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domino harvey wrote:Holy cat, what happened here?

Again, this is probably Craig Keller/evillights. His prose style is very unique, one could say.

Not just slightly unique?

Unique enough to be recognisable. I don't have a problem with it myself.

"Unique" can't be qualified was the point

Ohhh. Damn I went and did it twice!

EddieLarkin wrote:Certainly twilight denotes an ending more than evening does yes, so I'd say that's a better fit if afton carries similar connotations. Carny is a slang term for a person who works at a carnival or fair, as opposed to a circus, and is definitely not something that is used interchangeably with clown or jester. It typically carries a negative connotation; for me a carny is a shady type who runs a crooked game of chance at a carnival. But that's probably just because of that one Simpsons episode.

There's also this film and this more recent film, both entitled CARNY, that use the term to evoke an unsavory character or characters specifically found at carnivals, not circuses.

ola t wrote:Well, it's really hard to translate anything into a language that's not your first one, and besides I'm not too familiar with the word carny. I'd say the literal translation would be The Evening of the Jesters. The word gycklare can be used derogatorily to refer to the whole circus troupe, not just the clown(s), and that's probably the case here. If carny is not too modern then it's not a bad translation at all, though it loses the resonance with the corresponding verb, gyckla, which can mean "to ridicule (someone/something)". The title itself implies that those good-for-nothings who spend their days making fun of us hardworking decent people will nevertheless, somehow, have their evening. Afton carries all sorts of poetic associations about things coming to an end, as I'm sure evening does, but maybe twilight does that even better.

How about Jesterdämmerung?

MoC wrote:A kaleidoscopic fantasia that contains "youth" and "beast" onlly insofar as 1963 pop/youth culture was that violently upstart thing, not unlike the yakuza?

I've always felt that the "youth of the beast" title referred kind of directly to the Tamio Kawaji character, who is both younger than the other gangsters and something of a beast in the story.

there's long been something comically self-serious about the tortured prose in MoC booklets. whenever I read the boilerplate about incorrect aspect ratios that "travesty the integrity of both the human form and cinematographic space" I imagine it to have been originally uttered by someone with a monocle (who is not Fritz Lang) and/or one of the chattering intellectuals from Five Easy Pieces.

the Youth of the Beast copy seems to be what happens when this prose style lets its hair down.

jonah.77 wrote:there's long been something comically self-serious about the tortured prose in MoC booklets

Yes, I adore MoC but this is a long-standing problem that seems to be getting worse. (Jō Shishido doesn't look too happy about it either.)

I think Comrade Evillights (who we assume writes all this stuff) models himself on a caricatured image of the ardent French cinephile of the Cahiers era, straining so hard to convey his exceptional passion for the minor works of great auteurs that it comes across as camp and ridiculous.

I'm reminded of that Maureen Lipman character in Educating Rita, who opens the door and sighs 'Wouldn't you just die without Mahler?'.

While I agree that the blurbs for this and for I Clowns are terrible, it's not as though Nick had a flawless track record with those either: I always found the description of L'Enfance Nue (it's a powerful film, absolutely) as "earthshattering" a bit hyperbolic.

I think Comrade Evillights (who we assume writes all this stuff) models himself on a caricatured image of the ardent French cinephile of the Cahiers era, straining so hard to convey his exceptional passion for the minor works of great auteurs that it comes across as camp and ridiculous.

the "travesty..." line certainly seems like he's imitating the high moral dudgeon of Rivette's Kapo review

Finch wrote:While I agree that the blurbs for this and for I Clowns are terrible, it's not as though Nick had a flawless track record with those either: I always found the description of L'Enfance Nue (it's a powerful film, absolutely) as "earthshattering" a bit hyperbolic.

Unless you're reviewing a cosmic calamity, 'earthshattering' is always going to be a wildly hyperbolic adjective, but the addled brain salad we're looking at in these recent blurbs goes way beyond simple hyperbole.

I CLOWNS is definitely one of Fellini's lesser works if I do say so myself.

Finch wrote:While I agree that the blurbs for this and for I Clowns are terrible, it's not as though Nick had a flawless track record with those either: I always found the description of L'Enfance Nue (it's a powerful film, absolutely) as "earthshattering" a bit hyperbolic.

HHHHHEEEEEEYYYY!

Monsieur Keller did that one, and all the Pialats. He'd been doing about half the blurbs for a long time before I left. I did temper his wilder flourishes at times, and I think that brought about a balance that worked.

Is my track record now flawless again?

Oh, the Pialat blurbs were Craig's as well? Hope you accept my apologies, Nick.

I like the sentence in the MoC booklets about how the stretching or cropping a 1.33:1 image to fill a widescreen display results in images that "travesty the integrity of both the human form and cinematographic space," because I think that's completely true, and while "travesty" as a verb is much less common than the noun form, it's a perfectly standard usage. (I don't know if that was part of the issue for anyone.) I suppose I also just appreciate seeing a "public service announcement" that contains actual factual information that many surely were not aware of. Some zoom or stretch the image on their widescreen intentionally, but others are unaware of the settings, and it can be a matter of learning to see the problem with changing the picture that way. To me, the sentence doesn't seem overemphatic.

They're a bit pointless though when used in the booklets that come with Blu-ray only releases of 1.66/1.78/1.85 films. No one is accidentally going to watch a 16x9 Blu-ray squashed into 4:3 on their HDTV.

You'd be surprised.

I'm also a fan of the admonition to turn the damn motion smoothing/soap opera effect off.

Hopefully at least these obvious errors get corrected in the blurb for Thief of Bagdad:

"multi-hypenate"
"it was one the costliest films"
"Carl Davies"

While they're at it, there's a usage error in "Baghdad's premiere plunderer" (should be "premier").

So I have Youth of the Beast in hand. Someone has edited the blurb on the back cover, but something tells me that it wasn't domino...

Also, Carnies' Twilight is no more.

Is it still described as having been shot with a hermaphroditic telephoto lens?