My week with the Moff
Jan. 2nd, 2012 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogIt's not often that a single writer gets to debut three different long-awaited riffs, on three completely different legendary characters, in barely a week's time, but Steven Moffat did just that, and Emily and I watched every minute of it from Christmas to New Year's (with Eleanor joining us in the middle) for about as wild a ride as a single writer could take us on.
First was The Doctor Who Christmas special, which broke away from the entire House of Pond arc of the past season and into an almost entirely standalone story about theDoctor Caretaker's encounter with an amazing woman named Madge. The Narnian conceit doesn't actually involve a wardrobe, but they wind up in a similar land, and get out of it, and out of the family's own tragic recent past, in a way that was creative, inspiring, and I ACTUALLY GOT for once!
The part at the end with the Ponds, though, threw me, and therein lies my biggest complaint; I'd not caught the "prequel," which was exclusively online, and it was only today, more than a week after airing, that I saw it and read what the connection was between it and the events of the episode's beginning and end. (So the show started with Eleven falling from the sky; that happens randomly enough for you to not be sure you've missed something.) It kinda worked without that knowledge; with it, more so. Seeing it on Christmas Night made for a nicer shared moment between parent and child on this end of the Pond.
Then, we went to the cinema for Spielberg's homage to the classic Hergé cartoonage. Earlier in the week, we'd watched Polar Express at home, a film by Spielberg disciple Robert Zemeckis which was one of the first, if not THE first, of the major studio movies using the motion capture technique of animation. That earlier one always made me a little queasy, and not just me; it's formed the basis for animators' study of the "uncanny valley" which they try to avoid in depicting human animatees (particularly highly recognizable ones like Tom Hanks) in a too-close-for-comfort manner. Tintin did none of this; the animation of the humanoid characters was gorgeous and un-Uncanny, right down to the hands (Emily's observation) and the eyelashes (Eleanor's) that earlier mo-cap animations had not been nearly as good at.
As for the story, an amalgam of several classic Hergés? Brilliant! Even though my only prior contact with the franchise was a couple of handed-down-to-Emily t-shirts, I groked the suspense, the humor, the conflict and enjoyed how it all played out. Moff kept it just light enough, using the Interpol twins for comic relief at ideal intervals, and didn't gum up the multiple story lines all that much. The only oddity, purely coincidental for me, is that I was finishing Terry Pratchett's Snuff, my 52nd and final read of 2011, as we headed to this film, and both contain a mid-level character named Captain Haddock.
But that's about all I can carp about;)
Finally, 2012 brought us our first scent of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, in his modern-day incarnation, sniffing out miscellaneous dead bodies, a mentally equivalent sex worker, and a Scandal in Bohemia moved to SW1W.
Here, too, the biggest disconnect for me was from that which preceded it. The Great Game had ended suspensefully, with Moriarity holding Holmes and Watson in Total Mortal Peril for well over a year, only to have this episode summarily dismiss him with something resembling the SCENE MISSING bit from the Monty Python Cycling Tour episode (cue it to 9:20 or so, and the Czech subtitles make it even more perfect). From there, Moff moves into the original Bohemia story of Holmes and Irene Adler, adapting, confusing, rapidfirededucingairlineshedules from the most minimal of clues, and of course making Mycroft and the Mercuns out to be total twits, but still. The main focus of this series is on the two main characters, and they have immense fun playing off each other throughout; Mrs. Hudson also shines as a more-than-window-dressing supporting character in this one, and even the local constabularies come off in new and amusing ways.
So the Doctor's not in the house for a bit, Tintin likely for even longer, and only two Sherlocks remain in the current cycle. Still, I'm happy to have seen what I've seen, even if I didn't entirely observe it all;)
First was The Doctor Who Christmas special, which broke away from the entire House of Pond arc of the past season and into an almost entirely standalone story about the
The part at the end with the Ponds, though, threw me, and therein lies my biggest complaint; I'd not caught the "prequel," which was exclusively online, and it was only today, more than a week after airing, that I saw it and read what the connection was between it and the events of the episode's beginning and end. (So the show started with Eleven falling from the sky; that happens randomly enough for you to not be sure you've missed something.) It kinda worked without that knowledge; with it, more so. Seeing it on Christmas Night made for a nicer shared moment between parent and child on this end of the Pond.
Then, we went to the cinema for Spielberg's homage to the classic Hergé cartoonage. Earlier in the week, we'd watched Polar Express at home, a film by Spielberg disciple Robert Zemeckis which was one of the first, if not THE first, of the major studio movies using the motion capture technique of animation. That earlier one always made me a little queasy, and not just me; it's formed the basis for animators' study of the "uncanny valley" which they try to avoid in depicting human animatees (particularly highly recognizable ones like Tom Hanks) in a too-close-for-comfort manner. Tintin did none of this; the animation of the humanoid characters was gorgeous and un-Uncanny, right down to the hands (Emily's observation) and the eyelashes (Eleanor's) that earlier mo-cap animations had not been nearly as good at.
As for the story, an amalgam of several classic Hergés? Brilliant! Even though my only prior contact with the franchise was a couple of handed-down-to-Emily t-shirts, I groked the suspense, the humor, the conflict and enjoyed how it all played out. Moff kept it just light enough, using the Interpol twins for comic relief at ideal intervals, and didn't gum up the multiple story lines all that much. The only oddity, purely coincidental for me, is that I was finishing Terry Pratchett's Snuff, my 52nd and final read of 2011, as we headed to this film, and both contain a mid-level character named Captain Haddock.
But that's about all I can carp about;)
Finally, 2012 brought us our first scent of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, in his modern-day incarnation, sniffing out miscellaneous dead bodies, a mentally equivalent sex worker, and a Scandal in Bohemia moved to SW1W.
Here, too, the biggest disconnect for me was from that which preceded it. The Great Game had ended suspensefully, with Moriarity holding Holmes and Watson in Total Mortal Peril for well over a year, only to have this episode summarily dismiss him with something resembling the SCENE MISSING bit from the Monty Python Cycling Tour episode (cue it to 9:20 or so, and the Czech subtitles make it even more perfect). From there, Moff moves into the original Bohemia story of Holmes and Irene Adler, adapting, confusing, rapidfirededucingairlineshedules from the most minimal of clues, and of course making Mycroft and the Mercuns out to be total twits, but still. The main focus of this series is on the two main characters, and they have immense fun playing off each other throughout; Mrs. Hudson also shines as a more-than-window-dressing supporting character in this one, and even the local constabularies come off in new and amusing ways.
So the Doctor's not in the house for a bit, Tintin likely for even longer, and only two Sherlocks remain in the current cycle. Still, I'm happy to have seen what I've seen, even if I didn't entirely observe it all;)