Wednesday, August 02, 2006

in which I read about a dictionary

Saw an advance screening of The Descent last night. Very efficient. No CGI. Went with The Consultant, who was also a fan of the director's previous movie, Dog Soldiers. I'm not so much, because when you put boys in uniform, I can't really tell them apart, especially as this director doesn't invest a whole lot in characterization. With the All Girl cast of The Descent, I could at least tell who was getting eaten at any given time, but I couldn't tell you much about any of them. But the movie has a palpable sense of panic to it, and, little as you know about most of the character's lives, you know a great deal about how they are feeling from moment to moment. The tenuousness nature of trust is examined from every angle. Great, inevitable penultimate scene. Scary monsters, treated as dangerous animals and not as supernatural killing machines--the movie even takes a moment to show them as capable of feeling emotional pain. The movie creates rules for them, and then sticks with those rules. It's in the Straw Dogs genre: the protagonist finds untapped depths of savagery within herself, and comes to embrace her animal nature, only to get a comeuppance at dawn. The set-up is great, and entirely unexpected. The ending is effective, and not as cliched as it seems at first glance: she's actually replaced one set of ghosts with another. So far, this guy's two movies are much more impressive than Peter Jackson's early films (although I wish he had more of a sense of humor)--I hope he goes on to great things, and continues to lay off (as Jackson didn't) the CGI.
Final shot: close-up of eyes.

Read Defining the World : the Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, by Henry Hitchings. Very entertaining. It's curious that Hitchings is impressed with how Johnson, in his Lives of the English Poets, insists on not reading biographical elements into his analysis of the poetry, keeping the poems and the lives strictly separate; Hitchings' whole method is to read biographical elements into the Dictionary! It's a successful strategy and he does it convincingly, almost creating a narrative out of a non-narrative work. It's full of anecdotes about Johnson and about language, both fascinating to me. Favorite quotes (only tangenitally related to the Dictionary, but clearly too tempting for Hitchings not to include): when faced with a fancy violin solo, Johnson says, "Difficult, do you call it? I wish it were impossible." And, about my least favorite vegetable: "A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing."

Also finished a volume of Kitchen Sink Press' Li'l Abner series. I wish I had 'em all, but I've only got random volumes of the 27 or so that they got around to publishing. This volume detailed Abner's exploits as a radio Superman, and various near escapes from various femme fatales. As usual. I love this stuff.

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