no matter where you go

This is a tougher post to make than I would have thought, since everything so far has been really great! This is my very first Thon as a Snarry reader, so I'm enjoying it immensely - every day is like a little bit of Snarry Christmas! :)

But, as always, there are some stories that just grab you and don't let go. I've already waxed rhapsodic about In Perpetuity, which is incredibly delicate and multi-layered. I was also blown away by the first fic of the fest, In Time, Once Again, a remarkably understated and eloquent time-travel story that seems to have won over even those readers who are avowedly averse to time-travel (it's a thing of mine, but then I don't really spend a lot of time trying to work out the paradoxes...). Both Harry and Severus are, in this story, so much more than they seem to be, and their coming-together partway through the story (alt-timeline) moved me pretty much to tears.

Love and (Cupcake) War is a story that, on paper (so to speak), I'd think would be incredibly difficult to pull off. The prompt was tricky - a Snarry version of 'Cupcake Wars' - and it could easily have veered into cracky territory, but instead it's a lovely, heartfelt tale of rectified mistakes leading to love that's utterly charming and - well - sweet. :)

Finally, Innocent and Faithful is simply a delightful look at what might happen if Snape and Harry wound up in the same Beginning Spanish class. As you might expect, it's funny - laugh-out-loud hilarious in some places - but what gets me about it is the undercurrent of real longing and passion at its heart. It's a wonderful ride, made all the better by a beautifully poignant conclusion.

All the fics, though, have been really terrific - fun, exciting, heartbreaking, and beautiful by turns. If you haven't begun reading yet, go! Read! Now!

I was planning to hold off on any Snarry-a-Thon recs until the weekend, but this one has just stayed with me in such a way that I wanted to get out and rec it now. The warnings for Anon's In Perpetuity have the potential to scare some readers away, but do not let them. As a card-carrying Top!Snape lover, I can say unequivocally that this story breathes beautiful, believable life into a damaged, downtrodden Snape whose desire to be owned is almost overwhelming and something that even he himself cannot quite bring himself to fully acknowledge. He's had masters before, and to a one they've abused the privilege. When Auror Harry finds Snape - stripped of magic by the Wizengamot and barely making ends meet - he takes him in and gradually becomes master to Snape. But not, critically, in the abusive sense; instead, Harry recognizes and responds to Snape's need as just that, and he tends to that need with compassion and a compatible desire to own that he himself can scarcely lay claim to, while at the same time gently coaxing Snape's own desires and will back into the light. This story is wonderfully literate and heartbreakingly sensitive, and if you haven't read it yet, go now and read!

Here's the thing. Of my friends at every stage of my life, spanning not just one country but entire oceans, there are gay people. One of my childhood friends from Connecticut is gay and happily married to the man of his choice. Two of my high school friends from Hong Kong are gay; one is living the guppy life and I live vicariously through his many travels with his boyfriend of a year, one is also happily married and just yesterday welcomed a new baby into the world. A friend from Japan is busy planning her wedding, which hopefully will not be ruined by some bone-headed referendum in Maryland. My cousin is a lesbian with a wife and three children. Several of my grad school friends are either gay or lesbian, and - happily - in strong, loving relationships. Even I'm not a card-carrying heterosexual, loving husband and hyperactive young children notwithstanding.

These women and men are our friends, our colleagues, and our families. I don't understand how we as a society can continue to deny them the same basic rights to happiness that so many of us enjoy on the basis of simple biology.

45 years ago, my marriage would have been illegal in the state in which I now live. It disgusts and dismays me that this remains the case for so many people even today.

missyjack is looking for female fan artists in the New York City area to be interviewed in connection with a PBS documentary on fan art. Her call is here.

 Snarry-a-Thon starts today!!!!

This clip is one from arguably the most successful lesson I ever taught in a film course (and having just calculated final grades from my first after over a decade away, I need some kind of reassurance that I've had good teaching moments in the past), and the lesson was on sound in film. It's not so much the audacity of the scene - Robert Duvall's portrayal of a man who likes to give the Vietcong a head's up by playing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries during a helicopter raid on a Vietnamese village - but the way that the music plays the audience. 

There's a reason that Hitler liked Wagner, I'm guessing; Ride of the Valkyries is ridiculously rousing - much more so than even John Philip Sousa, and listening to his stuff usually gets me in an enlisting mood (one brief thought of sit-ups takes care of that urge pretty quickly). RotV sweeps you along, terrible in its righteous power, and it's that feeling that it can provoke that's so interesting here. FFC lets the music run for nearly a minute and a half, set against closeups of military equipment (bombs, guns), scared men, and sweeping arial shots of the helicopter formation that come together with the music in an almost seamless moment of might.

And then he cuts to an idyllic Vietnamese village square. Quiet, children pouring out of a school, only to be warned away by a woman in fatigues carrying a rifle as the music can be heard faintly in the background. Cut to the approaching helicopters, and the music & image becomes more ominous, contrasting as they do with the previous shots. We're still swept up in the music, but we've seen now that they're coming for a village, not just for the Vietcong. And the music makes it all rather inevitable - it's started, and the raid cannot finish until the music has somehow been silenced. And when that first missile is fired, it's fired in time to the music, and it's hard to describe the visceral thrill you get when image and sound come together like this.

And it's almost a guilty pleasure. If you're like me (and you may not be at all!), you can't help but feel the thrill even though you know that it's both real Americans and real Vietnamese whose lives are on the line. And I think that's what FFC is doing here - it's how (IMO) we approach war as a nation, and why we're so vulnerable to packaged military conflict. We know that there are real people firing guns and real people getting killed, but it's easy to be swept away once the music starts.

 For anyone following, 6/100 of 100 Things includes some personal photos and thus is flocked. FYI.

This clip from David Lynch's film The Straight Story is something of a spoiler for the film, since it marks the culmination of the film's events; and yet, the film itself is so much about the journey of Alvin Straight (based on his real-life trip across several states by riding lawnmower to see his dying brother) that knowing how it ends is, in of itself, kind of meaningless.

I love the film's ending for how it achieves its climax. There are no sweeping orchestrations, no grand professions of love between the two estranged brothers. If anything, it almost seems like nothing happens at all - two lines of dialogue: "Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?" and the answer, "I did, Lyle." Nothing happens, but everything plays out in Richard Farnsworth and Harry Dean Stanton's faces - anger, remorse, sorrow, and forgiveness - making it an unspeakably profound moment.

It occurs to me that this is how I like to write. My favorite kind of dialogue is short on exposition and long on silences; I like for the 'action' of a scene to take place somewhere between the spoken lines, not through them. I'm verbose when describing as a narrator, but my dialogue borders on incomplete, it's so clipped and truncated. That's how this scene works and why I like it so much.

(also, the film features one of my favorite pieces of film music, Angelo Badalamenti's Laurens Walking)

This is a post from a long-defunct blog of mine, but it pretty well sums up my personal relationship to movies. This one, in particular. ( The Nexus )

It's really easy for us in English-speaking countries to get it in our heads that Japanese films are somehow esoteric and fundamentally different from ours. They're supposed to be difficult, because they've been associated with art house cinema for decades; or, they're bloody action films meant for a fanboy audience that's equally impossible for the average movie viewer to penetrate.

But, in fact, they're not all that way. If anything, Japanese cinema of the past twenty years (and especially in the late 1990s) was doing some really fun stuff - not always 'happy', but frequently interesting to anyone who likes movies.

Director Sabu's 1997 film Postman Blues is one such film. It's a complete pastiche of movie cliches and code from not only Japan, but also Hollywood and Hong Kong as well. It may not have a stereotypically 'happy' ending, but it's a funny film, ironically about a young postman who has lost his way. The opening sequence of the film is wonderful both for its really inventive use of sound - each one is layered on top of the other in a growing cacophony of noise - and the way it succinctly capture's the postman's frame of mind. 

If it's one you can find, it's actually a great film on multiple levels.

I spent over an hour looking at favorite film clips trying to find something for this morning, only to come back to DH1. We'll call it unfinished business. 

This one is probably a bit more controversial, from a book reader's perspective. I loved (LOVED) Dudley's little speech at the beginning of DH; to me, it seemed earned and made sense - especially after Harry and Dudley's encounter with the dementors. And there was a part of me that was really heartbroken to learn that this scene didn't make it into the final cut. 

But, as with yesterday's sequence, Yates was going for something specific here, and Dudley (and the other cut scene with Petunia) would have effectively destroyed it. By DH1, the only people who are seeing the films are reviewers and those who are invested in HP - people who know the story and who know what's going to happen. I can't help but think that, from the perspective of a director who's doing a book-to-movie adaptation, this knowledge would be somewhat liberating. Oftentimes, film adaptations (rightly or wrongly) bear the onus of conveying all the information they can, which can lead to some pretty awkward (and sometimes unwise) omissions or truncations; and, God knows, the HP films had this problem as well, particularly as the novels themselves reached mammoth proportions.

But by DH, Yates has some leeway to telegraph the emotional import of the story, rather than explain things in any real detail, since he can be reasonably sure that his audience knows what's coming (and, I'd argue, what would be feasible to include and what wouldn't - Dumbledore's entire backstory is wonderful and complexifies his benign 'grandfatherly' image beautifully, but - like SPEW - it's just too much information for the film). So he chooses to hammer home - through the opening sequence, through their arrival at number twelve Grimmauld Place, through lovely long shots of the tent - just how alone in this Harry, Hermione, and Ron really are. As with yesterday's clip, its something he shows, rather than explains, and the film is all the more meaningful for it.

And, of course, all of those bits and pieces culminate in that one, iconic shot of Snape at the beginning of DH2 - literally trapped by the way he's framed - boxed-in and, in that exterior shot, entombed as Headmaster of Hogwarts. If H/H/R are alone together, Snape is simply alone, and devastatingly so.

The 'exodus' sequence from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1 is, to my mind, one of the most interesting of the entire series, and all for what David Yates brings to the table as director. He was the director who introduced contemporary Muggle UK to the films; up until this time, they had taken place in a largely anachronistic, vaguely 'British' (as opposed to clearly Scottish) setting, due in large part to Chris Columbus's early vision of the Wizarding world as a kind of pseudo-Victorian wonderland of Anglophilic wonders. If he had been making the films now, he might have gone Steampunk; it's an aesthetic that would also work to varying degrees in JKR's universe. But he went for the England of his (as screenwriter) Young Sherlock Holmes - quaint, quirky, and far, far removed from anything even remotely contemporary. Even the Dursleys' home, which is as close to the Muggle world as Columbus comes, is more cartoonish than real - an exaggeration of the real world that might reflect JKR's own whimsical representation of Harry's - let's face it - abusers, but which is all the more distanced from our own world because of it. The world of the first two films and, to a lesser extent, the following two, is one of fantasy; that of David Yates's final four films is markedly different.

( It's like a film studies course for freeeeee! Click! Watch! )

Told you I like talking about movies. And showing clips. ;)

Over on LJ, jdbracknell has begun a 100 Things challenge that I want to play. The idea is to pick one topic about which you have 100 things to say/show; since my one defining characteristic is that I like to talk about movies and, to a lesser extent, TV - to the extent that I obtained an advanced degree that qualifies me to get paid for showing film clips to people, to the extent that I have been known to rope my spouse and anyone else I can find into marathon clip-viewing sessions (he knows now to run...he didn't when we first got together) - my 'thing' will be 100 scenes from movies or TV that I can watch again and again and again...

Since I seem to have a hard time embedding media over here at IJ, for the time being I'll be posting these at LJ and DW.

Anyone else want to play?

 Since I can't quite remember who all the band-ficcers are on my various and sundry friends lists, I'm just posting this for general consumption: Which Direction? The Homoerotic Masculinities of the Modern Boy Band. The title is almost half the length of the article - it's not a tough read.

 This probably isn't done at all, so my apologies if I offend; but I was rereading this of mine on the occasion of getting an honest-to-goodness comment on it over at AO3, and I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that I like it more than I thought I did. So, just in case anyone is starved for a little Snape while we wait for Thon to begin, here you go: montage. While there are hints of Snarry on its periphery, it's mainly concerned with post-war Snape. Um, in Japan.

FYI, it's a sequel to this fic, in medias res. IMR is full-on Snarry (well pre-Snarry, anyway), and was my contribution to the severus_sighs  Fix-it-Fest earlier this year.

I have a third part planned, although it's currently taken a back seat to BB.

 I need the very best BBC Sherlock slash video around. Soon.

If anyone can help, please comment!

 So, Thon!prep having been completed, I find myself at a loss for things to do.

[Things I am conveniently forgetting, in no particular order: do laundry, clean house, start BB fic, prep for class, write a test review sheet, write a test, grade student journals, make dinner for the kids, file bills, etc., mop the kitchen floor, excavate the hall closet, venture into the back shed and make some sense of it, hose down the back porch, raze the yard to the ground...].

I mean, I'm just flummoxed here. Not a clue. 0_o

To the wonderful, and wonderfully talented, suitesamba, whose mentorfic proved to be the bait that lured me into Snarrydom lo these many months ago. I hope this is a day shared with friends and loved ones, and that the year ahead brings happinesses both big and small.

Over on LJ, lucianwolf has a wonderfully haunting fic up called he sleeps in fits and starts. It's a stream-of-consciousness meditation from Snape's perspective - hard to summarize, but it plays with the ways in which Harry embodies both James and Lily, and yet somehow exceeds them both. The Snape of this story is opportunistic and grasping; he desires Harry and loves him in his way. His awareness that Harry deserves a hero's ending, rather than the affinity born of broken lives that he represents, is rather meta in its way, and all couched in lush prose. Just a really beautiful, and satisfyingly short, little fic.