Cinema Purgatorio #5 - "The Time of Our Lives"

[laughing_tree]

"It was Kevin [O'Neill], when we were two or three episodes into the project, who most perfectly encapsulated what we were struggling our way towards by saying that it wasn’t really horror movies we were concerned with so much as the horror of movies: our work in Cinema Purgatorio seems to be focussing in on the uneasy aspects of the way we watch films, with our simultaneous awareness of the lives of the actors and directors and production companies that are going on behind the painted flats, and our conditioned acceptance of cinematic conventions that are in as complete a contradiction of reality as anything that H.P. Lovecraft ever attempted, simply because we’ve grown used to them and barely notice them anymore." -- Alan Moore

Comments

[indy2012]

Some stuff to digest here. The characters here do seem to be heavily-patterned from Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in something like The Philadelphia Story.

[laughing_tree]

Has anyone read Moore's JERUSALEM yet? I'm interested in checking it out, but I'm worried that, given the subject matter, there will be a bunch of references to British culture and history -- of which I only have the average American's knowledge of -- that I won't get. Is that the case?

[halloweenjack]

I've started it--I'd be sincerely surprised if anyone without an advance copy has finished it yet without the time for a marathon reading session--and I'm already starting to think that I'll need a concatenation of bookmarks, tape flags, marginalia, notepads, and such to really dig in.

[thanekos]

Quick, to the Jess Nevins hotline.

[alschroeder3]

I think a lot of the British references in JERUSALEM are explained. I've read it---my wife pre-ordered it for me, and I got it the day it came out. I started reading it on Tuesday afternoon, and finished it on late Sunday night. I'm a fast reader--I usually read four books a week---but this one was not just 1266 pages, but it was DENSE, every page--- each chapter a short story that illuminated the entire thing. The heart of it is Book Two, a possible four-dimensional (as in time as a fourth dimension) afterlife, where to souls after death, those things that have existed longest, like hills and trees, are real and solid, and things that are short-lived, like buildings and people, are mistlike. Where ghosts can range centuries. There's a gang of teenage ghosts, the Dead Dead Gang. There are devils and angels playing multi-dimensional "trilliards" rather than billards. There's a chapter that's nothing but poetry. There's a short play where the ghosts of John Bunyan, Samuel Beckett, THOMAS Becket, and John Clare all kibitz around a living couple quarrelling about something truly horrendous.

It's not the great British novel, or great American novel. It's too dependent on exposition for modern tastes. But still, I came out of it as if out of a dream.

I'll return to it. I get the feeling that rereading will bring out new things each time I do it. I recommend it with reservations.

[captainbellman]

So, yes, this might have been the most horrifying thing of Moore's I'd ever read.

[bradygirl_12]

Every time I turn around, it's Christmas again! Time flies!

[starwolf_oakley]

This is unsettling. I think I understand what Alan Moore means in his quote! DUN DUN DUN!!!

Yes, we see "the reality subtext" in the fiction we watch, read, hear. Sometimes we "get it." Sometimes we get a "Space Whale Aesop" as TV Tropes says.

As this is Alan Moore, I am reminded of the Joker and Heath Ledger. And the idea that playing the Joker somehow contributed to Ledger's death. Christain Bale (supposedly) said "People who think that don't understand the nature of acting,"