Mostly what today brought was hammering sheets of rain, but after I got back from my doctor's appointment this morning, the mail was kind enough to leave me a contributor's copy of Sky Whales and Other Wonders, in which my story "Stone Song" appears in the same table of contents as Tanith Lee, Anna Tambour, Erzebet YellowBoy, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Mike Allen, and other worthies. This is my oldest real story and I am very pleased, for a number of reasons, to see it finally in print. The rest of the book is rather lovely, too.
Of the five movies I've seen now by Stephen Frears, I think The Hit (1984) may be my favorite. It's an existential film about gangsters—in this case, an expatriate informer and the two hit men sent to take him out after ten years—but it's not Tarantino; it resists glitz or flash or splatter, instead using the countryside of northern Spain as a kind of meditative sounding board against which Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) plays his Zen-like whimsical calm, throwing both of his captors off-kilter with motives the audience, like Myron and Braddock (an almost unrecognizably young Tim Roth and John Hurt as a man so closed up, he's nearly a non-speaking role), can only guess at—both ends against the middle? a genuine philosopher's fatalism? the fun of it? Certainly he's got nothing better to do on the way to his own death. The screen is full of immense space and light, the kind of sky that can swallow you. The dialogue has odd stops and flaws of silence where you expect responses or remarks. Somehow a clean execution detours into a road trip, a stopover in a safe house results in a second captive (Laura Del Sol), a dusty gas station and a haze-veiled waterfall hold equal potential as sites of transcendence or horror.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving gave me the Criterion DVD last year and it took me until now to get around to watching it: I now want to see more of Terence Stamp. I like also that despite the disparate subjects and varying merits of The Hit, Mary Reilly (1996), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), and The Queen (2006), there is a palpable continuity of atmosphere between them; I think it's the way Frears looks at people. What haven't I seen by him that I should?
And I was totally not functional for the Burns Night I'd been invited to, so Viking Zen and I held our regular movie night with occasional alteration; she made cock-a-leekie soup and we drank whiskey and watched Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro (1962), in which Toshiro Mifune is awesome. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
Of the five movies I've seen now by Stephen Frears, I think The Hit (1984) may be my favorite. It's an existential film about gangsters—in this case, an expatriate informer and the two hit men sent to take him out after ten years—but it's not Tarantino; it resists glitz or flash or splatter, instead using the countryside of northern Spain as a kind of meditative sounding board against which Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) plays his Zen-like whimsical calm, throwing both of his captors off-kilter with motives the audience, like Myron and Braddock (an almost unrecognizably young Tim Roth and John Hurt as a man so closed up, he's nearly a non-speaking role), can only guess at—both ends against the middle? a genuine philosopher's fatalism? the fun of it? Certainly he's got nothing better to do on the way to his own death. The screen is full of immense space and light, the kind of sky that can swallow you. The dialogue has odd stops and flaws of silence where you expect responses or remarks. Somehow a clean execution detours into a road trip, a stopover in a safe house results in a second captive (Laura Del Sol), a dusty gas station and a haze-veiled waterfall hold equal potential as sites of transcendence or horror.
nineweaving gave me the Criterion DVD last year and it took me until now to get around to watching it: I now want to see more of Terence Stamp. I like also that despite the disparate subjects and varying merits of The Hit, Mary Reilly (1996), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), and The Queen (2006), there is a palpable continuity of atmosphere between them; I think it's the way Frears looks at people. What haven't I seen by him that I should?And I was totally not functional for the Burns Night I'd been invited to, so Viking Zen and I held our regular movie night with occasional alteration; she made cock-a-leekie soup and we drank whiskey and watched Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro (1962), in which Toshiro Mifune is awesome. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
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