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handful_ofdustHey, so: finished Chapter Twelve and am gearing up for Chapter Thirteen, which has creep up the wazoo, and may or may not close out the second section of the book. Then again, I'm still banking on maybe twenty chapters and Part One had six while this one has seven thus far, so...possibly not, but then again maybe. It might not be so bad for the climax to take longer than the set-up or the middle, after all.
The weekend, meanwhile, went fast and hard but good overall. Took Cal to his music lesson and the ballet on Saturday (he fell asleep for the first section, then woke up and enjoyed himself afterwards, though Mom is now pushing for me to find him an ASD-friendly dance class somewhere), saw the Bellefire Club on Sunday, where I drank an entire bottle of white wine and cried a little, blah blah. And on Saturday night Steve and i finally got to see what will probably be our last movie in a the-ayta for quite some time, considering the fact that Mom is taking off for first...Cuba, I think, then Poland on an opera tour. Because we wanted to see something silly and unashamedly entertaining, meanwhile, that movie was Jupiter Ascending.
Now...I cannot tell a lie, everything you've heard about Jupiter Ascending is totally true. Bees were intelligently designed to recognize royalty, a half-albino formerly-winged space wolfcop can't keep his shirt on and wears gravity-surfing boots, a toilet-cleaning Russian illegal immigrant turns out to be the head of Intergalactic Space Vampire EvilCorp Inc., as well as the not-exactly-mom of three equally douchey/untrustworthy/murderous adult spacekids. There's a ten-minute tour of Terry Gilliam-style space bureaucracy which climaxes with a cameo BY Terry Gilliam as the most annoying yet weirdly nicest of the whole graft-and-rules-happy bunch. Everyone dresses in outfits covered in crystals. Eddie Redmayne whispers, except for when he shouts. Mila Kunis falls off what seems like thirty different buildings.
And yet, and yet: this movie is outright fun, at least for me. It's space opera done Flash Gordon (1980)-style, with every possible sort of excess piled on top of yet more excess: massive armies, huge spaceships (their component parts held together with forcefields, which allows them to change shape at whim), whole planets drained of life to keep freaky people young and beautiful, antigrav pansexual space orgies, a cathedral-sized shrine to somebody's genetic pattern. Gugu Mbatha-Raw has sheep ears. Sean Bean lives in a house covered in beehives and has honeycomb-shaped irises. There are flying, talking dinosaur guards. There's a guy with an elephant's head named Mrs Nesh who literally communicates by trumpeting. There are robots with creepy human faces glued to fronts of their skulls, one of whom is shocked and appalled when he gets confronted by another robot with the temerity to show up wearing the same face.
Also, guess what? Turns out that the plot is extremely easy to follow, so long as you're not allowing your brain to freeze and gear-grind over the basics (lime, coconut, she's a reborn space empress recognized by bees, get the fuck over it). Turns out, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum have at least as much chemistry together as two crazy-hot people standing next to each other are likely to. Turns out, Jupiter Jone may be a wish-fulfillment avatar of every fifteen-year-old girl who ever wished she could say, along with Rapunzel in Tangled: "I AM the lost princess! Aren't I, mother?", but she isn't an idiot, a drip, a wet blanket or anything else you might have heard. She keeps up about as well as expected, she thinks her way through things if not out of them, she settles back into her own innate toughness, she rescues herself until she can't anymore, she makes friends who can rescue her after that point. She's willing to die, and sacrifice her entire biological family, in order to make sure Eddie Redmayne can't harvest the planet she was reborn on. She ends up with a pack of one who calls her "your Majesty" and begs her permission to kill people on her behalf, and yet she shows mercy at almost every turn, not because she can't kill but because she prefers not to. I like Jupiter Jones a lot,a nd those who don't can suck it.
Finally, totally get why fandom is wetting their collective knickers over this one, because Jupiter Ascending is tailor-made for the AO3 crowd--you walk out immediately wondering "but what happens when...?", and wanting to check if anybody else has done that, too. What happens when the other houses realize clan Abrasax is now headed by a primary who essentially refuses to rule, just shows up and vetoes stuff every once in a while? What happens when Jupiter is forced to recognize that she'll have to bathe in human misery in order to stay alive, or risk the Earth falling into her spacekids' hands? What happens if Jupiter tries to track down her spacekids' recurrences, so she won't have to deal with their present selves at all and can build a family more to her taste which still has legal Entitlement? (Oh, start with Balem, please...baby Eddie Redmayne, cleaning space-toilets on some shitty other planet somewhere, muttering: "I 'ate my fuckin' life.") Etc. etc., etc.
Anyhow, that's my not-exactly-review--loved it, top to toe. Too bad it's probably fucked the Wachowskis forever, in Hollywood terms, because there should be more fantasy like this, but there probably won't be. Ah well.
The weekend, meanwhile, went fast and hard but good overall. Took Cal to his music lesson and the ballet on Saturday (he fell asleep for the first section, then woke up and enjoyed himself afterwards, though Mom is now pushing for me to find him an ASD-friendly dance class somewhere), saw the Bellefire Club on Sunday, where I drank an entire bottle of white wine and cried a little, blah blah. And on Saturday night Steve and i finally got to see what will probably be our last movie in a the-ayta for quite some time, considering the fact that Mom is taking off for first...Cuba, I think, then Poland on an opera tour. Because we wanted to see something silly and unashamedly entertaining, meanwhile, that movie was Jupiter Ascending.
Now...I cannot tell a lie, everything you've heard about Jupiter Ascending is totally true. Bees were intelligently designed to recognize royalty, a half-albino formerly-winged space wolfcop can't keep his shirt on and wears gravity-surfing boots, a toilet-cleaning Russian illegal immigrant turns out to be the head of Intergalactic Space Vampire EvilCorp Inc., as well as the not-exactly-mom of three equally douchey/untrustworthy/murderous adult spacekids. There's a ten-minute tour of Terry Gilliam-style space bureaucracy which climaxes with a cameo BY Terry Gilliam as the most annoying yet weirdly nicest of the whole graft-and-rules-happy bunch. Everyone dresses in outfits covered in crystals. Eddie Redmayne whispers, except for when he shouts. Mila Kunis falls off what seems like thirty different buildings.
And yet, and yet: this movie is outright fun, at least for me. It's space opera done Flash Gordon (1980)-style, with every possible sort of excess piled on top of yet more excess: massive armies, huge spaceships (their component parts held together with forcefields, which allows them to change shape at whim), whole planets drained of life to keep freaky people young and beautiful, antigrav pansexual space orgies, a cathedral-sized shrine to somebody's genetic pattern. Gugu Mbatha-Raw has sheep ears. Sean Bean lives in a house covered in beehives and has honeycomb-shaped irises. There are flying, talking dinosaur guards. There's a guy with an elephant's head named Mrs Nesh who literally communicates by trumpeting. There are robots with creepy human faces glued to fronts of their skulls, one of whom is shocked and appalled when he gets confronted by another robot with the temerity to show up wearing the same face.
Also, guess what? Turns out that the plot is extremely easy to follow, so long as you're not allowing your brain to freeze and gear-grind over the basics (lime, coconut, she's a reborn space empress recognized by bees, get the fuck over it). Turns out, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum have at least as much chemistry together as two crazy-hot people standing next to each other are likely to. Turns out, Jupiter Jone may be a wish-fulfillment avatar of every fifteen-year-old girl who ever wished she could say, along with Rapunzel in Tangled: "I AM the lost princess! Aren't I, mother?", but she isn't an idiot, a drip, a wet blanket or anything else you might have heard. She keeps up about as well as expected, she thinks her way through things if not out of them, she settles back into her own innate toughness, she rescues herself until she can't anymore, she makes friends who can rescue her after that point. She's willing to die, and sacrifice her entire biological family, in order to make sure Eddie Redmayne can't harvest the planet she was reborn on. She ends up with a pack of one who calls her "your Majesty" and begs her permission to kill people on her behalf, and yet she shows mercy at almost every turn, not because she can't kill but because she prefers not to. I like Jupiter Jones a lot,a nd those who don't can suck it.
Finally, totally get why fandom is wetting their collective knickers over this one, because Jupiter Ascending is tailor-made for the AO3 crowd--you walk out immediately wondering "but what happens when...?", and wanting to check if anybody else has done that, too. What happens when the other houses realize clan Abrasax is now headed by a primary who essentially refuses to rule, just shows up and vetoes stuff every once in a while? What happens when Jupiter is forced to recognize that she'll have to bathe in human misery in order to stay alive, or risk the Earth falling into her spacekids' hands? What happens if Jupiter tries to track down her spacekids' recurrences, so she won't have to deal with their present selves at all and can build a family more to her taste which still has legal Entitlement? (Oh, start with Balem, please...baby Eddie Redmayne, cleaning space-toilets on some shitty other planet somewhere, muttering: "I 'ate my fuckin' life.") Etc. etc., etc.
Anyhow, that's my not-exactly-review--loved it, top to toe. Too bad it's probably fucked the Wachowskis forever, in Hollywood terms, because there should be more fantasy like this, but there probably won't be. Ah well.
