only thing that we did wrong was stayin in the wilderness too long

[lotesse]

Partway through the third season I'm still really enjoying Farscape; I appreciate the way it keeps bending my brain around in weird ways. But watching it is also kind of like playing Crazy Chicken. While I'd picked up the analysis from fannish osmosis of John Crichton as raped, I wasn't prepared AT ALL for the degree to which the show/Ben Browder are dedicated to the depiction of the cracks in his psyche. This is a show about madness - and while at the moment I find that topic deeply compelling I have to admit that there have been moments when I've had to tap out. I couldn't handle the clone arc, just couldn't handle it. I feel so on edge, watching, because I worry that they're going to crack his sanity like an egg at any moment.

And then there are the bits like "Look at the Princess" and "Liars, Guns, and Money," which are just altogether delightful and delicious and delovely and man I love SF multiparters. I'm really into John/Aeryn as a ship, no surprise there. I already knew that I was in love with Claudia Black because duh who isn't, but Gigi Edgly is charming the pants off of me, and I also am really digging on John&Chiana as a platonic bffs deal.

I bopped over into Pushing Daisies because I did kind of need a break from the psychological intensity of Farscape. I'd seen half of the first episode of the second season at home with my parents, and we'd backbuttoned out because it was clear we'd missed too much context by not starting from the beginning. I am PRIMED for Lee Pace; his movie The Fall has been occupying a lot of my psychic real estate since I saw it a few years back, and I just his face. However I did not anticipate the degree or speed with/to which I am DEAD GONE on Ned the Piemaker, who I lust after with more fervor than I've experienced in rather a while. Despite the whimsical charms of lonely tourist Charlotte Charles I ttly ship Ned/Olive; Cheno is da bomb and I cannot resist her squawky little voice. My sib and I spent a lot of hours listening to Jim Dale read the Harry Potter books, so I also pick up a lot of snuggly comfort from his narration.

Aren't media texts with narrators cool? I was trying to list other ones in my head last night and could only come up with Sally Potter's Orlando and Stranger Than Fiction, though I guess you could also say that most of Baz Lurhmann's films and, like, Singin in the Rain are also essentially narrated, just through a variety of schticks rather than an Eliotian interpretive voice from on high.

Comments

[executrix]

I usually don't like voice-over narration--I think it's usually a sign of weak story-telling, and it often makes the narrating character unlikeable. I'm thinking here of Laura in "Lark Rise to Candleford" and "Call the Midwife."

However, I really liked the voiceovers in "American Hustle" although it could be argued that they weren't used consistently enough, and we could have done with a bit more of Sydney's POV.

[lotesse]

ITA on voiceover as internal dialogue being a fairly weak device; I was thinking more in terms of the novelistic narrator, a separate voice that comments on the action. Which is what Pushing Daisies is doing, and which as a c19th afficionado I find appealingly familiar, a nice bit of bookishness in audiovisual media.

[executrix]

I'm all about the omniscience!

[princessofgeeks]

Macgyver? Burn Notice? "Jerry McGuire"?

Farscape is on my to-watch list. Maybe at Christmas.

[lotesse]

Do you know I've really never seen any of those things? I watched that one episode of MacGuyver with Chris Judge, back when I was in full first flush of Stargate lurve. Burn Notice is a thing I think I want to watch, but Jerry McGuire not so much.

[princessofgeeks]

MacGyver is very dated, but RDA is SO PRETTEH.

Burn Notice is very fun. Dive in anywhere. It got more grim toward the end (7 seasons, OMG). Seasons 2 and 3 were probably best.

Jerry McGuire was a good movie, but only if you like Tom Cruise.

[lotesse]

I missed the Tom Cruise thing; by the time I'd become aware of him, he'd already attained "scary religious couch-jumper" status. Tho I did just about bust a rib watching him gawp around in Legend, that trippiest of 80s fantasy trips.

(and ymmv but I'll take Baby Chris Judge over RDJ any day. *uh huh honey*)

[princessofgeeks]

LOL, yeah, I bet he was hunky!!!

[boxofdelights]

I remember being so tickled, as a little kid, by the metafictional playfulness of the narrator in the Disney Winnie-the-Pooh TV specials. If I remember right, the characters noticed the narration once or twice, too: not in a way that went anywhere, just a "Who said that?"/"I'm the narrator" exchange.

[lotesse]

Right? The only thing better is the part in Into the Woods where the characters gang up on the narrator and offer him as a propiatory sacrifice to a giantess, and are then plunged into existential angst.

My favorite bits of the Pooh metafiction play was when the characters would walk or dance across the letters on the illustrated pages.