dragojustine: (Priestly)
[personal profile] dragojustine
Successful "write a little bit every day" days-in-a-row: 8

I saw Ten Inch Hero, and it was not middling at all. It was awesome. Granted, it was awesome in a particularly teeth-rotting heteronormatively sweet kind of way, which frustrates me but is not bad, sometimes. I had a list of detailed comments and critiques and "if only they had" and "I would have loved to see" and "but what about" a mile long, which is pretty much how you know I liked something.

I also just watched Eyes Wide Shut on Saturday night, and had a long ramble about why I like the movies I like and what I look for and how intellectually stimulating/deeply metaphorical/tricky puzzle movies are all well and good and sometimes I very much like them but it's something else entirely that makes you just deeply ENJOY something. This is not that ramble, because that ramble would theoretically make sense.

I am in love with Priestly forever and ever and ever, and Clea DuVall just with that movie moved from "Hey, it's that chick again, I really like her" to "Ohmygod my TV girlfriend!" because I think she is wildly, indescribably hot. This movie was exactly the kind of "chosen family" setup that affects me, with characters who actually care about each other and therefore make you care about them, so that even if it the script is uneven and the movie isn't exactly high art Saying Something the important thing is that you invested deeply and emotionally (without feeling manipulated into doing so) and now the characters will stay with you for a long, long time.

I would be writing Ten Inch Hero fic right now, except it's dicey without the cannon available to you in any form, and I couldn't write Priestly without another watch (or maybe at all. If I tried to write him the character would be really... self-consciously performative, when the fact that for him it's NOT performative is so much of the appeal. Does that make sense?) but that is the kind of investment I have.

Because, amid all the crazy angst and demon apocalypse and secrets and problems and crap that make up the meat of a story (I love that the meat of my stories so often includes apocalypse) we can sometimes see good people who care about each other and want each other to be happy and have carved out their little corners of stability and, for lack of a less-girly word, love, in this crazy world.

Jensen Ackles and Clea DuVall need to take adorable promo pictures together so I can have a wallpaper with my gorgeous sexy TV boyfriend and girlfriend and their matched set of sexy freckles. (I would be remiss to not notice that Danneel has an astonishingly good body, but really, not my style.) Also, I need to be able to buy this movie on DVD, because I think being able to pop it in and just get myself a Priestly fix at a moment's notice would make my life so much generally happier.

I... haven't said anything concrete or thinky here, have I? One day I will organize my thoughts into a long thinky essay about why exactly I bother to watch movies and my objections to heteronormative endings, but today is not this day.

Date: 2007-12-04 02:11 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] amara-m.livejournal.com
My biggest issue with Ten Inch Hero was the author's need to pair everyone up and make everything neat and tidy...and in doing so she broke her own message.

Priestly, I adore Priestly...but he spent the movie telling Clea's character that love isn't about how you look, that someone who loves you will love you for who you are...and then he goes and changes himself into this ridiculous parody of what he thinks Daneel's character should want.

I think he was way cuter with the piercings and colored hair and mowhawk than in the yuppie boy get up he wore at the end.

Okay, I'll stop ragging on it now. As I writer, I think she copped out, and I'm willing to bet if she hadn't, she'd have a distribution deal.

Date: 2007-12-04 04:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dragojustine.livejournal.com
Okay, my one, single, overwhelming ISSUE with the movie was that we don't see Priestly return to his former getup at the end. Having him walk in all Banana-Republic was adorable, as it speaks to what a Big Deal this is for him and his personal insecurities and etc. But there was a huge gaping HOLE in the dialog there where she was supposed to say (some cuter and better written version of) "of course I'll go out with you, Priestly. Now go get out of that ridiculous getup." Predictable, yes, but necessary. Swapping out the "ridiculous names" exchange for that would have gone so far toward fixing the ending of the movie it isn't even funny.

I honestly don't think we're meant to assume that Priestly's makeover is in any way permanent, but the writer really fucked up by not making that explicit, especially given that he isn't back to his former self at the wedding-on-the-beach. By this point in the movie, our sympathies are far more fully with him than with her (cause Tish is an idiot made sympathetic only by how good she is to her girlfriends), and the lingering question is "does she deserve him?" And by letting the viewer think even for a moment that Tish would want or LET him change himself permanently for her, the writer just fucked up on that question.

Gah. This was the rant I was NOT going to do. (And yes, "everybody pairs off at the end" endings annoy the crap out of me even when they don't fuck up in a big way like that, but this movie thematically needed it and I wasn't going to rant. Man, failed there.)

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