Aure faces the great unknown.

( A year in review, + resolutions )

Happy New Year! Bonne année!

My roommate and I have lately been on something of an old-school ghost movie kick, which has so far resulted in our watching The Haunting (1963), The Other (1972), and The Legend of Hell House (1973). The last, rather unexpectedly, turned out to be the least scary in our opinions, and had a really bizarre twist ending that left us rather nonplussed, but the execution was still really intriguing and there were a couple of good scares. More importantly (;P) my roommate and I both fell head over heels in love with the wardrobe of one of the characters, a feisty spiritualist medium named Florence Tanner, played by Pamela Franklin. (I also just generally had a crush on her, but shhhh. Too bad she died horribly, like 50% of the cast.) So I went back after we watched it to take a bunch of screencaps.


The one all the way on the right, of course. If you can't tell from the combination of title + this screencap, the movie's about a team of spiritualists led by a semi-skeptical physicist to investigate a purportedly haunted mansion. Exactly the same plot outline as The Haunting, but they're based on different novels and play out pretty differently. The Haunting is also black-and-white, which made it much more atmospheric and quite a bit scarier. Anyway.

( Fashion Week at Hell House )

Has everyone checked out the Coraline movie website yet? It's a little time-consuming, but it's breathtakingly beautiful, which really gives me hope that the movie will be a great experience - different from the book, but great. It seems more colorful and brash than the book, which I always think of as a ghostly, wispy, monochrome kind of thing, figuratively and literally slender, with the same quiet, deeply-buried sense of wonder as Stardust (which I like better, for the record).

The movie, by contrast, seems more overtly playful, with its saturated nighttime color palette and curious, lively soundtrack. But generally, this is a transformation that I appreciate. (The one thing I really don't like is all of the advertising with Coraline smiling cockily, arms crossed. bleh.) I think everyone agrees that Stardust turned out as a fun movie with successful but not stupid mass appeal, and I did enjoy it, but every time I think about how hectic and action-stuffed it was I tend to feel a headache coming on. A lot of me still wishes that it had come out as a strange, small film with the kind of lyrical melancholy that I love about The Last Unicorn. I think TLU and Stardust (I mean the books here) have a lot in common - they're both wistfully funny, very fantastical works that are deeply rooted in reality. Good stuff.

Anyway, at least so far, I find the changes to Coraline a little truer to the feel of the book than were those for Stardust, maybe because the painstaking process of the film-making itself implicitly demands that the movie be a labor of love. It remains to be seen whether the movie will be as scary as the book. I think it might be a little more conventionally scary, but because the playfulness seems to bring it in a more Disney Alice in Wonderland direction (that is, weird-scary rather than eerie-scary... I think...), I think it still has a lot of potential. And regardless, it's going to be an aesthetic treat, like The Corpse Bride! Anyway again, I actually do have a headache right now, so this is all rather imprecisely written. So don't take me at my word for any of it exactly. wahhhh head hurty.

I do have to say that I have fangasms every time I think about the fact that *everything* in the movie - every single prop and character - is hand-made, not CGI. but of course in these jaded times, everyone will assume it's CGI.

Check out one of the special clips about the making of the movie: Micro-knitting!

Just thought it would be fun to do lists of all the movies and books read in 2008.

( Movies of 2008 )


( Books (and comics) of 2008 )

Will gladly provide summaries/details on anything if anyone wants more information.

I watched Gattaca tonight - swoony swoon swoon. Such a good/beautiful/well-acted/well-produced/etc. movie. But I was driven crazy by the conviction that there was a scene in the VHS version (which I first watched) that was cut from the later releases. I could swear that there was a bit in which Vincent walks in on Jerome, who's drunk out of his mind and hanging about with a prostitute. Vincent proceeds to chew out Jerome for wasting his time/money; the prostitute leaves in a huff, after nastily insulting Jerome, and Vincent is left to clean a sulky & wounded Jerome up and scold him for getting drunk all the time. And NO I'M NOT INTERESTED IN IT JUST BECAUSE OF THE SUBTEXT. (<--- not true. at all.)

This is the second time that this has happened to me - I'm convinced that there was a scene in Zoolander which doesn't appear in the DVD release or the deleted scenes, in which coal-miner Derek complains lengthily about lights, make-up and all the other occupational hazards of male modeling. His 80-year-old conversation partner responds by croaking, "I... only... have... one... lung." Derek blinks, then gives his trademark "COOL."

Am I just crazy? Do these scenes exist? Should I be doing my homework? (yes, possibly only on VHS, yes)