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Stormtroopers don't know anything about lasers
So that was my second 'Thon. Also a success.
We got a late start this year, so we missed John Carter (2012) and the American version of Reptilicus (1962); we came in on the last third of The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012), which I suspect we would have enjoyed seeing from the beginning, but there was something peculiarly delightful about arriving just in time for the denouement of a '50's-style rock-and-roll musical about juvenile delinquents from outer space—shot on the very last of Kodak's black-and-white, 35mm, Plus-X film stock—and having to mentally reverse-engineer the plot if we wanted to know what the undead rock star had to do with the interstellar rumble or whether it really was a running gag that the soda jerk kept fainting. The film was very clearly a goofy labor of love, complete with low-budget landscapes and slightly out-of-synch sound; it gave Kevin McCarthy his final screen role, even if we only saw him in the credits. Les Williams has a good period face. I was not expecting Paul Williams as a rather Nabokovian talk show host. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel: "Bud Cort's really let himself go.")
Every film festival needs a big dumb action movie to MST3K and War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012) delivered on all fronts. It's a nominal sequel to Wells' novel, imagining that in the fifteen years since the initial Martian attack Earth has undergone a steampunk revolution and an international task force named A.R.E.S. now patrols the skies in giant war zeppelins and the earth in three-legged mecha-walkers, training constantly against the aliens' inevitable return. The science is the purview of Dr. Nikola Tesla, the Secretary of War is Teddy Roosevelt, the best pilot in the A.R.E.S. Air Corps is hot-blooded Manfred von Richthofen in his Heat-Ray-wielding red Fokker triplane, and any alt-historical promise inherent in this premise is undercut completely by the fact that World War I is still breaking out as the interplanetary action begins and the characterization of everyone who isn't a historical figure (which is everyone else in the movie) begins and ends with their haircut, their accent, and their nationality. No cliché is left uncommitted, no matter what knots of logic the film needs to tie itself into in order to introduce it. We would have cared a lot more about the heroic sacrifice of a major character's son, for example, if we'd known he existed for more than the five seconds before he bravely lets himself fall into the burning ruins of New York City so that his father can ram their fatally damaged zeppelin into the Martian mothership. I hope I didn't give anything away.
Asternauts (2012) is a nearly perfect short: sweet, funny, not as obvious as it looks, it doesn't condescend to its characters and evokes a genuine sense of wonder without needing to invoke science fiction. The audience may have its suspicions, but for the two brothers with the smoking crater in the back forty and the bits of ex-cow splattered all over the field where whatever it was came screaming down in a ball of fire, the results are the same whether it was a weather satellite or a close encounter: kind of WTF and kind of wonderful. "The front seat of a planet" is a line I just really like.
We had planned on burritos from Anna's again, but the dinner-slot movie was the special edition of Battle Royale (2000), so we watched Takeshi Kitano dispatch two students with throwing knife and explosive collar and then went in search of very rare burgers. I don't know why the Boston Burger Company closes at eight o'clock on a Sunday, especially on a Sunday when the wind chill is below zero. We swore a lot and slogged up the frozen bike path to Joe Sent Me, which was open like a normal restaurant.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) was not quite last year's Dimensions: a Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), but two strong time-travel films in a row is beginning to give me hope for the genre again. It pulls off the trick that Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (1998) never quite did for me: the speculative elements are all half-hinted and metaphor until all of a sudden they are unambiguous fact and it works. I expected the story to finish a scene earlier than it did. I'm very glad it didn't. The four main characters could each have fallen into different stereotypes and all of them, even the difficult ones, are real; as a person with strong feelings on the subject, I appreciated that none of the romantic leads are conventionally attractive Hollywood people. No one is a manic pixie anything. I will watch Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass in many things now.
I still really hate the "Time Enough at Last" episode of The Twilight Zone—the one with Burgess Meredith and his glasses—but I understand it's the one everybody knows. The last shot pulling away, the bewildered man among his shattered columns and neat-stacked books with a clock-face staring at his feet, is a very good surrealist image.
I had not seen The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) since my family lived in the old house on Appleton Street, meaning I could have been eleven at the most; I had vague images from it, mostly the final third where it becomes a kind of existential survival horror, first against the cat, then the basement wilderness and the spider (which is seriously just minding its own business when Scott goes all Sam Gamgee on it), then the enormity of the universe itself. Unless you count the philosophy at the end, it really doesn't pull any of its punches. No miracle cure, no reassurance of mastering the atomic age; it's not even the glittering cloud that's the horror so much as Scott's awareness of the inexorable, irreversible change it's set in motion within him. Much of it could be a movie about terminal illness, watching a partner slip away from themselves, finding ways to fight for what they are instead of what they still remember being. I recognized William Schallert as Scott's first doctor instantly and couldn't figure out why. This afternoon, I finally remembered Star Trek.
I liked everything about Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw, 2012) except the cinematography. The conceit is ghostly and worthy of Cocteau, effectively rendered in the hall of shadows that seem to breathe faintly against their canvases, death-pinned with iron nails like fetishes or butterflies; Matthias Schoenaerts as the soldier-photographer has a somber, skinned-bone face that peers through his steel-rimmed glasses and his camera's strange lenses as though reduced even farther from life now than when he was shot in a French chateau, spinning around with the last image of a girl imprinted on his dying memory like light on silver salts, a shadow on the walls of death; and I wanted some strong formal composition to tell me the story, not floating handheld shots and naturalistic views of winter-paled copses and the warm humming bronze of rotors and keys of the machine that spits out, like ciphers, the names of all the dead whose shadows our protagonist has the choice of capturing. I'm not saying it had to look like Bergman, but it was like reading a striking story in serviceable prose: I wanted to see the uncanny as well as the actions it made possible, and I couldn't feel the contrast was a choice on the filmmaker's part. The telling was just sort of there. I can't remember ever feeling this way about a film rather than fiction before. I can still see why it got an Oscar nomination.
I had not heard of Phase IV (1974) before Rob read its cast and title off the schedule a week or so ago. It doesn't even seem to be a cult hit so much as a real obscurity. There are reasons for this. They are not the clunky, homebuilt mainframe computers or the strangely quiet nature of the movie's apocalypse; they are nothing against the casting, even if the female lead is something of a nonentity (note to scriptwriters: shock is not the same thing as total erasure of personality), and I even like how little the movie explains of its science and science fiction both. It's the minutely detailed, brilliantly edited close-up photography of the ants whom the film gradually reveals as the real protagonists of the story, not the besieged humans who have not yet realized that the increasingly specific behavior they have been hired to study is not some kind of environment-impelled anomaly, but the first stages of the shift in power of a planet. This is not a movie to watch if you have even a mild insect phobia. At any given time, the screen is more than half full of ants. After about thirty seconds, you're pulling your sleeves down and trying not to touch everywhere your skin twitches.
No amount of MST3K could save Motivational Growth (2012), the film which replaced The Hands of Orlac (1924) at four in the morning. At first we thought it was a short. It did not seem to have enough organization or inspiration for anything longer. At the forty-five-minute mark, the hideous truth became clear. I couldn't persuade Rob to leave the theater entirely, because if he didn't see it end with his own eyes, he felt he might never be sure that it wasn't still playing on somewhere in a kind of horrible Shining loop, but we spent most of its runtime downstairs in the lobby commiserating with other audience members similarly driven forth or staring at the contents of the Museum of Bad Art, because at least that was bad art we'd elected to put into our brains. I'll discuss the plot if you want, but I'm pretty sure anything I could say will only make it sound more interesting than it was, at all. I really had been looking forward to Conrad Veidt.
Because we had each seen it like half a dozen times, we bailed on V for Vendetta (2005) in favor of donuts at Verna's, hot coffee for Rob and hot cocoa for me. Returned just in time for the short La Luna (2011), which Rob had been trying to show me on the internet for months, and John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. (1996), which is exactly the sort of splashy stylized videogame movie you want to stare at after being awake for slightly over twenty-four hours and that's generously including the previous night's two hours of sleep. We did not stay for The Fifth Element (1997), much as I wouldn't have minded seeing its art direction on a big screen. We went back to Rob's and spent the afternoon in various states of prone and went out for dinner in the evening, only slightly vindictively, to the Boston Burger Company. And now I am doing a lot of Nokia, because continued employment is something I really do need.
Still not a full twenty-four hours of movies. There's always next year.
We got a late start this year, so we missed John Carter (2012) and the American version of Reptilicus (1962); we came in on the last third of The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012), which I suspect we would have enjoyed seeing from the beginning, but there was something peculiarly delightful about arriving just in time for the denouement of a '50's-style rock-and-roll musical about juvenile delinquents from outer space—shot on the very last of Kodak's black-and-white, 35mm, Plus-X film stock—and having to mentally reverse-engineer the plot if we wanted to know what the undead rock star had to do with the interstellar rumble or whether it really was a running gag that the soda jerk kept fainting. The film was very clearly a goofy labor of love, complete with low-budget landscapes and slightly out-of-synch sound; it gave Kevin McCarthy his final screen role, even if we only saw him in the credits. Les Williams has a good period face. I was not expecting Paul Williams as a rather Nabokovian talk show host. (
derspatchel: "Bud Cort's really let himself go.")Every film festival needs a big dumb action movie to MST3K and War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012) delivered on all fronts. It's a nominal sequel to Wells' novel, imagining that in the fifteen years since the initial Martian attack Earth has undergone a steampunk revolution and an international task force named A.R.E.S. now patrols the skies in giant war zeppelins and the earth in three-legged mecha-walkers, training constantly against the aliens' inevitable return. The science is the purview of Dr. Nikola Tesla, the Secretary of War is Teddy Roosevelt, the best pilot in the A.R.E.S. Air Corps is hot-blooded Manfred von Richthofen in his Heat-Ray-wielding red Fokker triplane, and any alt-historical promise inherent in this premise is undercut completely by the fact that World War I is still breaking out as the interplanetary action begins and the characterization of everyone who isn't a historical figure (which is everyone else in the movie) begins and ends with their haircut, their accent, and their nationality. No cliché is left uncommitted, no matter what knots of logic the film needs to tie itself into in order to introduce it. We would have cared a lot more about the heroic sacrifice of a major character's son, for example, if we'd known he existed for more than the five seconds before he bravely lets himself fall into the burning ruins of New York City so that his father can ram their fatally damaged zeppelin into the Martian mothership. I hope I didn't give anything away.
Asternauts (2012) is a nearly perfect short: sweet, funny, not as obvious as it looks, it doesn't condescend to its characters and evokes a genuine sense of wonder without needing to invoke science fiction. The audience may have its suspicions, but for the two brothers with the smoking crater in the back forty and the bits of ex-cow splattered all over the field where whatever it was came screaming down in a ball of fire, the results are the same whether it was a weather satellite or a close encounter: kind of WTF and kind of wonderful. "The front seat of a planet" is a line I just really like.
We had planned on burritos from Anna's again, but the dinner-slot movie was the special edition of Battle Royale (2000), so we watched Takeshi Kitano dispatch two students with throwing knife and explosive collar and then went in search of very rare burgers. I don't know why the Boston Burger Company closes at eight o'clock on a Sunday, especially on a Sunday when the wind chill is below zero. We swore a lot and slogged up the frozen bike path to Joe Sent Me, which was open like a normal restaurant.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) was not quite last year's Dimensions: a Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), but two strong time-travel films in a row is beginning to give me hope for the genre again. It pulls off the trick that Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (1998) never quite did for me: the speculative elements are all half-hinted and metaphor until all of a sudden they are unambiguous fact and it works. I expected the story to finish a scene earlier than it did. I'm very glad it didn't. The four main characters could each have fallen into different stereotypes and all of them, even the difficult ones, are real; as a person with strong feelings on the subject, I appreciated that none of the romantic leads are conventionally attractive Hollywood people. No one is a manic pixie anything. I will watch Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass in many things now.
I still really hate the "Time Enough at Last" episode of The Twilight Zone—the one with Burgess Meredith and his glasses—but I understand it's the one everybody knows. The last shot pulling away, the bewildered man among his shattered columns and neat-stacked books with a clock-face staring at his feet, is a very good surrealist image.
I had not seen The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) since my family lived in the old house on Appleton Street, meaning I could have been eleven at the most; I had vague images from it, mostly the final third where it becomes a kind of existential survival horror, first against the cat, then the basement wilderness and the spider (which is seriously just minding its own business when Scott goes all Sam Gamgee on it), then the enormity of the universe itself. Unless you count the philosophy at the end, it really doesn't pull any of its punches. No miracle cure, no reassurance of mastering the atomic age; it's not even the glittering cloud that's the horror so much as Scott's awareness of the inexorable, irreversible change it's set in motion within him. Much of it could be a movie about terminal illness, watching a partner slip away from themselves, finding ways to fight for what they are instead of what they still remember being. I recognized William Schallert as Scott's first doctor instantly and couldn't figure out why. This afternoon, I finally remembered Star Trek.
I liked everything about Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw, 2012) except the cinematography. The conceit is ghostly and worthy of Cocteau, effectively rendered in the hall of shadows that seem to breathe faintly against their canvases, death-pinned with iron nails like fetishes or butterflies; Matthias Schoenaerts as the soldier-photographer has a somber, skinned-bone face that peers through his steel-rimmed glasses and his camera's strange lenses as though reduced even farther from life now than when he was shot in a French chateau, spinning around with the last image of a girl imprinted on his dying memory like light on silver salts, a shadow on the walls of death; and I wanted some strong formal composition to tell me the story, not floating handheld shots and naturalistic views of winter-paled copses and the warm humming bronze of rotors and keys of the machine that spits out, like ciphers, the names of all the dead whose shadows our protagonist has the choice of capturing. I'm not saying it had to look like Bergman, but it was like reading a striking story in serviceable prose: I wanted to see the uncanny as well as the actions it made possible, and I couldn't feel the contrast was a choice on the filmmaker's part. The telling was just sort of there. I can't remember ever feeling this way about a film rather than fiction before. I can still see why it got an Oscar nomination.
I had not heard of Phase IV (1974) before Rob read its cast and title off the schedule a week or so ago. It doesn't even seem to be a cult hit so much as a real obscurity. There are reasons for this. They are not the clunky, homebuilt mainframe computers or the strangely quiet nature of the movie's apocalypse; they are nothing against the casting, even if the female lead is something of a nonentity (note to scriptwriters: shock is not the same thing as total erasure of personality), and I even like how little the movie explains of its science and science fiction both. It's the minutely detailed, brilliantly edited close-up photography of the ants whom the film gradually reveals as the real protagonists of the story, not the besieged humans who have not yet realized that the increasingly specific behavior they have been hired to study is not some kind of environment-impelled anomaly, but the first stages of the shift in power of a planet. This is not a movie to watch if you have even a mild insect phobia. At any given time, the screen is more than half full of ants. After about thirty seconds, you're pulling your sleeves down and trying not to touch everywhere your skin twitches.
No amount of MST3K could save Motivational Growth (2012), the film which replaced The Hands of Orlac (1924) at four in the morning. At first we thought it was a short. It did not seem to have enough organization or inspiration for anything longer. At the forty-five-minute mark, the hideous truth became clear. I couldn't persuade Rob to leave the theater entirely, because if he didn't see it end with his own eyes, he felt he might never be sure that it wasn't still playing on somewhere in a kind of horrible Shining loop, but we spent most of its runtime downstairs in the lobby commiserating with other audience members similarly driven forth or staring at the contents of the Museum of Bad Art, because at least that was bad art we'd elected to put into our brains. I'll discuss the plot if you want, but I'm pretty sure anything I could say will only make it sound more interesting than it was, at all. I really had been looking forward to Conrad Veidt.
Because we had each seen it like half a dozen times, we bailed on V for Vendetta (2005) in favor of donuts at Verna's, hot coffee for Rob and hot cocoa for me. Returned just in time for the short La Luna (2011), which Rob had been trying to show me on the internet for months, and John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. (1996), which is exactly the sort of splashy stylized videogame movie you want to stare at after being awake for slightly over twenty-four hours and that's generously including the previous night's two hours of sleep. We did not stay for The Fifth Element (1997), much as I wouldn't have minded seeing its art direction on a big screen. We went back to Rob's and spent the afternoon in various states of prone and went out for dinner in the evening, only slightly vindictively, to the Boston Burger Company. And now I am doing a lot of Nokia, because continued employment is something I really do need.
Still not a full twenty-four hours of movies. There's always next year.
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Yes. I was also very struck by the scene in which the ants retrieve and lay out their dead, killed in the destruction of the solar reflectors: considered by itself, it's more evidence of their intelligence and communality, but it also chimes in contrast to the cavalier treatment of the human family who died in the same poison shower, stumbling through it for help that never came—left lying where they fell, covered in the Crayola-yellow mire they didn't even realize was killing them until it was too late. I don't know whether the ants are the "good guys" in this story, but the humans definitely aren't.
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ANd then I snuck into Prometheus and ruined my afternoon.
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I liked the movie from the start, but I agree that she's really talented. She has at least two stereotypes to avoid as Darius: she has to be a catalyst for Kenneth without slipping into manic pixie dream-whatever (still the die-in-a-fire default setting for any woman who's supposed to be out of the mainstream), but if she's just the sarcastic, disaffected millennial, then half the emotional core of the story drops out (and it goes back to being something much more familiar about the skeptical woman drawn into a wounded man's dream). Instead, we actually get the chemistry dismissed by Jeff with the line about "Don't worry, I'm sure your weird mojo clicked with his weird mojo and you got it in the bag." They're not identical species of weird, but they're closely compatible. That wouldn't work if it was just Mark Duplass and a person-shaped space in the script.
(I do really like, though, that he's not the standard movie quirky loon-or-genius, either. For starters, he's not socially inept at all.)
And then I snuck into Prometheus and ruined my afternoon.
That is completely the wrong object lesson to learn from sneaking into movies.
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Just a few screens of terrific film criticism. Thank you.
Nine
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You're welcome. I think I need to be slightly more awake before it counts as criticism rather than reportage.
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I am amazed that they didn't all just blur together by the end!
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We understood instantly why it had not achieved mainstream success!
I am amazed that they didn't all just blur together by the end!
Possibly the year we watch every single film in the 'Thon, this will happen. So far, it doesn't seem to be a problem!
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I saw that in a theater, I think it was the second movie in a double feature, and all I can remember about it was the hive mentality.
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I wasn't surprised, exactly, because I hadn't been expecting it to be bad (unlike Reptilicus, which I'm still sorry about missing), but it was much stranger and more striking than I would have thought from the thumbnail summary ants develop collective intelligence, humans lose.
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Edit:
I wanted to thank you for a good write-up! I'd like to watch Death of a Shadow. And agreed about "Time Enough At Last"; there's a misanthropy in that episode that makes me queasy.
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Rob, next to me: "Hello, Cronenberg!"
I wondered at the time whether the ants themselves were being used by an alien intelligence.
Hah. I hadn't thought of that. I think I find it a more interesting film if they're not, but I agree you can wonder from the opening scenes whether the astronomical event that triggers the development of the ants is just plain old cosmic radiation or something more extraterrestrial.
I'd like to watch Death of a Shadow.
I don't know where to find it for you online! Trailers, yes, all over the place. Maybe if it wins the Oscar, someone will pirate it.
And agreed about "Time Enough At Last"; there's a misanthropy in that episode that makes me queasy.
It's just this big broad "HA HA, IRONY" ending which doesn't say anything profound about either Henry Bemis or his society—I would have found it more thought-provoking if it ended with Meredith's glasses intact and all the books in the world there for his reading and still the slowly setting horror of absolute loneliness rather than just being left alone, which is what's beginning to drive him to suicide before he finds the library; if you want an upsetting twist ending, it's the realization that no one will ever write a new book and there will never be anyone for Bemis to read to. Instead, sorry, God and/or Rod Serling just hates you, and the man with one thing in his life to love is punished for being a nebbish with Coke-bottle glasses. I understand why it's memorable, but I'd still rather have seen an episode I didn't know.
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Never heard of them! Thank you. Sounds slightly Alan Moore-ish.
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(J,GaR came up in a community thread somewhere around Yuletide--I forget whether it was
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I would read anything called "Jupiter, Gentian and Rosemary."
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Tam Lin has some of the same problem for me, honestly: a mostly naturalistic story with eddies of the unheimlich that might link up or might only be the lines people draw to make a pattern of coincidence that suddenly slingshots into the full-blown fantastic in the last chapter. I understand the virtues of a slow build, and some of my favorite novels take the same half-seen, shifting-focus approach to their fantasy or science fiction, but this one builds too slowly for me and introduces too much at the last second. The difference is that it doesn't work for me at all in Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, while I can find things to re-read for in Tam Lin. I keep thinking it might have worked fine as a short story or a novella, where the tightness of the structure could have made the ballad more evident from the beginning, or at least more plausible when it suddenly surfaced and turned out to be the text. As a novel, I can't figure out to fix it, but no one I know thinks it works as it stands.
I was wondering afterward why Safety Not Guaranteed didn't give me whiplash with its final scene, when it was exactly the kind of full daylight reveal that in most movies I feel is saying too much. (I loved Dimensions more than any other genre film I saw last year, but I'd still have excised two lines from its last scene because the audience can guess them already; it is unnecessary to have the information stated, especially by the characters who do so.) Partly I think it's because the story that leads up to it, although it opens with the question of whether a personal ad for a fellow time traveler is real or a prank or delusion, doesn't really depend on the resolution of this ambiguity. Everyone in the movie is concerned with time already, especially the lost kind. It's resonant when it's subtext, working within a larger framework of obsessions and regrets; it's just that much more powerful when turns out to be more. And it's nice to see a homebuilt time machine realized onscreen, especially when it looks both plausibly cobbled and as otherworldly as anything out of another person's mind. But there's also the fact that if the film had kept its distance in those last few minutes, I really think it would have been playing it safe—if the characters have the courage to fling themselves at something absolutely crazy, hand tight in hand as the world flares white around them, then their story needs to be as fearless, even if it runs the risk of alienating viewers like me in most modes. It paid off. I wasn't alienated. It was pretty awesome.
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I'm very grateful for that, because, though I have never seen it, I believe you. And if it did keep right on going, who knows what damage it might cause?
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I wouldn't have put it past that movie. There was already way too much of it by the time we fled.
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I was supposed to tell you about The Restless/Demon Empire/Joong-cheon</> some time ago but it got lengthy so I stuck it over on my own journal (http://fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com/268522.html) and then I think I forgot to let you know.
I have a powerful urge to watch it again, for whatever that's worth.
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Almost anything would have been better!
so I stuck it over on my own journal and then I think I forgot to let you know.
I am unfamiliar with most wuxia, although the examples I've run into I've mostly really liked. This one sounds very neat. Thank you!
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Literalizing that, have you seen Jade Warrior (2006)?
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That is a very good thing.
Phase IV sounds marvelous, but I fear the screen crawling with ants would be hard for me to bear. I prefer my movie-ants being clobbered by flame throwers in Them!.
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It's just a trope I can't stand, and I disagree with great violence with the critics who try to claim it's just a modern extension of the screwball comedy. Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938) is a force for chaos, not a cute, quirky free spirit. I have never yet seen an entire Brontosaurus skeleton destroyed like the Titanic in a contemporary indie rom-com and if I do I'll be really skeptical about it.
I prefer my movie-ants being clobbered by flame throwers in Them!.
The Post-Meridian Radio Players are doing an adaptation of Them! in April. If there is the slightest chance you'll be in the Boston area, come and hear! If not, there will be recordings!
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The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012)
This sounds marvellously silly. I hope I can get a chance to see it sometime.
It's a nominal sequel to Wells' novel, imagining that in the fifteen years since the initial Martian attack Earth has undergone a steampunk revolution...
It's always a pity when something with so much potential to at least be fun ends up as a giant mess suitable only as MST3K fodder.
This is not a movie to watch if you have even a mild insect phobia.
I'll have to avoid it, then, but it does sound fascinating. I'm glad to have read your description.
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Oh, it was fun. Just not for the reasons I assume the filmmakers were aiming for.
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Your penultimate line: ... and went out for dinner in the evening, only slightly vindictively, to the Boston Burger Company ---Honestly, the people who get to associate with you in the flesh a little more frequently than I do (seeing as your and my interactions are pretty much limited to smiling hellos in passing at Readercon once a year) are so lucky!
But to the films: the notion of reverse-engineering the plot of that first one made me smile, and I felt so disappointed about the second: I would have liked it to be all about the handsome Red Baron. ("No cliché is left uncommitted, no matter what knots of logic the film needs to tie itself into in order to introduce it." --Haha: OUCH. But you make the awful sound funny.)
Your write-up of Dimensions: a Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads is intriguing; I'll see if I can get it on interlibrary loan maybe.
I couldn't persuade Rob to leave the theater entirely, because if he didn't see it end with his own eyes, he felt he might never be sure that it wasn't still playing on somewhere in a kind of horrible Shining loop, .... Hmmm, that sounds like Rob was pulling a Digory-in-the-hall-of-the-wax-figures move on you, but, well, okay: at least you didn't have to **see** the film.
What's La Luna like? (I know asking a question like that in the age of Google is the height of lazy. It signifies: "tell me a story; I am too lazy to read one for myself.")
Thanks again for sharing the marathon.
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Hah. Thank you. I like sharing things I like. I realize that's the rationale for almost all of the internet (the remainder is sharing things you hate), but I'm glad it works for other people as well as me.
and I felt so disappointed about the second: I would have liked it to be all about the handsome Red Baron.
He was a supporting character! The hero is the traditionally haunted, self-doubting Eric Wells, who as a child in the first invasion froze in the street under a Martian tripod's boiling green glare and saw his parents die before his eyes, saving him—naturally he thinks of himself as a coward and the rest of the characters keep reminding him that he was ten. Every time his surname was mentioned,
If you want a crazy piece of anime with brilliantly tweaked historical figures all in the same plotline, fortunately we have the Read or Die OVA. A pair of friends showed it to me years ago and I am still occasionally seized with the impulse to run through rooms shouting, "I AM OTTO LILIENTHAL!"
. . . It'll make sense in context.
But you make the awful sound funny.
It's the schadenfreude that does it!
Your write-up of Dimensions: a Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads is intriguing; I'll see if I can get it on interlibrary loan maybe.
It's seriously the best time-travel film I've seen since Primer (2004). Safety Not Guaranteed is in many ways a completely different genre's take on the idea of recovering lost time, but the results in both cases are things I really like.
What's La Luna like?
Very gentle, almost like something by Tomie dePaola. It's not silent, but it's not in real language either: the boy's father and grandfather argue constantly in Italian-sounding Peanuts-adult mutternoise, disputing everything—which angle their boy should wear his new cap at, which tool he should use to get the night's work done—the family business is sweeping fallen stars from the surface of the moon so that it glows through all its phases, starting full and finishing crescent, reflecting in the rippling sea. The stars make wonderful dry little musical clinks when swept together, not quite pottery, not quite glass. The boy is wise enough to know that however his family tells him to do things doesn't have to be the only way.
Thanks again for sharing the marathon.
You are very welcome.
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Re: Read or Die, the ninja girl, who has just walked into the room, said she saw a dubbed version once. Did you see a dubbed or subbed version?
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If you can find it online, I think you would like it a lot.
Did you see a dubbed or subbed version?
Subtitled! I try to avoid dubs unless I've been especially recommended them for some other reason, like the voice actors or really interesting translation.
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And she said she saw La Luna, too (everybody's seen everything--except me), and concurs that it's beautiful. I should be able to find it online...
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The left to right flipping is to avoid copyright robots looking to pattern match on pixels.
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I know you like my descriptions, and I am very glad you do, but I am also very glad you could see—and hear—this one for yourself.