(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!