ghosts of the past, present, and future ~

[lookingland]

i've been neglecting this journal. just been ridiculously busy. but i thought i would check in with the week's book and film reviews.

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 37 ~ Cradled in Glory: The Georgia Military Instritute 1851-1865 by gary livingston. despite the prolific typos (yikes!) and the somewhat abrupt and sometimes erratic narrative, this book's a keeper (when i get some money i'll cough it up for a copy to own). what makes it so great is that it's such a detailed account (hashed together from letters and other records) of the short history of the GMI and the cadets who were enrolled there. it cemented in my mind that my Hollis will have a story of his own somewhere in the pantheon and it will involve his deserting the school for not being permitted to enlist in the fight. reading this book gave me so many cool ideas ~ yay! on the other hand, it's ultimately a sad account. the abandoned school is burned to the ground by sherman in november of 1864. though the book doesn't go into much detail about sherman's march, you get a very profound sense of the destruction and hopelessness of the situation. makes some of the cadet's young deaths (as young as 14-15!) even all the more pathetic.

the GMI in its short-lived hey-day
in film: An American Haunting ~ massive spoiler warning ~

this film doesn't really merit much of a review, but i'm going to spend some energy on it because i think it's a very interesting failure ~ the kind you can learn a lot from.

first of all, there's the script. great idea, lousy execution. because this was one of those written, directed, and produced by a single person, it's a good example of how to crash and burn as an auteur. the script should have been turned over to a stronger writer who had a better grasp of the period (1818 or thereabouts), and just overall better storytelling chops. what a waste of a wonderful cast! i'm amazed that a movie could attract actors like donald sutherland and sissy spacek and then fail so spectacularly. and once again james d'arcy is given nothing to do. poor mr. pullings. if i were to get famous before he gets old (right), i'd give him a role worthy of him. the dialogue here barely served to move the story forward. truly atrocious character development. one particular scene between the mother and the schoolteacher makes no sense whatsoever because the writer hasn't really bothered to layer in the heart of the problem. as a viewer twenty steps ahead of the game on this one, i found myself filling in all the scenes that might have made the film work.

the story of the Bell witch has been around a long time and is pretty well-known in American lore/mythology. In this reimagined concept, you have the witch as a MacGuffin to the real story, which is about a family tormented by the sins of the father (a sort of mass hysteria that falls over the family and manifests as this poltergeist ~ a split-off persona of the tormented daughter). both mother and daughter are living in denial of the father's rape the daughter and the spirit terrorizes the house wanting them to "see the truth".

this is a fascinating concept, but the film is a muddy mess of misdirection. the poltergeist activity is random, not wholly rooted in the psychological enough to make it truly scary, and much of the scare-imagery is just confounding to the plot. in the end, it all makes sense, but only in the most obvious and banal way ~ when it otherwise might have nuanced itself into a truly creepy, clinging sort of horror.

finally, the production on this is just wretched. it's obviously extremely low-budget, which i have no problem with. but the fact that it would appear no effort whatsoever was made to make the film adhere to its period is just unforgivable. the daughter sleeps in a bed that looks like it was sold at a discount furniture store, her doll looks like Kitty Carryall with brown hair, and the wedding photo of her and the school teacher looks like it was done at glamour shots (nevermind the fact that photography wasn't invented yet and wouldn't catch hold in america for another 20 years ~ this was the biggest "oh brother" of them all). how a film with even no budget can make this sort of error just astonishes me. for less than $100 they could have hewn a bed from raw wood, bought a reproduction china doll head (i mean, honestly, what was that doll made of ~ pvc?), and PhotoShopped an image that could have passed for an age-progression ambrotype (since the photo is seen in the future).

costumes were blandly passable in a borrowed off the rack from someone's production of The Christmas Carol sort of way. i won't pick on them too much for that.

i tried not to laugh out loud too much while watching this. I mostly felt a painful sort of sympathy for the cast. i mostly wanted to just stop everything and redo it. somehow make it right.

and there you have it and there it is
~ * ~

in further reading: i started stephenson's Quicksilver the other night. not very far in, but finding it interesting on a variety of levels. will prolly write about it along the journey. but not this morning.

in NaNo news: no news. no NaNo. i'm still at 41,547 words and not gaining. might work a little this weekend on it. hopefully i will just finish it and get it off my desk.

: D

Comments

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

I've been staring at Stephenson's books for a while - I shall wait to read about your journey before tackling you with questions :)

And, thanks for the heads up on the movie. Bad movies frustrate me to no end, so now I can skip that one! I have a feeling it's going to be a movie kind of weekend :)

[java-fiend.livejournal.com]

I saw an American Haunting and have to say that I was really disappointed. I didn't like that movie at all. I definitely think they could have done a much better job with it.

[sparowe]

I'd hesitated over picking that movie up, and really for reasons nothing to do with what you describe... seems to have been fortunate, sadly.