There was a car in the ocean off of Suicide Bridge

[sovay]

My poem "Green and Dying" is now online at Ideomancer. It's my first publication there, and possibly the only science fiction poem I've ever written. I have to thank Josephine Tey for the initial inspiration.

There was a total eclipse of the moon tonight, but the overcast was such that I only saw it dimly around seven o'clock, when the earth's shadow was mostly indistinguishable from, well, clouds.

Before the eclipse, rushthatspeaks and nineweaving and I watched A Matter of Life and Death (1946). It was sort of the opposite experience from The Tales of Hoffmann—which I loved rather more than I had expected to, while I liked A Matter of Life and Death somewhat less than I had hoped—but I did love some of the images, like the moving stairs and their ancient statues, where Abraham Lincoln is as weatherbeaten as Plato, and the fact that the plot can be explained in mystical and medical terms simultaneously. I suspect that somewhere among the stars Marius Goring's Conductor 71 and Edward Everett Horton's Messenger 7013 (Here Comes Mr. Jordan, 1941) gloomily compare notes on their respective debacles. And I really cannot hate any movie that reminded me of both Euripides' Alkestis and Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Dan'l Webster," but it was still weirdly Hollywoodlike for an Archers film. I will have to think more about it.

On the other hand, I really, really liked Breaker Morant (1980), which I taped off TCM yesterday and watched with my family in the evening. Previously I had known Edward Woodward only as the father of Peter Woodward, with whom I was familiar from J. Michael Straczynski's short-lived Babylon 5 sequel Crusade. (They did appear together in one episode. Yes, I'm a geek.) As it turns out, of course, he's immensely cool in his own right. And has a beautiful singing voice.

I need to bake hamantashn.

Comments

[kayselkiemoon.livejournal.com]

hamantashn! scrumptious stuff; I must learn how to make one of these days.

And I really cannot hate any movie that reminded me of both Euripides' Alkestis and Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Dan'l Webster"

now that's intriguing. *wanders over to look at film up* I've been meaning to see The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann for a while now.

[sovay]

I've been meaning to see The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann for a while now.

I recommend both of those, particularly The Tales of Hoffmann, which surprised me. (I love the opera, so I was very dubious about any film translation, but this one takes an already fantastical story and punches up all the supernatural elements into pure surrealism: all the guests at Spalanzani's are dolls and marionettes; the courtesan Giulietta steals reflections and shadows for the Devil; the soprano Antonia not only sings herself to death, but dies in an artistic inferno of applause; everything is so artificial it achieves its own hyper-reality. It's wonderful.) A Matter of Life and Death, however, is the first film by the Archers that I haven't wanted to write an essay about afterward. I'm not sure it should be the one you start with.

[kayselkiemoon.livejournal.com]

I'll start with The Tales of Hoffmann, then. Netflix has that one and The Red Shoes and not A Matter of Life and Death, anyways. I have seen The Archer's Black Narcissus and Powell's The Thief of Baghdad. I liked what you wrote about BN. thinking back on that movie, what I remember first is the brilliance of the colors and the sound of the wind. a bit disturbing, that film.