Epeolatrix
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Posts posted by Epeolatrix
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I'd always wanted to be one of the Addams Family: a loving family, awesome house, and wonderfully morbid. Now it's also things like I envy Hannibal's handwriting, Hannibal's office/study/library, and Vanessa's wardrobe (Penny Dreadful).
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Another famously lost film isn't technically lost — but thanks to embarrassment and rights issues it might not be seen for decades — is The Day The Clown Cried. It stars Jerry Lewis as a German clown named Helmut Doork who mocks Hitler and gets put in a concentration camp. He becomes an entertainer to the Jewish children of the camp right up to the point where he accompanies them into the gas chamber and the door closes behind them. Lewis believes it's a horrible movie that no one should see, but he is said to have given a copy to the Library of Congress with permission for them to screen it in about ten years (presumably after his death). However, since the rights issues are a mess, that might not happen.
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There are movies that have changed over time because there have been different legit edits made available. There's the possibility of a theatrical release, director's cut, airline version, only-on-cable version, and foreign releases. With discs, you add the availability of deleted scenes that we might inadvertently remember as part of the movie.
Manhunter (1986) might be the 'worst' of these. It has at least four versions (Showtime edit, director's cut, and different edits each called the theatrical cut but from different disc releases). They differ mostly in the presence or absence of small scenes, things are in a different order, and there's also a different ending that has a much creepier tone than the theatrical cut.
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Josie and the Pussycats is one of my favorite movies because it's so very snarky and often quotable.
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Other cool small details (some I noticed, some I read about later): Chris picking cotton (from the chair) saved his life. The buck's head mounted on the wall. The singing over the opening credits was partly in Swahili, saying "listen to the ancestors, run away". The Japanese guy at the gathering was an homage to the Japanese guy in Rosemary's Baby. The brother with his banjo was a Deliverance detail, and other movies given a nod were The Stepford Wives, The Shining, and maybe Halloween. It's possible that when Rose's brother put Chris in the choke hold, it was a reference to Radio Raheem's death by that same police choke hold in Do the Right Thing, but then again that used to be a depressingly common tactic with the police.
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I just finished Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day by Joel Selvin. I really liked it for its scene-setting and attention to detail. I knew the very basics of the primary incident (black man murdered at a Rolling Stones concert by a member of the Hell's Angels, who'd been hired to provide security), but wow there was so much else going on.
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It seems the art of the opening credit sequence is dying
There's an entire awesome website called The Art of the Title just about this. Their Exorcist (the movie) post is sadly lacking in detail, but most of the other entries are very interesting.
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Just finished Dahmer Detective: The Interrogation and Investigation That Shocked The World by Patrick Kennedy and Robyn Maharaj. Kennedy is the detective that got Dahmer's confession and later appeared in the documentary The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (currently on Netflix, I believe). After being interviewed for the film, he was encouraged to write a book about his experience. Sadly, he died before he was able to get it published. His co-author cleaned up his manuscript a bit, attached her own article at the end, and self-published the book with his widow's permission.
I liked that it's informative and detailed. I did not like that there was very little in the way of editing. There's a fair amount of repetition that could have been cleaned up. Cases are mentioned with very few victims' names appearing when it really would have been appropriate. There's not even a list at the end! Yes, that info is online, but this book could be so much more authoritative with such a tiny bit of extra work. It reads rather like someone sat next to him and said, "And then what happened? Then what?" and just typed what he said until they got to the place he felt was the end.
That said, I did enjoy the content and the insight into detective work, so for that I can still recommend it.
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The thing I liked most about it was that it was so transparently a movie of grown men who just really wanted to play cowboy. Be the stereotype, ham it up, play with guns, and die heroically / ride off into the sunset with heavy heart and mission completed. It's true that they could have done so with any fantasy Western, but they had the chance to play Magnificent Seven and took it. I thought it was fun, but I went in with no expectations and so was not disappointed.
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This is such an impossible topic, because there are too many films for me to list, but I'd like to recommend Nadja. It's an early 90s vampire film about a pair of vampire siblings, descendants of Dracula, coping with familial alienation after the death of their father. Now add a descendant of Van Helsing, more relationship drama, and a really good soundtrack featuring Portishead and My Bloody Valentine. It's a weird movie, admittedly, but oddly fun and quotable.
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One of my holiday movie-book acquisitions was "The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth" by Danel Olson as part of the exceptional "Studies in the Horror Film" book series. It's a collection of essays about themes of the two movies as well as interviews with actors and other key people involved with the films' production. If you're into critical analyses of film, this features a good set of observations.
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Just finished Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. I liked it, but it covers far more pre-NASA stuff than I had anticipated, and as a result, it sort of felt as if it ended too early. The author admitted that she'd wanted to tell more of the women's stories, but then the book would be too big. I don't even understand how that's a thing, a book that's too big, considering how much needed telling. It's also a bit more dry than the movie seems to be; you learn the women's accomplishments but you don't get as much insight into their personalities.
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I liked it, but it covers far more pre-NASA stuff than I had anticipated, and as a result, it sort of felt as if it ended too early. The author admitted that she'd wanted to tell more of the women's stories, but then the book would be too big. I don't even understand how that's a thing, a book that's too big, considering how much needed telling. It's also a bit more dry than the movie seems to be; you learn the women's accomplishments but you don't get as much insight into their personalities.
[Moving this convo fragment to the Books item "what we are currently reading" because I don't want to derail things here.]
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The movie isn't out yet where I am, so I read the book out of sheer impatience. That only made me want to see it more.
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I didn't think the message was "don't give gifts", I think it was "give something the person wants, not something you want to buy". Using the sock example, my boyfriend's mom bought him socks again, but this year they were Pokemon socks. She thought they were adorable (which they are). He was perplexed because he has no real interest in Pokemon, never mentioned Pokemon to her, and he felt that they were a little embarrassing. For him, the socks were a loss. I, however, play Pokemon Go like an addict and have no belief that my socks are meant to display maturity. I saw the socks as a gain, so he regifted them to me.
The theoretical lesson is that, if we're talking intrinsic value, she could have purchased the Star Trek socks from his wish list instead because he explicitly expressed interest in them. Same financial cost, but greater happiness for the recipient.
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Where is God? And why doesn't she/he send any help in the form of angels as innocent humans are being slaughtered?
The stories are about people and their faith. Sending in angels is the equivalent of having your big brothers fight all your battles for you; effective but it rather misses the point. If angels got involved, we'd end up with the Prophecy series instead of the Exorcist series, with humanity on the sidelines watching. But on a more serious note, every possession story I've ever come across makes it clear that it's is a human struggle against evil. Your faith in God is supposed to be all the strength you need against demonic forces.
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The use of blessed salt in Christianity.
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I always associate David Krumholtz as Wednesday's summer camp friend Joel Glicker in "Addams Family Values" because that's the first thing I saw him in. When it came out. In 1993. Sigh...
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So Victoria is getting punished for the both of them and probably in a far harsher manner than she would have if her fiancé hadn't killed himself.
I'm pretty sure the episode is based on both Myra Hindley (recording while partner commits assault) and Rosemary West (male partner dies, leaving woman to bear the brunt of social outrage), and the way the crime and reaction is described in the show is very much in keeping with English tabloid news treatment of both Hindley and West at the time. One thing I've seen come up in my reading is that they were both more vilified than their partners, because it was seen as a crime not just against society but against nature for them to participate in these kinds of acts. The men were merely human evil, but the women were regarded as on a whole other level of monstrousness and people reacted accordingly.
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I just had a thought. Where are they getting all this blood for the hosts?
Industrial-size quantities of special FX blood; you need something that would wash away easily, given how much damage the hosts are expected to take...
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Just finished How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life by Ruth Goodman. I had binge-watched a bunch of living-history shows she'd been part of (Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, Victorian Pharmacy) and then realized that she'd written a book. It was very interesting and accessible, so if you're interested in Victorian life, it's a great book.
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A problem with that is that words which were once considered quite shocking are harmless today. To get the flavor of cursing, writers have to use words that we consider shocking now.
Regarding Deadwood as an example, "Milch has explained in several interviews that the characters were originally intended to use period slang and swear words. Such words, however, were based heavily on the era's deep religious roots and tended to be more blasphemous than scatological. Instead of being shockingly crude (in keeping with the tone of a frontier mining camp), the results sounded downright comical."
With Westworld, I think it's not that far-fetched to have that much swearing simply due to social evolution and the environment. Common language now is worse than it was thirty years ago, for example, even on broadcast TV. I don't think people will suddenly take a turn for the more genteel as time passes, and the show is set in the future. Similarly, having spent too much time around tech-bros and game designers, I am not surprised at their language.
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On a bit of an X-Files kick lately, so I'm reading deeply in the area of conspiracy theory studies. The current book is "The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory" by Jesse Walker. It's not about the theories themselves, really, it's about the different styles of paranoid thinking, what they mean, and how they affect American politics and culture.
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One really good novel based on a true crime is "Boy A" by Jonathan Trigell. The novel is about a young man in his early 20s just after he has been released from juvenile custody with a new identity after having committed / helped commit one of the most shocking murders in recent English history. Based on the murder of toddler James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys, and the post-crime media hysteria, the book is largely about the young man's struggle to deal with his past, his attempt to make a future, and the extreme difficulty of surviving the ongoing efforts of the media to out him. It was also made into a 2007 movie by the same name starring Andrew Garfield.
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Best Movie Parents
in Everything Else Movies
Gomez and Morticia Addams. They have a passionate relationship with one another after years of marriage, they love their family members unconditionally, and they are very supportive of their children.