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I never get arrested, you know
This has already been a week!
On Monday, people were useful to me on the internet. Thank you for that.
On Tuesday, I exchanged a lot of links with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
strange_selkie about Bletchley and the SOE and continued the theme later that evening by meeting derspatchel for dinner and watching The Red Machine (2009), which at that point I had been trying and failing to catch at various festivals for two years. The DVD was my birthday present from my brother. Very happily, it turned out to be worth the wait. It is a beautiful little crime-and-cryptographer caper with a cast full of character faces and no budget to speak of and not a wasted shot in its eighty-four minutes, some of them very classically composed, too; it has the resourcefulness of a Golden Age B-picture, but it takes full advantage of the atmospherics of color film. It doesn't overplay its period slang, either Navy or underworld. (It does know its way around the Denver Post.) No one in the story is inscrutable, although Lee Perkins' Lieutenant F. Ellis Coburn is giving it his best brass-bound try. And if it is not a historical account of the breaking of the Japanese "Red" cipher machine in 1935, it wins major points with me for including Agnes Driscoll and making her pretty much as awesome as she actually was. We are now very invested in tracking down a copy of their newsreel short, Gandhi at the Bat (2006). And waiting to see what they do next.
On Wednesday, Rob and I met up withhermitgeecko, cirne, juldea, and the twenty thousand other people at TD Garden to see Rush's Clockwork Angels tour. I had correctly guessed the steampunk in advance, but I should probably have been expecting the pyrotechnics. There was a string section. There were very impressive things done with drums. Except for the fact that one of the people behind us spilled their terrible cheap beer all over my hat and gloves just as we were leaving (I am taking them to the dry cleaners tomorrow), I had a really wonderful time. Of the new material, I gravitated to "The Wreckers" above anything else, but that should not be very surprising. The video was like animated Wondermark.
And tonight I had a rehearsal for Sunday's concert and Selkie has found me a Wittgensteinian brewery and tomorrow night there will be pumpkin-carving, which I enjoy. In the meantime, I am recharging and (as of the last five minutes) working on not beating myself up about missing out on tickets for the Peabody Museum's Día de los Muertos. At least that night there will be new Gravity Falls?
On Monday, people were useful to me on the internet. Thank you for that.
On Tuesday, I exchanged a lot of links with
strange_selkie about Bletchley and the SOE and continued the theme later that evening by meeting derspatchel for dinner and watching The Red Machine (2009), which at that point I had been trying and failing to catch at various festivals for two years. The DVD was my birthday present from my brother. Very happily, it turned out to be worth the wait. It is a beautiful little crime-and-cryptographer caper with a cast full of character faces and no budget to speak of and not a wasted shot in its eighty-four minutes, some of them very classically composed, too; it has the resourcefulness of a Golden Age B-picture, but it takes full advantage of the atmospherics of color film. It doesn't overplay its period slang, either Navy or underworld. (It does know its way around the Denver Post.) No one in the story is inscrutable, although Lee Perkins' Lieutenant F. Ellis Coburn is giving it his best brass-bound try. And if it is not a historical account of the breaking of the Japanese "Red" cipher machine in 1935, it wins major points with me for including Agnes Driscoll and making her pretty much as awesome as she actually was. We are now very invested in tracking down a copy of their newsreel short, Gandhi at the Bat (2006). And waiting to see what they do next.On Wednesday, Rob and I met up with
hermitgeecko, cirne, juldea, and the twenty thousand other people at TD Garden to see Rush's Clockwork Angels tour. I had correctly guessed the steampunk in advance, but I should probably have been expecting the pyrotechnics. There was a string section. There were very impressive things done with drums. Except for the fact that one of the people behind us spilled their terrible cheap beer all over my hat and gloves just as we were leaving (I am taking them to the dry cleaners tomorrow), I had a really wonderful time. Of the new material, I gravitated to "The Wreckers" above anything else, but that should not be very surprising. The video was like animated Wondermark.And tonight I had a rehearsal for Sunday's concert and Selkie has found me a Wittgensteinian brewery and tomorrow night there will be pumpkin-carving, which I enjoy. In the meantime, I am recharging and (as of the last five minutes) working on not beating myself up about missing out on tickets for the Peabody Museum's Día de los Muertos. At least that night there will be new Gravity Falls?
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Thank you!
Nine
no subject
First and foremost, it's as fun as a caper movie ought to be: and then it's intelligent, it's period-perfect, it has a great pair of leads and wonderful character turns (Maureen Byrnes as Snyder the fixer) and observing the technical clevernesses (exterior shots matted from old photographs and new footage, the fact that apparently they embedded Morse messages in the sound design) just adds to the enjoyment and none of it is being done for post-ironic hipster points. It's not about winking at the past. A stonefaced Navy officer with secrets and a skeptical, smartmouthed thief are a pair of archetypes to conjure with, but that doesn't make them cartoons. So it's the same telephone exchange in two different locations. And a stage is always the same floorboards. What's your point?
(There's one scene at a zoo. There's no way they filmed it at a zoo. The liner notes to the DVD even say where all twenty-seven days of the shoot took place, and a zoo is not among them. But one of the characters has a bag of peanuts (of which he's eating as many as he pops through the bars) and an elephant is trumpeting somewhere and you know, it's a zoo. I like when that happens.)
And I just watched the trailer for Gandhi at the Bat and fell over.
You see why we must find it!