also the balance isn't quite right: Roscoe feels particularly underdeveloped – the tale of the MP didn't work for me either as light relief or as a potted history of vicious Tory hypocrisy – and Davies seemed unwilling to delve into the Blackness of this intriguing Black femme character.
But as you say, derek, the story does tighten and hits its stride when death begins to close in on the gang. The turning point for me was the scene when Jill visits the dying Scottish guy whose name i've forgotten, and is trapped in the hallway by the latest and scariest of the ogres. Here Davies takes the YA trope of corridors, pavements, entrances – hemmed-in non-places – and transforms it into something grown-up and moving. Jill is forever shuttling through these spaces, connecting private with communal with the thrilling, frightening outside world. i don't think we ever see her room, do we? She is always on the barricades, a very unmythical angel.
i'm not sure what to make of the series' depiction of AIDS politics. i like the range of the characters' resistances, from organising sparsely attended Die-ins to pissing in a tea urn. And i do like the refusal of a broad heroic narrative. The ending shocked me a little with its finality. i'm surprised none of the surviving characters were made to be HIV positive. The series seems to confirm the Gravestone Advert position that Aids really was a death sentence, and doesn't show us enough of the Randy Shilts argument which would allow us to understand that it was only ever a political choice (and medical arrogance) that made it so.
Above all it seems to bring down a curtain – or, more accurately, a scythe – on the AIDS era in 1991. There isn't much scope to imagine the next few years, which were vital and transformative in both HIV/AIDS and LGB politics. What are Roscoe and Ash doing three, seven, fifteen years later? i can't really tell. The YA gang-show format and the imbalance in the characters' narratives prevent Davies from opening out the story at the end. i, as a viewer, felt like Ritchie, trapped in his bedroom, suffocating. In reality, as a newly radicalised baby queer, i was caught up in the splintering of the LGB alliance, and the spread of its fruits like helplines and grassroots support organisations and reinvigorated Pride parades. HIV/AIDS began to shift onto other bodies, addicts, sex workers, Africans. HIV-positive gay men began to outlive expectations. Indeed, if Ritchie had survived another two or three years, there's a good chance he'd still be living a full life today.
In Covid times, it seems to me that my alternative ending is all the more necessary.Last edited by laverte; 03-03-2021, 18:11.
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Originally posted by Mr Delicieux View Post
I've been looking through that, as since subscribing to Disney+ I've only watched the Mandalorian and Wandavision - which I'd seen within the first 4 weeks - so am now effectively paying to catch up with old episodes of the Simpsons.
Glad to see that they have a load of Wes Anderson films on there, I've just made a cup of tea and am about to settle down to the Grand Budapest Hotel. Lush.
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Originally posted by Incandenza View Post
well now that's interesting...for me, the only Wes Anderson movies on Disney+ are Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs
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laverte and diggedy derek
this doesn't strictly belong here, but even I first read it back in 2018, I was fascinated:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/...e-was-a-plague
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That's a rich and rewarding piece, thanks gt3. i was planning to start a thread about HIV/AIDS in the summer, 40 years on from the NYT story, but might bring it forward. The hospital photos, like the deathbed scenes in It's a sin, are heartbreaking; i couldn't imagine anything so awful. From what i've heard and seen of Covid wards, they are worse.
Ha, derek, i was thinking about what i ended up writing while i put the vacuum cleaner around yesterday morning. Who knew that chores could be so productive? Interested to hear a little of what you thought, even – especially! – if critical. But no obligation, of course.
As a companion piece to It's a sin and to gt3's link, i recommend the documentary United in anger: a history of Act Up.Last edited by laverte; 05-03-2021, 15:50.
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Watched the first couple of episodes of "Upload" tonight, it's basically a cross between a Black Mirror episode and The Good Place. It's written by Greg Daniels, who wrote The US Office and has already had some genuinely laugh out loud moments combined with some fantastic sci-fi ideas. Definitely recommended so far.
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