{"id":786,"date":"2023-02-18T15:48:26","date_gmt":"2023-02-18T15:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/?p=786"},"modified":"2024-01-04T14:01:33","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T14:01:33","slug":"a-few-ws-the-whale-women-talking-extraordinary-attorney-woo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/?p=786","title":{"rendered":"A Few ‘W’s: The Whale, Women Talking, Extraordinary Attorney Woo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n

During my first year at university, I was presented with the difficult choice to read either Ulysses<\/em> or Moby Dick<\/em>. I went for the former option, so unfortunately I didn\u2019t get to experience the book which weighs heavy over the narrative of Darren Aronofsky\u2018s The Whale<\/em>. But I did get to listen to Franz Ferdinand\u2019s \u2018Ulysses\u2019 on repeat (\u2018last night was wiiild<\/em>\u2019) as I attempted to wade through nearly 800 pages of tiny, dense prose with no full stops to the point where my eyes hurt. What a lotta fun, as Vic Reeves might say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Whale<\/em> pushes us full throttle into the life of reclusive Charlie (Brenden Fraser), a closeted gay man who tries to rekindle his relationship with estranged daughter Ellie (an acidic, brilliant Sadie Sink) before he dies of congestive heart failure. Speaking of which, I studied cloistered individuals when I was at university too, including bnocs (big name on campus, for those not in the know) like Julian of Norwich. But Charlie isn\u2019t that type of cloistered individual. No, all shall not be well, all shall not be well, and all manner of thing shall not be well (if you know, you know). Morbidly obese, Charlie frequently orders pizza, not allowing his delivery driver Dan to witness his hulking figure, instead leaving money in his letterbox for him to collect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film has received a lot of criticism for Fraser\u2019s use of a fat suit and prosthetics instead of the director casting an obese actor, but this didn\u2019t bother me too much. Yes, there are numerous, intentionally gruelling scenes as Charlie painfully manouvres around his isolated abode, and Fraser\u2019s performance is so affecting that he largely stifles the film\u2019s formulaic, occasionally melodramatic dialogue (it\u2019s not too difficult to see that the film is adapted from a play, Samuel D. Hunter\u2019s 2012 work of the same name). There\u2019s also a side-plot about a missionary trying to save Charlie\u2019s soul that feels somewhat tacked on, but all in all, it\u2019s a worthwhile watch, and a poignant tribute to an actor who\u2019s been exiled from Hollywood for the better part of a couple of decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving on, we\u2019ve got\u00a0Women Talking<\/em>, and again have a narrative that largely takes place in a single area. As seems to be discussed in most reviews, the title apparently doesn\u2019t appeal in its vagueness and during a few interviews with its star-studded cast, there were worries that the title itself would put off large swathes of potential audience members; it\u2019s not a big-budget, action-infested MCU film, after all. But\u00a0Women Talking<\/em>achieves a lot with relatively little, in a minimalist sense. The narrative centres on a small group of women gathered in a shed debating whether or not to leave their colony following multiple savage attacks carried out by their menfolk. The opening narrative speaks to a child not yet born. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The atrocities that dictate the discussions we witness have already happened. In a refreshing choice that has been ignored in recent works such as\u00a0The Last Duel<\/em>, the audience are not forced to watch these attacks on screen. We listen to heartfelt pleas from each individual survivor, and despite the opportunity to capitalise and perhaps take advantage of such a brilliant cast, no woman\u2019s word is given more precedence over another\u2019s as they slowly come to their final conclusion. And \u2018slow\u2019 isn\u2019t an insult here, it\u2019s just the nature of the narrative, which reminded me somewhat of a revisionist\u00a0Crucible<\/em>\u00a0with the witch hunt-like pressure that\u2019s forced on the women as they have to make difficult choices in a short space of time.\u00a0\u00a0It won\u2019t be for everybody, but if you\u2019ve got the time to move away from those action-heavy superhero films for a bit, then\u00a0Women Talking<\/em>\u00a0might be worth your while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, I\u2019ll end with the big one, Extraordinary Attorney Woo<\/em>. Shoutout to my auntie Cecilia for recommending this one. It\u2019s a banger. It\u2019s not a show I thought I\u2019d gel with initially; if you know me, you know I generally like my TV and film dark and depressing (speaking of which, I really need to watch The Last of Us<\/em>, which I\u2019ll get round to very soon), but Woo<\/em> won me over pretty quickly with its socially awkward heroine, the eponymous Woo Young-Woo in question, an autistic lawyer who learns how to navigate the ins and outs of social interaction when she receives her first job at Hanbada law firm. I could easily emphasise with a character who has a lot of difficulty speaking to new people in forced social situations, and who also has an obsession with making sure her food (primarily kimbap) is arranged and consumed in meticulous order (do I have a tendency to save the \u2018best\u2019 food until last at the expense of other food going cold? Perhaps…).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What comparisons does this series have with either of the films mentioned above, you might ask? Well…whales. And lots of them too. No, there\u2019s not much Moby Dick<\/em> here (sorry Herman Melville, I may have enjoyed reading your work more than James Joyce\u2019s at uni, but I guess we\u2019ll never know), but Young-Woo\u2019s obsession with the aquatic creature provides much amusement throughout the series, whether they appear during fantasy sequences when Young-Woo has an \u2018eureka\u2019 moment during one of her cases, or when she\u2019s enthusiastically describing them to colleagues who display varying levels of interest in response (usually not much at all). Woo is also supported by a stellar cast of characters, with big mentions in particular to her childhood friend Dong Geu-ra-mi and Woo\u2019s supervising lawyer Jung Myung-seok. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s rare that I get this emotionally invested in a series, and that\u2019s a testament to the acting as well as the show\u2019s eccentric narrative structure. Having mostly watched dramas that are darkly lit shows with heavy adult themes, it\u2019s nice to watch lighter fare that nonetheless still deals with serious issues of discrimination and prejudice (yes Kwon Min-woo, I did direct a fair number of middle fingers in your direction when you tried to do Young-Woo dirty). It looks like Woo<\/em> could potentially be getting a second season too, which is nice, but it would still stand really well as a single season if it ultimately doesn\u2019t receive further commissions. Definitely give it a look. Even you\u2019re not that interested in whales (or dolphins), you\u2019ll find them difficult not to love after Woo Young-Woo has told you about their many virtues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1307,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions\/1307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}