Monday is such a busy day

[salinea]

FUCK YEAH ABIGAIL BRAND (AND MS MARVEL TOO) KICKING ASS AND BEING AWESOME!

Otherwise Games of Throne is even more VIOLENT even more SEXUAL and even more GRITTY (and even more RACIST >_>) than the books and much, much, much less subtle because of it. I'm starting to get really unimpressed about it.

Also The Good Wife and Mad Men are awesome as usual.

(So is Legend of Korra but for once I watched it on sunday.)


and I still need to do the newsletter. *sighs*.

Comments

[flo_nelja]

Abigail, c'est dans le cartoon, c'est ça ? Première ou deuxième saison ? Je n'ai vu que quelques épisodes, mais je suis intéressée.

[salinea]

Episode 4 de la Saison 2, le dernier donc.

[flo_nelja]

Un jour il faudra que je rattrape ça. ^^

[salinea]

je pense que tu peux voir l'épisode indépendamment du reste juste pour Abigail.

[shimizu_hitomi]

Aw, and I was thinking of catching up on GoT too (haven't even finished first season yet). That bad, huh?

[salinea]

well different people have different boundaries, I know I see a lot of people complaining more about the sex & nudity, which I find irritating and sometimes very gratuitous, but not disturbing - whereas what's really making me uncomfortable is the level of violence and sexual violence (in the last episode especially). YMMV.

It just feels like they're hamming it a lot compared to the book's handling of things.

[melusinahp.livejournal.com]

It's the lack of subtlety that bothers me more than anything.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I tend to think that they are corelated, like not all lack of subtlety has to do with SEX and VIOLENCE; but the fact that they try to ramp up everything by going with what it is more SHOCKING and more GRITTY is at the source of both.

[melusinahp.livejournal.com]

Mm, I agree completely. The writers simply aren't as good as GRRM. Do you know which episode he's writing this season? Is it 5? I think I heard that somewhere.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

"Blackwater", the final episode of the season.

[werthead.livejournal.com]

Blackwater is the penultimate episode of the season (ep 9) :-)

I think his episode from last year was by far the best, simply because he had zero need to ramp up the sex and violence and so on. The most outrageously violent thing in the ep - Drogo killing his rebellious follower - was inserted by the other writers and actually worked well, IMO.

This season has been all over the place so far. Some individually great moments but other moments that were just massive failures. I don't think it helps that they're rushing the storyline massively to make up for the fact they've got a longer book to fit into the same number of episodes.

[aiffe.livejournal.com]

I don't think it helps that they're rushing the storyline massively to make up for the fact they've got a longer book to fit into the same number of episodes.

Funny you should say that, as I've been watching the show with someone else who, like me, hasn't read the books, and his complaint after the most recent episode was that so much more wasn't getting resolved, and it seemed to be moving slower than last season. I said it wasn't really, that it's just that we still haven't resolved most of the plot threads from last season, and rather than handling that, we're opening new ones.

But like, if they sped it up tons and people unfamiliar with the book think it's still too slow, what does that say about the book (or about the average HBO viewer's attention span)?

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeah, GRRM's episode last year was clearly the best. It definitely had this lighter touch that make it sing instead of hamming everything.

I think I'll have a better vision of the pacing when the season will be done, but you might be right about this.

[the-corbie.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen any of series 2 yet, but series 1 definitely lacked subtlety: but this is pretty much what I expected. TV adaptations, by their nature, don't go for subtlety. They're aiming at a wider audience, in a different medium, than books are: and they have less time to grab people's attention.

Sometimes I think the lack of subtlety is justifiable and probably helpful to the 'casual' viewer: sometimes I think it's been a poor choice. But either way it's part of the whole deal when you do a big-budget TV adaptation. At least they have stuck reasonably closely to the original, i.e. they haven't decided to rewrite the entire thing as a light-hearted comedy detective show.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

S1 lacked subtlety, I think S2 is even worse.

It's true TV means you have to take some short cut, but I also watch TV shows that are very good at being lighter and deftier on how they handle things, like Mad Men or The Good Wife - or The Wire - so I'm not convinced they absolutely had no other choice. Of course GoT is the first fantasy show of this ambition, so that makes things tougher.

[williamjm.livejournal.com]

I think they were always going to have some problems dealing with the increasing number of plotlines in season 2, unless they started cutting large parts of the book. They struggled at times with the pacing in the first season and it could be an increasing problem. This has been exacerbated by some of the decisions made in some of the weaker scenes, although I understand that they might want to add in more explanation for the bits of the audience that haven't read the book that doesn't mean that the sexposition scenes were the best way to do it.

Personally, I wouldn't have minded if they'd taken an approach closer to The Wire and refused to make any compromises to make the show easier to follow, but I can see why that might put some of the audience off.

[annwyd.livejournal.com]

The sex, violence, and sexualized violence in GoT is really getting to be A Bit Much, especially when they're adding it to the story themselves instead of just dealing with what's already in the text. The latest episode had some serious cases of "this was upsetting but tolerable in text form, but it is REALLY UNPLEASANT on TV," as well.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

yeah, I mean, anything put from text to screen will already have a much stronger impact as it is - they should tone down what's in the text to have the same effect, not increase the amount of violence on screen!!

[podrick.livejournal.com]

It does seem to be very aware that it is a big budget TV show and it has to attract lots of viewers. And that means it can't be like a classy smaller (in budget terms) TV show like Mad Men or Homeland. Instead...we get even more sex and violence. Pity.

I still like the show though.