A Thursday well spent

[cosmolinguist]

Yesterday afternoon was good because I was shown all kinds of televisual entertainment new to me.

I wasn't feeling great for a lot of reasons and was relieved and surprised that I actually managed to sit still (mostly) and enjoy myself rather than thinking about things I should be doing or things that are wrong with me or the other tediously common thoughts I'm susceptible to.

I'd asked for something simplistic to watch; I wasn't up to anything I had to pay a lot of attention to or that was likely to make me feel any worse. "Simplistic-funny? Simplistic-violent?" magister asked. We ended up with both, but that's about all our set of choices had in common.

First Jason and the Argonauts, with most of the latter pleasingly tubby and even balding, looking much more like normal guys than the shiny bodybuilders you'd get in such a movie nowadays. And ace monsters by Ray Harryhausen. Give me models over CGI any day.

Then a couple of Wallace and Gromits, which made me giggle a lot and were just the thing for the am-I-getting-a-migraine I'm-very-tired-and-prone-to-tears mood I was in.

Then an episode of the most recent series of Sherlock, which I adored. And that's after detesting the second series enough I didn't watch any of this one when it was on. Apparently a lot of people didn't like this wedding-speech episode -- magister told me it'd been deemed "plotless" and "rambly" -- but I thought it was wonderful, with some lovely intricate storytelling and a much better characterization of Sherlock particularly than that which had put me off the second series (though that "high-functioning sociopath" line can still fuck off). I'll never be the world's biggest Cummerbund Bandersnatch fan, but he had a lot to carry in this episode and I thought he did it very well.

We went for takeaway pizza after this so had lots of time to chat about how nice it was. Part of the fun is having someone to talk to about what you're watching.

And I'm told the intricate storytelling carries on to the next episode of Sherlock too, but we didn't watch that one because by this point James wanted to show me The Avengers. So we had an episode of that before bedtime, and went to sleep chatting about how nothing like it could be made today.

Comments

[magister]

One of my better afternoons, I have to say.

With regard to The Avengers, possibly Colin Firth and Karen Gillan might do a passable job? Although, I'm not entirely sure Firth could manage the whole ruthless bastard who conceals it by being twinkly and charming thing. Ian Richardson could have done it rather well, I suspect.

[cosmolinguist]

I think I'm more sure of Colin First than I am of Karen Gillan there, actually.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Carefully sculpted bodybuilders seem less heroic to me than normal looking people. Stop motion animation is heroic too, because you just know how long it took to create. I couldn't get into the Lord of the Rings films because they just looked like games demos.

Years ago I went to a Q&A session with two film makers who had made documentary following Terry Gilliam making 'Twelve Monkeys'. They told us how, for the title sequence of their doc, they made a Gilliam-Python-style collage animation, quite a good one, using computers of course, and then showed it to him. Instead of being pleased he was really pissed off. "That would have taken me several all-nighters" he growled.