Most of my grown-up fictional tastes can be explained by the fact that growing up I devoured Alexandre Dumas and Russian musicals. Doomed love, men with swords, melodrama, and things that never end well - yeah, that's where I got it all ( Read more... )

I haven't had much time for dramas in the last few days but on the plus note, Baby Mousie is now trying to shape consonants with her mouth, really really hard - I think she is trying to say the letter "p". Her babble now sounds a bit more like talking.

1. I did catch up on ep 12 of Black and White which was (big shock, here) awesome. The ( Read more... )

I have bought a DVD of a movie from my childhood and have been watching Звезда пленительного счастья (The Captivating Star of Happiness), a Russian movie from the 1970s.

The movie is set during the years surrounding the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 (short version, if you don't feel like reading the wiki article, is that a group of Russian aristocrats ( Read more... )

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A nifty little Across the Universe picture to start with:


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I am leaving today to go on vacation to Scandinavia and won't be back until next Sunday. Net time will probably non-existent when I am there, so this is one large catch-all post ( Read more... )

Has anyone on my flist read the Dumas novel The Fencing Master? It's a minor novel of Dumas but it was translated into Russian (which is how I read it) because it dealt with The Decembrists. I have a hankering to reread it. The narrator, the fencing master, is hired on as a teacher in Russia, where he meets and befriends Pauline, a modiste at a ( Read more... )

Yeah, I am having a slow day.

What a grim, beautiful, passionate, complicated movie this is. I think queenofthorns is a fellow fan ( Read more... )

First, everyone should go and join vm_spork. Really.

Secondly, Good lord. I ventured into the Alexandre Dumas section of ff.net and am now scarred forever. They are so bad I can't even summarize.

Choice examples of summaries:

A story we wrote with a friend. Mostly Alexandre Dumas (Three Musketeers), also Bulgakov, Gerald Durell, P.G.Wodehouse, Èapek, ( Read more... )

Because of getting up at an unearthly hour again, due to jetlag, I ended up watching some of “D’Artagnan and Three Musketeers” before going to work. This is a Russian movie from the 1970s, a musical and very faithful adaptation of the story. It’s about 3+ hours long ( Read more... )