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hellostarrynightblr · 2 years

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highlights of January

There will be two sections this time: the new films and the re-watched ones as I have seen a lot of films for the second time this month. This actually brought me to choose the theme of this year’s challenge (albeit a bit too late): second chances. Turns out I enjoy most of the films I used to hate. Go figure.

New in 2022

1. Favourite movies: Good News (1947), 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956), Much Ado About Nothing (1993).

2. Decent films I liked / appreciated but not loved: Nightmare Alley (2021), Sitting Pretty (1948)

3. Best scenes: eavesdropping in Sitting Pretty (1948); the cafeteria number and the library flirting / song (Good News, 1947); Benedick vs the chair / the ‘balcony’ confession / the chapel confession (Much Ado About Nothing, 1993).

4. Favourite genres: romance, comedy, noir, musical.

5. Favourite directors: Kenneth Branagh (Much Ado About Nothing, 1993); Guillermo del Toro (Nightmare Alley, 2021); Walter Lang (Sitting Pretty, 1948); Henry Hathaway (23 Paces to Baker Street, 1956); Charles Walters (Good News, 1947).

6. Favourite actors: this is a lot.

Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Michael Keaton, Denzel Washington (Much Ado About Nothing, 1933); Willem Dafoe (Nightmare Alley, 2021); Basil Rathbone (The Woman in Green, 1945); Minnie Dupree / Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (The Young in Heart, 1938); Clifton Webb (Sitting Pretty, 1948); Van Johnson (Easy to Love, 1953 / 23 Paces to Baker Street, 1956); Joan McCracken, June Allyson, Peter Lawford (Good News, 1947).

7. Least favourite performances: I couldn’t warm up to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in The Music Box (1932) but maybe I just don’t like this kind of humour. But also, Keanu Reeves in Much Ado About Nothing (1993). That’s it. I have nothing else to say. What a trainwreck.

8. The most wasted cast: Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, Charles Coburn (George Washington Slept Here, 1942). I attribute it to slow, practically comatose direction. There were a few moments but overall it was just a drag.

9. The best premise: Sitting Pretty (1948). Lynn Belvedere is my new hero.

9. The best wasted premise: The Woman in Green (1945). Did you have to make it about hypnosis?? Really?

11. Favourite cast: Kate Beckinsale, Imelda Staunton, Jimmy Yuill, Brian Blessed, Phyllida Law, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Kenneth Branagh, Patrick Doyle, Michael Keaton, Ben Elton (Much Ado About Nothing, 1993). I’m excluding Keanu Reeves from the list because that was excruciating. I still like the guy but man was that bad!

Also, just look at Nightmare Alley’s cast! What a powerhouse: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, David Strathairn, Tim Blake Nelson.

12. Favourite on-screen duos: Kenneth Branagh + Emma Thompson (Much Ado About Nothing, 1993); Maureen O'Hara + Clifton Webb (Sitting Pretty, 1948); Claudette Colbert + Fredric March (Honor Among Lovers, 1931) (I’m choosing to ignore how absolutely disturbing the plot is and just enjoy the rapport between the characters); Esther Williams + Van Johnson (Easy to Love, 1953) (another idiot male but still an enjoyable film); Van Johnson + Vera Miles (23 Paces to Baker Street, 1956); June Allyson + Peter Lawford (Good News, 1947).

13. Favourite on-screen relationships: Connie Lane + Tommy Marlowe (Good News, 1947); Benedick + Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing, 1993).

14. Favourite characters: Connie Lane / Tommy Marlowe / Babe Doolittle (Good News, 1947); Benedick / Beatrice / Don Pedro (Much Ado About Nothing, 1993); Phillip Hannon (23 Paces to Baker Street, 1956); Lynn Belvedere (Sitting Pretty, 1948).

15. Favourite quote: If it proves so, then loving goes by haps; some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps (William Shakespeare curtesy of Much Ado About Nothing, 1993).

16. Favourite fact discovered in 2022: Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson used to be married. I love this fact so much, it gives me so much life! But I hate that he cheated on her with Helena Bonham Carter. That breaks my heart... But at least I understand why their chemistry is so palpable in Much Ado About Nothing (1993).

17. The most overrated film: The Music Box (1932). 8.0 imdb rating is a bit much.

18. The most disappointing film: The Woman in Green (1945) disappointed me because I loved pretty much all the films from Basil’s Sherlock collection up to this point and this one turned out to be really underwhelming. George Washington Slept Here (1942) is another one, but I already mentioned why I dislike this film above. It’s not worth repeating myself.

19. The most overrated / overlooked film: Good News (1947) is too pure for this world!

20. The biggest surprise: Much Ado About Nothing (1993). It’s so stupid and cheesy and hilarious! I adore this film!

As far as the actors go, Van Johnson is a revelation. I’ve liked him before but watching him now is like stepping into a bubble, nothing else matters and it’s just so very comforting.

I was also smitten by Minnie Dupree in The Young in Heart (1938). What a sweet, sweet lady…

21. Best cinematography: Dan Laustsen (Nightmare Alley, 2021). No competition whatsoever.

But also, a guick shoutot to the gloomy, mysterious and attractive 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956) curtesy Milton R. Krasner.

22. Best set design: Nightmare Alley (2021). It’s unsurpassable as far as I’m concerned.

24. Best costume design: I have no idea who to personally credit, so I’ll just credit the film overall: Nightmare Alley (2021).

24. Best music: Good News (1947)

25. Best production choice: casting Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty (1948).

26. Worst production choice: casting Keanu Reeves (Much Ado About Nothing, 1993); glorifying workplace harassment (Honor Among Lovers, 1931); the hypnosis scenes (The Woman in Green, 1945).

27. The film of the month: overall quality-wise, Good News (1947). Enjoyment-wise, Much Ado About Nothing (1993).

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mortuarybees · 5 years

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What books do you recommend me to read?

I’m not sure what your tastes are but I’ll tell you some of my favorites! To be quite honest, I mainly return to the same books over and over again so the list is rather short and I doubt I have anything to recommend that you won’t have heard of already. I’ll recommend my favorites. It consists mainly of my usual rotation of things i read over and over or books that left an impression on me and I refer back to them often.

When it comes to the non-fiction section just like….keep in mind that most academic texts have many, many problems and I’m not presenting any of the texts I list as The Quintessential Must Read Best Flawless Overview of a topic, I’m mainly listing the books I have found to be approachable and reasonable introductions to topics. Read everything critically, always (and that includes everything else on this list, not just the non-fiction).

Plays:

An Oresteia, translated by Anne Carson (Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Elektra, Euripides’ Orestes)

Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides

I mean like. Shakespeare, obviously; my personal favorites are Hamlet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth; recently, thanks to the productions starring David Tennant, Much Ado About Nothing and Richard II have been added to the list

Doctor Faustus, Edward II, and Dido by Christopher Marlowe

Antigone, particularly Anne Carson’s translation, and after you’ve read Antigone, I’d recommend reading Antigonick, but not before

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (I feel like Lady Windermere’s Fan is also kind of necessary reading and I do love it of course but I’ve only read it the once, for the sake of it, whereas I’ve come back to the Importance of Being Earnest a million times and the 2002 movie is one of the things I watch when I’m down)

Novels (and Epics)

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett if you haven’t yet, obviously

Maurice by E. M. Forster

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

VIRGINIA WOOLF. everything but particularly the Waves, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway. The Waves is my favorite, followed closely by Orlando, but I’d start with the Mrs. Dalloway because it gets you accustomed to Woolf’s writing style and the way she approaches her characters if you haven’t read her before.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (If you haven’t read it yet and you have seen 2005 P&P and love it and you’re opening the novel with the expectation that it’s similar to the 2005 film in tone and feel, you’ll be disappointed. If you’ve seen the 1995 miniseries, that reflects it very well. So just approach it with an open mind with 2005 on the back burner and you’ll find it an amazing and very repressed love story)

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore

The Iliad (the translation I own is Lombardo. It’s extremely approachable and colloquial and I enjoy it, and if you’ve never read the Iliad and you find it intimidating, I would very much recommend it, but my high opinion is not universal. Fagles and Lattimore are very popular translations and I like them both well enough)

I’m dying to get a copy of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation. I don’t love the Odyssey personally but I am a big fan of Wilson and from what I’ve read about her translation and what she’s said about it, if anything could make me enjoy the Odyssey, it would be that translation.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. I would personally recommend reading the Iliad first just because Miller takes…….liberties with it, but I also don’t think there’s a problem with that at all, so if you’re not interested in the Iliad, or you think tsoa would get you interested in it, there’s nothing at all wrong with reading it on its own or reading it first. I just think it’s a genuinely more enjoyable experience to read the Iliad first and then see what Miller does with it. And regardless of what order you read them in, if you read them both you will understand how very different tsoa and the Iliad are from one another and you will not be one of those people who talks about the Iliad when what they mean is tsoa. Again, there’s nothing wrong with tsoa, it’s one of my favorite novels, but it’s just a very separate thing and it gets just a little maddening.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. It’s both poetry and a novel but it’s got to go somewhere so

When I was 14 I got very into Les Mis and i will recommend it. I genuinely love it and it will always have a special place in my heart. I have read the entire brick only once however because as much as i love it. as much as i Relate to the infamous off-topic tangents. there is a limit to my patience.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is just like. extremely good. I really don’t know enough about it to recommend any specific translations; in high school I was given a stapled copy of the whole thing and I read that til I lost it and now if I want to reread it or refer back I just look it up online. I’m a fake fan.

Poetry

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson

Devotions, Felicity, and Winter Hours by Mary Oliver. Those are the anthologies that I have read and I adore them. I imagine that all of her anthologies are also amazing and all of them are on my to-read list. I don’t think you could possibly go wrong

I do not have the singular published collection of Elizabeth Siddal’s poetry (My Ladys Soul) but I have read all of her poetry and she is an amazing poet and I hold her very near and dear to my heart

Crush by Richard Siken

Useless Magic by Florence Welch……..yall knew what you came here for

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

Non-fiction and Essay Collections (again. None of these are recommended as the definitive, end all, be all, all-you-need book on any given subject, they’re just some of my favorites). I have limited myself to collection specifically because this is long enough already and if I start just adding essays it’ll never end. All of these were either purchased online for under $10, are available somewhere on the internet as pdfs, or were at my library, so if you look, you can probably find them somewhere (I say this bc while trying to find the authors of some of these I have been stunned by their retail prices and I’m assuring you, don’t be scared off by your initial search bc I sure as fuck did not pay $30):

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

Marie Antoinette: the Journey by Antonia Fraser (controversial but well-researched and approachable and I love it. I would recommend reading like. almost anything else first because Fraser does obviously focus on Marie Antoinette and her life and experiences; and while she does talk about the revolution, it isn’t the focus of this biography, and you won’t understand why it was necessary if you don’t come to it with a good grasp on the broader events outside Marie Antoinette).

A Day with Marie Antoinette by Hélène Delalex

Robespierre: a Revolutionary Life and Liberty or Death: the French Revolution by Peter McPhee

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James

If you’re at all interested in 18th century art, I recommend Rococo to Revolution:Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting by Michael Levey

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn is controversial. But it’s approachable and well-researched and if you don’t know a lot about American history, I recommend it highly (especially for Americans).

Eros, the Bittersweet by Anne Carson (okay literally everything by Anne Carson. All her essays, her poetry, her translations, her weird mashups, all of it. There are a few things I haven’t read yet but. I very much doubt you’re going to be able to go wrong, so just take what I’ve listed as my favorites)

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory and From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty (also the illustrations by Landis Blair are absolutely phenomenal. Look at this. I love it so much I pulled it out of the book to hang in my momento mori corner because it’s so beautiful.)

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

Alexander of Macedon by Peter Green is. okay we have a love-hate relationship, me and this biography; me, and peter green, but I have major issues with every single Alexander biography I’ve read and this was the first so if you want to start somewhere, I guess go for it.

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

The Honey Bee by James L. Gould. It’s out of date in some respects but a good, simple introduction into honeybee biology and behavior

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich

Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health by Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Kleinman

Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present by Neil Miller

Holy Madness by Adam Zamoyski isn’t by any means perfect, but it’s a alright introduction to the Age of Revolution. Just don’t let it be the only thing you read. It’s here because it has a special place in my heart as my introduction to it.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Erotic Exchanges: the World of Elite Prostitution in 18th Century Paris by Nina Kushner

Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology by Patrick S. Cheng

Our Lives Matter: A Womanist queer Theology by Pamela R. Lightsey

Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them by Paige Embry

At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell (I really do not know that much about philosophy or existentialism specifically or this subject generally, so I have no idea where the faults of this book are, but I really enjoyed reading it and it made me think a lot. I have a feeling it’s very simplified so take it with a grain of salt as I did?)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau (just. just. it’s enjoyable but don’t get too into it please for the love of God). My copy (and I think most copies?) includes his essay Civil Disobedience as well which is very good.

Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave by Ona Judge

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

The Diaries of Virginia Woolf: I’m currently in the midst of volume 2 (1920-1924). They’re very enjoyable, but they’re something of an undertaking as all diaries are if you aren’t already very familiar with the biography of the person in question, so like. If you find yourself moving slowly don’t worry about it.

Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy

To Be Broken and Tender: A Quaker Theology for Today by Margery Post Abbott

The New Jim Crow byMichelle Alexander

The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy by Judith A. Layzer is a textbook that was assigned to me in my Enviornmental Policy class last semester and I really fkcing enjoyed it. It’s a book of case studies in environmental policy and it’s dense at times, but really interesting and enjoyable.

The Second Amendment: a Biography by Michael Waldman

Michelangelo’s Notebooks: the Poetry, Letters, and Art of the Great Master by Carolyn Vaughan. Just like. Genuinely. Genuinely. unintentionally hilarious. but also sometimes very sad, and very gay. I just adore Michelangelo. Just a shy foul-tempered repressed disaster. Jesus Christ.

#my next read is going to be richard ellmann's biography of oscar wilde #i'm v excited #henry speaks #vocallsama

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studyinrevolution · 7 years

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Got my readings!!!

Hey folks, popping out of hiatus to share my university reading materials. I'm so pumped and part of the reason I thought I'd share is partially to give you all a sense of what I'm staring down the barrel of but also because my sister gave me some awesome advice I'd love to pass along because it was wildly successful to me. So basically the reading list will be confirmed in a few days but I emailed all my profs asking for the central materials to get a head start. Obviously I'm not going to even scratch the surface of this in a month even though I have Odyssey and Chaucer on hand (which I took a look at and cried). However how this benefitted me is that I can now devise a readings schedule and most importantly, my profs have a first point of contact with me. Most of them were eager to respond and so helpful and generally impressed that I was enthusiastic to get going on their course. I really recommend doing this because that's a really simple way to get a great first impression and a general sense of your profs (like do they email with emojis). Greek and Roman Studies Homer. Odyssey, trans. S. Lombardo. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Robert Strassler The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Robert Strassler Greek Tragedies, D. Grene and R. Lattimore Aristophanes. Lysistrata and Other Plays, trans. A. H. Sommerstein. Plato. Five Dialogues, trans Plato (Author) J. Cooper (ed.), G.M.A. Grube (trans.) Philosophy Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings. 7th edition. Eds. John Perry, Michael Bratman, Political Science Eric Mintz, David Close, Osvaldo Croci, Politics, Power, and the Common Good: An Introduction to Political Science English 200 “The Wanderer” Excerpts from the Canterbury Tales Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Malory, excerpts from Morte Darthur Marie de France “Lanval”; Margery Kempe, excerpts from The Book of Margery Kempe; Julian of Norwich, excerpts from Showings Spenser, excerpts from The Faerie Queene, Book 1, Cantos 1,2,4,7 (Stanzas 29-46),11,12 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Renaissance Lyrics: Wyatt, “They Flee From Me”; Marlowe “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”; Ralegh “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”; Jonson, “On My First Daughter,” “Song: To Celia”; Wroth, “74: Song”; Herrick, “Delight In Disorder,” “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”; Lovelace, “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” The Sonnet: Wyatt “I find no peace”; Sidney, from Astrophil and Stella, 1,2,41, 74; Spenser, from Amoretti 1,64,75; Shakespeare, 18, 20, 73, 130; Donne from Holy Sonnets, 5, 14; Milton “How Soon Hath Time,” “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” The Metaphysicals: Donne “The Flea,” “The Bait,” “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed”; Herbert “Easter Wings,” “The Collar”; Crashaw, “On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord”; Marvell “To His Coy Mistress” Milton, excerpts from Paradise Lost: Book 1, Book 2, Book 6 (lines 550-912 only), Astronomy Astronomy Today by Chaisson & McMillan (including Mastering Astronomy)

#future university student #uvic #university advice #studyblr on break #senior high school #university freshman #frosh

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