(no subject)
Dec. 17th, 2011 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charloweenBriefly:
- it gets dark here at, like, 4pm. It's been raining every day, and it's cold-but-not-snow-cold. Aaaaaah, this is the England I was promised.
- I've also been promised/threatened with a trip to Stonehenge over Christmas. "Because there's not a lot to do" in Wiltshire... except look at really, really old (mysterious) rocks. (Dude, seriously: that's fine with me.)
- spent a few hours today reading ethnographies of museums, collectors and collecting. One was helpful, one was boring, one was dismally patronizing, and the fourth had a photograph of anonymous Victorian women with a caption something like (as bad as), "People are often the most important subject of history". I didn't get past that page.
- Saw Hugo, The Deep Blue Sea and The Awakening in theatres this week. That's one film set in the 30s Paris about early film history (the archival clips were beautiful, but if I'd been watching it on TV I wouldn't have gone past the first five minutes and that would've been the right choice), one set in 50s London during rationing (great performances, bleak story based on a Terence Rattigan play), and one set in 20s rural Scotland (EXCELLENT creepy ghost story with scares in all the right places, also Dominic West as a history teacher yes please).
I enjoyed The Awakening the most: it was satisfying in ways the others weren't. Characters I could care about, child actors who were actually competent, engaging story, that kind of thing. All three have visual appeal, but Hugo was full of the camera prancing around and showing off. Sometimes invisible classical Hollywood style has advantages. Sometimes directors with a shiny new toy - let's call it the Lucas Syndrome? - forget they have actors to direct, not just pixels.
I could say more (might do, later on) but it's nearly 1am and well past my bedtime.
- it gets dark here at, like, 4pm. It's been raining every day, and it's cold-but-not-snow-cold. Aaaaaah, this is the England I was promised.
- I've also been promised/threatened with a trip to Stonehenge over Christmas. "Because there's not a lot to do" in Wiltshire... except look at really, really old (mysterious) rocks. (Dude, seriously: that's fine with me.)
- spent a few hours today reading ethnographies of museums, collectors and collecting. One was helpful, one was boring, one was dismally patronizing, and the fourth had a photograph of anonymous Victorian women with a caption something like (as bad as), "People are often the most important subject of history". I didn't get past that page.
- Saw Hugo, The Deep Blue Sea and The Awakening in theatres this week. That's one film set in the 30s Paris about early film history (the archival clips were beautiful, but if I'd been watching it on TV I wouldn't have gone past the first five minutes and that would've been the right choice), one set in 50s London during rationing (great performances, bleak story based on a Terence Rattigan play), and one set in 20s rural Scotland (EXCELLENT creepy ghost story with scares in all the right places, also Dominic West as a history teacher yes please).
I enjoyed The Awakening the most: it was satisfying in ways the others weren't. Characters I could care about, child actors who were actually competent, engaging story, that kind of thing. All three have visual appeal, but Hugo was full of the camera prancing around and showing off. Sometimes invisible classical Hollywood style has advantages. Sometimes directors with a shiny new toy - let's call it the Lucas Syndrome? - forget they have actors to direct, not just pixels.
I could say more (might do, later on) but it's nearly 1am and well past my bedtime.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-19 02:44 pm (UTC)- Stonehenge! I was somewhat doubtful and afraid it'd be too tourist trap-y for me, but it was awesome. Very touristy, yes, but still superbly cool. Old rocks FTW!
- I saw Sherlock Holmes? It was fun and made me giggle, which is pretty much all that can be said. RDJ and Jude Law have awesome chemistry, but I spent much of the movie wishing it was Bennedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. I haven't seen Hugo yet, but the book it's based on--The Invention of Hugo Cabaret--is AWESOME. It's the only chapter book to win a Caldecott (illustration award), and was eligible for the Caldecott in the first place because the fantastic illustrations continue the narrative, rather than complement it (that makes far more sense when you see the book). So cool!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-19 03:20 pm (UTC)I'm also going to heavily hint that going into Salisbury itself would be okay, seeing as the cathedral is a) old, b) famous, c) pretty, d) complete and e) the location of the best-preserved original copy of the Magna Carta. *steeples fingers*
Going into Hugo I didn't know it was based on a book, but in the few minutes leading up to Hugo following George through the graveyard I kept thinking why isn't this a graphic novel? this would be so much better as a graphic novel. pictures = good, framing = gorgeous, human actors = not abstract enough for the story
The BF is all about silent cinema, so he had lots of things to say about the quality of the pre-30s archival clips, "Must've struck new prints from the original negatives; probably only showed that part in colour because X is still in the middle of restoring and recolourizing," etc. But the rest of it felt like forcing film people to sit through a flaccid narrative for only a few minutes of crisp, beautifully-restored archival clips... sigh.
I suppose with a book you can skim past annoying child and get to the good stuff ie film history. With the film version you can't flip past every agonizing minute of bad child acting and have to sit through beginnings and endings of shots and sequences that really didn't need to be there. I have thoughts, but mostly feelings.