Sunshine

I...wow.

Good movie. Up until about the last 35 minutes, which turned a visually stunning, imaginative, well-directed, and frightening science fiction movie into a so-so horror movie.

Scratch that. Good movie. I would have preferred that they made this movie without a certain element--I honestly think it was not required by the plot--but although the element disrupts the movie for me and subtracts more than it adds, it does pick up again at the very end.

Thoughts while watching:

--Does human opposition make the effort more meaningful? If you could make a sacrifice for the greater good, and you were sure to die anyway, and no one could ever, ever know whether it was you that failed, or even know about your sacrifice...would you be able to summon the strength to continue?

--One of the great things about a within-the-bounds-of-current-scientific-knowledge story set in space is tension between certain death and possible survival--"we're dead" vs. "there's hope." Sunshine uses this tension to wonderful effect, not by presenting any new tricks about how to die in space, but by executing the old ones really well.

--Cillian Murphy: beautiful and good. The repeated sequence of his character, Capa, being strapped into his space suit by someone else (the first time, in stark contrast to the Captain strapping himself in, the second, time, being strapped in by the man who volunteered to stay and die to save the others): affectingly pathetic, paid off when he finally straps himself into a suit himself.

--People die three ways: hot, cold, cut. Self-sacrifice, with hope, without hope. Three recurring images: sunlight, water, plants. The sun motif, over and over again. The end, in the grey box, with universe changing and distorting around us.


Highly recommended. It's not flawless, but it's still amazingly well-done, and it's a thinking movie made by people expecting a smart audience, so I forgive it for not being flawless.

April is National Poetry Month!

Rhyming couplets get old after a while, but if you recite this, it's surprisingly natural-sounding. Simple, blunt, but effective.

I first became aware of this poem via a set of Death Note icons made by foamchicken combining some lines from it with images of Light and Misa. Extraordinarily creepy and very appropriate to the characters; I used one of them for ages.

Side note: man, I loved Death Note, and it let me down so bad by never even trying to be as deep as it was dark.


THE HANGMAN

By Maurice Ogden

Into our town the hangman came,
smelling of gold and blood and flame.
He paced our bricks with a different air,
and built his frame on the courthouse square.

The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
only as wide as the door was wide
with a frame as tall, or a little more,
than the capping sill of the courthouse door.

And we wondered whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal? What the crime?
The hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.

And innocent though we were with dread,
we passed those eyes of buckshot lead.
Till one cried, "Hangman, who is he,
for whom you raised the gallows-tree?"

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye
and he gave a riddle instead of reply.
( 'He who serves me best,' said he / 'Shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree.' )