Monday, April 02, 2012

Sentential Links

Time for links...but first, minx! Or rather, the soundtrack to an adult film called The Minx. Now there's something I never knew about film music. (No, the link is not safe for work. Ye Gods!)

:: So I decided that he was going to have to pay what I call "Get-A-Clue Tax". So I took his three dollars to the local bookstore and put it towards getting Nalini Singh's latest book because, well, her Guild Hunter series is my guilty pleasure. Not to mention that taking a clueless white dude's money and using it to buy a book by an awesome woman of color writer was the sweetest possible justice I could think of. (The older I get, the more I see that no matter how obviously bad a given idea is, there's someone out there who thinks it's a great idea. The guy in this story deserved a lot worse than he got.)

:: Long time readers of this blog understand my hate and mistrust of the cephalopod - your octopus, your squids, your cuttlefish, your assorted tentacled beasties that inhabit the cold and dark of our oceans. I welcome any opportunity to inform new readers of the true danger these boneless freaks pose to our civilization. (Pagh. They're cute and harmless. I, for one, welcome our new cephalopod overlords!)

:: So April is going to be a time for me to write about who I know I am to help me figure out where to go next. (A fellow A-to-Z challenge blogger.)

:: "It was a pleasure and a hell of an evening, surely was our night to win". I think of these lines every time I've had a great night doing anything especially gambling. The American and African became friends for a night and who knows, maybe always. (Another A-to-Z Challenger, who is focusing on Jimmy Buffett songs. I'm already liking this challenge.)

:: April Fool's Day seems ideal for Daffy Duck as the swashbuckling Scarlet Pumpernickel, something of a cross between Zorro and Percy Blakeney. Familiar characters and zany ending aside, it's not a bad little genre tale. (Yet another!)

:: I am not sure if I will ever kill that afterhours woman within me. Maybe my soul has always been a night owl. Maybe I will be able to one day train myself into a daytime person and put these afterhours writing party aside. Until then I will write as much as I can at night and pray that Jose (the hubby to be) will continue to be understanding, as he has been to date. (Still another. Challenges like this really give the lie to the notion that blogging is dying!)

:: “Dickensian” names is a bit of a slippery category — something to do with meter, with allusions to King James or Victorian English, and with a delightful mix of concrete nouns and sheer whimsy. The standard I’m using here is extremely subjective — can I imagine a character in a Dickens story having that name?

:: But again, not one of these details can actually explain the success of the film. It’s just one of those times when magic happened. Lightning is captured in a bottle. You can’t set out to make such a film, although, of course, everyone tries. But sometimes it happens when you are looking the other way. (A wonderful post by Sheila O'Malley about Casablanca, which compelled me to comment thusly:

I can never get over Casablanca for the sheer accidental nature of its greatness. So much art is meticulously crafted, labored over with exquisite care, pored over by its creator until he or she feels that every note, or word, or brushstroke, or frame is in its perfect place…and then along comes Casablanca, with its script still being written while shot, with its ending determined by sudden epiphany, and then that ending not even working until someone figures out how to edit it together…I just can’t get over that. A movie about the making of Casablanca couldn’t possibly seem anything other than contrived — “Those two producers, suddenly looking at each other and shouting, ‘Round up the usual suspects’! Give me a break, like that would ever happen!!!” And yet, it did. Wow.

I’ve always liked Roger Ebert’s view that Casablanca doesn’t have its greatest impact until you watch it the second time. I can attest to that…I enjoyed it well enough the first time, but when I watched it again, six months later, the thing just shattered me. I then watched it every single Sunday afternoon for six weeks. Movies like Casablanca are one of the only reasons I find death fearsome: I don’t want to enter a state where I can never see Casablanca again.

More next week!

1 comment:

Roger Owen Green said...

I'll have to see Casablanca again. I feel fortunate that I saw it the first time on a large screen.