To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Sometimes you just have to dance. Or sometimes, if you're me, you get tired of dancing around in your head/in your room to this song and have to vid some dancing to it.

Song/Artist: "No Cheap Thrill," Suzanne Vega
Fandom: Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies
Length: 3:07

( Streaming, download link )

[So, um...hi. I intended to write an LJ entry of moderate size, but 4,000 words later, I appear to have an essay. I feel like this might be a metaphor for my life.]

My most recent vid has inspired me to poke some more at my screwball comedy vid. I have several films lined up for it, but I figure I could probably use more, and I might want to switch some of them out for better representatives of the genre. Which led me to the question, apparently rather difficult to answer, of what exactly constitutes a screwball film, or even screwball comedy as a genre. More than most genres, it seems to be a case of "I know it when I see it."

Still, I figured there had to be some kind of guidelines. For answers, I turned to James Harvey's Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, which the internet tells me is one of the most highly-regarded texts in this field. I skimmed a couple chapters of it for my Modernism and ballroom dance (with a special appearance by Fred and Ginger) paper in grad school, but due to time constraints never read the rest of it.

It's a very good book: extremely readable, well-argued and supported, covering a good breadth of material, making a thorough analysis of specific films or scenes where warranted. Harvey's also an unexpectedly funny guy; the text is aimed at an educated popular audience, but it's still written mostly in academese...except when he calls this character a "dumbass," or says these characters are "talking shit." ¹ He also has this hilarious vendetta against Ronald Reagan (the book was published in 1987) that he carries out in the footnotes and which even intrudes into the text in the concluding chapter. He links Reagan to Capra's socially conscious films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which he deplores basically for being boring and false. This was my favorite bit: "[Y]oung people, who get restive at the high romanticism of old movies...sit rapt and unprotesting and apparently moved through the platitudes of Meet John Doe and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The Capra vision isn't dead. [footnote] Unhappily. Reagan in the White House (a Capra event in itself, though certainly no joke) 'explains' his economic policies to reporters by quoting 'lengthy passages' from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town!"

Harvey and I agree on many things. Our views on Capra are very similar; I find his movies bland and platitudinous, except for It Happened One Night, which is in my top five movies (Harvey loves it too). Like me, his favorite Astaire/Rogers film, at least scriptwise, is Shall We Dance. We both find My Man Godfrey overrated. But we differ on Irene Dunne, and specifically on The Awful Truth, which he considers the epitome of screwball comedies, and which I couldn't even make it halfway through, I found it so painfully unfunny.

He's a little too into the director-as-auteur theory for my tastes, which I think influences his tendency to ramble on about an individual director's whole oeuvre, from westerns to melodramas, rather than focusing on the romantic comedies. The book could do with tightening there. But overall, it's excellent.

( It also helped me define screwball comedy for myself. Well, sort of. Mostly. In a way. Because it is a very tricksy genre. )

Anyway, ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY...what are your favorite screwball comedies? What do you think makes one? OMG, TALK TO ME PLZ.

( Footnotes )

Some period-appropriate links:

So apparently there is going to be a stage production of Top Hat in London this spring. It looks good! Different, given that there isn't a cast of thousands and a set that spans acres, but at least they kept the feather dress? They've done previews in various smaller cities in the UK, and it's had decent reviews.

Speaking of the 1930s: Color photos of the US from 1939-1943. Back when color film cost the equivalent of seventy dollars a roll, ZOMG. No wonder only people working for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information could afford it.

But color is really an amazing thing. Not to knock B&W photography at all, because it can be wonderful, but the color in these photos makes them insanely more real. The color just removes all the distance B&W has.

The Library of Congress has a bunch more like this in this Flickr set, but for perhaps obvious reasons, a lot of them are of people working in fields, and that got a little old. The link above does a good job choosing a representative sample. The LOC has a bunch of sets like this on Flickr, actually, in addition to their own searchable online photograph archive, where I've whiled away many an hour.

*

And some period-reminiscent music recs:

I think I mentioned the Puppini Sisters back when iTunes had their doo-wop version of "Walk Like an Egyptian" as a free single. It's a lot of fun, but I figured that gimmick wouldn't take them far.

I was not quite right. As technically excellent as their arrangements and harmonizing skills are, the songs don't all quite work. Oddly, their covers of jazz standards seem to suffer the most: "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "It Don't Mean a Thing" are kind of terrible. However, their original stuff is largely quite good, swingy versions of songs like "I Will Survive" and "Heart of Glass" are fun, and at least one of their older covers is amazing. So here's the good stuff:

"I Got Rhythm." This is the best cover of this song I've ever heard, and I've heard several. Not only is the arrangement really peppy and fun, but they've added a new middle section that's really good. There's a riff on all the French in the American in Paris version, and then a totally new bridge in English from which I pulled the subject of the entry. I'm kind of in love with it.

According to NPR, "'Jilted' sounds like a confessional column from a Swing Era edition of Cosmo." This is not a bad way to describe it. This is my favorite of their few original songs; it's definitely a post-women's-rights-movement interpretation of a typical 40s-era song about being lovelorn.

"Soho Nights" is another good original offering, though I mostly like it for the beat. I would love to choreograph something to this.

Finally, a cover of "Mele Kalikimaka," from last year's Christmas album. They didn't do a whole lot to personalize this one, but I like it anyway; it was kind of made for their style. Plus, ukelele!

Completely unrelated to any of the above, have Iron & Wine's "Boy With a Coin," which has more of a beat than they usually manage. I like it a lot.

*

Finally, I, er, may have a couple lines of a potential Beckett-and-Castle-in-the-1930s ficlet. *cough* Anyway...

Fandom stockings have been revealed! Yay! I received some lovely graphics and recs for poetry and books which look interesting indeed.

I volunteered as a pinch-hitter (pinch-stuffer?) and thus ended up doing more than I thought I would for this fest; specifically, I wrote twelve fics and made one vid. Here's everything I wrote/vidded, with links to the AO3 because it's simpler than chasing down comment threads, especially for those that are broken into multiple comments. (Unless otherwise stated, these are 1,000ish words or fewer. All are, at most, PG.)

Babylon 5
And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall for perverseparagon – Londo's life is full of mazes now.

If Equal Affection Cannot Be for rivendellrose – Five poems Marcus Cole knows by heart. One-sided Ivanova/Marcus.

Soldiers for bessemerprocess – In which Susan Ivanova and Olivia Dunham meet in a bar. Angsty and apocalyptic. Crossover with Fringe.

Castle
...In an Elevator for debirlfan – Castle and Beckett, stuck in an elevator. UST.

Murder Most Kindergarten for soobunny – Five-year-old Alexis writes a story. It gives her father cause to worry.

Corner Gas
Baby, Baby for livii – Someone leaves a baby on the steps of the Dog River Police Station. Chaos ensues. Everyone appears, but it's Karen- and Davis-centric. (3,000 words; also at LJ.)

Doctor Who
Second Star to the Right for jenavira – Eight, Charley, and a low-gravity planet.

Follow the Fleet
Side by Side for idharao – Sherry and Bake are having a trying Christmas, but they make the most of it.

Fringe
Soldiers for bessemerprocess – In which Susan Ivanova and Olivia Dunham meet in a bar. Angsty and apocalyptic. Crossover with Babylon 5.

Northern Exposure
I Feel the Sky Tumbling Down for oxoniensis – An alternate explanation for Maggie's vertigo in "I Feel the Earth Move." Joel/Maggie, Ruth-Anne.

The Reality of Experience for juniperphoenix – Roslyn and Cicely share a life lived through books.

Slings & Arrows
All in a Day's Work for wiliqueen – An all-too-typical day for Anna Conroy.

Sea-Changed (vid) for loneraven – A vid about Geoffrey, the theater, and even Oliver. Set to "Full Fathom Five," by Hem, feat. Audra McDonald and Anne Hathaway. 1:30 long, 19 MB Quicktime file.

X-Files
The Heart of Saturday Night for ruuger – "John Doggett requires a cautious, quiet approach, like sneaking up on a bird or squirrel to take its picture." Doggett/Reyes UST.

For some reason, I always think of the film Carefree (1938) as having been filmed in color. Maybe it's that "I Used to Be Colorblind" song. Or maybe it's that half of it takes place outdoors, where I'm sure of what colors the grass, sky, etc. are. (Although I found it amusing that in the menu art, the colorists couldn't decide whether to make Ginger's "Yam" dress green or red. Surely they had records somewhere? Maybe not. I always think of it as pinkish red, myself.)

It's not a film that rewards rewatching, by the way. It just gets creepier and more disturbing if you spend the least little amount of time thinking about it. The dances are fun, though. (Well. That slow motion one was...not the best decision that could've been made. But anyway.) And I do enjoy Amanda/Ginger's hypnosis-induced crime sprees, not to mention that sequence where she makes up a dream involving wolves and squirrels and "[her] persecutors." ("And then...they got me.")

There's something about this film, and about Linda and Peter, that I really like. I think it's that the movie feels like something that could've really been amazing if only there hadn't been so many missed opportunities. At any rate, that's what has compelled me to write another gap-filler for it.

Title: Constantly Risking Absurdity
Author: icepixie
Rating: The Hays Office called and said, "No, seriously, this is too tame even for us."
Word Count: 2,114
Summary: After the movie ends, Linda and Peter still have some loose ends to tie up.
Note: Although the film appears to take place in the late fall or early spring, I ended up moving it to summer, or at any rate to an unseasonably warm night, because hypothermia is really not that romantic.

( Am I going to be hiding from reporters with you for the rest of my life? )

Pezzers, have you seen Kenneth Branagh's version of Love's Labour's Lost? If you haven't, you really ought to, because it's a musical version, and it's kind of hilarious. (Not quite as awesome as the production of Big Life we saw in London, but really, what is? That's like the pinnacle of adaptations for that play.)

I like seeing Shakespeare reborn in different settings, and I adore the 1930s, so set even a not-so-great play in 1939, add in a ton of songs from musicals of the era (mostly Fred and Ginger musicals, yay!) and add in dancing, and I'm totally sold even before I see the thing.

( A few further thoughts )

This got long. Like, really, really long. Four pages of long. If you make it to the end, you should be awarded a medal.

( Elaboration on the narrative behind 'A Love That Won't Sit Still' )

( Some beginning vidder musings on technique, and also on the movies/dances/costumes )

Anyone feel like quickly viewing a vid and passing some judgment on it? I've made what I'm considering a comic vid, but I'm not sure whether it's actually funny or if it just appeals to my twisted sense of humor. It's another Fred and Ginger vid, but you totally don't need to know the source material; I'm really just looking for a response along the lines of, "Yes, it's funny," or "No, it's lame." It's currently saved as a 32 MB Quicktime file, but in theory I can export to other formats and smaller sizes.

Pretty please?

The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Murder Case, by George Baxt. MST3K'ed by Becca.

( The hilarity begins under here. )