Sophinisba Solis

So, in general, being a married person I usually end up watching shows my partner and I agree on, but we don't really agree on any shows at the moment, and also (as explained in locked entries) I've recently had occasion to spend a lot of time lying in bed/on the couch, so I've watched a little more TV on my own and that's been kind of fun.

( a bunch of TV shows )

( also movies )

Okay okay okay, I know what you're thinking: but sophinisba, did you like that other Avengers movie, the one that came out a year and a half ago?

I didn't, especially! Here is a post about that, with spoilers for both Infinity War and Endgame.

( Read more... )

Whoa how did two months go by, I was doing such a good job of posting for a bit there.

Okay, Dreamwidth, I want to let you know that I did most of the Fandom Snowflake Challenge (13 out of 15 tasks/posts) in the first two weeks of January. I did them over on Tumblr and I thought that tagging them all would make it easy for me to link to them, but when I click on the tag it just takes me to all the posts with that tag on Tumblr.com and not on my Tumblr, so idek.

Also Dreamwidth, I want to let you know that I posted a ton of podfic last month. Specifically I made 15 podfics, each with a different author and a different femslash ship, adding up to a little over 3 hours. You can find them over on the AO3, where I made the series Femslash February 2018. It starts off with some Star Wars sequels, then there's a bunch of other stuff, then there's some Merlin. The last one is an hour and 23 minutes, so that knocks out two of my fannish goals for the year. Hooray! Maybe I will do another Dreamwidth post sometime where I actually list all of them.

Meanwhile my offline life has not gone especially well. Specifically I have had some stress and drama at work, but the last two weeks have been a little better and I'm feeling hopeful about the next two weeks.

I haven't seen Black Panther yet, but I'm planning to go see it tonight.

I did see the Chilean movie A Fantastic Woman yesterday and then was pleased when it won the Oscar for best foreign film last night. (I love the Oscars, as frustrating as they are. I watch every year.)

I stopped watching House about a year and a half ago, I think, but I did use to like the show a lot and I'm interested in watching the finale. Can anybody tell me whether it stands up okay on its own or how many episodes before the end they'd recommend watching? I'd go for three or four of them but probably not the whole season.

( links: finales discussions and podcasts )

Anthem for Doomed Youth by fahye is a really fantastic long X-Men fic, Raven-centric with Charles/Erik, taking place before and during the movie. Very much recommended if you wanted to see and understand more of Raven's feelings, and just in general because the writing is really beautiful and conveys so much emotion. Thanks to lolafeist for the rec!

I kinda want to ask about doing a podfic, because the language is so pretty and I think it would be fun to read because of that (plus there's not a ton of telepathy). On the other hand it is long so it would take a lot of work and not count for kink-bingo! So then I thought well what about using it as my project for ladiesbigbang, seeing as how I signed up and all! But despite it being Raven POV I am not really sure if it's lady-centric enough to be in the spirit of lbb, what with so much of it being about her relationships with Charles and Erik. So I don't know! (And it's possible the author wouldn't want a podfic anyway, or that someone else is already working on it, so it's sort of weird of me to be talking about this in a public post, but yeah.) What do you think?

Also here is a really interesting post of X-Men meta and history by gool_duck, about Israel and Holocaust survivors in the '50s and how that might affect Erik's story.

I rewatched Atonement the other night and I still love it a lot. Like, really really a lot. (I am sorry if that takes away from the strength of my recs for you - I guess some fans really hate this movie!)

Also rewatched the first X-Men movie a couple weeks ago, am now in the middle of watching the second one. I can't actually remember whether I've seen this one before. I find them kind of forgettable but fun, and I do like this second one a bit more than the first. It's nice to have most of the character introductions out of the way so they can focus on sexy stuff like mind control. Also, Erik and Charles are still in love, so there's that.

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In non-X-Men-related news, Why You Should Have Been Watching Treme Instead of The Killing has kind of a silly framing (it's not like Treme doesn't get talked about, and I don't agree that The Killing was that bad, and also it ignores the fact that lots of people would watch Treme if they could afford HBO...) but I like what it says about Treme being a show about creativity. There's been more violence in the second season (and I'm not happy about some of those stories), but

violence isn’t the show’s engine. The artist’s life is. There’s a meta-quality to many of the scenes of artists making art, since nearly all of them touch on debates about which types of creativity are authentic, political, pleasurable, meaningful, or lucrative, questions that clearly apply to the creation of the series itself. But rather [than] argue like an op-ed, Treme feels like poetry, and even better, it has begun to incorporate critiques of its own New Orleans exceptionalism, playfully showing the ways these attitudes can sour into pedantry, as they do on occasion with that Indian Chief, who is currently in New York driving his jazz musician son crazy with his passive-aggressive provincialism.

In general this person thinks the second season has been a lot less preachy than the first, and I guess I agree with that. I'm happy to see Annie and especially Antoine's stories getting more attention and direction, and like the reviewer am kind of amazed that I'm actually starting to care about Sonny.

I made a short post about the Argentine prison movie Leonera/Lion's Den for lgbtq_recs.

I watched Whip It last week and it was great. Even the things that bugged me about it in the middle worked out in ways that I liked. ( briefly, with spoilers ) I would ship Bliss/Maggie but I haven't found any, but I did enjoy this Maggie/Pash fic, Searching for Something That Makes Hearts Move by mazily.

Then last night I rewatched Bend It Like Beckham, which I had just seen once a long time ago. It's similar movie in a lot of ways - the girl's joy in finding out she can do something she loves with other girls, the lying to her parents so she keep doing it, the inevitability of the MOST IMPORTANT THING in her sport happening on THE VERY SAME DAY as the MOST IMPORTANT THING in her family life, and other stuff. ( Like femslash ) Anyway, that was fun. It was neat to see the girls so young and cute and, well, kind of awkward and amateurish, after years of watching Parminder Nagra on ER and so many other movies with Keira Knightley. Oh, and what a trip to realized that Jess's older sister Pinky (the sort of ditzy one who doesn't care about anything but her wedding) was played by Archie Panjabi, whom I've been fangirling as Kalinda on The Good Wife. The characters couldn't be more different and I seriously wouldn't have recognized her if I hadn't gone to look up something else on IMDB.

Hey, I think a lot of you saw Philipa_Moss's Yuletide fic Looking Behind Now, in which Tony from BILB meets Johnny and Omar from My Beautiful Laundrette, but did you see that they posted a sequel last month? Bring Your Mother to Work Day is similarly clever and adorable.

So yeah, Kalinda's pretty awesome, isn't she?! And how about that Diane Lockhart?! Actually I love pretty much everyone on The Good Wife except for Peter, and he's okay too. So much chemistry between everybody too. I'm about two thirds of the way through the first season now. The show took a little while to hook me, idk, at first I thought the way they'd do the exposition was awkward and kind of boring. But the characters have really won me over and I've also really gotten to like the balance between the case of the week plot and larger arcs. It's become my go-to show when I'm ready to be entertained (and not challenged too much) for an hour before I go to bed, the way I sometimes watch Law & Order and used to watch House.

(Is it me or has House been really bad lately? Like, a lot worse than it used to be?)

I'm also watching the first season of Community! I don't usually watch a lot of sitcoms but I decided to check this out after all the campaigning for Troy in Fandom March Madness. All those gifs etc. had led me to believe that Troy and Abed were the main characters so it was sort of disappointing to watch the first few episodes, which were so much about Jeff trying to get in Britta's pants. Still, the ensemble stuff is wonderful and Abed is the wonderfullest (I hope he wins March Madness next year!). Besides the main characters, Señor Chang and Professor Whitman make me laugh a lot.

Speaking of people who want to be the guy from Dead Poets Society, cereta had a really great post a few weeks ago on Why I hate "one teacher who made a difference". I also really liked reading the discussions over the last few days in her Grading Hell Theater: Misconceptions post, especially the stuff about what English teachers and professors do in real life and what people think they can/should do.

[A smooth transition,] I am so excited about remix_goes_wild, an open-ended challenge for writing lots of different kinds of remixes, for points! I think it'll be really good both for those of us who are remix addicts and also for folks who like the idea but have not wanted to deal with the deadlines, restrictions, and other pressures of the big exchanges. (Actually, I guess I'm a bit of both - I have done a lot of remixes but I decided I couldn't handle the pressure of Remix Redux this year.) Anyway, signups will open on April 1st and posting will be open through the end of the year. You can sign up to write and/or to make your some or all of your fic available to be remixed.

ETA: Major spoilers for Black Swan in Dreamwidth comments, proceed with caution.

I just did my fandom nominations for Yuletide! Nominations close in a little less than two days, so if you're planning on participating and have your heart set on a particular very small fandom, this is the time to make sure it's available. However, even if you don't do nominations this week, you can still play in the challenge with the fandoms other people have nominated. There are LOTS.

I nominated four movies, a TV show, and a book: ( Treme, Keeping the Faith, Antônia, Leonera, Caramel, Kindred )

There's been some great activity at dark_agenda this week encouraging people to nominate, request, and write for sources created by and starring people of color. Check out the comm and the Chromatic Yuletide Spreadsheet of Doom if that is also an interest of yours. They are also linking to promo posts so it could be a good place to find out about some new tiny fandoms. (I have been meaning for ages to do a post about Leonera and Antônia and haven't finished it yet. Maybe this weekend.)

El secreto de sus ojos/The Secret in Their Eyes is excellent, if you like a good crime thriller. Ricardo Darín plays a retired man who's still trying to figure out a rape and murder case he worked on 25 years earlier. There's also a romance between him and his colleague/former boss, played by Soledad Villamil, who is great. ( no spoilers )

Beware, gentle viewers, there's a graphic rape scene in this movie (which I was not expecting)! Mostly just short clips of it but the first instance really comes out of nowhere.

My parents and I had been watching an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit before we went out to the theater, and on the way home one of us made some comparison or other between the movie and SVU, and then we all quickly said, well, of course we really shouldn't compare them, this is a whole other level of quality and complexity...and then we looked up the director, Juan José Campanella, and found out he's directed a bunch of episodes of SVU! He also directed this week's episode of House and some others and, you know, this week's House was fine but nothing out of the ordinary. It's, I don't know, maybe a tiny bit sad but also sort of neat to think of this guy with such a huge talent and know he's working regularly and turning out good (but not amazing) quality TV when he's not making movies.

I've seen two other movies of his which he also wrote and which also starred Ricardo Darín: El hijo de la novia, which was sentimental but also lovely, and Luna de Avellaneda, which was a little too sentimental and didn't have enough story for my taste.