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Film: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
published by Apple TV+ (1 season/10 episodes so far)
2023-

We San Franciscans can be vain about our beloved City, so OF COURSE we have to watch the Godzilla movie about the “G-Day” attack on SF in current times, and remark on the rendering of the monster-smashed high-rises and relocated subway stops that appear in this fun series.

The premise: Godzilla and other giant Titans are real, and can periodically leave their connected universe to appear on (and destroy parts of) our world. How our worlds connect was the focus of the parents and grandparents of two of our three young current-era protagonists, who track down solider Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell now and by his son, Wyatt, in Shaw’s youth) to learn more about Titans, their world, the missing father of two of the leads, plus the government agency, Monarch, that turned against Shaw.

The series does a good job of telling the past and present stories without jarring us – we always know which era we are in (thanks, Russell father and son!) – and of showing a version of our current world where Titan evacuation drills are just a thing we do.

The older generation of characters, Doctors Miura & Randa and Lt. Shaw, have great chemistry, and I love seeing scientists as the leading characters. Their monster-chasing adventures have an old-school, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark feel in the best kind of way (and in a different era), but with less camp. Their grandkids are persistent in the right way, though their shaky bonds are shaky for plot reasons; once they free him, older Shaw herds them to where they need to go.

This is a fun, San-Francisco-smashing version of a Godzilla mythos, and I would like to see another season.

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Film: Gunpowder Milkshake

Gunpowder Milkshake
published by Netflix
2021

This hyper-violent action comedy has a fun cast – including Karen Gillan, Angela Bassett, and Michelle Yeoh – and features stylish sets, great lighting, playful colors, and VIOLENCE.

An assassin (who was abandoned by her own assassin mother) rescues a child, and assassin-wars ensue.

This stylish fantasy checks all of the American set boxes – the lovely colors of the bowling alley fight scene, the pastels of the diner, the gentleness of the “librarians” around small children before they begin shooting massive weapons – and looks like it was fun for the actors to be over-the-top killers.

It delivers what the preview shows! Please note that this is a comedy AND an action film, so the deadpan commentary by the actors is not self-seriousness EVER. Please adjust your expectations accordingly.

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Life: Managing Fear of (Watercolor) Failure

I sat down on the national holiday and made a little sketch to paint, and while it was harder than it should have been, it also wasn’t the end of the world. It isn’t finished – I need it to dry to glaze some sections that aren’t well defined – but it is recognizably the right general [vague hand-waving gesture] shape.

Watercolor study
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

I could say this reminds me of going from being a swimming instructor with superb form to feeling like a brick dragging itself through the water with weak arms after many years of not swimming laps regularly. (A thing that happened to me.) But the difference is: I was actually good at swimming. (I practiced for years every summer weekday as a student, and kept practicing as a swimming teacher, so there was a least a decade of intensive swimming there, including recreational racing with others.). When I lost that ease in the water, I felt… wrong. Like I’d forgotten something important, and had ‘let myself go’ in a way that made me sad.

However, I was always a beginner-level painter, so I can’t pretend to be crushed at still being one now. I took up watercolor with enthusiasm back in college, but took too many classes, and had no time to play. Painting lost out in favor of manual drafting (a skill I was rewarded for as both a student and professional). (OMG, I am so old!) Watercolor back then was something great for “renderings,” which were hand-painted, intentionally pretty illustrations of what a building would look like in the future, to help clients visualize their project in flattering ways. Being a renderer was a professional speciality people paid extra for. Now that’s all done digitally, which means design projects by others made during my youth are going to wind up in museums, and people will be so impressed that people could once make such images without computers…

Ah, well. There are some watercolor projects I’d like to try, and yesterday’s sketch suggests I can chip away at my fears and work on them.

Some of my watercolor project ideas are mere fantasies: much like cafes with big windows and views of gardens, the IDEA of painting is a fantasy of leisure. Imagine, having time to paint! Imagine, painting often enough to be good at it! Imagine having time to drink good coffee and practice! I know what I’m like: I work too much, I see what these ideas of quiet painting time offer, and I understand why these projects are such a draw, even if my actual results are so basic.

Once I overcome my dread of being bad, painting allows me to enjoy the process of painting. The results are less important than the experience, in some ways. If the experience is pleasant, I will try again. Even if the results aren’t great, I am still able to sit still for a while and put paint on paper for a few hours, which is a joy.

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Film: Kate

Kate
published by Netflix
2021

Kate is a stylish film about the last day of an American assassin’s life in Japan. It is also one of the few films that properly shows the lead character looking like hell while their health collapses, which is strangely refreshing!

(Note that this is one of those films with nearly all American lead characters set in Japan, in a some combination of cultural fan service and backdrop-exploitation. I like it as fan service, of course. I also like the good guy and bad guy cross-cultural collaboration as an attempt at better cultural engagement to ground the story. (There is a speech within the film that suggests disdain for exploitative foreigners, which implies…. self-awareness, even though the context is different.))

Kate is a skilled assassin living in Japan, working for an American handler at jobs that the local assassins can’t or won’t do for local political reasons. She displays (minimal) ethics by wanting to reschedule an assassination that would happen in front of a child, to let us know that she is a good person. Shortly after telling her boss she wants to get out of the assassination business, Kate suffers a medical incident, learns she has been poisoned, and only has hours to live. How will she spend that time? Identifying her assassin and avenging herself, of course!

This film is tight: the pacing is good, the scenes are stylishly composed, the roving fight scenes are extremely satisfying (room to room, bathhouse to alley, street to restaurant), exposition is limited (guns and swords do the talking), and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is an understated heroine. While the preview has a local ally/frenemy talking Kate up as a badass, there is very little swagger – Kate fights like she means it, not like she wants others to be impressed.

I believe I’ve watched this four times. I would buy this if it were for sale. I’ll watch it again. It’s a well-executed action film.

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Film: The Old Guard

The Old Guard
published by Netflix
2020

This is a fun action film about a group of near-immortals who work as soldiers for hire in the modern world. Charlize Theron shines as Andi, the leader of this group that has come together over centuries after finding each other (often through dreams) and fighting side by side. If practice makes perfect, this army of five is very close to perfect – and almost impossible to kill.

As they take on ethical-yet-violent jobs, they come to the attention of an evil biotech bro who wants to turn what they’ve got into profit – and he isn’t going to wait for them to agree to his invasive study plan.

The backstory flashbacks across time are well done; the settings are good; the fight scenes are well choreographed; the logistics of supporting oneself over centuries are addressed in bite-sized realism; the camaraderie between the near-immortals is adorable. I’ve watched this at least three times, and recommended it strongly when it first came out, to ensure my circle had a chance to see it.

It’s well done American-style action. I’d buy this if it were for sale. I’d watch sequels.

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Life: A Stack of Books

Image of a stack of five books described in further detail in the text
That statistic about ten percent of people buying ninety percent of the books may be about me.

There… was a book sale in a bookshop-turned-different-bookshop (popup, maybe?), and I did not resist. Plus, a special order came in for me at Dog Eared Books, where I shop and take friends visiting from out of town (and where most of my recently reviewed books came from).

I’m currently making very loud, positive sounds while reading Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort. Snyder’s thoughtful and ominous book is too heavy for me this week – I’m too busy being angry about the Supreme Court to cope – but was already growing heavy with ‘bookdarts’ until I switched, as even his introduction brilliantly encapsulates alarmingly relevant ways of viewing our current political crises.

There are more books virtually in this stack: I have a digital stack of purchased audiobooks from libro.fm awaiting my attention also.

Do I have time to read these? No, I don’t even have time to get seven hours of sleep each night, don’t be silly. I will find/make the time, eventually.

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Life: Watercolor paint (and fear of failure)

The last time I made a small watercolor painting, it turned out badly. Like the normal, totally well-adjusted person I am, I decided it turned out badly because I am a terrible painter, no matter how many decent paintings I produced in the past, and so I avoided watercolor painting for several years.

Most of this was based on a misunderstanding.

Back when I was a starving architecture school student, I could only buy small amounts of paint at a time. A tube of transparent watercolor here, another tube there, a lot of skilled mixing, and I could get by. I experimented and made some decent paintings with my mismatched tiny tubes, and I was happy.

My first FULL boxed set of watercolors YEARS later was Holbein’s Iródori Antique Watercolors. I had been a regular user of Holbein’s regular watercolors (they released colors that matched the landscape of my trips to Japan SO PERFECTLY!). I liked colors in traditional paintings, so I thought this was the right choice for me. Yet, my paintings with these colors all… lacked something. I blamed myself, put them away, and moved onto other things (including watercolor pencils, and a travel set of a different brand of watercolors, which I worked more effectively with). Years passed, I brought the set out again, painted a rather muddy painting of a Japanese scene form one of my own photos, blamed myself, and put them away again. I was already so familiar with Holbein, I couldn’t figure out why I’d become so RUSTY.

YouTube sorted me out. An artist with a shop called Hino Art Materials in Vietnam reviewed Holbein’s new sets of Iródori GOUACHE. Yes, Holbein re-relased the colors as OPAQUE watercolors, to giddiness from YouTube. She recommended not mixing these paints (they are very saturated, and muddy easily) and showed off a lovely gouache painting on a dark blue background. She showed off that some colors have been reformulated, but not all of them. Perhaps my existing set, even before this re-release, could be used like opaque paints?

So today, a precious day off work, I broke out BLACK WATERCOLOR PAPER (a thing that wasn’t available when I first purchased these paints so long ago) and white watercolor paper, and tested the paint out.

Two sheets of watercolor paper, one black, one white, with circles of Holbein Irodori watercolors painted upon them to show saturation and opacity.
Casual testing of Holbein Irodori Antique Watercolor on Clairefontaine mixed media black and Arches hot press white papers.

Oh, YES. So many of these colors are HIGHLY OPAQUE and look great on black paper. The great colors and saturation on white watercolor paper had fooled me! If only I’d had more experience with gouache when I purchased these, I could have put these to better use, and stuck to transparent colors for those other projects. Now that I understand their opacity, I can use them like gouache (and mix them with opaque white as needed when they need an opacity boost), and perhaps resist buying those French and German gouaches a bit longer… And actually get to enjoy these without fear of failure built in.

(Oh, that Antique Bronze Blue in particular is the color of the sky hours after sunset… I could USE that…)

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Language Study Update: 1800 Days

I'm on an 1800 day learning streak with Duolingo (sharing graphic)

I am persistent.

This year it has been all German. I have travel plans that require another language, and my reluctance to study that language has me doubting whether I will really go…

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Film: The Witcher (Seasons 1-3)

The Witcher
published by Netflix
2019 (Season 1), 2021 (Season 2), 2023 (Season 3)

The Witcher is a “fantasy” TV series, set in a ‘feudal Europe-type world’ (kings, queens, elves, fairies) world in which magic and its related technologies are real. Notable characters include Geralt, a feared, modified person with beyond-human abilities capable of defeating monsters; Yennifer, an abused girl who transforms into a powerful mage, and is constantly involved in political mage warfare; and Ciri, a princess who is accidentally tied to Geralt by fate; and a collection of well-dressed villains and allies.

The stakes are survival: humans versus monsters, army versus army, and gloomy empire versus other kingdoms.

The series starts very strong in separate character development for the leads and world-building to establish the forces of mostly-good and mostly-evil. As the series progresses and the lead characters connect and become involved with each other, the emphasis switches to the fight for the continent and the sacrifices each side makes to win the battles. The battles are more visually dramatic and satisfying than the manipulation and politics, but the action-to-exposition ratio is good for much of the series. The first two series were especially clear in narrative.

Geralt and Yennifer are both active, motivated, and interesting characters. Jointly and separately, they have more going for them than Ciri, who is a child struggling with her (really interesting) mothers’ death, the destruction of her hometown, being hunted by obvious villains, abstract prophecies about her role, and trying to grow up in this chaos.

The complexities of mage life were of special interest (flunking out is… pretty dire), and the idea that powerful people with strong rivalries becoming political enemies seems completely plausible. The ethics of creating Witchers are pretty dubious, though the results are compelling!

I enjoyed it, though any additional series will need to offer tighter narrative structure (and perhaps fewer characters?) to satisfy me as much as the first two seasons did.

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