sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2018-03-02 02:28 pm

I've been drowning the waves for you

It is grey and pouring and the winds keep slamming the telephone lines outside the window, a real nor'easter. We saw the T entrances near the waterfront piled high with sandbags last night. Now the downtown is underwater. The Aquarium station flooded. The glittering rich playground of the Seaport has the sea itself in the streets. I approve of this last in theory because the Seaport as a symbol of Boston's gentrification angers me, but since it sounds as though the storm is hitting the construction workers harder than the suits, in practice I'm glum. I don't know how long this weather is supposed to last. I'm hoping it will blow off by tomorrow morning: the Somerville caucus is being held at the high school and I want to be there, to stand as delegate again to the convention this summer and choose a gubernatorial candidate who's even better than an artichoke with ethics. My sleep schedule is borked, but I slept almost eight hours. The cats are in full rainy-day hibernation mode. I cannot blame them.

1. The current issue of Poetry comes with a mixtape. I have not yet tried listening as I read, but of the poems I am particularly struck by Carla Panciera's "And Standing before Those Canvases, He Said, I Would Feel This Tingling," Danez Smith's "sometimes i wish i felt the side effects," Camonghne Felix's "Willing in the Orisha," and Martha Silano's "Ode to Autocorrect."

2. Musicophilia has curated a lot of library music. I feel people who like Ghost Box should know.

3. Tracy Butler draws faces. Man, Boris Karloff had some recognizable eyebrows.

4. The HFA has announced—but not yet detailed—a series of German Films 1945–1957. Please God, let this include a print of Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951). The illustrating image seems to point that way.

In the meantime, while the organizing theme of Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination seems a reach when some of these titles were made long before there was an internet to be anxious about, any series which offers me an opportunity to catch both WarGames (1983) and Strange Days (1995) on a big screen is just fine by me. When a friend asked me to outline a (purely speculative) 'Thon of my own, both of those films were first-choice programming.

A series of Wim Wenders is also a fine thing. I imagine everyone on the planet will come to Wings of Desire (1983), including me—Otto Sander turned up in the first half of Das Boot (1981) last night, reminding me of how much I love him as Cassiel—but it might provide an equally good excuse to try for Paris, Texas (1984), The American Friend (1977), and Until the End of the World (1991), which I have been generally meaning to see on grounds of Harry Dean Stanton, Patricia Highsmith, and Talking Heads.

5. I know the title of this photograph is "Moonwalking," but she looks like the deep sea to me.
moon_custafer: sexy bookshop mnager Dorothy Malone (Acme Bookshop)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2018-03-03 02:01 am (UTC)(link)
The Net I describe a bit below. Copycat may well have aged better, in that one of the heroines is an FBI profiler turned recluse after her identity became famous and every serial killer and serial-killer-fanboy in the world began obsessing over her; she never leaves her apartment and communicates with the outside world through the internet and a loyal gay personal assistant (who naturally doesn’t survive to the end of the movie.) I can’t recall how she can afford to do so — I think she was actually attacked and nearly killed at a law-enforcement conference, so possibly she won a big worker’s-comp lawsuit against the FBI, or maybe she does well-paid security-consultant stuff online, or maybe it’s just the movie thing where characters never have to worry about money unless it’s a plot point that they do. Anyway, staying in ultimately can’t stop one of her “fans” from sending her messages* and crime-scene photos from the string of murders he’s committing to get her attention, so a pair of detectives (one male, one female) are sent to simultaneously protect her and enlist her help in catching the killer, who is deliberately staging each murder as a tribute to a different famous serial killer, and who is being mentored and encouraged from prison by the most notorious criminal she caught in her earlier career. Semi-spoiler — while the copycat killer/stalker is ultimately killed at the end, the epilogue shows her real antagonist, still in prison, answering his fan mail and encouraging new wannabes to go after her, like some kind of serial-killer Gamergate.
*The online messages from “Peter Kürten“ are all made of quicktime clips and crude sixteen-bit animated computer graphics, and they are Creepy As Hell.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-03-06 02:21 am (UTC)(link)
It's a good movie if you just ignore the final five minutes, which I do. It's worth watching for Weaver and Hunter's relationship.