Facelift and Master of the Revels

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Well, I finally watched Facelift the whole way through, and

there are almost-spoilers for it (not the ending)(and maybe Master of the Revels) down below...

Okay - ohmigod, weird film! It's set in the year 2074, and our MS plays Zax, a magician who really can do magic to entertain the "names" - the scruffy - but at least interesting and human! - proles of the future. They are generally ignored by the "numbers", the elite - and incredibly boring - upper class, who are born in laboratories, exist in a sterile computer-generated world and rarely venture out of it. One of their guilty pleasures, however, is to visit Zax's magical theatre and when F-number female insists on going with M-number male, Zax spots her in the audience and is enraptured. But she returns to being the guinea-pig in the numbers' experiments to isolate the human soul, and he returns to his dressing room where he treats his girlfriend and magician's assistant appallingly, and starts work on a replicant of the F-number female. Of course when he finds out about the numbers' experiment - from his friend Ojuka (Peter Clarke) no less! (Oh alright, his friend Bob) - he realises what he needs to do...

But I'm really not going to spoiler the end too badly. *g* It's actually got lots of potential to be quite interesting, in an eighties, humanity-is-doomed-unless-we-save-ourselves kind of science fiction-y way. The bit that should be the crises is totally gory and made me go ewwwww very effectively, but then it just copped out and made that the penultimate scene instead - with a sort of see-why-you-shouldn't-meddle sort of final message... Ewwwww.

Master of the Revels, on the other hand, which I've started with only the first half in my hand until next month - ack! - not only brings in Bodie and Cowley (okay, Galen and the Controller, but they so are Bodie and Cowley), but it's started to flesh out the world of names and numbers and Regulators a bit more, and I stayed up way too late last night reading it when I meant to go straight to sleep... And Zax in the film just has no personality that I can see, so I can totally believe that he might yet turn out to be Doyle in a he's-been-terribly-traumatised kind of way. Which means that it really is an AU, and as we know I've gone from hating them to adoring them over the last eighteen months or so... Usually I hate it when AUs use names other than Bodie/Doyle too, but maybe because I've seen the film now I can deal with it in this one.

I know lots of people don't seem to like it, and I was wondering - do you think it might be because you've not seen the film? Might that help? ('cos, honestly, anything's got to be good after that..!) Or is there something else about the zine (without spoilering me too much, cos I'm barely a third into it!) that puts you off? And there are people out there who liked it, right? Apart from the gorgeous art?

Oh, and credit for the wallpaper up above to Bri's Professionals Wallpapers!

Comments

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

I don't normally have a problem with AUs. But I find I have a hard time liking a story when one of the characters isn't Bodie or Doyle. I don't want to read about Cade or Deed or whoever. Those are totally different characters. Bodie or Doyle in a different setting, like Cook and the Warehouseman, I can deal with. It's a different place. But the underlining characters are still supposed to be Bodie and Doyle.

I haven't read MotR, though I have the zine, mainly because of this. Is Zak Doyle? And, if so, what does that say about the Zak character? Or Cade, or whoever they use? Is there so little in these other characters that Doyle, or Bodie, can be so easily overlaid on them?

Oh, and thanks for the link! It's one I hadn't seen before. Great work!

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

But I find I have a hard time liking a story when one of the characters isn't Bodie or Doyle.
That's exactly how I feel - I'm very wary of Cade and Deed fic, I want Doyle to be around as well, and I don't want Cade/Bodie or Deed/Bodie, I only want Doyle/Bodie (*stamps foot petulantly*)

The thing about Zax in the film is that, to me anyway, he totally had no personality, so he can be completely overlaid with Doyle-persona, with no effort at all. And that's one reason I'd argue it's not a good movie - not only do I have no sympathy for what Zax does in the movie but there's no aspect of a personality in him that I can latch onto as motivation unless I make up my own backstory for him, which pretty much negates the whole point of watching a movie imho.

I'm reading Zax as Doyle with a different name, and although that usually throws me too (I search and replace alternative names that authors have used when I can - I know, I'm bad...), in this case it works just fine, and I'm really enjoying the world and the situation that HG has created for them.