Monthly Archives: November 2010

Sherlock follow-up

when I wrote my last post about Sherlock I’d only seen episode 1. Have now watched the grand total 3 episodes, and some of my thoughts about the series have changed.

I loved the portrayal of Watson in ep 1 as a war veteran who seeks the thrill of an underground, underhanded kind of war in London. He was made particularly poignant by a very reserved performance from Martin Freeman, who usually plays dorky, comical characters.

So here’s a disappointment: in the next two episodes, Watson has been reduced to his usual bumbling, side-kick status. Except for the moment he finds himself – er – all wrapped up at the end, Freeman falls back into his usual performance and Watson is made to look a bit dim in comparison to Holmes.

(His devolution is all there in the haircut, which gives away his army background to Holmes in the first episode and has grown long and tousled by the second.)

For me, this lost the tough, human character they’d created so wonderfully in the first episode – with all its potential for shaking up the Sherlock Holmes mood. Watson doesn’t react to his circumstances like a trained soldier looking for action. He reacts like an eejit.

And, yes, as per my hunch, Watson gets a girlfriend. I really liked her – the characterisation and the actor. Except for one thing. Her first date ends with her life on the line in pretty horrific circumstances. And yet Watson’s glib “The next date won’t be like this” seems to go down just fine.

Um…wouldn’t any sane lady never want to see him again? It would at least give him something to overcome, romantically.

The other downer from her presence is that, yes, it kills off the homoeroticism – but it means that when they bring the insinuations back, it turns the theme into a punch line. A joke.

Let me stop here and say that special k declared he hasn’t enjoyed a tv show so much in years. Because I know a rant when I see one, so I apologise.

Now, where was I?

Cat made a very good point when we were chatting about it: House is really the modern Sherlock Holmes. The tv show Sherlock isn’t modernising the concept or the character – it’s performing a neat optical illusion.

 

third-wave romance

according to the people who like to talk, coffee culture is up to its third wave. So in a completely unrelated aside, I decided that I have a theory about romance writing, and where it’s up to.

(I’m obliged to say that “third-wave” is considered a highly pretentious, silly term by actual coffee people. But it works for my theory, so it stays.)

There is old-school, bodice-rippers-of-the-70s romance. This is what lingers, and gives people the impression they have of the genre. This is what we snuck into the library and read as teenagers, with its “quivering mound of venus”s and “purple-headed warrior”s.

As skilful and beloved as Stephanie Laurens is, I think she’s an example of first-wave romance. Her heroes are alphas, her heroines are plucky, and whilst the heroine never finds herself suddenly turned on in the middle of being raped, she does quite often “leave the mortal plane” for hours on end after sex, before coming back to herself.

To me, that says old-school.

The second wave are the intelligent, funny, sexy and wise writers like Eloisa James, Elizabeth Hoyt, Lisa Kleypas – even Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Their books are complex and peopled with flawed, human characters. Sex isn’t always perfect. The writing is that epitome of genre writing: entirely transparent, like a window that draws you into a scene, without making you aware at any time that there’s glass between you and what you’re watching.

Then there’s third-wave.

I admit to only having read a tiny corner of what’s out there, but for what I’ve read, there are three writers bringing in the new generation of romance: Sherry Thomas, Meredith Duran and Julie Anne Long.

Third-wave romance has characters that don’t only have three dimensions and believable motivations, and aren’t just sympathetic and flawed. They feel human. To the point where sometimes you feel like you’re intruding on a private moment between them and their beloved.

These writers are also pushing the kind of language that romance novels are written in. They’re using unique, fresh images and startling turns of phrase. Their characters are so well-drawn that we are only ever seeing the tip of the iceberg, in the best writerly fashion. Language is becoming a facet of the novel, in and of itself.

I wouldn’t say third-wave is best. In a way, second-wave makes for a more enjoyable read, because of its transparency – it doesn’t unsettle you, or leave you wondering.

I aspire to be the best writer I can be, but I maybe secretly aspire to the third wave as well.

movies I’m looking forward to…

I’ve been oddly stuck on movies and tv shows of late, so just before I foray off the topic again (ah! but will I?), here are some film clips I’ve come across that are making me really excited.

First and foremost is Sucker Punch. I love the hyper-stylistic film-making of 300 and Watchmen – and of course, whatever else you can say about the film, the graphics in The Owls of G’ahoole were amazing (all Snyder films). This film wanders into thematic territory that I started exploring in a YA book I wrote the first draft of last year: the inner landscape of the outer landscape.

Very. Excited.

Mia Wasikowska seems to be making it. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s a great thing. She’s entirely watchable and happened to grow up in the same little city as me. She’s also only 21…eeep!

I love surprising love stories, with ending-in-death endings. But it’s the ghost friend that makes me really want to see this one.

And lastly, because I find I have a thing for action movies the older I get (is this because I allow myself to admit it now, or because my tastes have changed?), I’m looking forward to The Eagle. It also reminds me a lot of this online novel I’ve been following. The two leads are both actors I really enjoy watching, and I hope there will be something of unrequited love in the film, too…

I am astounded and delighted by the worlds people create, without end.

plot jealousy

me and Cat were talking today about how when a character falls in love, the object of their affection has to become their greatest weakness. I re-watched Hancock tonight, and that premise is so beautifully written into the film that I really, really wish I’d thought of it first.

*spoilers ahead, people!*

Hancock is the only superhero on earth, and he’s a lonely, drunken asshole. Until a PR guy takes him on, and dares him to face the fact that he’s running, and that he will never be happy until he accepts his role as hero and saviour.

That guy’s wife also just happens to be Hancock’s other half – his wife, before he had his head bashed in 80 years earlier and forgot everything.

They are angels, gods – superheroes. They are immortal until they are close to their other half. Then they are graced with mortality, with the ability to live, and love, and die. Dying being the operative part.

Unfortunately, the universe wants to keep Hancock alive, i.e. keep he and his wife apart, so any time they come close, she is wounded to get to him.

I think my favourite scene is after he’s been shot and admitted to hospital and his wife comes to see him and to explain. She shows him the scars on his own body – each a testament to his saving her throughout history. She knows his body intimately, and his scars are signs of a deep and selfless love, in a life where he thought he had no one.

Then he has to fly as far from her as he can go, to save her life.

It’s a tragic love story in the best possible way. The wife stays with her human husband – who is equally heroic in his quieter, more human way. She exercises her free will. But watching over her, and eternal with her, is her other half.

Ah sigh. Plot jealousy.

a new day, a new tv show.

I just watched the first episode in the BBC’s 3-ep mini-series Sherlock. It’s Sherlock Holmes, but in 21st Century London and with a couple of gadgets he never had before. And a riding whip.

He’s kinda mean, too. Meaner than I remember. But I think it works. They’re riding the sociopath/psychopath line with him – the “what will happen when he gets bored?” line.

Which made for one of my favourite exchanges in the episode.

Watson is really well-drawn. Better than I’ve seen him in any other rendition – much more morally ambiguous and more a character in his own right, rather than simply existing in relation to Holmes.

So Watson has just been left in the lurch by Holmes for the first time, and a police detective who really doesn’t like Holmes warns Watson off him. She explains that he’s a sociopath – that he gets off on murder, and he has no friends for a good reason.

And the gorgeous thing is that it reads like the best kind of romance novel. She thinks she’s warning him off, when in fact she’s stoking his interest and his sympathy.

This is something I love about this adaptation: Because it’s set in the modern day, they approach the homoerotic question head on. You know, that one academics have been going on about for years. The homoerotic v homosocial one.

They’re sitting in a restaurant and Watson starts asking questions about Holmes’s love life. He rules out women, then broaches the question: “Oh, do you have a boyfriend? I mean, that would be fine–”

“I know that would be fine,” Holmes interrupts, looking at him with a kind of withheld skepticism.

These boys have loads of chemistry. No doubt Watson will be given a girlfriend in the near future.

thanks to Shin-Ichi for the great fan-pic up the top

 

human by portions and percentages

there’s a new Aussie show on ABC1 that I’m really enjoying for its indulgence and humour. That show is Rake, about a highly flawed, disreputable barrister in Sydney.

A short segment of dialogue from the last episode has stuck with me.

 

Cleaver Greene, our anti-hero, has just slept with his best friend’s wife. In an effort to unload himself to his ex-wife, he starts talking about a nature documentary he watched about chimpanzees – how they’re 98.7% like humans.

“There’s this 1.3% disparity”, he says, “that apparently has something to do with our ability to program dvd players, but essentially they are us, and we are them.”

Followed by an ode to the chimp way of life: the women in competition, until they go on heat, which pitches the males into out-and-out war with each other. He bemoans the fact that humans are expected to stay married to the same person for a lifetime, no matter how dull it gets. Then:

“98.7% of us is telling us we’re morons, it’s just this 1.3% – the dvd-programming part – telling us we’re doing the right thing.”

This struck me as such a poignant picture of the human condition. And it really is what marriage feels like sometimes – the tiny, cultivated part of the brain at war with tens of thousands of years of biology.

some thoughts about Jane Eyre

eeep! I don’t think this is the best-made trailer, but I can’t wait to watch the film. I was talking with Cat the other day about Jane Eyre, and she was saying that she never particularly got the romance of it.

I have always loved it, since my English teacher gave it to me for my 15th birthday.

*if it’s possible you haven’t read the book, there are spoilers ahead. But, seriously, why haven’t you read it?*

As a teenager I could never quite forgive Bronte for blinding and crippling Rochester, but I feel like the older I get, the more sense the ending makes. He has so much power over Jane – emotional, physical, financial. So in order for them ever to have a good life together, she needs to go and find family who will protect and fight for her and money to support herself. And lastly, his injuries level the physical playing ground.

I also love the decision she’s faced with in the end: To go and “save the world” and give her life to the endeavour, or to be with the one flawed human who needs her – who needs the passionate, personal part of her.

Whenever people question historical romance characters as being too outside their time, or propriety, or the way women would have been, I think of those Bronte girls living on the heath with such passionate romance burning away inside them.

two links that made my day good

tonight special k and I cooked dinner for friends and their kids. Have just finished the washing up. It’s nice to have vivid little faces in our flat.

Me: “What happens in the cool bit of The Incredibles?”

Kid: Struggles for words, for which his tiny hands and many explosive noises substitute.

So here’s one great link. Yum! Pumpkin ravioli with sage butter. The other is for a podcast I found this morning, The Popcorn Dialogues.

Two women talk about romantic movies, and one of them is the amazing Jenny Crusie. The podcast I listened to is about When Harry Met Sally – which inspired a morning of watching that wonderful, hilarious film – and it has some great discussion about how character gives comedy.

NaNoWriMo

I’m not taking part in NaNoWriMo, because I’m lost somewhere in the swamps of revision-land without a flint or a knife. Or Bear Grylls. But just as a nod to National Novel Writing Month, which is a glorious, contentious, hair-raising kind of a venture, here’s the facebook status of the year:

NaNo: day 18. Have managed to write 30,179 words of a story about a fat guy living with his mother. My wrists and elbows are killing me, may have RSI.

the world’s best research tool

I went to the State Library of Victoria this morning to start my new summer writing regime. That is, I am actually researching the Regency, instead of just assuming other romance writers have it right.

It was super fun. I looked at a book of architectural drawings from the Regency – finally! A real idea of how rooms were laid out! I also looked at a design book with material swatches, lace designs, pottery etc.

But by far the most useful information I got was from the librarian, and this is it:

www.archive.org

This website archives the whole internet – past and present. (The past-sites search engine is called The Wayback Machine. How cool is that!) It has all google books uploaded as well as a huge number on top of that and an open digital library.

Basically, anything that has ever been published and is now out of copyright can be found there.

Check it out.

And in the spirit of research, here’s the State Library in 1861: