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stunt_muppet at 12:01pm on 16/05/2008 under college, doctor who, life, randomness, writing
stunt_muppet at 12:01pm on 16/05/2008 under college, doctor who, life, randomness, writingGuys, I just had to go through five pages of flist. Like, skip=120. Oh, the things I miss.
First off, hurrah California! Here’s to hoping that more states will follow its example.
My final paper got an A! My final paper got an A!! *dances with glee* Granted, it was an A-minus, and I’m sure it helps that I did Actual Legitimate Work on this one, but still. Good way to end the year.
Also, I ended up studying entirely the wrong things for the Bio final, per usual – it was not as comprehensive as I thought it’d be, and I didn’t study our recent anatomy lessons hard enough because I thought I’d have to remember all the early material. Short Prose Fiction final was also appropriately punishing, but most of that’s also my fault, because I didn’t memorize enough details about the stories we read. Or rather, I memorized details about the stories, but I couldn’t remember who wrote which story – I honestly spaced out on who wrote “A Rose for Emily”, no lie. And I tried to make myself remember by thinking “it’s the same guy who wrote The Sound and the Fury! You know who he is!” And for about ten minutes, I didn’t. I forgot William Faulkner.
My ability to (almost) recite Finding Nemo from memory and play a mean game of Six Degrees of Separation yet instantly forget anything of actual importance is becoming annoying. It might have been a momentary space-out rather than truly forgetting, but my point stands.
My room stands all but empty now. Mom came by yesterday to help me move out most of my stuff, including my TV and microwave, so that I could check out on my own and fit my stuff into my car. Of course, it promptly started to rain as we loaded up the car, and continued to drizzle the rest of the day. WTF, May. First it’s all chilly and miserable throughout exam week so we’re all even less motivated to get out of bed, and now it’s raining on Leaving Day. I call shenanigans.
It feels very strange not to be procrastinating on anything. I’m sitting here, typing this LJ entry and listening to music, and there’s honestly nothing else I’m supposed to be doing, no impending deadlines looming over my head. Well, actually, I’m lying; there’s packing I need to do (since I’m checking out Saturday night) and laundry I need to do before that. But I’ve got the rest of the day for that, and I can actually spare a minute to just sit. I could cue up a movie if I wanted to. I could go out for a walk. It’s odd.
Brief obligatory moment of freakout: Two more years until I have to go out in the real world and get a real job and pay my own utility bills and interact with people who aren’t fellow students eeeeeek. *hides*
I stayed in my mom’s hotel room for the night after we moved the majority of my things out, since I didn’t have a TV available anymore. Mostly what this meant is that I watched whatever was on and wrote while my mom napped and periodically asked me what I was doing.
I caught the end of Silence of the Lambs, which I haven’t actually seen; granted, it was the TV-edited version, but since this was the tail end of the thing there was surprisingly little cut out. I would not have wanted to see that scene with Jame Gumb in the night-vision goggles in a darkened theater, I’ll tell ya.
What freaked me out the most, however, was that Jame Gumb was played by Ted Levine. Better known to me as Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, in Monk. Since I tend to associate actors with the first role I see or love them in, this really wierded me out. And he sold the “creepy psycho” thing disturbingly well. I remember watching a commentary track on Monk where Ted Levine talked about how he usually plays crazy people, so it was nice to play the ‘straight man’ to Tony Shaloub’s more out-there Monk. Now, I actually know what he’s talking about.
For some reason, I don’t have the same problem with Jodie Foster, but that’s probably because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Jodie Foster movie all the way through. Must rectify that.
Speaking of actors I know in roles that I don’t, Capricorn One came on TCM right after Silence of the Lambs. It’s a ‘70s movie about a faked mission to Mars (that’s the movie’s premise, by the way, not a spoiler), and I’ve been wanting to see it for some time, not because I thought it would be particularly good, but because it had wee Sam Waterson in it, which is enough to pique my interest. Of course, as with Ted Levine, in my mind Sam Waterson is permanently in a business suit, so every time his character was onscreen I kept seeing this phantom gray suit over his astronaut gear. It was a bit strange.
Unfortunately, the movie wasn’t very good, at least the latter half of it (which I saw); the leads never got a chance to emotionally react to what happens to them before they go out on their Epic Desert Trek, and even the character of James Brolin’s wife barely seems to respond to her situation. Not to mention Wee Sam Waterson is barely even in the second half of the movie – it’s James Brolin’s show from there, pretty much. And the premise itself never gets explored and dug into quite the way it could be, ditching such introspection for an out-of-nowhere biplane-helicopter chase.
The good news is that it also had Wee Eric Bogosian, who I didn’t know was in it, as a reporter of some sort; this was a nice surprise. And Wee Sam Waterson was very wee – couldn’t have been out of his early thirties. And (I feel appropriately strange for saying this) he had a frankly magnificent tush back then.
No, really. There’s this scene where he’s climbing up a cliff and he’s sweaty and delirious and hurting and why do I find this so attractive this fact is ripely obvious.
Not a movie I’d recommend, but I still consider it a well-spent hour or two.
I also ended up watching Hellboy twice while studying/writing, since it was on back-to-back on FX. Hellboy is another one of those movies where I objectively know it’s not the Best Damn Comic-Book Adaptation Ever (although Cousin, a greater geek than I could ever hope to be, tells me the movie does a decent job of condensing an unwieldy and huge canon) and probably not that great a movie if I really think about it but dammit, I love it like CAKE. Something about Hellboy and Abe Sapien really clicks with me – they feel real, and believable, and in some way human, to me. And hey, Ron Perlman pulled off a Big No convincingly near the end. I think I’ve seen maybe five other people do that.
Unexpected New Topic!
Crossovers I would dearly love for someone else to write, because either I don’t know the canon very well, I have no ideas beyond the premise, or I’m too damn lazy:
1) Doctor Who Crossovers:
a) Second Doctor/Myst-verse, set as a Mind Robber AU where the Master of the Land of Fiction is actually stuck in an incomplete Age, which he must perpetually write to maintain. He has no Linking Book back to the “real world”, but cannot stop writing his own story to maintain the Age, so he traps Jamie and Zoe in another Age with no Linking Book back (or in a Prison Book?) to force the Doctor to complete his Linking Book and take his place in the unfinished Age. I’ve no idea if this actually works with the Myst mythos, as I stopped following such with Riven, but I direly want someone to make it work.
b)Third Doctor/Portal-verse. You know he’d spend hours messing with the Portal Gun before he did anything productive. And he has gone against insane computers before…
c)Fourth Doctor/King’s Quest-verse. Yes, it would be difficult to reconcile the inherent magical quality with the almost-purely-scientific Whoniverse, but it would be so worth it to watch the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane in Falderal. He’d take to its warped logic right away.
d) Ninth or Tenth Doctor/Silent Hill 2-niverse. If something as twisted and sick as Pyramid Head could come out of James Sunderland’s imagination, just imagine what a post-war Doctor’s darkest dreams could manifest.
2) CSI-verse/Hellboy movie-verse. Someone has to work with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense and all its attendant oddity. Probably pre-movie, have their memory wiped before they leave. OR – it’s revealed that they worked the Bureau before they quit and headed to the Crime Lab.
Was writing my essay; needed some background noise; put on The Claws of Axos commentary track to serve as such.
Things I’ve noticed about the actual episode:
- Everything is in so much beautiful color. Not that I don’t passionately and insatiably love the black and white era, and not that I’m not grateful for internet video, but oh high-resolution color DVDs I love you so. You make my eyes happy.
- The Doctor changes into a different coat about halfway through episode 1 – he goes from red velvet jacket with purple-lined cape to a black velvet jacket and red-lined cape. There’s no obvious reason – or indeed, any time – for him to do this, but I’ll just handwave it by saying that if he had the red velvet on he’d get lost amid all the Trippy Colors of Axos.
- How did I miss all this subtext the first time around, guys? When the Doctor first gets attacked by Axos, he’s apparently yelling for the Brigadier. And the Brig is, depending on how you see it, either reaching for him or shaking him by the shoulders.
Thankfully, I was not so thick as to miss the Doctor/Master subtext when I first watched, but that may have been because I was coming fresh off “Last of the Time Lords” and I was actually looking for it. And I didn’t catch nearly all of it; I’m still marveling at how smoldering unexpectedly subtexty those scenes in the TARDIS are.
- For that matter, how did I not start shipping Three/Jo, like, instantly? I’m ashamed of you, fannish brain. You’re obviously out of practice.
In my defense, I have to say that knowing the context of Jo’s and Three’s arc makes it all even shippier. Like I said, I watched this coming right off the new series, so when the Axons threaten to age Jo to death, the Doctor’s reaction seemed…well, like how the Doctor would react when his companion was put in danger. It’s not until now that I realize that Jo has been put in danger before, and when she is, the Doctor usually reacts by threatening whatever’s threatening her or grimly acquiescing to the Master’s demands (because it’s usually the Master with a gun to her head). Here, he…panics. And shouts. And looks more than a bit scared for her. I’m not sure if it’s consistent writing for the character, but I like it. Of course, the epic mindscrew he pulls on her near the end of the story by pretending to leave probably negated some of the shippiness for me the first time ’round.
Thought: Perhaps it’s because he remembers Sara Kingdom and her unpleasant Death by Aging? He feels awfully guilty about it at the end of The Daleks’ Master Plan, IIRC.
This becomes a bit funny when you contemplate that Jean Marsh (who played Sara Kingdom) was once married to Jon Pertwee.
…why do I know that. *facepalm*
- While we’re talking of subtext, the Master gets this terribly smug little grin on his face when the Doctor tells him that he can’t remember how to make the TARDIS work. It’s delightful. He looks like he’s just barely refraining from laughing at him. Oh, Bitter Ex-Boyfriends In Space. You make my day.
Thoughts from the commentary track and the shooting footage:
- Katy Manning’s rather adorable, yes. And she has such affection for her co-stars, whom she refers to as Roger and Jon. She’s always saying things like “Jon and I used to…” or “I remember this one time we…”. It’s darling, but, as when Frazer talks about working with Patrick Troughton, really quite sad.
- There was actually a good reason that Jo doesn’t do much in this serial – it was winter, in Dungeness, and Katy in her miniskirt ensemble was too cold to do many of her lines, so a lot of her dialogue had to be cut.
Apparently, she got so cold that between takes in outdoor scenes she and Jon hid in the front of the Axos set and wrapped her up in his cape. D’aww.
- The shot of Jo “aging” didn’t use makeup – they actually found an extra who looked a lot like her and did her up in Jo’s costume.
- Barry Letts, Katy, and Richard Franklin are far kinder about the effects on the show than Peter Davison and his co-commentators are. Even if they do make fun of the wobbly TARDIS set.
- “Are they real Army? They run like real Army, I suppose they must be.”
- Richard Franklin actually was in the Army for a while. “Shockingly, what to do about giant blobby Axons is not included in your training.”
One last bit of Doctor Who blather ere I move on: The Invasion makes me fall in love with Doctor Who all over again, every single time I watch it. I mean that in an almost literal sense – to watch The Invasion is to feel the same tension and fascination and unbridled joy that I remember from back in 2005, when my family sat around watching “The Doctor Dances” and I clung to my Dad every time something in a gas mask showed up.
Also, every time I see the Second Doctor I want to hug him. Yes, even when he’s got the Scary Alien Mode switched on.
I actually have still more to talk about, but there's laundry what needs doing and I'd rather not do all my packing tomorrow night. Catch you all later.
rejuvenated
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