Abandon Ship! Abandon Ship!

1. Finished watching a sweet Japanese film entitled Rental Family - starring Brendan Fraiser as a struggling American actor in Japan, who lands a gig with an organization that hires actors to play roles in real family dramas. The film is directed and produced by Hikari.

Here's the synopsis: ( mild spoilers )

I went in blind? But found it to be interesting and moving, dealing with the complexities of human nature/connection and cultural differences. I fell in love with the characters, cried at the end, and found it a moving antidote to the aggravated misanthropy I'd been feeling off and on lately.

It's playing for free on Hulu, if you want to give it a shot.


2. Also watched, much earlier in the week while ill, Ghostbusters: AfterLife - which is directed by Jason Reitman, and stars Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, the kid who played Mike in Stranger Things, and two young kids who are actually pretty good in it (possibly the best things in it), and the remaining stars from the original making cameos.

It's okay? Coon and Rudd are underused. They did more with Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis in the original. The focus is of course on the kids, so think...Goonies meets Ghostbusters? I miss the 1980s films, where kids were utilized better, and there were better scripts, and far less focus on bad CJI. The effects were even better in the original flick. This felt kind of cheap in places (Muncher was definitely showing his age), and not quite as many ghosts. It also references the original a lot, without explaining it - so it kind of assumes you've seen the original Ghostbusters and remember it vividly? (I don't, so it took me a little while to figure a few things out, which I did - relatively quickly. So it's possible?)

It's also on Hulu.

3. Finished Bridgerton S4 - which had dropped the final episodes today. I didn't enjoy this season and used Rental Family as an antidote to my feelings of general misanthropic annoyance. It was aggravating to say the least and no, did not, provide the promised satisfying ending. If anything it wrapped it up a bit too quickly and neatly, and let the villainous step-mother off with barely a scratch.

It's the Cinderella trope or a reworking of it, which doesn't quite work for me. ( Read more... )

This season admittedly adapted the most controversial of the Julie Quinn Bridgerton romance novels, entitled "An Offer from a Gentleman". I'd hoped they'd change the novel, do to the controversy surrounding it, and make it a gay romance, since Benedict has been portrayed as bisexual. A m/m Cinderella trope would be have at least been different, and far more interesting. But alas, no. (I can see why - that's very hard to do in this sort of series and remain true to the historical romance genre. Also that's a lot for a writer to take on? A Cinderella class problem and a gay romance at the same time.). But in the end, the only thing they really changed was the ethnicity of the heroine, from what I know of the books (which is very little - I've not read them, nor plan to).

Bridgerton is actually a good example of the difficulty of book to television adaptations, and how they aren't always faithfully adapted, and sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes not, depending on your perspective? The series is adapted from a popular 21st Century group of romance novels by Julie Quinn, surrounding a titled and wealthy family and their friends in Mayfair London. While it doesn't change a lot of the plots (outside of S3, which did veer away from the books a bit along with the whole Lady Whistledown thread), it does change a lot of bits and pieces of the world and historical period (dicey that - considering it's a regency romance series - albeit not necessarily a faithful one), also changes the genders, ethnicity, and sexual orientation of various characters in order to be inclusive, and for sly social commentary. I wouldn't say it is a biting social satire (Austen, it's not - few romances are), but it is a satire of manners. More politically correct Georgette Heyer, than Austen.
( spoilers )


Oh, Netflix has grabbed a few series - it has all four seasons of Veronica Mars now, also West Wing, Grantchester, and various others.