Cimorene

( Watched )

( Read )

And now most recently I've been in the process of rereading CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books, from the beginning. That's:

1 Foreigner 2 Invader 3 Intruder, 4 Precursor (♥) 5 Defender 6 Explorer (♥), 7 Destroyer 8 Pretender 9 Deliverer, 10 Conspirator (♥) 11 Deceiver 12 Betrayer (♥), 13 Intruder (♥) 14 Protector (♥) 15 Peacemaker (I accidentally skipped this one and didn't notice until I was almost done with #16!), 16 Tracker 17 Visitor... there are about six more I think.

I've never read any Anne Rice, but Wax read all of them when she was younger and owns many of them. My impression from fandom osmosis was largely accurate as to the character and quality of the movie, and it really was a good time, and a well-made movie about two completely unlikeable hilariously melodramatic emo jerks. Will be interested to see the new series or whatever they're developing now.

Fandom osmosis had managed to give me the impression that Louis and Lestat were ultimately the intended OTP of this universe, which would have been very Yikes on the basis of this movie, so I was relieved that Wax told me that wasn't the case.

So now I've watched Top Gun, Point Break, Robocop, and Interview with the Vampire, I'm afraid I may run out of silly 80s (action? genre?) pop culture classics to watch. There's still Blade Runner, obviously. Wax suggested Gremlins, but other than that horror is ineligible. I can't think of any other ones I've missed! I may be reduced to reading listicles soon.

I applied for Finnish citizenship today, or, well, I filled out the online application. I've been meaning to get around to that for years, but it was always like "Well, when's a good time to suddenly spend 380€?" (No better time than the day you get paid, I guess.) That's what the application cost the last time I checked, but it's up to 460€ now, and the process takes like a year, haha. Still, I guess that's in time for the next national elections so I can vote - and before my US passport expires so I can get an EU one instead.

Continuing to watch silly 1980s movies that I missed, we watched Legend (1985) last night. I definitely understand why it did not become a deathless classic and influenced the later fantasy movie genre mainly via like... visuals. Like matte paintings.

This movie sort of reminds me of Guillermo del Toro, but it's like a Guillermo del Toro movie made by a music video director, because the developments of the plot are disjointed and it has no sense of pacing whatsoever. There's a little cast of comic side characters who repeatedly appear for extremely boring by-play amongst themselves, and these scenes are like the scenes in a Shakespeare comedy with the clowns, EXCEPT that in Legend they aren't funny at all, and don't even contain any jokes or innuendos. They definitely aren't clever and there is zero wordplay. Nothing about Legend is clever. Legend doesn't waste any time on backstories or exposition, which in a way is probably a plus, but also means that the romantic leads are already in love before the movie starts apparently, and we never learn anything about their background, their history, their parents, or their circumstances - not even their future in fact.

This is a Ridley Scott film starring a very young Tom Cruise with visible connecting sprouts between his eyebrows, playing a kind of wild inexplicably Mowgli-like forest-dwelling boy who frolics around in a loincloth and is the bestest friend of a princess in a very renfaire dress with a dim antecedent somewhere in the 14th-15th centuries, and she apparently sneaks into the forest to hang out with him and also with a woodsman's wife in a little forest cottage surrounded by chickens and goats, but the woodsman's wife could not be more clearly 16th century and also has literally no bearing on the plot.

The plot is just that an 8'-tall red Tim Curry with giant ox horns and hooves (sort of Hellboy meets The Mask except red, but a faun) lives in a cave under the forest attended by goblin servants and goes by the name The Darkness and apparently is the son... of Satan...? but can be killed by sunlight like a vampire, so plots to kill the last two unicorns which apparently are all that have kept the sun rising all this time (who knew?). He sends goblins who shoot the second to last unicorn while it's sniffing the princess's hand (what princess? good question! we know that she's friends with Tom Cruise and the woodsman's wife, and that's it), and she just has time to agree with Tom Cruise that they love each other and probably want to get married before the unicorn's death plunges the forest into a magical frozen winter in which the people in the woodsman's cottage are all frozen but the princess and Jack aren't for no reason. They rush off to investigate, are separated, and the princess gets scooped up accidentally by the goblins capturing the last unicorn, so Tim Curry has the chance to accidentally become infatuated with her. He is instructed by Satan via Zoom call that he is fascinated because her heart is pure and the correct procedure is to lure her to the dark side, which he does by sneakily offering her a silver tea service, a diamond necklace, and a glittery black goth dress, the last of which appears to her on a faceless dancer in an honest to god black glitter gimp suit and waltzes with her until she somehow magically consents to wear it.

Meanwhile Mowgli Cruise, with the aid of an obvious Puck knockoff named Gump, an obvious Tinkerbell knockoff named Oona, and two bumbling bulb-nosed fairies who look exactly like dwarves right down to the beards, outfits himself in magical fairy armor with a magical fairy sword, gets kidnapped by the goblins, rigs up a series of mirrors to beam sunlight into the cave, and then attacks Tim Curry right after the princess, who obtained a sword by pretending she wanted to be the Queen of Darkness and asking to kill the unicorn, frees it by breaking the single chain holding it with a single blow from the sword. There's a fight and eventually the doors open and Tim Curry is struck by reflected light and dies, and for some reason the princess is enchanted unconscious but Tom Cruise simply returns her own ring to her and wakes her with true love's kiss and they walk into the sunset after waving goodbye to the fairies for what feels like about five minutes.

Sometimes you know you're going to hate all of it, but you have to experience it anyway because some bizarre sense of internal fairness tells you that it's not technically fair to decide (even privately) that you hate it without giving it a chance, but once you check you'll be free to judge it with a clear conscience.

The reaction videos I've seen for Cats make this familiar process look a lot more fun than it usually feels to me, though. I laughed all the way through Folding Ideas's.

Well, Knives Out was a more enjoyable and intelligent commentary on Agatha Christie than either of the most recent Sarah Phelps ones.

(That is to say, Malkovich Poirot and The Witness for the Prosecution, which shared a love of changing the ending and a positive glee in ~grittiness and grimdark.)

I wouldn't want to write a review without rereading the relevant books and access to the movie for rewatching though.

And now I'm not entering a movie theater until after Christmas, because the execrable Christmas music they were playing before the movie nearly made me claw my own face off.

We saw Rocketman last night and it was FANTASTIC. It was INCREDIBLE. It was just - they did an amazing job. I am not a big fan of musicals, but given that it's about Elton John, making a musical and throwing themselves into it at 110 mph of sincerity was the only way to go, and boy, did they. It's very gay, very colorful, very unafraid to skim over 5 years or more via a transforming costume change in the middle of a musical number, full of recreated Elton John stage costumes that are wonderful and hilarious even if you've seen them before. Everyone is clearly having the time of their lives, including the score composer whose enviable task was making smooth thematic bridges between and variations on Elton John songs.

I wouldn't have thought you could make a story with such depressing 'nearly succumbing to depression and self-loathing' stuff so fun and funny and uplifting (ultimately - I did cry a bunch of times first), but they did a fantastic job. And even if you didn't like musicals I think you could still enjoy this movie solely on the basis of the visual design (although maybe not if you don't like sequins, or if you genuinely don't like Elton John's music; and definitely not if you're triggered by suicide attempts, or if you are a child who isn't cognitively and emotionally prepared for that much explicit drugs and alcohol). Some of the musical theater-style musical numbers were so witty that I was muffling shouts of glee in the theater.

Also, some interview/BTS/promo material featuring Taron Egerton and Elton John is well worth watching too. Also this review focusing on the wigs (and dressing gowns) by wigwurq is a great read that does a better job of selling it, unless you prefer to avoid potentially spoilery details.

(Yeah, I thought I'd be posting a longer review of Good Omens first, but I haven't finished rereading it. We should be signing the deed to the house Tuesday. Third time's the charm?)

2019 Oscars Speech for Best Film Editing but it's Edited in the Style of Bohemian Rhapsody - by Ambient Film Tracks on YouTube

I just thought that the Oscars weren't edited quite as well as they could have been so I took what I learned from the film editing in Oscar winner Bohemian Rhapsody and attempted to improve this speech.

(As hilariously patchy as the editing of BR was, it's pretty much impossible that anyone would do that on purpose. As waxjism pointed out, they probably had terrible coverage to work with and did the best they could to frankenstein it together into telling a different story from what they had originally filmed. That is at least a somewhat comforting idea that tallies with what we know of the film's journey to the screen. On the other hand, at some points it's hard to believe that was the best anybody could do...?)

... and the changes made to the gay (/bisexual) content when converting book to movie, in both directions:

...oh. Yes, I see. Well, I think it was well meant and the change to Guillam was all to the good, but... if they thought that a change from text into subtext wouldn't make any real difference to the meat of the story, I don't think I agree.

I don't usually do this, but I was browsing my quotes-of-the-month posts from the past and stumbled on one I did for 2011 which was enlightening to look back on. So I decided to hit the memorable bits again here.

( 2018 in review )