For the first time in a very long while, I’ve gotten ahead of the curve on writing a post for every movie that I watch. This gives me extra time to write about other miscellaneous stuff. So I thought this would be a good time to make a list of some of the fanfiction I’ve been reading and enjoyed. As always, the list is sorted in no particular order. It’s a long list because I’ve been reading a lot of the stuff over the past two years or so.
I’ve posted about this before here and it’s still ongoing. The plan is apparently to finish it this year. I still enjoy a great deal but it’s now much darker and serious than when it started. Oddly enough, it’s also gotten so caught up in its plot that it’s much less of an author tract than it was originally intended to be.
Our list of films to watch has grown so long that we can’t remember whether this one was added by my wife (because she remembers it being highly praised back when she was in high school) or myself (because it shows up often in lists of best films). Either way, this means that Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is a film that both of us really wanted to watch.
Out of all the genres of fiction, I think that comedy is the hardest to cross cultural boundaries. It also doesn’t help this film’s case that while the Marx Brothers are well-known in the US, I don’t believe that they are quite so established internationally, compared to say Charlie Chaplin or even the Three Stooges. For my part, I knew next to nothing about them save that they exist and that the iconic Groucho glasses disguise comes from one of them.
With Applause, we move from the silent film era to the talkies. Surprisingly, this isn’t just one of the earliest talkies, it also pioneered a number of interesting innovations while being its director Roubien Mamoulian’s first feature film. Unfortunately, its technical achievements are much more interesting than its annoying characters, unsatisfying plot and simplistic moralization.
Embarrassingly for someone who claims to be fan of science-fiction, it’s been a while since I last read a sci-fi novel. Most of my fiction reading these days are on the web, either web-based originals or fanfiction. I picked Charles Stross’s Halting State to read recently both because I’d previously read his Accelerando and thought it interesting and because this particular novel’s tie-in with online gaming worlds seems like a good fit for my own interests.
I think it says something that when my wife saw the DreamWorks logo appear, she adjusted her expectations accordingly, especially in the context of this being a film about white and black race relations in 1960s United States. We’d look out for a competently put together film that is aimed squarely at the mainstream market, a strong social message, plenty of entertaining bits and most of all an uplifting and hopeful ending. In the event, this was exactly what we got.
A few minutes into this second film on my upcoming course’s watch list, I can guess at some of the reasons why the professor picked it and the previous Street Angel. Both are silent films and both are ultimately love stories. Yet the two are very different films. Where the first film was elegant and timeless, The Docks of New York is gritty, dirty and very much rooted in the New York of the steam-ship era. The opening shot sets the tone for the whole movie: deep within the bowels of a ship, a gang of stokers shovel coal into the engines. Sweat runs down their bodies and drenches their shirts. Gravel and goal scrunches under their boots. The flame from their cigarettes and the fires of the engine cast stark shadows within the tight confines.
