I'm bored, so I'm just going to ask a bunch of questions about writers. These are for Fred and Tom and Tim and Mudpuddle and Himadri and Dai and Anne and Caroline and Nicrap and Miguel and anyone that visits this blog.
Mostly for fun.
1/ Who are your favourite writers?
2/ Who were your favourite writers when you were a teenager? Which of them do you still like?
3/ Which writers have most influenced you?
4/ Which writers do you wish had not influenced you?
5/ Which writers are you embarrassed you used to like?
6/ Which writers did you not expect to like, but did?
7/ Which writers do you think you will still read, and like, for the rest of your life?
8/ Who are your favourite prose stylists? Or your favourite writers on the sentence level?
9/ Who are your favourite writers of characters?
10/ Which writers, alive or dead, would you invite to dinner?
11/ Which writers, alive or dead, would you like to know personally? And think you could be friends with?
12/ Do you personally know any published author?
13/ Which writers do you like/ admire but generally avoid, for some reason?
14/ Which writers do you like as critics/ essayists but not as novelists?
15/ Which writers have changed you as a reader?
16/ Who do you think are overrated?
17/ Who do you think are underrated and should be more widely read?
18/ Who do you think are the best living writers?
19/ Which writers do you go to for comfort?
20/ Which writers do you go to for mere amusement?
21/ Who are the greatest writers that you don't personally like/ that you just don't warm to?
22/ Which writers do you hate/ strongly dislike?
23/ Which writers are you prejudiced against?
24/ Which writers do you feel you should have read by now?
25/ Which writers from your country would you recommend to a foreigner?
26/ Which writers do you recommend to everyone? Every serious reader?
27/ Which writers do you wish you could write like?
28/ What is your favourite language to read in?
29/ Which foreign-language writers make you wish to learn their language in order to read them in the original?
30/ Who is the best writer you've just discovered recently?
My answers in 2017.
Friday, 6 January 2017
Daniel Day-Lewis on Cecil Vyse
My obsession with Daniel Day-Lewis, I suppose, may sometimes be quite ridiculous, but look at how adorable he is in this interview:
There's also a clip- 1 of the best scenes in A Room with a View.
Perhaps I have always been indifferent to the Lucy-George romance because my attention's always on Cecil Vyse.
There's also a clip- 1 of the best scenes in A Room with a View.
Perhaps I have always been indifferent to the Lucy-George romance because my attention's always on Cecil Vyse.
Thursday, 5 January 2017
Another young woman, another Italy trip, another boring man
What am I reading, after A Room with a View? Effi Briest.
I attempted to read Effi Briest in Norwegian in 2015, and before putting it down to read Dracula, wrote about foreshadowing and "love" in 3 languages.
Now I pick it up again, this time in English, and am enjoying it very much.
______________________________________________
1/ In the 1st chapter, Theodor Fontane lays out the most important stuff: Effi Briest (her youth, childlikeness, vivacity), Geert von Innstetten (a man who once courted her mother), the Briests, and foreshadowing for the tragedy later in the story.
2/ Geert's "enthusiasm for art": what does that make Geert sound like? Cecil Vyse. Does having an enthusiasm for art mean being deficient in human feelings?
3/ Maybe I only say that to feel better about my own ignorance about art.
4/ Childlike, vivacious... Look at this quote by Frau von Briest:
5/ Now and then Effi reminds me of Natasha. Tolstoy's Natasha.
6/ I like Effi. Who doesn't? She's so likeable.
7/ Effi Briest is sometimes dreamy, and dislikes boredom. Like Emma Bovary. But compare how Fontane writes about her to how Flaubert depicts Emma.
I attempted to read Effi Briest in Norwegian in 2015, and before putting it down to read Dracula, wrote about foreshadowing and "love" in 3 languages.
Now I pick it up again, this time in English, and am enjoying it very much.
______________________________________________
1/ In the 1st chapter, Theodor Fontane lays out the most important stuff: Effi Briest (her youth, childlikeness, vivacity), Geert von Innstetten (a man who once courted her mother), the Briests, and foreshadowing for the tragedy later in the story.
2/ Geert's "enthusiasm for art": what does that make Geert sound like? Cecil Vyse. Does having an enthusiasm for art mean being deficient in human feelings?
3/ Maybe I only say that to feel better about my own ignorance about art.
4/ Childlike, vivacious... Look at this quote by Frau von Briest:
"For soft and accommodating as she is, there's something reckless in her that will risk anything."That I like.
5/ Now and then Effi reminds me of Natasha. Tolstoy's Natasha.
6/ I like Effi. Who doesn't? She's so likeable.
7/ Effi Briest is sometimes dreamy, and dislikes boredom. Like Emma Bovary. But compare how Fontane writes about her to how Flaubert depicts Emma.
Wednesday, 4 January 2017
A riff on love and A Room with a View
1/ This is a romance novel.
2/ A love story in which our heroine has to learn and grow, in order to understand herself, and understand love.
3/ What does that sound like? Jane Austen.
4/ Our heroine Lucy is silly. Like me.
5/ Lucy mistakenly thinks she loves Cecil.
6/ Cecil mistakenly thinks he loves her.
7/ A blogger friend of mine ponders "Is it my imagination or is Beebe implying that Cecil is homosexual?". No, Cecil isn't gay. Not everyone has their other half somewhere waiting to be found, I suspect there are people who can never love, and people who can never be loved. Cecil probably belongs to the 1st group.
8/ What are Cecil's problems? He's self-important, snobbish, pompous, judgemental, uptight, forever disdainful, and intolerable to be with.
9/ Proper, but too proper; intellectual, but too intellectual; he lacks flexibility, and spontaneity, he lacks a sense of fun; people can't be themselves around him.
10/ That is what George sees. Lucy doesn't. She vaguely feels it, but doesn't see it clearly till he tells her.
11/ Biggest flaw: Cecil sees and judges people based on intellect and sophistication. He doesn't feel.
12/ Or he does feel, but what he feels is the admiration or even the ecstatic bliss of an intellectual, an art lover, a virtuoso, towards a painting, a piece of music, which is how he feels about Lucy. Not human feelings.
13/ Definitely not passion. Look at how he kisses.
14/ I wonder how Cecil acts in bed. Would he politely, properly ask for permission?
15/ Because he's up there, with his standards, and looking down on others, he can't know anyone intimately.
16/ Especially not a woman, George says. Because Cecil has his own ideas about how a woman should act. Women are the other sex, almost like another species, he wants to control them, and therefore can't understand them.
17/ An ideal bachelor.
18/ What about George Emerson?
19/ "He is already part of you. Though you fly to Greece, and never see him again, or forget his very name, George will work in your thoughts till you die. It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal."
How is it love? How is it eternal? How, when come to think of it, Lucy and George barely know each other?
20/ 1 thing unites them: an incident, a moment, a connection.
21/ Another: a longing, a desire to be free, to be unbound, to learn, to grow.
22/ Is that enough? Maybe it is.
23/ (Sometimes I wonder if George sees Cecil even better than he sees Lucy).
24/ Tom wrote a few years ago: "Normally I have no stake in anyone liking or not liking a book – so many personal peculiarities go into “liking” and “loving” – but not liking A Room with a View seems like an error of some sort. A miscategorization. The book is so enormously likable."
But I don't. I don't dislike it. I just don't particularly like it.
25/ Should I write a post titled "On not liking an enormously likeable book"?
26/ The reason is perhaps George. He's rather vague, more like a type than an individual, except in 2 scenes when he has a long speech, after the murder, and when he confesses his feelings and tries to persuade Lucy to break off the engagement.
27/ Or the love story between him and Lucy. They barely know each other, I said.
28/ (Or I prefer to read about tempestuous/ toxic relationships, like Anna Karenina's, like Emma Bovary's, or Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff).
29/ Or Julian Sands. Let's put the blame on Julian Sands.
30/ My favourite character would be Cecil Vyse. Not because I like him as a person- oh the unbearable Cecil. But because of how real he feels.
31/ Another is Charlotte Bartlett, someone who can exist perfectly in the background of a Jane Austen novel. A marvellous creation.
32/ I suppose I have a thing for annoying, intolerable characters.
33/ How does Miss Bartlett love, you think?
Saturday, 31 December 2016
2016 in reading
It's that time of the year again. I'll now write about 2016 in reading.
It wasn't much. This year I spent more time living, experiencing, exploring, experimenting, absorbing "all the vast range of impressions that life could offer", then moved to Leeds and became extremely busy with studies. Over the past months I've mostly read non-fiction books in or for my course.
I read 2 new books: ****: The Anatomy of Melancholy by my blogger friend Matthew Selwyn, and the Pulitzer prize winner The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is in my facebook friend list. I don't think very highly of the latter, which deserves a long essay/ review, but by the time I finished reading it (which took a very long time), I was tired and just wanted to move on with my life. My thoughts summed up in 2 words: "too American".
Let's look back at my reading ideas for 2016.
I didn't read more Russian literature- no Dostoyevsky, no Turgenev, no Gogol, no Nabokov... Highly interested in Vasily Grossman at the moment but unable to find time for Life and Fate. However, I did read another Tolstoy book, consisting of "The Cossacks" and "Hadji Murad" (speaking of which, a rather good-looking guy started a conversation with me online a few days ago, but I lost interest the moment he said Tolstoy's a misogynist that was also a bad writer and his wife rewrote all of his novels).
I didn't read more Dickens. Gave up on Bleak House. Instead was another Victorian writer who never seems Victorian- Lewis Carroll. People who associate Victorian literature with social realism and thus tedium should read the 2 Alice books, or someone like Robert Louis Stevenson.
Recently I've just read an Edwardian writer, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. A rather thin book, enjoyable enough but not great, and maybe this reader was in the wrong mood to appreciate it.
I neither reread Madame Bovary nor got acquainted with other French writers of that period.
I didn't read Norwegian literature.
I didn't read Faulkner or Woolf. Nor early James Joyce, though I did borrow Dubliners in Leeds.
I didn't read another Henry James. Nor Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edith Wharton.
Looks like a year of failures.
Except that it couldn't be a bad year, as I discovered Moby Dick, a masterpiece, a novel unlike any other, a book that had a profound impact on my views on literature as well as on my life like Anna Karenina previously did; fell in love with Herman Melville; revisited "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and spent time with the other 2 great Bs "Benito Cereno" and "Billy Budd, Sailor"; read the wonderful "The Encantadas", at least twice, and a bunch of Melville's short stories; and again went to sea with Melville with The Confidence-Man.
That, I suppose, isn't too bad.
Reading ideas for 2017? I'm going to be more busy, not less. There's 1 book in the list: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Anyone's in for a read-along?
As I'm in Vienna, and have just gone to a concert, here's some music:
It wasn't much. This year I spent more time living, experiencing, exploring, experimenting, absorbing "all the vast range of impressions that life could offer", then moved to Leeds and became extremely busy with studies. Over the past months I've mostly read non-fiction books in or for my course.
I read 2 new books: ****: The Anatomy of Melancholy by my blogger friend Matthew Selwyn, and the Pulitzer prize winner The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is in my facebook friend list. I don't think very highly of the latter, which deserves a long essay/ review, but by the time I finished reading it (which took a very long time), I was tired and just wanted to move on with my life. My thoughts summed up in 2 words: "too American".
Let's look back at my reading ideas for 2016.
I didn't read more Russian literature- no Dostoyevsky, no Turgenev, no Gogol, no Nabokov... Highly interested in Vasily Grossman at the moment but unable to find time for Life and Fate. However, I did read another Tolstoy book, consisting of "The Cossacks" and "Hadji Murad" (speaking of which, a rather good-looking guy started a conversation with me online a few days ago, but I lost interest the moment he said Tolstoy's a misogynist that was also a bad writer and his wife rewrote all of his novels).
I didn't read more Dickens. Gave up on Bleak House. Instead was another Victorian writer who never seems Victorian- Lewis Carroll. People who associate Victorian literature with social realism and thus tedium should read the 2 Alice books, or someone like Robert Louis Stevenson.
Recently I've just read an Edwardian writer, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. A rather thin book, enjoyable enough but not great, and maybe this reader was in the wrong mood to appreciate it.
I neither reread Madame Bovary nor got acquainted with other French writers of that period.
I didn't read Norwegian literature.
I didn't read Faulkner or Woolf. Nor early James Joyce, though I did borrow Dubliners in Leeds.
I didn't read another Henry James. Nor Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edith Wharton.
Looks like a year of failures.
Except that it couldn't be a bad year, as I discovered Moby Dick, a masterpiece, a novel unlike any other, a book that had a profound impact on my views on literature as well as on my life like Anna Karenina previously did; fell in love with Herman Melville; revisited "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and spent time with the other 2 great Bs "Benito Cereno" and "Billy Budd, Sailor"; read the wonderful "The Encantadas", at least twice, and a bunch of Melville's short stories; and again went to sea with Melville with The Confidence-Man.
That, I suppose, isn't too bad.
Reading ideas for 2017? I'm going to be more busy, not less. There's 1 book in the list: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Anyone's in for a read-along?
As I'm in Vienna, and have just gone to a concert, here's some music:
Sunday, 25 December 2016
The jump in A Room with a View
I've watched James Ivory's film adaptation about 3 times or more (mostly because of Daniel Day-Lewis), and have always had a problem with it- or rather, there's always a feeling that something's missing and I don't quite get what's going on and why the characters act the way they do.
That's why I picked up the book, hoping it would clear a few questions on my mind.
It didn't.
After the incident in Florence, Lucy Honeychurch, together with her cousin Charlotte Bartlett, decides to go to Rome to see the Vyses. In the next chapters, we're with other, and new, characters- Lucy's mother Mrs Honeychurch and Lucy's brother Freddy. They're talking, and discussing Lucy and Cecil Vyse. A few pages later, Cecil, whom the readers have never before seen, now appears, and announces that he and our heroine are now engaged. Episodes are cut off. The entire courtship with the 3 proposals is left out. A huge jump in time. And space.
What does that remind you of?
The Portrait of a Lady.
The difference is that the engagement news in The Portrait of a Lady produces a shock, puzzlement and a sense of outrage, whereas that in A Room with a View takes us aback because there's hardly any warning but we know nothing about Cecil to know whether or not it's a right choice- other than surprise, there's nothing else.
I don't mind the jump. What bothers me is the feeling that something's missing- I'm on chapter 11, and I still don't quite understand the relationship between Cecil and Lucy, specifically how she really feels about him, what has happened between them, why she rejects him twice and accepts him the 3rd time, why she thinks she loves him and how she really sees him. I feel cheated.
My general impression is that E. M. Forster can be rather observant (it's very good how he writes about Charlotte playing the role of a "prematurely aged martyr" to control Lucy and persuade her not to tell her mother about the kiss), and there's a quiet humour about him that can be amusing, but that's it. The kiss between Lucy and George is, I have to say, rather disappointing. Too abrupt.
There are readers out there who enjoy The Room with a View more than I do.
_____________________________________________________
PS: There's a book that I really, really want to read right now- Life and Fate (though of course not "right now", I don't have time for such a big book). Several people have made me believe that I'd like Vasily Grossman. Thoughts?
PPS: Oh and I'm in Vienna, by the way. Having a good time.
That's why I picked up the book, hoping it would clear a few questions on my mind.
It didn't.
After the incident in Florence, Lucy Honeychurch, together with her cousin Charlotte Bartlett, decides to go to Rome to see the Vyses. In the next chapters, we're with other, and new, characters- Lucy's mother Mrs Honeychurch and Lucy's brother Freddy. They're talking, and discussing Lucy and Cecil Vyse. A few pages later, Cecil, whom the readers have never before seen, now appears, and announces that he and our heroine are now engaged. Episodes are cut off. The entire courtship with the 3 proposals is left out. A huge jump in time. And space.
What does that remind you of?
The Portrait of a Lady.
The difference is that the engagement news in The Portrait of a Lady produces a shock, puzzlement and a sense of outrage, whereas that in A Room with a View takes us aback because there's hardly any warning but we know nothing about Cecil to know whether or not it's a right choice- other than surprise, there's nothing else.
I don't mind the jump. What bothers me is the feeling that something's missing- I'm on chapter 11, and I still don't quite understand the relationship between Cecil and Lucy, specifically how she really feels about him, what has happened between them, why she rejects him twice and accepts him the 3rd time, why she thinks she loves him and how she really sees him. I feel cheated.
My general impression is that E. M. Forster can be rather observant (it's very good how he writes about Charlotte playing the role of a "prematurely aged martyr" to control Lucy and persuade her not to tell her mother about the kiss), and there's a quiet humour about him that can be amusing, but that's it. The kiss between Lucy and George is, I have to say, rather disappointing. Too abrupt.
There are readers out there who enjoy The Room with a View more than I do.
_____________________________________________________
PS: There's a book that I really, really want to read right now- Life and Fate (though of course not "right now", I don't have time for such a big book). Several people have made me believe that I'd like Vasily Grossman. Thoughts?
PPS: Oh and I'm in Vienna, by the way. Having a good time.
Thursday, 22 December 2016
Greetings, etc.
Hello there.
I know, I know, it's been a while.
If anyone cares, I'm all right, alive and kicking- just busy and, as usual, tired, slightly sick and a bit heartbroken. But this too shall pass.
A few months ago I started the A Room with a View read-along (Tom was part of it) and failed miserably, because of studies and everything, but now I've picked it up again.
2016 has been an interesting and eventful year. In terms of world politics, yes, but not only so. So many things have happened that it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that I'm now a different person. Is it a good thing? Or a bad thing? Hard to say. Both, perhaps. But there have been significant changes- 2016 me is not the same as 2015 me.
So, yeah.
What can I say.
Merry Christmas, though. And Happy New Year.
I know, I know, it's been a while.
If anyone cares, I'm all right, alive and kicking- just busy and, as usual, tired, slightly sick and a bit heartbroken. But this too shall pass.
A few months ago I started the A Room with a View read-along (Tom was part of it) and failed miserably, because of studies and everything, but now I've picked it up again.
2016 has been an interesting and eventful year. In terms of world politics, yes, but not only so. So many things have happened that it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that I'm now a different person. Is it a good thing? Or a bad thing? Hard to say. Both, perhaps. But there have been significant changes- 2016 me is not the same as 2015 me.
So, yeah.
What can I say.
Merry Christmas, though. And Happy New Year.
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
ASFF
I've just got back from York. Was there from Friday for ASFF (Aesthetica Short Film Festival) and returned to Leeds on Monday morning.
List of films I watched:
ANIMATION:
1/ Gnome by Sacha Goedegebure
2/ No Place Like Home by Cat Bruce
3/ To Build a Fire by Fx Goby
4/ Bound by Dann Parry
5/ Riflesso by Alice Guzzo& Mateusz Borkowski
6/ Puzzle by Stav Levi
7/ Hobart by Hajnalka Harsanyi
8/ Seven Seven by Georgina Ferguson& Eduarda Lima
9/ Apocalypse Rhyme by Oliver Harrison
10/ Dave by Garry J. Marshall& Chris Watson
11/ Trial& Error by Antje Heyn
12/ About Death by Eunjae Lee
THRILLER:
13/ Oh, Morris by Lewis Kyle
14/ Truck by Rob Curry
15/ The Sticks by Jamie Delaney& Russell Davidson
16/ Panic by James Cookson
17/ Insomnolence by Keifer Findlow
18/ Lock In by Neville Pierce
19/ Cork Man by Dawn Han
20/ Severed Garden by Goncalo Almeida
21/ Listen to Me by Rob Ayling
22/ Eat by Carl Shanahan
23/ Smile by Carolina Giammetta
24/ The Understudy by Morgane Polanski
25/ Prey by Sunny King
26/ The Kindness of Strangers by Alkin Emirali
27/ Cerberus by Remy Bazerque
28/ O- the Movie by Frank Aron Gårdsø
29/ Black Woods at Sundown by Tom Oliver
30/ Béatrice by Christophe Previte
31/ Fumes by Tom Werber
32/ The Ditch by Sheena Holliday
COMEDY:
34/ Mark Gets Coffee by Richard Starkey
35/ Aquabike by Jean-Baptiste Saurel
36/ The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret by Rachel Genn
37/ City Lights by Ed Wiles
38/ Shabes Morgen by Or Dotan
39/ Headless- The Ed Shades Story by Youself Thami
40/ More Than God by Kev Cahill
41/ One-Minute Time Machine by Devon Avery
42/ Check Please by Daniel Sorochkin
43/ Cropped by Chris Thomas
44/ Lovequake by Stephen Glass
45/ Madam Black by Ivan Barge
46/ Big Boy by Bryan Campbell
47/ Paco by Catalina Jordan Alvarez
48/ The Final Scene by Mark Pressdee
49/ Rhonna& Donna by Daina O. Pusic
50/ Fangirl by Kate Herron
51/ Little Big House by Cat Jones
Seen on vimeo, not at the festival:
52/ Drawcard by Antonio Orena
EXPERIMENTAL:
53/ The Great Moon Hoax by Alex Simon Klug& Daniel Pitts
54/ Fragments of May by Maria Pia Fanigliulo
55/ Aymara by Michele Benigna
56/ Moth Vitals by Nancy Wyllie
57/ Emma, Change the Locks by Julia Hart
58/ Haldernblou- Triptich by Laurent Scheid
59/ Kaltes Tal by Florian Fischer& Johannes Krell
60/ Two Signs' Den: Epilogue by Bruno Decc
61/ Made of Sugar by Kevin Rios
62/ Ravages by Alan Lake
63/ The Museum of Departures by Gautamn Valluri
64/ The Tide by Richard Rudy
DRAMA:
65/ Midnight of My Life by Phil Davis
66/ Senses by Zanyar Adami
67/ The Mausoleum by Lauri Randla
68/ Run by Elad Tzadok
69/ Jacked by Rene Pannevis
SPECIAL SCREENING: FILMS THAT WON LAST YEAR:
70/ Pinch Me- For Ted Baker by Crowns& Owls
71/ A Confession by Petros Silvestros
72/ Billy the Kid by Sam Johnson
73/ Across Still Water by Ruth Grimberg
74/ Drifters by Anu Valia
75/ How I Didn't Become a Piano Player by Tommaso Pitta
And other films that won last year and were shown again at ASFF now but I saw before the film festival:
76/ Stutterer by Benjamin Cleary
77/ We Were Evergreen: Daughters by Dominique Rocher
In short, in York I watched 74 short films in total, not counting the one seen on vimeo, and, excluding the films that won last year, I watched 69 out of the 400 films at the film festival. Also went to 2 masterclasses.
Some of the films are in the wrong category, like Oh, Morris is more like comedy than thriller- perhaps it was meant to be a thriller but distorted during filming and turned into comedy by the main actor, the same way Johnny Depp alone made The Tourist a comedy.
Some to me feel incomplete, like To Build a Fire or Lovequake. Some don't seem to go anywhere, such as Eat, The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret, Seven Seven, Big Boy; or can frankly be pointless, like Paco; whilst the experimental films don't speak to me at all.
Some of the films are well done, and might touch some people, but in my opinion are quite unoriginal or simply unremarkable and forgettable: Panic, Lock In, Prey, Listen to Me, Béatrice; whereas Senses has trace of Ingmar Bergman, especially Autumn Sonata, all over it. But it's hard to say. City Lights isn't original; the idea and plot might be said to be banal, the outcome is predictable and even the twist is a bit conventional, but somehow it's OK because it's 1 of those films that are just cute, like Stutterer. Madam Black and Rhonna& Donna are also cute.
The Sticks has a good turn of events- though, if you think carefully and dig more into your memory, the twist is not really original, it's so effective that that is forgiven. O- The Movie starts from a very simple idea and works around it- it works well because of suspense and intrigue. The same goes for Check Please, though it's a different kind of suspense.
The Mausoleum is amusing and sharp in its absurdity, and mockery of the USSR.
Mark Gets Coffee and More Than God are funny- I have no more to say, that word alone would suffice.
Above all, I like short films that stand out. Puzzle is clever. Trial& Error is an intelligent film that is fascinating in its spontaneity and randomness, starting from a very simple idea- a man loses a button on his jacket and thinks outside the box by using other stuff around his house to keep the 2 parts together, replacing the button. Cerberus is a circle. One-Minute Time Machine plays around with the concept of a time machine that allows you to go back 1 minute, and the idea that each time pushing the button is killing a copy of yourself in a parallel universe, in a flirting scene. But the film I voted for is Aquabike, because of its humour, its illogicality, its absurdity, its originality, and its irreverence for reality or logic or boundaries or anything whatsoever.
It's a pity that none of the films I like got any award in the end.
(From last year's winners, my favourites are Billy the Kid and How I Didn't Become a Piano Player- those 2 shorts are worth hunting down).
List of films I watched:
ANIMATION:
1/ Gnome by Sacha Goedegebure
2/ No Place Like Home by Cat Bruce
3/ To Build a Fire by Fx Goby
4/ Bound by Dann Parry
5/ Riflesso by Alice Guzzo& Mateusz Borkowski
6/ Puzzle by Stav Levi
7/ Hobart by Hajnalka Harsanyi
8/ Seven Seven by Georgina Ferguson& Eduarda Lima
9/ Apocalypse Rhyme by Oliver Harrison
10/ Dave by Garry J. Marshall& Chris Watson
11/ Trial& Error by Antje Heyn
12/ About Death by Eunjae Lee
THRILLER:
13/ Oh, Morris by Lewis Kyle
14/ Truck by Rob Curry
15/ The Sticks by Jamie Delaney& Russell Davidson
16/ Panic by James Cookson
17/ Insomnolence by Keifer Findlow
18/ Lock In by Neville Pierce
19/ Cork Man by Dawn Han
20/ Severed Garden by Goncalo Almeida
21/ Listen to Me by Rob Ayling
22/ Eat by Carl Shanahan
23/ Smile by Carolina Giammetta
24/ The Understudy by Morgane Polanski
25/ Prey by Sunny King
26/ The Kindness of Strangers by Alkin Emirali
27/ Cerberus by Remy Bazerque
28/ O- the Movie by Frank Aron Gårdsø
29/ Black Woods at Sundown by Tom Oliver
30/ Béatrice by Christophe Previte
31/ Fumes by Tom Werber
32/ The Ditch by Sheena Holliday
COMEDY:
34/ Mark Gets Coffee by Richard Starkey
35/ Aquabike by Jean-Baptiste Saurel
36/ The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret by Rachel Genn
37/ City Lights by Ed Wiles
38/ Shabes Morgen by Or Dotan
39/ Headless- The Ed Shades Story by Youself Thami
40/ More Than God by Kev Cahill
41/ One-Minute Time Machine by Devon Avery
42/ Check Please by Daniel Sorochkin
43/ Cropped by Chris Thomas
44/ Lovequake by Stephen Glass
45/ Madam Black by Ivan Barge
46/ Big Boy by Bryan Campbell
47/ Paco by Catalina Jordan Alvarez
48/ The Final Scene by Mark Pressdee
49/ Rhonna& Donna by Daina O. Pusic
50/ Fangirl by Kate Herron
51/ Little Big House by Cat Jones
Seen on vimeo, not at the festival:
52/ Drawcard by Antonio Orena
EXPERIMENTAL:
53/ The Great Moon Hoax by Alex Simon Klug& Daniel Pitts
54/ Fragments of May by Maria Pia Fanigliulo
55/ Aymara by Michele Benigna
56/ Moth Vitals by Nancy Wyllie
57/ Emma, Change the Locks by Julia Hart
58/ Haldernblou- Triptich by Laurent Scheid
59/ Kaltes Tal by Florian Fischer& Johannes Krell
60/ Two Signs' Den: Epilogue by Bruno Decc
61/ Made of Sugar by Kevin Rios
62/ Ravages by Alan Lake
63/ The Museum of Departures by Gautamn Valluri
64/ The Tide by Richard Rudy
DRAMA:
65/ Midnight of My Life by Phil Davis
66/ Senses by Zanyar Adami
67/ The Mausoleum by Lauri Randla
68/ Run by Elad Tzadok
69/ Jacked by Rene Pannevis
SPECIAL SCREENING: FILMS THAT WON LAST YEAR:
70/ Pinch Me- For Ted Baker by Crowns& Owls
71/ A Confession by Petros Silvestros
72/ Billy the Kid by Sam Johnson
73/ Across Still Water by Ruth Grimberg
74/ Drifters by Anu Valia
75/ How I Didn't Become a Piano Player by Tommaso Pitta
And other films that won last year and were shown again at ASFF now but I saw before the film festival:
76/ Stutterer by Benjamin Cleary
77/ We Were Evergreen: Daughters by Dominique Rocher
In short, in York I watched 74 short films in total, not counting the one seen on vimeo, and, excluding the films that won last year, I watched 69 out of the 400 films at the film festival. Also went to 2 masterclasses.
Some of the films are in the wrong category, like Oh, Morris is more like comedy than thriller- perhaps it was meant to be a thriller but distorted during filming and turned into comedy by the main actor, the same way Johnny Depp alone made The Tourist a comedy.
Some to me feel incomplete, like To Build a Fire or Lovequake. Some don't seem to go anywhere, such as Eat, The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret, Seven Seven, Big Boy; or can frankly be pointless, like Paco; whilst the experimental films don't speak to me at all.
Some of the films are well done, and might touch some people, but in my opinion are quite unoriginal or simply unremarkable and forgettable: Panic, Lock In, Prey, Listen to Me, Béatrice; whereas Senses has trace of Ingmar Bergman, especially Autumn Sonata, all over it. But it's hard to say. City Lights isn't original; the idea and plot might be said to be banal, the outcome is predictable and even the twist is a bit conventional, but somehow it's OK because it's 1 of those films that are just cute, like Stutterer. Madam Black and Rhonna& Donna are also cute.
The Sticks has a good turn of events- though, if you think carefully and dig more into your memory, the twist is not really original, it's so effective that that is forgiven. O- The Movie starts from a very simple idea and works around it- it works well because of suspense and intrigue. The same goes for Check Please, though it's a different kind of suspense.
The Mausoleum is amusing and sharp in its absurdity, and mockery of the USSR.
Mark Gets Coffee and More Than God are funny- I have no more to say, that word alone would suffice.
Above all, I like short films that stand out. Puzzle is clever. Trial& Error is an intelligent film that is fascinating in its spontaneity and randomness, starting from a very simple idea- a man loses a button on his jacket and thinks outside the box by using other stuff around his house to keep the 2 parts together, replacing the button. Cerberus is a circle. One-Minute Time Machine plays around with the concept of a time machine that allows you to go back 1 minute, and the idea that each time pushing the button is killing a copy of yourself in a parallel universe, in a flirting scene. But the film I voted for is Aquabike, because of its humour, its illogicality, its absurdity, its originality, and its irreverence for reality or logic or boundaries or anything whatsoever.
It's a pity that none of the films I like got any award in the end.
(From last year's winners, my favourites are Billy the Kid and How I Didn't Become a Piano Player- those 2 shorts are worth hunting down).
Friday, 28 October 2016
Some funny lines in A Room with a View, or maybe I keep laughing in the wrong places
Reading A Room with a View, I sometimes laughed at a phrase or clause that I wasn't sure was meant to be funny.
(Emphasis mine)
Like on the 1st page:
Or this whole sentence a few pages later:
The funniness of this line is perhaps intended:
What do I see in chapter 2 then? This is the 1st line:
(Emphasis mine)
Like on the 1st page:
"She looked at the two rows of English people who were sitting at the table; at the row of white bottles of water and red bottles of wine that ran between the English people; at the portraits of the late Queen and the late Poet Laureate that hung behind the English people, heavily framed; at the notice of the English church (Rev. Cuthbert Eager, M. A. Oxon.), that was the only other decoration of the wall."Eh?
Or this whole sentence a few pages later:
"He preferred to talk to Lucy, whose playing he remembered, rather than to Miss Bartlett, who probably remembered his sermons."The information given is a bit strange, I think, or it's the structure of the sentence.
The funniness of this line is perhaps intended:
"The clergyman, inwardly cursing the female sex, bowed, and departed with her message."Or this line, in the same chapter:
"The young man gazed down on the three ladies, who felt seated on the floor, so low were their chairs."This is how E. M. Forster ends chapter 1:
"Then she completed her inspection of the room, sighed heavily according to her habit, and went to bed."Maybe my laughing is what he intended. The "according to her habit" just sounds funny to me.
What do I see in chapter 2 then? This is the 1st line:
"It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons."Feel like I keep laughing in the wrong places.
Startled, shocked, reddened with displeasure: chapter 1 of A Room with a View
Everything seems to be pale and dull after Melville. Except for Tolstoy. The Bronte sisters. Nabokov.
I've just started reading A Room with a View. The 1st page is about Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett whining about the rooms and being upset with the Signora's Cockney accent or the manners of some ill-bred English folk. So small, so petty, so narrow.
A stranger butts in the conversation.
It is clear we're meant to find Charlotte Bartlett ridiculous. Lucy? I'm sure we're supposed to like Lucy- I've watched the film (with Helena Bonham-Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis).
Look at this scene:
I've just started reading A Room with a View. The 1st page is about Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett whining about the rooms and being upset with the Signora's Cockney accent or the manners of some ill-bred English folk. So small, so petty, so narrow.
A stranger butts in the conversation.
"Miss Bartlett was startled."Why?
"Generally at a pension people looked them over for a day or two before speaking, and often did not find out that they would “do” till they had gone."When the man and his son George seem to impose on them the idea of exchanging rooms:
"Miss Bartlett, though skilled in the delicacies of conversation, was powerless in the presence of brutality. It was impossible to snub any one so gross. Her face reddened with displeasure. She looked around as much as to say, “Are you all like this?”..."In another mood I may have laughed.
It is clear we're meant to find Charlotte Bartlett ridiculous. Lucy? I'm sure we're supposed to like Lucy- I've watched the film (with Helena Bonham-Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis).
Look at this scene:
"... Hardly had she announced this fell decision when she reversed it. The curtains at the end of the room parted, and revealed a clergyman, stout but attractive, who hurried forward to take his place at the table, cheerfully apologizing for his lateness. Lucy, who had not yet acquired decency, at once rose to her feet, exclaiming: “Oh, oh! Why, it’s Mr. Beebe! Oh, how perfectly lovely! Oh, Charlotte, we must stop now, however bad the rooms are. Oh!”"Genteel people have such affected manners it gets on my nerves.
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