Almost swept away by the passing Zamboni.
1. As if this were not already the best Chrismukkah ever, cf33 wrote the most amazing and adorable remix of one of my fics. It's called it's an all time low, and it's Daring Adventures for Boys retold from Jeremy's perspective. She and I had been talking about how I don't often know what's going on in the heads of my characters when they're not narrating the story, and when people ask questions to that effect, it's like, you tell me. So she told me, much better than I could have told it myself. Go read; it's fabulous.
2. Speaking of fabulous:
The only thing more darling than a prepubescent Johnny Weir and his former pairs partner dressed up as reindeer...
...is Jeremy Abbott as a toddler, with his sister.
3. In misc. skating news, Tanith Belbin has a new puppy, and there are now more pictures of the puppy on her MySpace than there are of Evan.
And I hope that puppy keeps her warm this January, because Ben's injury sounds serious enough that I don't know how they are going to be ready for Nats. They were supposed to skate in a Christmas show, but it sounds like she skated solo and with Evan; Ben was too seriously injured to even put on skates. I actually hope they sit out Nats so he can recover fully.
4. I probably should have put this first, since anyone not skating obsessed has surely stopped reading by now, but (hi, boldface!) movies I have watched while conjugating Greek verbs, and what I thought of them:
a. Like, twelve people have told me how much I would love Once, and all twelve of them were wrong. I was so bored. It seems to be a romantic musical for people who don't like romances or musicals, which is fine for them, but a little depressing for me, because I love romances and musicals with lame-assed and dorktastic pride. The principal characters are supposed to be everyday shlubs whose emotional connection feels magical, but they're so average that they end up being dull. I mean, I have never had a relationship, platonic or romantic, as boring as the one in this movie. I am also less impressed with Glen Hansard's music than others are: it's vacuously pretty, with gratingly repetitive melodic lines and dumb lyrics. Indie folk-rock for people who don't like indie folk-rock? Probably. I like "Falling Slowly" better as an ice dance routine, and actually, I like that ice dance routine better than any part of this film.
b. I got a new TV for Chanukah, because my mom visited earlier this year and proclaimed my 10-year-old TV too geriatric to live. Now I am a total brat with a huge flatscreen. The first thing I watched on it was the Pats game (which we are not discussing I swear I will screen your comment if you even bring it up), but the third or fourth thing was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Nobody told me I would love this movie, and nobody was wrong. But I watched it expecting a dumb pirate movie that would defy historical accuracy, narrative coherence, and the laws of physics, so I was in no way disappointed. Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp were awesome. There were swords and cannons and credulity-straining special effects. I got to watch it in HD. I'm happy.
c. The worst way to hear about a film is on NPR. If you like a film (never a movie) that NPR has profiled positively, you are a film snob for liking it. So I am a total film snob, because Interview pushed tons of film snob buttons and I liked it. It's the inverse of Once in a lot of ways: both are films that center almost exclusively around a pair of lead characters, one male and one female, who are both liberated and destroyed by the tension between art and mundane reality. But Interview isn't trying to be appealing or heartwarming - quite the opposite. It is a gruesome movie about gruesome people, but those people are impeccably portrayed by Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller, who rattle around like caged carnivores in a prisonlike loft and spew lies at each other for ninety minutes. Miller's character in particular is awful in ways that real women are awful, rather than in the ways that most contemporary narratives like to pretend that women are awful, and the film's most chilling moments are when she uses her own insecurities as a weapon to bring down Buscemi's even more insecure, disgraced, and venal character. And yet there is something appealingly fragile about these people and about this movie. I needed a stiff drink at the end, but I felt shaken and moved.
2. Speaking of fabulous:
The only thing more darling than a prepubescent Johnny Weir and his former pairs partner dressed up as reindeer...
...is Jeremy Abbott as a toddler, with his sister.
3. In misc. skating news, Tanith Belbin has a new puppy, and there are now more pictures of the puppy on her MySpace than there are of Evan.
And I hope that puppy keeps her warm this January, because Ben's injury sounds serious enough that I don't know how they are going to be ready for Nats. They were supposed to skate in a Christmas show, but it sounds like she skated solo and with Evan; Ben was too seriously injured to even put on skates. I actually hope they sit out Nats so he can recover fully.
4. I probably should have put this first, since anyone not skating obsessed has surely stopped reading by now, but (hi, boldface!) movies I have watched while conjugating Greek verbs, and what I thought of them:
a. Like, twelve people have told me how much I would love Once, and all twelve of them were wrong. I was so bored. It seems to be a romantic musical for people who don't like romances or musicals, which is fine for them, but a little depressing for me, because I love romances and musicals with lame-assed and dorktastic pride. The principal characters are supposed to be everyday shlubs whose emotional connection feels magical, but they're so average that they end up being dull. I mean, I have never had a relationship, platonic or romantic, as boring as the one in this movie. I am also less impressed with Glen Hansard's music than others are: it's vacuously pretty, with gratingly repetitive melodic lines and dumb lyrics. Indie folk-rock for people who don't like indie folk-rock? Probably. I like "Falling Slowly" better as an ice dance routine, and actually, I like that ice dance routine better than any part of this film.
b. I got a new TV for Chanukah, because my mom visited earlier this year and proclaimed my 10-year-old TV too geriatric to live. Now I am a total brat with a huge flatscreen. The first thing I watched on it was the Pats game (which we are not discussing I swear I will screen your comment if you even bring it up), but the third or fourth thing was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Nobody told me I would love this movie, and nobody was wrong. But I watched it expecting a dumb pirate movie that would defy historical accuracy, narrative coherence, and the laws of physics, so I was in no way disappointed. Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp were awesome. There were swords and cannons and credulity-straining special effects. I got to watch it in HD. I'm happy.
c. The worst way to hear about a film is on NPR. If you like a film (never a movie) that NPR has profiled positively, you are a film snob for liking it. So I am a total film snob, because Interview pushed tons of film snob buttons and I liked it. It's the inverse of Once in a lot of ways: both are films that center almost exclusively around a pair of lead characters, one male and one female, who are both liberated and destroyed by the tension between art and mundane reality. But Interview isn't trying to be appealing or heartwarming - quite the opposite. It is a gruesome movie about gruesome people, but those people are impeccably portrayed by Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller, who rattle around like caged carnivores in a prisonlike loft and spew lies at each other for ninety minutes. Miller's character in particular is awful in ways that real women are awful, rather than in the ways that most contemporary narratives like to pretend that women are awful, and the film's most chilling moments are when she uses her own insecurities as a weapon to bring down Buscemi's even more insecure, disgraced, and venal character. And yet there is something appealingly fragile about these people and about this movie. I needed a stiff drink at the end, but I felt shaken and moved.