Men without hats

[stillsostrange]

Adjustment Bureau: Sweet and well-acted, with a nice understated SFnal twist. A little too heart-warming, maybe, or at least too easy, but I like the characters enough that I mostly don't care.

But. Comma. I am so fucking sick of romances wherein all the narrative weight is given to one character. By which of course I mean the male character. David was completely privileged by the narrative. David and Elise's lives didn't intersect; she got caught in his orbit. Damon and Blunt made me care about their characters equally, but the narrative didn't. And in a romance where both characters are supposed to be risking terrible sacrifice to be together, I damn well want to see both sides.

And speaking of characters and narrative weight, my decision yesterday to splice two characters in Prayers into one is having much greater effect than I imagined. The book is spinning in wildly different directions now--the brooding love interest who was supposed to be an equal third has fallen almost entirely by the wayside. Another character whose role hasn't changed has started taking on a whole new appearance and demeanor in my head. The plucky paleontologist love interest--one of the characters who got spliced--has grown back in a new body, with a new personality, and is now the female lead's love interest instead of the male's. This is all very alarming, but I'm curious to see how it will shake out.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Hollywood still can't seem to get its head around the idea that woman might be entire people. Indeed, they love to reward actors for portraying women as broken, incomplete, or as only really completed through men. It is not helpful.
On the other hand, the book stuff sounds fabulous.

[readingthedark.livejournal.com]

Agreed on Adjustment Bureau. Somehow, her dance sequences were supposed to express deep character in ways that failed for me. From what I understand, given the director's previous work, this was slightly brainier and actually did slightly better with the orbit problem--but I found the narrative imbalance to be the fatal flaw.

Conversely, given PKD's own strange view of the world, I think this would qualify (barring the possible exception of the French film Barjo) as the first adaptation of his work that he would have actually enjoyed watching. Given his criticism of the two scenes of BladeRunner that he saw before he died, I'm ecstatic that Isa finally got a film made that her dad would've liked.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

Personally, I tend to bounce right off Dick's writing, but have better luck with films based on his work. Not all of them are gems, though. (Total Recall gets points for being funny, but not so many for being good.)