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Books Film Me

February

This one’s a bit late. That said, I didn’t get a whole lot read or seen.

Watched

13th was the only movie I watched at home in Feb. After I Am Not Your Negro the month before I don’t really know what to say any more. It’s just so horribly broken.

Out at the pictures we saw Black Panther and loved it. It’s the best treatment of the ‘baddie with same powers as the goodie’ trope we get in Marvel films, it looked great, it was funny, mostly self-contained, deserving of its success.

Then a week later we saw The Shape of Water which I adored.  I’m a sucker for fairy tales and this was a wonderful fairy tale. I just want GDT to keep making films like this, Pan’s Labyrinth, man I would loved to have seen his Hobbit. “Fuck. You are a god.”

Read

I picked up Bera the One-Headed Troll a while back but only just got around to reading it. It was… ok? Not quite what I expected, I don’t think I’d recommend anyone seek it out. The gist is a troll (the titular Bera) finds a human baby and is trying to return it while all the other trollkin want to kill it. She has to evade the baby hunters while trying to find ancient troll heroes who will help her, each in turn essentially makes her realise she can be the hero. There are some commando mice. Reading that back it sounds cooler than I found it. I also read vol 3 of Invincible (Perfect Strangers), we got a bit of explanation about some of last volume’s events. These are well-drawn and written and I enjoy very much when I’m reading them, but once I’m finished I don’t feel compelled to read the next one. I imagine I’ll pick at these over the course of the year.

At the no-pictures end of the reading scale I read A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East. You may take title length as an indication of book length and density. But damn it was good. It covers British and French activity from the First World War through to the second. Given the state of world affairs, this should be taught in schools. I understand that trying to explain that, “during this war, in which we were the goodies, as well as fighting these people, who were the baddies, we were also sort of trying to beat these people, who were our fellow goodies, and also screw over these people, who (again) were our fellow goodies,” isn’t as simple but it seems important. Especially when the people living in the Middle East today are still living with the consequences, which in today’s world means we all are.