(no subject)

[kitewithfish]

 -I got to watch Knives Out and The Mirror Crack'd (1980) so far this weekend - both of them are excellent mysteries!  I cannot recommend Knives out enough - it has an excellent cast, all of them having a blast, and the film is tight and excellently attentive. It really thinks the audience is paying attention and respects that attention. In some ways, I suspect that I am the ideal audience for this film - I'm an avid mystery film fan, particularly of Agatha Christie's work. I also was familiar enough with the members of the cast from their other work that when Rian Johnson used my expectations for what a particular actor *should* be cast as, I felt for it! It made the surprises even better. There is some excellent fic out there as well.   I think it has I had already seen an adaptation of the Mirror Crack'd in the form of the British tv series 'Agatha Christie's Marple', which I suspect I liked better because I was more familiar with that actress as Miss Marple - Angela Lansbury was not in any way deficient, I just think that the movie had to fill a lot of time that the British TV series had done in a slightly crisper way. 

- The book club book that I was enjoying so much was The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt  - I'm only on chapter 16 or so, when the main plot of the trilogy really starts to take off, but I think that there's some more excellent reading in my near future. I don't know if I would have picked this book up by myself, but it's doing an excellent job of telling its story, and it's clearly written with a rich understanding of the tropes of the genre.

-I started watching the National Theatre's adaptation of Frankenstein, with Johnny Lee Miller as the Creature. I haven't finished it, I got distracted by another thing, but, I got to the part where the creature murders Elizabeth with some distaste already brewing and I found that they decided to .... embellish that murder with some delightful rape. 

Sigh. 

I finished it later. 

The production already had felt off to me, in some ways, that they had chosen to adapt the story with a focus on elements that were very different from the ones that had stuck with me in the novel. They had really altered a lot of the story's narratives - it's a revenge story in their hands, and it doesn't feel nearly as a tragic. They removed or altered a lot of the women who gave the original story a feeling of being in the real world of a woman author, and they removed all the framing narratives, which I had always loved as a way of really putting the creature and Frankenstein's lives in context. There was so much that I loved that was missing, and the remainder seemed to portray the things I enjoyed in horrifyingly wrong ways. 

That said, it was not boring!

 

Comments

[tei]

I LOVED Knives Out! I think you really hit the nail on the head with the fact that it assumes and respects the audience's attention.

Aaaand that doesn't sound great on the Frankenstein front. I was vaguely planing on maybe watching it, though I haven't read the novel and it was more of a "here's a thing people I know if fandom are watching" idea.

[kitewithfish]

I highly recommend the novel of Frankenstein! - it's a fascinating book and so many adaptations have to smooth out elements of the structure to focus on the main narrative thread, that my expectations on reading it were really mistaken. It's a semi epistolary novel with a lot of opinions on women'seeducation. At one point it has a so many layers that you're hearing the story of a woman saved from a harem being told by the creature, to Frankenstein, who is telling it to a sea captain, who is writing to his sister. But it's got so much compassion for its characters and their flaws that I feel like this production missed by making the creature truly violent at a much earlier stage of his story.

[tei]

I keep meaning to read it. Weirdly, I've meant to read it ever since watching the Highlander episode that featured Mary Shelley, which I actually remember nothing about other than that I was very taken with her and it involved a lot of laudanum.

[yourlibrarian]

I always thought Mirror Crack'd was one of Christie's best books. It just all came together very well.

[kitewithfish]

I do really like it! It has the advantage of being about a murder that is vengeful but nearly random, and I think most of the characters are very sympathetic.