Smashbomb

" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

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LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020) in Movies

Sep 30, 2020 (Updated Sep 30, 2020)

Exhibit no. 853928706 on why DC has been *crushing* Marvel these past four years. I do have my grievances: they pretty much skip all the actual Birds of Prey stuff (you know, what the movie is titled lmao) until the last twenty minutes, it takes a bit too much time at points, and not to mention this is a completely different character than what was presented in 𝘚𝘶𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘚𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘥 (for better and for worse) which I confess I would have liked to have seen more psychotic. Otherwise though this is pretty much exactly what movies were made for - a candy-coated live action cartoon sprinkled heavily with orgasmically choreographed savage violence, plentiful vulgarity, and the cheerfully dark edge that the aforementioned 𝘚𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘥 (which I still defend for at least being a good time) desperately craved. Robbie, Messina, and McGregor knock it out of the park and it's just great seeing Rosie Perez punch people in the face with brass knuckles. Furthermore this is one of the precious few recent studio 'girl power' movies where I actually bought that it gave a shit about the girls beyond superficial, insincere, and reductive woke points. At its core lies a legitimately poignant story about these women being chastised, abused, undermined, and taken advantage of for having the same traits (in a world that would already jump at the opportunity to eat them alive even if they didn't have them) that men get a pass and/or are even encouraged for having - so they respond by beating the ever-loving, merciless fuck out of them and it's deeply satisfying. No wonder usual superhero audiences who are used to female characters with zero personality or dynamism let this flop. Though I'm probably the only person on the planet who though that Leto's cracked-out Joker would have made a perfect addition to this.