Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Technology sucks...

I spent most of today trying to save my Word doc of A65 to a PDF without the ICC color profiles, and it's not working. I even went to FedEx Kinko's to use one of their PCs and got nowhere. I'm going in to work for a while, tomorrow morning, and we have Adobe Acrobat there so if I have a chance I'll try that. Otherwise, I have no idea what the problem is and cannot get past it with the programs I have now...not and turn out a decent original for the print run.

Tomorrow before I go in, I'm contacting Tech Support at Ingram and asking them what to do. Maybe it's not something I even need to really worry about. It's just frustrating to not be able to do what I have to do to get A65 ready to go, all because a major company insists on using an archaic format.

I did do laundry and ironing, today, as well. Needed to. As I ironed, I watched Call Me By Your Name...and didn't believe a moment of it. The acting was good and it had pretty scenery, but it was a very idealistic vision of a coming of age gay story set in 1983, with no reference to the AIDS epidemic that was already sweeping through not only the US but Europe. The closest things to conflict were misunderstandings and misinterpretations between Elio and Oliver.

Part of my reaction to it might have to do with how it was a sexual relationship between an adult man and a 17 year-old boy who looked like he was 15. It was a bit creepy, especially since Oliver was a real jerk. Pretty, but obnoxious and controlling.

What's funny is, I started comparing moments in this movie to Weekend, an indie film set in Northern England about two gay men who hook up a few days before one of them is to leave, and how they affect and change each other. It had so many similar moments, it was like they'd seen that movie and decided to remake it in Italy...or steal ideas from it, right down to a good-bye at a train station.

I'm also reminded of a French film I saw, called Pauline at the Beach. It was made in 1983 and had a 15 year-old girl at its center who loses her virginity to a boy who's just a clueless as she is, if I remember right, but that was made by Eric Rhomer. He saw people's attitudes about sex and love as something absurd and silly, and had fun with it.

CMBYN acts like it thinks it's making an important statement about love, when it's just a meandering tale about a boy's first crush. To be brutal, at the goodbye in Weekend, I was in tears; at the goodbye in this movie, I gave a shrug and a nod. Timothee Chalamet's long take staring into the fire and letting himself feel was good (and probably the reason he got nominated for an Oscar), but compared to the long, long take of Garbo at the end of Queen Christina or Jean-Pierre Leaud's long run and haunting gaze back at the camera in The 400 Blows...it was pale.

I'm glad James Ivory finally got an Oscar, but I wish it'd been for one of his own far-better films.

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