One Day Off, One Day On
Jan. 26th, 2009 01:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustSo, this week in fandom: The Merlin is proliferating, as I knew it would. Pretty soon it'll be everywhere. Why I should care I don't know, but...seems I do. My own annoyance is annoying me.
Anyhow--no writing yesterday, as I sort of knew there wouldn't be. Instead, Cal went to Mom's and Steve and I went to see The Unborn, which (say it together with me now) Isn't Vaguely As Bad As You've Been Told, though it does suffer mightily from having been framed specifically for what Goyer et al assume is its best demographic, ie little stick-figure chicas like Odette Yustman, their dumb friends and their dumb-but-nice boyfriends, all of whom inhabit a wish-fulfillment world of privilege and anti-intellectualism. It reminds me once more of just how much I ended up liking Stir of Echoes, especially in retrospect, because its main characters were A) working-class and B) adults with C) actual problems who were D) capable of thinking their way out of a plastic bag, especially if said bag was tightening around their head. Is this too much to ask for? That things have beginnings, middles and ends, that actions have consequences, that themes get addressed for more than five minutes after stick-figure sex? OTOH, glad to see iconography that's not Christian for once, and nice to see that faith of any sort apparently counts for something in a crunch (especially considering how fucking difficult it is to come by/maintain under pressure).
I also rented and watched Righteous Kill (not shit, but not stunning--it was written by the same dude who wrote Inside Man, and he only seems to be interested in one highly specific form of cinematic storytelling) and The Chair (a well-executed microbudget Canadian ghost story with very interesting side-pockets, particularly the subplot yoinked directly from Poes' "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"). And I ended up buying End of the Line, a Toronto/Montreal co-pro horror movie which took top prize at FantAsia last year...it undercuts itself with some very low-cost set dec and uniformly fake-y acting, possibly a result of the director directing in his second language, but it looks damn good, moves well, and has a nice/nasty third-act sucker-punch. As ever, I think it played here once, during the TIFF; probably wouldn't've made much of an impact even if it had gotten a release, but still. Same old same old.
And what else: Oh, turns out one of my most talented former students has been making porn since he graduated; the good part is, he's built up a fair bit of gelt that way, and wants to use it to break back into "legitimate" movie-making. I remember joking about this in class as a "smart" plan of action a couple of times, but swear I had nothing to do with this general outcome. And I clocked about 500 words today going back over what I wrote on Friday, thus making it--finally--to the end of Chapter Three. I'll be doing some more planning tomorrow, and probably going back to "Strange Weight" for a while on the side, but at least I'm moving forward at a reasonable clip.
That's all, folks. I need to shut down, pack for tomorrow, get up early.
Anyhow--no writing yesterday, as I sort of knew there wouldn't be. Instead, Cal went to Mom's and Steve and I went to see The Unborn, which (say it together with me now) Isn't Vaguely As Bad As You've Been Told, though it does suffer mightily from having been framed specifically for what Goyer et al assume is its best demographic, ie little stick-figure chicas like Odette Yustman, their dumb friends and their dumb-but-nice boyfriends, all of whom inhabit a wish-fulfillment world of privilege and anti-intellectualism. It reminds me once more of just how much I ended up liking Stir of Echoes, especially in retrospect, because its main characters were A) working-class and B) adults with C) actual problems who were D) capable of thinking their way out of a plastic bag, especially if said bag was tightening around their head. Is this too much to ask for? That things have beginnings, middles and ends, that actions have consequences, that themes get addressed for more than five minutes after stick-figure sex? OTOH, glad to see iconography that's not Christian for once, and nice to see that faith of any sort apparently counts for something in a crunch (especially considering how fucking difficult it is to come by/maintain under pressure).
I also rented and watched Righteous Kill (not shit, but not stunning--it was written by the same dude who wrote Inside Man, and he only seems to be interested in one highly specific form of cinematic storytelling) and The Chair (a well-executed microbudget Canadian ghost story with very interesting side-pockets, particularly the subplot yoinked directly from Poes' "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"). And I ended up buying End of the Line, a Toronto/Montreal co-pro horror movie which took top prize at FantAsia last year...it undercuts itself with some very low-cost set dec and uniformly fake-y acting, possibly a result of the director directing in his second language, but it looks damn good, moves well, and has a nice/nasty third-act sucker-punch. As ever, I think it played here once, during the TIFF; probably wouldn't've made much of an impact even if it had gotten a release, but still. Same old same old.
And what else: Oh, turns out one of my most talented former students has been making porn since he graduated; the good part is, he's built up a fair bit of gelt that way, and wants to use it to break back into "legitimate" movie-making. I remember joking about this in class as a "smart" plan of action a couple of times, but swear I had nothing to do with this general outcome. And I clocked about 500 words today going back over what I wrote on Friday, thus making it--finally--to the end of Chapter Three. I'll be doing some more planning tomorrow, and probably going back to "Strange Weight" for a while on the side, but at least I'm moving forward at a reasonable clip.
That's all, folks. I need to shut down, pack for tomorrow, get up early.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 03:10 am (UTC)As someone who enjoyed the remake, I still feel compelled to point out the original Insomnia (1997, dir. Erik Skjoldbjærg) exceeds the American version in pretty much every single way. It's maybe the first movie I've seen which accurately transfers to its audience the sense of always snapping awake and never quite coming up to speed that comes with serious sleep deprivation; it is not an effect so much as an integral component of the film and it's awesome. It is also beautifully filmed, with an ambient electronic score that sounds like the loops your brain gets stuck in, working the same image over and over. And Stellan Skarsgård is one of my small gods of acting by now.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 04:13 am (UTC)It's available from Criterion. If the price of DVDs ever drops as precipitously as the shift in audiovisual technology keeps promising, I'm picking up a copy.
Did you ever see The Killing Gene?
No; this is the same film as WΔZ? I'm not even sure it came out anywhere near me. Speak to me of it.