lunabee34

1. Y'all were so right! Always Be My Maybe is delightful. ( spoilers )

2. ( children's books roundup for June )

3. ( Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus )

4. ( fic recs in MCU, Guardian, and Stranger Things )

1. I finished The Deathly Hallows! ( my reaction )

2. Gotham is back!! ( spoilers )

3. We watched a great little indie movie called Life after Beth. It's a take on the zombie apocalypse with a great cast; very funny with lots of good pathos. It's not scary at all (or else I couldn't have watched it LOL). It's also an hour and half long which is a huge selling point for me; I lament the loss of the hour and a half movie. You can't watch a three hour movie on a week night after the kids are in bed and still get to sleep at a decent hour.

4. executrix send me an awesome batch of books. I am enjoying going through them.

Infra-Apparel by Richard Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Beautiful pictures of clothing in which the underwear or under-layers of clothing are either exposed or come to influence the outerwear or outer-layers.

I think the text is unnecessarily fussy and obfuscating at times, but it's still fascinating if you are interested in fashion.



View all my reviews

1. I finished To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol Wallace which is about the rush of American heiresses who married into English aristocracy in the late Victorian through Edwardian period. Excellent read. I especially loved the copious photographs of the glitterati of the time, their gowns by Worth, and their homes. What constitutes beauty in any given era is always so interesting to me; more than half the women pictured in this book would probably not be considered beautiful by modern standards (and I'm not talking about weight or figure; I'm talking more facial features although to be fair, those horrific Edwardian hairdos flatter no one's facial features).

That leads me to another question. How did Victorian, aristocratic women keep their figures? Exercise in the way we understand it now was not appropriate for women to engage in, and the aristocratic life was one ball, dinner, and banquet after another. I suspect a fair amount of just not eating was responsible as well as corsets, and women could walk and ride horses. IDK I am just imagining women secretly doing push-ups in their bedrooms at night to work off the breakfast of ortolans and champagne.

2. Lucifer continues to be enjoyable. ( SPOILERS )

3. Emma and I went to go see Hail Caesar. I was surprised she wanted to see it in the first place, and doubly surprised when she ended up enjoying it rather than being bored. The movie was hit or miss for me. ( SPOILERS )

4. We started watching Daredevil which I enjoy. ( SPOILERS )

5. In the past couple years, I've gone for long stretches where I don't read books and only read stuff online, and then binge read like 10 books in two weeks. This has been one of those stretches where I've not been reading much, so I'm resolved to start reading books again. Here's my To Read list:

The Mechanical
Ancillary Justice
Goblin Emperor
Ragnarok
Sugar
The Game
Parasite
Irving book
3 Body Problem
Martian
the final Mortal Instruments book
Stephen King books on Kindle

1. I noticed tonight that the line about an inch down in a Solo cup marks 12 oz.

2. I have started reading Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, and it is fabulous. It reminds me a great deal of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad--very meta-textual, very fourth wall-breaky. I am always so pleased when the women who get to say very little (Or nothing in Lavinia's case) are given a story. Highly, highly recommended. I could drown in UKLG's words no matter the subject, so perhaps I am a bit biased.

3. Josh and I watched The Perfect Host on Netflix the other night, and it was such a fun movie. First off, it was an hour and a half long. Don't get me wrong. I want some movies to be epic. But on the whole, I lament the demise of the hour and a half movie. It's the perfect length of time for a weeknight movie. I don't want to watch a three hour movie after Ems goes to bed at nine. I want something that puts me going to bed before midnight. I also think that the shorter form makes in many cases for tighter storytelling and a lack of extraneous bits. This movie stars Niles Crane LOL and it's one of those where I don't want to say much at all about the plot except for the basic premise is that a bank robber takes refuge at Niles's house immediately after he commits his crime. Highly entertaining and unpredictable with lovely black humor.

4. Josh and I watched the first episode of Psych, and it was fantastic, unbelievably good; pretty much zero pilot pains. Josh and I both literally LOL'ed multiple times. We're holding off on watching any more until Ems gets back from her grandparents. We both agree that this is a show she will enjoy. I hope like hell this show has a fandom; I find that the comedies are less likely to have much of a fandom which makes me sad. I probably won't go looking until we're done with the show.

What've y'all been up to?

We have watched a lot of movies and the suchlike over the holidays. May I recommend to you:

( Skyfall )

( The Last Lovecraft )

( I Sell the Dead )

( Iron Chef Redemption )

I have nothing Profound to say about Dark Knight, just that I enjoyed it and wish I had been able to see it on the big screen. Heath Ledger and Thank You for Smoking guy turned in amazing performances. I was a little confused when Katie Holmes turned into Maggie Gyllenhall, so much so that I didn't realize they were the same character for far too much of the movie. My favorite part of the movie was that one beautiful and surprising moment of grace, when the tension has been building and building on both ferries and the prisoner takes the detonator and instead of triggering it, he throws it out the window and then the businessman on the other ferry chooses not to detonate the bomb either. In a movie that I found unremittingly dark, with violence and horror that constantly escalated, this was a wonderful bit of counterpoint that kept the movie from being entirely too fatalistic.

Preaching to the Perverted was an uneven movie but an enjoyable one. It's another of those that we discovered while watching that IFC documentary on sex in films. There were moments that I would characterize as hot and as funny and as sweet and as emotionally touching, but overall, this movie didn't feel very cohesive to me. Or maybe it's just that parts of it bored me. I did like that kink and sex weren't necessarily treated as synonymous; I liked that people whose kinks and sexual practices marginalize them were treated as actual human beings (even if some of their scenes were often over the top); and I liked that the movie seemed to advocate a real balance of kink and vanilla, with neither approach to life and sex being demonized, but rather shown as complementing each other. Overall, a solid 3 out of 5 on this one.

Shadowboxer surprised the hell out of me. I had no idea at all what it was about. The only thing I had seen was a clip from the movie on that IFC documentary of Steven Dorff in a sex scene. I think this movie was uneven as well, but the things I liked about it, I liked so much that I think everyone should watch it. There are a lot of people of color in this movie and they are all interesting and complicated characters and none of them is the bad guy (with one exception) or the magical black man. We have a lot of inter-racial relationships, a relationship between a significantly older woman and a much younger man (yay!), older people portrayed as legimately sexual beings, and people of varying sizes and shapes treated as people (not the comic relief or the supportive fat friend who lives vicariously through the heroine's exploits). Macy Gray kicked ass in this movie; her character was so funny and off the wall. And Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr., pretty much chewed up the scenery every time they were on the screen. Yes, you read that right. Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr. *fans face* Go watch. Now. (Be advised that this is a violent movie with references to and one short depiction of child abuse.)

Besides agreeing with Roger Ebert who says: [it] plays like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians and nearly changing the title of my journal to a pestilential skin, I am curious about a plot point and Google doth fail me.

( SPOILERS )

1. New icon! Lookee! *points* This is a scene from “Rumours of Death,” the absolute best episode of B7 that I’ve seen so far—Avon’s all intense and lethal and Servalan is so freaking hot tied up on that wall with bruises all over her face. Yum! “It’s an old wall. It waits.” Thank you executrix!

2. I got two pages of comments on Thantopsis! I have never, ever gotten two pages of comments on an entry that wasn’t meta! I am so in love with myself right now. LOL

3. Some entries for my No Pressure SPN Ficathon have come in, so check those stories out. Good stuff, people, and hopefully more entries to appear by this weekend.

4. Andy put up a teaser trailer for the movie we've been shooting here: Synchronicity Teaser. I'm the chick at the very end with the longer hair, which is super specific, I know. LOL I can't actually watch it myself due to dialup. I don't think I'm in this clip much, but it's a great scene.

5. ( Spoilers for Shortbus )

6. ( Spoilers for SPN episode: Heart )

Andy and I were looking at one of his Entertainment Weekly's and they had all the covers pertaining to Bond over the years on this issue. The cover from 1969 had a tag line about Midnight Cowboy that said, "The gay cowboy movie." Since Andy owns it, I demanded we watch.

( Review of Midnight Cowboy )