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

[sc-fossil.livejournal.com]

MOTR possible spoilers...

Oh, cool. You've seen the movie. I've heard it's appallingly bad, but it's all taste, right? I'd love to see it since I love the zine. I have about twenty more pages of that tiny, itty-bitty print and I'm finished, but I was suck in immediately. I love the facial hair on Zax (Doyle) myself. And I do see Doyle and Bodie and Cowley through the entire story. It is definitely AU, but I've bought it big time.

The zine is beautiful. I bought it for the art and after hearing how people hated the story, I thought a few times I wouldn't read it, but what the heck. It's right here, next to me. So I started in... I can tell if I like a story within the first few pages. Next thing I know, it's two hours later and I'm happy.

The secondary characters are very lifelike, as is the "nemesis" to Zax. So all in all, I like it very much.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Erm... I'm not sure that taste does have much to do with the quality of this movie actually...

I've seen the zine, I've just not bought it yet. I figured I wanted to try it first, since it's not technically B/D. It's just that it turns out that it sort of is! And I've not got to his nemesis yet, so now I'm even more intrigued... *g*

[alicambs.livejournal.com]

Want to borrow it?

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Oooh - could I?! I've got the first half from the Paper Circuit at the moment, but it'll be a whole month before I can read the rest of it! Plus the print is very faded on this copy in places...

My email is slantedlight at hotmail dot com... *g*

Ooh, I'm all happy-excited about that now too...