teach me the art of war

Movies

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022): This was absolutely heartbreaking. Last time I tried to watch it, I was in way too soft a mental space and had to nope out early; I got the whole way through this time, but man, it hurt. It's a film about the senselessness of war, and the total disconnect between the men calling the proverbial shots and the men actually forced to fire them.

But if you've read All Quiet, the novel, then perhaps you're reading my summary and thinking 'but that's not really what it's meant to be about!' and - yeah. I'm not entirely convinced this a counts as an adaptation? I'll grant you, the film does contain characters named Paul Bäumer and Kat and Kropp who fight in WWI, and they occasionally do the same things as their book counterparts, but huge chunks of the plot are made up from whole cloth. The geopolitics of the situation, so little touched on in Remarque's work, are front and centre; the intimacy and psychological insight are largely gone. (Paul never even goes on leave!) If the filmmakers had only had the courage to stand on their own two feet and give their work a different title, I'd have had nothing but praise for it: the acting is top notch, the score is exquisite, the themes are powerful, and the combat is fucking terrifying. It's a great film, but it has so little to do with its source material that I'm left with a bit of a sour taste.

Music

Walk the Wire by Miazma: YO DAWG I HEARD YOU LIKE SISTERS OF MERCY. Listen. Sometimes you want to hear musicians reaching for new heights and pushing the boundaries of their chosen genre; other times you just want to shovel huge, heaped helpings of First and Last and Always into your greedy goth mouth, and when you've scraped your plate clean, you want to continue the binge with something that technically isn't First and Last and Always but tastes pretty much the same. This is an album that absolutely makes a virtue of being not particularly original, by being so good at what it does that you can't imagine caring.

Chappell Roan: In the past week or two, tumblr has been talking about this artist so much that my dash would probably have become unusable if I tried to block her name. Her music is a very long way away from anything I would normally listen to, but I watched a few of her film clips and now I think I'm a little bit obsessed? The unabashed queer joy and playful eroticism of Red Wine Supernova is activating feelings I didn't even know I had about my own sexuality. I was lucky to grow up in a fairly non-homophobic environment - I never exactly "came out" so much as just started including girls in my teen dating life without much fanfare - but I had nothing teaching me how to nurture those attractions the way I did with boys. Having lesbian women like Chappell Roan visible in the mainstream back then would have meant so much to me.

YouTube

With no input from me that I can figure out (my YouTube use is like 10% music videos and 90% me streaming Bob the Builder for my toddler), The Algorithm has recently offered up Tasting History with Max Miller, an alarmingly RTMI channel devoted to recreating old recipes and telling fun historical anecdotes along the way. So far I've really enjoyed some videos he did on medieval taverns and monasteries, and another on Regency era breakfasts. I've got a couple about WWII-era cooking queued up next, and also I think I'm going to have to buy his cookbook and see if I can lure any of the neighbours over for a historical dinner party...

Movies

Glass Onion - I didn't enjoy this quite as much as Knives Out, but I still enjoyed it. The structure is basically the same: Agatha Christie-style murder mystery about wealthy assholes gets subverted to shocking effect halfway through, then re-subverted at the end to bring it to a conclusion that still satisfies the original promise. One of my favourite things about Rian Johnson's filmmaking is that he subverts with affection - he's as much a fan of these genres as anyone - and he always keeps his promises eventually, even if the path to get there is full of surprises.

It's very much a snapshot of this very particular moment, full of jokes about COVID and The Lockdown Experience (TM) that will - at least, I sure hope - be incomprehensible in a couple of decades. And that's not to mention all the celebrity references that will date even faster. But I kind of love it for that. Not all media needs to aim for timelessness. I'm just glad someone thought to have fun with different mask-wearing styles during this narrow window of time where that kind of character detail has meaning.

1917 - I know nothing about cinematography, but the 'one shot' conceit really worked for me. (It was not actually filmed in one shot, and even my untrained eye can make out some of the joins, but that doesn't matter - it's about the impact on the story, not the technicalities of filming.) Two soldiers are on a time-sensitive mission to deliver a message that could save the lives of 16,000 men, and the movie follows them from start to finish without skipping a single moment of their journey. The result is breathless and in places excruciating - I kept expecting to jump to the next 'plot-relevant' event, but instead the cameras sat staunchly with the soldiers through all of it, through suspense, through inaction, through mundane blunders that shaved precious minutes off their deadline.

There's a scene towards the end, after a frantic near-drowning scene, where we float dazed and exhausted down a sparkling clean river watching cherry blossom petals swirl overhead - right into a dam made of bloated, waterlogged corpses that have washed up against a log. That one's going to stick with me. It's beautiful and horrible and not exactly subtle, but I don't blame it for that, because 'don't romanticise war' is a lesson that just never seems to stick with people.

All Quiet on the Western Front - DNF'd at around 40 minutes and bitterly wish I'd stopped earlier. It's a brilliant adaptation that I absolutely do not have the stomach for right now, which I should have realised the moment Felix Kammerer brought his ear-to-ear smile on screen, bouncing with boyish excitement about being sent to the front. The casting is impeccable - he and his cohort look desperately young and vulnerable, all innocent smiles in the face of impending horrors they can't possibly understand. 'We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.' Definitely recommend watching this if you no longer need your heart and would like it smashed to a bloody pulp.


Internets

This short, accessible analysis of Triumph of the Will breaks down the myth of its supposed cinematic greatness: not innovative, actually, just really fucking expensive! A valuable contribution to Project Let's Stop Discussing the Nazis in Exactly the Terms They Wanted.

In lighter news, I'm still lapping up ACOUP's ongoing critique of Rings of Power. This week, he's analysing battle tactics during the major showdown in episode 6: 'Udûn'. The topic itself is nitpicky, but the theme that emerges - of the show prizing 'clever' tricks and the element of surprise above all else - is emblematic of its flaws, and I think of a trend in blockbuster media lately where creators are desperate to 'outsmart' fans at all costs. If your foreshadowing and internal story logic are good enough that people can predict where things are going and post about it on the internet, that's Bad, actually! Far better to keep viewers on their toes with a neverending stream of shock!!! twist!!! moments that no one saw coming because they make no fucking sense. It's the exact opposite of the Rian Johnson 'affectionate subversion' vibe I was just talking about and I hate it.

Speaking of Rian Johnson, I really enjoyed this video essay about The Last Jedi's subversive handling of male hero arcs. At the start of the movie, Finn, Poe and Luke are all positioned to suggest a traditional male heroic archetype, only to be challenged by a woman who's explicitly portrayed as holding either institutional or moral authority over them. The subversion is only a temporary roadstop - they all three get to fulfil their heroic potential in the end, but only after learning a valuable and humbling lesson from a woman who is not seeking to 'emasculate' them, but who genuinely cares and has important wisdom to impart. I thought I was done feeling over-emotional about TLJ (after what, five years???) but this made me slightly teary.

The other day I cheerfully wasted a whole day's allowance of downtime rereading The Ms Scribe Story, as I can't resist doing every now and then. As legendary fandom wanks go, it's probably my all-time favourite for the sheer amount of effort that went into the fuckery.

But despite its being a horrible story about horrible people, my main takeaway this time is a weird nostalgia for those days - I mean, the days when single-fandom archives, forums, and LJ were the main hubs of fannish activity. I coped well enough with the move to tumblr, but twitter is basically the perfect polar opposite of what I want from a fandom space (Speed! Impermanence! Overlap with the non-fannish world!); discord, doubly so. I don't think LJ was any more or less wanky than other platforms - it really just depends on who you hang out with, or I guess who you're unlucky enough to get noticed by. (I was a nobody, so most of the drama sailed right on by me.) But it was definitely better at fostering the kind of interactions I enjoy. I love it here on DW, but we're not exactly in the room where it happens.

Anyway, the upshot of this nostalgia binge is that I've wasted today's downtime tinkering with my icons, which I haven't touched in forever. I've found some I really like, and I'll whittle and adjust based on what I actually end up using. Today's is for great flaming wankstorms lol. Let's hope I don't need it.