What's your maximum?
I sang in person with A Besere Velt this afternoon. It was the first time since early 2020. It was my first time in two years inside a building with other people who were neither family, doctors, nor an unavoidable, stressful errand. Just being in such close, confined proximity, even masked, was exhausting. I came home and after a thwarted effort to order dinner ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch made me noodles and cheese and hot dogs. I am reminding myself that it was an exhausting week to begin with and I am not in fact too damaged to interact with the world ever again, but it would help not to have an ongoing pandemic that far too many people are invested in pretending is no longer going on. I can't see any hope of resuming what I would have recognized three years ago as a normal life. The city I live in, the state, the country have collectively given up on doing anything but leaving it to the vulnerable to keep themselves some haphazard definition of safe. It's my own fault for missing out if I can't get back into the swing of the economy. My medical conditions, as always, more than ever, are no one's problem but my own.
The problem with The Black Watch (1929), the first sound feature directed by John Ford, is that it is both a sincerely impressive adventure epic full of stunning shots and set pieces and it can be described without exaggeration as a three-way collision between The Four Feathers (1902), "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888), and Journey's End (1928). On the eve of his regiment's embarkation for France in 1914, Victor McLaglen is tapped for a secret mission requiring him to resign under an impression of cowardice and hare off to the Khyber Pass to head off an impending jihad being raised against the Raj by a mysterious woman locally recognized as a goddess. When we meet her and find her played by Myrna Loy with a surprising absence of exoticism beyond some terrible dialogue, I said frivolously that naturally she was white, she was descended from Alexander the Great. I didn't think it would turn out to be the textual explanation. I missed most of the rest of her speech attempting to seduce McLaglen to her cause by invoking a prophecy about empires because I was laughing too hard. In the meantime, the action periodically cuts back to the travails of the Black Watch on the Western Front, once through the supernatural device of a crystal ball. It is, you could say, a trip. I have no idea how closely it hews to the credited source material of Talbot Mundy's King of the Khyber Rifles (1916); I'm a little afraid to try the novel and find out. Outside of the rituals of the regiment and some of the compositions, deep-focus and sharp-lit, I don't know that I would have recognized it as a John Ford movie without being told. A couple of nights ago we watched his bazonkers pre-Code submarine picture Men Without Women (1930) and even with an intertitle problem and no pacing to speak of, it made perfect sense in his catalogue.
We broke for the night about forty-five minutes into Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944). I had last seen the film in high school; I had remembered vividly the transition from theatrical artifice to open-air shooting, but I had somehow forgotten that it does not just open, but spends most of the first two acts in a reenactment of the Globe Theatre of 1600, playing to the groundlings, quick-changing backstage, going on with the show through inclement weather. It approaches the illusion of reality by degrees, trading the wooden O for studio sets as carefully constructed as a book of hours and then, at least as I remember it, sudden real skies and fields and horses printing their proud hoofs right there in Technicolor. When the actors reappear, they look more like the fifteenth century than the cusp of the seventeenth. I don't know which of them I would have recognized the first time around, but now the introduction of the cast is a delightful succession of Leslie Banks, Felix Aylmer, Robert Helpmann, Ernest Thesiger, Robert Newton, Freda Jackson, Leo Genn, Max Adrian . . . It has already gone on the shortlist of our fictional repertory series of movies where immersive, conscious artificiality is a key part of not just their aesthetic but their intellectual and emotional effect. I am finding it a pleasant surprise: I had not responded so strongly to it as an adolescent and I don't remember liking Olivier's Hamlet (1948) or his Richard III (1955) at all. I had also forgotten, if I knew it to begin with, that when the Globe burned down in 1613, it was because of an accident with pyrotechnics, specifically a cannon. That's so Keith Moon, I hope there's a Drunk History about it.
As far as I can tell, I have begun re-reading Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy—I have just moved on to The Eye in the Door (1993)—because it seemed to follow naturally on A Month in the Country (1987). I'm waiting to see if I end up rewatching Jarman's War Requiem (1989), at which point I will probably be studying something.
spatch made me noodles and cheese and hot dogs. I am reminding myself that it was an exhausting week to begin with and I am not in fact too damaged to interact with the world ever again, but it would help not to have an ongoing pandemic that far too many people are invested in pretending is no longer going on. I can't see any hope of resuming what I would have recognized three years ago as a normal life. The city I live in, the state, the country have collectively given up on doing anything but leaving it to the vulnerable to keep themselves some haphazard definition of safe. It's my own fault for missing out if I can't get back into the swing of the economy. My medical conditions, as always, more than ever, are no one's problem but my own.The problem with The Black Watch (1929), the first sound feature directed by John Ford, is that it is both a sincerely impressive adventure epic full of stunning shots and set pieces and it can be described without exaggeration as a three-way collision between The Four Feathers (1902), "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888), and Journey's End (1928). On the eve of his regiment's embarkation for France in 1914, Victor McLaglen is tapped for a secret mission requiring him to resign under an impression of cowardice and hare off to the Khyber Pass to head off an impending jihad being raised against the Raj by a mysterious woman locally recognized as a goddess. When we meet her and find her played by Myrna Loy with a surprising absence of exoticism beyond some terrible dialogue, I said frivolously that naturally she was white, she was descended from Alexander the Great. I didn't think it would turn out to be the textual explanation. I missed most of the rest of her speech attempting to seduce McLaglen to her cause by invoking a prophecy about empires because I was laughing too hard. In the meantime, the action periodically cuts back to the travails of the Black Watch on the Western Front, once through the supernatural device of a crystal ball. It is, you could say, a trip. I have no idea how closely it hews to the credited source material of Talbot Mundy's King of the Khyber Rifles (1916); I'm a little afraid to try the novel and find out. Outside of the rituals of the regiment and some of the compositions, deep-focus and sharp-lit, I don't know that I would have recognized it as a John Ford movie without being told. A couple of nights ago we watched his bazonkers pre-Code submarine picture Men Without Women (1930) and even with an intertitle problem and no pacing to speak of, it made perfect sense in his catalogue.
We broke for the night about forty-five minutes into Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944). I had last seen the film in high school; I had remembered vividly the transition from theatrical artifice to open-air shooting, but I had somehow forgotten that it does not just open, but spends most of the first two acts in a reenactment of the Globe Theatre of 1600, playing to the groundlings, quick-changing backstage, going on with the show through inclement weather. It approaches the illusion of reality by degrees, trading the wooden O for studio sets as carefully constructed as a book of hours and then, at least as I remember it, sudden real skies and fields and horses printing their proud hoofs right there in Technicolor. When the actors reappear, they look more like the fifteenth century than the cusp of the seventeenth. I don't know which of them I would have recognized the first time around, but now the introduction of the cast is a delightful succession of Leslie Banks, Felix Aylmer, Robert Helpmann, Ernest Thesiger, Robert Newton, Freda Jackson, Leo Genn, Max Adrian . . . It has already gone on the shortlist of our fictional repertory series of movies where immersive, conscious artificiality is a key part of not just their aesthetic but their intellectual and emotional effect. I am finding it a pleasant surprise: I had not responded so strongly to it as an adolescent and I don't remember liking Olivier's Hamlet (1948) or his Richard III (1955) at all. I had also forgotten, if I knew it to begin with, that when the Globe burned down in 1613, it was because of an accident with pyrotechnics, specifically a cannon. That's so Keith Moon, I hope there's a Drunk History about it.
As far as I can tell, I have begun re-reading Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy—I have just moved on to The Eye in the Door (1993)—because it seemed to follow naturally on A Month in the Country (1987). I'm waiting to see if I end up rewatching Jarman's War Requiem (1989), at which point I will probably be studying something.
no subject
Aw, I hope you get there sometime! I haven't seen much Shakespeare on stage, but that was a college A-Level trip & we also saw a local group do a version of Twelfth Night, our other Shakespeare play for the course. (My sister and I once almost went to see Cymbeline when I visited her in LOndon, but for whatever reason, we didn't or couldn't. I realised about 10 years later it was this one: https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/CBJcymbeline-rev XD Ah well. lol.)
[edit] "It is the best horse of Europe."
Not even Julian Glover does it better! ♥ (It has been so many years, though! I just remember getting ridiculously attached to him alone in the production.)
See, that one I loved just for John Hurt as the Fool.
Yes, he was very good too! It was a good cast all round, but he disappeared off screen earlier and I forget so soon. lol.
I imprinted from that production on David Suchet's Salieri; years later I discovered that its Mozart had been Michael Sheen.
OMG. Well, that was a cast indeed. And, I mean, being take up by David Suchet instead is perfectly understandable. Who wouldn't be? ;-)