Frilly shirts!
Nov. 24th, 2003 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaWell, one frilly shirt.
Went to see Master and Commander tonight.Will put the rest of this behind a cut tag. Will only note for the public record that the costume designers were acutely aware of the iconography of the frilly shirt (the sort that is always open at the throat), since they took great care to allow only the hero (dressed in white white white) to wear one. Everyone else got plain shirts.
Eh, it was OK. I like the O'Brian books, but am not a passionate fan. They are well-written and adventuresome, but curiously constricted, narrow, and limited in scope. I never feel that they rise beyond the narrative to any deeper ideas, insights, emotions. It's not the confined settingor theme that causes this (after all, think of the shipboard stories of Joseph Conrad or what Tolstoy did with a Napoleonic War story)), it's that the author is interested only in his sea tales, his manly men, his wonderful command of the "gear and tackle and trim" of the period and genre. O'Brian admires Jack Aubrey for his limitations--his sense of duty, his narrowly focused imagination. He invites us to admire Aubrey for these same limitations, and we do. To a point.
The movie was faithful to this idea. It told a limited story, and told it well. The sense of accuracy was magnificent and deeply satisfying, but hardly sufficient to carry the whole film. Decent acting, decent pacing, good photography. Not enough witty repartee to meet the standard set by the swashbucklers of the 1930s, alas. And god, does no one know how to film a swordfight anymore??
*rant mode on* You hold the camera still, at midrange, so that the audience can see what's happening. You do not jiggle the camera around to give the effect of fast action (that's the actors' job). And you do not mess up their choreography with a lot of tiresome jazzy short cuts. Unless, of course, your actors have not bothered to learn how to handle a saber. Whatever one may say about Errol Flynn's skill at fencing, you could always see him work for that moment when he gets the bad guy. Cliche it may be, but it is also good visual storytelling. *rant mode off.*
The movie also bent over backward to provide no opportunity whatever for slash. If ever there were an example of a story in which there is no silent space for slash to enter, this is it. So determined is the movie (and indeed the books) to affirm the (rather nice) idea of male friendship without any subtext whatever that the characters are stripped of any erotic presence at all.
And lacking eros, they lack the capacity to express deep bonds. Good friends watch one another die, and their sorrow seems no more than what we would feel if we missed a train. This despite the fact that about half the cast is beautiful golden-haired boys with the sort of rosy lips that A.E. Houseman wrote poems to.
No doubt there will be masses of Aubrey/Maturin slash anyway. There already is, from the books. But there was more fierce brotherly bonding in the ROTK trailer than in the whole movie that followed.
(ROTK lookin good, btw.)
But the ships were teh pretty.
Went to see Master and Commander tonight.Will put the rest of this behind a cut tag. Will only note for the public record that the costume designers were acutely aware of the iconography of the frilly shirt (the sort that is always open at the throat), since they took great care to allow only the hero (dressed in white white white) to wear one. Everyone else got plain shirts.
Eh, it was OK. I like the O'Brian books, but am not a passionate fan. They are well-written and adventuresome, but curiously constricted, narrow, and limited in scope. I never feel that they rise beyond the narrative to any deeper ideas, insights, emotions. It's not the confined settingor theme that causes this (after all, think of the shipboard stories of Joseph Conrad or what Tolstoy did with a Napoleonic War story)), it's that the author is interested only in his sea tales, his manly men, his wonderful command of the "gear and tackle and trim" of the period and genre. O'Brian admires Jack Aubrey for his limitations--his sense of duty, his narrowly focused imagination. He invites us to admire Aubrey for these same limitations, and we do. To a point.
The movie was faithful to this idea. It told a limited story, and told it well. The sense of accuracy was magnificent and deeply satisfying, but hardly sufficient to carry the whole film. Decent acting, decent pacing, good photography. Not enough witty repartee to meet the standard set by the swashbucklers of the 1930s, alas. And god, does no one know how to film a swordfight anymore??
*rant mode on* You hold the camera still, at midrange, so that the audience can see what's happening. You do not jiggle the camera around to give the effect of fast action (that's the actors' job). And you do not mess up their choreography with a lot of tiresome jazzy short cuts. Unless, of course, your actors have not bothered to learn how to handle a saber. Whatever one may say about Errol Flynn's skill at fencing, you could always see him work for that moment when he gets the bad guy. Cliche it may be, but it is also good visual storytelling. *rant mode off.*
The movie also bent over backward to provide no opportunity whatever for slash. If ever there were an example of a story in which there is no silent space for slash to enter, this is it. So determined is the movie (and indeed the books) to affirm the (rather nice) idea of male friendship without any subtext whatever that the characters are stripped of any erotic presence at all.
And lacking eros, they lack the capacity to express deep bonds. Good friends watch one another die, and their sorrow seems no more than what we would feel if we missed a train. This despite the fact that about half the cast is beautiful golden-haired boys with the sort of rosy lips that A.E. Houseman wrote poems to.
No doubt there will be masses of Aubrey/Maturin slash anyway. There already is, from the books. But there was more fierce brotherly bonding in the ROTK trailer than in the whole movie that followed.
(ROTK lookin good, btw.)
But the ships were teh pretty.
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 12:02 pm (UTC)