So, once again, I’m tempted to write in another fandom. I wrote my
first Jeeves/Wooster fic, “Hard Boiled Eggs” and I’ve been on a reading
binge for at least a week. A large part of the latter is that my elderly
mother is doing badly and I need to hide from that and from the state
of the world in general. So I plunge into the world of Archive of Our Own 3 for hours on
end.
But is all of my time to be taken up writing fanfic? I’m not
young anymore. I should be turning my thoughts to a memoir, and essays.
I have many ideas. I’ve written about mental illness. Right now I’m
writing a piece about going insane. I’m quite good at it. I’m
considering writing about handling a gun (45) while I was in Memphis and
how I really wanted to buy it. Even though I’m pro-gun control and a
New Yorker to boot. I should finish a long piece I’ve been writing about
my father’s death. Or the time I had orgasms for 18 straight hours. Or
the time a SWAT team showed up on my doorstep and took me to the psych
ward. (Turns out it was a false alarm–someone called in to 911
deliberately. I never found out who it was.) I managed to write about
being deported from England, in “A Basket Full of Cats”.
I
should finish the enormous historical fantasy novel I’ve worked on in
spurts since 2009. I should promote the anthology of my plays that a
small press published over a year ago. I should try to perform more than
twice a year.
Part of me just wants to write about the
unexpected consequences of when Bertie convinces Jeeves to be Fred
Astaire to Bertie’s Ginger Rogers.
If I was younger I wouldn’t be quite so conflicted. Oh, wait, I’m always so conflicted.
I've been away for a long time. Wasting my time on tumblr and twitter, being generally paralyzed by the state of the world, the usual. But I've found myself wanting to write about films. Currently I am screening the films of Daniel Radcliffe. I was knocked out by Swiss Army Man, about which more in a future entry. I've never seen more than a few minutes of Harry Potter. So I don't come encumbered with any baggage when I watch his films.
So, I’ve been
watching Victor Frankenstein, and I have to say, it stinks. Both James
MacAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe do their damndest to bring the story to
life. But not only have we seen this before, we have to wait for a
hellishly long time for the monster. Which then explodes in a series of
blinding flashes and complete nonsense. At the end the movie sets itself up
for a sequel. Since it flopped, I doubt one is forthcoming.
Watching
on my computer screen is a blessing. I can stop the movie, do some
chores, and come back. I can’t imagine sitting through this on the big
screen.
Good evening, I'll be your tortured freak for the evening
The
beginning is by far the best part of the movie, when Igor (Daniel
Radcliffe) is the abused nameless hunchback/gifted doctor in the circus
who is freed by Victor Frankenstein (James McAvoy). Amazingly enough,
the “hump” is a gigantic 18-year-old abscess. Um, okay. The first
intensely homoerotic sequence is Victor smashing the hunchback against a
pillar to straighten his body. Victor names him Igor. Igor is amazed
at standing up. He is told to take a shower and dress and do something
about his hair. Amazingly enough, he knows how to shower, shave, and cut
his hair.
Why look, it’s Daniel Radcliffe.
Within
hours, his gait has straightened, learned to dress
himself in spiffy Victorian fashion, and stride jauntily around the streets of London. Throughout the picture, Radcliffe
manages to suggest his former self at moments. But for the most part he
becomes a proper English gentleman able to dance, fall in love and have
sex with Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey. She has no real identity
because we come for the monster, stay for the hot and heavy bromance. I
love a good potential ship as much as the next fan, but I wanted to
slap James McAvoy. My god, man, you probably didn’t need to go to craft
services because you were too busy chewing scenery.
Aaaaacting!
Victor
and Igor create a chimpanzee and bring it to life, but it turns out to
be a crazed killer in a sequence that doesn’t get anybody killed but
does break a lot of glass. Hunted by an extremely dull police inspector,
they hide out in a castle and bring the monster to life in the last 10
minutes. Right before the whole big bang finale, we hear Igor saying,
“you know the story” which serves to make the ending of the movie even
more tedious.
It involves lots of shouting in the rain. The
monster is–well–a monster. Tries to kill everyone, there are
explosions, screams, minor characters falling to their death blah blah
blah. I’ve watched the ending twice and I still can’t figure out what’s
going on. Explosions, majestic faux-classical chorus, people screaming.
That’s okay, I’ll wait it out. By the way, there’s huge pieces of
metal, guns, electricity–how come it doesn’t occur to anyone to stab the
bloody thing in the HEAD?
The movie flopped, in part because of
its bloated budget. If the filmmakers hadn’t be so in love with their
Sherlock knock-off, they might have cut 30 minutes and cut the redundant
dialogue about life/death God/man. Why bother when we know the ending?
It’s
not all bad. I opened my mail, paused it and made some phone calls,
looked it up on imdb.com and got to look at Daniel Radcliffe. He is sexy
and adorable. I’ve only seen him as adult actor. So I have Harry Potter reference points. Probably good, because then I might be thinking of the Boy Who Lived instead of the Monster Who Died.
