I turned in all directions, but my compass wouldn't spin
It is a quiet, sunny September afternoon and all of a sudden it feels like fall. Last night it was cold enough for an electric blanket and as of today I have transferred my keys into the pockets of my corduroy coat; the color of the light and the clarity of the sky are stone-washed, paling, remote. The leaves are not yet turning that I can see, but I just realized that the tree directly across from my office window may have died. Its branches are split and grey with lichen, its twigs leafless. I wonder if the ash borer got it. It had better not be an omen. Autolycus crouched next to my computer with the afternoon in his green eyes suggests that I should not take it as such.
Tomorrow I plan to meet![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks for the HFA's all-night vampire marathon. For most of next week spatch and I will be out of town and traveling because of family business on his side. When we get back, the Brattle will be running a celebration of Tilda Swinton and I will get to see more Derek Jarman on the big screen, including The Last of England (1987), which I have only read about. The HFA is not running a full Wellman retrospective, but selected works with emphasis on his pre-Code and social message pictures. I am glad that someone other than me considers Heroes for Sale (1933) and Wild Boys of the Road (1933) "neglected classics," because they are. Any summary that leaves Dorothy Coonan out of the latter, however, is out of focus.
I keep thinking about Dunkirk (2017). I went to see it again last weekend because I wanted to observe the structure now that I knew how it worked; what I feel I mostly ended up observing was the emotion. It's really not a cold movie. Some characters' arcs leapt out at me this time around, one numinous moment in particular which I may describe if I can recompile my brain. The cinematography still sticks for me. There are moments of great visual beauty, disorientation, immersion, but not everything needs to be quick-cut, adrenaline-flash. You can create astonishing claustrophobia and chaos holding the camera crisp and steady—Sidney Lumet and Oswald Morris did it with The Hill (1965), yet another film I saw this summer and failed to write about. I know Christopher Nolan thought the alternative would be more intuitive. I don't know that he was right.
I wish I were not so tired. I remember being able to think. I liked it.
Tomorrow I plan to meet
rushthatspeaks for the HFA's all-night vampire marathon. For most of next week spatch and I will be out of town and traveling because of family business on his side. When we get back, the Brattle will be running a celebration of Tilda Swinton and I will get to see more Derek Jarman on the big screen, including The Last of England (1987), which I have only read about. The HFA is not running a full Wellman retrospective, but selected works with emphasis on his pre-Code and social message pictures. I am glad that someone other than me considers Heroes for Sale (1933) and Wild Boys of the Road (1933) "neglected classics," because they are. Any summary that leaves Dorothy Coonan out of the latter, however, is out of focus.I keep thinking about Dunkirk (2017). I went to see it again last weekend because I wanted to observe the structure now that I knew how it worked; what I feel I mostly ended up observing was the emotion. It's really not a cold movie. Some characters' arcs leapt out at me this time around, one numinous moment in particular which I may describe if I can recompile my brain. The cinematography still sticks for me. There are moments of great visual beauty, disorientation, immersion, but not everything needs to be quick-cut, adrenaline-flash. You can create astonishing claustrophobia and chaos holding the camera crisp and steady—Sidney Lumet and Oswald Morris did it with The Hill (1965), yet another film I saw this summer and failed to write about. I know Christopher Nolan thought the alternative would be more intuitive. I don't know that he was right.
I wish I were not so tired. I remember being able to think. I liked it.
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The numinous moment for me was the plane gliding without fuel over the empty beach. And to a lesser extent, the propaganda fliers fluttering down from the sky.
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See, I like black-and-white cinematography, quite a lot, when it's done by people who know what they're doing. Increasingly I think I may just not like shaky-cam. It has its applications, but it's not a good default. I guess maybe if you want to see the world through GoPro, you'll be fine with it.
The numinous moment for me was the plane gliding without fuel over the empty beach. And to a lesser extent, the propaganda fliers fluttering down from the sky.
The soundlessly gliding plane was part of it for me.
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Also I have motion sickness and there was a stretch of years where shaky-cam was so extreme that I literally could not see many movies I wanted to see. I spent half of one of the Bourne movies sitting simmering with my eyes shut.
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I would accept this exchange. We can keep as much shaky-cam as there is new black-and-white these days.
I spent half of one of the Bourne movies sitting simmering with my eyes shut.
Bleh.
I do not get motion sickness, but Dunkirk on first viewing actually gave me some trouble parsing action sequences, which is how I knew it had gone too far. I didn't have that problem the second time around, but it still felt unnecessary.
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On the other hand, when it gets to the point where the technique interferes with understanding, yes, that is a problem.
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It worked for me some of the time; I think it interfered more. It worked better for my mother. It totally wrecked the experience for at least one person I've heard from. I understand what Nolan wanted to do with it and why. I'm just not sure it was the most successful tradeoff with the technique possible.
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Yeah, I do not disagree with that, either.
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Thank you! If I can just sleep first, I think the vampires should be a lot of fun.
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< hugs > Hopefully Fall will help?
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Thank you. I hope so!
*hugs*
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Nine
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I would happily see that again in a theater. I don't think I can quite reconcile myself to Constantine, but I've never heard of Conceiving Ada and that sounds potentially interesting.
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As for Conceiving Ada -- oo, nice, Tilda as Ava Lovelace. Shall totally Netflix that now that I know it exists.
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I was not able to disassociate it from the comic the one time I caught it on TV with friends, but since what we got when we changed the channel was the 2005 Fantastic Four, we watched the rest of Constantine anyway.
(I'm not Catholic myself, but do they still refuse funeral mass for suicides? I thought at some point they had decided to give the deceased the benefit of the doubt.)
I asked the internet and according to Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in San Francisco, the Church now recognizes that suicide is an act deserving of compassion rather than condemnation and does not deny Catholic burial to those who died by it. Which is nice to know!
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(I'm currently watching the BBC's 1977 Count Dracula, but not overnight. My brain doesn't work properly even when I do sleep...)
And re. Dunkirk is good to have fictional things that keep coming back to you in that way.
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Thank you on both fronts! I suppose it's conceivable that I will faceplant during the 1958 Hammer Dracula, since it's the one I've seen multiple times before, but I suspect Peter Cushing will keep me awake.
(I'm currently watching the BBC's 1977 Count Dracula, but not overnight. My brain doesn't work properly even when I do sleep...)
To be honest, I try not to watch movies overnight except in marathon contexts. I loved that Dracula and Renfield.
And re. Dunkirk is good to have fictional things that keep coming back to you in that way.
Yes. It means there's something about them that lasts. I've been lucky: I've never been obsessed with something that years later I looked back on and couldn't figure out what I'd been thinking. Sometimes it no longer resonated for me the same way, but that's different from a total collapse.
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To be honest, I try not to watch movies overnight except in marathon contexts. I loved that Dracula and Renfield.
It's being very good! I'm enjoying it a lot so far (Dracula has just made it to Whitby and bitten Lucy). My heart obv. still belongs to the creaky b&w ITV 60s version made on a budget of about tuppence and only one day's studio time, of course, but there's nothing new about that. ;-D
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I accept Peter Cushing gifsets even if I haven't recently slept through him! Thank you.
My heart obv. still belongs to the creaky b&w ITV 60s version made on a budget of about tuppence and only one day's studio time, of course, but there's nothing new about that.
I still need to see that. Denholm Elliott.
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Oh, yes. He's rather an enjoyably troll-y Dracula. After all, if you can turn up at dinner parties and mock people while making vampire innuendoes as well as biting them, why not? It' an odd one, because it does feel a little as if someone put a bunch of my favourite 60s TV actors in a studio somewhere and told them to do Dracula (possibly without much prior warning and enjoyably random actor choices), but on the other hand it's also in outline it's a really interesting and well-cast adaptation with lots of thoughtful and imaginative touches and the two filmed sequences are lovely - it does make you wonder what it could have been like if they'd had the cash and the time to do it all on film. Par for the course for British 1960s home-grown telly, really, but still.
Whereas the 1977 (so far), despite being studio-bound, isn't any less watchable than most films of the period, which is pretty impressive for the BBC. (Although if a person could take away some of their SFX budget and give it to the 1968 version for use in more location sequences, we would have the best of all possible worlds. Probably.)
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And before that, I hope the vampire marathon is enjoyable. ^_^
The air is full of autumn here too. I always try to tell myself it's not really fall until equinox, in the name of clinging to summer, but I think it's undeniable this year.
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Thank you!
And before that, I hope the vampire marathon is enjoyable.
And also thank you! I just want to be awake enough at the end of it to say something intelligent.
The air is full of autumn here too. I always try to tell myself it's not really fall until equinox, in the name of clinging to summer, but I think it's undeniable this year.
It's amazing how fast it flipped. Thanks, climate change? No, thanks.