Kage Baker launches the first in a series of looks-back at early SciF[l]icks with the Le Voyage dans la Lune. Fun and, really, pretty insightful, what with its iconic mutation from fairytale to sci-fi and whathaveyou. And I had a shameful LoL at the caption to the wounded-moonman picture.
Ouch ....
the wounded Man in the Moon bleeding like a particularly runny Brie, grimacing in pain with a space capsule protruding from his right eye.
Better than Gatsby
Erika Nelson wrote about Benjamin Button that
But to what end is this aging in reverse? It infuses the whole movie with a sense of melancholy. Seeing Benjamin born old, visibly haunted by the specter of death from infancy, makes his life seem more fragile. Benjamin acts as a dark reminder that we are all dying.
and I wanted – while careful not to spoil – to bring-up a couple things in the limelight, and in no particular order, but as they occur to me. 1.) Benjamin’s association with the war as a relatively-young-man-in-an-old-body circles and circles the old maxim that boys go to war to become old men; that 2.) New Orleans and Tug-Boating and U.S. Navy is all inextricably tied to (with fates dependent on) water: traditionally cleansing, unstable, maternal, and not to mention the root of our descriptions of Time (which flows); 3.) his life begins with The Great War, includes the Second World war, and ends during the Iraq War (implicitly the beginning of a Third?); 4.) the happiest time of his life was during the late sixties, middle-aged, inbetween dawdling and doddering; and 5.) that the care required by children is the same for the elderly, capped by a mentally atrophied, disensitized orphan-teen in the nineties.
