1. Yesterday's mail brought my contributor's copy of Animal Day II, the latest annual not-Not One of Us publication. It contains my poem "кот древнее и неприкосновенное животное" along with fine work by Steve Toase, Barbara Rosen, Holly Day, and Suzanna Hersey among others; I recommend both picking up a copy and sending work for the spring issue. My poem was inspired equally by reading Bulgakov and living with two black cats who like opening doors and eating dessert.
2. Last night I finished watching The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch, who had never seen it. It remains one of my favorite movies I have never really written about. I can recognize now all the ways in which Hardy Krüger's Heinrich Dorfmann is a deliberately difficult character with his cold equations and his monofocus and his stubborn arrogance that's just as dangerous as the threatened traditionalism of James Stewart's Frank Towns, but he was my favorite character from the first time I saw the movie and remains the one I gravitate toward, maybe because he's the outsider (the one German in a mixed American, British, and French cast: "That's it, then, that's why they never won—they didn't have old Heinrich!"), maybe because he's intelligent and anoraky and his people skills are so terrible that calling them ass would be an insult to the human posterior. I love that his chilly, rational, logical plan is the craziest dream of all, if only the rest of the cast knew it. Also I just like watching people build things. I would have loved The Finest Hours (2016) if it had just been the high seas and on-the-fly engineering of real life instead of a shoehorned—and invented—love angle which sticks out just as awkwardly as the hallucinated belly dancer in The Flight of the Phoenix.
3. David Cairns writes in memory of Dorothy Malone and then overthinks that scene in The Big Sleep (1946).
4. So, yes, the Oscar nominees. I don't understand the prominence of Darkest Hour, which looked from all the reviews like a thoroughly traditional biopic with a lot of Churchill clichés (if you must have your WWII mythmaking, at least Dunkirk was weird), and I fully expected to see at least a costume design nod for Wonder Woman and its practical Amazons, but I can't remember the last time a genre film was nominated for Best Picture and I would be fine by which I mean delighted with either Get Out or The Shape of Water; if they split the vote, at least may Call Me by Your Name or Lady Bird take it instead of any of the more obvious fallbacks. I haven't seen enough of the nominees to say much about Best Leading/Supporting Actor/Actress, but Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out would be as unusual and welcome as the movie itself for Best Picture, I have heard nothing but praise for Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and I liked Richard Jenkins very much in The Shape of Water, but I'd have given that nomination to Michael Stuhlbarg. (I am pleased Octavia Spencer received hers.) Coco should take Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, no questions. I suspect Hoyte van Hoytema will win Best Cinematography for Dunkirk even if his shaky-cam annoyed me. Either Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, or Guillermo del Toro would please me for Best Director, even if their chances are probably sketchy against Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson, and all three of them (and Vanessa Taylor) could also clean up on the Original Screenplay front as far as I'm concerned. Paul Denham Austerberry et al. would be entirely justified in taking Best Production Design for The Shape of Water. The rest of the categories, I don't have enough information for opinions, but apparently this is a year in which I have a stake in the Oscars. I think it's because it feels like the Hugos. More years should.
5. The Strange Horizons 2018 Prize Draw is now live. Check it out!
So that's most of what I wanted to post when I got the news about Le Guin; I wrote about her instead and then I wrote about a noir I'd seen on Saturday and then I held the cats a lot. (Oh, God, I named my ancient and now somewhat precarious laptop half after one of her characters. Now I feel even more protective toward him.) I forgot until now that I dreamed of watching a nonexistent and impossible movie starring Leslie Howard at twenty-eight, at which age he looked and sounded like a dorky student. There were no sound films in 1921. Leslie Howard didn't even come to Hollywood until 1930. I would ask what the hell, brain, except I think it's as simple as my brain really appreciating all those pictures of Howard where he looks like a thoroughgoing nerd.
2. Last night I finished watching The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) with
spatch, who had never seen it. It remains one of my favorite movies I have never really written about. I can recognize now all the ways in which Hardy Krüger's Heinrich Dorfmann is a deliberately difficult character with his cold equations and his monofocus and his stubborn arrogance that's just as dangerous as the threatened traditionalism of James Stewart's Frank Towns, but he was my favorite character from the first time I saw the movie and remains the one I gravitate toward, maybe because he's the outsider (the one German in a mixed American, British, and French cast: "That's it, then, that's why they never won—they didn't have old Heinrich!"), maybe because he's intelligent and anoraky and his people skills are so terrible that calling them ass would be an insult to the human posterior. I love that his chilly, rational, logical plan is the craziest dream of all, if only the rest of the cast knew it. Also I just like watching people build things. I would have loved The Finest Hours (2016) if it had just been the high seas and on-the-fly engineering of real life instead of a shoehorned—and invented—love angle which sticks out just as awkwardly as the hallucinated belly dancer in The Flight of the Phoenix.3. David Cairns writes in memory of Dorothy Malone and then overthinks that scene in The Big Sleep (1946).
4. So, yes, the Oscar nominees. I don't understand the prominence of Darkest Hour, which looked from all the reviews like a thoroughly traditional biopic with a lot of Churchill clichés (if you must have your WWII mythmaking, at least Dunkirk was weird), and I fully expected to see at least a costume design nod for Wonder Woman and its practical Amazons, but I can't remember the last time a genre film was nominated for Best Picture and I would be fine by which I mean delighted with either Get Out or The Shape of Water; if they split the vote, at least may Call Me by Your Name or Lady Bird take it instead of any of the more obvious fallbacks. I haven't seen enough of the nominees to say much about Best Leading/Supporting Actor/Actress, but Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out would be as unusual and welcome as the movie itself for Best Picture, I have heard nothing but praise for Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and I liked Richard Jenkins very much in The Shape of Water, but I'd have given that nomination to Michael Stuhlbarg. (I am pleased Octavia Spencer received hers.) Coco should take Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, no questions. I suspect Hoyte van Hoytema will win Best Cinematography for Dunkirk even if his shaky-cam annoyed me. Either Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, or Guillermo del Toro would please me for Best Director, even if their chances are probably sketchy against Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson, and all three of them (and Vanessa Taylor) could also clean up on the Original Screenplay front as far as I'm concerned. Paul Denham Austerberry et al. would be entirely justified in taking Best Production Design for The Shape of Water. The rest of the categories, I don't have enough information for opinions, but apparently this is a year in which I have a stake in the Oscars. I think it's because it feels like the Hugos. More years should.
5. The Strange Horizons 2018 Prize Draw is now live. Check it out!
So that's most of what I wanted to post when I got the news about Le Guin; I wrote about her instead and then I wrote about a noir I'd seen on Saturday and then I held the cats a lot. (Oh, God, I named my ancient and now somewhat precarious laptop half after one of her characters. Now I feel even more protective toward him.) I forgot until now that I dreamed of watching a nonexistent and impossible movie starring Leslie Howard at twenty-eight, at which age he looked and sounded like a dorky student. There were no sound films in 1921. Leslie Howard didn't even come to Hollywood until 1930. I would ask what the hell, brain, except I think it's as simple as my brain really appreciating all those pictures of Howard where he looks like a thoroughgoing nerd.
