prysmicdork

Chewing on a rant about why Frank Miller's stuff annoys me, despite how cool the art is. I think my tollerance for machesmo is lessening by the second. But it's not that clear cut either. I still dig 'Blade of the Immortal' and Manji is pretty much a spit, scratch, you stand back now little lady type of guy. Except that well, he isn't. He tries to *teach* Rin, not just run off and kick Anotsu's ass and save her from big bad life.

I'm also chewing on a Tara love rant, a what I wish we could see more of on Buffy rant and a I think season seven should be it and here what I think should happen after rant.
Watched 'Restless' on Friday night. It's so one of my favorite episodes. Surreal, funny, scary. They should do more of these.

Heh, sometimes I should actually try writing these things down when they're whirrling around in my brain instead of waiting until days later when the grey cells have moved on

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From:

shrike6.livejournal.com

Personally, I've always admired how Miller's characters are UN-macho. They don't do a lot of posturing and preening, and they usually aren't all gung-ho about having to go out and do hard, violent things for people. There's a really shit situation, no-one else wants to deal with it, so they have to go kick seven shades of shit out of the bad guys. And at the end of the day, all they want is to go home and get on with their lives.

Well, there's always the obvious exception of Marv, but then again, he really is a comic book character. I don't know anyone...well, maybe my brother Tom in his crazier moods, but that's another story altogether.

From:

prysmicdork.livejournal.com

I think my problem with him really started while I was reading 'Hell and Back', which I hadn't read before. It tripped me up that the subtitle is "a Sin City love story", when no, it's not. It sort of got to the point where I was giggling or making faces everytime the main character (Wilson? Wendle?) would say "Esther!" and then look angsty and dramatic. I'm not particularly fond of the instant love (just, heh, add water) that he ends up coming to believe in. I can believe that he'd care to find out what happened to her, but then it becomes this obession and he's not doing what he believes is right - he was willing to make that deal to get her out, but to find a woman he hardly knows. I'm willing to accept that saving her was a bonding experience, but not *that* bonding. I don't think I'm articulating this well. I guess it's the fact that the love to me didn't seem like real love, that the woman ends up being a helpless victim to be saved and topped off by the over proficiency of the character... I felt very much outside the story, like I was reading the ultimate guy fantasy.
And so my experience with that book changed the way I reread the rest of them. Except for 'Family Values', that pretty much stood up to my memory of it.
300 didn't really even stand up as well as I'd hoped, mostly because I think my knowledge of history and the Greeks has expanded since the last time I'd read it. I don't mind the tweaking of history so much in the service of story, as long as I appreciate the result and the changes in 300 are mostly minor, but annoying to me. He has Leonides and other think again and again that the Greeks (and of course more specifically the Spartans) are some last bastion of freendom against the inslaving Persians... which is crap. The reason there be that scene when the king is asked why he brought so few soldiers and he answers that all his men are Soldiers, as opposed to bakers and farmers and carpendters etc, which was true, is the fact that the Spartans had themselves thousands of slaves and other Greek states under their control. And of course once the Greeks beat the Persians back (which is ultimately due to Athens), they all promtly turn on each other and who comes out on the top of the pile, subjegating all of "free" Greece. Sparta.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that I really don't like the way he characterizes women, don't like the way he deals with the relationships between men and women and don't relate to the people that his male characters are. But (obviously) I do get enough out of his stuff to read and disagree with it and he is the god of artistically used black so. I'm torn ;