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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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject
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.