a quick background check first: based on a novel by a guy called yates, critical acclaim, the New York Times reviewed it as "beautifully crafted... a remarkable and deeply troubling book."

all this i am on board with. also, let's note that this is the first movie i see where the starring couple are dicaprio and winslet.

pedal to the metal, gentlemen.

opening: smooth swing music, cityscapes (chicago? just guessing), noir lipstick and cigarettes. haha domo's got his mouth half open! look! it's so funny.

i love event blogging. think i'll make some popcorn.

3 min 30 sec in. they've fallen in and out of love. i think i got whiplash.

6min. so far everything leo's said has sounded like he's a guy saying lines.

that would be par for the course for everything since gilbert grape, then...

how's domo handling it?

he (domo) is literally tearing into a wicker basket in what looks like frustration. makes me wish i had claws

lolz he is a furvolutionary

the golden compass was surgical in how all of the literary beauty of the story was removed and only the narrative skeleton maintained. this feels the same, the words people say are melodramatic but i'm not in it. granted, i'm being badgered by a cat and writing, but i am ascared at how much movie there is left

surgical is a good word for the poor golden compass. come on, join the revolution and see what it has to offer! don't give up yet! yes we can!

there's only one thing i ever actually say to domo these days:

kathy bates is a joy! i'd rather follow her character around.

sounds pretty similar to my usual conversation with nonni:
Me: "Cat, you are a cat."
Nonni: [is cat]

or the Finnish variation
Me: "Kissa, sinä olet kissa."
Nonni: [on kissa]

oh and btw. is being badgered like a cat similar to being dogged by a wolverine?
and kathy bates rocks, which is why we should maybe rent (ha ha rent) the road to wellville.

lol @ nonni's stage direction _:D:D

bates wasn't really on my radar until right NOW. it's nuts to see the supporting cast blow the stars out of the water.

all of dicaprio's lines so far have been heavy with "look: i'm a douche". it's not even 15 minutes in (studio idents etc included) and he's hamming up a young secretary.

have to say that winslet's got something. i don't find her madly attractive but her expression in the falling-in-love scene actually tugged on my heart.

boys get that from films too? i may have to make you rent (ha ha rent) pride and prejudice, for i don't know anyone else here with whom i can watch it. awesome.

oh yeah i get that, but rarely. i tend to get bored weird by pure-bred chick flicks, but of course you connect with a good scene when it comes your way.

ok of course he banged the secretary he took out to lunch in a scene stolen out of 6 mad men episodes.

in mad men at least you have good actors like jon hamm. man, this dicaprio kid is weak.

and he's like 45 now or something. but at least he cares about the environment.

plot update: after they got together and sick of each other within the opening scene, the next 20 minutes is basically elaboration of their marital fuck-all. now winslet is trying to reboot their marriage and i guess this is going to be the thematic pivot, so i might just breathe and just be with it.

perhaps this courtship scene will be more to your liking: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/extras/ps000021.html

don't think for a second i won't pause an award-winning movie for a Problem Sleuth break. loved it!

count the infidelities until you get to 10, and then start again? it's zazen cinema.

STOP PRESS! 31 minutes in, in an apparent reversal, dicap gets on board with winslet's suggestion they move to paris to get out of their mutual suffocating career-funk——

hold on. i just realized something. the story takes place in the 50s, and whatever happened in the secretary-out-to-lunch scene in the restaurant, in my brain i read that as dicaprio making a call on a mobile. i mean he spoke to someone elsewhere in the company (an excuse for the secretary to be away for the rest of the day) from a restaurant when there was nobody there but them. what the fuck? it had to be a cellphone.

i will not go back and check.

no, but i insist that you think about all the affairs he has on the Internet.

or do you have a memory of a waiter bringing a phone on a platter?

what a cunt!

LOLZ :D:D:D:D

this is such oscar-bait.

in other news, is there a 3-second rule for dropping food on your cat?

!

he was customarily trying to sleep on the keyboard, sort of wedged between everything. i think he took personally to becoming a dining plate for a slice of orange and went on to lose his shit over a toy.

now they introduced that character that bates mentioned in an earlier scene i cognitively surfed over. he's sort of hollywood neurotic and asks for copious amounts of sherry when offered a drink. i like this gentleman, and the fact that kathy bates is in the room again

i wonder what is going on with the plot

i like trying to imagine your first paragraph is about dicaprio and the rest is about your cat.

uh, who's eating the food, you or cat?

me. (but no, i didn't eat the bit i dropped on d. that would be gross. that guy eats his own hair.)

not to mention licks his own butt

oh shit. guess what he was doing just as i looked round to see what he was doing?

ok the neurotic guy has had 37 rounds of ECT, it turns out. and that made him lose math, but not emotional problems.

i'm getting a sinking feeling the whole plot is about the PLAN to go to paris.

what a great USP: "lose your math forever--and worry about it twice as much (whatever "twice" means)!"

i think these bullshit distinctions of whether i'm telling you about domo or dicaprio need to go!

he likes to peer over things so you see just his eyes and the top of his head.

he often has very dramatic looks that seem to convey something but nothing that makes real sense at that moment.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Iz LOLing!

he's back to being an asshole.

i'm looking at internet stuff.

(with apologies to the excellent problem sleuth -ed.)

Kthx that looks good enough for the INTERNET!

the paris plotline is officially gone. he's back to banging the secretary and staying because the CEO (who knew and had forgotten his father) gave him a huge promotion because he had one good idea, because that's how business works and is not at all a shorthand plot device. who am i kidding, everything in this film (except for the notion of a homemade abortion using rubber tubing) is a movie convention.

OVER HALFWAYS

he's licking himself again

"he's licking himself over halfways" is boss.

do i detect a note of bitterness that one's veritable string of one-good-ideas has not made one king of the empire yet? i hereby promote you to MAN of REAL PLOT.

he typically sleeps in a position that looks like he's frozen mid-reach, or mid-punch.

winslet is enjoying a MARTINI of PETULANT FROWNING.

now there's a neighbor boning down on winslet. still no idea what the lynchian insertion of electroshock man was about

she should spit out the olive pit and then go KICK HIS ASS

"lynchian insertion over halfways"

turns out electroconvulsive boy is the truth-speaker. of course! he's the one who verbally cuts dicaprio's nuts off from behind a comically large helping of bourbon

plot puzzle complete

dammit, he lost his math but not his plot device.

he pockets the NARRATIVE CONTRAPTION with a wry smile.

he only made it halfway through awake =x_x=

dammit, when actors PHONE IN their SCRIPTITUDE, that's one thing, but OVERSLEEPING THE SCENERY is another.

uh oh. she's got the HEART WRENCH

Quick, replenish with MORE BRANDY and some TEAR BEEF JERKER

oh i wish i had brandy.. i just went all the way down the road STONE COLD SOBER.

job done. the winslet unit self destructed in a DRAMATIC FASHION, leading to an ending of BROKEN PEOPLE and SPARSE PIANO NOTES.

oh no, not the SPARSE PIANO NOTES!

Quick, someone find a FRENCH HORN!

HAH!!!

that was WAY BETTER than just watching the film.

[half an hour later]

it's 1:30 AM and i'm contact juggling

listening to stephen fry's thoughts on language the other day made me feel absolutely great in a way that had to be taken note of. (if you didn't read, or more importantly, listen to it yet, i'm not gonna lie to you: you'd be better off there than here.)

in short, the piece in question here was a rallying cry for language in its joy and surprise and vivaciousness and the sheer pleasure of it. here's one of the core things: you don't eat just for nutrition, you take pleasure in it. you don't have sex just to procreate. why would you take a similarly coldly utilitarian view of everyday language? also the gentleman spoke of (with much more craft and clarity than my words here) and against smug pedantry and the prescriptivist bent to impose and regulate is to control and extinguish language, deny its whimsical autonomy.

what i felt listening to it (the battle-cry part) was, in a very real way, the most deeply touching, motivating elation, this strange combination of feeling of kinship and allegiance, elation, a strange kind of pride, an energy. a good, compelling speech making a stand (even for a topic nobody's currently at war on) and delivered with sincere belief and — a kind of depth that distinguishes the superficial emotion of pushy angry rants from good oratory — stirred me. i mean really, significantly made me feel fantastic and changed the course of my day.

the reaction seemed both a familiarly quotidian Thing of emotional mechanics, and at the same time a strange, vulnerable, transgressive way of communication. like You're Not Supposed To Be Serious Like That. there's the honest appeal, the unironic standing for something .. and then there's the eloquence part, which begs to be unpacked.

i leave mr fry here for a few words more broadly on this.

on seriousness: language that's simply serious enough to be the primally evocative is not .. very fashionable. it's the domain of the teenager, the drunk and the demagogue. and for this it's like we're collectively missing an awesome trick. a badly thought-out evocation's eigenvector sincerity makes us scoff, and we're rooting for failure if someone tries. (and by "we" i mean "me", trying to find an angle to make fun of anything.)

and on eloquence: if poetry, and possibly oratory, has what can be likened to the direct sense-appeal that runs around consciousness like the sensuous draw of rhythm and harmony in music, the stimulation of modern visual media, the lure of empathy and synecdoche and suspense and whatnot in narrative art — in short, the appeal to parts of us deeper and faster than the known mind can hold, examine and tranquil — it is in how when we give attention to language, we process the fuck out of it beyond its face denotation. in image recognition studies, hundreds of images shown within a space of seconds still yield a majority recognition rate later. likewise with language it is the bouquet complexity of mind-echoes, the systems-overwhelming pace of the quick cut, the rhizomatic, lightning-branch reach of the flash of recognition: we take in a scene in a blink.

what to make of this? more, how to break out of the habit of expending minimal effort in expression?

i recognize there's no point or structure here. that sort of being an emblem of the problem.

i've long been inspired by captain geoffrey "pirate" prentice's famous banana breakfast (in gravity's rainbow, the quotes above copied from here in deborama's kitchen). step one is to find out what, roughly, making the various dishes would entail. here are my notes for this first round:

next step: rope in remaining friends for nutjob kitchen experiments.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. "Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew. "I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! "Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. cried Scrooge's nephew. "Why?"

said Scrooge.

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years," Scrooge replied. "Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

demanded Scrooge. said Scrooge.

Scrooge replied.

"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "It's not my business," Scrooge returned. Marley's face. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. "Humbug!" said Scrooge; and walked across the room.

"It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. said Scrooge, raising his voice. asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.

"I don't." said Scrooge.

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. "You are not looking at it," said Scrooge.

"I do," said Scrooge. "You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge. said Scrooge.

"I will," said Scrooge. Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost's had done.

"I -- I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.

hinted Scrooge.

It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. Scrooge stopped.

november 16-18 (one weekend only, don't miss it!)

'nuff said

i didn't audition because i couldn't be sure about traveling; as it turns out, i wouldn't have had a problem. on the other hand, it'll be great to see one of the group's productions from the audience!

and it should be good fun. more about it at finnbritplayers.com/themourningprimrose

music by rebecca clamp

video by field marshall huzz

the rude mechs' stage version of get your war on is coming to finland.

FUCK YEAH.

i'm going in on Sat 13 Oct. come along.

(reviews below)

it maps what people (a french 70's cross-section) drank, ate, listened to, watched, drove, etc, mapped on high-low overall capital (vertical axis), with predominantly cultural capital on the left (where you find academics and such), and predominantly economic capital (aka parvenu schmucks) to the right.

love it.

click for full size.

and that doesn't include holidays.

uh huh so you got in

uh huh

WTF you really got in!!!

it's too awesome to handle!!!!

this is me handling the awesome

i think you'll do .. All right

kaikki normal. Yo where you at?

hier. i'm in your country scorin notches on your beermat

i don't think germany is good for me

i've got nothing to add or indeed say today so i present to you an alleged separated-at-birth photo pair:

(culprit)

it will RULE.

more here