dry heat

just got home from Beowulf. i've never liked CG when it's used to depict 'real' people; even done with motion capture, it never looks right to me. there's a strange foreshortening effect on anatomy, a subtle wrong-ness to movements i seem to be particularly sensitive to despite the graphics having started out real-time anyway, a certain deadness to faces--Anthony Hopkins, for one, couldn't seem to get much through the pixel-juice mask, though his line delivery was typically brilliant. it's all very displacing when it isn't meant to be, shouldn't be. 'toonish' CG folks such as the Pixarians--The Incredibles, Linguini and Collette, for instance--make much more sense in my head. i suppose that was at least partly to blame for the fact that the opening scenes of Beowulf had me shaking my head, mumbling 'uh-oh' repeatedly to myself. thankfully, either the graphics team or my head eventually started pulling things together more or less seamlessly (albeit not perfectly), and i ended up more or less perfectly happy with what i'd just seen.

i would have liked to see Stardust and Beowulf back to back. in my head they make nice endpieces on the spectrum of 'epic' fantasty in cinema. (though of course Stardust isn't epic, but let's not mince words here. i'm sure someone out there must see what i mean.)

there're a few things here and there i could link to--like this article from The New Scientist which seems suggestive of the solution to the problem of 'Is God male or female?'--and a few other things i could ramble about--like how after ten months i believe i've finally genuinely developed homesickness--but instead i think i'll just drop this quote, picked up from this review of Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion at The Guardian--it's from Tolstoy, on the writing of Anna Karenina:

"...everything seems to be ready for the writing - for fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion."

Chris had already found another way of looking at it, by way of a Marcus von Altenburg--i suppose she means Eva Ibbotson's A Song for Summer. read the quote here:

http://ficsation.blogspot.com/2007/11/advice.html

i'll figure out which might apply to Spooky in the morning. if i can get myself out of bed.