So I'm not talking much about my life outside of movies because right now it's very difficult and things are very uncertain and I don't know how next month is going to work at all. I will not be at Wiscon this weekend. With any luck, I will be with friends and family at Canobie Lake Park.
1. Courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moon_custafer: an ideal Lord Peter Wimsey. This continues to delight me.
2. Courtesy ofstrange_selkie: Crassus' moray.
3.ladymondegreen sent me a care package containing, among other things, a children's graphic novel about Houdini and a DVD of the Lloyd Alexander documentary.
4. I really like this poem: Paula Meehan, "The Solace of Artemis."
5. I didn't manage to post about it last night, but I have now seen the first episode of the BBC's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015) and to my great surprise and relief, it was very good. My make-or-break moment was the first appearance of the gentleman with thistle-down hair, here played by Marc Warren; I am delighted to report that I wouldn't have put leaves on his coat, but he is otherwise excellently otherworldly, menacing without apparent awareness of intimidation and capricious without camp. His hair is not only the right color, but the right shape for a thistle-head; he has silver-winged eyebrows and his ears are not pointed. His fingernails are opaque, white as teeth. (A touch I don't remember from the novel, but it's much more unsettling than it should be, like a photograph with the eyes put back in upside-down.) He has inhuman cadences in his voice; there is some post-production effect that whispers and hisses in the lower range, but clears suddenly when his voice rises in a tone of clarion carelessness, so either is equally uneasy to listen to. The adaptation sadly omits his initial address to Norrell in effusive Latin, but I understand there's a specialized audience for that joke (antiquarians and other people who study dead languages but don't expect to have to use them conversationally). It is probably inevitable that he should slightly recall David Bowie's Jareth, but I've never been sure that Labyrinth (1986) didn't get into the DNA of the original novel, so that's all right.
The casting on the whole is very good. I don't have much feeling for Bertie Carvel's Jonathan Strange yet, but Eddie Marsan has the right anti-charisma as Mr Norrell and the right air of dry suspicious irritation with everything outside his orderly library; possibly as a byproduct of casting, he's more immediately sympathetic than Clarke's Norrell, a very shy and didactic man rather than a strictly passionless and secretive one, and I am curious to see how this quality will interact with later chapters when he starts doing really stupid, dangerous things as opposed to just bargaining with fairies for the dead.1 I was surprisingly taken with Edward Hogg's John Segundus: he has a pale, slightly apprehensive face and a sheepish nod after questions he knows are "wrong" and he smiles in pure wonder as the stones of York Minster speak, terrifying nearly every other member of the Society of Magicians. Childermass as played by Enzo Cilenti is a rough-grained, magnetic, mysterious presence, hiding secrets in plain speaking; his Tarot-sharping scene with Paul Kaye's Vinculus is a highlight. We haven't seen much of Stephen, but Ariyon Bakare has a beautiful face and a grave well-turned voice and I am hoping. I have a similar optimism about Charlotte Riley's Arabella and Alice Englert's Emma Pole.
And the mise-en-scène is great. The interiors are accurately colored, the clothes are lived-in, the wigs are frequently terrible, and the regional accents are themselves. Nobody has been flattered by Georgian costume if it wouldn't have looked good on them to begin with and let's face it, Empire dresses aren't for everyone. People have stubble and wiltingly crimped hair. The 1995 Persuasion is the only other contemporary piece I've seen put so much time into looking ordinary rather than a showcase for historical design. I don't like the score, but that's mostly because it insists on telling the audience when the magic is going to happen rather than letting it discover them. I'm reserving judgment on the tone until I've seen another episode at least. So far it's more comic than I was expecting—it's not broad, but it gets a lot of pointed mileage out of the disjoint between the confines of respectability and the lawlessness of magic, Mr Norrell's extravagant reputation and his shabby anonymous person, the incongruity of aimless Jonathan Strange finding his calling in magic, which he didn't even believe in before he tried it. My complaints are mostly to do with subtlety, the places I don't feel the script or the direction trusted it. The stones of York Minster are startling, but not especially numinous; the only real charge of strangeness comes with the arrival of the gentleman with thistle-down hair, which is why I was grippingderspatchel's hand, praying the series wouldn't screw him up. I don't think it did. I hope it can keep it up. My standards for the numinous onscreen are crazily (Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Powell and Pressburger) high. The scene in which Strange performs his first piece of magic works perfectly because it is shot without any unusual emphasis at all.
So, yeah. That was really pleasant. I'm hoping it continues not to suck.
I have work to do now.
1. One of the major reasons the story feels in direct descent from Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). There are not that many modern novels that so clearly associate the two worlds, but it's here straight from the start.
1. Courtesy of
moon_custafer: an ideal Lord Peter Wimsey. This continues to delight me.2. Courtesy of
strange_selkie: Crassus' moray.3.
ladymondegreen sent me a care package containing, among other things, a children's graphic novel about Houdini and a DVD of the Lloyd Alexander documentary.4. I really like this poem: Paula Meehan, "The Solace of Artemis."
5. I didn't manage to post about it last night, but I have now seen the first episode of the BBC's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015) and to my great surprise and relief, it was very good. My make-or-break moment was the first appearance of the gentleman with thistle-down hair, here played by Marc Warren; I am delighted to report that I wouldn't have put leaves on his coat, but he is otherwise excellently otherworldly, menacing without apparent awareness of intimidation and capricious without camp. His hair is not only the right color, but the right shape for a thistle-head; he has silver-winged eyebrows and his ears are not pointed. His fingernails are opaque, white as teeth. (A touch I don't remember from the novel, but it's much more unsettling than it should be, like a photograph with the eyes put back in upside-down.) He has inhuman cadences in his voice; there is some post-production effect that whispers and hisses in the lower range, but clears suddenly when his voice rises in a tone of clarion carelessness, so either is equally uneasy to listen to. The adaptation sadly omits his initial address to Norrell in effusive Latin, but I understand there's a specialized audience for that joke (antiquarians and other people who study dead languages but don't expect to have to use them conversationally). It is probably inevitable that he should slightly recall David Bowie's Jareth, but I've never been sure that Labyrinth (1986) didn't get into the DNA of the original novel, so that's all right.
The casting on the whole is very good. I don't have much feeling for Bertie Carvel's Jonathan Strange yet, but Eddie Marsan has the right anti-charisma as Mr Norrell and the right air of dry suspicious irritation with everything outside his orderly library; possibly as a byproduct of casting, he's more immediately sympathetic than Clarke's Norrell, a very shy and didactic man rather than a strictly passionless and secretive one, and I am curious to see how this quality will interact with later chapters when he starts doing really stupid, dangerous things as opposed to just bargaining with fairies for the dead.1 I was surprisingly taken with Edward Hogg's John Segundus: he has a pale, slightly apprehensive face and a sheepish nod after questions he knows are "wrong" and he smiles in pure wonder as the stones of York Minster speak, terrifying nearly every other member of the Society of Magicians. Childermass as played by Enzo Cilenti is a rough-grained, magnetic, mysterious presence, hiding secrets in plain speaking; his Tarot-sharping scene with Paul Kaye's Vinculus is a highlight. We haven't seen much of Stephen, but Ariyon Bakare has a beautiful face and a grave well-turned voice and I am hoping. I have a similar optimism about Charlotte Riley's Arabella and Alice Englert's Emma Pole.
And the mise-en-scène is great. The interiors are accurately colored, the clothes are lived-in, the wigs are frequently terrible, and the regional accents are themselves. Nobody has been flattered by Georgian costume if it wouldn't have looked good on them to begin with and let's face it, Empire dresses aren't for everyone. People have stubble and wiltingly crimped hair. The 1995 Persuasion is the only other contemporary piece I've seen put so much time into looking ordinary rather than a showcase for historical design. I don't like the score, but that's mostly because it insists on telling the audience when the magic is going to happen rather than letting it discover them. I'm reserving judgment on the tone until I've seen another episode at least. So far it's more comic than I was expecting—it's not broad, but it gets a lot of pointed mileage out of the disjoint between the confines of respectability and the lawlessness of magic, Mr Norrell's extravagant reputation and his shabby anonymous person, the incongruity of aimless Jonathan Strange finding his calling in magic, which he didn't even believe in before he tried it. My complaints are mostly to do with subtlety, the places I don't feel the script or the direction trusted it. The stones of York Minster are startling, but not especially numinous; the only real charge of strangeness comes with the arrival of the gentleman with thistle-down hair, which is why I was gripping
derspatchel's hand, praying the series wouldn't screw him up. I don't think it did. I hope it can keep it up. My standards for the numinous onscreen are crazily (Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Powell and Pressburger) high. The scene in which Strange performs his first piece of magic works perfectly because it is shot without any unusual emphasis at all.So, yeah. That was really pleasant. I'm hoping it continues not to suck.
I have work to do now.
1. One of the major reasons the story feels in direct descent from Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). There are not that many modern novels that so clearly associate the two worlds, but it's here straight from the start.
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