House of the Dead Review
Jul. 13th, 2011 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azn_jack_fiendI succumbed to peer pressure and listened to the House of the Dead! Some points:
I dislike James Goss' writing for a bunch of reasons I've already ranted about before at length, but what the hell, I'll rant about it some more. He's a lively writer who does good dialogue and he knows how to hook people emotionally, but there's always this weird self-indulgent flippant-but-still-overly-sentimental aspect to it that gets under my skin. Like the Duchess in Golden Age, who went on and on and on, and the fact that the Indian characters were all redshirts, so this play that I loved for setting and creativity ended up inspiring an equal amount of hate. Or how much time female!Ianto spent in Almost Perfect complaining about wearing high heels and then rationalizing wearing them anyway because his womanly feet had shifted into that high heel shape so he couldn't wear shoes that weren't high heels, ARRRGH (yes, I will be complaining about that bit on my deathbed).
- JB's exposition delivery in the beginning was pretty over the top, but he got better.
- GDL's crying... not very good.
- EM was basically perfect, and having heard all of the radio plays and audiobooks except for these new ones, I think she is the best voice actor.
- Feels a bit derivative of Lost Souls (theme of the living entrapped by the dead).
- Snatches of very good dialogue and delivery; loved Ianto's light-hearted "thanks, Jack" near the end in response to Jack's very dramatic line.
- The end struck me as too sentimental and emotionally articulate. I loved Ianto's very romantic and poetic monologue in "The Dead Line", so it's not that it was too romantic. "The Dead Line" sold me because it had a fresh approach to the declaration of love moment, but the ending dialogue to House of the Dead just felt... cliched and cheap. Like they could be any couple, and it didn't have any uniqueness or freshness or poetry or realism for me.
I dislike James Goss' writing for a bunch of reasons I've already ranted about before at length, but what the hell, I'll rant about it some more. He's a lively writer who does good dialogue and he knows how to hook people emotionally, but there's always this weird self-indulgent flippant-but-still-overly-sentimental aspect to it that gets under my skin. Like the Duchess in Golden Age, who went on and on and on, and the fact that the Indian characters were all redshirts, so this play that I loved for setting and creativity ended up inspiring an equal amount of hate. Or how much time female!Ianto spent in Almost Perfect complaining about wearing high heels and then rationalizing wearing them anyway because his womanly feet had shifted into that high heel shape so he couldn't wear shoes that weren't high heels, ARRRGH (yes, I will be complaining about that bit on my deathbed).
- JB's exposition delivery in the beginning was pretty over the top, but he got better.
- GDL's crying... not very good.
- EM was basically perfect, and having heard all of the radio plays and audiobooks except for these new ones, I think she is the best voice actor.
- Feels a bit derivative of Lost Souls (theme of the living entrapped by the dead).
- Snatches of very good dialogue and delivery; loved Ianto's light-hearted "thanks, Jack" near the end in response to Jack's very dramatic line.
- The end struck me as too sentimental and emotionally articulate. I loved Ianto's very romantic and poetic monologue in "The Dead Line", so it's not that it was too romantic. "The Dead Line" sold me because it had a fresh approach to the declaration of love moment, but the ending dialogue to House of the Dead just felt... cliched and cheap. Like they could be any couple, and it didn't have any uniqueness or freshness or poetry or realism for me.
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Date: 2011-07-13 10:28 pm (UTC)