![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
no subject
What did you think of Nights at the Circus?
no subject
Join the everlasting queue!
What did you think of Nights at the Circus?
I like it very much—it's a kind of second-tier favorite with Heroes and Villains or The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, depending on whether I feel like deconstructed post-apocalypse or surrealism. (There was a stage version in 2006 that I really wish I'd been on the right side of the Atlantic to see.) Her short fiction is what I most frequently re-read.
no subject
Sounds like some critic couldn't get Peeping Tom out of his skull even after seven years and, furthermore, hadn't realized that that probably meant the film was actually (at the very least) good.
no subject
I second this. And I mourn the lack of a copy of that film that I could watch.
no subject
I find it odd that it's so obscure, given the cult-popularity of The Company of Wolves (1984), for which Carter also wrote the script. Maybe because everyone knows Neil Jordan and David Wheatley, not so much?
no subject
"Dank," I'm afraid. But in general, I agree.
I am still a little burned that Ian Christie already named his critical study of Powell and Pressburger Arrows of Desire, because it is the perfect title and I so often disagree with him.
I can see some likenesses between Carter and the Archers, but not to anyone's detriment at all.
no subject
It's a good film of the book, very true to the feel of it all the way through, but the end was changed and sucked. The friends I saw it with hated it. But then they made me watch Top Gun, so it evened out.
How come Company of Wolves is a classic and this isn't? I always thought of them as being very similar, they're both slightly surreal films of Carter, too close to horror for me to really be comfortable with them.
Have you seen Brimstone and Treacle? I saw it with the same friends a little earlier and all three of those go together in my mind as disturbing and clever and twisted.
no subject
IMDb users report either seeing it on the BBC or ITV or in tiny arthouse cinemas. There seems to be some argument over whether it was originally commissioned for television and got a theatrical release or just re-ran in the usual way; I have no idea, which is another reason I'd like to get hold of The Curious Room.
It's a good film of the book, very true to the feel of it all the way through, but the end was changed and sucked.
Mrgh. I'm sorry. I still want to see the rest.
But then they made me watch Top Gun, so it evened out.
(Good God. I'm not sure anything evens out Top Gun.)
Have you seen Brimstone and Treacle?
Not the 1982 film, but the original 1976 teleplay with Michael Kitchen: I loved it. It doesn't appear to exist on Region 1 DVD, otherwise I'd own it—I watched it off YouTube a few years ago. I looked it up because of Denholm Elliott and Dreamchild, but it's one of the reasons I started watching Foyle's War.