ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I started watching the new Supergirl series over the weekend and I find myself utterly charmed by the series. Don’t get me wrong: there a definitely better superhero shows on television. Jessica Jones and Daredevil have the kind of production values that are hard to go past, and they have an advantage in that they’re not fighting for space on free-to-air network TV that frees them up to do things that TV narratives aren’t allowed to do. Even in this free-to-air space, Arrow and The Flash are pretty hard to beat. They’re both more technically accomplished that Supergirl, in terms of their special effects, fight choreography, and the performances of the supporting cast. As super-hero shows, they have the advantage of two series in which to build up their shared world and character pool, with their new time-travel show on the horizon. Supergirl doesn’t compete on any of those levels. The scripting is often clumsy and occasionally over-earnest. The FX are…uneven. The supporting cast is not quite there, although Calista Flockhart’s Cat Grant is more fun than any of the trailers made her look and Mehcad Brooks delivers the best damn Jimmy Olson I’ve seen in any superhero medium. What Supergirl has going for it is fun. It’s the story of someone who enjoys being a superhero, whose life is actually improved by embracing her destiny, and with a minimal amount of angst about secret identities and – surprisingly – romantic relationships. It’s a show that does not fuck around when it comes to

Over the course of the last seven days, I’ve watched a TV show and a movie that occupy the two extremes of representing the creative artist as a narrative achetype – the Amazon Original series Mozart in the Jungle and the Coen Brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis. Mozart in the Jungle is brilliant. It details the lives of the conductor and musicians who make up the New York Orchestra, best summed up as “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music.” It’s totally not the show you’re expecting when you hear the words classical music, with one exception – Gael Garcia Bernal’s eccentric conductor, Rodrigo, who exemplifies the kind of hyperactive, devoted-to-the-art-of-it madman who finds music in the sounds of a cab crossing a bridge and tortures himself with the demands of his own genius. People bend over backwards to deal with his eccentricities because of that genius. Naturally, within the of the show he’s gifted, brilliant, and fantastically successful in his chosen career. Inside Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers at their best: beautifully shot, beautifully cast, touched by moments of strangeness (although less than most of their work). It deals with the titular character, Llewyn Davis, a down on his luck folk-singer in sixties New York, trying to make a living as a solo performer after the death of his partner. Llewyn is the antithesis of Rodrigo: a competent musician, but not great. Unable to brush up against the greatness required to be a true artist, despite the fact that he has pursued this goal to the point of his own self-destruction. There is

Peeps, I am currently looking for book and film recommendations within the following parameters: Books: Anything outside of the SF genre. Films: Anything that’s not a SF film, YA movie, or Romantic Comedy No time-limit in terms of the release – I’m currently going back over nearly a decade of recommendations people have made that I never got around to watching, and it covers a lot of ground.The limitations are explicitly there because I want stuff outside of my particular taste and comfort zone, which have grown increasingly calcified in recent years. If you’ve got something you’ve loved, let me know.

I’m planted on the couch, notebook on my lap, listening to the rain. The world is wet and green and exceptionally pleasant, and I will be on this here couch for the remainder of the day. Unless the rain gives up. Then I’ll have to move, as the front room gets too hot for work purposes in Summer. I’ve been reading Peter Temple’s Black Water in the evenings for the last few days and it’s rather glorious. I started the book years ago, then managed to pack it away into a storage box when I moved into a friend’s spare room; I spent three or four years convinced that I’d lost the book, unfinished, until my parents recent move meant that I finally had to unpack everything I’d stored at their place. I was mildly tempted to leave it unfinished when I first unpacked it, since it’s one of the stories that got adapted into the Jack Irish TV series, but I figured that would be a mistake. So now I’m finishing it. It’s an extraordinarily Australian book, without being an extraordinarily Aussie book. It captures the kind of laconic mood that gets associated with the Australian voice, but its setting is decided urban Melbourne and filled with the minutia of football clubs and horse racing and cabinet making. Little windows into secret worlds that you don’t get to see or comprehend, which is one of those things that makes fiction addictive. I’m about a third of the way through