Pirates and Hallows
Jul. 14th, 2006 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseSaw Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest the other night.
It's been getting mixed reviews all around, but overall I liked it. The story starts briskly, jams for about 20 minutes in stupid slapstick (Thus leading to the many complaints about pacing), then gets moving very well, with some very nice moments of characters turning out not so nice, twists, turns, and torments.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wicked_wish has a pretty good analysis of the actual plot, and how it falls out, once things get underway, here, to which I have very little to add. I do disagree with her about how good it is, but I like her analysis of the character interactions. What I want to talk about isn't the plot, though, or the big set-up it makes for movie three. It's the big gaping non-plot stretch toward the beginning, the removal of which would turn the movie I saw into the movie she saw.
The pirates rush panicking and/or confused, to land. And end up on an island of cannibals who look like they decided to leave King Kong because it was too grim, and now regret the choice. The whole sequence, not just the cannibal tribe with its "savage blacks" taking a white man as god, and all the baggage that goes with that, but the way all the dark skinned pirates end up in the cage that gets smashed to pieces, prove slower, dumber/less resourceful, have implications of racial stereotyping and condemnation, which offended me in a way the "voodoo priestess" Tia Dalma doesn't, (or wouldn't if she were the only case of such, and didn't first show up hard on the heels of this.)
This sequence also has nothing to do with the plot before or after, and the few genuinely funny moments in the mostly tepid slapstick aren't enough to redeem what is, effectively, a lengthy pause in the plot. Exactly one thing of importance happens in this whole sequence; Will Turner rejoins the Black Pearl's crew (As do the two piratical clowns, who actually prove to serve a purpose later but it's all of a piece), and tells Captain Jack what he's after and why. So, effectively, the filmmakers spent umpteen gazillion dollars, somewhere around 15-20 minutes of screen time, and who knows how many special effects, not to mention alienated a significant chunk of their audience, for asomething that could be accomplished in a 30-second scene (Eg: the pirates go to seek Tia Dalma out right away, and when they arrive, she sends a man from her village to collect Will Turner, who's still probing around the ship at the beach), a two minute barfight sequence in Tortuga, or even a five minute set piece of some other kind.
Most nastily of all, it has no emotional impact past the immediate sequence. Sorry, the surviving crew members are being kept in a cage made of the bones of their eaten comrades, and they don't act the slightest bit different after than they did before. Those cages are used for comedy, including a cheap, horrible circus-music background at one point. Somewhere, they missed the difference between comedy to relieve the horror, actual black comedy, and this grotesquerie. The first makes you laugh because it's a shift of mood, the second makes you laugh guiltily, and if anything, raises your awareness of how wrong it is, even as you can't help it. This just made me sick. The Jack Sparrow shish-kebab joke happening at the same time was funny, could stay funny; this couldn't.
Summary - Worth seeing, but go get popcorn during the cannibals.
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Someone I otherwise respect dismissed The Hallowed Hunt as "good the first tiem she wrote it, with the Curse of Chalion".
THat person was wrong, this isn't a rehash by any stretch. In fact, I'm having a hard time seeing how it could be interpreted so. Yes, the way her gods deal with individuals and countries do lend a linking thread to the story, but no more so than Paladin of Souls. The "Creature inside the man" is not a dissimilar image to the "Demon in the belly", but it is neither made by nor into the same form of magic, nor is it used to the same ends. It's a very different country from that in the past two gods books, moreso than one might first notice, when one realises that yes, indeed, all the coutnries in her world do indeed worship the same gods, if in different ways (If the deities appear on a regular basis all over the place, well, of course the whole world should worship the same beings, whatever else their culture does. It's a scarily logical extrapolation of the "active and interfering god" trope, and one I'm astonished isn't more common -- I have a rationale for why it isn't so in mine, but I did find a while ago that I had to figure out that "Why not?")
And yes, the character begins damaged, but he begins so in very different ways, and for different reasons; notr does he end the same. Cazaril almost seems too healed over the book; Ingrey still feels damaged, to me, just differently, and now in ways he can see and live with.
I thought damaged characters tended to be rather like bad families, all different, where whole characters, like good families, are much alike. If damage makes characters alike, I'm truly living in a different world from everyone else.
I'm reminded of nothing more than my mom's concern that someone, reading my description of the dream I had a while ago (that I might turn into a story someday), would use it as a start to their own story. I just can't take that as a threat, or a danger to my version. What this ostensible idea thief did with such a thing wouldn't match at all what I would do. Bujold writes two books, in a similar theme, with a not too dissimilar starting point, and veers of widely in where they go.
______________________________
But both of these are stories feeding into the wrong story of mine; it's the feral looks, the feral actions, people not quite human, the moral knots and the fact that the good characters still aren't necessarily the nice characters, as well as the wild woods and the undead -- both those acting demon-like and those dragging history into the present. I'm having to beat that one back with a stick to get any progress on Raising the Storm. Yarrgh!
It's been getting mixed reviews all around, but overall I liked it. The story starts briskly, jams for about 20 minutes in stupid slapstick (Thus leading to the many complaints about pacing), then gets moving very well, with some very nice moments of characters turning out not so nice, twists, turns, and torments.
wicked_wish has a pretty good analysis of the actual plot, and how it falls out, once things get underway, here, to which I have very little to add. I do disagree with her about how good it is, but I like her analysis of the character interactions. What I want to talk about isn't the plot, though, or the big set-up it makes for movie three. It's the big gaping non-plot stretch toward the beginning, the removal of which would turn the movie I saw into the movie she saw.The pirates rush panicking and/or confused, to land. And end up on an island of cannibals who look like they decided to leave King Kong because it was too grim, and now regret the choice. The whole sequence, not just the cannibal tribe with its "savage blacks" taking a white man as god, and all the baggage that goes with that, but the way all the dark skinned pirates end up in the cage that gets smashed to pieces, prove slower, dumber/less resourceful, have implications of racial stereotyping and condemnation, which offended me in a way the "voodoo priestess" Tia Dalma doesn't, (or wouldn't if she were the only case of such, and didn't first show up hard on the heels of this.)
This sequence also has nothing to do with the plot before or after, and the few genuinely funny moments in the mostly tepid slapstick aren't enough to redeem what is, effectively, a lengthy pause in the plot. Exactly one thing of importance happens in this whole sequence; Will Turner rejoins the Black Pearl's crew (As do the two piratical clowns, who actually prove to serve a purpose later but it's all of a piece), and tells Captain Jack what he's after and why. So, effectively, the filmmakers spent umpteen gazillion dollars, somewhere around 15-20 minutes of screen time, and who knows how many special effects, not to mention alienated a significant chunk of their audience, for asomething that could be accomplished in a 30-second scene (Eg: the pirates go to seek Tia Dalma out right away, and when they arrive, she sends a man from her village to collect Will Turner, who's still probing around the ship at the beach), a two minute barfight sequence in Tortuga, or even a five minute set piece of some other kind.
Most nastily of all, it has no emotional impact past the immediate sequence. Sorry, the surviving crew members are being kept in a cage made of the bones of their eaten comrades, and they don't act the slightest bit different after than they did before. Those cages are used for comedy, including a cheap, horrible circus-music background at one point. Somewhere, they missed the difference between comedy to relieve the horror, actual black comedy, and this grotesquerie. The first makes you laugh because it's a shift of mood, the second makes you laugh guiltily, and if anything, raises your awareness of how wrong it is, even as you can't help it. This just made me sick. The Jack Sparrow shish-kebab joke happening at the same time was funny, could stay funny; this couldn't.
Summary - Worth seeing, but go get popcorn during the cannibals.
____________________________________
Someone I otherwise respect dismissed The Hallowed Hunt as "good the first tiem she wrote it, with the Curse of Chalion".
THat person was wrong, this isn't a rehash by any stretch. In fact, I'm having a hard time seeing how it could be interpreted so. Yes, the way her gods deal with individuals and countries do lend a linking thread to the story, but no more so than Paladin of Souls. The "Creature inside the man" is not a dissimilar image to the "Demon in the belly", but it is neither made by nor into the same form of magic, nor is it used to the same ends. It's a very different country from that in the past two gods books, moreso than one might first notice, when one realises that yes, indeed, all the coutnries in her world do indeed worship the same gods, if in different ways (If the deities appear on a regular basis all over the place, well, of course the whole world should worship the same beings, whatever else their culture does. It's a scarily logical extrapolation of the "active and interfering god" trope, and one I'm astonished isn't more common -- I have a rationale for why it isn't so in mine, but I did find a while ago that I had to figure out that "Why not?")
And yes, the character begins damaged, but he begins so in very different ways, and for different reasons; notr does he end the same. Cazaril almost seems too healed over the book; Ingrey still feels damaged, to me, just differently, and now in ways he can see and live with.
I thought damaged characters tended to be rather like bad families, all different, where whole characters, like good families, are much alike. If damage makes characters alike, I'm truly living in a different world from everyone else.
I'm reminded of nothing more than my mom's concern that someone, reading my description of the dream I had a while ago (that I might turn into a story someday), would use it as a start to their own story. I just can't take that as a threat, or a danger to my version. What this ostensible idea thief did with such a thing wouldn't match at all what I would do. Bujold writes two books, in a similar theme, with a not too dissimilar starting point, and veers of widely in where they go.
______________________________
But both of these are stories feeding into the wrong story of mine; it's the feral looks, the feral actions, people not quite human, the moral knots and the fact that the good characters still aren't necessarily the nice characters, as well as the wild woods and the undead -- both those acting demon-like and those dragging history into the present. I'm having to beat that one back with a stick to get any progress on Raising the Storm. Yarrgh!
