poukledden

Grrr. Is all I can say. But then, I'm not really on board with the idea of live action versions of anime movies. The potential for lame is too great. Like, you know, Keanu Reeves being cast.

So here was my Saturday: 10 1/2 hours at work, legs burning with pain by the end (damn those hard floors). Home to vegetate and relax and...not sleep. I was desperately exhuasted, and couldn't sleep.

So, you know, somewhere around 3 am I gave up and decided to at least do something, in the hopes that if I did something and didn't think about sleep, sleep would sneak up on me. Which is why I ran rsync to backup my home directory on my computer, then grabbed the Intrepid Ibex Ubuntu disk I had burned for myself and got to work. Booted up on the disk, and did a complete reformat and install. The end result is what I had hoped: a small host of niggling little problems I had been having on my computer vanished. All programs recognize both optical drives. I can launch my preferred program for movie watching on DVD insert. I can install and delete themes in the Appearance control panel. All the little things that had been breaking are now unbroke. Apparently a year of playing, installing and uninstalling various things (including KDE at one point), plus two distribution upgrades, had done a bit of damage.

I also reclaimed a ton of disk space, which doesn't suck.

What is amazing is how painless it was, even in a hugely sleep-deprived state. The install was painless, and the rest -- instalilng a number of programs I use that aren't in the standard setup, setting up desktop effects, etc -- was a breeze. I had the computer up and running again in less than an hour, and mostly back to the way I like it later in the day, after i had collapsed on the bed and finally gotten to sleep for a while.

I remember when doing clean installs sucked ass. Especially when I had Windows, and had to install Windows and then all the drivers, one by one. And I didn't have an external harddive, so had all my music and files backed up on CDs. This way is much, much nicer.

And, as I said, it did finally bring me to a point where I could sleep. I was helped in this by Spud, who lay in my lap while I fixed the computer, purring and being warm and generally relaxing. Cats are Good Things.

And yesterday I watched the first episode of Cosmos and then Topper and Topper Returns. This was goodness.

The ninth season MST3K episode "Werewolf"?

My new fav episode. EVAH. I so needed this tonight. I can't believe I had never seen this one.

Destiny. Fritz Lang, 1921

The short and skinny: a young, madly in love ooo look at the kitties kind of couple meet Death in a small mountain town, who proceeds to make off with the Handsome Husband. The Pretty Wife takes hemlock to enter Death's Domain and demand her man back. Death makes a bargain -- there are three life candles about to go out. In a high stakes game of real time strategy live action role-playing, she must save at least one of them. We then get three stories. In each of them, she is the heroine, trying to save her lover who is fated to die. The stories take place in Arabia, China, and Italy, and give you a good taste of early 1920s Construction of the Exotic Other. But it's all good fun, despite the frequent OMG Did He Really Do That On Purpose? feeling.

I'm not giving much away by saying that she fails. Death gives her one last chance, which involves bringing him a life that isn't at its end yet. I won't say anything more, except to note the the hospital burning down wasn't really her fault.

It's a wonderful story, and a moving meditation on death and loss. It's hard, too, not to be moved by Death's fervent desire to finally be conquered. It's a lovely image, Death seeking desperately to fail, at last, even if only once.

You'd think -- oh, you'd think -- that having done this before, I'd know not to do it again:

To wit, one should not, not, never ever ever, read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House late at night. Especially when, say, you're just getting to that part when Eleanor and Theodora experience the knocking on the door -- you know, the knocking so hard that it seems like the door will shatter? The knocking that the men don't hear because they've been chasing a mysterious beast?

Seriously had things crawling over at least 20 different spines, and the room suddenly seemed very small, and my cat a very inadequate method of defense (since, you know, he'd just cower under the futon or in the bathroom if some Big Nasty Spooky Thing came a knock knock knockin' at my door).

So, yeah. It's late, I'm very alone in my little apartment, and something is going to eat me. Eeep.

In other news, I am now the very happy owner of the Frankenstein legacy collection. All 5 Universal movies! I really, really want to get the Wolfman one, too.

The bad news -- I couldn't go running tonight.

The good news -- because after I got home from work the heavens they did open, and there be a deluge.

Or, should I say, the storm was very thunder and lightning oh my and then it started to rain and it was glorious, and has now been raining for about 2 and a half hours, pretty much nonstop.

Sweet.

So, instead, I curled up with Fingersmith, which I had been wanting to watch for a while (having loved the earlier Tipping the Velvet). Which reminded me once again that I really have to actually *read* Sarah Waters sometime, instead of just watching the BBC dramatizations of her books.

Anyway, it was delicious fun, very different from Tipping the Velvet, and has me thinking thinky thoughts, which is always a good thing. I keep finding myself drawn to this whole issue about how power corrupts human relationships, and I get deeply embedded in stories that deal with that issue. It might be bloggy material sometime, either here or on Atheist A Go-Go!.

I may be the only person in the world who could find deep points of convergence in the movie Wristcutters and Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below, or would even think of trying*, but there you are. (short form: Kneller's happy camp, Frank, ferals, top down vs bottom up, individual connection vs mass community).

It could all be summed up in the thought that keeps coming at me from different directions, literature and art and movies and random encounters and conversations, that the radical revolution takes place in the meeting of hearts.

See Wristcutters. A quirky, dark comedy about the afterlife of suicides, with a soundtrack composed of Gogol Bordello, Tom Waits and a bunch of artists who commited suicide (Joy Division! Christian Death! That guy who wrote Gloomy Sunday!). And it has Tom Waits playing that type of Tom Waits character that he plays so, so well. And it also proves that Gogol Bordello is the Cure for All Woes, which explains why the first thing I did after watching the movie was firing up Emusic and putting their album Mutli Contra Culti, which has at least 2 of the songs from the movie, on my saved for later list. Come August 5th or so, that sucker is mine.

(*well, actually, I didn't try. These things just happen in my brain.)

The other night I watched Father Frost, a Russo-Finnish coproduction from 1964. This would be the second of two Russian movies that MST3K did -- this one appearing as Jack Frost, because apparently the American company didn't know from jack.

The confession, as some of you may recall from me talking about Sadko (The Magic Voyage of Sinbad in the Americanized nightmare that MST3K riffed to hell and gone), was that Jack Frost was an episode that I always liked, as much for the movie as for the jokes. Sure, it was bad, but in a not so bad way, if that makes sense.  Kinda cute in some ways.

This DVD version had some advantages over the copy that MST3K worked with. The movie has been cleaned up, with sharper images and a clearer soundtrack. And you can watch it with the original Russian and do subtitles. That takes care of the bad dubbing that plagued the American version. The result?

Ya know, fun. Oh, it's bad in many ways. Simplistic, cheap, annoying songs. But really kind of sweet in a way, done with  a certain amount of gusto. I'm not going to say it's a great movie. There have certainly been many much better fairy tale movies. But this one is worth a look.

It's interesting to note that Father Frost came out a decade after Sadko, post-Stalin. And it shows. Where Sadko has the mandatory Stalinist junk thrown in to placate the censors, Father Frost just goes out and tries to tell a whimsical fairy tale. It's a movie, I suspect, that would have at least gotten frowns from the Stalinists, if not something more severe. If only for that, it's interesting to watch these two movies, both dealing with very un-Bolshevik material, and see how the political atmosphere affected them.

1 -- I had forgotten how much I loved this silly, silly movie. Even with Ben Stein showing his ugly little weasel face on screen for a minute or two.

2 -- This, then, is the Great And Important Message one should take away from Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- sisters are annoying and evil until Charlie Sheen loosens them up. If only I had known.

3 - The best thing, of course, is the same curious strength of many 1980s teenager movies: even with all its silly, vapid pop culture fluff, the movie manages to look at Suburbia and say "that's some fucked up shit right here." Cuz it is, and was, and dear God how did any of us survive?

4 -- And yes, of course, I probably have a weak spot because of Cameron and his screwed up, dysfunctional family and deep, deep father issues. Hard not for me to relate to THAT, especially when I was young and saw this movie for the first time.

5 -- And, of course, the other Great And Important Message: authority figures are evil. And stupid. Spot on!

So what 1980s flick of nostalgia goodness should I do next? The Breakfast Club? Pretty in Pink? Oh, the choices, the choices.

102!

There's always something fun about the 100F milestone each year. It's like Tucson's version of first snow. What's amusing, though, is that the current prediction for Thursday is 76F. It's been an odd May, weather-wise.

But I'm in full on summer mode now. Craving fruit, becoming a veritable fiend for smoothies (thank god I got a new blender today), light meals, minimal cooking. Hydrate hydrate hydrate and sun screen application as a standard part of the morning routine. And shopping, since I mostly do so on my bike, becomes more and more a thing of the evening.

Watched Cloverfield last night. Jaaaayzus, that movie freaked me out. Damn good, though.

The Gold Diggers of 1935 (Busby Berkeley, umm, sometime in the 1930s or so)

Last week I watched The Gold Diggers of 1933, which was good fun in the early 1930's, romantic-comedy-musical "Code? What Code?" type of movie. The Gold Diggers of 1935 was made in the Code Era, so there's less in your face sexual innuendo and scantily clad eye candy. But Busby Berkeley was in full charge for this one, so you get a full dose of the Berkeley magic.

The thing I love about Berkeley -- his movies have this pattern. It's all normal romantic comedy silliness, but coherent, interspersed with Dick Powell or whoever singing at random moments, and then, just when you think you've got a handle on it,  BAM. Everything is out the door, and there's music and dance routines that completely step out of the movie and go completely, utterly apeshit. You're mainlining Escher, the legends of Prestor John, and the wormhole sequence from 2001 straight through the eyeballs. And it's not all happy weirdness, because, as the Lullaby of Broadway sequence from this movie shows, sometimes ol' Busby was droppin' the brown acid.

In sad movie news, my copy of The Man Who Fell to Earth arrived from Netflix in a sadly cracked and unplayable state.

Watching The Dark Crystal tonight I was struck by how much my viewing and reading has been gravitating towards the idea of healing of late. Healing of the kind that goes beyond the body and touches the deep hurts of the soul.

We hurt, and so we hurt; our pains and sins lash not only ourselves, but the world around us, too. The human answer to pain and suffering seems, all too often, to be to spread it onto the whole world. Misery loves company, or maybe it's a desperate attempt to dilute the pain until it disappears. Instead it only magnifies, spreading like a cancer.

Thankfully we have the Storytellers like Jim Henson. It struck me that Henson was like the modern George MacDonald -- his stories all proclaim, in simple, gentle fashion, "Love."

Love: not the first commandment, or even a commandment, but rather an invitation, a possibility, the real hope of healing not only for the self, but for the world.

Sadko (Russian, 1952)

The first time I saw this movie, it was on MST3K. Season 5, to be exact, one of the last episodes Joel did before leaving the show. Only, it wasn't called Sadko. It was called The Magic Voyage of Sinbad.

"You know," Crow said multiple times, "I don't think he's even Sinbad."

The sordid story: Sadko is a Russian film bringing to life the folktale hero Sadko. Apparently someone in the U.S. thought Americans wouldn't get this, and so when it came to these shores (whenever that was exactly), they slapped an English soundtrack on it and made it The Magic Voyage of Sinbad. It's the soundtrack, and its frequent incongruity with the actual movie, that make The Magic Voyage of Sinbad the kind of perfect awfulness that was the fodder of MST3K. And I can tell you that episode was pretty damn funny.

But Sadko, happily, is now available on DVD, entact and with subtitles. And I'm not going to say it's a great movie, but it is fun, allowing for the kind of heavy-handedness one expects from Stalin-era Soviet cinema. It's got its truly magical moments -- the scenes with the King of the Sea, for instance -- and some truly spectacular imagery. Novogrod is rendered in nothing short of fairy tale wonderfulness, as is the distant Indian city.

What's interesting, though, is watching a Soviet filmmaker dance such a careful dance with this movie. There's elements that seem to be a sop to the censors -- the sniveling, greedy monk/priest, for instance -- and there's the mandatory suffering proletariat at the hands of the greedy merchants and princes. Sadko is reworked as a stalwart, Stalinistic Hero of the People, complete with Heroic Poses and Triumphant Declarations. But beneath that heavy-handedness there's a good story, and the social commentary isn't easy to dismiss. The sight of the Novogrod merchants hording wealth for no purpose but to horde wealth is about as nice a metaphor as you're going to get for empty heart of Capitalism.

So we have a Folktale being used to teach some Proletariat Correct Thinking, Stalin-style, but it's also a very Russian film, and thus has a nationalistic core that is sometimes at odds with the Communist message. All of which, of  course, exists in a cognitive dissonance with the original source material. Personally, I rather suspect that the filmmakers put in the minimum necessary amount of Stalin-style to get the movie accepted by the Powers That Be, and mostly were just trying to have fun with a magical story. Careful dance, indeed.

Next up for me on the Soviet Movies I First Saw on MST3K: Father Frost, which appeared on MST3K in a butchered form as Jack Frost. Another folktale. Heh.