those who spuff

I saw Superman! I liked it a lot!

Positive stuff:

+ Finally, a superhero movie that cares about every single life! I did not think we would ever see such a thing--superhero movies use "collateral damage" to raise stakes while not actually caring about the people who die. But this movie cares because Superman cares. And I love that so very very very much. Even if it hadn't done anything else, I would have thought it a success for that.

+ Honestly, Superman is my favorite superhero because he's so ridiculously good and decent, and this movie gets that. It's earnest and sincere and isn't winking at you but it also isn't saccharine--it knows that it can be HARD to be good, and intentions aren't everything.

+ Top tier casting. Everyone is doing a fantastic job. Corsenswet, Brosnahan, and Hoult ARE their characters. They were just as good as I hoped, but I was not expecting how much I would love Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific.

+ This movie loves the relationship between Clark and Lois, which means that this movie has good taste. Their chemistry is lovely and the scene where they're doing the interview is probably my favorite scene in the whole thing.

+ Lex is realistically evil in a way that many of our real billionaires are, which I appreciated a lot. His motivations are completely foreign to me, but I only have to look at the real world to see that there are really people who are like that.

+ The twist involving Superman's backstory was so ridiculously good and meaty. A really bold writing choice, but a great one.

+ I thought the pacing was really good! It never felt like it lagged!

+ Everything was bright! You could see what was going on even in the dark scenes!

+ Lots and lots of fun details that made it feel like the people who were making the movie were having fun making it.

+ Krypto!

Mixed stuff:

+ Being a rabid John Williams fan, I was delighted that they adapted his Superman theme for the film, but I really wish we had gotten just one scene where they used the full-throated original. None of the music was that level of thrilling.

+ I could have done with a lot more Clark at the Daily Planet, living his normal life, letting us get to know the Daily Planet people. The action scenes were very good action scenes, but as always in an action movie, I want way more of characters interacting. Imagine how much more Clark & Lois we could have had! However, I understand that the masses do not share my taste so I get why there wasn't more of that, and there was enough that I'm not angry about it.

+ The plot could have been better. It wasn't bad, and it provided a fine backdrop and set piece for the characters to show who they are, but I didn't love it, you know?

+ #teamsomebodyloveeve

+ I wish we'd had a smidge more showing us how Lex inspires loyalty in other people. I mean, yes, in real life, there are a bunch of people who will follow a billionaire that they think is smart without thinking about his morality at all. It's very realistic! but I want to know about this specific dynamic. Is he paying them obscene amounts of money? What is his view of the world that he could convince the engineer to do what she did to her own body?

Negative stuff:

+ Okay, what was the Kents' accents???? If the movie had been set in Alabama, sure, that would be reasonable, but I do not believe that people in Kansas talk like that? Nobody Iw've ever known from Kansas talks like that? It’s so weird how media uses "very southern accent" as stand-in for "country" even when the country the people are from is the Midwest.

If you are from Kansas and I am wrong about how people talk there, please tell me so I can stop being annoyed about this.

[as an aside, Mister Terrific's accent was so lovely that I immediately looked to see where Gathegi grew up, and to my shock found he grew up in California! I would never have guessed it! His southern accent was so realistic! Well done, sir!]

Me trying to work out the geography of these made up countries: ??????? The one is clearly Russia, the other is inspired by Pakistan, Afghanistan, or possibly a province of India, yet we're told this is all happening in Europe. Which makes no sense. Russia is half in Asia, it would have made so much more sense to just say Asia instead????

But my complaints are small.

So yeah! A fun movie! I recommend it even if, like me, you're not such a big superhero person and are exhausted by too many superheroes.

Now can we pretty please have a prequel movie about how Clark and Lois met and how she found out he's Superman???????

What I finished:

+ A Lonely Death by Charles Todd, another Ian Rutledge mystery. I don't really have anything to say about this! It's an entry in a mystery series--you know what you're getting!

+ The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is only the second Tchaikovsky I've read--I've started a few but up till now, the only one I liked enough to finish is Elder Races. I don't read nearly as much scifi as I do fantasy, mostly because most scifi (emphasis on most) seems like it's more focused on the ideas than on any of the other stuff that makes a book for me--characters, emotional resonance, even worldbuilding from a cultural perspective rather than a technological one.

However, I do like to read them now and then, and this was an example of one where the idea was indeed very intriguing--extradimensional cracks between worlds as an excuse to think about what sentient life might have looked like if it had developed at other points on the evolutionary tree. Very cool, actually! I liked the idea, I liked Tchaikovsky's prose well enough, I liked the unconventional way of giving information (via excerpts from a diegetic text--btw, can you use diegetic to talk about things other than sound? I am simply going to do so because I think it's a very useful word).

There's a wide-ranging cast of characters, too, which I enjoyed, varying in race, gender, and sexual orientation though not nationality (all the human characters are British). I could have done with some truly old characters--I am one of those people who thinks that every story can be improved by the inclusion of an old lady--but I won't complain about that since if I complained about that I'd have to complain about 90% of books. The characters were pretty well-developed but for reasons I can't articulate, I didn't emotionally connect very deeply with any of them. It was more like me going, "That's a good character design," than me truly caring about the characters. But I find this is true in a lot of scifi, and it's not a dealbreaker for me when there's other interesting stuff going on.

This is one of those books that ended up being so long that if I'd gotten the physical copy and seen that it was 600 pages, I might not have started it at all, but it was an ebook so I didn't know when I started! And I did read the whole thing over the course of a long weekend, so clearly it was readable enough even at that length. I thought the pacing was good, and the toggling between character perspectives was enough to keep it moving briskly, so it didn't feel as long as it is.

All in all, a book I enjoyed but did not love.

What I started but abandoned:

+ A Fate Inked in Blood, a Norse-inspired fantasy that was a massive bestseller, which I'd heard good things about from someone whose taste usually completely aligns with mine, but...nah, this isn't for me. I was initially intrigued by the fact that our heroine is married to a terrible guy, which is just not something you see a lot. But then in the opening chapter, along comes this super hot guy who is so clearly coded as Our Male Romantic Lead that I found it annoying, and then they started flirting, and I was like, "I am too ace for this," and I peaced out. I also wasn't impressed by the first person perspective/prose style, so I don't think this is any real loss for me.

What I'm reading/what's on pause:

+ On recommendation from chestnut_pod, I started Sofia Samatar's The White Mosque, and I am very enamored of it despite wishing that Samatar's prose style was about 15% more conventional (more on that when I actually write this up), but I have put it on pause. The book is a memoir about half-Mennonite, half-Muslim Samatar tracing the steps of a 19th century group of Mennonites who traveled through and settled in Central Asia for a few decades--one of those unexpected quirks of history that gets me wildly excited. But I got a chapter or so in and she referenced a nonfiction book about the same topic that covers the historical trip in detail, I saw that we have it at the library of the university I work for, and so I decided I would go read it before I read this book. But I am so looking forward to getting back to this. chestnut_pod was correct that this book is Extremely Relevant To My Interests.

+ I also started Godkiller by Hannah Kaner but I am literally a chapter and a half in so I can't possibly speak to whether I'll like it or not.