Right

[ateolf]

I almost thought I had a major catastrophe yesterday losing my phone. Right after grocery shopping, I went to take Mary Beth's car down the block to put air in her tires. In between I knew I had my phone, but after I got back I just couldn't find it anywhere. Even drove back up to the gas station to try to find it. Well, what happened was as I was heading back out, I switched jackets in a hurry as it was feeling a bit colder than when we first went out. The phone was in the jacket pocket that was left at home. And after coming back, I naturally looked in the pockets of the coat I was wearing but I didn't think about the one I wasn't wearing. Anyway, when I finally figured it out it was a huge relief. Anyway, after all that Mary Beth and I went over to Josh and Molly's with the same configuration as last week (with Dustin and Courtney there as well). We played that Horrified game again, this time going into a regular mode with more difficulty. Well, we also went a good ways into it misunderstanding some key rules and were making it way harder on ourselves. We compensated by pretty much just ignoring the terror meter (or whatever it's called) but we still lost anyway 'cuz we ran out of monster cards. Ah well. One day we will play it and get it damn right! Then we hung out and talked a while, good time and all that. After we got back home, Mary Beth and I ordered some pizza from Little Italy. We ate it and watched Vita & Virginia (a biopic about Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf). I have some mixed feelings about it. At first, I absolutely hated it. It does that thing too many biopics do where it over-crams the dialog with explanation and biographical detail. I also really didn't like the editing. It felt it was trying to make everything stylish in a "cool" way rather than in a way that fit in with or enhanced the characters or story or whatever. It was very visually beautiful, especially the exterior shots, but that beauty still felt kinda separate from the movie or whatever. As it went on and the story developed more, I felt it settled into something and I didn't hate it so much. I guess I didn't think it was good as far as movies go and I think much better could have been done with the subject matter, but it wasn't overall irredeemable and I did glean something out of it. Now it's a new morning and I must have slept funny 'cuz I woke up with a sore shoulder. I also woke up because in my dream a word was spoken (I think someone just saying "right" in response to something else) and it was much louder than everything else in the dream. Like, it wasn't spoken or shouted loudly, it was just like the "volume" on that word jumped up and it sounded like it was right in one of my ears and that "loudness" woke me up. Anyway!

Comments

[ifjuly]

interesting. i thought the "stylishness" while very jarring/noticeable was in service in that wonderful a-movie-that-knows-it's-a-movie,-and-thus-what-it's-got-to-work-with-vs-a-book way* to slyly/silently layering way more nods and thus meaningfulness to virginia's works. and you know i love stuff like that, where if you don't know the myriad quiet allusions it's ok but if you do you can relish that and have it inform your experience of the work more deeply. (also, i thought it was meta-fitting, a subtly charged commentary on that thing i too am very sensitive about, how what is considered frivolous frippery, style or ornament for no deep purpose, often very much says a lot***, the opposite (and i think is a defiant reactionary response to the drabness people who aren't interested assume of the subject, or of "sapphism" and all-women-or-women-focused-spheres in general**), in just those ways women's spheres of attuned knowledge/literacy are keyed to and is hence why that depth isn't remarked upon as much or even recognized as such.) and the silent referencing of the most to me poignant unspeakable things virginia found a way to touch upon aside even (!), there's that eliot-style "objective correlative" aspect, plus less mystical but also meaningful visual themes (i don't think i will be forgetting the slow and steady zoom into the closed green door with its chalk x anytime soon, all it represents, the eloquence of that as at least three or four metaphors all at once stacked together).

(*though, simultaneously i _also_ dug how it knows pretty much _the_ codified source material, their letters, speak for themselves and thus how that's used, the most reverent centerpiece...i liked that a lot, down to the romanticism of the letters as physical artifact, the one area (aside from "her lost home", that notion) where it is precious in its focus. thought that was fitting.)

i was also worried how it would treat virginia's unusual mental landscape, and i'm still mulling that over but am inclined to say it's a gentle step in a (to me, better) different direction than god knows most things from my formative past, say most of the '90s biopics i ever saw, in general--it made quiet but important space for the notion just when you think she has experienced a kind of devastating interior fallout she is in fact harnessing her whole unique way of being to something as nonpareil as orlando (while not sugarcoating generally obscured pain and difficulties either). (and, not to fall too deep into the cliche trap of lumping figures together demographically just because of that, the physical-_and_-simultaneously-interior difficulties bit, that kind of bright-horror-pain, made me think back to davies' emily dickinson treatment...)

and of course, not to oversay the blindingly obvious but it's definitely of the school, like so much lately, of "we're both talking about this thing but also not at all, we're talking about things now" bit. that train scene, oh my (and the eclipse scene of course). i think a lot of the clash-y bits are in service to making that more obvious. it's definitely (and surprisingly) not precious about the people/events involved, in search of something more direct and intimate in its way, i felt. that notion intrigues me (and is in part also where the "quietly subversive" line some reviewer used springs from, i reckon).

**visually and politically, it kind of shared something in common with the newer picnic at hanging rock which i think many probably saw as a vivid colorful messy failure and i wouldn't disagree it was messy but also personally, even if i didn't absolutely love it, found rather astonishing for its bold come-out-swinging outreness. if de palma can do his now-cheesy clumsy screen flourishes and have people respond with grace, well, you know...

***wrt passing-googling look at reception to this thing, and yeah it's nowhere near the level of, but i'm reminded slightly of the online forum response, from guys, to carmen maria machado's "especially heinous" that indicated said guys had a passing/dart-in-and-out/non-comprehensive nor turned-over-and-over-and-_over_/surface knowledge of law and order svu but not deep enough to understand what she was doing, how much deeper down she was drilling in what she was doing with it (and how much there was with the show itself with wrestle with if you had skin in that game, way beyond regular/sane/whatever "tv entertainment") and thus assumed she had never watched the show at all as it, to them, bore no resemblance, wasn't casually-obviously fixed to it in legible plain-and-simple terms.