Testaments to the Boom Times to Come

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

I shall never forget the occasion where I was visiting a school as a writer and the whole place suddenly fell into an uproar because the school tomboy - a most splendid Britomart of a girl - had beaten up the school bully. Everything stopped in the staffroom while the teachers debated what to do. They wanted to give the tomboy a prize, but decided reluctantly that they had better punish her and the bully too. They knew that if, as a child, you do pluck up courage to hit the bully, it is an act of true heroism - as great as that of Beowulf in his old age. I remember passing the tomboy, sitting in her special place of punishment opposite the bully. She was blazing with her deed, as if she had actually been touched by a god. And I thought that this confirmed all my theories: a child in her position is open to any heroic myth I care to use; she is inward with folktales; she would feel the force of any magical or divine intervention.

Diana Wynne Jones (via intomyth)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

What I can tell you is that works of art are the only silver bullet we have against racism and sexism and hatred. Joe Biden happened to see Hamilton on the same day James Burrows was here. James Burrows directed every episode of Will & Grace, and remember when Biden went on Meet the Press and essentially said, “Yeah, gay people should get married”? He very openly credited Will & Grace with changing the temperature on how we discuss gays and lesbians in this country. It was great to see Jim Burrows and Joe Biden talk about that, and Jim thanked Biden and Biden thanked Jim because that was a piece of art changing the temperature of how we talked about a divisive issue. It sounds silly. It’s a sitcom, but that doesn’t make it not true. Art engenders empathy in a way that politics doesn’t, and in a way that nothing else really does. Art creates change in people’s hearts. But it happens slowly.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, ‘Hamilton’s’ Lin-Manuel Miranda on Finding Originality, Racial Politics (and Why Trump Should See His Show) (The Hollywood Reporter)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[kinghardy]

Why do you think people love bad guys in movies when they hate them in real life?

“Watching someone genuinely say I’m going to change the world to better suit my needs as opposed to change myself to fit in with society, is something that’s quite compelling that ultimately, I think all of us would kind of like to walk in those shoes for a day when they say, ‘You know what I’m just going to say no to any request made of me and do exactly what I want. Regardless of the consequences.’ That place is safe in a theatre, it’s safe in a book, it’s safe in fantasy, and safe in the symbolic playing field of the mind and in conversation and discussion. As soon as it becomes a real thing and the consequences are genuine, then it no longer has the same compulsion no matter how charismatic that world is, or these players are, or these key figures.

The consequences are genuinely of a real nature and are immediately very abhorrent, and not something that we want. I think that’s why people like to watch characters who are rebellious or will do what they want to do, or are anarchic or nihilistic or crazy or off the wall. It’s something I’d like to do in real life but I wouldn’t do it because I feel responsible to participate and be a member of society. And I care about too many people and love too many people to want to hurt anyone, or harm anyone, I think it’s impossible not to hurt people. But to harm, you know?

I think it’s healthy to have that conversation in a safe place than to not, and to be aware that it’s part of the human condition as well. I think people who change things are fascinating. Passion can either create or destroy. If that passion is in a certain agenda connected in a person then that destruction is going to go in a specific way. I’m just glad I’m not that person doing that and have to live with those consequences. But you know, watching it feeds the fantasy as opposed to the reality.”

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Anonymous asked:

What say you to the lest flattered critics giving CP negative reviews?

I have not seen these negative reviews, but I can imagine and resent them.

True facts, I actually haven’t read a single “”professional”” review of Crimson Peak OR Pacific Rim, because I got my review from you all. Which I think is right – these aren’t movies made to charm a few critics, these are movies made to bring joy to the people. And Guillermo del Toro’s people happen to be my people: over-excitable nerds who are way into ~storytelling~ and monsters and how everything is really just about our hearts.

I’m sure these negative reviews will say things about how the visuals are the strongest part, under this strange idea that you can divide del Toro’s plots from the imagery. I’m sure they will use a large amount of condescending qualifiers when talking about it as a grand sweeping gothic Romance, as if the discerning filmgoer should always find intensity of feeling to be silly and overdone, something you have to consciously lower yourself to enjoy. I’m sure a fair few will fault it for not being as scary as they wanted, though that has nothing to do with the movie, and some will conflate fairytale with predictability, and others will not like Mia Wasikowska’s heroine for any multitude of reasons, because the greatest and trickiest beast a female hero has to face is always her own audience, who demands far more than just her blood.

But one of the probable negative comments I most anticipate resenting, is any that somehow tries to make Crimson Peak out to be lesser in importance and intelligence than any other movie that doesn’t have the gall to be Genre. As if tropes and archetypal forms somehow take away meaning. Guillermo del Toro is one of the wisest storytellers I have ever come across. He talks about monsters as the hungers & wildness in us that we try to call Other than ourselves. He talks about horror as being, quite simply, the thing that is there that should not be, and the thing that is not there that should be (from roofs to love, you’ll see that tracks). And, much like his haunted house, what clay he builds his movies on top of comes seeping up, bold & red, through the floorboards – issues of class, of feminism, of institutional control.

Sometimes people try to defend certain blockbusters by urging you to just turn off your brain and enjoy the spectacle. Guillermo del Toro and Crimson Peak do not ask you to do such a thing in order to enjoy theirs, and it’s thrilling, both on its own and for that.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

These daring structural flourishes bring Hannibal closer than any commercial series to embodying the phrase “a novel for television.” A novel is not merely a novel because it is long. It is a novel because of the freedom it takes, or can take, in telling its story. It can adopt different points of view and slip back and forth between past and present, not just from chapter to chapter, but within the context of a page, a paragraph, even a sentence. Hannibal makes almost every other TV series seem aesthetically impoverished in comparison because it takes these freedoms and actually plays with them, to make the story and its telling more surprising, confounding, and multilayered. (One of the best examples are the sex scenes, which are shockingly explicit, in that you always know exactly what the characters are doing with each other physically, but also figurative, smearing and doubling body parts into prismatic tangles of limbs and whirling graphic patterns.)

Anyone who makes scripted television should look at this series and think about ways to apply Hannibal’s experiments in tone, point of view, image, and sound to non-horror material, because what it’s doing is not innate to the horror movie, but to the most sophisticated third-person omniscient novels. It is literary and cinematic at the same time, in such a way as to suggest that one mode can be the continuation of the other, without falsifying or oversimplifying the uniqueness of either form. It represents a major step forward in scripted TV’s artistic evolution.

Hannibal is dead. Hannibal is the future.

Hannibal Redefined How We Tell Stories on TV – Vulture

Of Matt Zoller Seitz’s fantastic review of Hannibal, this is what I love best, and what I see in the show that makes it so much more meaningful for me than pretty much any other television show I’ve ever seen. It’s not that other television is bad - I love my shows - but that Hannibal was just that good.

(via lunchtop)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human  (via tellmefive)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin 
(via foxesinbreeches)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

The symbolic interpretation is the only one which expands, enlarges the world, makes it boundless, illimitable. All others reduce it. Dreams, mysteries, myths, symbols, are as necessary as bread.

Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944
(via violentwavesofemotion)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[swanjolras]

man this has been said before by cleverer folks than me, but sometimes you have to sit down and let the sheer size and age of the storytelling tradition just completely overwhelm you, ja feel?

like— think for a second about how mind-bogglingly incredible it is that we know who osiris is? that somebody just made him up one day, and told stories about him to their kids, and literally thousands and thousands of years later we are still able to go “there was a god whose brother cut him into pieces”, it’s so arbitrary, it’s so incredible

that in talking about scheherazade and her husband, you are doing something that someone in every single generation has done since it was written— you are telling stories that have lasted an impossible amount of time 

can you conceive of telling a story, and then traveling into the future and hearing that same story told— with alterations, and through media that you could not possibly conceive of, but your story— in the year 3214?

the fact that we! as a species! have been telling the same damn stories for so long— the fact that we’ve seen homer’s troy and chaucer’s troy and shakespeare’s troy and troy with fucking brad pitt because we never fucking stop telling stories! never ever ever!

we never stop caring about stories, or returning to the same stories, or putting our own spins on stories. we never stop talking about the characters as if they were real, or asking what happened next, or asking to hear it again.

generation after generation, they never ever ever stop mattering to us.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Words… They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more… I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Tom Stoppard (via amandaonwriting)