Category: art

Oooh, I like Ben Hammersley. Just look at this, about Petrarch. Now that’s entertaining reading.

Well, darned if this isn’t good news! Rob Wittig‘s erstwhile e-mailed novella Blue Company is now available online. Originally, you had to subscribe to it, and it got mailed to you every day for a month. Ingenious use of the medium, and it worked really well. While reading it on the Web might not be quite the same thing, it’s still brilliant. I highly recommend it.

And while you’re at it, do check out Scott Rettberg‘s sort-of sequel to Blue Company, called Kind of Blue.

Perhaps I should take notes every time it occurs to me to blog about something; I feel as though my brain is currently missing some crucial topics that I’ve thought about putting out there in the past couple of days.

Went to see the Trilogy. That’s right, took my little not-terribly-crazy-about-LOTR-in-the-first-place self and, at a friend’s goading and offer of ticket, rode out into western Massachusetts to sit through roughly twelve hours of Movies. The following offers no spoilers, except for one possible place, where I name the topic of the third movie’s opening scene.

I have to say, I liked the experience. Had seen the first film in an airplane, and thought it a waste of three hours of my life even in an airplane – and now I know why; mostly, the appeal that Fellowship of the Ring holds for me is scenic. My goodness, but I want to go to New Zealand.

The second movie I’d been reasonably fond of before; I mean, Legolas on a medieval snowboard, what else does a girl need? It had seemed a bit fluffy, which was okay for once: I’d gone in expecting that. (Usually, I have little interest in eye candy.) Yesterday’s re-viewing confirmed that: nothing new, and not much that actively held my interest.

Return of the King was okay. The twenty million endings annoyed me a bit, not at all a good editing choice. They were each of them aesthetically appealing enough, but that isn’t justification for lumping all of them one on top of the other, with long fade-out transitions that get old quickly.

One thing I really, really did not appreciate is the Middle Eastern imagery in some of the Evil Guys’ costume choices. It’s a choice, and as costumes the black face veils and turban-like headgear looked wicked cool, but that was the only hint at The Arab World, and it was presented in a negative context, and frankly, I’m tired of the goddamn propaganda. It makes me cranky, doubly so if it’s unconscious.

Elijah Wood also seems to have little acting ability. Sure, he can do agonized okay, but kindness and wisdom are foreign concepts to his acting range. He was saccharine in places, and his relationship with Sam was more patronizing than it needed to be. (Although I liked Sean Astin’s portrayal of Sam’s relative simplemindedness, it would’ve been nice to see Sam’s wisdom and confidence grow, after all of his adventures.)

With the caveat that the furthest I got in the paper trilogy was about fifty pages into The Two Towers, I was disappointed with the turn Gollum’s character took in the third film. For all of his inner conflict, brilliantly presented in the second part of the epic, there was no clear resolution in the third. His good self did not clearly struggle to survive through to the end; and there was no clear triumph of the evil self either. Considering that the movie opens with a flashback to how Smeagol got hold of the ring, I thought they’d actually, you know, do something interesting with the character.

All of this said, though, I liked it. The photography is stunning; the soundtrack is both grand and unobtrusive; and, I admit it, the eye-candy factor is high, when it comes to the actors. I mean, Orlando Bloom. swoon.

Unrelatedly, Sir Ian McKellan is impressive as Gandalf, through and through, including both his transformation in the second film and the change over to a fierce, down-to-business attitude in the third. Cate Blanchett as Galadriel is not bad, though there were a couple of moments where she seemed to try too hard. Both Mortensen and Rhys-Davies did what they could with the roles of Aragorn and Gimli, although the post-cut material they were left to work with was rather pitifully poor (fault of the director &c.). Liv Tyler as Arwen… well, she’s as pretty and vacant as ever. Miranda Otto as Eowyn kicked all kinds of ass. Merry and Pippin were just what they needed to be, no more, no less; although I did find Pippin’s accent and naivety surprisingly endearing and not annoying. And finally, Mr. Weaving was great as Elrond but really shouldn’t have taken on two roles so major at once, both requiring him to use a non-native accent. Every once in a while, I caught glimpses of Agent Smith in his speech, and giggled.

Shelley Jackson announces Skin. Excellent idea, not to mention an excellent writer. What, you haven’t read The Melancholy of Anatomy? It’s hypnotic. She’s written and drawn a children’s book, too. Hers is some of the most interesting contemporary fiction I’ve read.

The war movie is a 1957 film by… shame on me for having already forgotten his name. It’s called Cranes Flying (? – Letiat Zhuravli in Russian), and is about the second world war. It won all kinds of awards all over the world when it came out, including Cannes, Vienna I think, Canada, USA — was relatively well-known in the West.

Continue reading “Cranes Flying”