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Numbers are as close as we can get to the handwriting of God
Thank you to everyone who commented last night for Abbie—if you sent wishes, thoughts, love, or just the recognition of reading, thank you. Rob has an update on the situation here. The short version is that we are to consider the cat on hospice care. The salient fact is that there is still a cat. We were very surprised: we did not expect him to live until morning, and then we did not expect the veterinarian's house call to end in anything other than the difficult decision Rob had spent the night accepting he would have to make. Instead, there's a cat under Rob's bed as I write—it's one of his traditional hangouts on hot days or nights. He is still not really eating, except for a little licking of tuna liquid, but he has been seen to drink water, wander around the downstairs in an aimless, jingling fashion, and when we got home from a 2-D showing of Pacific Rim (2013) tonight, Abbie was in the dining room, being made much of by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ratatosk and laura47. We are waiting on some test results from the veterinary hospital where he spent an overnight this weekend and then we will see what comes next. For the time being, however, a cat is here.
The thing to understand about Pacific Rim is that I cannot write a comprehensive review of it tonight. I want to write a post just enthusing about all the major or minor details, the realization of the world in in its casual scruffy lived-in-ness and the way it begins where a stupider movie would have tried to throw a late-act twist, the coherently staged fight scenes that are of genuinely epic, elemental scale. The kaiju do not move like weightless computer modeling; they shoulder up out of the sea, snap bridges like wires, grind skyscrapers to ash-glass with the awful immensity of volcanic eruptions or tsunami, things that overwhelm. There is something a little frightening about the Jägers, too, with their nuclear chest-cores and huge sliding hydraulics: I got little flashes every now and then of the God Warriors from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The film never loses track, though, of the fragile human bodies being slammed all ways within the blind metal armor as they animate it, or the even greater vulnerability of the three-way neural link that allows two pilots to bear the strain of controlling a Jäger where a solo operator would start to bleed from the brain (even if I would have liked the script to take a little more time over what the Drift actually entails and the implications of its slightly Cronenbergian form of telepathy. There is a casual, haunting mention of a dead pilot's memories remaining within the mind of his surviving partner, because they were in the Drift together when he died: there's an entire story in there that is not quite this film). The character backstories have been pared down to the strictly functional, but the worldbuilding is sprawling and meticulous. The genre shout-outs are so numerous and so affectionate that I'm almost waiting for the drinking game. The World War II echoes are almost more intriguing to me: there is nose art on the Jägers, ration cards and work projects, Burn Gorman's kaiju-predicting mathematician is nearly a cartoon of a Bletchley eccentric right down to the tweeds and sweater vest. I did not expect to see a perfect realization of St. Michael and the dragon iconography in a grappling-tailed monster and a giant robot. (I did not expect to see, either, the closest I ever will to the Sea's Tooth of Deep Wizardry (1985) where the Lone Power lies burning in a basalt-stacked canyon at the bottom of the sea, the water bursting into sullen blue flame all along its lava-black and deadly length. I do not believe this is an allusion Guillermo del Toro intended, whereas I'm pretty sure about the other, but it was still an amazing thing to find on my screen.) There are splashy horror-comic setpieces and moments of unexpected understatement. Ron Perlman plays a Tom Waits role. And it's a movie that knows exactly which clichés it wants to honor unashamedly and which ones it wants to subvert or entirely ignore, meaning Rob and I applauded our way through a number of scenes. It's not a romance, for example. Except for the alien monsters rising from the deep, it's not a movie with villains, either. The recurring motif is the sharing of memories, the bridging of minds. Rob noted afterward, approvingly, "Nobody gets betrayed."
We went to the movie in the first place because Abbie was stable and we needed to do something completely different. Pacific Rim was exactly the correct thing to do. About a minute in, I started grinning. I don't think I stopped until the house lights came up. It is dedicated to the right people.
I am going to bed.
ratatosk and laura47. We are waiting on some test results from the veterinary hospital where he spent an overnight this weekend and then we will see what comes next. For the time being, however, a cat is here.The thing to understand about Pacific Rim is that I cannot write a comprehensive review of it tonight. I want to write a post just enthusing about all the major or minor details, the realization of the world in in its casual scruffy lived-in-ness and the way it begins where a stupider movie would have tried to throw a late-act twist, the coherently staged fight scenes that are of genuinely epic, elemental scale. The kaiju do not move like weightless computer modeling; they shoulder up out of the sea, snap bridges like wires, grind skyscrapers to ash-glass with the awful immensity of volcanic eruptions or tsunami, things that overwhelm. There is something a little frightening about the Jägers, too, with their nuclear chest-cores and huge sliding hydraulics: I got little flashes every now and then of the God Warriors from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The film never loses track, though, of the fragile human bodies being slammed all ways within the blind metal armor as they animate it, or the even greater vulnerability of the three-way neural link that allows two pilots to bear the strain of controlling a Jäger where a solo operator would start to bleed from the brain (even if I would have liked the script to take a little more time over what the Drift actually entails and the implications of its slightly Cronenbergian form of telepathy. There is a casual, haunting mention of a dead pilot's memories remaining within the mind of his surviving partner, because they were in the Drift together when he died: there's an entire story in there that is not quite this film). The character backstories have been pared down to the strictly functional, but the worldbuilding is sprawling and meticulous. The genre shout-outs are so numerous and so affectionate that I'm almost waiting for the drinking game. The World War II echoes are almost more intriguing to me: there is nose art on the Jägers, ration cards and work projects, Burn Gorman's kaiju-predicting mathematician is nearly a cartoon of a Bletchley eccentric right down to the tweeds and sweater vest. I did not expect to see a perfect realization of St. Michael and the dragon iconography in a grappling-tailed monster and a giant robot. (I did not expect to see, either, the closest I ever will to the Sea's Tooth of Deep Wizardry (1985) where the Lone Power lies burning in a basalt-stacked canyon at the bottom of the sea, the water bursting into sullen blue flame all along its lava-black and deadly length. I do not believe this is an allusion Guillermo del Toro intended, whereas I'm pretty sure about the other, but it was still an amazing thing to find on my screen.) There are splashy horror-comic setpieces and moments of unexpected understatement. Ron Perlman plays a Tom Waits role. And it's a movie that knows exactly which clichés it wants to honor unashamedly and which ones it wants to subvert or entirely ignore, meaning Rob and I applauded our way through a number of scenes. It's not a romance, for example. Except for the alien monsters rising from the deep, it's not a movie with villains, either. The recurring motif is the sharing of memories, the bridging of minds. Rob noted afterward, approvingly, "Nobody gets betrayed."
We went to the movie in the first place because Abbie was stable and we needed to do something completely different. Pacific Rim was exactly the correct thing to do. About a minute in, I started grinning. I don't think I stopped until the house lights came up. It is dedicated to the right people.
I am going to bed.
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I'm glad!
To your earlier comment—
"Nobody gets betrayed" is very important to me--very very. I can't tell you how much I hate the almost tossed-in (because for some reason it has to be there?) Hollywood betrayal.
Nobody in Pacific Rim is a weasel. Nobody is a blowhard. The government isn't evil, it's frightened and overwhelmed—the Wall of Life won't save anyone, but these days the Jäger program isn't, either. It's one of the tropes of a war movie, a motley gang pulled together against the odds, but there's so little of the expected conflict in this one, it's actually refreshing. The protagonist wants the co-protagonist as his partner. There's a cocky, antagonistic kid, but he's explicitly identified as not a villain. When the scientists come piling breathlessly in through the door with last-minute information, they're not shut out or shouted down or any of the expected bullheaded forms of military blindness, they're listened to. It doesn't make the movie boring. It was great.
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What you saw as a St. Michael thing, Waka saw as a shoutout to Japanese legend, when one of the Minamotos is lifted into the air by a demon and slices him through the middle with a sword, and Little Springtime and the ninja girl said it was a complete shoutout to Evangelion: "When firepower fails, they use the progressive knife," LS is telling me.
I have some thoughts about single combat and land clearance that I'll stick up on my blog.
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That's awesome. Let's hear it for multivalent signifiers.
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Watanabe no Tsuna. Waka notes that not all versions of the story have the demon actually flying off with him, but lots of them do, he says.
I don't care; that's still really cool.
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I was so charmed that Hermann got his own poster.
As I wrote to
I loved the mid-credits scene. And the dedication at the very end of the film.
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(And those blackboards. I love that he goes from madly scribbling on blackboards to working with a 3D holographic model)
--I missed the dedication at the end--who was it to?
Just got back from LimeRed btw. YOU AND ROB MUST COME HERE OK?
Okay, off to jail now. I love saying that.
but before I go, one last thing
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Ray Harryhausen and Ishiro Honda, creators of some of the greatest monsters on the screen. Harryhausen was a master of stop-motion. Honda directed the original Gojira (1954).
Just got back from LimeRed btw. YOU AND ROB MUST COME HERE OK?
We'd love to! What's LimeRed?
Tell me about Cronenbergian telepathy?
I just thought of Cronenberg because it's artificial telepathy—mechanically assisted—and because of the potential for body horror, which the film occasionally alludes to: the drivesuit's spinal interface with its slightly insect-legged, clicking contact points, the brain-destroying properties of the Drift, the way that the damage to a Jäger is felt as pain by its pilot.
One thing me and the ninja girl were musing on was how much you gain of the other person's memories in drift, and how much you retain upon waking.
I thought the movie implied quite a lot: there's a repeated refrain of pilots acknowledging the things they don't have to say to each other (although sometimes it is important to say them nonetheless) because they've already felt them in each other's minds. We see this with Raleigh and his brother, with the father-and-son Hansens, with Raleigh's experience of Mako's memories of the destruction of Tokyo. Rob pointed out that right after Newt and Hermann come out of the Drift, they're finishing each other's sentences and speaking in unison. There are ways in which the Drift is still the great missed opportunity of the film for me, though—I really expected it to make more of the fact that Raleigh and his brother were in each other's heads when Yancy died. They never got the chance to unplug from either Gipsy Danger or each other. Raleigh tells Mako she might still feel some of his brother's memories in there. Having fragments of a dead man you loved always in your head is an incredibly evocative image of trauma. If we were going to get that one stunning memory of Mako's, I would love to have seen a similar ghostscape for Raleigh.
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Ditto.
I really loved what being in drift did for Newt and Hermann--if I think about it too hard, I'm likely to get all teary-eyed.
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Here; I like this one because you don't even have to read it slashily. They need the sleep either way.
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I am also very fond of Hermann's default expression of wary skepticism.
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