Monday Summary: 2010, Pt. 1
Dec. 13th, 2010 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustStill ill--or "eel", as Steve and I have been calling it; one of those "let's make this cute so we can deal!" ideas, sort of like referring to the horrific lassitude we've both been battling as our "slug-bag" (ie, bag o' slug, not exactly great to be inside but really hard to extract one's self from, too)--but I think things may be improving, at least slightly. I'm looking around at other people doing their top whatever for 2010 lists, and realizing that A) unlike usual, I decided early on this year to just not keep a list of everything I'd read and/or seen which B) makes it really hard to recall what might have impressed me in particular, and makes me feel like heigh-ho, maybe nothing much did.
This is getting really bad when it comes to films, because I don't often watch them in the theatre anymore, and even when I do catch up with them on DVD I'm often not as impressed as I'd like to be, maybe because I'm reduced to watching them late at night with the sound off. Earlier this year, in fact, I almost felt like maybe I should stop watching horror films at all, which is like me saying: "Hey, I don't need to eat, per se--I mean, I've probably eaten enough, don't you think? Over thirty years of eating? How different can the next meal possibly be?"
That being said, some horror films do come to mind--ten, at least: House of the Devil, Lake Mungo, Noroi: The Curse (available via Youtube!), Splice, Paranormal Activity 2, The Objective, The Last Exorcism, Devil, Let Me In, and Blood Creek. Want to know more? Ask me.;)
It was interesting seeing the Criterion version of House and the reassembled Metropolis, a film I think I’ve bought, like...three different times in three different packages. I also really enjoyed tripping across various films via Turner Classic Movies, like The Shout, Laughton's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gilda, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. and those Hammer Frankenstein films, plus They Made Me a Fugitive, which was indeed an aMAzing slice of post-WWII Brit-noir. I may reward myself by picking it up on DVD sometime soon. (The original 3:10 to Yuma, OTOH, was a bit of a bust.)
Otherwise...I liked Inception, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Centurion (sorry!), Agora, Winter’s Bone, Valhalla Rising, Predators, The Runaways, Shutter Island, Tangled, The Secret of Kells. Was also not unsatisfied by Edge of Darkness (sorry!), The Crazies, How to Train Your Dragon, Kick-Ass, The Losers, Iron Man 2, Suck and Ondine, though I didn’t hugely love any of them, either. The last thing I saw on my own hook was Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary about Norwegian Black Metal.
Finally, here’s some links:
“Mother Knows Best”, Mother Gothel’s primary toxic aria, from Tangled (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGZrm3dcf0). “...the Plague!” “No!” “Yes!”
The entirety of Marjorie Bowen’s Black Magic as a downloadable .pdf, here (http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1585a.pdf). This is an extremely obscure 1900s supernatural romance novel I once spent two years adapting into a stage-play without any apparent hope of production, just because; subtitled “A Tale of Antichrist”, it spins around the crazily slashy relationship between fellow students of the occult Thierry and Dirk, the Handsome Dr Dan and Herbert West, Necromancer of mediaeval Flanders, eventually taking them all the way from the heart of the Holy Roman Empire to the court of a false pope with Joan-ish undertones. Bowen isn’t much known these days, but I really love her style--she wrote compulsively under several different pseudonyms, supporting her entire family single-penned for most of her life (quite literally, in that she sold her first novel at age fifteen).
A list of obsolete english words that should make a comeback, here (http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-obsolete-english-words-that-should-make-a-comeback/). I think I’ve seen quite a few corraded arguments in my time, and definitely felt myself set all of a jargogle by them.
Okay...off to make the coffee, then maybe hack at "Lagan" a bit. Time's a-wastin'.
This is getting really bad when it comes to films, because I don't often watch them in the theatre anymore, and even when I do catch up with them on DVD I'm often not as impressed as I'd like to be, maybe because I'm reduced to watching them late at night with the sound off. Earlier this year, in fact, I almost felt like maybe I should stop watching horror films at all, which is like me saying: "Hey, I don't need to eat, per se--I mean, I've probably eaten enough, don't you think? Over thirty years of eating? How different can the next meal possibly be?"
That being said, some horror films do come to mind--ten, at least: House of the Devil, Lake Mungo, Noroi: The Curse (available via Youtube!), Splice, Paranormal Activity 2, The Objective, The Last Exorcism, Devil, Let Me In, and Blood Creek. Want to know more? Ask me.;)
It was interesting seeing the Criterion version of House and the reassembled Metropolis, a film I think I’ve bought, like...three different times in three different packages. I also really enjoyed tripping across various films via Turner Classic Movies, like The Shout, Laughton's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gilda, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. and those Hammer Frankenstein films, plus They Made Me a Fugitive, which was indeed an aMAzing slice of post-WWII Brit-noir. I may reward myself by picking it up on DVD sometime soon. (The original 3:10 to Yuma, OTOH, was a bit of a bust.)
Otherwise...I liked Inception, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Centurion (sorry!), Agora, Winter’s Bone, Valhalla Rising, Predators, The Runaways, Shutter Island, Tangled, The Secret of Kells. Was also not unsatisfied by Edge of Darkness (sorry!), The Crazies, How to Train Your Dragon, Kick-Ass, The Losers, Iron Man 2, Suck and Ondine, though I didn’t hugely love any of them, either. The last thing I saw on my own hook was Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary about Norwegian Black Metal.
Finally, here’s some links:
“Mother Knows Best”, Mother Gothel’s primary toxic aria, from Tangled (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGZrm3dcf0). “...the Plague!” “No!” “Yes!”
The entirety of Marjorie Bowen’s Black Magic as a downloadable .pdf, here (http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1585a.pdf). This is an extremely obscure 1900s supernatural romance novel I once spent two years adapting into a stage-play without any apparent hope of production, just because; subtitled “A Tale of Antichrist”, it spins around the crazily slashy relationship between fellow students of the occult Thierry and Dirk, the Handsome Dr Dan and Herbert West, Necromancer of mediaeval Flanders, eventually taking them all the way from the heart of the Holy Roman Empire to the court of a false pope with Joan-ish undertones. Bowen isn’t much known these days, but I really love her style--she wrote compulsively under several different pseudonyms, supporting her entire family single-penned for most of her life (quite literally, in that she sold her first novel at age fifteen).
A list of obsolete english words that should make a comeback, here (http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-obsolete-english-words-that-should-make-a-comeback/). I think I’ve seen quite a few corraded arguments in my time, and definitely felt myself set all of a jargogle by them.
Okay...off to make the coffee, then maybe hack at "Lagan" a bit. Time's a-wastin'.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 03:09 pm (UTC)Why are we apologizing for Edge of Darkness? I thought that was pretty ok, for a Gibson action movie, and thought the end was great.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 04:22 pm (UTC)How closely is it related to the original miniseries? Which I have not seen either, but I've wanted to ever since I read that it goes completely speculative bonkers in the last reel.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:03 pm (UTC)Thanks for the reminder.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:41 pm (UTC)You did, but I don't fault you for not remembering; it wasn't a review so much as a slightly dazed attempt to catalogue the breadth and depth of weirdness in the film, and failing.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:47 pm (UTC)Since you don't tag your entries, can I ask how you search them? Usually when I want to find something in your journal, I remember more or less when the discussion happened, and then I just go through the month's entries until I hit the right one. Is that what you do (application of brute force), or do you have another method?
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:59 pm (UTC)I get comment notifications; they contain the text of the original post or comment; they get downloaded to my e-mail, which is then searchable. It isn't a flawless system, since it requires that someone respond to whatever I said in order for me to be able to find it again, but it's worked for the last five years. The idea of going back and tagging all of my entries with classifications or names or dates just seems both daunting and superfluous at this point.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 06:03 pm (UTC)I certainly wouldn't expect you to go back and tag them all! I'm not happy with my own tagging method, but I'm not going to change it at this point. (My method was to put in tags for items in the post, e.g., if it has trees in it, I may tag it with "trees." If I had it to do over again, I'd try to make tags for the overarching concept in the entry--but then again, that would require being able to say what that concept was (and would presuppose that the entries had an organizing concept).)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:04 pm (UTC)