I’ll be completely honest that today’s rhyme, The Village of Erith, made no sense at all. I have the sneaking suspicion it started out as a riddle.
To make matters worse, in my confusion I got loom the verb mixed up with loom the noun. For a while, I thought I’d keep my mistake and laugh at why there were looms abandoned on the river bank but I ended up erasing them and spending the next five minutes cleaning up the mess.
So for this weeks selection I went for French Fantastic Mysteries. Movies that questioned reality as we know it and left us scratching our heads.
Eugene Francois Vidocq was one of the first and great pioneers of forensic science inspiring such mystery writers as Edfar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. In the film Vidocq his life is glamorized to epic proportion as he faces his greatest challenge yet.
Played with typical gusto by Gerard Depardieu. Vidocq fights a mysterious individual know only as the Alchemist who traps the souls of his victims in the mirror he wears as a mask.
I really liked this film. While hardly a masterpiece the look of this film was amazing. With wonderfully theatrical sets shot through sepia filters with multiple closeups and the occasional fish eye lens this was remarkably surreal capturing a romanticized France at the brink of revolution.
Mystery, Monsters and Martial Arts what more can you ask for in a film? Brotherhood gives us all of these things nicely rapped up in wonderful period costumes.
The Beast of Gévaudan was an alleged creature that was apparently responsible for the death of over a hundred people in southern france between 1764 and 1767 whatever it was it was never identified; Brotherhood of the Wolf tells a romanticized tale of what it might have been.
Naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac and his Indian companion Manji, are sent to hunt the Beast. On the way they find Gypsies, corrupt aristocrats and ancient conspiracies and kick a whole lot of ass.
This is a fun movie beautiful in it’s vision of 18th century france, the fighting choreography is amazing making it the only savate martial arts film I know and when we finally encounter the beast it is beautifully constructed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
In today’s rhyme, “Miss One, Two, and Three I was briefly confused by what a tea caddy was getting it mixed up with a tea cart when it turned out to be something completely different.
Since woman gathering around an actual tea caddy, unless it was on a table or something, made little sense I stuck with the tea cart. Just assume the tea caddy’s there right next to the teapot.
For today’s Rhapsody we return to Haydn Wood with his Manx Rhapsody!
I found today’s rhyme Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes to be an interesting example of how the language changes… I’d never even seen wanton as a noun before… and even then I think i’m going to have to crack open my copy of Oxford Unabridged to find it meaning what it does in this context.
Today’s rhyme, Madam, I Come a Courting, was another one that kind of stumped me the only real detail that’s given (beyond a courtship going on) is the implication that since the woman wants a handsome man, the suitor isn’t one. In the end, because of the line about how long flowers last I decided to focus on the garden this was taking place in.
The rhyme seems to accuse the woman of being only interested in beauty… says the man who assumes love can be bought…
Of course I’m sure whoever wrote this would say “what has love got to do with marriage?”
