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We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago
Last night's dreams were full of rivers and rainforest and severed heads and people whose wrists were sliced with gills, like razor cuts. This stuff had better alchemize into story, or my brain has no excuse.
I am going to need to rent the first season of M*A*S*H after all: the episodes currently broadcast on TV Land are cut for commercials, and I haven't been watching them regularly anyway. At least I have had a good week for movies. In the last five days, I've seen Notes on a Scandal (2006) with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving, Little Miss Sunshine (2006) with gaudior and weirdquark, and Dinner at Eight (1933) with my mother. And all of these I liked, although throughout Notes on a Scandal I kept thinking how much better the film would have been without Philip Glass' score, which was alternately minimalist and bombastic and at no point suited the story. But because of Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, an entire character in Victor / Victoria (1982) finally makes sense, and for Steve Carell I will see The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and maybe the DVD of Notes on a Scandal will come with some option to turn off the score, because otherwise it was a terrific film. Next up should be Pan's Labyrinth. I've realized that there are many fewer movies than books with secondary worldbuilding that I really like—possibly because film often feels like a filter through someone else's resonance, while words on the page allow for more overlap between the writer's and the reader's particular images. But I am hardly averse to giving Guillermo del Toro's resonance a try.
Speaking of secondary worlds, I have been discussing Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle withfleurdelis28. Cut for anyone who cares about spoilers.
Along with The Lives of Christopher Chant, Howl's Moving Castle is one of the touchstone books of my childhood. I was six or seven years old when I read it for the first time, and it hardwired right in; this is one of the reasons, I suspect, that I still haven't seen the Miyazaki adaptation. And on the one hand, such an early influx of Diana Wynne Jones could not have been bad for me. On the other, though, I wonder whether certain aspects of the book might have seemed stranger or more familiar to me if I'd encountered them at a later age—I had far less trouble with moving castles and fire demons than I did with the scenes set in Wales, because at six-seven years old I didn't recognize Sophie's perceptions of computer games ("The main magic box had a glass front like the one downstairs, but it seemed to be showing writing and diagrams more than pictures . . . 'Don't interrupt,' one of the boys said. 'He'll lose his life'") or photocopies ("a strange, slightly shiny paper . . . printed in bold letters, but they were slightly gray and blurred, and there were gray blurs, like retreating stormclouds, round all the edges") or twentieth-century clothes ("Michael's jacket had become a waist-length padded thing. He lifted his foot, with a canvas shoe on it, and stared at the tight blue things encasing his legs"). Some of those details took years to come into focus. "Sospan Fach," etc.
In the same way, only on this latest re-read did it quite impress itself on me that while Howl is a magician so good he has to send Sophie to blacken his name to the King of Ingary ("Howell, you see, was my last pupil and by far my best . . . I saw at a glance that he had twice the imagination and twice the abilities"), wherever he comes from in Wales he's Howell Jenkins, disreputable and unemployed PhD, who keeps his car in his sister's garage and bribes his nephew with unique computer games and his niece adores him, however much her parents do not. In another book, this double-sided life might have been the main plot. Here, it's backstory that's essentially irrelevant to Sophie, who doesn't much care that Howl comes from another world, except insofar as meeting his family explains a few things about him:
"Don't keep interrupting!" Megan answered in a low, ferocious voice. "Listen now! I've told you before I'm not a storehouse for your property. You're a disgrace to me and Gareth, lounging about in those clothes instead of buying a proper suit and looking respectable for once, taking up with riffraff and layabouts, bringing them to this house! Are you trying to bring me down to your level? You had all that education, and you don't even get a decent job, you just hang around, wasting all that time at college, wasting all those sacrifices other people made, wasting your money . . ."
Megan would have been a match for Mrs. Fairfax. Her voice went on and on. Sophie began to understand how Howl had acquired the habit of slithering out. Megan was the kind of person who made you want to back quietly out of the nearest door. Unfortunately, Howl was backed up against the stairs, and Sophie and Michael were bottled up behind him.
". . . never doing an honest day's work, never getting a job I could be proud of, bringing shame on me and Gareth, coming here and spoiling Mari rotten," Megan ground on remorselessly.
Sophie pushed Michael aside and stumped downstairs, looking as stately as she could manage. "Come, Howl," she said grandly. "We really must be on our way. While we stand here, money is ticking away and your servants are probably selling the gold plate. So nice to meet you," she said to Megan as she arrived at the foot of the stairs, "but we must rush. Howl is such a busy man."
It is a safe bet, I think, that Megan is not the person responsible for the house being named Rivendell. But that's not a reference that Sophie would get, either. And I love that it doesn't matter to her or really to the story as a whole; the book is about other things. With additional awesome randomness thrown in.
I still credit it and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles with instilling in me an early desire to learn Welsh.
I am going to need to rent the first season of M*A*S*H after all: the episodes currently broadcast on TV Land are cut for commercials, and I haven't been watching them regularly anyway. At least I have had a good week for movies. In the last five days, I've seen Notes on a Scandal (2006) with
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving, Little Miss Sunshine (2006) with gaudior and weirdquark, and Dinner at Eight (1933) with my mother. And all of these I liked, although throughout Notes on a Scandal I kept thinking how much better the film would have been without Philip Glass' score, which was alternately minimalist and bombastic and at no point suited the story. But because of Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, an entire character in Victor / Victoria (1982) finally makes sense, and for Steve Carell I will see The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and maybe the DVD of Notes on a Scandal will come with some option to turn off the score, because otherwise it was a terrific film. Next up should be Pan's Labyrinth. I've realized that there are many fewer movies than books with secondary worldbuilding that I really like—possibly because film often feels like a filter through someone else's resonance, while words on the page allow for more overlap between the writer's and the reader's particular images. But I am hardly averse to giving Guillermo del Toro's resonance a try.Speaking of secondary worlds, I have been discussing Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle with
fleurdelis28. Cut for anyone who cares about spoilers.Along with The Lives of Christopher Chant, Howl's Moving Castle is one of the touchstone books of my childhood. I was six or seven years old when I read it for the first time, and it hardwired right in; this is one of the reasons, I suspect, that I still haven't seen the Miyazaki adaptation. And on the one hand, such an early influx of Diana Wynne Jones could not have been bad for me. On the other, though, I wonder whether certain aspects of the book might have seemed stranger or more familiar to me if I'd encountered them at a later age—I had far less trouble with moving castles and fire demons than I did with the scenes set in Wales, because at six-seven years old I didn't recognize Sophie's perceptions of computer games ("The main magic box had a glass front like the one downstairs, but it seemed to be showing writing and diagrams more than pictures . . . 'Don't interrupt,' one of the boys said. 'He'll lose his life'") or photocopies ("a strange, slightly shiny paper . . . printed in bold letters, but they were slightly gray and blurred, and there were gray blurs, like retreating stormclouds, round all the edges") or twentieth-century clothes ("Michael's jacket had become a waist-length padded thing. He lifted his foot, with a canvas shoe on it, and stared at the tight blue things encasing his legs"). Some of those details took years to come into focus. "Sospan Fach," etc.
In the same way, only on this latest re-read did it quite impress itself on me that while Howl is a magician so good he has to send Sophie to blacken his name to the King of Ingary ("Howell, you see, was my last pupil and by far my best . . . I saw at a glance that he had twice the imagination and twice the abilities"), wherever he comes from in Wales he's Howell Jenkins, disreputable and unemployed PhD, who keeps his car in his sister's garage and bribes his nephew with unique computer games and his niece adores him, however much her parents do not. In another book, this double-sided life might have been the main plot. Here, it's backstory that's essentially irrelevant to Sophie, who doesn't much care that Howl comes from another world, except insofar as meeting his family explains a few things about him:
"Don't keep interrupting!" Megan answered in a low, ferocious voice. "Listen now! I've told you before I'm not a storehouse for your property. You're a disgrace to me and Gareth, lounging about in those clothes instead of buying a proper suit and looking respectable for once, taking up with riffraff and layabouts, bringing them to this house! Are you trying to bring me down to your level? You had all that education, and you don't even get a decent job, you just hang around, wasting all that time at college, wasting all those sacrifices other people made, wasting your money . . ."
Megan would have been a match for Mrs. Fairfax. Her voice went on and on. Sophie began to understand how Howl had acquired the habit of slithering out. Megan was the kind of person who made you want to back quietly out of the nearest door. Unfortunately, Howl was backed up against the stairs, and Sophie and Michael were bottled up behind him.
". . . never doing an honest day's work, never getting a job I could be proud of, bringing shame on me and Gareth, coming here and spoiling Mari rotten," Megan ground on remorselessly.
Sophie pushed Michael aside and stumped downstairs, looking as stately as she could manage. "Come, Howl," she said grandly. "We really must be on our way. While we stand here, money is ticking away and your servants are probably selling the gold plate. So nice to meet you," she said to Megan as she arrived at the foot of the stairs, "but we must rush. Howl is such a busy man."
It is a safe bet, I think, that Megan is not the person responsible for the house being named Rivendell. But that's not a reference that Sophie would get, either. And I love that it doesn't matter to her or really to the story as a whole; the book is about other things. With additional awesome randomness thrown in.
I still credit it and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles with instilling in me an early desire to learn Welsh.
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I love this about DWJ too, that you can keep revisiting her books and seeing something else in them.
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Howl's Moving Castle was my introduction to John Donne; like Robert Graves' "Song of Amergin," which one day I discovered Susan Cooper hadn't written. There are worse ways to get to know a poet.
Inevitably, these things don't make it into Miyazaki's film (about which I have spoken at spoilerish length in the past).
Yeah. Which is another reason I haven't been in a hurry to see the film: those are some of my favorite aspects of the book, all the more so as I got older and picked up on more of them, and what replaced them does not sound anywhere near as interesting.
I love this about DWJ too, that you can keep revisiting her books and seeing something else in them.
Yes. Fire and Hemlock infinitely rewards re-reads. And pieces of A Tale of Time City made much more sense once I learned something about the timeline of World War II.
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That could be some of it. I suppose the Ainu might be as close as one could get, or the Okinawans (although that situation sounds more like lowland Scotland--an historically independent kingdom with a related yet distinct language), but I don't think either is terrible close.
My own feeling is that it was cut because to Miyazaki it didn't seem very important, and it got in the way of the standard Miyazaki messages: "War is bad and dehumanising, and war-making authorities should be resisted," "Family is good, but sometimes you have to ignore the folk who're actually related to you and pick out new ones you like better," and "steampunky aircraft are cool." ;-)
One of the other things that bugged me about the movie was the way that Miyazaki cut out the revelation that Sophie's mother and sisters actually did care for her.
Myself, I wish he'd just taken the ideas that interested him and made a new story, as he did, and not called it Howl's Moving Castle. But I do get the feeling that Japanese authors and directors don't look at making an adaptation of something quite the same way as we do--when manga are made into anime, and anime tv shows into feature-length films, they seem very often to go completely sideways.
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Yes; because it goes toward Sophie's realization that story-traditions don't rule her life after all, that she's not doomed to failure as the eldest of three sisters, that she doesn't have to be whatever is expected of her, that her stepmother is not wicked, and her sisters are also iconoclastic and rather awesome people.
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You think that Wales is designed to be read as "somewhere else"? I see the trick as being that Ingary is "real world" to Sophie, and described as such, but the reader knows that actually it is "fantasy land" Wales is actually in the reader's "real world", but described through Sophie's eyes as if it were "fantasy land" - Wales is as much "here" as Manchester or Brighton.
So the problem for Miyazaki is how you depict the "real world", and whether you locate it in Europe (I'm assuming that Ingary is European, which seems justifiable) or make it Japanese... Yes, I can see that you might choose not to open that can of worms.
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The 40 Year Old Virgin was actually rather good. It's got the crude humour, but it spends a surprising amount of time building characters.
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I'd never seen him in anything before, and I thought he was fantastic. (Also in Little Miss Sunshine he looks rather strikingly like someone I know, but that stopped distracting me after his first scene.) What else has he done that you recommend?
The 40 Year Old Virgin was actually rather good. It's got the crude humour, but it spends a surprising amount of time building characters.
And for sound character work, I will watch almost anything, yeah.
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I mainly know him from The Daily Show--he was on that for years and years, and I'm probably the only loser you'll find who's actually watched that show since episode 1. He used to do "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-CH6EZgOpk) with Stephen Colbert on Saturday Night Live--he and Colbert used to work together a lot as part of Chicago's Second City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_City).
You might also check out the American version of The Office--Carell takes the role originated by Ricky Gervais--I saw Gervais recently saying he felt Carell does a better job with the character.
Little Miss Sunshine and The 40 Year Old Virgin are the only times I've seen him play straight guys--he's usually a great buffoon. And he hasn't been in many movies. He had small roles in Anchorman and Bewitched--I haven't seen the former, but the latter was mildly entertaining. He had a tiny role in Bruce Almighty, which he's reprising as the star of Evan Almighty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Almighty). I've never seen Bruce Almighty, but I'm kind of looking forward to Evan Almighty as it pairs him with Lauren Graham, an actress I like despite having seen her handling some bad scripts.
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Whoa. I should see this.
I've never seen Bruce Almighty, but I'm kind of looking forward to Evan Almighty as it pairs him with Lauren Graham, an actress I like despite having seen her handling some bad scripts.
I saw the trailer for Evan Almighty, I believe, when we went a few weeks ago to see Blood Diamond. The chances that I'll actually see the movie are small, but I liked the idea of ark-building as midlife crisis.
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I haven't seen Dinner at Eight, but I adored Victor / Victoria... Which character do you mean?
I adore Howl's Moving Castle. I think I read it after the Prydain chronicles, which I was reading as I was taking my first Welsh course, and delighting in doubly because I could properly pronounce people's names. ; )
Also, 40 Year Old Virgin was surprisingly good! Definitely worth watching.
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Lesley Ann Warren's Norma. I'd always assumed she was a general platinum-blond parody, but in fact I think she's specifically a take-off on Jean Harlow's Kitty, who lounges in bed in sexily sumptuous dressing gowns, moodily eating half of every chocolate in the box, breathily voiced and nowhere near as refined as she would like to sound—there's even a scene where she crooningly tries to call her husband back to bed with a pet name and some pouty baby-talk, although with somewhat more success than Norma "So . . . what's with the soap?" Cassidy.
after the Prydain chronicles
Another set of touchstone books. Because of Susan Cooper's The Grey King, I even had a chance at pronouncing the names.
which I was reading as I was taking my first Welsh course, and delighting in doubly because I could properly pronounce people's names.
That's really wonderful.
Also, 40 Year Old Virgin was surprisingly good!
This is what I keep hearing!
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Also, I hate the way he's taken two of the most ethically alien characters from the Mabinogion and simplified them into Hero (Gwydion) and Villain (Arawn). In the original text, Gwydion isn't good. Arawn isn't evil. They aren't the other way around, either. They're just alien to modern worldviews altogether. Arawn is the king of the Otherworld, and he behaves perfectly appropriately according to the rules of that world. Let's not even talk about Gwydion, unnecessary war, accessorizing to rape, and bestial incestuous mpreg.
Sorry, I didn't mean to go off on my Lloyd Alexander Rant (TM). I'm sure you knew all that, too. I also think you're totally right on what makes Howl's Moving Castle a fabulous book.
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Is all right; I always pronounced his characters' names according to the rules given by Bran.
bestial incestuous mpreg
(This totally sounds like a fanfic rating.)
I'm sure you knew all that, too.
It's perhaps the only time a simplified mythology hasn't annoyed the living daylights out of me, and perhaps only because I read the Prydain Chronicles before the Mabinogion (or The Owl Service), and only later matched up the characters with their original roles; but for whatever reason, it's never interfered with my liking for the books. And at least Alexander warns the reader that he has altered the mythology rather.
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I feel as though I can't take credit for any of them. I can identify daytime influences sometimes, but I'm not a lucid dreamer: they just turn up in my head. I write them down in hopes that some of the weirder ones will turn into stories or poems. It has happened before.
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I still credit it and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles with instilling in me an early desire to learn Welsh.
Do you have Welsh? (I'm not remembering it, which puzzles me as that's usually the sort of thing I'd remember.)
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I neither speak nor read Welsh: but it's still Diana Wynne Jones' and Lloyd Alexander's fault that I want to.
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I hope you get round to learning it sometime, although I have to admit that I'd always recommend learning Irish instead, cos I could always use somebody else to talk with. ;-)
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Fflewddur always was my favorite.