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x_losThe Line of Beauty could well be my favorite book, if it weren't uncomfortably good. I didn't read it in the long sprawling gush that its weighty, atmospheric, absorbing prose seemed to command by right, but in jagged pieces--twenty one day, two hundred a few weeks later--to spare myself at intervals from its relentless perfection. The story of Nick Guest, a recent Oxford graduate, gay and naive, being enfolded by a rich and powerful Tory family and their set, is poised on the edge of dramatic irony. You know, in a way Nick cannot, that he's on the precipice of the AIDS crisis, that the people he's connected himself to fundamentally oppose him and will inevitably reject him. That he's a rube. That the oft-reoccurring Line of Beauty cannot protect him--that beauty isn't salvatory, cannot be enough.
The prose is so perfect, replete with "Drummer Hodge" a la History Boys instances of exquisite, transcendent understanding between writer and reader. Catherine's depression and medicated troughs and crests are as perfect a depiction of mental illness as I've seen.
As to British "Queer as Folk," god do I wish I'd seen this before and instead of the drawn out, tedious, soft-core porn American rendition. It was like the interference you get learning German when you're an English speaker who's already learned a second language. My grammar for how the show should go was already established and wrong. I knew what was going to happen and knew different versions of all the character names. But the original show resolves plot lines that took three American seasons in three hours of footage, and I don't feel I'm missing out on the packing-material bulking-up plot lines the American QaF distracted me with.
The writing was noticeably better, the characterization less annoying, the music Placebo-tastic. Our final central couple is a much better idea. The ending is a bit hammy and possibly naff: why are we in Arizona sloppily indulging the underdog fantasy of turning physical force back against the homophobes who intimidate you? We might've left it with out po-mo goodbye to Canal Street. Thought I do like the 'where are they now' shots and the remake's implication that Manchester is pretty much Philadelphia. And the many Doctor Who jokes: I had fun.
The prose is so perfect, replete with "Drummer Hodge" a la History Boys instances of exquisite, transcendent understanding between writer and reader. Catherine's depression and medicated troughs and crests are as perfect a depiction of mental illness as I've seen.
As to British "Queer as Folk," god do I wish I'd seen this before and instead of the drawn out, tedious, soft-core porn American rendition. It was like the interference you get learning German when you're an English speaker who's already learned a second language. My grammar for how the show should go was already established and wrong. I knew what was going to happen and knew different versions of all the character names. But the original show resolves plot lines that took three American seasons in three hours of footage, and I don't feel I'm missing out on the packing-material bulking-up plot lines the American QaF distracted me with.
The writing was noticeably better, the characterization less annoying, the music Placebo-tastic. Our final central couple is a much better idea. The ending is a bit hammy and possibly naff: why are we in Arizona sloppily indulging the underdog fantasy of turning physical force back against the homophobes who intimidate you? We might've left it with out po-mo goodbye to Canal Street. Thought I do like the 'where are they now' shots and the remake's implication that Manchester is pretty much Philadelphia. And the many Doctor Who jokes: I had fun.
