The commuter train stalled between Back Bay and South Station and the Red Line stalled between Porter and Davis Square and the earliest bus was the one that requires walking the blocks down from Highland instead of just around the corner of my street, but I was greeted by my own cats as soon as I came up the stairs and I did not even have to think about dinner because ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch had left me a pot of tortellini with sausage and tomato sauce. I changed out of my clothes because Hestia hissed at the smell of them. I knew she disliked hospitals, but I had no idea she had feelings about storage units.
I wanted something to stare at while eating tortellini, so I rewatched Paramount's Island of Lost Souls (1932). I have a hard time thinking critically about it as a version of the Wells novel because it's such an id-blast of a movie; it takes the main points of The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and pushes every button it can find in them—miscegenation! cannibalism! bestiality! vivisection! colonialism! eugenics! Charles Laughton flirting with everyone!—but the cumulative effect is nastily weird rather than preposterously overheated and it does something unusual and effective with the villain's sidekick: Arthur Hohl underplays him. I acknowledge this may be the sole rational course of action when Charles Laughton is delicately chewing all the scenery within reach, but since the character of Montgomery is a drunken ex-doctor bound by sunk costs and self-loathing to Laughton's Moreau after some vague but prison-worthy "professional indiscretion," he could easily have been a broad type and instead he's just this gaunt, hangdog man with unflatteringly slicked-back hair, a slightly sneering and slightly sad Renfield whose heel face turn in the third act is believable, just as it's believable that it takes the horrified reactions of outsiders to galvanize him to rebel. Kathleen Burke's Panther Woman is naive and exotic but not very feline until she drops out of a tree onto an enemy and claws his throat out. Richard Arlen and Leila Hyams, neither of them a nonentity, are just outgonzo'd by the rest of their movie. I forget every time that Laughton's goatee is its own tonsorial horror, like a chinstrap beard got a French wax.
As soon as I had finished feeding him and his sister, Autolycus climbed into my arms and made sure that even in a familiar bathrobe I did not smell like strange cat. My shoulders objected slightly, but I held him while he purred thunderously into my collarbone. It was very soothing. Then he tried to groom my hand and got confused and groomed one of his feet instead. He watched about half of the movie with me. I told him he was a perfect creation exactly as he was, pantherine.
I have a song about not sleeping stuck in my head. I am about to attempt to not take its advice.
spatch had left me a pot of tortellini with sausage and tomato sauce. I changed out of my clothes because Hestia hissed at the smell of them. I knew she disliked hospitals, but I had no idea she had feelings about storage units.I wanted something to stare at while eating tortellini, so I rewatched Paramount's Island of Lost Souls (1932). I have a hard time thinking critically about it as a version of the Wells novel because it's such an id-blast of a movie; it takes the main points of The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and pushes every button it can find in them—miscegenation! cannibalism! bestiality! vivisection! colonialism! eugenics! Charles Laughton flirting with everyone!—but the cumulative effect is nastily weird rather than preposterously overheated and it does something unusual and effective with the villain's sidekick: Arthur Hohl underplays him. I acknowledge this may be the sole rational course of action when Charles Laughton is delicately chewing all the scenery within reach, but since the character of Montgomery is a drunken ex-doctor bound by sunk costs and self-loathing to Laughton's Moreau after some vague but prison-worthy "professional indiscretion," he could easily have been a broad type and instead he's just this gaunt, hangdog man with unflatteringly slicked-back hair, a slightly sneering and slightly sad Renfield whose heel face turn in the third act is believable, just as it's believable that it takes the horrified reactions of outsiders to galvanize him to rebel. Kathleen Burke's Panther Woman is naive and exotic but not very feline until she drops out of a tree onto an enemy and claws his throat out. Richard Arlen and Leila Hyams, neither of them a nonentity, are just outgonzo'd by the rest of their movie. I forget every time that Laughton's goatee is its own tonsorial horror, like a chinstrap beard got a French wax.
As soon as I had finished feeding him and his sister, Autolycus climbed into my arms and made sure that even in a familiar bathrobe I did not smell like strange cat. My shoulders objected slightly, but I held him while he purred thunderously into my collarbone. It was very soothing. Then he tried to groom my hand and got confused and groomed one of his feet instead. He watched about half of the movie with me. I told him he was a perfect creation exactly as he was, pantherine.
I have a song about not sleeping stuck in my head. I am about to attempt to not take its advice.
