![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This is an ordinary town and the prophet stands alone
Without having first read the graphic novels that make up the first half of its story, I saw Southland Tales (2007) tonight and found it neither uninvolving nor incoherent. [See comments for explication. This is not a warning-off.] It plays like a satire with a few more serious threads until the final half-hour, when the tone deepens (and weirds); I did not get the same charge out of the various revelations as would someone who already knew all the events leading up to them, but there was nothing in the plot I couldn't parse. Of course, I still have a song by the Pixies stuck in my head . . .
"Do you know the story of the Lord of Shorth, who forced the Foretellers of Asen Fastness to answer the question What is the meaning of life? Well, it was a couple of thousand years ago. The Foretellers stayed in the darkness for six days and nights. At the end, all the Celibates were catatonic, the Zanies were dead, the Pervert clubbed the Lord of Shorth to death with a stone, and the Weaver . . . He was a man named Meshe."
"The founder of the Yomesh cult?"
"Yes . . . The Old Man of Arbin Fastness once said that if the Weaver could be put in a vacuum at the moment of the answer, he'd go on burning for years. That's what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of Shorth. It's hard to believe. I doubt a man could endure it. But no matter . . ."
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
"Do you know the story of the Lord of Shorth, who forced the Foretellers of Asen Fastness to answer the question What is the meaning of life? Well, it was a couple of thousand years ago. The Foretellers stayed in the darkness for six days and nights. At the end, all the Celibates were catatonic, the Zanies were dead, the Pervert clubbed the Lord of Shorth to death with a stone, and the Weaver . . . He was a man named Meshe."
"The founder of the Yomesh cult?"
"Yes . . . The Old Man of Arbin Fastness once said that if the Weaver could be put in a vacuum at the moment of the answer, he'd go on burning for years. That's what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of Shorth. It's hard to believe. I doubt a man could endure it. But no matter . . ."
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
no subject
no subject
Yeah. I didn't mean to damn Southland Tales with the proverbial faint praise. I enjoyed the film immensely; I hadn't expected it to be so funny or to contain so many different points of information on a single screen: at times, it's a little like the internet on acid. But it's been consistently reviewed as incomprehensible, boring, or just plain godawful, and this was totally not my experience. I wasn't lost in the plot. Even murky character motivations were cleared up by the end of the story. And certain scenes were laugh-out-loud hilarious. I need to read the graphic novels, but seeing the movie was still an excellent use of a Sunday night.
no subject
*This* is an endorsement! Thanks for the clarification--I'll see if I can get ahold of it.
no subject
I hadn't heard of Southland Tales at all. Hunh.
no subject
I have been re-reading her recently; The Left Hand of Darkness, The Telling, The Birthday of the World. My copy of Four Ways to Forgiveness seems to have gone missing. She is one of the writers who is very important to me.
I hadn't heard of Southland Tales at all. Hunh.
Richard Kelly's previous film was Donnie Darko, so it was on my radar. The two are consistent as the work of the same writer-director, although at this point I do prefer Donnie Darko; I'm waiting to see how my opinion of Southland Tales will change once I've read the graphic novels.