One for Sorrow

Happy birthday praetorianguard!!!

So I got the DVD to Carrie. I love this movie, and wonderfully it contains some nice documentaries with cast interviews etc.

Fun facts:

• auditions for Carrie were actually joint auditions for that movie and Star Wars. (Yes, William Katt was there reading for Luke!)


• Amy Irving's real life mother plays her mother in the movie.


• Piper Laurie saved one of my favorite lines in the movie from getting cut--though she thinks most people don't even notice the line and only she cares about it.:-) The line is when she sees Carrie's prom dress she says: "Red. I might have known it would be red." This line was written assuming the dress would be red, and they forgot to change it when the dress was changed. When it came time to say it dePalma wanted to cut it but Laurie insisted it remain. So now we have the way it is in the movie, where she says that line and Carrie replies, "It's pink, Momma." As Laurie explained--and as I always thought was wonderfully apparent in the scene--to Margaret White, it's red. There is no pink. Go Piper Laurie!!

There's a lot of interesting stuff obviously, and it made me have ( thoughts about how great this movie is and about how a country can inform a story. )

Tonight I went to see Ju-On. I had tried to get it on video once but it wasn't yet available for US VCRs. Anyway, I very much enjoyed myself. There's a shower scene where...well, you know how Janet Leigh gets stabbed to death in her shower? I'd almost rather have that happen then the little thing that happens to this woman. And the scene with the cats. Yes.

( The rest of my evening. I'll probably say incredibly ignorant things about Japan in here, but at the end I meet Neil Young. )

Today I watched my new DVD copy of The Haunting. It turns out it's got commentary from the whole cast, the director and the screenwriter! ( So cool. )

In other news I finally pounded out a basic outline for something, thanks very much in part to incredible conversations about writing on spare_change's journal. Who knew talking to good writers about writing could help you. Not just practically, with people giving good advice, but just knowing people are out there struggling. This helps. Hopefully it will help me actually start putting words on a page.

I saw a really fun double feature with petitesoeur the other day. These are the Damned was an oddball British rock-n-roll movie featuring a very young Oliver Reed emoting all over the place as King, the leader of a gang of Weymouth Teddy Boys. He had a strange fixation on his sister and didn't want her kissing older American tourists. The Teddy Boys had their own theme song, btw, which I have been singing for days (points to subject line). The movie really picked up when the radioactive children showed up, but then what movie isn't immediately improved by a bunch of radioactive children? Anyway, it was really fun. And ultimately, it got to you. The end was effecting.

The other movie was one of my absolute favorites, The Innocents. It's a wonderful adaptation of Turn of the Screw by Truman Capote starring Deborah Kerr and Martin Stephens. Who's Martin Stephens you ask? Well, Martin Stephens was my first celebrity crush. At the time I was 7 and he was about 27. He was in Village of the Damned (the original, of course, not the lame remake) which I saw on TV. He is phenomonenal in The Innocents as Miles and Pamela Franklin is quite good as Flora too. The movie actually manages to preserve the book's ambiguity--is the possession real or not? What happened at Miles' school? Are the ghosts really there? Is Miss Giddens just so repressed she's insane? What happened between Miles, Flora, Quint and Miss Jessel? It's a movie that gets more horrible the more you think about it and you should think about it often! The final scenes between Miles and Miss Giddens is one of the most deliciously tense things ever!

I had always wondered what happened to Martin Stephens, btw. I finally discovered he grew up and became an architect. I was so happy to hear this I wrote him the only fan letter I've ever written. I figured it might amuse him to know some little girl discovered his work decades after he did it. He wrote me back, which led to my going on a meditation retreat where I wasn't allowed to speak for 10 days but that's another story. He loved filming The Innocents, btw, though he was too young to see it when it came out. He finally snuck into it when he was 15 or so and for the first time understood it: "Oh, it's about sex!"

This was the second time I'd seen it on the big screen. The first time was at the MOMA and I must say that their audience was better than the one at the Walter Reade. The MOMA crowd was mostly older people and they really jumped the first time the ghosts of Miss Jessel and Quint appeared. But nothing compares to the collective gasp they gave when Miles gave Miss Giddens that kiss goodnight. It felt like the air was all sucked out of the room. Also, I love the theme song--more than the jazzy "Black Leather" number from TATD. (We lay my love and I, beneath a weeping a willow...)

On a totally unrelated note, I was reading this thread on Snape characterization in fanfic and it made me think about author's authority over their own characters and stories a little bit. Also I thought about how I love Snape. ( I shall put my thoughts under a cut tag. )