Sunday, May 08, 2016
I May Have Some Currentlies
Current clothes: Olive green sweat pants. My Doctor Who wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey t-shirt. White socks. Black leather boots.
Current mood: Not bad. Today has been that combination of relaxing and productive I most like to achieve on the weekends, marred slightly by the fact that my days off just seem to slip by faster and faster, and today has not been an exception.
Current music: I was just listening to random-shuffle stuff on the iPod while doing some housecleaning. Last song was something by the Goo-Goo Dolls.
Current annoyance: That thing about my time to myself going by too fast. Slow down for a sec, time! I have things I want to do with you! (Stupid wibbly-wobbly stuff. Sigh.)
Current thing: Some of that time (OK, probably too much of that time) slipped past while I was playing Slither. That game is stupidly addictive, I think mostly because it's one of those games where every time you lose -- and you will always, always lose - it feels as if you almost didn't, and all you have to do next time is not make that one stupid mistake, or be just a little bit faster... It's so hard not to just click "play again" to attempt to prove it.
Current desktop picture: Still the same Doctor Who one I've had for ages. I really, really should change that. Will it happen before I do this again next month? Probably not.
Current book: Pretender by C. J. Cherryh, book 8 in her Foreigner series. Someday, in the distant future, I will actually make it through all of this series.
Current song in head: "Temporary One" by Fleetwood Mac, which came up on random shuffle yesterday, and has been playing in my head ever since.
Current refreshment: Diet cream soda.
Current DVD in player: Crimson Peak. Which, like all of Guillermo del Toro's movies, is extremely visually impressive (albeit a bit gory in places), but, like most of his movies, I'm not sure how impressive it is or isn't in other respects. It's got its good points, but... Well, if it's a bit slow, a bit stilted, and more than a bit ridiculous, is that a flaw, or is it just really, really good at capturing the sensibility of the Victorian Gothic stories it's paying homage to? I honestly can't tell.
Current happy thing: No work today! And later I will have pot roast. Mmm, pot roast.
Current thought: Happy Mother's Day to all you motherly types out there (at least in places where it's celebrated today). Me, I'm going to continue spending today reveling in the inestimable joy of not having kids.
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I don't know the Gothic horror genre terrifically well, and I seem to remember reading somewhere that del Toro's film isn't entirely faithful to it, or at least isn't a Gothic horror, as much as it's paying homage to it. That said, I loved the movie, and I think it was easily my favorite of his movies, with the possible exception of Pan's Labyrinth. I too tend to like del Toro more in theory often than in practice -- his enthusiasms or infectious, and I could listen to him talk about genres and influences for days -- but yeah, the visuals can sometimes overwhelm the rest of it for me as well. With Crimson Peak, though, that felt more like a design feature than a bug: the dialogue's supposed to be stilted, and the plot is supposed to be cliche.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how it looks on a television screen -- I haven't tested my Blu-ray yet -- but it was absolutely gorgeous on the big screen.
I've read a few things that probably qualify as Gothic, modern or Victorian, and while I'm sure people who care about genre definitions more than I do could quibble about whether the movie does or doesn't fit them, it certainly is one heck of an homage. But I couldn't, myself, quite make up my mind on that feature vs. bug question. Partly because bad dialog is arguably going a bit too far in the interests of homage, and partly because character and dialog are never his movies' strong suit, whatever genre he's doing, so it's actually hard to know for sure just how deliberate it is.
DeleteI mean, my reaction to Pacific Rim was that it was wonderfully enjoyable as long as it was doing monster-fighting action, but got tiresome whenever it actually tried to do character development or plot, even though normally my tastes run in the exact opposite direction. Del Toro has some strengths, but those things are not among them.
Honestly, Pan's Labyrinth is the only one of his movies I've found completely satisfying. (For whatever it's worth, it was also the first one I watched.) I almost wonder now if maybe it was helped by the fact that the dialog was in a language I don't speak (or at least, speak very little), so I could blame any flaws in it on the translation. But I do did think it did some wonderfully compelling and complicated things with its dark fairy-tale themes. I keep looking for more of that in his movies and never quite seeing it, alas.
I will say that on my good-sized TV, even on regular DVD, Crimson Peak certainly looked beautiful. I can only imagine it would have been visually amazing on the big screen.