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A lot of people are saying that about the Bible these days
1. So, yes. The apartment went through. We are very happy.
I still have to move everything out of my present location by the 31st, because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adrian_turtle's new housemate takes possession in September. Packing is mostly not the issue; transportation is. I have no car and my back is still badly messed up from the cube shelving incident in May. ratatosk and rushthatspeaks are coming early next week, but anyone else local who wants to help shlep stuff to derspatchel's for food should please let me know. My goal is to be done with everything but the essentials—bed, laptop, meds—by the 30th, so that a week from today I can get up, wrangle a futon mattress into or onto a car, and then spend the night at the HFA's all-night noir marathon. I think it's a good incentive.
2. I dreamed I was taking part in a foretelling ritual called the Midnight Angel: a voice speaks three times at midnight, one time male, one time female, one time neither, telling who will fall in love in the coming year, who will die, who will travel or be changed. Each voice only recites a list of names. There is some paraphernalia with dried flowers and fresh water poured into a mirror on the ground. Only I was taking part in the pre-Victorian version, which was a lot less like British guising than Mongolian shamanism, dressed in bright robes and ribbons, veiled with knots, ridden by something that was not an angel and while it was in me, I was something else. I remember sitting upstairs in a small, paneled room with diamond-paned windows, slightly overheated, waiting. Then I remember speaking to people in the third voice, the genderless one of journey and transformation, and walking around the university grounds and the fern-filled glasshouse and a shop that sold rose and lotus cookies ordinarily, answering common questions as well as the future, which was not what anyone had been expecting. Crackling sparks and a dusk-blue sky. The riding not-an-angel may have taken a lover; I have the vague sense of being approached by them afterward, remembering nothing of what my body had done with them. After it was over, I tried reading a book from the library about the known traditions of the Midnight Angel, only to feel it had absolutely nothing in common with the experience I had undergone. There was an awful romance novel of the name, a period piece framed around one of those supposedly adoring deceptions where the guy passes himself off as the voice of the future in order to get close to the girl; I didn't get more than a chapter in.
3. Yesterday afternoon I picked up my replacement Kickstarter T-shirt from the Brattle, successfully bought enough groceries to last me the week here, and then met Rob and a gang of birthday-celebrating persons mostly known to me from the stage in the balcony of the Somerville for The World's End (2013). Final film in the Cornetto Trilogy, which I still think is one of the greatest linking devices of cinema. It may be the best thing Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright have ever made together. Mostly copying the e-mail I wrote tonineweaving last night—
The thing about The World's End is that the first forty minutes are not even faintly science fiction; they are a well-deserved takedown of the Apatovian man-child comedy, in which Simon Pegg's Gary King is painfully not the free spirit he so aggressively and pathetically tries to present himself as, and neither are his four mates, his old high school posse, the aged-before-their-time sticks-in-the-mud who need to be liberated from the emasculating constraints of family life and steady jobs, as it seems Gary would have it as he bullies, cajoles, irritates, and embarrasses them into recreating the epic pub crawl they failed to finish twenty-three years ago. It's amazing work from Pegg, departing entirely from his familiar amiable geek—Gary at seventeen was a stompy Goth in Doc Martens and trenchcoat, a wing of dyed-black hair cutting dramatically across one eye; Gary at forty still blackens his hair when it doesn't suit him, flaunts the same long-sleeved Sisters of Mercy T-shirt and silver necklaces with ankh and Eye of Horus, the same boots and long black coat, but his face is wired to the bone, littered with small scars of fights and piercings, a jittery, ticcy, needling ricochet of a man whose mouth can run double-time even when he's utterly fucked up, which is basically his default state at this point. He's perpetually drunk, he'll do any drugs that come his way, but he's hooked worst of all on the idea that the defining moment of his life was that last school-leaving day when he and his gang pledged to complete the Golden Mile—the legendary twelve-pint traversal of Newton Haven—and blew out halfway, when after the addition of some unwise weed they staggered off paranoically into the night and ended up sitting on the classic hillside overlooking their small home town, blinking at the bright dawn of their adult lives and occasionally leaning over to puke. Everyone else has moved on, into lives as predictable or divergent from their adolescent selves as the usual distribution allows. Gary crashes back into their lives as if through a windshield, clowning at that register that's a wink removed from panic or rage, leading almost more by force of confidence in his charisma than by the thing itself. He's not unsympathetic, because Pegg is that good; he's not stupid, he's not all right, and there are things he's not telling his old school friends because what he is telling them doesn't quite add up. It doesn't make him any less difficult to watch. His concept of boundaries is nil. His sensitivity to others' emotions, ditto. His highly selective memory eventually becomes such a running joke that Gary forgets, suitably meta, which one of them it's supposed to apply to. And yet his friends follow him, because he was once someone they loved: efficient, impatient Oliver (Martin Freeman), gym-cut and oddly wistful Steven (Paddy Considine), nervy, submissive Peter (Eddie Marsan), and in a matchingly beautiful turn of casting against type, Nick Frost as Andy, highly successful businessman, husband, father, inseparable once upon a time from dazzling, loose-cannon Gary until the ambivalently alluded-to "accident," after which we know only that he hasn't taken a drink in sixteen years. He can barely speak to Gary at first. He's the wariest of all of them; he might just be there to keep an eye on his more susceptible fellows, God help them if they start listening again to their "once and future King." They reenter Newton Haven. It's nothing like the way they left it. Or it's too much like, meaning everyone remembers their very good reasons for getting out, except Gary, apparently. Against their communal better judgment, the pub crawl begins.
Then the science fiction cannons sideways into the story, knocks it off its feet, and the characters are too busy fending off the science fiction to deal with the other genre. I do not want to go into details if you have any thought of seeing the film, because we went into it more or less blind and it's a jawdropper of a turn. But then in the third act, it turns out all the unresolved emotional stuff from the first is thematically relevant and in more than one case has to be solved if anyone is going to get out of the situation alive, things being not exactly a cozy catastrophe, although they are indeed a very English kind of apocalypse. (Please to direct me toward your favorite John Wyndham, because I have read only The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and I still got vibes.) It's a welcome follow-through which continues all the way to the credits. The film has the courage of its initial convictions. I was not expecting its epilogue.
It does flunk having more than one female protagonist, although I appreciated very much that Rosamund Pike's Sam resists at every turn the attempts of the male characters around her—mostly Gary—to position her as some kind of rewarding achievement or life event as opposed to a forty-year-old woman who did once fuck Gary in the disabled toilets at the Good Companion and doesn't regret it all these years later, but doesn't consider it the defining moment of her youth, either. When one character reveals that his seemingly perfect marriage is on the rocks, the next sentence isn't some kind of return to the fold of bromance, it's his reaffirmed commitment to keep fighting, by which he doesn't mean "winning her back" or some equivalently misogynist cliché, he means being a better partner and a better parent and first and foremost surviving this weirdness so that he'll get the chance, because life isn't perfect moments of hawthorn-golden nostalgic haze, it's the stuff you decide to work for because it's worth it. Gary is always putting down his friends' wives, but we never get the sense that the film agrees with him. I just wish we'd seen more of them in person. Otherwise it's a true ensemble piece, leaving me wanting to see a lot more of Paddy Considine in particular: I have the idea from the internet that he's better known for violent, ambiguous characters than he is for ones like Steven, a tall, handsome, hangdog man who is still not as simple as a soft touch under brick shithouse shoulders, but he's so low-key about his three dimensions, it's easy to miss for quite some time that unlike previous Frost-Pegg movies, this one is not about a dyad. "None of them are losers," Rob observed afterward, and it's pleasantly true. Even Peter, whose scarring bullying in high school left him the quietest of the group and the most vulnerable to Gary's self-destructive glamour, is not a sad sack. He's played by Eddie Marsan, so I love him, but the script gives him one of the funniest, most triumphant moments in the movie, and this is a movie that scored appreciative audience outbursts on an average of five to ten minutes.
Which is where my brain ran out at three in the morning, but it's the kind of movie I'm really hoping plays again at the 'Thon in February, because I'd cheerfully watch it just for all the lines I missed for laughing; it's an incredibly dense script and it doesn't wait for anyone, except I never lost the thread of the story, so everyone must have known what they were doing. I have no idea what they'll do next. With any luck, something with no ice cream or pubs. I'll be very curious.
I have a week.
I still have to move everything out of my present location by the 31st, because
adrian_turtle's new housemate takes possession in September. Packing is mostly not the issue; transportation is. I have no car and my back is still badly messed up from the cube shelving incident in May. ratatosk and rushthatspeaks are coming early next week, but anyone else local who wants to help shlep stuff to derspatchel's for food should please let me know. My goal is to be done with everything but the essentials—bed, laptop, meds—by the 30th, so that a week from today I can get up, wrangle a futon mattress into or onto a car, and then spend the night at the HFA's all-night noir marathon. I think it's a good incentive.2. I dreamed I was taking part in a foretelling ritual called the Midnight Angel: a voice speaks three times at midnight, one time male, one time female, one time neither, telling who will fall in love in the coming year, who will die, who will travel or be changed. Each voice only recites a list of names. There is some paraphernalia with dried flowers and fresh water poured into a mirror on the ground. Only I was taking part in the pre-Victorian version, which was a lot less like British guising than Mongolian shamanism, dressed in bright robes and ribbons, veiled with knots, ridden by something that was not an angel and while it was in me, I was something else. I remember sitting upstairs in a small, paneled room with diamond-paned windows, slightly overheated, waiting. Then I remember speaking to people in the third voice, the genderless one of journey and transformation, and walking around the university grounds and the fern-filled glasshouse and a shop that sold rose and lotus cookies ordinarily, answering common questions as well as the future, which was not what anyone had been expecting. Crackling sparks and a dusk-blue sky. The riding not-an-angel may have taken a lover; I have the vague sense of being approached by them afterward, remembering nothing of what my body had done with them. After it was over, I tried reading a book from the library about the known traditions of the Midnight Angel, only to feel it had absolutely nothing in common with the experience I had undergone. There was an awful romance novel of the name, a period piece framed around one of those supposedly adoring deceptions where the guy passes himself off as the voice of the future in order to get close to the girl; I didn't get more than a chapter in.
3. Yesterday afternoon I picked up my replacement Kickstarter T-shirt from the Brattle, successfully bought enough groceries to last me the week here, and then met Rob and a gang of birthday-celebrating persons mostly known to me from the stage in the balcony of the Somerville for The World's End (2013). Final film in the Cornetto Trilogy, which I still think is one of the greatest linking devices of cinema. It may be the best thing Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright have ever made together. Mostly copying the e-mail I wrote to
nineweaving last night—The thing about The World's End is that the first forty minutes are not even faintly science fiction; they are a well-deserved takedown of the Apatovian man-child comedy, in which Simon Pegg's Gary King is painfully not the free spirit he so aggressively and pathetically tries to present himself as, and neither are his four mates, his old high school posse, the aged-before-their-time sticks-in-the-mud who need to be liberated from the emasculating constraints of family life and steady jobs, as it seems Gary would have it as he bullies, cajoles, irritates, and embarrasses them into recreating the epic pub crawl they failed to finish twenty-three years ago. It's amazing work from Pegg, departing entirely from his familiar amiable geek—Gary at seventeen was a stompy Goth in Doc Martens and trenchcoat, a wing of dyed-black hair cutting dramatically across one eye; Gary at forty still blackens his hair when it doesn't suit him, flaunts the same long-sleeved Sisters of Mercy T-shirt and silver necklaces with ankh and Eye of Horus, the same boots and long black coat, but his face is wired to the bone, littered with small scars of fights and piercings, a jittery, ticcy, needling ricochet of a man whose mouth can run double-time even when he's utterly fucked up, which is basically his default state at this point. He's perpetually drunk, he'll do any drugs that come his way, but he's hooked worst of all on the idea that the defining moment of his life was that last school-leaving day when he and his gang pledged to complete the Golden Mile—the legendary twelve-pint traversal of Newton Haven—and blew out halfway, when after the addition of some unwise weed they staggered off paranoically into the night and ended up sitting on the classic hillside overlooking their small home town, blinking at the bright dawn of their adult lives and occasionally leaning over to puke. Everyone else has moved on, into lives as predictable or divergent from their adolescent selves as the usual distribution allows. Gary crashes back into their lives as if through a windshield, clowning at that register that's a wink removed from panic or rage, leading almost more by force of confidence in his charisma than by the thing itself. He's not unsympathetic, because Pegg is that good; he's not stupid, he's not all right, and there are things he's not telling his old school friends because what he is telling them doesn't quite add up. It doesn't make him any less difficult to watch. His concept of boundaries is nil. His sensitivity to others' emotions, ditto. His highly selective memory eventually becomes such a running joke that Gary forgets, suitably meta, which one of them it's supposed to apply to. And yet his friends follow him, because he was once someone they loved: efficient, impatient Oliver (Martin Freeman), gym-cut and oddly wistful Steven (Paddy Considine), nervy, submissive Peter (Eddie Marsan), and in a matchingly beautiful turn of casting against type, Nick Frost as Andy, highly successful businessman, husband, father, inseparable once upon a time from dazzling, loose-cannon Gary until the ambivalently alluded-to "accident," after which we know only that he hasn't taken a drink in sixteen years. He can barely speak to Gary at first. He's the wariest of all of them; he might just be there to keep an eye on his more susceptible fellows, God help them if they start listening again to their "once and future King." They reenter Newton Haven. It's nothing like the way they left it. Or it's too much like, meaning everyone remembers their very good reasons for getting out, except Gary, apparently. Against their communal better judgment, the pub crawl begins.
Then the science fiction cannons sideways into the story, knocks it off its feet, and the characters are too busy fending off the science fiction to deal with the other genre. I do not want to go into details if you have any thought of seeing the film, because we went into it more or less blind and it's a jawdropper of a turn. But then in the third act, it turns out all the unresolved emotional stuff from the first is thematically relevant and in more than one case has to be solved if anyone is going to get out of the situation alive, things being not exactly a cozy catastrophe, although they are indeed a very English kind of apocalypse. (Please to direct me toward your favorite John Wyndham, because I have read only The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and I still got vibes.) It's a welcome follow-through which continues all the way to the credits. The film has the courage of its initial convictions. I was not expecting its epilogue.
It does flunk having more than one female protagonist, although I appreciated very much that Rosamund Pike's Sam resists at every turn the attempts of the male characters around her—mostly Gary—to position her as some kind of rewarding achievement or life event as opposed to a forty-year-old woman who did once fuck Gary in the disabled toilets at the Good Companion and doesn't regret it all these years later, but doesn't consider it the defining moment of her youth, either. When one character reveals that his seemingly perfect marriage is on the rocks, the next sentence isn't some kind of return to the fold of bromance, it's his reaffirmed commitment to keep fighting, by which he doesn't mean "winning her back" or some equivalently misogynist cliché, he means being a better partner and a better parent and first and foremost surviving this weirdness so that he'll get the chance, because life isn't perfect moments of hawthorn-golden nostalgic haze, it's the stuff you decide to work for because it's worth it. Gary is always putting down his friends' wives, but we never get the sense that the film agrees with him. I just wish we'd seen more of them in person. Otherwise it's a true ensemble piece, leaving me wanting to see a lot more of Paddy Considine in particular: I have the idea from the internet that he's better known for violent, ambiguous characters than he is for ones like Steven, a tall, handsome, hangdog man who is still not as simple as a soft touch under brick shithouse shoulders, but he's so low-key about his three dimensions, it's easy to miss for quite some time that unlike previous Frost-Pegg movies, this one is not about a dyad. "None of them are losers," Rob observed afterward, and it's pleasantly true. Even Peter, whose scarring bullying in high school left him the quietest of the group and the most vulnerable to Gary's self-destructive glamour, is not a sad sack. He's played by Eddie Marsan, so I love him, but the script gives him one of the funniest, most triumphant moments in the movie, and this is a movie that scored appreciative audience outbursts on an average of five to ten minutes.
Which is where my brain ran out at three in the morning, but it's the kind of movie I'm really hoping plays again at the 'Thon in February, because I'd cheerfully watch it just for all the lines I missed for laughing; it's an incredibly dense script and it doesn't wait for anyone, except I never lost the thread of the story, so everyone must have known what they were doing. I have no idea what they'll do next. With any luck, something with no ice cream or pubs. I'll be very curious.
I have a week.
spoilers below!
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The fact that The World's End actually blows up the planet may be the element I admire most about the movie for precisely that reason. The story would be an uncomplicated celebration of immaturity without it. We cheer "Get in your rocket and fuck off back to Lego-Land!" because it's an assertion of individualism against soulless conformity (and it is absolute genius to posit the gentrifying blandness of corporate culture as a function of alien takeover), but also because it's just a hilariously, idiotically juvenile retort. If that saved the world, it would be Apatow in space. Gary, who's "never wrong," would be finally proven, by no less an authority than the combined sentient universe, right. Gary even is right: the ability to make one's own decisions, even when they're not very good ones, is kind of the definition of free will. But this decision, and his friends' decision to support it, destroys the world as we know it. And what's left in the ruins is ambivalent. On the one hand, total crash of civilization. It's not a good thing and the film doesn't present it as one, even if Andy admits it means that everyone finally went organic. But people go on. They make their lives as best they can. And the little flashes of happiness among the drifting smoke and the burned-out skyscrapers are strangely mature—Andy and his wife repair their marriage and make their garden grow, like serious Candides. Sam and Steven appear to be genuinely happy in their survivalist way. Blank-Oliver, who was always the closest of the characters to the alien-approved mainstream (never losing his Bluetooth headset, even when body-snatched), returns to his professional life of real estate, only slightly impaired by having half a volleyball for a head, and blank-Peter goes home to his family, entertaining his children with the deadpan tricks that detachable hands can do. Gary as a black-clad, wandering paladin backed by the blanks of his school-days friends looks at first like the most adolescent fantasy ever—except that when he strides into the tavern to make trouble for a dystopian-tattooed gang of human supremacists, he's ordering water. If we're set back to the Dark Ages technologically, at least it's not a complete emotional reversion to match. But the planet is still pretty busted. Even more so than in Shaun of the Dead, where part of the joke was how little a zombie apocalypse changes anything; here nearly everything is changed, except for the indomitable human spirit which longs occasionally for prepackaged ice cream and rebels against whatever you've got. I respect that ending a lot more than if the human race had chased off an alien invasion with the incontrovertible awesomeness of being a fuck-up and stopped complacently there. "You remember the Friday nights," Andy tells Gary early on, at a point where it's not getting through. "I remember the Monday mornings." Weirdly, and successfully, I think, the film is both of these things in the end.
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I will take you up on that offer. Thank you very much. Depending on a piece of scheduling with
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Thank you. E-mail forthcoming.
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The film sounds like just the thing darkforge and I should attempt to rent. (Haven't managed film rental and watching in 2.5 years because I'm not really a film person and always have something better to do after the little one goes to bed, but I'd make an exception for what sounds like a rather well-rounded Pegg film.)
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Thank you. The interim period will be difficult, but I am looking forward to the final results.
(Haven't managed film rental and watching in 2.5 years because I'm not really a film person and always have something better to do after the little one goes to bed, but I'd make an exception for what sounds like a rather well-rounded Pegg film.)
I expected it to be fun, because the first two were. I did not expect it to be the kind of movie I want people to see so that I can talk about it with them.
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I don't think it would be necessary to see the first two films in order to enjoy The World's End—they're more thematically linked than anything else, with some great visual callbacks. That said, I did think it benefited.
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Heh. Thank you. The thought is appreciated!
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Another fabulous vision from your sleeping psyche. I want the Criterion collection of your dreams. With commentary.
I'd heard The World's End was terrific--and now I'm dying to se it.
Nine
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Thank you. I will let you know if it's needed.
I'd heard The World's End was terrific--and now I'm dying to see it.
It was much more thoughtful than I was expecting! As well as being extremely funny and brilliantly visually clever, which I was prepared for.
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Those sound like very sensible viewing choices. I hope you enjoy!
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I really appreciate stories that do not feel the need to make their characters conventionally sympathetic. There is nothing Gary does that's traditionally redeeming. Pegg never tries to convince us that he's really as witty or inspiring or underappreciated as he thinks he is. He's a difficult character, and we care about him. That's not the same as the film making excuses for any of his behavior.
and putting the latter in the position of being the moral center of the film and its most straightforwardly heroic character.
And not doing it to swap them later on, either. Andy is awesome.
All of the others get their moments (partially excepting Oliver, because Plot), and those moments aren't just token things ticked off a list ("have we taken care of Characterization for Peter yet?"). They matter. Quite a lot.
Absolutely agreed. And sometimes even small moments, like the way Sam behind the wheel of a hell-for-leather car doesn't look panicked or praying or any of the usual states; she is steely-mouthed and determined and when she yells for an opinion on which way she should go, it's not helplessness. Peter gets two of the best scenes in the film as far as I'm concerned.
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Yeah. I get the impression that the difference between Then and Now is not that Gary somehow lost the trick of being their King; it's that the trick was always that he had confidence and they didn't, and that was enough. It didn't matter whether he was smart or interesting or nice, or whether the place he was leading them was anywhere they wanted to go. The habit is still there, faintly, of following Gary because Gary is going somewhere, but these days sheer confidence isn't enough. They don't follow him anymore because of anything in him; when they do follow him, it's because of something in themselves, be it loyalty or whatever. But the point is, Gary never was truly that sort of charismatic leader, and he definitely isn't now.
And not doing it to swap them later on, either. Andy is awesome.
Yes. It reminds me of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which hit all the usual "she's so tough and he's so emasculated" notes . . . but then didn't reverse it at the end, didn't have some grand moment of masculinity-restoring glory for John, separate from/oppositional to Jane. She remained the kind of woman who would complain about getting "the girl gun," and he remained the kind of guy who has a squishy soft center and is okay with that.
And sometimes even small moments, like the way Sam behind the wheel of a hell-for-leather car doesn't look panicked or praying or any of the usual states; she is steely-mouthed and determined and when she yells for an opinion on which way she should go, it's not helplessness.
Yes. Having more central female characters would have been nice -- Basil could have been a woman, maybe -- but for the motifs of Gary's posse to work, they have to all be guys. So the next best thing is to make sure the woman is a good character, rejecting (as you said) being positioned as a trophy for the protagonist to win, remaining strong in a crisis, etc.
And I read your comments about the ending over on DW. Absolutely agreed, a thousand-fold. As shocked as I was, the more I think about it, the more they had to deliver on that promise. To do otherwise would have been the truimph of the Apatovian man-child -- and since I detest that character type, letting him win would have left a bad taste in my mouth.
[Edited for failed HTML on my end, too.]
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See, I imagine at seventeen he was exactly as cool as they all thought, but that's the kind of cool that works only when you're seventeen. The standards are entirely different. (I agree with you that the sheer pull of someone who knows what they want is a huge part of it. That stops being enough to offer when everyone else starts to have desires and goals of their own. Also when what you want is so single-minded and so self-destructive, it starts dragging other people into its killing orbit. It's never directly addressed, but by the time of the accident, I got the sense that Andy was the last person actually in contact with Gary. Everyone else heard about the accident, but only Andy was there for it.) He can't have been—isn't—a complete loss, because Andy loves him and we know that Andy can actually tell what's worth fighting for and what isn't, but that doesn't make him safe. Andy didn't make a mistake, cutting him off all those years ago. I loved that revelation, because in a movie with two estranged best friends it's usually some kind of misunderstanding or the two of them just need to talk and forgive each other, but here, no: skittering off into the night leaving the person who was trying to save your life to die is, actually, a very good reason for them never to talk to you again if they can avoid it. There are some very weird ways in which Gary is a character from an M. John Harrison novel who just happens to be in a Frost/Wright/Pegg movie.
but then didn't reverse it at the end, didn't have some grand moment of masculinity-restoring glory for John, separate from/oppositional to Jane.
Nice. Ice Cold in Alex (1958), which I otherwise really loved, kind of imploded that way.
rejecting (as you said) being positioned as a trophy for the protagonist to win
And not being picked up by Steven because of what he does or proves over the course of the story: she doesn't fall in love with him for saving her life, they could probably have been a couple years ago if Steven had ever been able to indicate the slightest reciprocal interest rather than rather idiotically assuming that banging Gary once in the disableds meant she was his for life.
As shocked as I was, the more I think about it, the more they had to deliver on that promise.
It is also just a wonderful corrective to all the movies where the world is saved at the last moment, our heroes escaping the firestorm in the nick of time—I was impressed enough that the chase scene ended with them all stumbling out of Sam's burnt-shelled car, coughing in the blowing clouds of smoke, staring in silence at each other and this smoldering hell-scape that was a clean little Starbucks-homogenized village just a few hours ago. I don't begrudge it in Pacific Rim, but seriously, the movie is called The World's End. Was that pub sign with a half-exploding Earth painted for nothing?
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I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing; I'm just having a hard time putting my read on Gary into words. I think you're right about the flavor of cool -- I think that's what I'm pointing at when I talk about confidence. The problem for all involved is that it's the wrong kind of confidence. If Gary had grown up and learned how to apply that to the right targets . . . but he didn't.
I don't, however, read him as ever actually being charismatic. I've known some people who are magnetic enough in their personalities that other people (myself included, on occasion) will put up with their shit for longer than we should, but I don't see Gary as having ever had that flavor of power. We don't see enough of the seventeen-year-olds to be sure, but I feel like if he'd had that, their interactions would be different now.
I loved that revelation, because in a movie with two estranged best friends it's usually some kind of misunderstanding or the two of them just need to talk and forgive each other, but here, no
I am so very tired of the Big Misunderstanding in pretty much all circumstances. It's been beaten to death by romance plots, but they're not the only ones to blame. I joked while writing Midnight Never Come that I kept calling a particular scene the Big Misunderstanding, only it really wasn't: yes, Deven had the wrong end of the stick at the time, but he was dead-on correct about there being a stick, and furthermore the stick was a genuine problem.
Nice. Ice Cold in Alex (1958), which I otherwise really loved, kind of imploded that way.
I somehow missed that post of yours when you made it -- I don't always read the ones for movies I've never heard of, though it's invariably fascinating to see how you describe characters. ("He's out of spoons; the bottle opener is the only silverware left in the drawer" is a brilliant line.) Anyway, if you haven't seen Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I think you might enjoy it. Very slick, and maybe a bit less with character depth than you might want, but it plays some elegant structural games.
she doesn't fall in love with him for saving her life, they could probably have been a couple years ago if Steven had ever been able to indicate the slightest reciprocal interest rather than rather idiotically assuming that banging Gary once in the disableds meant she was his for life.
Yes. Steven doesn't "win" her; if I remember correctly, he's about three words into his Great Romantic Speech when Sam gets this expression that says he can shut up already, because she has the point and yes, she's interested.
I was impressed enough that the chase scene ended with them all stumbling out of Sam's burnt-shelled car, coughing in the blowing clouds of smoke, staring in silence at each other and this smoldering hell-scape that was a clean little Starbucks-homogenized village just a few hours ago.
That startled me, yeah, because the cloud of smoke is usually your visual setup for fading to "six months later" or whatever. But nope: they don't get to skip out on the bill for their Grand Finale.
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(In my dream, which was a long time ago, I was helping a friend dress for her role as Love, in a white dress and circlet of red roses, when I was suddenly and entirely unexpectedly possessed by Death and saw her eyes change as we recognised each other and this thing, and we were in this basically green room and not on the stage or temple we were supposed to be in and we both turned with the same movement to look for our third one and we were both reciting names and everyone was terrified and not writing anything down and I was darkly amused. I think I was a man, in this dream, and Death certainly was.)
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I know the traditions about seeing, at midnight on suitably liminal dates (All Hallows' Eve, New Year's Eve), a doppelgänger procession through the churchyard of all the people destined to die in the next year, and I know there are marriage rituals as well, often done with water or reflections, but I couldn't find anything when awake about this specific combination. Brains are good at synthesizing things, though.
and we both turned with the same movement to look for our third one and we were both reciting names
Did they ever show?
Should this ever turn into some kind of story, I'd like to read it.
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Likewise if yours ever did becomer a story or a poem or anything I'd like to read it. I don't often use my dream imagery because it doesn't usually make enough sense when viewed in external light. This one would work best as part of something, and then the question is, what?
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(And doing some of the carrying myself is not entirely out of the question, depending on timing.)
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Thank you! This is valuable to know. At the moment I have three people who have volunteered cars between Monday and Wednesday, which feels like it should be enough to move several thousand books in boxes without too much horrible back-and-forth, but there's still a lot of stairs involved in this process. And books are heavy.
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Thanks. It's frustrating. I've never had a bad back in my life. I still don't think I do in the permanent sense; I think what I have is a lot of slowly healing damage that I keep reinjuring slightly at annoying and unpredictable intervals, because it is impossible for me not to put any strain on my lower back in the course of my ordinary life. It's way better than it was in May and June—I am not in prohibitive pain just from sitting in a chair or sleeping in any position at all. I can carry a backpack again, although a heavily laden one does hurt at the end of the day. I can carry groceries. But it's still a hindrance and I've been used all my life to lifting whatever. This is the first move where I have not been able to carry all of my books myself, boxes stacked two at a time up and down as many stairs as needed, and there are ways in which it is really demoralizing.
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You asked about Wyndham. Try "The Kraken Wakes", for the sea. Also, if you can, watch the early eighties BBC adaptation of Triffids; it nails that fine line of cosiness and utter dread very well. I had recurring triffid nightmares for years (it has an impressively dissonant theme tune, which scared the hell out of me as a wee kid).
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It did not come as a shock, which is how I know how good the film is. It was the thing that made all the sense that everything he'd been saying up until that point hadn't, quite.
But then, that ending.
I don't remember your Dreamwidth status, but there is some spoiler-marked discussion of the ending here. It's immensely ambivalent and I think that's what I like best about it.
Try "The Kraken Wakes", for the sea.
I agree that is a promising title. Thank you!
Also, if you can, watch the early eighties BBC adaptation of Triffids; it nails that fine line of cosiness and utter dread very well.
This one? I can't view any of the clips at the BFI because I'm in the wrong country, but maybe YouTube will be kind to me.
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How the hell did I miss this dream of yours? Turn this into a story if you can.
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It may take time. I'll see what I can do.