lust, caution, lolz (pick just two)

[dubdobdee]

warning not really a review: ok so (A) the present is not in such a healthy state and we may well soon by boiling one another's bones in bonfires of busted ipods, and (B) i was a happy little kid in the never-had-it-so-good era and (C) actually a functioning voting adult in a bit of the past a lot of you lot consider ANCIENT HISTORY PLUS (with punk rock and everything)

but even with a bit of natural aging-bones loyalty to then over now, when i watch films which put themselves thru the grinder to catch the feel and texture of times gone by -- the hang of the clothes, the look of the walls -- i really really REALLY REALLY warm to the fact that i live now rather than then

ok so ang lee's film is contemporary with -- kinda sorta features offstage as historical setting-- the RAPE OF NANKING among other non-jolly events, and life under the fascist heel etc was never going to be a picnic, but i guess what i'm getting at (decadently enuff) is more the texture of surfaces, as a reason to keep on keeping on --> todd haynes's far from heaven (on TV on monday) is set in a far less evidently pitiless era (50s america, as the still-unfinished thaw of interracial relations is just just just starting to glimmer) but still (and of course todd piles on the sirkian folds of lush repression cz that's his thing obv) oof i am glad i didn't live there and then

i am well aware this is a kind of optical illusion: so turn it into a QUESTION (and LJ meme even!): viz WHEN (based on a movie or a book or a comic or SAY WHAT) in history would you not have minded living or even maybe ENJOYED IT

Comments

[spittake.livejournal.com]

After watching a documentary abt Malcolm Lowry which showed a bunch of still of severely advanced syphilis, I am happy to live in a time of readily available penicillin and latex.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

There are lot of desolate, unsafe locations from films where I wouldn't mind living in, especially these days as I have a desire to get away from it all (and not in a two week holiday way either or backpacking, but properly disappearing), and when its photographed amazingly this 'wouldn't mind' is amplified to an active desire.

The ultimate example comes the zone in Tarkovsky's "Stalker". This was a nuclear contaminated site wasn't it? But it looks great to walk around/play in/relax. That with a library somewhere wouldn't be bad.

[koganbot]

I've no answer to your question, and haven't seen either of the films, but I remember that when my Mom saw Chinatown she marveled how the film got the look of the Thirties right. And what impressed me about it is that it made absolutely no big deal (or no deal at all) of being in the Thirties as opposed to now and see how we got the look right. It was about itself, and didn't make a point of where it lived, it just lived there. And then several years later there was Dick Richards awful remake of The Big Sleep, in which it kept dropping all these references from the Forties so that we would be constantly aware that we were in a film SET IN THE FORTIES. I can't say that the latter technique is invalid in principle, but in fact it really sucks, in literature, in movies, etc. (except when the thing is clearly being narrated from the point of view of the present and a lot of the point is the distance between then and now).

But wouldn't it be more relevant here to look at films actually made in the past? And in those instances they would not only give us the look of movie sets past, but also the actual attitudes of moviemakers and movie audiences from times past. (Of course, who's to say that a later movie set in the Thirties might not get the time better, not being beholden to the lies of the Thirties. [Strokes chin and goes, "Hmmm."]