Monday Summary: 2010, Pt. 1

[handful_ofdust]

Still 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'.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Devil should be out on DVD soonish, I'd think. The Objective is very odd, in a good way--not a found footage movie, for once, but it definitely still derives from the In Search Of... mock-doc fascinations that fed into Blair Witch. There's also a soupcon de 1970s sci fi going on there, almost a Peter Weir vibe, and a neat-o apolitical attitude towards Afghanistan in general. And Blood Creek is just fun, crazy pulp--has a very Hellboyish vibe, what with Michael Fassbender popping up as a Thule Society dude stranded in backwoods America, a Viking Blood Whisperer using rune magic to keep himself alive and evoke some huge Lovecraftian conjunction, not to mention growing a third eye while wearing a coat made out of his ancestors' bones. Well worth the seeking out, maybe on Netflix.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha, In Search Of! I need to track down that show.