gajumaru

I've now watched all three seasons, and I have Opinions.

OK, so there are lots of reasons I am going to keep obsessively watching it ( spoilers )

Reasons why I'm not angry, just disappointed ( moar spoilers )

In conclusion: amazing characters and world-building, with so much promise for inspiring storytelling, but lacklustre delivery. Too many plot holes, too many bad decisions, and too much emphasis on oversimplified morality, individual pew-pew heroism, and frankly too many life or death crises and traumas. Give me a season of Discovery where they aren't constantly fighting for their lives, they can get a break, get counselling, attend a concert, and have some episodes about culture and philosophy where we get cute domestic scenes with the characters and no-one cries.

Yeah, basically I want TNG only with a cast of women, queers and people of colour. I'll keep hoping.

4/5. Whoa, this is wild. I picked it up in Housman's Radical Booksellers in Kings Cross, where a staff note recommended it as "the most bonkers thing I've ever read".

In a near future dystopic Santo Domingo, acid rain falls on dead seas, after a chemical spill and a tsunami has destroyed all marine life in the bay. Acilde Figueroa has escaped her life as a rent boy, and now finds herself at the heart of a Santería prophecy. With the help of a sacred (and now immensely valuable) anemone, she has been chosen to travel back in time and stop the seas from dying. Her price: the injection which will complete her transition into the man she's always known herself to be.

In the early 2000s, deadbeat visual artist Argenis Luna works as a fake psychic for a phone line, but he can't even keep that terrible job. Argenis is a talented painter, and a malevolent son of a bitch who suppresses his unacknowledged queerness with violent homophobic and misogynistic thoughts.

As the now-male Acilde travels back in time, he encounters Argenis and exploits his artistic talent to raise funds for his marine preservation project. After getting stung by the same anemone, Argenis too travels back in time, and struggles to maintain a double life as both modern artist and 17th century buccaneer along the same coastline.

Argenis and Acilde's lives intertwine in multiple timelines, as Argenis works to create art and hang onto his sanity in the face of 17th century violence and 21st century expectations, and Acilde finds his sacred conservation mission challenged by the temptations of 21st century wealth and comfort.

This packs a lot into a slim volume, with restless punk prose and vivid characterisation and details. It's full of unexpected twists and turns. The different timelines are shown rather than told, and it took me a while to get to grips with who was who and what was happening when. I had to flick back and forth a lot to update my picture of events as I started to figure out what was going on.

I love the strong beginning, with Acilde's backstory and transformation. Argenis' entry into the story too is compelling, and I wanted to read more of him doing tarot readings in a dingy office and convincing sad white women that he can see their future. Despite his many failings, I found myself rooting for him, cheering him on to achieve artistic success and come to terms with his sexuality. But Argenis' future - including in the past - is full of disappointments.

I wanted a more optimistic ending, although I understand why I didn't get one. I found the end of Acilde's story a bit unconvincing - I felt like his character development was a bit thin and I didn't understand why he made the decisions he did. I'd have liked to see the sacred Santería prophecy threat wrapped up. But despite an anticlimactic ending, there's a lot to like here. The artistic promise of the early chapters is enticing, and I'm already tempted to revisit them. This is a book that provokes us to do better than its self-indulgent characters, artistically and politically, with the threat of what awaits us if we don't.

5/5. I stayed up til 11.30pm finishing it while E slept beside me. A haunting, thoughtful, beautiful and profoundly moving novella. Four human astronauts go on a decade long mission to a red dwarf solar system to survey its four habitable planets. While they are traveling between them at half the speed of light, enzyme patches transform their bodies to adapt them to each new environment.

This is breathtaking. It's an ode to the joy and wonder of exploration and scientific discovery. It's glorious, imaginative glimpses into the extraordinary beauty of alien flora and fauna. It's about how we enter new spaces, how much space we take up, how we harm and are harmed. It's about the impossibility of seeing more than a tiny slice of the new life we encounter, and the arrogance and humility of thinking that mere glimpse has meaning. It's a rousing invitation to sort our shit out and get into space. It's an eerie, mournful glimpse into a dark period of Earth's future.

Oh, and it's a queer high functioning polycule consisting of trans, ace and neurodiverse characters, at least two of whom are (I think) of colour. Yay, queers in space! But the sex positivity and queerness is so background compared to the main thrust of the story, it barely gets a mention in passing.

I couldn't put it down. It's left my mind and heart ringing. Stunning.

Last night a friend and I curled up on the sofa to watch a film. I'd had the songs from The Little Mermaid stuck in my head in the shower that morning, so that was my first suggestion, but when we opened Netflix I was reminded that there was this new live action/CGI film out in a similar Disneyish vein. I heard of it via mr_magicfingers, who works in the film industry and was on the SFXVFX team for Mowgli. I try to watch stuff he's been involved in, if only for the pleasure of seeing his name in the credits :)

So, Mowgli: a straight-to-Netflix original with a big CGI budget. It's enjoyable fluff and beautiful eye candy. I could happily watch those sweeping shots through the jungle for hours, and the background of the closing credit sequence would make a stunning psychedelic video projection (or even desktop screensaver). The score was stunning. Rohan Chand as Mowgli was watchable and convincingly energetic (the enthusiastic running around, and the scene where he's learning to leap and catch a branch and stubbornly hurls himself across the gap time after time, not caring that he keeps landing on his face, reminded me of a certain 13 year old boy I know). And the voice performances were amazing, from a stellar cast including Andy Serkis as a gruffly cockney Baloo (Serkis was also the director), Cate Blanchett as a scary and mystical Kaa, Christian Bale as a wonderfully sympathetic Bagheera, and Benedict Cumberbatch growly and resonant as Shere Khan. I could listen to his voice all day, although if I had to close my eyes I'm not sure I could have told the difference between Shere Khan and Smaug.

It was also very heckleable, with enough silly moments and narrative inconsistencies to result in a fair amount of shouting at the screen.

( Spoilers )

In summary: perfect film for talking over with a friend because you pretty much know the story already, nicely tense without being too scary (although the bloody bits were convincingly brutal), visually gorgeous fairytale. Don't expect it to make perfect sense, and you won't be disappointed.