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It's all become looney tunes with sugar packs and plastic spoons
This is neither of the posts I planned to make today, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks asked me if I wanted to watch the first season of The Great British Bake Off with dinner and the next thing we knew we were making monkey bread. It came out more like sticky buns and midway through the procedure we discovered that the oven wasn't working (all hail the toaster oven), but as I am eating a piece with cream cheese glaze as we resume watching, I think it all worked out.
P.S. This isn't the post either, butasakiyume has just alerted me that Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown (2010) is being staged in New York City. Outside of the two windows of time this year I have already planned to be in town! It's still really tempting, even if I have no idea who's in the cast. Greg Brown's Hades troubled my childhood definitively. It's not an epic tradition if it isn't reperformed.
rushthatspeaks asked me if I wanted to watch the first season of The Great British Bake Off with dinner and the next thing we knew we were making monkey bread. It came out more like sticky buns and midway through the procedure we discovered that the oven wasn't working (all hail the toaster oven), but as I am eating a piece with cream cheese glaze as we resume watching, I think it all worked out.P.S. This isn't the post either, but
asakiyume has just alerted me that Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown (2010) is being staged in New York City. Outside of the two windows of time this year I have already planned to be in town! It's still really tempting, even if I have no idea who's in the cast. Greg Brown's Hades troubled my childhood definitively. It's not an epic tradition if it isn't reperformed.
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Now that's what I call a date!
Nine
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The first episode was all about cake; it was imperative to watch it with something on hand. Emergency biscuit monkey bread was the fastest cake-like thing we could find to bake. Would have been even faster if the oven had actually worked. Was still a pretty great way to spend the evening.
(I had just gotten back from seeing the last showing of The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) at the Somerville. I am going to try to write it up for Patreon, but you personally should be aware that this is a film which contains, among other things, Northern accents and diction, a low tumulus of a house in the woods with stone for the door and trees for the roof, and a grief-maddened mother who gives suck to her lost infant in a dream or a hallucination or a bewitchment and only later do we see that it is a raven perched upon her breast, tearing blood from it instead of milk. It is very definitely witchcraft as it was understood in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and therefore not entirely congruent with your aesthetic, but there are also images in this film which I had encountered in prose but never expected to see depicted, or depicted well. All the day scenes in this film are by Vermeer; all the night ones are Goya.)
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I loved it. It is beautifully photographed in a now slightly unusual aspect ratio, in natural light that looks like paintings until all of a sudden it looks like the forest turning itself inside out to swallow the characters, the camera, the audience. The soundtrack is a mix of folk music and the kind of eerie ambient score that often accompanies contemporary horror films, but it is being performed on instruments like nyckelharpa and fiddle. That low, buzzing, agitated drone that comes up over an incrementally slowly zooming shot of the woods is not electronic. Some scenes were shot at Plimoth Plantation, others in north Ontario, which preserves the old-growth forests that Massachusetts mostly clear-cut. There is a witch in the shape of a hare. There is the Devil in the form of a goat. (There is the Devil in the form of a man; he is barely seen, a deep voice, a spurred boot, a dark face shadowed by a hat-brim, and he is magnificent. He does more of the diabolical with his three minutes than some actors do with two hours, Al Pacino.) There is human horror and there is a fair amount of gore, which I feel I should warn people about, although it is only part of the folklore. The ticket-taker told me as I went out that he's never seen anyone ambivalent about it: either people come out smiling like me or they come out swearing it was the worst movie they ever stupidly bought tickets for. The actress who plays the protagonist, the oldest daughter of the family, is astonishing. Her eyes are so wide-set, they look a little off true, as if she herself has some animal's vision, as if she is always looking past what she is supposed to. The English language is antique and organic and partly drawn from documents of the early seventeenth century; it is never self-important or stilted, but it can be terribly constrained. I don't know what the non-English language is.
[edit] It reminded me of both Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013) and David Rudkin's The Ash Tree (1975), but it is of New England rather than old. I think it is a combination of the landscape, the religion, and the specifics of the witchcraft that afflicts the protagonist's family that does it. The Devil in New England is a black man with a book. So he is.
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Nine
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If it's still playing anywhere you can see it, or if the Brattle brings it back as part of their ongoing "recent raves" series, I think you will love it. I almost didn't go because
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It was so good! I love how it avoided the obvious ambiguity—is the supernatural real? Is the family tormented by a witch or only turning on themselves?—in favor of the much scarier one: the supernatural is real, but how much of it is the family correctly perceiving? Does it matter? Within their religion, witchcraft is the answer to all kinds of natural and interpersonal calamities; they are right this time, but will the knowledge help them? Can it help them? What does it mean if it can't? William and Katherine with their hands linked and outstretched, praying above the body of their apple-afflicted son as if warding him with the desperate angles of their bodies: I think the exorcism works, but if it does, it only saves Caleb's soul. Their faith tells them that should be enough. It so clearly isn't. If the love of God is no longer a consolation, what does it matter whether the Devil is abroad in your cornfields or not?
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until all of a sudden it looks like the forest turning itself inside out to swallow the characters, the camera, the audience. --love this.
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The official website has a list of showtimes, which may include theaters near you!
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Hadestown
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That's what I got out of the announcement. And that's what I always assumed the album was intended to be, so I'm hoping!
Re: Hadestown
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I believe in you.
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Are you watching the season with Chetna Makan? She is one of my favorites.
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We're watching the actual first season, from 2010, before it was obvious that it would become a breakaway beloved national institution! It's very close to the established format of the later show, but not quite. Everyone still hugs the bakers who have to leave at the end of the weekend, though.
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Thank you. I would like someday to make the acquaintance of your lagoon.
April 5th is not an option due to your household being out of town, though, right?