firecat

firecat

Media Consumption for February 8–12

Listening

Victoria: An Intimate Biography by Stanley Weintraub. Introduced in previous post. I just finished it. I see why one reviewer described it as “not that intimate.” It’s unclear to me whether her official diaries were available to earlier biographers. Most of the glimpses of her feelings came from those.

The book’s organization was kind of chaotic. There was a lot of what seemed more like trivia than history (details about the lives of minor nobles or politicians in her orbit). And I continued to feel the author didn’t like her and judged her too harshly. Sometimes he portrayed her as a whiner who wasn’t interested in governing, and other times he seemed to think she was too pushy. Like, make up your mind, dude! The only section where he laid off that was when he was writing about her supporting the troops during the Boer War. It’s possible that the narration made the prose seem judgier than it really was. Donada Peters’s voice can come across that way.

The bio repeatedly described her as fat (using a different word) and ugly (not that he described other people more favorably). Usually it came up in the context of her own or contemporaries’ opinions, but at times it seemed gratuitous. A lot was made of her disability, and not so much from contemporaries. The author expressed a lot of pity. I didnt get a sense what Victoria herself felt about it, except that she didn’t like the accompanying pain.

So, takeaway: she was a fat, short, disabled, often cranky woman — the kind of person who is overlooked and undervalued in current mainstream society. Yet she became the icon of an empire and almost an entire century.

I thought the author did a pretty good job of describing her transformation into a symbol. His description of her death was moving and it reminded me a little of how I and others felt about QEII’s death (“the end of an era”; “a stabilizing influence and brake on change is gone”).

Overall, I’m glad I read it but I came away convinced that a better biography could be written of her. I know almost zero about the challenges of writing biographies though. I don’t read very many of them.

Reading

I didn’t manage to open any ebooks this week.

Watching

iZombie. No new thoughts to report.
Heartstopper Season 2 episode 8. A little heavier than previous eps. Aro-ace representation, yay!
Blue Eye Samurai. Netflix original. US-made Samurai revenge anime, with a twist. Very stylish and violent. 3 eps in, and I really love it so far. The person I was watching it with said it reminded her of Kill Bill. I haven’t seen Kill Bill but it reminds me of John Wick.
Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears. 2020. Partially crowdfunded movie based on the TV series. It was planned to be a trilogy, but I’m not seeing any additional films in the pipeline.

I heard this was bad. It wasn’t bad. I was entertained. But I’d call it “pretty good fanfic of Miss Fisher” rather than more Miss Fisher. She (and Jack) acted out of character occasionally and most of the rest of the regular cast only had brief cameos. Also, minor point, but that’s not how beekeeping works.
Bagdad Cafe. 1987. My third or fourth rewatch. There were two versions of this movie, an English one and a German one, which was about 20 minutes longer. I watched the longer version this time. Most of the differences are extended scenes, but two of them could be seen as shifting the plot.

This movie is the reason I sometimes say “I don’t want an intentional community. I want an unintentional community.”

There’s also good fat representation and a romance involving a fat person. There’s a little fat bashing and racism, but they’re never portrayed as an OK thing to do.

This movie passes the heck out of the Bechdel test and it somewhat passes the Mako Mori test.

Partly inspired by a road trip across U.S. Route 66 taken by the director and his wife. The restaurant used in the film is on Route 66 and was still operating, as of 2017.

I’m a fan of Roger Ebert, and he said this about the movie:
"[Directir Percy Adlon] is saying something in this movie about Europe and America, about the old and the new, about the edge of the desert as the edge of the American Dream. I am not sure exactly what it is, but that is comforting….The charm of Bagdad Cafe is that every character and every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.”
This quote makes me want to write a fusion of Bagdad Cafe and American Gods.
Princess Mononoke. 1997. Second or third rewatch. I’ve watched Gaiman’s English language version once but I prefer the Japanese with subtitles. I just love how Miyazaki can tell a story from multiple points of view and get you to sympathize with all of them and then leave the story unresolved yet emotionally satisfying. I love how the soundtrack of this movie uses silence. (E.g., whenever the Shinigami appears there is utter silence.) I want a Kodama orchestra.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

fauxklore

I may need to rewatch Bagdad Cafe.

From:

firecat

It aged pretty well!

From:

greghousesgf

I read a Beatle book in which the writer had a weird tendency to say something nasty about the appearance of every woman mentioned except for the Queen.
I like Roger Ebert too. I don't agree with everything he said but I respect his opinions. I got to meet him once. Fascinating guy.

From:

firecat

The writer exempted the Queen, that’s funny! But criticizing the looks of all the women, PBTPBTPBT

I am so envious you got to meet Roger Ebert! I didn’t agree with his everything either but he got closer to my tastes than any other critic I’ve followed.

From:

pameladean

I haven't read any biographies of Queen Victoria, but when you got to the fat and ugly part, I remembered bios of both Dorothy Sayers and Shirley Jackson that I've read, and while the "ugly" part was not expressed, both biographers went on and on and ON about their subjects' weights. But it struck me that neither of them was half as worried about and obsessed with her weight as the biographers were.

P.

From:

firecat

Oh ugghhh on the biographers!

I did get the impression QV had conventional tastes in appearance; in the diaries she sometimes described people she knew as ugly and it was clear she didn’t like her own face. But there were no diary entries quoted where she mentioned her size.

From:

bibliofile

> both biographers went on and on and ON about their subjects' weights. But it struck me that neither of them was half as worried about and obsessed with her weight as the biographers were.

Bleah, yet more indicators of how fucked up society is at present about women's bodies.

I never did see Bagdad Cafe; I should get on that. I did see and like Rosalie goes shopping, Adlon's subsequent film, in the theaters.

Oh, and I liked iZombie when it originally aired and thought it consistently pretty good. I hope it continues to amuse.

From:

firecat

iZombie got me to care about some of the characters, so now the distributed Netflix watch party tunes in each week to watch what trouble the writers are going to make for them this time.