Leisurely paced but not slow. Heartaching but not completely breaking. Really nuanced performances. Lovely music. Thumbs up all ’round.
ETA: And I forgot to tell you that my favorite drummer Jay Bellerose (from here and he played at this show also although I didn’t know it at the time) played in the movie / on the soundtrack. Oh YES! 🙂
“I Won’t Be Found” – The Tallest Man on Earth
Hear it here in its original and daytrotter versions (the daytrotter is the one I put on repeat). (Found via this post on Fuel/Friends, my all-time favorite music blog.)
Doctor: So where would you say your pain is on a scale from 1 to 10?
Me: My pain level? Is pretty low. My annoyance level? Is off the fucking charts.
(Three weeks of not being able to hear out of my left ear…and counting.)
Quite lovely.
I feel like I’ve seen a zillion movies about Elizabeth so it was nice to visit with a different monarch for a while. Emily Blunt was fantastic.
And I loved that she got to have a love story (and not a salacious one), even if it that meant I cried through a lot of it. Very nice interplay between the couple.
These outtakes are fabulous. (link via Go Fug Yourself.)
Very charming. Wonderfully voiced. I really love the puppet look vs. traditional animation.
Well. I guess I’ll have to eat crow. I thought this movie looked really, really dumb (as I may have mentioned here and also here) and I went to it somewhat against my wishes.
And I really enjoyed it.
It’s super heavy handed, almost clunkily so (“I AM A GOOD GUY! SEE THE SIGN ON MY HEAD!”), and very typical in its… racial… assumptions, let’s say, but despite that (or because of it?) it totally works on one’s emotions and I just couldn’t help but care about the characters.
And it doesn’t hurt that Sam Worthington is really kinda secretly sneak-up-on-you hot. (I have told you that before even though I didn’t know his name then and just called him that “half-terminator dude”.)
We paid for 3D and I thought the effects were SO MUCH BETTER than when I saw 3D Beowulf, but I am wondering if there’s a difference between 3D on the regular movie screen and 3D on Imax…
Another fantastic duo, I would recommend these just as highly as the Kristin Cashore books, but note that they are very, very different.
The dystopian universe here is almost Dickensian in its shadings (although with fewer of the finer details) and it definitely makes you, the reader, long for escape for these characters, for survival, for even just the littlest bit of hope.
Unexpectedly cruel with odd kindnesses. And, as in much YA, some growing up and self discovery along the way.
An adventure of endurance… You’ll want to block off a day for these as you will find yourself unable to do anything else.
And if you’ve read the story “Wealth” in Margo Langan’s “White Time” collection, it almost seems like they come from the same world. In fact, I drove myself insane for an entire afternoon trying to figure out where that story was from as they felt so much of a piece.
I absolutely loved these books; they sucked me right into their world and I didn’t really ever want to leave. (A third book is being written…. Wahoo.)
A world where people have “talents” or “graces.”
Graceling: a novel of growing up, of standing one’s ground, of discovering the hidden layers, of coming to know oneself.
Fire: a different sort of animal, a story of someone already grown but not always allowed to grow, already knowing oneself, but coming to better know others.
Lyrically written, they both made me cry at points. They both made me yearn.
Note: Fire is a prequel but I’d say DEFINITELY read it second as it gives away something that you want to figure out more slowly as you read Graceling.