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things watched
Aug. 21st, 2023 12:14 pmPeter Pan Goes Wrong, at the Ahmanson in LA. Very funny - I think my favorite part was sitting next to Q as he cracked up, but I laughed a lot myself too. They're very good at setting up a gag, milking it, and then elevating it one even worse step further. There are some full episodes of the Goes Wrong Show available online if you like slapstick (or maybe it's farce? I don't really know how these things are classified).
Emma, 2020 film, on the plane. Fine! Great costumes and set design. Of course the whole time I was just thinking "what part of Clueless is this". I really liked getting to see a little bit of the endless labor of servants going into maintaining these people. I have gotten old enough that I can't tell what the young people find attractive, and so to me it seemed like there was maybe something interesting going on in the casting, where Knightley is the shortest and scruffiest and to my eye least attractive of the various men, which is a very different approach than, like, Clueless, where Paul Rudd is clearly The Aspirational Object. (I only mention shortest because it seemed unusual to me in film to show your ostensible lead romantic hero standing next to a series of taller dudes. I have a personal history of crushes on guys shorter than me, so I'm not trying to deny the attractiveness of shorter dudes here! Just not whoever that actor was.) Is this a subtle "look, everyone has ended up "correctly" sorted based on class/money and not looks" thing? Or maybe it is a looks thing, in that Anna Taylor-Joy is also honestly kind of weird looking... Junie says it's mean to say her interpupil distance is creepy, but it's certainly *striking*, let's say that. Or maybe the director and the young people do find this Knightley just as swoony as I found Paul Rudd in 199whatever, and I was not actually supposed to be thinking "Robert Martin is clearly the catch of the village if you take off the class goggles".
Emma, 2020 film, on the plane. Fine! Great costumes and set design. Of course the whole time I was just thinking "what part of Clueless is this". I really liked getting to see a little bit of the endless labor of servants going into maintaining these people. I have gotten old enough that I can't tell what the young people find attractive, and so to me it seemed like there was maybe something interesting going on in the casting, where Knightley is the shortest and scruffiest and to my eye least attractive of the various men, which is a very different approach than, like, Clueless, where Paul Rudd is clearly The Aspirational Object. (I only mention shortest because it seemed unusual to me in film to show your ostensible lead romantic hero standing next to a series of taller dudes. I have a personal history of crushes on guys shorter than me, so I'm not trying to deny the attractiveness of shorter dudes here! Just not whoever that actor was.) Is this a subtle "look, everyone has ended up "correctly" sorted based on class/money and not looks" thing? Or maybe it is a looks thing, in that Anna Taylor-Joy is also honestly kind of weird looking... Junie says it's mean to say her interpupil distance is creepy, but it's certainly *striking*, let's say that. Or maybe the director and the young people do find this Knightley just as swoony as I found Paul Rudd in 199whatever, and I was not actually supposed to be thinking "Robert Martin is clearly the catch of the village if you take off the class goggles".
