Okay so.

I love the Mission Impossible movies.

Look, you don't need to be with me on this, they are purest Velveeta, but I do, I love them dearly. With all sorts of varied caveats but frankly? they keep surprising me by not sucking as much as I was expecting on assorted social justice scales, and actually, that means someone involved is making an effort. Hollywood movies don't do better than average on accident.

These movies are really iffy on Bechdel. (Maybe 4 passes? I'll check when I go again tomorrow, it's possible that there's lines exchanged between the female Agent Carter and the female assassin Moreau that aren't regarding dude Hanaway. Lolnope, Carter and Moreau don't really actually talk at all, despite having screen time together, sigh. But if you toss out the subrule where the female characters have to be named, you could make an argument for MI3, where Julia is informed by a female guest that her sister has arrived, and then where she exchanges greetings with her sister before her sister is like "so you're marrying tom cruise?" And then she also tells her sister that "Mom's dying to see you." Clearly Tom Cruise is not the important part of that conversation for them.) However, there's always a female agent on the team, sometimes more than one, like in the first mission in the first Mission Impossible movie, which had Sarah Davies, Hannah Williams, and Claire Phelps. There's always at least one agent of color--Luther, who appears in all 4 films and is on team in 3 of them, is black, and Jane Carter in MI4 and Nyah Nordoff-Hall in MI2 are multiracial black/white; Zhen Lei in MI3 is multiracial Vietnamese/white.

And the primary villain is never a scary brown person or a woman. The first MI film has some problems declaring who, exactly, its villain is--I mean, you could argue for Max, since she's the criminal trying to buy the list of agent names and assignments, but they make it so hard to dislike her, when she's played by Vanessa Redgrave and helps Ethan out and everything. (And then there's the side issue about Claire which... okay, in my AU, Claire doesn't die. Also she killed Jim. Although it looked like a suicide. Murder? There was no murder here. Whatchutalkinbout. Let's just leave it like that, okay. My AU is an AU with less death, although obviously not no death. Also I saved Lindsey Farris.) But seriously. MI3 tried to fake us out with Laurence Fishburne, but no, actually, every time, the main villain is a white dude.

Right now we are at: way, way better than I ever thought they would be.

I mean, let's be real, the main character is is also a white dude, these things are unapologetic Tom Cruise vehicles, but do I watch them for Tom Cruise? I do not. (Okay, I do a little. I watch them for Tom Cruise getting the shit kicked out of him.) Fun fact about the Mission Impossible movie franchise: it basically exists because Tom Cruise fanboyed at Paramount until they let him have it. And you know, basically fund it out of his own pockets. Other fun fact: Tom Cruise loves stunts. Basically he gets cast and crew and funding together based on A LIST OF BEAUTIFUL LOCATIONS AROUND THE GLOBE WITH TALL THINGS FOR HIM TO JUMP OFF OF and then later on, sometimes as they are shooting, they write a script justifying why he needs to do so. You think I am exaggerating. I am not. Brad Bird, director of the last one, joined fairly late in preproduction, and kept bugging producer JJ Abrams for a script. After several times ducking out of it, Abrams admitted they didn't have a script, they had about six scripts, all different. There is a subplot of the film about a dude Ethan breaks out of prison that they didn't write in until they were shooting at the prison. The two set pieces they had set at the time Bird was bugging Abrams about the script were the Burj and the carpark. Oh Tom Cruise.

Back to not-Tom Cruise features of these films.

Have I mentioned how much I love Luther Stickell? Okay, so it's 1996. You're making an action thriller spy movie. Do you cast a big black dude as a) a demolitions expert b) a hand-to-hand fighter c) a hacker? It is totally against (limited, omg, Hollywood is so fucked up) type that Luther is the hacker. And, just, he's always the one to call Ethan on his bullshit. "That look in your eye is a pain in my ass, you know that, right?" So much heart for Luther.

The turning expectations on their head thing is a thing these movies do a lot. In the part that's strictly the universe, the world of Mission Impossible, that can suck, because it means they made the one carry-over character from the TV series, Jim Phelps, a traitor; in fact three of the four films revolve around someone internal to the agency fucking Ethan over (guys, guys it's not a surprise anymore, what are you dooooiiiing). HOWEVER, in terms of turning standard casting/writing/filmmaking tropes upside down, it's actually... sort of... awesome.

Let's talk about MI:3, and the woman in the refrigerator.

( mostly cut for augh this is painful and not for plot spoilers for a 6 yr old movie, but the plot and film ending will be thoroughly dissected )

But I think this is worth pointing out: good guy characters, all women, most of them of color, in the Mission Impossible films who got kidnapped or shot or otherwise endangered, who I really, really expected to be dead by the end of the film, who got out alive:

--Nyah Nordoff-Hall
--Julia Meade/Hunt (twice, even)
--Zhen Lei
--Jane Carter

I winced, I swore, I said I know how movies work, this will not end well, I braced myself for them to kick it, and they all survived.

Baby steps. And still.

( the queer population of Lima, Ohio; contains reference to a couple lines from this week's episode )

So yay.

( Sanctuary s2/3 stuff )

I don't even know what else. Just: I am always right, and I always meant it literally.

Meanwhile, in Van Nuys

Notes: This is a Supernatural 5.22 story. While I have been spoiled extensively for 5.22, I have in fact only seen about 15 seconds of it. Also, this is crack. Squick warning for grossitude.

385 words. Also on AO3.

( Did that look like jell-o to anyone else? )

I am dying of allergies. Seriously, zyrtec-D is the only thing that makes my life worth living right now. And sucktastically as well, the sniffling and the watery eyes mean I constantly feel like I'm on the verge of crying. That plus general failure to cope makes me feel like I am constantly breaking down.

I am frustrated with my headspace about Supernatural right now. I'm starting to come out of the fruitcake obsesso place and wake up with the "did you get the number of that truck?" hangover about the last few months and I don't want to, quite yet, I want to actually write and vid a lot of the bunnies I have hanging around. I think part of the problem is that I don't deal well with week-to-week viewing of a show, as opposed to binging. It's killing me to play will I be jossed, will I be kripked, instead of just mainlining. (I realize normal people just watch shows this way. Hi, I'm not normal.)

So I have a plan. I haven't decided if I'm going to implement the plan yet, because there are drawbacks to the plan. But the plan is: I don't watch between now and the season finale, and then I get to mainline the last, what, five or so episodes. In between I would watch older stuff (I still haven't finished watching season 2!) and then when I get to mainline season end, I think I'll get a resurgence of fruitcake interest without the stop and go stagnation frustration I'm getting now.

Drawbacks: I'm actually looking forward to the next few episodes, based on spoilers. Not sure I have the patience. everysecondtuesday, grey_bard, and echan would have a hard time talking to me without spoiling me (though considering how much I've been trawling imdb and youtube, maybe that would be okay? I could just be not-watching-spoiled until I mainline). And then, I don't know, there's vid considerations. Which is totally the last thing on my list because I'm still on waitlist for vvc and feel weird submitting stuff if I'm not going and honestly, vvc is going to be "I'm spending $500 to hang out with some people I like," as opposed to the other thing.

I keep turning myself around on that, too. I had one idea I thought I was doing for challenge and it occurred to me in like, the past two hours, that the drawer vid might be even MORE challenge-suitable. So there's like, three or four things I want to take to vvc. I mean, I guess just in that "to show my friends" way.

(On DW this is a GIP post. I haven't bothered to update my icons on LJ and probably won't.)

So I had the experience, watching Farscape, of being spoiled with spoilers so over-the-top unbelievable that I did not believe them and therefore I watched events unfold essentially unspoiled. It was early season three, there had been two Johns for an episode or two, and I asked ysobel how long until one of them died? She asked me where I was and I told her and she told me I had to wait for an episode near the end of the season and I did not believe her. At all. I thought she was being cryptic so as not to spoil me. I thought she was making it up. The more of the season I watched the more incredulous I got until eventually I said to her, "You... you told me." To which her response was sort of, "Giggle? Yes?"

At the time I treasured that phenomenon. Dear show, you went there, I didn't expect you to, I so far didn't expect you to that even being told you would I didn't believe it. Yeah.

I say "at the time" because I've had this experience, both in the hearing about and the telling about, about fourteen times since I've started watching Supernatural. I feel like most statements about the show should be prefaced with "And I mean this literally." I have a new apology in my fannish vocabulary: "I thought you were kidding. Apparently I was wrong."

So this icon is about one of those moments. I'd been told ( 5.10 spoilers )

I had to apologize to grey_bard for not believing her about that one.

Secondarily: Castiel. SQUISH.

So I've been reading some old skool Holmes stuff because really the new movie is fluffy and malleable enough that you can stuff it somewhere in between most of the other canon (though by my count Watson ought to have been married off already before Holmes acquired that cabinet portrait of Irene) and the thing that keeps cracking me up is they cite the stories. I keep reading stuff that's footnoted with references to what story random item X happened in, be it deeply relevant to the fanfiction plot or random aside commentary. It's like, really? Really? Do you not trust you audience to have read the "sacred texts," or do you just want to impress them with how much you have?

In other news: hilarious tongue-in-cheek proof that Watson was a Woman, ca. 1941. My biggest disconnect on it was "dude, your main argument is that they're married, Watson doesn't actually have to be a woman for that." It's like a heteronormative slash thesis with bonus absurd numerology. I am quite fond of the bit about the wedding, though. OH HOLMES. You know, my drag king kink is such that I am REALLY QUITE OKAY with cross-dressing female!Watson in some small portion of stories that do not remotely manage to counter the tide of proper slash.

( movie plot thoughts, spoilery? )

This was my instant fix-it for episode 1.07, and as such a) contains spoilers b) is very silly.

Mastermind
~1000 words
No warnings. Gen slash.

( Read more... )

ETA: Also on Archive of Our Own! Yay AO3.