Celedam wrote:Once again we are in complete agreement. Thanks.
As for what to move on to, I was thinking The Expanse since Amazon Prime recently picked up Season 3. But offline I'm currently reading The Player of Games, the second book in Iain M. Banks' Culture series, so my space opera needs are already covered.
I just read Consider Phlebas (first book) a few months back. It was well written I guess, but I still considered it a little bit of a slog, probably in the first instance because like a lot of people it's become hard for me to read full books any more. But also because, while I'm sure it was a rollicking space adventure in its time, with super-advanced tech and singularity-level AI that still plays as hard science, those themes been reused/ripped-off so many times in the years since then that it (unfairly) seems ho-hum in 2019. And also because, while I can appreciate the intellectual accomplishment of getting the details of things like orbital mechanics, microgravity, etc precisely right, in actuality I'm not checking the math, and just care that they sound kind of convincing, so I find myself kind of guiltily speeding over those passages instead of savoring them with any of the degree of attention the author put into them. And finally
...I felt that I had to work to like Horza, who is let's face it an asshole, and eventually I did, but then he dies at the end in a way that felt unsatisfying to me, from a space operatic perspective. I get it as literature. Banks was considered a "serious" writer and one of the things that "serious" writers don't do is keep characters alive for mawkish or sentimental reasons, but in this case his death seemed particuarly tacked on.
I was also thinking The Magicians, but it's a little too soon for something like after the disappointment of The Gifted.
I like the Magicians, at least well enough to keep watching it. I don't think I'd recommend it though, at least, doesn't seem like what I'd imagine you'd like. The main actors are attractive and act well but they play somewhat unpleasant roles. The lead character (Quentin) is a mopey whiner who constantly feels sorry for himself, one of the lead women (Margo) is so sassy all [clap] the [clap] time [clap] that it was a super-turnoff for about a season and a half until I finally came to appreciate the skill of the actress, another main woman (Alice) is first positioned as angelic but has an outlandishly selfish and self-serving turn that makes her so unpleasant from then on. They're almost anime level caricatures of human beings. I find the actress who portrays Julia (Stella Maeve) madly attractive, that's about 60% of the reason I watch the show, although I may have mentioned previously that I was initially expecting her to have a posh English accent and was momentarily disappointed by it being more South Jersey.
Speaking of magic, I recently followed Joanna (Cast of Kings and Storm of Spoilers podcasts) Robinson's suggestion of watching
A Discovery of Witches which is available on Shudder/VRV and Sundance Now! and is apparently a colossal hit in the UK. It was...okay...but again underwhelming to me for much the same reasons I mentioned previously about recent British fare. But also, the lead guy is meant to be broodingly sexy and maybe I'm not the best judge of that but I didn't see it at all. He seemed perhaps the least charismatic male actor on the entire show. The leading lady has very beautiful blue eyes but is otherwise a bland knockoff brand Anna Torv. The plot twists were contrived and marred by some glaringly bad dialogue. What got me was that Joanna Robinson gushed over the show in comparison with The Umbrella Academy, which she found uninspired, yet to me after a couple of episodes, I rate Umbella far higher than Discovery. I simply can't trust her judgment going forward.
Here's something I can unabashedly recommend if you haven't seen it: Future Man, on Hulu. The first season is ridiculously funny --
Geek's Guide cannily compared it to Back to the Future crossed with There's Something About Mary. The second one is much inferior but still better than any of the other TV shows I've mentioned thus far within this post. (And of course I continue to recommend The Expanse. The orbital mechanics are just as on-point, but I can lazily watch them instead of having to visualize all that "
east takes you out" shit while I'm reading.)
Anyway, I 100% agree with that Blade Runner 2049 assessment. It was a true masterpiece in a way that the first one wasn't. That is, the first one was a great film, groundbreaking, unforgettable, and hugely influential but studio interference corrupted its auteurial purity. Villeneuve was given free rein to pursue his vision and it shows in every frame, in the clockwork precision of the story and the psychological themes present throughout. The first film also had echoes of a 1970's approach to sound editing (long stretches of near silence and low key dialogue punctuated with an intrusive soundtrack) which post Star Wars sounds oddly anachronistic. I like the way the sequel subtly embraces that aesthetic while also bringing it into the 21st century.