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Spring Season: Week 12
OH GOD I'M SO TIRED. I also like, just updated this thing, but fuck it, it's Monday, might as well pretend I keep to some sort of human schedule whenever I feel physically able, right?
A lot of cold, dreary, rainy May days lately. Yesterday started out clear and sunny and shot up past twenty degrees before the clouds rolled back in, which would have been nice if I wasn't, you know, inside at work for the entire duration of it. Very grey most of the time, and not that clear, bright sort of winter grey, either; it's all that flatter, yellower sort of apocalypse grey, where everything is just dark for no evident reason. Maybe the weather just wants us to keep our stupid asses indoors until all this pandemic bullshit is over. No new cases reported in almost a month now, which definitely makes me feel better about maybe getting to visit my grandmother on the weekend, though!
All the disaster relief vehicles finally cleared out of my neighbourhood over the weekend, which makes things feel a smidge more normal, which is nice. Well, "normal". Back to just the one crazy ongoing thing affecting every aspect of day-to-day life, anyway, although I admittedly haven't been downtown since the flood and I'll still have to get my daily water rations all summer, so I guess these things are all real relative.
I started my big catchup of old articles I clipped to Evernote to read at the beginning of March, so I'm just getting into the early days of COVID-related stuff, which is very odd given how quickly everything snowballed (cascades!), but WEVS. Gonna start putting this behind a cut because it's really just a long, boring list of links for my own reference (the essays on Starbucks and onions at the end are both quite good, though):
I had no big sleep crash this week? Which on the one hand, feels like kind of a good thing in that I seem to be adjusting to this schedule, but on the other hand, means that I'm getting less than twenty hours of solid sleep in a week which is decidedly not enough for my purposes. JUST TWO MORE DAYS AND I'M FREE FOR ANOTHER GLORIOUS SEVEN DAYS, THOUGH.
I really need Discovery to come back already. Also to catch up on all the MCU shows while we're still in a dry patch. Also all the other eight million shows I've fallen behind on. But mostly the Disco thing.
The spoiler zone is small this week, but movies have been more vital to my sanity than ever of late:
3:10 to Yuma (1957): God, even when Glenn Ford is the bad guy, he's still so fucking Glenn Ford, you know? Anyway, I really loved this, it's slow and tense and quiet and just beautifully shot, letting the super simple premise ride entirely on the execution. The bridal suite scenes were perfection, and the ending was so surprisingly satisfying, given how damn likable both leads end up being. A new classic western fav!
Safe (1995): So this is the Carol guy, huh? I kinda thought this was a mess and really don't understand the universal acclaim it's gotten, like, at all? The first hour (which is the much more engaging half) just feels like a David Lynch fan film without anything really going on under the hood (complete with Walmart-brand knockoff Badalamenti score FUCK that was annoying), then when the health cult stuff starts it's just... what? What is this movie even about? Where is the throughline, what is the point to any of this? And now it's an AIDS allegory, I guess? Somehow? I just... I don't know, man. Also, like, people having difficulties getting diagnosed is such a frustrating, upsetting real issue, it could absolutely support a horrorish sort of film, but having the illness actually be psychosomatic in this case just feels like it muddies the water an awful lot on that front and undercuts a lot of the sympathy the movie effectively builds in her search for an answer? I feel like this could have been a decent movie about a woman with an unexplained illness she needs treatment for OR a decent movie about a woman who has psychological issues she needs to overcome, but instead it wanted to be both, all 'OOOOH, WHICH IS IT? WHO CAN SAY? NOT US, SO MYSTERIOUS' and so it winds up being neither. And surely it must be in her head, because Julianne Moore is way too good an actress for that one coughing scene to have been so incredibly stupid looking otherwise? Yeah, this just did NOT do it for me. Maybe it resonates more if you have a chronic illness?
Orlando (1992): Okay, now this was EXTREMELY my shit, oh my GOD. It is precisely the right degree of ridiculously sumptuous vaguely historical bullshit that I instantly love (see also: Peter Greenaway movies), and that's before throwing in the fact that it's about GENDER-BENDING FOURTH-WALL-BREAKING IMMORTAL TILDA SWINTON. I'm generally not fussy for things that are ambiguous for the sake of being ambiguous, but there was just so much here to love, I couldn't bring myself to give a shit about that. Queen Elizabeth told him not to age, so he's not gonna age, don't worry about it! It's poetry! He's a woman now, don't worry about it! Just look at how comically dreamy Billy Zane is! So good.
The Last Picture Show (1971): Peter Bogdanovich really just murdered small-town American nostalgia, huh? I kinda wish the balance was tipped slightly more in favour of coming-of-age drama over crushing existential bleakness (that final death really felt like overkill on that front, surely closing the damn theater was enough), but yeah, this is the good shit.
Better Luck Tomorrow (2002): CAR X-MEN: ORIGINS
oh my god, it's still only 10am HOW
A lot of cold, dreary, rainy May days lately. Yesterday started out clear and sunny and shot up past twenty degrees before the clouds rolled back in, which would have been nice if I wasn't, you know, inside at work for the entire duration of it. Very grey most of the time, and not that clear, bright sort of winter grey, either; it's all that flatter, yellower sort of apocalypse grey, where everything is just dark for no evident reason. Maybe the weather just wants us to keep our stupid asses indoors until all this pandemic bullshit is over. No new cases reported in almost a month now, which definitely makes me feel better about maybe getting to visit my grandmother on the weekend, though!
All the disaster relief vehicles finally cleared out of my neighbourhood over the weekend, which makes things feel a smidge more normal, which is nice. Well, "normal". Back to just the one crazy ongoing thing affecting every aspect of day-to-day life, anyway, although I admittedly haven't been downtown since the flood and I'll still have to get my daily water rations all summer, so I guess these things are all real relative.
I started my big catchup of old articles I clipped to Evernote to read at the beginning of March, so I'm just getting into the early days of COVID-related stuff, which is very odd given how quickly everything snowballed (cascades!), but WEVS. Gonna start putting this behind a cut because it's really just a long, boring list of links for my own reference (the essays on Starbucks and onions at the end are both quite good, though):
- The "I Stay in the House" Decree (Wired)
- The Word from Wuhan (LRB)
- A Dataset is a Worldview (Medium)
- It's Not Easy Being (Consistently) Green (People Science)
- Contemplations on Cascades (Neil Kakkar)
- Digital Theme Park Platforms: The Most Important Media Businesses of the Future (Matthew Ball)
- Snap is the World's Most Innovative Company of 2020 (Fast Company)
- Weird Internet Careers (All Things Linguistic)
- Dressing for the Surveillance Age (New Yorker)
- The UK's Most Violent Crimes are Going Viral on YouTube (Wired)
- Down the Rabbit Hole of Twitch Streamers' TikToks (Kotaku)
- I Was a Middle-Class Drug Mule (Vice)
- Starbucks: A Reconsideration (Vox)
- Let Us Now Praise... The Onion (Lit Hub)
I had no big sleep crash this week? Which on the one hand, feels like kind of a good thing in that I seem to be adjusting to this schedule, but on the other hand, means that I'm getting less than twenty hours of solid sleep in a week which is decidedly not enough for my purposes. JUST TWO MORE DAYS AND I'M FREE FOR ANOTHER GLORIOUS SEVEN DAYS, THOUGH.
I really need Discovery to come back already. Also to catch up on all the MCU shows while we're still in a dry patch. Also all the other eight million shows I've fallen behind on. But mostly the Disco thing.
The spoiler zone is small this week, but movies have been more vital to my sanity than ever of late:
3:10 to Yuma (1957): God, even when Glenn Ford is the bad guy, he's still so fucking Glenn Ford, you know? Anyway, I really loved this, it's slow and tense and quiet and just beautifully shot, letting the super simple premise ride entirely on the execution. The bridal suite scenes were perfection, and the ending was so surprisingly satisfying, given how damn likable both leads end up being. A new classic western fav!
Safe (1995): So this is the Carol guy, huh? I kinda thought this was a mess and really don't understand the universal acclaim it's gotten, like, at all? The first hour (which is the much more engaging half) just feels like a David Lynch fan film without anything really going on under the hood (complete with Walmart-brand knockoff Badalamenti score FUCK that was annoying), then when the health cult stuff starts it's just... what? What is this movie even about? Where is the throughline, what is the point to any of this? And now it's an AIDS allegory, I guess? Somehow? I just... I don't know, man. Also, like, people having difficulties getting diagnosed is such a frustrating, upsetting real issue, it could absolutely support a horrorish sort of film, but having the illness actually be psychosomatic in this case just feels like it muddies the water an awful lot on that front and undercuts a lot of the sympathy the movie effectively builds in her search for an answer? I feel like this could have been a decent movie about a woman with an unexplained illness she needs treatment for OR a decent movie about a woman who has psychological issues she needs to overcome, but instead it wanted to be both, all 'OOOOH, WHICH IS IT? WHO CAN SAY? NOT US, SO MYSTERIOUS' and so it winds up being neither. And surely it must be in her head, because Julianne Moore is way too good an actress for that one coughing scene to have been so incredibly stupid looking otherwise? Yeah, this just did NOT do it for me. Maybe it resonates more if you have a chronic illness?
Orlando (1992): Okay, now this was EXTREMELY my shit, oh my GOD. It is precisely the right degree of ridiculously sumptuous vaguely historical bullshit that I instantly love (see also: Peter Greenaway movies), and that's before throwing in the fact that it's about GENDER-BENDING FOURTH-WALL-BREAKING IMMORTAL TILDA SWINTON. I'm generally not fussy for things that are ambiguous for the sake of being ambiguous, but there was just so much here to love, I couldn't bring myself to give a shit about that. Queen Elizabeth told him not to age, so he's not gonna age, don't worry about it! It's poetry! He's a woman now, don't worry about it! Just look at how comically dreamy Billy Zane is! So good.
The Last Picture Show (1971): Peter Bogdanovich really just murdered small-town American nostalgia, huh? I kinda wish the balance was tipped slightly more in favour of coming-of-age drama over crushing existential bleakness (that final death really felt like overkill on that front, surely closing the damn theater was enough), but yeah, this is the good shit.
Better Luck Tomorrow (2002): CAR X-MEN: ORIGINS
oh my god, it's still only 10am HOW
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