Fireworks in August?

[alexsarll]

Livejournal entries nowadays are like confession - they mostly seem to start with 'I have sinned, it has been...too long since my last update'. Of course, this also means I missed the riots, but I had my moment in the sun when it came to LJ posts about London unpleasantness, and rosamicula is welcome to the limelight this time. Besides, I've been having rather a pleasant time of it, on the whole - even when finding one of the land's last gibbets, and an old cultish church, in the depths of Hampshire, the setting was at least as cosy as it was Lovecraftian. I've seen plenty of gigs by the usual suspects - mostly very good, but with little new to say except that Proxy Music's version of Eno's 'Third Uncle' is amazing - hypnotic almost to the point of being evil.

Made my third consecutive cinema trip to see a Marvel superhero film, and if Captain America doesn't quite ascend to greatness, it's still thoroughly good fun, feeling at times like a classic Bond film, at others like a cousin to Raiders of the Lost Ark (which it references, brilliantly, as it does A Matter of Life and Death, which was always going to impress me). Chris Evans' previous Marvel outing was as the Human Torch, possibly the easiest superhero role going, but somewhere along the line he's picked up the combination of pluck, naivete and steely charisma you need to play Steve Rogers. And this is a take on Cap which plays him very much as what America should be - not Mark Millar's Republican hardass, but not too self-questioning either. He doesn't want to join the war to kill Nazis - he just hates bullies. This is even played out in his shield, which is itself indestructible, but whose paint - unlike in the comics - gets scratched and scuffed, showing a battered but unbowed America rather than one unsullied and invincible.
The only real flaw, for me, was some iffy CGI - and oddly it all comes on the action set-pieces, rather than on the stuff which you'd expect to fall into the uncanny valley, like the skinny pre-Super Soldier Serum version of Steve, or the noseless Red Skull (and the Red Skull does look excellent here, impressively so given I'd always had him down as the sort of character who'd be almost impossible to realise properly off the page). Here he's the head of Hydra, a Department of Mad Science which goes solo when it proves too mad for the Third Reich. Love it. Mad Scientist in Chief is of course Arnim Zola, played by Toby Jones with his customary creepiness, and making his first appearance as a face on a screen - just one of the obligatory geek in-jokes in a film which also sees Dugan running amok with a pulse cannon, and appearances for Union Jack and Bucky (albeit sadly not in costume). The prospects for The Avengers are looking better and better.
The trailers beforehand, though - ugh! Two in a row were for wholly unnecessary remakes - Tinker, Tailor and Conan, though the latter at least had good production design. And Immortals looked so much like pastiche that for at least a minute I genuinely assumed it must be the new Orange ad.

John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up was released in 1972, and is the story of a near-future humanity sleepwalking into ecological collapse. You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? And yet, if the only problem with his Stand on Zanzibar was that its dystopian vision of circa now was actually too optimistic*, then here he's a little too far the other way. Yes, we can all recognise this world:
"The government couldn't go on forever bailing out mismanaged giant corporations , even though it was their own supporters, people who ranted against "UN meddling" and "creeping socialism", who yelled the loudest for Federal aid when they got in a mess."**
But with condoms now a fact of life everywhere except the most mediaevalistic of backwaters, details such as the endemic, persistent STDs are still a little far-fetched. Aren't they? OK, and the pests which have out-evolved the pesticides, maybe they were a good call. And the shops which profit from the demand to eat organic - and be seen to eat organic - while in fact pushing the same old crap. And the "riots among Britain's five million unemployed". But precisely because of the concerns of Brunner's generation, we have dodged some of the evils he saw coming - you can still walk on the grass beneath a blue sky in the heart of a major Western city, and breathe unassisted (well, unless the weather is especially smog-friendly that day). And thank heavens for that, for the degree to which the casual sexism and racism which lasts into his distinctly seventies future is now the province only of random park-bench drunks, for the fact that "Paper, which consumes irreplaceable trees" need no longer be such a hot-button issue both because it doesn't anymore, and because it's being bypassed. Not that we can quite rest easy, of course, but it's not as bad anymore as it looked to the clear-sighted forty years ago. Or at least, it isn't quite yet.

*Elsewhere in that entry, I love that my Brunner reading seems to be synchronised with my Torchwood moaning. To think we believed back at the end of the second season that we had it bad!
**See also The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 in which the fall of France as a major power, and thus of the French monarchy, comes largely because "financial reform was rendered next-to-impossible. In the neat formulation of J.F. Bosher, the French kings could not change the system because it was not theirs to change...too much had been farmed out to vested interests in pursuit of short-term gain, and it couldn't be clawed back". Yes, it has been suggested that I might suffer from a touch of apophenia. I can't imagine why.

Comments

[fleuriee.livejournal.com]

hello :)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Hello! How are you?