{"id":4470,"date":"2018-09-11T14:42:36","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T12:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/?p=4470"},"modified":"2021-01-02T18:02:29","modified_gmt":"2021-01-02T17:02:29","slug":"mixed-media-tuesday-11-september-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2018\/09\/11\/mixed-media-tuesday-11-september-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Mixed media, Tuesday 11 September 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.netflix.com\/title\/80002612\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-4471\" src=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/images\/2018\/iron-fist-s2.jpg\" alt=\"Danny Rand and Colleen Wing\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>TV:<\/p>\n<p><b>\u2b50\ufe0fIron Fist Season 2<\/b>: <em>Huh<\/em>. <a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2017\/06\/04\/mixed-media-sunday-4-june-2017\/\">I didn&#8217;t like season 1<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2017\/09\/17\/mixed-media-sunday-17-september-2017\/\">The Defenders<\/a>. But this new season is really good! (Not just &#8220;better than&#8221;.) At ten episodes, it&#8217;s shorter than other recent Marvel TV seasons on Netflix, which is to its benefit. The first couple of episodes move slowly as they re-establish the relationships, but the second half of the season is very solid. Colleen Wing and Misty Knight make a great on-screen pairing, and I was surprised by how attached I felt to Ward Meacham. He&#8217;s still an asshole, but he is trying really hard to rebuild himself after the crisis he suffered in season 1. I had my doubts about how wishy-washy the character Mary seemed in episode 1, but she came back strong. Finn Jones as Danny Rand is not insufferable any more, although I found it hard to deal with Sacha Dhawan&#8217;s Manchester accent as Davos. He has good screen presence but his voice doesn&#8217;t back it up. I don&#8217;t want to spoil anything, but at the end of episode 8 there&#8217;s a &#8220;damn, they&#8217;re really going to go there?&#8221; moment, and the last two episodes are terrific. The final moments tease what&#8217;s to come in season 3, and if they follow through on that it could be amazing.<\/p>\n<p>Books:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b><i>Ms Marvel vol. 9: Teenage Wasteland<\/i><\/b> by G. Willow Wilson, Nico Leon, et al. Fun to see Kamala&#8217;s friends step up to the plate to try and keep things running while she is away.<\/li>\n<li><b><i>Velvet vol. 2: The Secret Lives of Dead Men<\/i><\/b> by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, and Elizabeth Breitweiser. More cold war spy action and intrigue. If this were an ongoing series I&#8217;m not sure if I&#8217;d keep going, but there&#8217;s only one more volume so I&#8217;ll see how it resolves.<\/li>\n<li><b><i>The Bedlam Stacks<\/i><\/b> by Natasha Pulley. I&#8217;m not normally one for steampunk, but I had hoped for something more humorous and action-filled, but it&#8217;s meandering and meditative. Not quite my thing.<\/li>\n<li>\u2b50\ufe0f\u00a0The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin (<b><i>The Fifth Season<\/i><\/b>, <b><i>The Obelisk Gate<\/i><\/b>, and <b><i>The Stone Sky<\/i><\/b>) Very good, but three Hugos in three years implies something quite extraordinary, and I wouldn&#8217;t put it one that level. (<a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2018\/09\/10\/anhedonia\/\">Take my opinions with a grain of salt right now, though<\/a>.) It covers lots of themes explicitly, such as environmental destruction and prejudice towards &#8220;outsiders&#8221;, and many more (race, gender, sexuality) with a kind of subtlety and matter-of-factness that makes you wonder if this was actually written twenty years in the future where such things are taken for granted. It also covers a giant world-ending plot with great pacing and complex characters.<\/li>\n<li><b><i>Split Second<\/i><\/b> by Alex Kava. Serial killer\/FBI profiler thriller. No more than \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Films:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\ud83d\udca9 What&#8217;s <b><i>Pacific Rim: Uprising<\/i><\/b>? Not much, what&#8217;s Pacific Rim: Up with you? (Bad film, bad joke.)<\/li>\n<li><b><i>Whisky Tango Foxtrot<\/i><\/b> Good<\/li>\n<li><b><i>Red Sparrow<\/i><\/b> Had some good bits, but it could have hit most of the same character and action beats without the scenes of sexual degradation.<\/li>\n<li>\u2b50\ufe0f\u00a0<b><i>Ant-Man and The Wasp<\/i><\/b> Enjoyable superhero action.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TV: \u2b50\ufe0fIron Fist Season 2: Huh. I didn&#8217;t like season 1, or The Defenders. But this new season is really good! (Not just &#8220;better than&#8221;.) At ten episodes, it&#8217;s shorter than other recent Marvel TV seasons on Netflix, which is to its benefit. The first couple of episodes move slowly as they re-establish the relationships, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2018\/09\/11\/mixed-media-tuesday-11-september-2018\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Mixed media, Tuesday 11 September 2018&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4470"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4981,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4470\/revisions\/4981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}