Janine Ashbless's Blog, page 83

Into the Woods - movie review

[SPOILERS]

I think George R R Martin learned everything he needed to know about author brutality from Stephen Sondheim.

Into the Woods is a luscious, witty, deceptively cruel movie based on the 27-yr-old stage musical. I watched the DVD of the Broadway production last night, followed by the new movie version on the big screen today, because there was a lot of media fuss about the differences and I wanted to be sure.

I loved it ... I'm just not sure at all that I like it.

For those who haven't seen any version, the musical falls into two halves (separated starkly by an interval in the theatrical version). The first act is a tapestry of interwoven familiar fairy-tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel) linked by the story of a baker and his wife who are trying to break a witch's curse and so conceive a longed-for child.

The witch is played beautifully by Meryl Streep, who is a much better singer than I ever anticipated.


There are catchy, haunting songs with clever-clogs Sondheim lyrics ("while her withers wither with her") that I long to write down and steal. It's laugh-out-loud funny in places and I was rolling in my seat during the duet between the two dickhead handsome princes:




You know, of course, just how the stories are supposed to go ... and yes, by the end of Act One all the quests have been completed, the brides claimed, the monsters killed, the wishes fulfilled ... and everyone is going to live happily ever after. Huzzah!

Johnny Depp's paedophilic Wolf, btw, is practically a cameo. Thank goodness, because he is SO GODDAMN CREEPY.
Then comes Act Two, which fucks everything over in a character bloodbath of random and undeserved destruction that would do Game of Thrones proud. Every decision taken in the first half  turns out to have terrible consequences. True Love disintegrates as lovers stray. Happy-Ever-After turns to loss, despair and deep existential and moral uncertainty. It's one of the bleakest landscapes in musical theatre, and if it has a message that must be "No man is an island, and I don't mean that in a comforting way. Everything we do has the potential to screw things over for other people. And that will come back to bite you, because they are not islands either."

Before the movie release there was a lot of worry that it would be bowdlerised and Disneyfied. I can reassure you that those fears are (largely) unfounded. The narrator and baker's father have been trimmed out, to good effect. A few of the songs have been cut (for reasons of length, I strongly suspect) and the movie is indeed slightly less brutal than the stage version - in particular Rapunzel makes it out alive with her prince (whereas in the stage play she's so damaged by her upbringing that she goes insane and commits suicide), and Jack's mother isn't deliberately clubbed down; she is pushed over and smacks her head on a log instead. But by the end there are still basically only four characters standing, all bereaved and labouring under the witch's "screw you guys, I'm going home" curse that one suspects will see them make the same stupid selfish mistakes over and over again. It ends, after all, with Cinderella uttering the fateful words "I wish..."

This is what wishing got you last time. Will you NEVER learn?!
It's basically a family film in which the first half of the movie is for the kids (and the kid in all of us) and the second half is emphatically for adults. I still don't know if it works. The satisfying ending is in the middle, the ultimate ending is unsettling and painful.

I'll watch it over and over again.

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2015! I hope everyone had a good New Year and has recovered sufficiently to face the rigours of the weekend :-)

I'm going to be taking a week off the blog in the hope of recovering my mojo and scraping together my few remaining braincells. See you all soon! My best wishes for 2015 - may it be better than 2014 in every way!

2014 in the rear view mirror

Somebody has been stealing days while my back was turned. I swear that 2014 was the shortest year ever ... It had barely kicked off before it was October and all my books came out at once, and now it's over. Who the hell is it running away with time like that?!

So I'd better get this post up, I guess, before it turns out it's July again all of a sudden. Every year I nominate my cultural highpoints. The Ashys for 2014 go to ...

Best Book:


The best book I read in 2014 was a graphic fantasy novel translated from the French. Beautiful Darkness is a truly horrific story depicted in the prettiest Golden-Age-of-fairy-illustrations manner ... which just makes it more emotionally devastating. A powerful and chilling book reminder that neither Beauty nor Innocence equates to Good. "Borrowers meets Lord of the Flies" is the best summation I've come across.


Best Movie:


I watched 29 movies this year, slightly more than last year. I think it's been a good year for fantasy films (in the broadest sense), and its been terrific to see some really strong female roles and heroes for a change.  Here are my top five, in order of personal enjoyment at the time of watching, not artistic merit or anything:



1) Locke
2) Frozen
3) The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
4) Maleficent
5) The Railway Man.

And the movie I hated most was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes .


Best Music:

I've been listening to two CDs overandoverandover whilst driving, and both are from artists you'll probably have never heard of.

Freddie Stevenson:



and Frank Turner:




Best TV:



I know I'm miles behind the rest of the world, but I spent a lot of 2014 catching up on Deadwood ... and enjoying it thoroughly. Cocksusckers.

Best Entertainment Act:



I went to see illusionist Derren Brown live in the show in which he discusses his coming out. He's awesome :-)

"The process of coming out is normally very disappointing," he said. "It’s not that people react badly to it - they really don’t care. You walk around with something for years that you build into this huge secret but it isn’t reflected to how it is in other people’s eyes. It’s so important to defuse that because it becomes a huge misery needlessly. There’s a nice quote by David Foster Wallace: 'We’d worry a lot less about what other people think about us if we realised how seldom they do.'"

Best Picture:



This has to be picture of the year!! - one of the pictures sent back from the Philae lander from the surface of Comet 67P. It made me teary with awe :-)

Blue Monday

Every Monday I post a naughty excerpt for your entertainment. Between October (when it came out as an e-book) and today, the last Monday of 2014, those excerpts have all been from the stories in my new collection Fierce Enchantments.

Story 10: The Merry Maid

The final story! My previous two collections have finished with a romance, but since I already wrote one ("A Man's best Friend") for the #9 slot, this book finishes with humorous fairytale that features three brothers who set off together to seek their fortune  (and a magic porridge spoon) ...


 
“Do we taste the same?” the Eldest Brother asked, as the Merry Maid wiped at her chin. The Middle Brother was in no state to ask anything: he was still gasping and groaning.

“No,” she giggled. Then she turned to the Youngest Brother.

He handed her his cup of ale that had languished, forgotten, during the performance, and she drank from it gratefully. “Before we begin,” he said, “I would like to give you the kiss I promised.”

“Very well.”

“Sit you upon the end of this bench, Merry Maid.” But when she did so, looking at him a little askance, he went down on his own knees before her and threw up her skirts over her thighs.

“Oh! I see!” said she, as he parted her legs. Then “Oh!” again as he pushed her back upon the cushion and went nuzzling up under her skirt, pressing his lips to her virgin puss. And “Oh!”—far longer and more drawn out—as his kiss struck home. To the bemusement of his brothers, their youngest sibling did not cease in his kissing, and the Merry Maid did not resist his blandishments. Her bare breasts heaving, she lay back upon the bench’s length, wriggling her hips with joy. Slowly it dawned upon them that her secret treasure, that thing that must remain inviolate until her wedding day, was more than capable of being pleasured without being entered by any cock. This sight was no hardship for their eyes either, nor for their nether parts, which despite being so recently drained were a-twitch with interest. The two brothers watched, grinning, as their youngest sibling gamahuched away.

At length the Merry Maid gave a great cry and arched her spine and then collapsed, babbling and giggling. The Youngest Brother looked up from under her skirts with a big grin and a slick of juice plastered across his face, appearing for all the world as if he had been eating a basket of ripe plums.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh, you have earned your pleasure with that kiss! Come here, my sweet, that I may repay you!”

“But—No,” he said. “Not yet. I would rather do this …” And with those words he plunged back into the fray, and set to once more upon her virgin treasure with his lips. At first the Merry Maid shrieked and made as if to wriggle from his grasp, but as he persisted she surrendered in very short order, with many sighs and yelps of pleasure. This time, too, she caught her own breasts in her hands and pinched her own nipples.

That was too much for the Middle Brother. Rising from his seat, he found the pot of butter that had been on the dinner table, and scooped out a big blob upon his fingertips. He used this to baste the maiden’s bosom, slathering her all over until her breasts were two slippery orbs that he could mould and press and squeeze together. She seemed most grateful for this attention, willingly giving up to the task to him. In fact she smeared butter from her skin onto her hand and used it to grease up his tool, working it with a firm grip.

That was enough to bring the Eldest Brother back into action. Coming round the other side of the bench, he took his turn tugging upon a slippery nipple. Eagerly she grabbed his cock too. They arranged themselves either side of her head, and as the Youngest Brother ate her puss, they plied their trade upon her breasts as if milking a fine cow.

“Yes!” the maiden groaned, pulling upon their cocks—lengths that were showing surprising solidity and girth, considering what they had already been through. She rolled her face to one side, urging the Eldest Brother’s length toward her open, hungry mouth. With one knee on the bench edge, he discovered her could crouch at the right angle to feed his bell-end to her lips. Her tongue darted out, lapping him. For a moment he rediscovered paradise—and then she rolled away, to the other side, searching out the Middle Brother’s cock in turn.

That was how they brought her off for a second time, between them—slippery tits, slippery cocks, a kiss upon a wet and slippery puss. Turn and turn about, two stiff members to suck, back and forth between them, tasting butter and sweat and salt, until she opened up once more and, with a squeal, came. By that time she had worked their limbs so hard and so surely that it was not difficult for both the elder brothers to take themselves in hand and squeeze out their seed in slopping spasms into her open mouth.

As they staggered back, the Youngest Brother rose at last to claim his own.


 Amazon UK : Amazon US 

Xmas bun

I went over to Jennifer Denys' house today for a smashing post-Xmas lunch, and to natter about life and books, and meet the much-grown Holly the Rabbit again.

Okay, that's it for Xmas. The diet starts NOW!

Phenology - December

FIRST FROST!!
Well good grief, we are getting a proper winter at last.



Not that I am a fan of cold. I'm not really a fan of December at all. Carols laud the holly and the ivy because there is barely any other foliage left to notice:


As we head toward the dark of the Winter Solstice the only compensating features of natural interest are to be found above the earth, not on it. There are sometimes wonderful long winter twilights, where the sky stays blue over a greeny-brown streak of atmospheric pollution at the horizon, and the lacy black silhouettes of trees are etched against the light.


I love those. Tree anatomy, clothed for so long by foliage, is wonderfully striking when bared to view like that.


And sometimes, even more rarely, there are magnificent dawns:


But damn, I hate the mud.

Happy Xmas!

Well, despite all the warning signs, Christmas has still managed to catch me unprepared. I haven't sent any cards, I haven't wrapped the few presents I have managed to buy, and my food preparation timetable consists of "cross fingers and hope it all comes together." :-D

It doesn't matter. That's just trimmings. There's a superb article here about the True Meaning of Christmas (which I recommend only as long as you are not feeling fragile).

Joy and peace and love to all who read this. May you find comfort with those you love. May you make it through the dark days and come out into the light.

XXX

Blue Monday

Every Monday I post a naughty excerpt for your entertainment. Between October (when it came out as an e-book) and the end of 2015 (when it comes out in paperback), those excerpts will be from the stories in my new collection Fierce Enchantments.

Story 9: A Man's Best Friend

For those exhausted and traumatised by last week's story, A Man's Best Friend should be a bit more peaceful. It's a proper fantasy romance, set in a land which somewhat resembles ancient China. Musician and ex-warrior Lin Xhai, exhausted and broken by war, has travelled for months to find the wife of his best friend, and let her know that she is a widow.



“Rest with our ancestors, husband, and be at peace,” she whispered, setting the blue pot among the others. Xhai stood and moved away, giving her space to pray. He looked out across the darkening landscape and the blue gloaming. Early stars were emerging in the west. The evening was still, no breeze stirring the grass. He could feel his heartbeat, thudding in his chest.

When Tsulin had finished, he helped her replace the grave slab. Her face was pale in the shadows, but he had heard no weeping. They walked away a little.

“I didn’t know you’d had children,” he said softly.

She ran her hand across her head. “They were both born too early, and only half-made. One the second year, one the next, and then the soldiers came and took him away for the Emperor, so I never had a chance to give him another.” Her voice sounded hoarse. “I must have spoken to a widow-woman when I was small, my mother says, and been stricken barren. Now I have passed the widow’s curse on, to my children. To my husband, who is dead of it.”

The weight in his chest was jagged now. “No!” he protested. “You did not kill him; war took him. It is an insatiable thing. I have seen a thousand thousand men dead upon the battlefield—do you think your little curse did that?” He wanted to grab her and shake her. He wanted to seize her face and kiss it. “You did not curse him. Liwan spoke of you often, and always with love. He longed to return to you. You were a joy to him.”

Tsulin turned to him in the blue dusk. He could hear her breath, fast and shallow. She laid a hand on his breast and his heart crashed against it. She tangled the fingers of her other hand in the still-damp ends of his long hair. He clasped her around the waist, before he could think about it, and she pressed against him, panting. His blood was roaring in his veins, and he was filled with both delight and the terror of teetering upon the edge of doing her a terrible wrong. The scent of her hair filled his head, driving out thought. Her body was pliant under his hands and he couldn’t tell if he was pushing her away or pulling her to him.


Then she reached down and grabbed his cock through his trousers, and his whole world fell apart. He didn’t need to see clearly to clasp her face and lift it, covering her lips with his kiss. She moaned into his mouth, her open palm writhing across the hardness of his shaft, and he staggered, pushing her back across the grass. Both her hands were suddenly at the drawstring of his trousers, pulling frantically, as he kissed her and kissed her and the breathless dusk whirled around them.

It was only when she bared him that he really believed it. Only then that he knew what he was doing. He laid her down in the long grass and yanked open her jacket to reveal those luscious breasts, soft as peaches. The scent of her skin was intoxicating; the ripe swell of her flesh beneath his mouth and the stiff pucker of her nipples drove him out of his senses. He sucked upon her even as his hands tore at her trousers, jerking them down over narrow hips, pulling off one of her boots and hurling it away in his haste to open her legs.

He found her sex, moist and open and soft. There was no question of finesse. Her hands scrabbled at his cock and balls, pulling him to her, squeezing his shaft like it was a spear and she was ready to kill someone with it. So he stabbed her to the core and felt her gasp and heave beneath him. Her heat was all around him, wet and slippery and exquisite; her legs embraced his hips. For a moment he froze, not daring to move. He felt her arch her spine, and heard her growl as she bit at his jaw.

“Yes!” she gasped.

It was like a fight to the death. Her body heaved beneath his. She was slighter and softer and so much weaker than him, but she refused to go limp. He was thrusting with all his weight, but still she fought him, her body growing more and more rigid as he drove in and out. And he didn’t want to hurt her, didn’t want to defile her, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t tear himself away from the hunger of her mouth, and the fingernails that bit into his clenching buttocks, and the wet hot incredible need of her sex, the need of her body, the need of her lost days and her stolen love.

Until she start to shake, clamped rigid and locked around him, and she jerked and cried out like something dying, and then for a moment he paused because he thought that somehow he was hurting her, and then he knew he was going to die too; he could feel his death pouring through him like a red tide from his balls all the way up his spine. It was coming, coming, coming—he jerked out of her, desperate to spill on the green grass, but he’d lost control of this long ago and he erupted all over her belly and thighs.

Oh, he thought, as he fell through a star-filled void. I had forgotten what it’s like. How good.



 Amazon UK : Amazon US 

Rijksmuseum

Here are some pics from last week of random things in the Amsterdam Rijkmuseum that amused me for various reasons (some of them silly, yeah okay!).

This was the closest I got to Rembrandt's The Night Watch. I know what I like ... and this is nothing special, seriously.
I do like medieval art:

Mary Magdalene, Carlo Crivelli, c. 1480
Depictions of St. Mary Magdalene are usually cool because she was an ex Fallen Woman and therefore that gave one an excuse to own a painting of a HOT BABE, in fashionable/sexy clothes, and still be pious. This one is particularly lecherous-looking, and her clothes are sumptuous.


Okay, this one is surreal. A medieval heraldic lady with antlers for legs that you hang off the ceiling. Because ... No, actually I have no idea on this one. Back to art that makes a bit more sense:

Detail, Four Canons Regular of St. Augustine meditating at an open grave , Master of the Spes Nostra, 1500I like corpse pictures, okay. This corpse is the centre of attention in the painting.

Detail, Saul and the Witch of Endor by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, 1526This picture is full of witches, satyrs and demons in various crazy forms. And giant owls. The full pic is well worth a look!

Detail, The Fall of Man , Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem 1592 I like the fact that the painter here has had an imaginative shot at God Almighty himself, depicted as a cloud man with face and hands.


This picture (a detail of a church scene) is meant to be funny - the painter included a full-sized tromp-l'oeil fly on the woman's bonnet, to fool viewers into thinking one had landed on the picture :-) (Also there is an owlet on the other woman's head. What is it with the owls, you Dutch?)


Shiva's very fine bum. No further explanation required.

Detail, Landscape with an Episode from the Conquest of America , Jan Mostaert, c. 1535Finally, a real oddity. The full picture shows the Spanish turning up to massacre Native Americans (depicted as naked Dutchmen because the artist had no clue whatsoever what they should look like). What I really want to know is why two of them - and only two - have bright red Santa Claus hats on...?

In bed with the Huns

I spent last weekend in the Netherlands. NOT doing what you might think! No, I was looking at beds:


These are hunebedden - either "Hun beds" or "giants' beds" (it's not entirely clear which the word derives from, nor is it clear that there was a distinction in popular mythology):

Look! Giants!
Fifty+ of them are found in the woodsy province of Drenthe in the north of the country, and they are in fact Neolithic burial mounds, belonging to the Funnel Beaker People and built around 5000 years ago. The rocks themselves are erratics weighing up to 25,000 kilos, swept down from Scandinavia by glaciers during an ice-age 200,000 years ago.

This is the biggest hunebed: D27



It was excavated in 1685 by a LGBT poet called Titia Bronsgerma, who was famous in her time for writing poems in alternating lines of French and Frisian.


Here's a rather wonderful engraving of her supervising the dig and being presented with treasures, dressed as a Greek goddess. Clearly archaeology was a lot more about having fun, and a lot less about post-holes and carbon-dating, back in the early days.



She of course subsequently wrote a poem ("Loff op 't Hunnebed") about her site, which is, ahem, loosely translated here.

 
This is what they are assumed to have looked like from inside when complete. Each would have had multiple occupants:


The Dutch are, of course, still obsessed with civil engineering and moving rocks about. They even build statues to rock-humpers:

But they seriously need to learn to lift with the knees