guess. who. got. an. APARTMENT!?


(Benjamin Button? Pretty good for the first 75% or so, at which point the screenwriter apparently got writer's block and decided to go with insert-obligatory-plot-twist-here. The result is like me trying to argue about something I don't believe myself in an essay when the deadline is approaching. So go see Laputa instead.)

Despite the fact that I hated Big Fish, won't read Time Traveller's Wife and can't watch violent films (like David Fincher's Seven), I can't wait to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher.

All I can say, it's a pretty good trailer.

I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Today I logged into LJ for the first time in 11 days. During the summer I thought that I was going to use the computer more once the term started, but apparently I was wrong.

I also have space for a few more icons, so if anyone knows where to find good ones, feel free to tell me. Audrey Hepburn, maybe. I could use more of those. And Kirsten Dunst!

I saw Happy-Go-Lucky and Wall-E, liked the first more but would recommend the latter too. Love and Other Disasters wins both, though, so go see that first, if you can!

Let it be stated for the record that Juno is not worthy of an Oscar or the rave reviews it has received. It is, at best, a three-star comedy with an overly quirky main character of no other substance than her punchlines, a romance nearly inexplicable and a heartwarming ending merely annoying in all its warmth.
On the plus side: good music (including my favourite Belle&Sebastian song).

In addition to the occasional movie, I've been reading a melodramatic Canadian novel which has more teenage pregnancies than any ex-stripper could come up with in a single screenplay, listening to Carla Bruni's (now wife to the French President) No Promises, an album of British and American poetry composed to music which is actually quite good.

#Re-read Sense & Sensibility for my proseminar and still loved it.

#Have started a few other books and finished one: Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood. Slightly uneven but mostly good stories.

#Saw Stardust, which is definitely recommendable; Becoming Jane, which is kind of recommendable; and Evening, which unfortunately is not.

#Have been listening to The Arcade Fire again -somehow their music is very suitable for wintertime.

#Tried to think of birthday wishes, but it seems I have everything I need.

Some time ago, I finally finished reading Pride & Prejudice (to make a long story short: I just cannot be as fond of it as of Sense & Sensibility or Emma, but I would recommend it) and after that watched the 2005 film version, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen (who would have been a new face to me, had I not, through a strange coincidence, watched the tv-series Murder Rooms that he appears in that same week).

As a fan of the BBC miniseries of P&P but not of Miss Knightley, I was, well, prejudiced. Yet I would claim that I wouldn't have liked the movie even if I had not seen the miniseries.
( cut for length )

Soon after P&P, I watched another movie directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley -Atonement, based on the novel by Ian McEwan. After that I was ready to forgive Wright and even Knightley, to some degree.

( Again cut for length )

Sometimes I just don't get age limits. I bought a DVD box of BBC's Murder Rooms, about the young Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell, and it's K-15 (unsuitable for children under 15 years of age). Yet is has about as much authentic violence as the Hercule Poirot tv-series, and no sex (or, well, I cannot imagine a 15-year-old who would be traumatized by a few whores who aren't shown doing anything else than talking).
What I don't get is that I saw The Curse of the Golden Flower last week, and it too is K-15. After Pan's Labyrinth, I have been wary of K-15 movies that appear to have gotten that rating because of violence, but Nyt made Golden Flower sound more like a court melodrama, dammit, and it does even begin as one (with some slow-motion sword handling, which is cool, not gross). Towards the end, however, the film made me feel physically ill. As my ability to watch violent movies is close to nil, much more so than, apparently, most people's, I'm not saying that The Curse of the Golden Flower should be K-18. Just that maybe Murder Rooms could be like, I don't know, K-11? Argh.


And now, a meme from myntti.
( Career Matchmaker )

My Mp3 player has been dead for weeks and I have been too lazy to do anything about it. Not being able to listen to music on the bus has not been as awful as I expected, but I still miss it sometimes, most often when I'm in the mood for a song that I do not have easily available in other format.

So, randomly, some songs I have missed [click for download]:

Death Cab for Cutie - Marching Bands of Manhattan
Death Cab's I Will Follow You Into the Dark is the most over-used song in the history of fanmix, but if I ever did a mix for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, this would be on it.

Devotchka - How It Ends
Like everyone else, heard the song when it was used on the Everything is Illuminated trailer and loved it. Too bad the film sucks.

Zero 7 - Somersault
Full lyrics here.

Radiohead - Myxomatosis
After reading this comparative study about Haruki Murakami and Radiohead, I felt that Myxomatosis was the song most likely inspired by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Lately the band has been on my mind because I've listened a lot to Rubik (which I have already mentioned is very much like Radiohead). Also, I'm in the middle of Murakami's latest, After Dark.

Somehow I have already used way too much time and still haven't got to the point of this post, the Order of the Phoenix movie that I saw last week.
( Cut for spoilers )

I also finished Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock today, and as it's highly unlikely that I'll do a full review, let me just say that it's worth a read.

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
Part One is reminiscent of E. M. Forster's Maurice, but Waugh's main theme is, in the end, Catholicism. Still, beautiful prose and decadence.
Suggestions for soundtrack: Rufus' Leaving for Paris no 2 and Tiergarten, also practically everything by Ed Harcourt.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Fun, too long, plot-wise completely nonsensical and at times sort of anticlimactic. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the previous two.
( Here be spoilers )

Zodiac
Didn't make me feel too queasy and has both Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. Also, I watched CSI and Law & Order for years and have read a part of Patricia Cornwell's Jack the Ripper book. Serial killer stories are interesting, as long as the actual killing part isn't described or shown in too much detail.

Spiderman 3
Just one word: fanmix. For a superhero action movie, this film has been an inspiration for an awful lot of teenage girls.
And it has Kirsten Dunst.

And now I'm off to watch Miss Marple. Have a great weekend.

I spent the afternoon drinking tea N brought me (the tea surprised me by tasting almost good; everyone knows I've often enthusiastically proclaimed the taste of tea to be very much like the smell of old socks) and watching Sense & Sensibility. It's been years since I last saw it, and after reading the novel very much wanted to watch it again.

Hugh Grant is a bit too much like Hugh Grant and not enough like Edward Ferrars (I actually imagined Grant as Willoughby when I read the book), but otherwise I have no complaints about the cast. As an adaption it is very faithful, and as a movie very entertaining, but I still think that of the Austen adaptions I prefer Emma.

Book-wise, I'm not so sure. ( Cut, in case everyone doesn't know the plot of S&S )
It really amazes me to think how young Austen was when she wrote Sense & Sensibility -the first draft of it was written when she was only 19. The later adjustements made to it might explain the quality of the writing and structure, but still. At least at the moment S&S is one of my top 10 books of classic literature. There are very few pre-20th century books I've genuinely liked this much.

Boo for Marie Antoinette not getting more Oscar nominations. I've seen it twice and just received the soundtrack in the mail. Listening to it makes me want to watch the movie again. I really need to get it on dvd.

Why Marie Antoinette is teh best:
1) Kirsten Dunst. I've loved her in every role I've seen her in -most importantly, of course, in Interview with the Vampire but Virgin Suicides gets rather close, and I also have a soft spot for Mona Lisa Smile.
2) The marvelous silliness of the film combined to its more serious side.
3.) The masked ball -scene really deserved a special mention, since it's in my opinion the one that most clearly shows the mixing of modern style in the historical setting.
4.) The music, obviously, works quite well. Otherwise I wouldn't be listening to the soundtrack right now.
5.) Just the general eyecandy-quality of the film. This is one of the reasons why I could watch it twice in less than two months.
6.) There's also Rose Byrne and that-woman-whose-name-I-don't-know, but she's been in some tv-series and the Tristram Shandy movie (which I incidentally forgot when I listed the movies I saw last year. Unforgivable, really, since it rocked).

I'm pretty sure that this is an accurate list of the films that I saw (for the first time) in year 2006:
( cut for length )

So, the top 5 of 2006:
Brokeback Mountain, The Libertine, In the Mood for Love, Marie Antoinette, Pan's Labyrinth.

And although the accuracy of this list is not quite as certain, I read at least the following books:
( cut...although not really because of length )
That is 19. Only 19. 20 if I cheat and include Lanark by Alasdair Gray -I've read everything except the ending.
A couple of years ago my book count was 54, and I think that even in 2005 the number was over 30. Of course this year has in many ways been different, and I have my excuses, but still, this sucks.

Curious facts:
-Of the 19 books, 5 were in Finnish (and of these, 4 were originally in Swedish), 14 in English (including one translation from Japanese).
-2 books were re-reads.
-7 were borrowed from the library, 10 I had bought, 1 was a bookcrossing book and 1 was a gift.

But as a consequence of the fact that I never finish a book I don't like, most of these 19 were very good. The best were of course Shriek and Lolita, but also Leijat Helsingin yllä and Amerikkalainen tyttö, both of which made me discover new authors. I'm not so sure about Essays in Love (um yeah, I probably never mentioned it. If you're curious, one review can be found here) and Everything is Illuminated -I might not like them as much if I tried to read them now (although both are very quotable). That's what happened with The Blind Assassin, just in the reverse: I started reading it a few years back, got bored and gave up halfway through. Now I tried again, from the beginning, and wasn't bored at all. Although I have to say that even the first time around I loved Atwood's prose.

I just thought it might be a good idea to at least briefly mention these books and movies if I'm going to do Best of the Year -lists again.

( The Devil Wears Prada )
( Marie Antoinette )
( Jade Warrior )
( Casino Royale )
( Eragon )
( Pan's Labyrinth )
( Swordspoint )

( after thoughts of the grave, in the home of the brave and of the weak )

Oh man, I'm too full of fangirl squee right now. Yesterday was really horrible, I'm tired as hell and have just done an exam for which I had plenty of time to study for and yet didn't, so I can only blame myself when I get a bad grade. Yet somehow I' keep switching between Good Mood and Bad Mood. Hi, bipolar disorder?

Also: Is it just me, or is there a some kind of a trend about 19th century magicians this Christmas? (I mean this and this).

J just called, I don't have to eat lunch alone, yay! Gotta go.

The undeniable fact of short story collections is that all of the stories can never be good, and coming across two bad stories in a row might make you drop the book entirely. I originally started reading Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors some years ago and found it uneven in quality. About halfway through I skipped right to the last story that I had heard good things about (Snow, Glass Apples), but having just read a similar (better) tale by Tanith Lee even it was sort of disappointing and I put Smoke and Mirrors aside, intending to finish it someday.

Now, I've always preferred (long) novels to short stories (although with my ridiculously short attention span it should be the other way round), but lately I have had serious trouble trying to finish anything longer than two pages. After reading Anansi Boys I've started two books, but for no particular reason have struggled with both. And they're in Finnish.

Since I had read both American Gods and Anansi Boys in record time, the obvious solution was to read more Gaiman. I knew Fragile Things would be coming out soon but thought that the sensible thing to do would be to finally finish reading his first collection before buying the second one.
( Short stories on paper )

And although this was more influenced by Charlotte Gainsbourg's music than by reading short stories, I think these two reviews fit in the same entry nicely: I went to see the episodic movie Paris, je t'aime with a schoolfriend.
( Short stories on screen )

Random Notes
-For those who enjoyed Snow, Glass Apples: try Tanith Lee's Red As Blood, published in the collection titled Forests of the Night (also includes one of my favourite short stories ever, The Tree: a Winter's Tale).
-In addition to Gaiman's story The Daughter of Owls, John Aubrey also appears in the alternative history vampire novel Deliver Us from Evil by Tom Holland.
-If you're bored, try counting how many film critics claim that the vampire story in Paris, je t'aime is by Wes Craven (according to IMDb, it's by Vincenzo Natali).
-My review of the novel that the husband reads in the Bastille segment is here.

We're currently having some computer-related problems (again), but if I don't write this soon I will forget what I wanted to say.

( Espoo Ciné )

If some of the sentences make no sense, it's because I'm tired and hate using public (or semi-public) computers.

First of all, there's the Espoo Ciné film festival 22-27.8. Three of the movies I really want to see are shown on the 26th, which means that if I buy tickets for all of them, I'm basically going to spend the whole day, from 2 pm to 11 pm, at the Espoo Culture Center.
( Full list of films that I'm considering )

And of course before Espoo Ciné there's Finncon, 18-20.8. I'm mostly interested in the international guests, and maybe slightly curious about the Finnish author Pasi Jääskeläinen, but (luckily) there's also a lot of stuff I don't care that much about. Too much of a good thing can be tiring.
At least Finncon's free. In theory. Because how could you not buy The Troika?

Somewhere between these events is the Helsinki Night of Arts (24th of August), and then another film festival, Love & Anarchy, in September.

I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest yesterday with N and her sister, and squee, it was fun!

I sensed some improvement in Orlando Bloom's performance, although Keira Knightley's still barely bearable. Sparrow steals the show, of course.
One of the new characters, Tia Dalma (played by Naomie Harris) annoyed me to no end but Jack Davenport (Norrington) makes up for it. I hope he will start getting bigger parts after this, he'd deserve it.

I had heard the movie's overlong, but it certainly held my attention (indeed, when I realized the end was obviously approaching I hoped it would be longer).
But gah, I hate the way they've turned this into a trilogy: plot-wise, this second part is the one with all threads left dangling and we have a year to wait, at least! ( Spoilers )

I saw Saved! today. My advice -if you ever consider watching it but haven't yet seen Dogma, watch that instead. And if you're looking for a basic high school movie, I'd recommend Mean Girls. Or Clueless, but the former has an extra amount of irony.

Mind you, it wasn't exactly bad. Just kind of fell flat in the end.