Don't forget, I'm charming

I have now seen seven episodes of Mushishi (2005—2006), which Viking Zen and I started watching off Netflix last week. mamishka, did you recommend this show to me? It's absolutely lovely—quiet, enigmatic, genuinely otherworldly; its stories feel like riddles or dreams, some of which may be nightmares, but beautiful all the same. They chime like folktales. I keep feeling one or more of cucumberseed's characters are going to wander through the landscape. My only complaint is that we can't stream it with subtitles, but that's what the DVDs are for. I cannot imagine I won't want to rewatch the entire thing.

The bulging eyes of puppets strangled by their strings

So there is a film of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop (1967), with screenplay by the author. It was directed by David Wheatley, starred no one I've ever heard of (the exception being its Uncle Philip, Tom Bell; Greenaway's Antonio in Prospero's Books), and judging by the number of wistful comments on IMDb, it doesn't seem to exist even on VHS unless you taped it off the television yourself in 1987. This saddens me: The Magic Toyshop wasn't the first novel I read by Carter, but it stands a good chance of still being my favorite.¹ And my curiosity about its movie has been in no way diminished by the scathing contemporary review from the Washington Post I ran across last night:

In its most successful moments, the film hovers somewhere between the dank perversities of Michael Powell and those Hammer horror films in which Peter Cushing shows up as the proprietor of some haunted antique shop.

Seriously, dude: you misunderstand your comparisons. I want to see that.

1. The challenger would be Wise Children (1991), which was the first and about which rushthatspeaks recently discovered something neat. I am also very fond of Shadow Dance (1966), which I have under its U.S. title of Honeybuzzard with a very mod cover.