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Hugo reading/watching: prereqs edition
Apr. 16th, 2018 08:54 pmI had seen the original Blade Runner at least once and possibly as many times as twice, but those times were in the mid and late 90s respectively, and I did not remember a lot of it. Am not convinced the plot bears close examination, but it works as a vehicle for the aesthetic and the set-piece scenes. I... don't remember if Harrison Ford was so clearly the bad guy last time I watched this movie?? But wow, first snake lady is just like at work doing her job, and then the super-uncomfortable scenes with Rachael, yikes. (By which I mean rapey. So rapey.) And, okay, Rutger Hauer should not have killed those dudes, but his and Pris's little-kid emotions and body language in some scenes made it hard for me to read him as an adult, quite, and they've been so thoroughly fucked over by the system... I mean, they *tell* us they've killed other people, but what they show us is this anguished acting-out. Anyways, I hope we find out in 2049 that Rachael got away from Deckard and was able to live out the rest of her life *not* complying in fear with his sexual fantasy of her, but given that it's an actual studio movie and not fanfic, I have little hope for that.
(Speculating about what might be in 2049, it occurs to me that one thing that Blade Runner is is a fantasy of effective policing - I mean, the worldbuilding was a little vague to me about how many replicants had *actually* ever been loose on Earth, but it's enough that they have this whole law enforcement subtype to deal with them, but they seem to believe that they've caught all of them, and Deckard claims to have never killed a human by mistake... in the middle of the dystopian setting, there's this sneaky triumphal "we can actually catch all the gangsters/win the War on Drugs/whatever the big policing goals were in 1982". I can't imagine anyone taking that seriously in a 2017 movie, so maybe what we'll see in 2049 is an undermining of that, that it turns out replicants *did* evade the blade runners?)
I also read Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch, the sequel to which is on the YA ballot. I liked it but did not love it. Some really neat imagery, but *so* much of it was stuck on the same emotional beat of "main character has questions which other people refuse to answer", which I find to be a kind of tiresome driver for tension in a story. The last third was better and I do look forward to the next one, but more from curiosity than, like, grippingness. Possibly I would have found it more compelling as an actual Y.A.? The little me who reread the Young Wizards trilogy a hundred times (back when they were a trilogy) might have eaten it up. And, like, I (actual large me) did find it very *interesting*, seeing a Nigerian-American version of the you're-a-wizard story, and just some of Okorafor's particular details (like the way characters get magically awarded points (wizard money, but basically points) whenever they learn or accomplish something, like the whole world is an rpg or video game). I believe Okorafor gets annoyed by the "African Harry Potter" comparison but there really are a *lot* of points of comparison; I'll be curious to see whether the next one feels like it's diverging more from that or what.
(Speculating about what might be in 2049, it occurs to me that one thing that Blade Runner is is a fantasy of effective policing - I mean, the worldbuilding was a little vague to me about how many replicants had *actually* ever been loose on Earth, but it's enough that they have this whole law enforcement subtype to deal with them, but they seem to believe that they've caught all of them, and Deckard claims to have never killed a human by mistake... in the middle of the dystopian setting, there's this sneaky triumphal "we can actually catch all the gangsters/win the War on Drugs/whatever the big policing goals were in 1982". I can't imagine anyone taking that seriously in a 2017 movie, so maybe what we'll see in 2049 is an undermining of that, that it turns out replicants *did* evade the blade runners?)
I also read Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch, the sequel to which is on the YA ballot. I liked it but did not love it. Some really neat imagery, but *so* much of it was stuck on the same emotional beat of "main character has questions which other people refuse to answer", which I find to be a kind of tiresome driver for tension in a story. The last third was better and I do look forward to the next one, but more from curiosity than, like, grippingness. Possibly I would have found it more compelling as an actual Y.A.? The little me who reread the Young Wizards trilogy a hundred times (back when they were a trilogy) might have eaten it up. And, like, I (actual large me) did find it very *interesting*, seeing a Nigerian-American version of the you're-a-wizard story, and just some of Okorafor's particular details (like the way characters get magically awarded points (wizard money, but basically points) whenever they learn or accomplish something, like the whole world is an rpg or video game). I believe Okorafor gets annoyed by the "African Harry Potter" comparison but there really are a *lot* of points of comparison; I'll be curious to see whether the next one feels like it's diverging more from that or what.
