I was supposed to meet my parents this afternoon for the traditional selection of our deliberately secular Christmas tree. I was in bed. I hurt so much, I couldn't fall asleep until well after sunrise even with the hot-water bottle of a softly purring Autolycus curled up between my shoulderblades. What the hell do I have? I got my flu shot in September. Have some links.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
umadoshi: "What Everyone Having Diarrhea on the Set of The Magnificent Seven Tells Us About Toxic Masculinity." The goofily provocative title is not just clickbait; the author actually makes it foundational to her project of appreciating Robert Vaughn's Lee in context of his co-stars' famous dick-measuring during the shoot. I like the movie better than she does (and I suspect I'd like it even better if I hadn't seen it for the first time directly after seeing Seven Samurai (1954) for the first time, but that's history) and I can't help but feel her analysis shows a regrettable absence of Charles Bronson, but she's spot-on about Vaughn. I imprinted on him with The Magnificent Seven. When he died in 2016, it's the movie I watched for his memory. I could have sworn I'd written about him, but it doesn't seem to have happened. He's so young, and so peculiarly beautiful, and so afraid.
It's not that he doesn't live up to the impressive dash of buildup that the other characters provide before his big reveal. He's not a disappointment. He's just . . . slightly odd. His accent is unexpected and unplaceable. His dress and mannerisms just a touch dandyish. His stare is more sad than steely.
Watching that unravel is bleakly beautiful. Whether it's his drunken, scenery nibbling breakdown amidst the shaken bar staff or his quaking but determined redemption in death, Vaughn is compelling in a way that his co-stars simply aren't. He's compelling in a way that the limitations of their characters don't allow for. I'd go so far as to argue that he's compelling in a way that some of their off-screen concerns didn't allow them to even consider, either.
2.Courtesy ofmoon_custafer: "A Professional Safecracker Reveals His Craft."
There are a lot of safecrackers, I learned, but the good ones, like Santore, live in a state of magical realism, suspended somewhere between technology and superstition. The safecracker sees what everyone else has been hiding—the stashed cash and jewels, the embarrassing photographs. He is a kind of human X-ray revealing the true, naked secrets of a city.
Weegee, eat your heart out.
3. I am stunned that Anthony Lane does not hate the new Mary Poppins, but he really doesn't: "'Mary Poppins Returns'—With a Spoonful Less Sugar."
In short, those of us who pursue Mariolatry—the worship of all things Poppins—are free to delight in this film. Indeed, it shifts a little nearer than its predecessor did to the spiky, peppery briskness of Travers's tales, and the whole enterprise exhales, as it should, an air of the politely mad.
I had no idea he felt that way about the books, either. That's appealing.
4. I wanted to rewatch Defiance (2008), which I remembered being on Netflix. It is no longer on Netflix. Netflix instead suggested that I might want to watch Schindler's List (1993). I did not want to. I keep feeling I should. It's having an anniversary. I should have an opinion. It was not my first Holocaust narrative, because I had access to Jane Yolen and also I accidentally read my grandparents' copy of Maus (1991) when I was about ten, but I believe it to have been my first Holocaust film. It was screened by my high school for our entire tenth grade class, in the science auditorium because that was the one with the projector; it was an all-morning affair, like an assembly; everyone stumbled out shell-shocked into the sunlight at lunch period and sat around the quad processing. I had stopped being capable of rational thought around the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto, not because of that wandering touch of innocent child-red among all the black-and-white atrocities, but because the song playing over the atrocities is "Oyfn Pripetshik," which was sung to me as a lullaby by my mother, who does not speak Yiddish but passed on the sounds so faithfully that I can distinguish how the lyrics changed in her family's version. People talk about Spielberg as a puller of heartstrings, but that went for the hindbrain. In some ways my strongest memory of Schindler's List is not the film itself, but trying to explain to friends afterward why the scene had had such a visceral effect on me, since the song had meant nothing to any of them beyond more Jewish music on the soundtrack. I would have a much better armory these days for evaluating the film as a film, but I don't want to do that scene to myself again. Nothing else in the movie was as bad.
5. I have a little trouble not associating them with The Terror (2018), but I love these photographs of Nick Bondarev's Greenland.
1. Courtesy of
umadoshi: "What Everyone Having Diarrhea on the Set of The Magnificent Seven Tells Us About Toxic Masculinity." The goofily provocative title is not just clickbait; the author actually makes it foundational to her project of appreciating Robert Vaughn's Lee in context of his co-stars' famous dick-measuring during the shoot. I like the movie better than she does (and I suspect I'd like it even better if I hadn't seen it for the first time directly after seeing Seven Samurai (1954) for the first time, but that's history) and I can't help but feel her analysis shows a regrettable absence of Charles Bronson, but she's spot-on about Vaughn. I imprinted on him with The Magnificent Seven. When he died in 2016, it's the movie I watched for his memory. I could have sworn I'd written about him, but it doesn't seem to have happened. He's so young, and so peculiarly beautiful, and so afraid.It's not that he doesn't live up to the impressive dash of buildup that the other characters provide before his big reveal. He's not a disappointment. He's just . . . slightly odd. His accent is unexpected and unplaceable. His dress and mannerisms just a touch dandyish. His stare is more sad than steely.
Watching that unravel is bleakly beautiful. Whether it's his drunken, scenery nibbling breakdown amidst the shaken bar staff or his quaking but determined redemption in death, Vaughn is compelling in a way that his co-stars simply aren't. He's compelling in a way that the limitations of their characters don't allow for. I'd go so far as to argue that he's compelling in a way that some of their off-screen concerns didn't allow them to even consider, either.
2.Courtesy of
moon_custafer: "A Professional Safecracker Reveals His Craft."There are a lot of safecrackers, I learned, but the good ones, like Santore, live in a state of magical realism, suspended somewhere between technology and superstition. The safecracker sees what everyone else has been hiding—the stashed cash and jewels, the embarrassing photographs. He is a kind of human X-ray revealing the true, naked secrets of a city.
Weegee, eat your heart out.
3. I am stunned that Anthony Lane does not hate the new Mary Poppins, but he really doesn't: "'Mary Poppins Returns'—With a Spoonful Less Sugar."
In short, those of us who pursue Mariolatry—the worship of all things Poppins—are free to delight in this film. Indeed, it shifts a little nearer than its predecessor did to the spiky, peppery briskness of Travers's tales, and the whole enterprise exhales, as it should, an air of the politely mad.
I had no idea he felt that way about the books, either. That's appealing.
4. I wanted to rewatch Defiance (2008), which I remembered being on Netflix. It is no longer on Netflix. Netflix instead suggested that I might want to watch Schindler's List (1993). I did not want to. I keep feeling I should. It's having an anniversary. I should have an opinion. It was not my first Holocaust narrative, because I had access to Jane Yolen and also I accidentally read my grandparents' copy of Maus (1991) when I was about ten, but I believe it to have been my first Holocaust film. It was screened by my high school for our entire tenth grade class, in the science auditorium because that was the one with the projector; it was an all-morning affair, like an assembly; everyone stumbled out shell-shocked into the sunlight at lunch period and sat around the quad processing. I had stopped being capable of rational thought around the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto, not because of that wandering touch of innocent child-red among all the black-and-white atrocities, but because the song playing over the atrocities is "Oyfn Pripetshik," which was sung to me as a lullaby by my mother, who does not speak Yiddish but passed on the sounds so faithfully that I can distinguish how the lyrics changed in her family's version. People talk about Spielberg as a puller of heartstrings, but that went for the hindbrain. In some ways my strongest memory of Schindler's List is not the film itself, but trying to explain to friends afterward why the scene had had such a visceral effect on me, since the song had meant nothing to any of them beyond more Jewish music on the soundtrack. I would have a much better armory these days for evaluating the film as a film, but I don't want to do that scene to myself again. Nothing else in the movie was as bad.
5. I have a little trouble not associating them with The Terror (2018), but I love these photographs of Nick Bondarev's Greenland.
