failure is not the end

[aberration]

The Lion King (1994) ★★★★
A Goofy Movie (1995) ★★★1/2
Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018) ★★★★
Toy Story (1995) ★★★1/2
Pocahontas (1995) ★★1/2
Hercules (1997) ★★★
Anastasia (1997) ★★★
A Bug’s Life (1998) ★★★
Mulan (1998) ★★★1/2
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) ★★★★1/2
Black Panther (2018) ★★★★1/2
Toy Story 2 (1999) ★★★
Fantasia 2000 (1999) ★★★★
My Octopus Teacher (2020) ★★★1/2
Dinosaur (2000) ★★1/2
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) ★★★
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) ★★★1/2



So obviously there has been… *gestures vaguely at everything*. And I know I've been incredibly inactive. And yes there can be plenty of reasons for that given… *gestures vaguely at everything.* But now more than anything it feels like my job. My job is good, I have good pay and benefits. But it's also exhausting. It's exhausting to ping pong between serious problems and threats, constantly stressed I won't find or know the right thing and what the consequences for that could be. I spend so much time already talking on the phone with people who are stressed or frightened or angry and the idea of finishing up a day and then pulling out my phone again to do phone banking is just more than my brain can take. Arguing more after spending a day writing or making arguments about law or public policy is more than my brain can take. I can occasionally text a friend to bitch about the SCOTUS hearings or something, but I just. Want to not be doing my job literally all the time.


Anyway, here are a couple books I've read –



In sum, neuroscience is extremely complex and lots of people sure have trouble keeping their confirmation bias out of their experiments.

One thing I did find interesting was the discussion of how children at a very young age tend to be inclined to hyperclassify gender characteristics, but not in a way that necessarily reflects predominant cultural attitudes toward gender. Fine includes a few anecdotal examples, including a child who thought only men drink coffee and women drink tea (or vice versa I can’t remember) based on her parents’ preferences, and a very young boy who response to being taunted for liking a “girly” thing pulled down his pants and displayed his genitals, to which the taunting child replied, “So what? Everyone has that.”

But aside from these anecdotes, this does retrospectively feel true to my experience. That as a very young, pre-school child I would desperately want to fit everything into neat and simple categories so that I could quickly understand the world. Because the world is big and scary and at that age you feel like you have a lot of catching up to do.

Which, in any case, it sure is weird that there’s such a freak out about pre-adolescent children choosing to take puberty blockers, but a child choosing teacups or Legos as has been relentlessly impressed upon them at an age when simplifying a complex and confusing world is extremely attractive definitely confirms every gender stereotype, so.





I liked some parts of this, but a lot of the time it felt like the author had a lot of vague cool-sounding ideas in his head and… didn’t really bother to make them make sense when he put them down on the page. I also didn’t really understand what made our Pirate Queen friend less villainous than the Empress, other than that she committed genocide in, I guess, a less orderly fashion and wasn’t doing it at the exact moment the story was happening?

It also was just the case that every time I detected a potential story I thought would be interesting, the author turned away from it. I liked the idea of Vivian and the Empress being the same person and had sort of figured it by that point, but I guess I'd envisioned it as Vivian and the Empress being in the same timeline before the Empress plucked Vivian out of her past, which would give them a solid connection – the Empress is what Vivian is going to become. But making her like a simulation the Empress ran gives Vivian a distance from the Empress that I guess I found less interesting. It was similar with the Pirate Queen (whose name I can't remember I'm sorry) and the fake version of her ruling her former kingdom planet thing. The idea that this was some real side of herself that had manifested to make choices the character would otherwise find incomprehensible and irredeemable to save her world is a lot more compelling to me than… no she was just fake, I guess.

Though now that I think about it I'm not totally sure where exactly that whole thing landed, I don't remember it being… that relevant… to the overall story resolution. idk.




And we've also watched some TV that we have not watched before –



I didn't find the pilot for this that promising, as it felt so performatively edgy and grimdark and well, something that probably had a lot of Nic Pizzolatto residue. But as it went on, I grew much more affectionate for it. Like I said, I've never actually watched or read the original Perry Mason, so I don't have some nostalgia or other attachment to it by which to judge this. This is a miniseries-now-turned-regular-series that served as an origin story for its new Perry Mason and related characters, and revolved around one mystery – the high publicized kidnapping and murder of an infant boy.

So I really like Matthew Rhys as an actor, and if someone could make this brooding-male-antihero-PI-turned-lawyer work for me, it was him. It may have in part helped that I feel like the show made an effort to actively include and focus on other characters, rather than Look How Sad and Brooding Our Dark Perry Mason Is at the expense of everything else. It was like enough that I could appreciate and engage with his anger at the police and the legal system, and empathize with his desire to be a better father and his stress at the position he'd found himself in (awkwardly having no idea what he was doing as a lawyer was honestly A+), without you know, just getting tired of him. My only regret is that they kind of implied for a second that he might be bi, and then no it was a different dark WWI backstory that got him discharged from the army, and you know. Why not both?

But again, there are the side characters, the biggest for the series going forward being Della Street and Paul Blake. Della Street has been turned into our Competent Lesbian Heroine for this, who lives with her hand model girlfriend and basically spends a lot of this being better than everyone else (by which I mean, again, being competent but also having a bare minimum level of emotional intelligence) and telling off the men for being stupid so you know. As the Competent Lesbian does, I'm not really complaining. She's also pretty funny and I really enjoyed any scene of her arguing with Mason. In the original books/show she was Mason's secretary, and here she was the "secretary" for the John Lithgow-lawyer who had previously employed Mason (though was pretty clearly doing large parts of his legal work), and ends the show announcing that she'll work for Mason until she also passes the bar, at which point they'll be partners. Which is pretty exciting! Because I just want to see them argue all the time!

Paul Drake was a PI in the original and here starts out as a beat cop, who is also black and also this is 1930s Los Angeles so there is some RACISM. The show spends a lot of time with Drake and his pregnant wife and their aspirations for, you know, a normal life while Drake is unlikely to get promoted because racism and then gets entangled in a scheme of bribery and murder that ties into the overall mystery. So as one would imagine, his story ends in him leaving the police because the police are shitty and corrupt, and coming to work as an investigator for Mason, the fruition of me yelling at the tv for the whole season for him to come "join the Avengers."

Much of the rest of the cast is made up of corrupt cops, others in the criminal justice system (including Hamilton Burger, who tends to be Mason's DA adversary in the original books/show but in this is a closeted gay assistant DA who helps Mason cheat on the bar exam and acts as Della's beard and I mean, vice versa), and the family of the murdered baby, including the mother who is charged with being complicit in his murder.

But the big second-billed star of this was Tatiana Maslany. And given her billing, her role is both… surprisingly small, but also the kind of role you'd give to a big guest star. Maslany plays Sister Alice, a preacher at a fictional Assembly of God congregation who seems to be somewhat based on Aimee Semple McPherson. The Assembly becomes very publicly involved in the case both in publicly taking in the accused mother, and in the conspiracy that surrounds the baby's death. And the Sister Alice role is… weird and theatrical? It becomes clearer as the season progressing, like she starts out as a strange mystery that unravels as the story progresses, which, I guess – makes sense! It's just like. But her first episode ends in the "Blessed be the Hangman" sermon of "uhhhhhhhhhh I need help… reacting to something" and much of the tension in the show ends up surrounding Sister Alice's claim that she will resurrect the child on Easter Sunday. It's like – it's a weird role that by the end you can say 'well okay, that makes sense,' but in the meantime – she's kind of weird! And I'm not surprised Maslany could pull that off, even if it is a different kind of weird from any of her clones in Orphan Black.

So, the mystery plays out, and Mason is eventually essentially successful in defending his client. The show takes a dim view of the criminal justice system as stacked against the defendant, unwilling to tackle police corruption and too influenced by hysteria-driven public opinion. A magical happy ending of course cannot actually come to fruition, though I do think the show moved past its grimdark opening into something short of cynical but also not pat. On its landing, though, it did perform a pretty significant ~subversion~ of the Perry Mason property and legal/trial fiction generally. Mason is shown questioning a witness on the stand, the corrupt cop that he and we as the audience know is really responsible for the crime. It looks like with enough pressure, the cop may break – but then the scene changes, and we see that the whole thing had been a fantasy as Mason and the ensemble engaged in trial preparation. And a simple observation develops from this – "No one confesses on the stand."

Making a witness confess on the stand was a staple of the old Perry Mason and is common in legal fiction generally. But this is way more accurate. The idea of a witness (or defendant) confessing on the stand is a dramatic fantasy. Moreover, it sort of goes to how fiction like this that presents the defense, rather than the prosecution, is essentially expected to actually solve the crime and point to the real killer, which even happens in this show. But it's not the job of the defense to solve the case – the absence of a clear alternative suspect doesn't implicate the defendant. The only burden of the defense is to stop the prosecution from proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, not to prove the defendant's innocence by proving someone else's guilt. And while I get that yes we as a mystery genre audience want resolution to the mystery, there's something interesting to me in the idea that an audience will expect someone defending an accused to prove an alternative theory when – actually that is not their job!

There is also one thing I feel obligated to note, and once again spoiler because this gets right to it – Mason ultimately deduces the baby's death was due to being breastfed by a woman who was addicted to heroin. For the record, this is not a thing, there's no scientific evidence that I know of to support the idea that being breastfed by a woman who used heroin (or other illegal substances) would kill an infant, unless I'd think the woman was intaking such high quantities that she'd probably die, too. I know this has been alleged by at least one prosecutor but again, I've seen no scientific backing for it. Infants who breastfeed from women who use heroin or methadone treatment can become dependent, but this is a treatable condition. So. I just feel like I have to note that.

But – I overall enjoyed the show, especially more as it went on and the ensemble came together. I'll watch a season 2.





This is an extremely ahistorical show about Catherine the Great's rise to power in Russia. And I'm not generally going to care about a lack of historical accuracy, it's not like the show is pretending anything otherwise. There are a few points when it's taken a bit far for me, often for the sake of comedy, and also where it's like – idk I feel like there is a discussion to be had about the extent of "lol Russians are backward." I'm just probably not the person to have that discussion.

Anyway, Catherine the Great is now your Progressive Historical BFF. But with a special note about how this is Not Historical, so, cheers. And it was entertaining and often pretty fun and funny. The actors are all good – I was happy to see Sacha Dhawan as I'd liked him as the Master in Doctor Who, and I also in particular liked Phoebe Fox. Even with historical-or-not-etc., or my feelings that some points pushed too far past suspension of disbelief, I do like this approach of satirical views of history that don't treat the past as some time of refinement or seriousness that the present comparatively lacks. I did also feel at points that I was just getting tired of the relentless abuse and misogyny that Catherine has to deal with, like – just let me get my resolution already, but.

Well that didn't happen at the end of this season, and I had been kind of hoping it would since this was another show originally billed as a miniseries. But surprise! Also now a regular series! So I guess I'll just have to hope that by the end of the next season she'll have just killed that fucker already.




We also ended up rewatching (well, for me rewatching) the 2010 reboot Nikita which I had remembered watching and liking at least enough to watch all the way through, but I could only recall snippets of it. So it was kind of like watching it for the first time. And it was fun! It's a very CW show of Attractive People Doing Things, and you know, convoluted plot hijinks and absolute nonsense (can you avoid injury in a BALLISTIC MISSILE STRIKE by making it to the parking lot because I am doubtful). But I guess yet again I became very attached toward the characters, and I certainly have a thing for Action Hero Women Who Struggle With A Sense Of Inner Darkness. We've also been occasionally watching the 90s La Femme Nikita and I prefer Nikita's Very American Masculine Shane West Michael to the 90s "European Vampire Boyfriend" as I keep calling him. But then Shane West Michael is a banter-flirty-equals boyfriend and not a controlling asshole! Please come back next week for Veronica talks about 10+ year old shows that nobody cares about. But it's like the only other things we watch are Jeopardy and YouTube videos of people playing Among Us.

In other news, with this year’s Emmys there was something intoxicatingly freeing about not knowing anything about anything nominated and it honestly makes me wish I could just give up on liking things altogether. Like between that and every glance at any fandom I ever get right now just, Stop Liking Things Challenge 2021.

But of course because that won’t happen, I’m vidding again. I’m trying a thing of just stuffing random clips into the timeline so I at least have something down instead of empty space I agonize over, and in a few instances it did randomly create some nice match-ups. But then I also watched and at points thought ‘that actually looks pretty good’ before remembering that was in fact a sequence of clips I had purposefully arranged. I guess that’s not a bad thing.

And some day I will finish my Fish Nun fic. SOME DAY. When I stop gd playing The Sims again.

Comments

[silveraspen]

Jobs are super exhausting these days, and your expectations are more than reasonable!

... also, Fish Nun fic? What?

[aberration]

Eheh yeah, it's a fic about one of the nuns on that island in The Last Jedi

[silveraspen]

Ohhhhhhh!

Come the day you do finish that, I will be lined up to read it. :)

[vivien]

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine - Brain science and children, whaaaaat? That definitely sounds like something I need to check out. (I wonder if the simplification of classification is a result of the neuron pruning process that begins around 4-5 - that would make sense. But not a neuroscientist, just an early childhood educator who likes brains. But not in a zombie way.)

I really enjoyed The Great as a ridiculous confection. I think I liked the casting the best because the facts don't matter, so neither does the skin color of the beautiful people playing the roles. The aunt was my especial favorite, though.

I skipped all but the very beginning of your Perry Mason review because I've heard so many good things about it. I watched the first episode and really liked it, but then I forgot about it, and my brain absorbs so little media these days that I haven't watched the rest. But now I'm more determined to Get Around To It.

All hail the fish nuns!

[aberration]

She goes over so many studies that are essentially 'how many seconds does a baby look at one thing versus another thing' or 'does a toddler choose the masculine toy or the feminine toy or the neutral toy' that then eventually get used as 'and here is proof that Women Are Bad At Math.' Though something she mentioned about neuroimagery studies that I found interesting was that there are studies looking to document some kind of difference in how men and women respond to certain things, but also plenty studies that are also using neuroimagery that aren't specifically looking for gender difference and so don't highlight the gender breakdown of the participants, but don't repeat the sames findings of those that purport to show difference. Anyway, I'd recommend it?

Honestly re: cast I think that's fine even when something is trying to be historically accurate. Getting actors of color jobs and exposure >>>> historical accuracy that will inevitably be bent for artistic license anyway. So I'm happy to see The Great continue that trend.

If you liked the pilot of Perry Mason I definitely think you'd like the rest of the show. Like I said I was mixed on the pilot and liked the rest of the show, but I think it's likely whatever changed from there on like, isn't going to make you like the show less! Mostly I feel like it was a case of a pilot having to make a strong initial splash and then the show itself broadening the world and story and I can be kind of impatient for the latter.

;D