things watched

[psocoptera]

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, at the Ahmanson in LA. Very funny - I think my favorite part was sitting next to Q as he cracked up, but I laughed a lot myself too. They're very good at setting up a gag, milking it, and then elevating it one even worse step further. There are some full episodes of the Goes Wrong Show available online if you like slapstick (or maybe it's farce? I don't really know how these things are classified).

Emma, 2020 film, on the plane. Fine! Great costumes and set design. Of course the whole time I was just thinking "what part of Clueless is this". I really liked getting to see a little bit of the endless labor of servants going into maintaining these people. I have gotten old enough that I can't tell what the young people find attractive, and so to me it seemed like there was maybe something interesting going on in the casting, where Knightley is the shortest and scruffiest and to my eye least attractive of the various men, which is a very different approach than, like, Clueless, where Paul Rudd is clearly The Aspirational Object. (I only mention shortest because it seemed unusual to me in film to show your ostensible lead romantic hero standing next to a series of taller dudes. I have a personal history of crushes on guys shorter than me, so I'm not trying to deny the attractiveness of shorter dudes here! Just not whoever that actor was.) Is this a subtle "look, everyone has ended up "correctly" sorted based on class/money and not looks" thing? Or maybe it is a looks thing, in that Anna Taylor-Joy is also honestly kind of weird looking... Junie says it's mean to say her interpupil distance is creepy, but it's certainly *striking*, let's say that. Or maybe the director and the young people do find this Knightley just as swoony as I found Paul Rudd in 199whatever, and I was not actually supposed to be thinking "Robert Martin is clearly the catch of the village if you take off the class goggles".

Comments

[irilyth]

it seemed like there was maybe something interesting going on in the casting, where Knightley is the shortest and scruffiest and to my eye least attractive of the various men

I am not familiar with the names of the characters in the story, and did a big double-take for a second there, thinking that it would be a super interesting casting decision to have Keira Knightley play a scruffy and unattractive man...

[psocoptera]

Keira Knightley has never been the least attractive anything in her life. And the dude wasn't exactly *un*attractive, they're all still Hollywood faces, he just didn't stand out in the way that romantic leads often stand out.

[glynhogen]

I love the way kids defend against mean comments! Even when they are neither particularly mean nor directed at the individual. (I once commented on how I hate Gilbert Gottfried's voice and had to spend several minutes talking about how he was using his voice as a professional, getting a certain effect, and I happened to not like that effect, etc., etc. It was Cookie Swirl C all over again.)

[psocoptera]

This is a slow reply, sorry, but I'm curious who is Cookie Swirl C in this context? Seems to be some kind of Youtube person? (And yeah, I think there's something neat about the way the kids are anti-mean these days...)

[glynhogen]

Yes, sorry, Cookie Swirl C was a big part of our life for a brief period. She was (is?) a YouTuber who makes pretty unobjectionable videos, but she speaks in a very high-pitched voice. Again, a performance I absolutely loathe, but it's quite conscious and aimed at her audience, etc., etc. But since it was hyper-feminine, and K was very young at the time, I felt extra pressure to not criticize feminine voices.

[psocoptera]

Reading this, it has hit me that Q watches a lot of Youtube videos, and I don't think I've *ever* heard a female-sounding voice on any of them, and I never noticed that. (I think they're mostly gamers playing games? I'm not really sure, they're all shouty and I don't like hearing them. But huh, wow.)

[glynhogen]

Yeah, I am very much not a fan of most of the YouTubers the kids have watched, and T's are largely dudes. K also ended up adding dudes to the mix (for some reason, Flamingo was the height of humor, straddling their 3.5 year age gap with zero difficulty).