Master and Commander: Far side of the world (2003)

[version]

hes really bad at that. i feel sad watching that. really, really bad.

Yeah, it's embarrassing. I was listening to him talk about how he grew up performing music in clubs and how he loves it, so I looked up his music and he's fucking terrible.

 

[luka]

hew obviously lying he never did music in pubs. hes got the air of a liar. i do love him but i wish he didnt feel the need to lie. but actors are very insecure.

 

[version]

 

[luka]

extraordinary how a good actor can be so appalling at this. cant he just act being a good singer?

 

[Corpsey]

Sorry but it's clearly much better that he's terrible.

 

[catalog]

First: this story is, indeed, a romance. (This is almost certainly against O’Brian’s intentions, but—here we proclaim the mystery of queer resonance in fiction—the characters speak for themselves.) Beginning with their enemies-to-lovers meet-cute (almost coming to blows over chamber-music audience etiquette), Jack and Stephen trace an arc familiar from a thousand rom-coms. After the realization that both men play themselves (violin and cello, respectively), they are soon arranging duets between naval battles.

Their deepening intimacy over the first several books is one of the series’ great pleasures: Stephen swoops in to save Jack’s reputation at a court martial; Jack goes rogue on a risky undercover mission to rescue Stephen in Minorca. Trope by trope they grow jealous over competing admirers, affectionate over trifling gifts, crabby when one of them snores or hogs the coffee pot. Eventually, they both marry—but all four participants understand that the story they’re in is the story of Jack and Stephen’s relationship.

Actually, Master and Commander is a Domestic Fantasy About a Codependent Life Partnership!

Over the course of summer 2023—giving myself a hard deadline of Labor Day—I set out to read my way through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series of nautical adventure novels, beginning with Maste…

lithub.com

 

[version]

It's definitely there if you want to read it that way, but it's a reading that's been done to death. You really have to knock it out of the park to make "Actually, it's secretly a love story" an interesting angle at this point. We're at the stage where it's so obvious a move it's the template for every pithy Letterboxd review of more or less any film.

 

[sus]

Moreover I think it reflects bad ideology

 

[sus]

What are the second order effects of labeling every close male friendship homoerotic, eh?

 

[sus]

Might such an argument carry a whiff of regressive gender norms eh?

 

[sus]

Catalog you're very smart and have a good aesthetic eye/ear but your taste in ideology needs work. It's a nose thing. This and the Arthur Jafa quote on Alien you posted both have a faint reek of self-involved parochial projection. A refusal to appreciate the other as other that (ironically) advertises itself as woke

 

[version]

Might such an argument carry a whiff of regressive gender norms eh?

It's essentially the same reading my dad does when he makes homophobic comments about Sam and Frodo in LOTR.

 

[sus]

I'm not suggesting you're this way, just that you're too sympathetic to it, it needs to disgust you.

 

[version]

Catalog you're very smart and have a good aesthetic eye/ear but your taste in ideology needs work. It's a nose thing. This and the Arthur Jafa quote on Alien you posted both have a faint reek of self-involved parochial projection. A refusal to appreciate the other as other that (ironically) advertises itself as woke

The Jafa reading of Alien I find interesting. It wasn't one which had occurred to me, particularly the bit about Kotto vs. the alien.

 

[sus]

You are older and wiser than me by many years catalog so I cede to your authority but I have been very proximate to the people who spread these ideas Ive been exposed to their ideologies so my sense of smell is excellent

 

[sus]

Alien isn't a primordial vision of black people it's a vision of primordial life in general

 

[version]

Alien isn't a primordial vision of black people it's a vision of primordial life in general

I think there's enough there for Jafa's reading to be worthwhile. The guy in the alien suit was actually a black guy too.

 

[sus]

Jafa is halfway there but he can't generalize he's stuck in his parochial mindset

 

[sus]

The guy in the alien suit was actually a black guy too.

Ok, I'll admit the theory has slightly more legs than I initially judged.

 

[version]