cleolinda | Entries tagged with the prestige

You know how bad I didn't want to work today? I went and scrubbed the toilet instead. And then I went and worked on footnotes for The Prestige anyway.

(The bitchful part of it is having to go back through my books on stage magic--which, being print copies, don't have helpful search functions--to back up my vague claims that, uh, stage patter was... important, and... stuff. People died doing the bullet catch... somewhere. I mean, definitely. I'm pretty sure. The real attraction of a footnoted "Prestige in Fifteen Minutes," though, is that I've gone through it and theorized (spoiler) ( Read more... ) and I think I can make a pretty compelling case. I'm working on a discussion of the differences between the POTO musical/movie and the book, with key excerpts from the latter--it's public domain, after all--and I already have huge amounts of My Thoughts on Dracula, Let Me Show You Them for that 15M. With any luck, this will be something people would actually be willing to pay for.)

So hopefully I'll have my little e-book (zip folder, really) done soon and can try to raise some money to pay off the air conditioner we had to replace, since I've been working on the footnotes for months and the no-interest period ends as of this month, and if we can't pay the rest off, we start having to pay 23% interest as well. And also, I want to move on with my life and get back to working on Black Ribbon. Particularly since October is such a great gothy little month.

(Hey, randomness! You know that's a really fun snack? A slice of bread with peanut butter spread over it and then covered in mini-marshmallows. Kind of an open-faced fluffernutter sandwich. The sad thing is that I don't even have the excuse that I liked to eat this as a child or anything. I just went downstairs to make myself a sandwich and went, "Huh, you know what might be fun...?" I think the bleach fumes from the toilet are starting to get to me.)

Linkspam! ( This guy better hope he is dead or else he'll be going to jail for a long long time )

Current Mood: mellow

So my computer crashed in the middle of me footnoting "The Prestige in Fifteen Minutes" (and I had just spent like an hour discussing, uh, who I thought was in each scene--if you've seen the movie, you know what I mean) for the e-book project, which was a buzzkill. Meanwhile, my grandmother's sick (a sinus infection similar to mine, I think, only worse, since she's so frail), she's also worried about her money being with Merrill Lynch (yeah... I would too, right now), Shelby's having stomach problems, my stepfather is having a really, really hard time at work right now, my sister's having to do catering deliveries again and she inevitably ends up getting her car totaled by some nut loose on the street, we're going to have to have a plumber come out and look at the downstairs toilets, Tiny Tim needs a new crutch, and I'm just tired of it all, really. And feeling bad for everyone.

That said, I've already posted twice today and I was very productive (the computer crash aside), so I've got that going for me. Actually, I think I'm cycling back through a manic or hypomanic phase again. ( Who wants to make bets on what I'll be doing at the end of October? )

Oh, and apparently Let the Right One In is going to be playing at the Sidewalk Film Festival here in town on Saturday night (!!), although I don't know if I'll be able to go.

Speaking of which: Cloverfield's Matt Reeves Remaking 'Let the Right One In'; Countdown under way for 10th Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival in downtown Birmingham.

More linkspam! ( Hey, it's Alice! In Wonderland! Why is she on a ship? )

Current Mood: working

What with this being my third entry of the day, and all.

Maggie has all 65 Marie Antoinette dress pages up! And we're still looking for that pink dress with the bow at the bottom of the page--we haven't seen it anywhere in the movie. Meanwhile, I went through some Eragon DVD caps last night (wait a minute... that isn't out on DVD yet, is it? And yet somehow, there were 7700 caps), and I may actually do a costume feature here like the one I did for MA, except the focus of this one would be how the elf chick's costumes make no sense. You know how Lovecraft writes about how mortals get a glimpse into the Elder Gods' realm and go mad from all the non-Euclidean geometry? The Elder Gods are wearing Elf Chick's costumes, is all I'm saying. You'll see what I mean, if/when I put pictures up.

Tonight: the sorting of Prestige caps, because

oh_cap is awesome. (DVD release tomorrow, whee!) Also, I'm thinking of making actual Heroine Addict icons for movies that have come out... well, since V for Vendetta, which I think was when I did the last batch.

( Linkspam )

Been reading, mostly, in between bouts of cleaning. Have I nattered on about what books I'm reading at the moment yet? ( The orange tree and the disappearing birdcage )

Linkspam: I accidentally pressed "post" too soon, so there was a giant uncut (and unformatted) linkspam entry that may have appeared on your friends list for the two frantic seconds it took me to recopy and delete it. So, uh. Extremely sorry about that. Because it is kind of giant.

( Where is he? I will cast him out! )

Here's what I love: BellSouth insists that internet woes are a problem on my end, despite the fact that my internet is slow or out at the same time every day (with additional, random outages), which would suggest to me that it's THEIR PROBLEM, and THEIR NETWORK, because it's not like my modem's just going to be like, "I don't like afternoooooons, you guyyyyyys." So I call to complain yet again, and the BellSouth guy just sort of casually mentions that they're going to be out in my area working on the line, so turn off the computer and unplug everything and then reboot "at some point in the afternoon," but it is, in fact, still my modem that's the problem.

Uh huh.

At some point, I need to carve another pumpkin this afternoon/evening--it's been tempting to just leave the one I did last Sunday out there, but it's half-covered with black (and red) mold on the inside, and the long fangs I cut for it have now completely curled under, making it look toothless. Also, it keeps asking when Jello's going to be. Really, we need another jack o' lantern. I think I'm going to do a Jack Skellington face, but I hate gutting the pumpkin. I mean, I don't mind the goo; I mind that it takes me so frickin' long to do it. Also, I really wish I had one of the little sawwy knives that Valkyrie and Dr. Typo had. But really, our honor in the neighborhood is at stake. A new jack must be carved.

( Conversations with my mother )

A particularly juicy set of linkspam, with first looks at The Golden Age and His Dark Materials, and some choice Cruise and Federline schadenfreude: ( Read more... )

Oh, and if you play Kingdom of Loathing, make sure you log in for Crimboween today.

And finally,

this_quiet: "Hi. I was wondering if you would be so kind as to link Light a Million Candles in your next linkspam. It's a website advocating against online child pornography, and I think it's really important that we get the word out there, that it's really happening, one of the more unfortunate products of the internet. Anyway, it would mean a lot if you did. Thank you!"

ETA: Cookies of Win go to

sabinelagrande for not just deciphering the coded passage in Borden's parody diary, but for also catching a mistake I made. (I'm surprised I only made one.) (Yes, that was a functional cryptogram. Again: the kind of quality you have come to expect from this journal.)

I'm holding off posting these on the main comm until later today, since I posted the parody last night, and a lot of people probably won't even see it until they check their friends lists this morning. (It is currently 3:30 am, and I can't sleep because I lost another battle in the Thermostat Wars.) So I figured I'd go ahead and let Y'all, The Faithful, have at 'em. Twelve is about all I could manage, given the images currently available--none of which were particularly spoilery; there won't be DVD-quality screencaps until the Oscar screeners come out in about a month, most likely.

( Cut for (IMO) oblique spoilers )

God, I'm trying to work (1600 words so far. More on that later)

This is what I was talking about. Yeah, the "I probably can't do it and I promise nothing" thing: very frequently a way of psyching myself out in reverse so I actually can do something. And if I can't manage to do it--well, I said I couldn't, right?

( The Prestige! Minor spoilers! )

( More Prestige! Major spoilers! )

ETA: ( Spoiler question )

Warning: Given that people who have seen the movie will probably want to discuss it, there will probably be major spoilers in the comments. Don't go browsing unless you've already seen it. Trust me, you don't want to know the twist(s).

You know how you can say something over and over until it doesn't even sound like a word anymore? ( Read more... )

By the way, re: espionage and fashion: do y'all know of any paintings of Madame du Barry that are online? I searched artrenewal.org and didn't come up with anything; the painting on the Wikipedia entry isn't really what I'm looking for--the dress is too casual. It's basically for the plot point of, "We think she will try to have the couturier copy a gown of Madame du Barry's," and Rose Hannah will need to have a reasonable facsimile of it if she wants to pass as this woman (again: espionage). Now, I can fake it, obviously, but if I could find a real painting with a good court or ball gown, that would be fantastic.

(By the way, if you're writing a period piece, the aforementioned Art Renewal Center can be super helpful. I used a lot of Tissot, Sargent, and Millais paintings for visual reference when I was originally writing Black Ribbon back in '03.)

And just a little linkspam, so it doesn't pile up:

New movie stills: The Prestige (which is going to be totally awesome); Rescue Dawn (more Christian Bale); Little Children (Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, Patrick Wilson); Goya's Ghosts (Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgard); Stranger Than Fiction (Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson--I would say "Which one of these is not like the others?," but all of them are); more Casino Royale.

Cocaine Is It.

Unified Celebrity Theory Puts Britney Spears' Odds For Happiness At An Even 0-To-0.

Zooey Deschanel is Janis Joplin.

British business mogul Richard Branson said Thursday he would invest about $3 billion to combat global warming over the next decade. This is the same Richard Branson who pulled the Paris in Wonderland stunt, by the way.

Investigators Find 'Smoking Gun' Linking Spinach to E. Coli Outbreak: Now there's a headline you won't see every day. "Consumers should throw away any fresh packaged spinach they may have bought in the past few weeks and not buy more until the warning is lifted, the FDA said. It also said that washing the spinach won't help because the bacteria is too tightly attached." So... why were we having spinach lasagna pinwheels for dinner the other night? Does nobody in this house watch the news?

Lamictal, day 8: Reading's getting a little easier if I try really hard. As proof:

Do you ever find yourself wondering about really arcane, random things? Like, I was watching the Prestige trailer again. I'd just watched it streaming before, but I downloaded it this time so my mother could see it (I'm going to try to sell her on the new Bond trailer as well; she's still mad that they didn't get Clive Owen. You know, even though she can't remember his name half the time. He used to be "King Arthur," now he's "That Guy from Inside Man"), so I watched it again. And I find myself wondering... where did magicians in that period (the book is set in the late 1870s, I think?) actually perform? Well, I did a little digging, and I found out that they generally performed on the vaudeville circuit in the United States and in music halls/variety theaters in Britain. And then I started wondering... where do the performers live? It's not like a circus, where they're basically carrying their own accomodations with them. Some of them seemed to stay in one place, maybe performing at more than one theater, but probably staying in one city, but that seemed more London-based; American vaudeville (particularly from what I've seen in Gypsy, set some 60-70 years later) seems a lot more nomadic. Did ordinary traveling B- and C-list performers just live at the theater while they were there? In (cheap, I assume) hotels? Was it kind of a pain in the ass to find a place to stay every time you moved on to a new city (which is why I'm wondering if there was some kind of set accomodation)?

The obvious solution would be to read a biography of such a performer--Robert-Houdin turned up as an interesting possibility. Houdini is the obvious choice, of course, although he was more early twentieth-century. What I noticed was, once I'd gotten sucked into a daisy chain of Wikipedia articles, you see several classic magic tricks in the Prestige trailer: the bullet catch, the vanishing cage (you actually see the secret of how that works), the Aquarian Illusion (which I don't think actually existed until recently), a little sleight of hand in passing, and the big trick that's Real Magic Zomg looks like a dressed-up version of your basic teleportation.

(What? Two movies about magicians this year, and you thought I wasn't going to get sucked into the history of stage magic?)

Speaking of Bond a long, long time ago up there, if you liked the trailer: updated Casino Royale gallery. Also at the trailer link: a download of the Catch a Fire trailer I mentioned the other week.

(I'm going to stake my money on it right now: somewhere, somehow, someone will not like the Bond movie, and they will write a negative review, and it will be titled "Royale with Cheese.")

Still Life Takes Top Honor at Venice. More importantly (for our purposes), Helen Mirren and Ben Affleck take top acting awards. Start your Oscar betting... now.

Ledger on the Joker: I Wouldn't Have Thought of Me Either. Heh.

Rumor: JKR Says Book Seven "up to about 750 pages." Sweet fancy Moses. I'll remember to rent a handcart when I go buy the book.

First Glimpse of Kingsley Shacklebolt and More in New King's Cross Report.

Models Flunk BMI, Get Spain Fashion Boot. That's right, bitches. You gotta have something to work.

Jilted bride turns wedding into benefit. No, not for herself, either.

In other news, I just realized that Marie Antoinette and The Prestige come out on the same weekend in October, and I am feeling something like panic--moviegoer's panic? Maybe we could swing another double feature, but I don't know...