"You can't have my heart."
I woke to the news of Ray Bradbury's death. I'm not going to say much about it, because this is something that hits me in the gut and the head and the heart. I need time to allow it to sink in. I've said too many times that I might never have become an author without Ray Bradbury. He showed me how to rub two words together and make a spark that could become a glorious and terrible inferno. One of the greatest honors of my life thus far was being asked to write an introduction to the P. S. Publishing edition of Bradbury's The Day It Rained Forever (id est, A Medicine for Melancholy). But...that Ray Bradbury died during the 2012 Transit of Venus, that's poetry.
Stuff your eyes with wonder...live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
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A series of bad days, and I can work on some of them, and on others I cannot. Too much worry, pain, pills, indignation, and cold weather. I have no time to be wasting time. But the world, and my brain, think differently on this matter. A weird and shitty time in my career, but I'm going to observe all due decorum. You are not meant to see what happens backstage. You're paying to see what happens from the theatre's seats, after the curtain opens.
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Yesterday, after a white-hot rage on Monday, I gave myself a time out (as I told my editor at Penguin). Spooky and I went to a matinée of Rupert Sanders' Snow White and the Huntsman. I went in having loved the trailer, but fearing I wouldn't love the movie. I was most emphatically wrong. Now, if you can't accept that it's a fairy tale, and that fairy-tale shit happens in fairy tales, or if you can't accept that "Snow White" should go all Angela Carter on you and place the true power of a tale in the hands of female characters, if these are the sorts of things you can't handle, stay home. Or if you don't know these old tales often came with intimations of child abuse, incest, pedophilia, and rape. Oh, and maybe there should be a "trigger warning" (hahahaha) to the effect of "If overt references to the story of Erzsébet Báthory squick you out..." But, if you want "breathtaking," see this film. I figured, hey, at worst, it'll be nice eye candy. But it's more than that. It's fucking powerful. It packs a wallop I never saw coming. Here is the power of myth, all shine and rust and filth, all blood and light and darkness.
It is not necessary to say the film is visually beautiful; that's self-evident. What truly amazed me, visually, is that it has given me hope that cinematography might yet survive the abomination of 3-D. Snow White and the Huntsman is stunningly filmed, and hardly a frame seems ill-conceived and/or ill-executed. The script, very good. The casting, spot on. Chris Hemsworth and Kristen Stewart? Booya. Every time Kristen Stewart turns in a good performance, it's a grand "fuck you" to the Twilight franchise and her (by her own admission) farcical role in it. And Charlize Theron was as wicked as any wicked stepmother ever dreamt of being. And hot. I should probably mention how hot Charlize Theron is in this film, lest someone fail to notice. The climactic battle between Snow White and Queen Ravenna? That was fuck-me sideways sexy. As is Kristin Stewart in plate mail. And, despite that, I still almost cried at the end. Oh, and you even get Ian McShane! If you want my opinion, see this movie. But I'm the sort who wants to see pixies riding rabbits and the shattering of obsidian soldiers and sadistic evil monarchs all rolled up in a single film.
Gods, if someone would make a Beowulf even half this good.
Wishing for a Glass of Dandelion Wine,
Aunt Beast
Stuff your eyes with wonder...live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
---
A series of bad days, and I can work on some of them, and on others I cannot. Too much worry, pain, pills, indignation, and cold weather. I have no time to be wasting time. But the world, and my brain, think differently on this matter. A weird and shitty time in my career, but I'm going to observe all due decorum. You are not meant to see what happens backstage. You're paying to see what happens from the theatre's seats, after the curtain opens.
---
Yesterday, after a white-hot rage on Monday, I gave myself a time out (as I told my editor at Penguin). Spooky and I went to a matinée of Rupert Sanders' Snow White and the Huntsman. I went in having loved the trailer, but fearing I wouldn't love the movie. I was most emphatically wrong. Now, if you can't accept that it's a fairy tale, and that fairy-tale shit happens in fairy tales, or if you can't accept that "Snow White" should go all Angela Carter on you and place the true power of a tale in the hands of female characters, if these are the sorts of things you can't handle, stay home. Or if you don't know these old tales often came with intimations of child abuse, incest, pedophilia, and rape. Oh, and maybe there should be a "trigger warning" (hahahaha) to the effect of "If overt references to the story of Erzsébet Báthory squick you out..." But, if you want "breathtaking," see this film. I figured, hey, at worst, it'll be nice eye candy. But it's more than that. It's fucking powerful. It packs a wallop I never saw coming. Here is the power of myth, all shine and rust and filth, all blood and light and darkness.
It is not necessary to say the film is visually beautiful; that's self-evident. What truly amazed me, visually, is that it has given me hope that cinematography might yet survive the abomination of 3-D. Snow White and the Huntsman is stunningly filmed, and hardly a frame seems ill-conceived and/or ill-executed. The script, very good. The casting, spot on. Chris Hemsworth and Kristen Stewart? Booya. Every time Kristen Stewart turns in a good performance, it's a grand "fuck you" to the Twilight franchise and her (by her own admission) farcical role in it. And Charlize Theron was as wicked as any wicked stepmother ever dreamt of being. And hot. I should probably mention how hot Charlize Theron is in this film, lest someone fail to notice. The climactic battle between Snow White and Queen Ravenna? That was fuck-me sideways sexy. As is Kristin Stewart in plate mail. And, despite that, I still almost cried at the end. Oh, and you even get Ian McShane! If you want my opinion, see this movie. But I'm the sort who wants to see pixies riding rabbits and the shattering of obsidian soldiers and sadistic evil monarchs all rolled up in a single film.
Gods, if someone would make a Beowulf even half this good.
Wishing for a Glass of Dandelion Wine,
Aunt Beast