dollsome

random sinners thoughts:

+ love letter to southern american music. we love to see it.

+ finally some recognition that the southern us has always been culturally and racially diverse--the black/white binary dominated and still dominates most thinking about race, but there have always been people who don't fit into either category. having chinese, choctaw and mixed-race people more accurately reflects the time and place than most stories with similar settings.

+ the dobro is one of my favorite instruments ever and i hope this movie inspires a million people to start playing it

+ finally a movie that's filmed in Real Locations and knows to use cgi for necessary effects and not for the whole world. the production designer should win every oscar. as should the costume designer.

+ The Scene was one of the best scenes i've seen in cinema. like. wow. yes. that's what movies are for.

+ wtf was up with using "wild mountain thyme" though that song is from the '50s????

+ honestly the irish picks were pretty low-hanging fruit and something more obscure would have been more interesting but “rocky road to dublin” is a banger of a song so i’ll let it pass

+ having the white trio play the world’s whitest version of a geeshie whiley song was a genius move (and that one! with those lyrics!)

+ so proud of michael b. jordan in my heart he'll always be vince all grown up

+ michael b. jordan and hailee steinfeld got top billing, but this was sammie's story. miles caton, i'm excited to see what you'll do!

+ lovely to see wunmi mosaku, who i have liked since in the flesh, getting such a great role. she's otherworldly beautiful.

+ i am always happy to see hailee steinfeld

+ delroy lindo!!!

+ i thought it was pretty cool how jack o'connell kept going in and out of that irish accent--added texture to the character

+ can chris eyre or somebody make a movie about the choctaw characters? it's tragic we lost jeff barnaby a few years back--he would have been awesome at that.

+ a bunch of people left when the credits started, and i feel sorry for them

+ rhiannon giddens on the soundtrack! honestly i would have side-eyed them if she hadn't been

+ i always think that i don't like horror movies but i think i need to admit to myself that i do like them, i just prefer them to be period pieces

+ the amount of time we had for set-up before the revelations of what kind of world we're actually operating in was excellent and not something i expect to see in 2025

+ the dialogue was layered enough that i feel like i'm going to keep picking up new little details on subsequent rewatches

+ in short: that was a Movie and i love a Movie

What I finished:

+ Westmark by Lloyd Alexander. I read the Chronicles of Pyrdain a couple of times when I was a kid and also The Iron Ring, but I completely missed this series. Several people with good (read: my) taste had it on their 100 books list, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan.

I see why people imprinted on it! I did not imprint on it, being not the right age for it, but it went directly to my "wish I'd discovered it as a kid" shelf on GoodReads. Alexander is better at the prose level than I realized as a kid, and it was a joy to read his writing. I liked our main character Theo, who is a person who always tries to do the right thing but is not always sure what that is (relatable) and is surrounded by people with different ethical frameworks than he has. I hate to be all "the publishing industry has gone downhill!" but honestly, very few authors (Hardinge, as always, is a big exception) are doing this level of nuanced morality and prose on even the YA level, much less the MG one. It's a joy to read "old school" YA/MG books and be so totally trusted by the writer. That said, it is very much a book for kids, so every time I wanted the writing to really dig into a particular idea or feeling, it didn't, but, like, that's a me problem. It's perfect for a MG reader!

I also think it's interesting how his worldbuilding looks at a glance like Generic Medieval European Fantasy, but it's clearly not--this is actually Reformation-era fantasy with the importance of printing presses and a Cromwell-esque villain, and it reminded me that your worldbuilding doesn't have to be complex to be good and distinctive. Just a few details make things feel realistic.

Also, this is an aside, but I was looking at Alexander's GoodReads page, I do not think I'd ever seen a picture of him before, and I am so taken by his face, especially his nose. He looks like a Froud illustration! Exactly what a children's fantasy author should look like! What a wonderful face!!!

+ Also, Everything Is Tuberculosis again. I had long ago put both the book and the audiobook on hold at the library and then ended up buying a copy of the book instead, so I read it right after it came out, but the audiobook hold finally arrived last week so I listened to it again. I still think it's great; I still wish it was longer; I still understand why it isn't.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Still working on City of Stairs. I might not finish it before it's due back at the library and then I will probably have to wait for it to come around again!

+ I also finally started Tendencies by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. This is my first time reading more than short excerpts of queer studies icon Sedgwick and damn, that woman could construct a sentence. This book is a collection of essays and I am reading one essay at a time. It'll take me a while to get through it but she is not a writer that you rush through! Many of her insights seem even more relevant now than they did in the early 90s when she was writing.