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Also there was a Pemberley Moment
Last Saturday was the fall flea market at our church, and I never got around to posting about it; I ended up bringing home:
a mid-calf-length late-'60s cashmere coat with a fur collar;
a mid-calf-length gray wool coat of the same vintage;
"Original Rock & Roll Volume 1: The Greatest of the Great: For Professional Use Only", undated, no publisher or editor listed -> someday I will make a proper post about old-fashioned Fake Books in the history of music piracy
"50 top ten hits complied from billboard magazine 'hot 100 charts'", 1972
"The best of Simon & Garfunkel: The Paul Simon songbook", 1966 (I was like 'why does this not have some of their best-known songs in it? Oh, right, because they hadn't been written yet.")
"100 Years of the Automobile", 1985 -> So many pretty pictures! And then it talks about how mid-80s cars are the prettiest of them all. :D
That was my share of the $10 change. Plus a bag of walnut-chocolate bars for $.50 and lunch. Also afterward we took the leftovers to the Salvation Army store and I found another pair of brand-new waterproof hiking boots, that fit me, for $2. \o/
And then this Saturday was the great biannual holiday of the two Methodist Church flea markets and the historical society book sale!
At GBUMC, I bought:
3 slip-cast pottery mugs, @$.25 each
"A little house of my own : 47 grand designs for 47 tiny houses" by Les Walker, 2000 @$.50
Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, volume IX, issues 1 and 3 @$.25 each
Also a paperback for a Christmas present, @$.25
At the used book sale, I bought:
"The submarine boys for the flag" by Victor Durham, 1910, @$.25
"Watching for the wind; the seen and unseen influences on local weather" by James Edinger, 1967
"Crystal Singer" by Anne McCaffrey, @$.25
"African Systems of Kinship and Marriage" by A.R. Radcliff-Brown, 1965, @$.50
"Dinosaur in a haystack : reflections in natural history" by Stephen Jay Gould, 1996, @$.50
"Arkansas Wildflowers" by Ruth Gier, 1977, @$.50 (I figured that Arkansas 1977 is about the same climate range as Maryland 2012.)
My Enemy My Ally, The Romulan Way, Vulcan's Glory, and The New Voyages 1&2, to give away to fangirls who need them: @ 5-for-$1
"Essentials of Latin: An Introductory Course" vol. 1 and 2 on LP: @$.50 each
The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, @$.25, which it turns out I already had;
and "Naked Pictures of Famous People" by Jon Stewart, @$.50, which may also be to give away to fangirls.
At the SPUMC sale, I bought:
1 pair brand-new waterproof hiking boots, @$.50 (I think I am good on boots for a couple more years now, at this point.)
1.5 yards lightweight brown wool suiting, @$.75
A tin cup, $.50
"Sword at Sunset" by Rosemary Sutcliff, 1963 hardcover with original dust jacket, @$.50
"What Kind of a House is That?" by Devlin Henry, 1969, @$.50
"Flower Making for Beginners" by Priscilla Lobley, 1970, @$.50
"Lao Mien embroidery : migration and change" by Ann Goldman, 1995 @$.50
"Dinosaurs of the East Coast" by David Weishampel, 1996, @$.50
"The Great International Paper Airplane Book" by Jerry Mander, 1971, @$.50
"Taran Wanderer" by Lloyd Alexander, 1967, @$.50 (I already had a copy of this, but this one matches the editions of the rest of my set. Which I believe were bought at this flea market about fifteen years ago.)
"Passing" by Nella Larson, 1929, @$.50
...yes, I am out of shelf space again. And coat closet space, incidentally.
Anyway after that I ended up going and hanging out with
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xerahanadu and lindentreeisle and company in Baltimore, and X-Men: First Class was watched.I feel like I should be writing a thoughtful post about the fact that every time Charles and Erik were on screen together, the reaction from the audience was giggles as we waited to see who would be the first to give in and shout "KISS ALREADY!" at the TV, and what that says about society and the media and gender and sex, but I didn't get in until 2:30 AM last night and then I had to get up for church, so instead I'll say: it was a fun movie.
But it made no sense. I mean, I'm used to reading a bunch of fanfic for something, and kind of working out a pretty good idea of what happened in the show, but there will be a few things that aren't entirely clear from the fanfic, so I'll eventually watch canon, and then I'll go "Oh, that makes more sense now!"
XMFC is the first thing I've ever encountered where canon made less sense after I saw the movie. O.o Every fanfic I've read in the fandom had deeper characterization, more logical worldbuilding, more believable dialog and better-strung plot than the movie. Yes, even the fratboys!AU where they're all drunk off their asses the whole time. So, y'know, yay XFMC fandom, I guess?
There's probably something wrong with me, but I've decided that this movie makes about twice as much sense if you accept the postulate that mutants are a new species of humanity, Erik and Charles are the first wizards of mutantkind, Shaw is an incarnation of the Lone Power (his power seems to be taking organized energies and converting them into heat: if that's not an avatar of the power of entropy I don't know what is), and Erik chose power while Charles saw Death.
Also: We let this movie play with Science, and it broke it. So then we gave the movie its very own Science that had nothing to do with ours, and it broke its own Science, too. So we have decided it isn't allowed to have any Science at all anymore.
Moments other than the "Kiss already!" that got vocal reaction from our audience: the Wolverine cameo, which was basically the best thing ever committed to film (Aside from the bit in the second XMM movie with him and the kitten) and the scene where Darwin died, in which the only member of the audience who was completely unspoiled shouted, "OMG THEY KILLED OFF THE BLACK GUY? SERIOUSLY?" and the rest of us mocked her for her naiveté.
The guy who played Young Patrick Stewart was actually really good, and I loved what they did with that character while deeply disliking him (and pretty much every character in the movie, but I think I was supposed to - they managed to make a movie full of deliberately unlikeable characters which was still fun to watch, which is interesting.) The girl who played Mystique kept looking strangely familiar and I can't figure out why.
The guy who played Young Ian McKellen was way too bland - bland-looking, bland-acting. Of course, it doesn't help that people keep posting photos of young Sir Ian, which have made me save stuff to my Hot People folder for the first time in about a year. I mean, nobody could have lived up to that,
The title of the troll version of this movie is A Talented Psychic Seadweller Rescues From Drowning A Renegade Threshcutioner Bent On Revenge And They Attempt To Build A Moirallegiance As They Gather A Team To Find The Cruel Subjugglator Who Killed His Lusus, Until The Unexpected Flowering Of Their Black Passion Leads To The Destruction Of Alternia Through The Release Of Thousands Of Missiles Carrying Nuclear Fission Bombs; There Are Seven Kisses, Three Of Which Are Followed By Explosions And Three Of Which Are Vectors For Nonconsensual Psychic Manipulation.*
It's probably a better movie than this one, too.
*I am assuming that Troll XMFC actually had kissing at some of the places where we had to just yell "kiss already!"
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The Futures are both very into Homestuck right now, so I sent them your description. Future of Fandom says:
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Because hello, Erik/Charles, utterly in love. No chance in hell that beach divorce would happen in that way.
LOL you must be one of the few unmoved by Michael Fassbender/Erik. I liked him in the role but I think it is more that I like him and the delicious James McAvoy all over each other for my entertainment.
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In all honesty, if not for McAvoy I would not have bothered.
I am, hoever, greatly enjoying the fandom, especially the more snese making AUs and the really nice fixits.
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Although still not as pretty as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. So there's that. And I've never subjected myself to XM3, which everyone tells me was a wise decision.no subject
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And I've been engaged in debates for the past N months about whether that's a good thing, about whether the film's engagement with Jewish post-war iconography is positive, but nobody I know who's steeped in Jewish culture thinks Fassbender was a bland choice.
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It's interesting to think that may have been a deliberate choice saying something about Magneto's role in the film and their overarching themes with history and politics, but I kind of hesitate to give them that much credit. <_< (Magneto + postwar Jewish culture and identity is another thing that XMFC fandom did so much better than the movie, and it's not like the fandom overall has done a particularly good job with it, minus a few very thoughtful pockets.)
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Since leaving the cinema it's been months and I haven't seen anyone who felt the same way as me. And even when I point out all of these things, which do not at all look like coincidences to me, people tend to say the sort of thing you said: "I kind of hesitate to give them that much credit."
So I've started to doubt my reading of the movie. Maybe I wanted to see a certain movie so much that I saw it even if it wasn't there.
But I'm not really sure why you think fandom's done a better job of postwar Jewish culture and identity than the movie did. I've mostly been avoiding fandom's response because what little of it I've peeked at his been so outsidery and othering to me, with only a few notable exceptions.
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I definitely share with you the impression that they somehow ended up writing a movie with Magneto as the hero, though, and I think some of the feelings of ...nonsensicalness that I got from watching the movie came from the fact that the movie kept swerving between wanting an interesting hero!Erik and having to concede to genre and tell us he's the bad guy, with the result that a lot of it (especially the ending) felt like it didn't really hang together as a whole.
I suspect my view of the fandom was warped by the fact that a lot of my exposure to it was silently reading what you (and people like you) linked and wrote. My experience, that is, has been that the vast majority of fandom ignores the Jewish stuff altogether, and a small minority is writing all sorts of interesting things that teach me things I never knew about 20th century Jewish experiences. So my expectations were raised!
(In particular, a fair proportion of the fanfic that actually addresses Magneto's identity seems to have assumed he had some kind of history with Mossad, friendly or otherwise, and I guess I had fit that in to my reconstruction of canon to the extent that I was expecting some kind of explicit reference to period Zionism and 1960s Middle Eastern politics, beyond the "lone Nazi hunter" cliche. Of course, my reconstruction of canon also somehow decided that the "Charles saves Erik from drowning himself" scene had rather more gloomy bridges and discussions of feelings than wetsuits and nuclear submarines. My reconstructions of canon are often interesting but not always reliable.)
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I don't understand all the hesitation to give the writers credit, to be honest. It's not a perfect film- see especially the science problem, which even with the application of Comic Book Science strains the credulity a bit- but it's doing some very clever and relatively subtle things. It goes beyond them making Erik more a hero than a villain and Charles more a villain than a hero, IMO. The way they handled Hank v. Raven's character arcs was more subtle than you'd expect, and very good. I want to stand up and fucking applaud the way they managed to work through at least four different love stories without any capital-r-Romance that HOllywood insists on shoehorning into everything.
But what most impressed me is the way that the writers and filmmakers created a narrative about privilege that rang extremely true, completely reshaped the traditional view of familiar characters, and managed to be extremely critical without being preachy. That's a level of subtlety you don't often see in films pitched to the American audience. The fact that they did it in a superhero film- a genre that so frequently commits the sin of obviousness- and that they did it with the team that is THE quintessential superhero soap opera just makes me more appreciative.
In light of all the stuff they did that I CAN see, I don't find it hard to believe that they could be savvy enough to comment on Jewish identity in the fashion you are suggesting. Especially if, as you suggest, they are Jews and this is a narrative that they understand and appreciate very viscerally.
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OMG. I don't usually keep close tabs on what is done to bend or break Science in a movie, but this sounds unusually awful even by Hollywood standards.
On the other hand, Young Sir Ian link was most appreciated!