Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav
I have been having a run of the kind of days where I can't understand why my body keeps waking up at all. In the afternoon, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch showed me a mural he had found a few days ago, which the owners of the house should be frequently complimented on, and in the evening we watched Ken Russell's Mahler (1974), which with all due thanks to gwynnega for the recommendation we turned out to love. Autolycus sleeps with his tail wrapped beneath his ears like a pillow. My ability to watch movies seems to have returned to a normal level; the time I have to write about them has not. The number of problems the institution of universal basic income would solve for me is honestly not small.
spatch showed me a mural he had found a few days ago, which the owners of the house should be frequently complimented on, and in the evening we watched Ken Russell's Mahler (1974), which with all due thanks to gwynnega for the recommendation we turned out to love. Autolycus sleeps with his tail wrapped beneath his ears like a pillow. My ability to watch movies seems to have returned to a normal level; the time I have to write about them has not. The number of problems the institution of universal basic income would solve for me is honestly not small.
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We weren't sure what it was doing for the duration of the opening reverie and then it was clear that it knew exactly what it was doing and we loved it. The TCM summary was unwarrantedly snarky: "Both trifles and structure are tossed out the door by director Ken Russell in this film . . ." One of the things I enjoyed so much about it beyond the images/actors/interplay with music/David Collings! was the way its fantasies could be dialed up or down as needed, with the horrifying burlesque of Mahler's conversion somewhere over the top of the scale and then there's the moment right after he's been told to cut out physical exertion for his health and remembers himself running and it's not a symbol, it's just part of the past now. I want my life to be safe enough to see it in a theater one day.
What a wonderful mural.
I want a garage to paint an octopus on.
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Mahler is very tightly structured! Which is why it can dial up and down, as you describe. Sometimes I think people hold Russell's later work against his earlier (and, in my opinion, vastly superior) films. (I've seen reviewers call Savage Messiah wretchedly excessive, and I'm pretty sure they never saw it and just assumed, because it's not!) I would love to see Mahler in a theater, too.
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It is! And it teaches the viewer to read its jumping-off points, so that when later in the film it nests one reverie within another it's not confusing where we are in time at all. It's also just a very good—necessarily incomplete, but all-round—portrait of a person who happens to be a famous composer but would be interesting even if he weren't because of the detail the film devotes to his inner life. Also much of it is very funn
Sometimes I think people hold Russell's later work against his earlier (and, in my opinion, vastly superior) films.
What point do you date the falling-off from? I always think I have seen fewer films of his than I have, although I'm still missing some of the really famous ones. So far I'd put The Devils, Mahler, and Crimes of Passion at the top of the list.
(I've seen reviewers call Savage Messiah wretchedly excessive, and I'm pretty sure they never saw it and just assumed, because it's not!)
When that one comes around on TCM, I will let you know what I think of it!
I miss movie theaters so much. It feels like almost everyone I know has returned to them and I would be a lot more comfortable if they had returned with any precautions, if anyone seemed to care.
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Before the pandemic, going to the movies wasn't all that comfortable for me because of vertigo, so I'd have to feel a lot safer before I'd consider going again.
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I bounced hard off Gothic, but I love Salome's Last Dance.
I haven't seen that one! I was shown Gothic by some friends about ten years ago and it has a fantastic cast and generated an extremely entertaining single and I did enjoy the experience, but in the way where it probably matters that it has to be divorced completely from the actual history of the Villa Diodati in 1816. Like, I think the prologue of Bride of Frankenstein may be closer.
Before the pandemic, going to the movies wasn't all that comfortable for me because of vertigo, so I'd have to feel a lot safer before I'd consider going again.
Endangering yourself for the sake of vertigo doesn't sound like a great tradeoff to me, no.
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Like, I think the prologue of Bride of Frankenstein may be closer.
Exactly!
I don't remember exactly why I hated Gothic so much. It may have been nothing more than the sad realization that it was going to be one of those Ken Russell films, as opposed to the kind that I love. (That single is great.)
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At least his opinions of Wagner were consistent.