It's official: I'm going to ICFA this year. My paper got accepted, so Orlando, here I come!
In other news, I just came back from seeing Paranormal Activity. As far as "docuterror" movies go, it's good, but a little too predictable. ( no spoilers, but analysis )
Somebody has contaminated Canada's flax crop with trace amounts of a genetically modified variety, whimsically called "Triffid" after a 1960s horror flick that starred a villainous breed of plants replete with legs, intelligence and a venom-filled stinger.
If you're going to genetically modify a crop, why, oh why, would you call it a "triffid?" That's like calling a spaceship Apollo 13 and expecting everything to work out okay.
Loads of entertainment news this weekend. Starting with the goodish news, I hear that after having weathered terrorism, the holy-shit religious-wacko-meltdown of the series' original lead, and the untimely death of the prequel's rumored star, Mad Max 4 is back on track.
In another blast from the past, there's the dubious news that Nickelodeon Has Acquired The "Ninja Turtles". Really, though, they couldn't screw up this series worse than the movies did. Go ninja, go ninja go!
All sarcasm aside, I'm rather fond of Coriolanus, and Butler's casting indicates that the producers are adapting this misunderstood play with an eye to its untapped potential for Classical Beefcake Shirtlessness. Would that more Shakespearean films did the same.
And lastly, in news that's sure to appall me and about 5 other people in North America, David Fincher Will Turn the Famed British Miniseries "House of Cards" into a One Hour Drama. I fondly remember this mini-series as introducing my 12-yr-old self to the concepts of unreliable narration, the fourth wall, blackmail, twist endings, and sociopathic politicians, all of which have, in their own way, proved useful. So will the remake be any good? Will it be yet another sad American dismembering of a classic British series?
You might think that. You might very well think that, but of course, I couldn't possibly comment.
Where the Wild Things Are looked beautiful. I liked the acting, the cinematography & the script. The pace seemed unnecessarily slow at times, but that may have been because I was starving and really wanted to get out of the theatre and grab some dinner.
I just finished reading In the Woods. It's a dark and unsettling book, so naturally, I really liked it.
The plot: three children vanish in Ireland in the 1980s. One is later recovered alive, clinging to a tree in the nearby woods, his shoes covered in blood. He claims to have no memory of what happened to his friends. Years later, the boy in question has grown into a troubled detective who finds himself working a child murder in the same vicinity as his own childhood trauma. Believing the two cases to be linked, the detective decides to keep his own role in the story secret from his colleagues and from the townspeople as he searches for answers.
Publisher's Weekly calls this a "psychological thriller," and I have to agree. This is really a story about how people think, about what they recognize and what they don't. It's also a good example of Todorov's Fantastic, in that there's a strong hint of the supernatural in the plot, but as it is filtered through the first-person perspective of an extremely damaged person, it's not clear whether the "truth" lies in the realms of the real or the unreal.
Somehow I missed that there was an "Eagle Of the Ninth" movie filming. I remember being very fond of that YA novel. I was also pleased to hear that the always-in-development Tripods trilogy has a new script.
For those of you whose taste runs more to the musical, you might be interested to hear that there's a Miss Saigon movie in development.
Also, the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has now got a US release. The book seems enormously popular, but I haven't read it yet. Any good?
What struck me about this story wasn't so much the oh-god-here-we-go-again spectacle of American remakes of British tv, but the fact I somehow hadn't yet heard of this series: The original [Red Riding], which was based on a four novel series by David Peace, is a study of power and police corruption framed around the investigation of the disappearance of several young girls in a case based on the real life Yorkshire Ripper killings.
Cellphone snapshots, ugly and hard to refute, are circulating here and feeding rage: they show that women were the particular targets of the Guinean soldiers who suppressed a political demonstration at a stadium here last week, with victims and witnesses describing rapes, beatings and acts of intentional humiliation.
Thanks to people like sapphohestia and the fabulous D. Elizabeth Wasden (CW alum and writer extraordinaire) I've had a chance to see some movies that are actually in the theatres. It's amazing.
The short version is this: I saw Jennifer's Body yesterday and really quite enjoyed it. It's definitely in the Ginger Snaps school of using horror movie tropes to talk about teenage girls and their gender issues, although it succeeds more at comedy than it does at horror. Beth and I had no expectations going in, so this film had no problems surpassing them. Anything else I have to say must be done under a spoiler lock -
- but I'd say it's fun, and worth checking out, particularly on DVD.
I preferred Jennifer's Body to the other two films I saw recently. 9 started strongly, but soon suffered from an acute case of Stupid. Personally, I hate it when producers of SF films interpret SF to mean "doesn't need to make sense," and this seems to have happened here. The story is (fairly) logical until about 3/4s of the way through, and then the Obvious (though Horrible) Solution to the Problem is disregarded in favor of WTF?, betraying the rules of the world in the process. In short, 9 is a beautiful film, sabotaged by its script.
I also saw the other SF "9" movie: District 9. I'd heard good things about it before going in, which may have raised my expectations; I was disappointed. The first 30 mins were intriguing, but the rest of the movie turns away from a mock-documentary interrogation of racism and Otherness into a more simplistic action movie.
That in itself might have been ok, had the script writer(s) also not decided to make the fairly ordinary protagonist do Reprehensible Things that killed my empathy for that character - and then continued as though I, the audience, still cared about this guy. I like anti-heroes, and I'm generally intrigued by explorations of the darker sides of human nature, but in this case I felt condescended to. To be blunt: I don't like films that assume that I and everyone else in the audience is racist, and will pull for the White Guy because of his skin color. And at the conclusion of this film, that's what I felt was going on.
Today's happy: I got to ride an elephant! And hang out at the Maryland Ren Faire with sapphohestia and J. And I am now the proud owner of a hat of Total Awesome!
It's been a while since I've memed, but given that birdgirl78 tagged me:
1. Post about something that made you happy today even if it's just a small thing. 2. Do this everyday for eight days without fail. 3. Tag eight of your friends to do the same.
(I prefer not to tag people, so if this meme appeals, just go ahead and join in.)
Today I am really happy to have an office. For real! And it's in the main building, the one where I teach!
I still don't quite know what to do with my office: I'm waiting on my research budget to buy all books to fill up the shelves, and on my first paycheck to do any decorating, so right now it resembles a grim metal coffin. But it's *my* grim metal coffin.
This week I figured out that I can leave my high-heeled shoes in my office, so that I only have to change into them for teaching. This makes me (and my feet) inexpressibly happy!
And tonight, in a fit of indulgence, I bought an extra kettle and mug, so I can treat people to tea in my office. Again, this makes me happy!
In other news, my classes all seem to be going well. I have my first batch of grading to do this weekend. Wish my students luck!
One of my fellow Clarionites has just published a CW story over at Flurb magazine. Emily C. Skafton's My Only Sunshine is a lovely magic realist piece about relationships and the storms they do (or don't) weather.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
akashiver's journal