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1. Another pretty but cold day. The days are either pretty and cold, or rainy and lukewarm. But the morning clouds have cleared and there's pristine blue with streaks of white outside my window...it's not a vibrant blue though...and upon looking closer not quite so pristine. I love the sky. It's so changeable and vast, and open to possibilities.
2.The Crown S3 -- continues to be excellent. The problem I'm having is there are too many television programs I want to watch right now -- it's hard to choose between them. There's The Report, Marriage Story, The Irishman, Modern Love, Kominsky Method, His Dark Materials, Watchmen...right now, I've narrowed it to The Crown and His Dark Materials, both of which are moving at a nice clip. The Crown is more episodic and you can watch each as standalone. While His Dark Materials is not episodic at all -- also HBO, being HBO, hasn't dropped all the episodes yet. I'm caught up, but there are three to go. Apparently they are just doing nine episodes this year?? [Also, it helps a great deal if you don't remember the source material all that well, because it does vary from it in some casting choices and story line choices...but nothing glaring. I don't remember the books all that well -- I read them over 16 years ago.]
Anyhow, back to The Crown -- the fourth episode is a rather touching portrait of Princess Phillip's mother, social justice advocate and nun, Princess Alice. Who was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, given electro-shock treatment, and treated by Sigmund Freud, who was rather unkind to her. She got heavily involved in social justice and charitable works soon after.
The advice she gives her son is to find a faith, that is what got her through everything. And they take a walk, after years of being estranged.
3. His Dark Materials -- is very good at world-building, and a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material. Some critics miss Pullman's voice -- I don't, I don't even remember it.
Anyhow, here's an article on it by The New Yorker - Building the Worlds of His Dark Materials
This time of year, Gordon Square, in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, is covered in pale yellow and red leaves, which obscure the park’s walkways and its dying grassy patches and dot a half-dozen wooden benches that line its perimeter. The other day, Jack Thorne, the head writer of the new television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s fantastical trilogy of novels His Dark Materials, was hovering over one particular bench, trying to read the words etched onto a small gold plaque: “Here beats the happy heart of our emotional geography. Jack & Rachel.” “Ah, it’s got scratched,” he said, peering at it fondly.
His wife, the agent Rachel Mason, had surprised him with the plaque in 2014. “It took quite a lot of effort” to secure permission from the city, Thorne said. They had their first date in the park, and Thorne proposed to Mason there, in front of a bench, after an elaborate treasure hunt. (“I had a box that had a box inside it, and a box inside it, and a box inside it, and the smallest box contained an engagement ring,” he recalled.) Now he goes to the bench to think about Lyra Belacqua, the young heroine of “His Dark Materials,” and Will Parry, the boy she falls in love with in “The Subtle Knife,” the second novel in the series. Lyra and Will share a bench, too, in Oxford, although they sit on it in different worlds. “Lyra and Will’s bench is so important in those books,” Thorne said. “There’s something reassuring about knowing this is mine and Rachel’s spot. And so, when thinking about Will and Lyra, that felt right to me.”
The first season of “His Dark Materials” premièred on HBO in the U.S., and BBC One in the U.K., in early November. The show follows Lyra, an orphan raised in the great halls of Jordan College, Oxford, in a world similar to (but not the same as) our own. In Lyra’s world, each person has an animal companion called a daemon, which functions as a sort of externalized part of their soul. When children in Oxford start to go missing, Lyra sets out on a quest to the North, where armored polar bears reign, to find them. She carries with her an alethiometer, or a golden compass, a truth-telling device that she has a special ability to read. It is the BBC’s most expensive series to date. Promotions have included watch parties, scavenger hunts, and an online test to determine your daemon. (Mine, disappointingly, was a black skink, which is a type of lizard.) In the U.K., the books are almost universally admired, and fans have been burned before. Pullman has called the books a retelling of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and they involve a critique of organized religion. A film version of the first novel, from 2007, directed by Chris Weitz, cut nearly every reference to this critique, and was panned. Christian groups protested the film anyway, and no sequel was ordered. But perhaps the real problem was time. The books are dense, containing multiple worlds, and it’s difficult to fit everything into two hours without causing whiplash.
The eight-episode structure of the new version allows more breathing room “to dwell in the characters,” Thorne said. He was wearing a rain jacket, sneakers, and a red knit cap, and was speaking with his hands. There’s a scene in the show in which Mrs. Coulter (played by a stunningly good Ruth Wilson, who is often costumed in an enviable, and seemingly endless, collection of silk pajamas), a beautiful and mysterious woman who plucks Lyra out of Jordan College, is bathing Lyra in her extravagant London apartment. There’s a shot of the two of them together, Mrs. Coulter shampooing Lyra’s hair, and then a shot of Mrs. Coulter alone, staring distractedly into the cooling bath water as her daemon, a golden monkey, looks on with concern. She might be plotting, or else thinking about all she’s lost. “It’s just that moment of twenty seconds of watching an actor’s face, but it tells you so much about who she is,” Thorne said. “If you’ve got to rattle along with the story, you don’t have time for that.”
Some of the most affecting scenes occur in quiet moments between a character and his or her daemon. Lyra (played with gritty defiance by Dafne Keen) often falls asleep with her shape-shifting daemon, Pantalaimon, or Pan for short, curled up around her neck in the form of a white ermine. The fierce explorer Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) has his daemon, a powerful snow leopard, walk into the room ahead of him if he senses danger. Mrs. Coulter will sometimes abuse her golden monkey, who, unlike the other daemons, does not speak, perhaps out of fear. In one episode, after Lyra escapes Mrs. Coulter’s apartment, the golden monkey quietly closes Lyra’s bedroom door so that Mrs. Coulter can rip the room apart with her bare hands.
“Philip always says the daemons were the best idea he ever had,” Thorne said, sitting on his bench with a cup of tea. “And the complications of the daemons—the way that just grows and grows and grows—it’s so vivid and brilliant.” He first read the books in the nineteen-nineties, when he was in his twenties. He read them again when he bought them for his mother. “They’ve got that touch of wonderful crazy to them that sets them apart,” Thorne said. He heard about the TV project while enmeshed in another British fantasy world, as a writer of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a play that continues the story of the Harry Potter books—and continues to sell out on the West End. At first, he didn’t want to work on the HBO show. It was six months before “Cursed Child” opened, and he and Mason were expecting their first child. “I was knackered,” he said. “And I was scared of the Potter fandom, and I was equally scared of the His Dark Materials fandom.” But he loved the books, and he eventually signed on. A second eight-episode season is already in the works.
Most of the first season takes place in Lyra’s world, which is parallel to our own, but runs on different technology. “They’ve had their own industrial revolution, but it was a slightly different industrial revolution to ours,” Thorne explained. “So they’ve got electricity, but it’s ‘anbaric.’ ” The creators had to decide how to render this world on the screen. “We had lots of discussions about cars, like really, really lengthy discussions about cars, and what they would look like,” Thorne said. (In the film version, Mrs. Coulter is driven around in a vehicle that seems to be powered by a glowing orb. For the show, Thorne went for something more subtle.) They discussed at length what the armor on an armored bear would look like. They wrote forty-six drafts of the script for the first episode, Thorne said, trying to figure out how to explain Lyra’s world without overburdening the viewer but still making it comprehensible to executives at the network. “It was the hardest thing,” Thorne said. “I think the quote is, ‘Producers need answers; audiences need questions,’ ” he said. “There’s a lot of audiences that just want to be taken on a journey, that want to be bewildered.”
As we were talking, I pulled out my copy of “Northern Lights,” the first book in the series, called “The Golden Compass” in the U.S., and my bookmark fell out. “You’ve lost your place!” Thorne shouted, genuinely concerned. (Later, he told me that his daemon would definitely be a woodpecker: “my anxiety fed and dealt with by its hammering.”) Thorne is a great fan of fantasy books and movies, partially because he found solace in them as a lonely child. He saw “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” several times in theatres; he held up his wrist to show me a tattoo of the words “be good,” which is a quote from the movie. “Just that sort of sense of ‘the other’ made it all better,” he said. He feels similarly comforted by the daemons in His Dark Materials. “I think a lot of people have been reassured that there’s something inside them that could be there for them,” he said. “That your soul is not as simple as just going, How do I feel? That there’s a shared identity somewhere that can help you.”
I'd agree -- the best idea Pullman ever had was the daemons -- which are a physical manifestation of the human soul that walks along with the human and can be hurt. They change shape until the human reaches a certain age -- then they manifest into one shape.
The series is doing a rather decent job of playing with the concept.
And yep, only eight episodes. (It's a co-production with the BBC and the BBC only does 6-8 episode series. A number that Netflix, HBO and various US streaming channels and premium cable are adopting -- mainly because they've discovered it's cheaper to produce, faster, and you can get a higher quality of talent. So, the 13-22 episodes series are slowly disappearing as a result.)
Oh, and I finally figured out where I've seen Dafne Keen before -- she played Laura aka X23 in the film Logan. She's amazing. Utterly amazing. And by far my favorite television female young heroine to date -- and yes that includes people like Buffy and Ayra, Lyra could take both on with her wits alone, and she's far more empathetic and independent.
4. There's a new Doctor Who Trailer This one is for the New Year's Episode. The same cast and same writing team as before -- except it looks a bit more exciting, and seems to be more action oriented. Also a guest appearance by Stephen Fry.
5. Spoke with my mother who has connected with and made close friends with a liberal New Yorker couple who lives nearby. (Or former New Yorkers). The husband is 102, and so many people write them off as being too old. My mother and father don't. My mother told me that right now she's trying to practice kindness. And as a result has made a lot more connections in her community.
It struck me as odd how we write off old age or seem afraid of it -- when death and infirmity can hit you at any age. It's pretty much indiscriminate. I still remember the boy killed on a bicycle at the ripe old age of 6 years. I was in first grade, I think. And got all the gory details from the kids who watched it happen from the bus windows. My mother was shocked that I still remember his name. But some things never leave you.
6. A Spoiler Free Guide to the Witcher Television Series Universe. It should be noted that The Witcher is a series of books and games, which vary from each other, but that the television series is only adapted from the books NOT the games.
I skimmed it and...His Dark Materials has a more interesting and better developed world. This world seems a bit like it has been thrown together on the fly, and contrived to be as vague as humanely possibly, not to mention broad and encompassing, in order to cover every possible angle.
I prefer more focused worlds and less graphically violent ones, but I'm admittedly not the target audience or demographic for The Witcher series. Will I watch? IDK, I have a lot of things to watch as it is...
2.The Crown S3 -- continues to be excellent. The problem I'm having is there are too many television programs I want to watch right now -- it's hard to choose between them. There's The Report, Marriage Story, The Irishman, Modern Love, Kominsky Method, His Dark Materials, Watchmen...right now, I've narrowed it to The Crown and His Dark Materials, both of which are moving at a nice clip. The Crown is more episodic and you can watch each as standalone. While His Dark Materials is not episodic at all -- also HBO, being HBO, hasn't dropped all the episodes yet. I'm caught up, but there are three to go. Apparently they are just doing nine episodes this year?? [Also, it helps a great deal if you don't remember the source material all that well, because it does vary from it in some casting choices and story line choices...but nothing glaring. I don't remember the books all that well -- I read them over 16 years ago.]
Anyhow, back to The Crown -- the fourth episode is a rather touching portrait of Princess Phillip's mother, social justice advocate and nun, Princess Alice. Who was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, given electro-shock treatment, and treated by Sigmund Freud, who was rather unkind to her. She got heavily involved in social justice and charitable works soon after.
The advice she gives her son is to find a faith, that is what got her through everything. And they take a walk, after years of being estranged.
3. His Dark Materials -- is very good at world-building, and a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material. Some critics miss Pullman's voice -- I don't, I don't even remember it.
Anyhow, here's an article on it by The New Yorker - Building the Worlds of His Dark Materials
This time of year, Gordon Square, in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, is covered in pale yellow and red leaves, which obscure the park’s walkways and its dying grassy patches and dot a half-dozen wooden benches that line its perimeter. The other day, Jack Thorne, the head writer of the new television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s fantastical trilogy of novels His Dark Materials, was hovering over one particular bench, trying to read the words etched onto a small gold plaque: “Here beats the happy heart of our emotional geography. Jack & Rachel.” “Ah, it’s got scratched,” he said, peering at it fondly.
His wife, the agent Rachel Mason, had surprised him with the plaque in 2014. “It took quite a lot of effort” to secure permission from the city, Thorne said. They had their first date in the park, and Thorne proposed to Mason there, in front of a bench, after an elaborate treasure hunt. (“I had a box that had a box inside it, and a box inside it, and a box inside it, and the smallest box contained an engagement ring,” he recalled.) Now he goes to the bench to think about Lyra Belacqua, the young heroine of “His Dark Materials,” and Will Parry, the boy she falls in love with in “The Subtle Knife,” the second novel in the series. Lyra and Will share a bench, too, in Oxford, although they sit on it in different worlds. “Lyra and Will’s bench is so important in those books,” Thorne said. “There’s something reassuring about knowing this is mine and Rachel’s spot. And so, when thinking about Will and Lyra, that felt right to me.”
The first season of “His Dark Materials” premièred on HBO in the U.S., and BBC One in the U.K., in early November. The show follows Lyra, an orphan raised in the great halls of Jordan College, Oxford, in a world similar to (but not the same as) our own. In Lyra’s world, each person has an animal companion called a daemon, which functions as a sort of externalized part of their soul. When children in Oxford start to go missing, Lyra sets out on a quest to the North, where armored polar bears reign, to find them. She carries with her an alethiometer, or a golden compass, a truth-telling device that she has a special ability to read. It is the BBC’s most expensive series to date. Promotions have included watch parties, scavenger hunts, and an online test to determine your daemon. (Mine, disappointingly, was a black skink, which is a type of lizard.) In the U.K., the books are almost universally admired, and fans have been burned before. Pullman has called the books a retelling of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and they involve a critique of organized religion. A film version of the first novel, from 2007, directed by Chris Weitz, cut nearly every reference to this critique, and was panned. Christian groups protested the film anyway, and no sequel was ordered. But perhaps the real problem was time. The books are dense, containing multiple worlds, and it’s difficult to fit everything into two hours without causing whiplash.
The eight-episode structure of the new version allows more breathing room “to dwell in the characters,” Thorne said. He was wearing a rain jacket, sneakers, and a red knit cap, and was speaking with his hands. There’s a scene in the show in which Mrs. Coulter (played by a stunningly good Ruth Wilson, who is often costumed in an enviable, and seemingly endless, collection of silk pajamas), a beautiful and mysterious woman who plucks Lyra out of Jordan College, is bathing Lyra in her extravagant London apartment. There’s a shot of the two of them together, Mrs. Coulter shampooing Lyra’s hair, and then a shot of Mrs. Coulter alone, staring distractedly into the cooling bath water as her daemon, a golden monkey, looks on with concern. She might be plotting, or else thinking about all she’s lost. “It’s just that moment of twenty seconds of watching an actor’s face, but it tells you so much about who she is,” Thorne said. “If you’ve got to rattle along with the story, you don’t have time for that.”
Some of the most affecting scenes occur in quiet moments between a character and his or her daemon. Lyra (played with gritty defiance by Dafne Keen) often falls asleep with her shape-shifting daemon, Pantalaimon, or Pan for short, curled up around her neck in the form of a white ermine. The fierce explorer Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) has his daemon, a powerful snow leopard, walk into the room ahead of him if he senses danger. Mrs. Coulter will sometimes abuse her golden monkey, who, unlike the other daemons, does not speak, perhaps out of fear. In one episode, after Lyra escapes Mrs. Coulter’s apartment, the golden monkey quietly closes Lyra’s bedroom door so that Mrs. Coulter can rip the room apart with her bare hands.
“Philip always says the daemons were the best idea he ever had,” Thorne said, sitting on his bench with a cup of tea. “And the complications of the daemons—the way that just grows and grows and grows—it’s so vivid and brilliant.” He first read the books in the nineteen-nineties, when he was in his twenties. He read them again when he bought them for his mother. “They’ve got that touch of wonderful crazy to them that sets them apart,” Thorne said. He heard about the TV project while enmeshed in another British fantasy world, as a writer of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a play that continues the story of the Harry Potter books—and continues to sell out on the West End. At first, he didn’t want to work on the HBO show. It was six months before “Cursed Child” opened, and he and Mason were expecting their first child. “I was knackered,” he said. “And I was scared of the Potter fandom, and I was equally scared of the His Dark Materials fandom.” But he loved the books, and he eventually signed on. A second eight-episode season is already in the works.
Most of the first season takes place in Lyra’s world, which is parallel to our own, but runs on different technology. “They’ve had their own industrial revolution, but it was a slightly different industrial revolution to ours,” Thorne explained. “So they’ve got electricity, but it’s ‘anbaric.’ ” The creators had to decide how to render this world on the screen. “We had lots of discussions about cars, like really, really lengthy discussions about cars, and what they would look like,” Thorne said. (In the film version, Mrs. Coulter is driven around in a vehicle that seems to be powered by a glowing orb. For the show, Thorne went for something more subtle.) They discussed at length what the armor on an armored bear would look like. They wrote forty-six drafts of the script for the first episode, Thorne said, trying to figure out how to explain Lyra’s world without overburdening the viewer but still making it comprehensible to executives at the network. “It was the hardest thing,” Thorne said. “I think the quote is, ‘Producers need answers; audiences need questions,’ ” he said. “There’s a lot of audiences that just want to be taken on a journey, that want to be bewildered.”
As we were talking, I pulled out my copy of “Northern Lights,” the first book in the series, called “The Golden Compass” in the U.S., and my bookmark fell out. “You’ve lost your place!” Thorne shouted, genuinely concerned. (Later, he told me that his daemon would definitely be a woodpecker: “my anxiety fed and dealt with by its hammering.”) Thorne is a great fan of fantasy books and movies, partially because he found solace in them as a lonely child. He saw “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” several times in theatres; he held up his wrist to show me a tattoo of the words “be good,” which is a quote from the movie. “Just that sort of sense of ‘the other’ made it all better,” he said. He feels similarly comforted by the daemons in His Dark Materials. “I think a lot of people have been reassured that there’s something inside them that could be there for them,” he said. “That your soul is not as simple as just going, How do I feel? That there’s a shared identity somewhere that can help you.”
I'd agree -- the best idea Pullman ever had was the daemons -- which are a physical manifestation of the human soul that walks along with the human and can be hurt. They change shape until the human reaches a certain age -- then they manifest into one shape.
The series is doing a rather decent job of playing with the concept.
And yep, only eight episodes. (It's a co-production with the BBC and the BBC only does 6-8 episode series. A number that Netflix, HBO and various US streaming channels and premium cable are adopting -- mainly because they've discovered it's cheaper to produce, faster, and you can get a higher quality of talent. So, the 13-22 episodes series are slowly disappearing as a result.)
Oh, and I finally figured out where I've seen Dafne Keen before -- she played Laura aka X23 in the film Logan. She's amazing. Utterly amazing. And by far my favorite television female young heroine to date -- and yes that includes people like Buffy and Ayra, Lyra could take both on with her wits alone, and she's far more empathetic and independent.
4. There's a new Doctor Who Trailer This one is for the New Year's Episode. The same cast and same writing team as before -- except it looks a bit more exciting, and seems to be more action oriented. Also a guest appearance by Stephen Fry.
5. Spoke with my mother who has connected with and made close friends with a liberal New Yorker couple who lives nearby. (Or former New Yorkers). The husband is 102, and so many people write them off as being too old. My mother and father don't. My mother told me that right now she's trying to practice kindness. And as a result has made a lot more connections in her community.
It struck me as odd how we write off old age or seem afraid of it -- when death and infirmity can hit you at any age. It's pretty much indiscriminate. I still remember the boy killed on a bicycle at the ripe old age of 6 years. I was in first grade, I think. And got all the gory details from the kids who watched it happen from the bus windows. My mother was shocked that I still remember his name. But some things never leave you.
6. A Spoiler Free Guide to the Witcher Television Series Universe. It should be noted that The Witcher is a series of books and games, which vary from each other, but that the television series is only adapted from the books NOT the games.
I skimmed it and...His Dark Materials has a more interesting and better developed world. This world seems a bit like it has been thrown together on the fly, and contrived to be as vague as humanely possibly, not to mention broad and encompassing, in order to cover every possible angle.
I prefer more focused worlds and less graphically violent ones, but I'm admittedly not the target audience or demographic for The Witcher series. Will I watch? IDK, I have a lot of things to watch as it is...
no subject
I think I will try THE WITCHER because it visually looks interesting. No idea if it will work for me or not.
no subject
The Witcher -- near as I can figure is a dark fantasy series that focuses on a mercernary hero who kills monsters for hire. The hero is played by the easy on the eyes, Henry Cavill (Superman and the Tudors). So potential. The man is pretty and can act.
I'm considering checking it out because of the visuals as well.
no subject
Hell, I saw through a Tom Cruise movie to see Cavill. THAT was painful, but well worth it.
no subject
LOL!
Mission Impossible 4? Actually that wasn't a bad film....there were some excellent stunts, and nice twists. Now, Man of Steel and Justice League were painful.
no subject
MI4 was redeemable because of Cavill, as far as I was concerned. His role was interesting, and he was hotter than hot. I really like him scruffy.
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I read it in the 90s (the Polish books were translated to Russian and published there way before they were translated in English), and I was blown away by the first books. Of course, I was 20, and haven't read that many fantasy novels, and dark fairy tale retellings were still a new thing... But I am still rather nostalgic about it. I started re-reading it - and, well, it's very 80-90s type of a story. There is good stuff there, and the characters are good, so I hope the update is successful.
no subject
I thought it was Russian, forgot it was Polish.