For all you shatter is our seeming, And in breaking we are free

I watched Krull (1983) for the first time last night. It’s one of the few of the 80s fantasy canon that I hadn’t seen before. I recognised everybody, though Alun Armstrong as the honourable crook Torquil was a particular treat. Heh. Oh, 80s fantasy(/sci-fi) cheese, I do love you. I think my favourite character was probably Ergo the (Usually-Not-So-But-Can-Be-If-Pushed) Magnificent, but Rell, Ynyr and the Widow of the Web were also very lovely. The special effects were … okay, 80s cheese, but the glass spider worked very very well (even, or especially, speaking as a borderline arachnophobe over here), and I really liked the set design for the Dark Fortress, the organic, bone-like structure they gave it. Creepy organic-looking castle of evil, I approve. Can’t mess with the classics. I also love that the hero and his lady had to find an alternate means of killing the baddie at the end, because the Mystical Weapon of Destiny™ literally got stuck and left them high and dry. Heh! Totally unrelated sidenote, weddings on this planet are a lot more hardcore than expected.

God, I love me some 80s cheese. I do, I always do. It’s shite, but it’s extremely enjoyable shite :)

1) Stop watching ghost stories, self. You're the girl who screamed at Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, remember? Quit freaking yourself out.

2) M.R. James wrote some freaky stuff. I'm watching a BBC adaptation of his A View From A Hill. Thank you for filling my house with quiet breathing/rustling noises and a sense that ghosts are stalking me, thanks so much for that.

3) PUT DOWN THE CURSED BLOODY OBJECT YOU NINCOMPOOP! Seriously, what is with people in ghost stories? Yes, by all means sleep with the binoculars that make you see things that aren't there in your bedroom, absolutely that's a good plan. Hang the haunted doorknocker on your front door. Wander around dark woods with cursed ghost-summoning objects all by your lonesome. What is wrong with you people?! Does no one in horror stories have the smallest sense of self-preservation?

4) Seriously, I gotta stop watching these things. I'm gonna be sleeping with the lights on at this rate. It's just sort of addictive, that's all.

No matter how many times I do job interviews, I always seem to come out of them a wreck. You'd think I'd be starting to get used to them by now. Oh well. At least it's done. It was about ten minutes shorter than it was supposed to be, which is either very good or very bad, but there's no helping anything now.

For some reason, I've spent the past few days watching Hammer and Amicus horror films on youtube to relax. It surprisingly effective, and Peter Cushing is always wonderful to watch. Heh.

For a prompt on comment_fic.

Title: A Perfect Pair
Rating: PG
Fandom: Mary Poppins (1964), Doctor Who
Characters/Pairings: Mary Poppins, Bert, mention of Romana. Hint of Mary/Bert
Summary: Time Lady Mary Poppins and her companion Bert have a small conversation about Time Lords and reputations
Wordcount: 672
Warnings/Notes: *shakes head* Random, mostly.
Disclaimer: Not mine.

Right. So I’ve just watched The Artist. Um. 1600 words of babbled reaction below:

Recently my sister and I had a lot of fun overhauling and organising the DVD press at home. 300-odd DVDs to be put in something approximating order - it's tonnes of fun! What? I've mild OCD, okay? I actually like stuff like that. Sitting on the floor with stacks of DVDs around us, sorting them into the approproiate piles ... Anyway, we've tried various systems before - alphabetical, chronological - but this time we went with genre. And then we had some problems.

The basic list included War (waaay too many, thanks to my dad), Crime/Thriller (again, loads, but we all chipped in there), Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Disaster Movies (thankfully few), Westerns, Comedy, Drama (basically, anything that wasn't any of the others), and TV Series (which is a medium, not a genre, but we had to put all those damn boxsets together for storage reasons). Which worked okay until we met things like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Is that comedy, or crime/film noir, or fantasy, considering the title character is a talking rabbit? We went with comedy after input from my dad ( though I was pushing for crime) based on the fact that the main element/theme was the need for laughter/fantasy, and the fact that the movie is damned funny.

But it got me thinking, after a few like that, about how we were defining genre. I mean, most of the horror I know isn't actually horror to me. Dracula was Victorian porn with a supernatural twist. Frankenstein I would have rated primarily as a drama, a coming of age story from an extreme outsider POV, and a comment on society that just happened to have horror/sci-fi elements as the main plot. Interview With a Vampire is a period drama with overtones of gay romance, just with vampires. We ended up putting Alien in with the Horror instead of the Sci-fi, because of the whole monster/haunted-house-in-space thing, while Aliens did end up in Sci-fi, after considering a detour to War or Diaster Movie. It got confusing, and lots ended up just in best guess or first instinct.

How do things end up in one genre or another? Lots are multigenre, or cross-genre, or don't actually have a genre of their own yet (most of those ended up in Drama). That's why libraries have maybe a sci-fi/fantasy section, and then a big 'Fiction' section, I think.

How about you guys?