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Then the pink and then the may
Maybe not the end of an era? The mighty ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rosefox used their knowledge of LJ styles and layers to get me back a fairly decent facsimile of Refried Paper, with icons, yet! It's got some weird glitches I'm still trying to figure out how to amend (moral of this story: learn CSS), but at least it actually looks like my own journal again.
In the meantime, I have started adding tags to my entries. So far I've got one. It's for my Patreon reviews. I can already tell that I will want to be completist with genre and director and main cast and key subjects and I had better not, because that's what the AFI Catalog of Feature Films is for. Or Tumblr.
I don't think that I want to spend an entire review on Green Dolphin Street (1947). I watched it last night, after finishing the source novel the previous week. Taken on its own merits as a historical potboiler, it's fun. Taken as a version of Elizabeth Goudge, it may cause bleeding from the eyes. I am ambivalent about the novel Green Dolphin Country (U.S. Green Dolphin Street, 1944), but I can see why it was an attractive prospect for a studio like MGM—it's a sweeping, world-spanning, three-generation family saga revolving around a dramatic romantic mistake redeemed, in both the conventional and the religious senses, by the consequences rippling out to transform not only the three characters immediately involved, but everyone whom their lives touch thereafter. It has moments of the numinous that prefigure The Valley of Song (1951) in their fusion of Faerie and Paradise. It's trying hard with the Māori characters, but well-intentioned clichés are still clichés. It is a great novel of the sea. And I'm not at all surprised that I bounced so severely off it the first time around: it's one of her books that put their reader at a disadvantage for not being Christian. I don't mean that it made me feel scolded or preached at, I mean that it's written with such a depth of assumption that it renders some of the characters' motives opaque to me, since they are based on convictions and values which are not only not mine, but which the narrative takes so profoundly for granted, the reasons for the decisions they produce are never explained. It lends the novel a curiously genre quality, actually—the past is another country, but so is Anglicanism. When the film is Christian, it's in Hollywood ways: it's not strange to me, I just don't agree with it. Not strange is, I think, the most damning thing I can say about Green Dolphin Street. Allowing for the inevitable compression of the novel's half-century timeline and the excision of most of its subplots, it's actually a relatively faithful adaptation; it hits most of the novel's key points, including some I didn't expect to see filmed, and it even preserves some of the dialogue line-for-line, or close enough that I could recognize it from one reading. The emotional and intellectual effect is entirely different. It's the simplified romantic version, streamlined and fitted to familiarity. Every now and then a moment in key with Goudge flashes out of the melodrama and it is both jarringly out of place and the most interesting thing for half an hour around it. I don't blame the cast, who are Donna Reed and Lana Turner as dissimilar sisters and Richard Hart and Van Heflin as the men who respectively love them; they are all less flawed than their book counterparts, but everyone gets at least one memorable scene. I am amused that Heflin plays the character I would have liked best in the book if I had managed to read it in high school. Hart had an unusual face for a leading man, by which I mean that I spent forty minutes trying to figure out who he kept reminding me of and the answer turned out to be Chris Barrie circa the first two seasons of Red Dwarf. He made four films and died young. Neither of them should ever have been made to wear a mustache. Meanwhile Reed and Turner bear up bravely under their spectacularly ahistorical hair. Basically, Green Dolphin Street is the kind of expensive, homogenized adaptation I was braced for Madame Bovary (1949) to be and was so delighted when it wasn't. Maybe someone should have read Minnelli in on this one. The New Zealand earthquake, however, is all the special effects extravaganza it was cracked up to be. Mattes, models, full-scale practical effects, rear projection, the works—it's technically impressive and artistically admirable and the internet tells me it won the film an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1948. I just wish the rest of the story had been treated with the same enthusiasm and care. Not to mention the Māori.
Now that Mythic Delirium has an alphabetical index of authors, I can point toward a small archive of my publications; they're filed under "T."
My e-mail is still kaput.
rosefox used their knowledge of LJ styles and layers to get me back a fairly decent facsimile of Refried Paper, with icons, yet! It's got some weird glitches I'm still trying to figure out how to amend (moral of this story: learn CSS), but at least it actually looks like my own journal again.In the meantime, I have started adding tags to my entries. So far I've got one. It's for my Patreon reviews. I can already tell that I will want to be completist with genre and director and main cast and key subjects and I had better not, because that's what the AFI Catalog of Feature Films is for. Or Tumblr.
I don't think that I want to spend an entire review on Green Dolphin Street (1947). I watched it last night, after finishing the source novel the previous week. Taken on its own merits as a historical potboiler, it's fun. Taken as a version of Elizabeth Goudge, it may cause bleeding from the eyes. I am ambivalent about the novel Green Dolphin Country (U.S. Green Dolphin Street, 1944), but I can see why it was an attractive prospect for a studio like MGM—it's a sweeping, world-spanning, three-generation family saga revolving around a dramatic romantic mistake redeemed, in both the conventional and the religious senses, by the consequences rippling out to transform not only the three characters immediately involved, but everyone whom their lives touch thereafter. It has moments of the numinous that prefigure The Valley of Song (1951) in their fusion of Faerie and Paradise. It's trying hard with the Māori characters, but well-intentioned clichés are still clichés. It is a great novel of the sea. And I'm not at all surprised that I bounced so severely off it the first time around: it's one of her books that put their reader at a disadvantage for not being Christian. I don't mean that it made me feel scolded or preached at, I mean that it's written with such a depth of assumption that it renders some of the characters' motives opaque to me, since they are based on convictions and values which are not only not mine, but which the narrative takes so profoundly for granted, the reasons for the decisions they produce are never explained. It lends the novel a curiously genre quality, actually—the past is another country, but so is Anglicanism. When the film is Christian, it's in Hollywood ways: it's not strange to me, I just don't agree with it. Not strange is, I think, the most damning thing I can say about Green Dolphin Street. Allowing for the inevitable compression of the novel's half-century timeline and the excision of most of its subplots, it's actually a relatively faithful adaptation; it hits most of the novel's key points, including some I didn't expect to see filmed, and it even preserves some of the dialogue line-for-line, or close enough that I could recognize it from one reading. The emotional and intellectual effect is entirely different. It's the simplified romantic version, streamlined and fitted to familiarity. Every now and then a moment in key with Goudge flashes out of the melodrama and it is both jarringly out of place and the most interesting thing for half an hour around it. I don't blame the cast, who are Donna Reed and Lana Turner as dissimilar sisters and Richard Hart and Van Heflin as the men who respectively love them; they are all less flawed than their book counterparts, but everyone gets at least one memorable scene. I am amused that Heflin plays the character I would have liked best in the book if I had managed to read it in high school. Hart had an unusual face for a leading man, by which I mean that I spent forty minutes trying to figure out who he kept reminding me of and the answer turned out to be Chris Barrie circa the first two seasons of Red Dwarf. He made four films and died young. Neither of them should ever have been made to wear a mustache. Meanwhile Reed and Turner bear up bravely under their spectacularly ahistorical hair. Basically, Green Dolphin Street is the kind of expensive, homogenized adaptation I was braced for Madame Bovary (1949) to be and was so delighted when it wasn't. Maybe someone should have read Minnelli in on this one. The New Zealand earthquake, however, is all the special effects extravaganza it was cracked up to be. Mattes, models, full-scale practical effects, rear projection, the works—it's technically impressive and artistically admirable and the internet tells me it won the film an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1948. I just wish the rest of the story had been treated with the same enthusiasm and care. Not to mention the Māori.
Now that Mythic Delirium has an alphabetical index of authors, I can point toward a small archive of my publications; they're filed under "T."
My e-mail is still kaput.
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Meanwhile Reed and Turner bear up bravely under their spectacularly ahistorical hair.
I love this detail. This is something that I also notice in films, and which drives me a bit crazy, but not as crazy as ahistorical art and costume.
Boo for kaput e-mail. I was going to inquire about your potential NYC film viewing plans.
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It was seriously above and beyond on their part.
I was going to offer similar services, but I am pleased that it has gotten done sooner, as I am currently in the land of work transitions and houseguests.
If at some point you have the time to offer suggestions about restoring entry titles as links (a helpful feature of S2 Refried Paper which does not seem to have translated to this version), I would still appreciate it!
This is something that I also notice in films, and which drives me a bit crazy, but not as crazy as ahistorical art and costume.
I don't think I noticed it at all growing up, and then I saw Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago (1965) and suddenly it was everywhere.
I was going to inquire about your potential NYC film viewing plans.
Probably not at all, damn it. Everything is chaos. I had really, really wanted to see the original version of James Whale's The Road Back (1937). I'm going to have to hope that, having been restored, some of these films will now start to become available outside of MOMA. This month so far has been as exhausting as May.
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Are these the "previous" and "next" entry titles at the bottom of an entry, or somewhere else, like in a sidebar.
Probably not at all, damn it. Everything is chaos. I had really, really wanted to see the original version of James Whale's The Road Back (1937). I'm going to have to hope that, having been restored, some of these films will now start to become available outside of MOMA. This month so far has been as exhausting as May.
Alas. I hope you get to see it, one way or another.
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These are the entry titles visible on a normal page view of the journal. In the previous version of Refried Paper, they served as links to indivdual entries. In this one, they don't.
Alas. I hope you get to see it, one way or another.
Thank you. I am hoping. Having neither resources nor time for travel is not a fun state of being. I'm doing what I can around here.
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Sorry about the continued email woes--it must be frustrating.
Agreed about outsourcing taglike info to AFI....
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They pointed me toward a layout by
Sorry about the continued email woes--it must be frustrating.
It's been five days now. My test messages from earlier this week have now permanently failed to deliver. I can't fix it on my own: it's a problem with RCN. I can't even imagine what I'm missing.
Agreed about outsourcing taglike info to AFI....
I think I may still want some basic tags for "film" and a couple of actors and directors, like Peter Cushing or Powell and Pressburger, about whom I was writing long before I considered starting a Patreon. But I really don't want to go overboard, which is my natural tendency where indexing is concerned.
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Oh Hollywood. Your description of what happened to the book when it was translated to the screen reminds me of how the American palate is often criticized by people from other countries for its preference for things very sweet. (Obviously Not All Americans, but broadly speaking--the American palate that brings you the McDonald's milkshake and the muffin-that's-indistinguishable-from-a-cupcake.) Similarly, a preponderance of films (not the ones you generally report on, but others) seem to home in on a romantic plotline, if there is one, and focus on it. Romantic love is good and all, but Hollywood! There are other flavors! And if a story features some of those other flavors, how about considering that maybe they're part of what makes the story strong?
Reed and Turner bear up bravely under their spectacularly ahistorical hair. --that's just a delightful sentence and deserves commendation as such.
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It's amazing how much better it makes me feel.
Similarly, a preponderance of films (not the ones you generally report on, but others) seem to home in on a romantic plotline, if there is one, and focus on it.
It probably is true that I don't focus on romance when writing about movies: it isn't generally what interests me most about a story. I am more interested if it's not heteronormative, but I treasure the narratives I find where romance does not play a part in the bonding of two characters at all. Pacific Rim (2013) and A Canterbury Tale (1944) are two disparate examples.
(In the process of looking for one of these entries: crosspost links seem to have disappeared from a bunch of my Dreamwidth entries! Long after I started using Dreamwidth as my posting default. I don't understand what happened. Why do social media platforms want me to be unhappy?)
Romantic love is good and all, but Hollywood! There are other flavors! And if a story features some of those other flavors, how about considering that maybe they're part of what makes the story strong?
Seriously! Instead, I have finally met the movie Van Heflin couldn't save. I think he was handicapped by his mustache. At least it had good special effects.
--that's just a delightful sentence and deserves commendation as such.
Thank you!
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I'm sorry! I don't know!
Off-Topic: Water Woman
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...though I'm not sure I'd want to do earthquake depictions these days, and it does sound a bit like I might end up throwing things over certain of the characterization. But interesting to know it exists.
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I would not be surprised if New Zealand prefers to forget it happened. (Other than this guy, who provides a detailed and well-deserved appreciation of the aforementioned special effects.) The book may be better or it may be as much of a problem in different ways; I know that Goudge never visited New Zealand herself and I have no idea what she did for research. She writes very beautifully of the land. I don't know what she was working from. I wouldn't mind getting at least the terrain fact-checked sometime, but I expect the culture to cause headaches.