I watched 2 films today.
The first one was an Irish film,
Finky, which I mentioned in the Celtic Language Study Group because for another 14 days or so it's available to view on the TG4 website. It's not a perfect film--I take issue in particular with how it uses disability as a kind of purgatory for the protagonist to work through his guilt. Like, can film and TV writers come up another way to represent disability that doesn't make it a metaphor for evil, moral failing or punishment? Please?
Anyhow, there were some things I did like about it, like the acting and cast, and the surreal elements of it. So it was worth a view.
The other was was
Солярис (Solaris), which is currently on HBO Max. I've never see this one before, despite being a huge sci fi fan. Years ago I read the the English translation of the novel, that Stanislaw Lem reportedly hated ( there is a more recent English translation that is suppose to much better). But I have never gone out of my way to see the 1972 film by director Andrei Tarkovsky. I've heard and read a lot about Tarkovsky but I've never seen any of his films. One of the things I had heard about
Солярис was it was Tarkovsky's answer to Kubrik's
2001, a film I personally do not like very much.
OK, before a Kubrick fan gets mad at me, let me say that I understand very well that Kubrick is a god of cinema and has had unparalleled influence. I understand his importance and I in no way wish to diminish that. It's just some of his films for me feel dated, tedious and the cinematic equivalent of wearing a heavy wool coat on a Texas summer afternoon, and
2001 is one of them. Sorry.
But that bias kept me from seeing
Солярис all these years, and I have to say, that was unfortunate, because I really liked it. I could see how it was response to
2001, but it is also so much more than that. It is very much in the tradition of a lot of my favorite sci fi literature that comes from the period just pre-dating this movie, the mid-1950s thru the late 60s/early 70s, where one of the major themes many writers, including Lem, were exploring was "Reality not being what you thought it was" with intertwining themes of disillusionment, alienation, anxiety, trauma and grief as the precursor or the consequence of that realization. Some writers, like Herbert and Le Guin, wrote complex sagas about it, others wrote more futuristic-politically about this, like Clarke (who wrote the novel
2001) and Heinlein, and others centered more the individual's psychological experience, like Philip K. Dick. And I would put Lem's novel somewhere on the spectrum between Clarke and Dick, where he merges the futurist and psychological orientations preferred by these two authors respectively.
Not only does the film stay true to Lem's themes of becoming alienated from the reality one once knew (or thought they knew), it does so in a really beautifully cinematic way that is completely Tarkovsky's own creation, not really owing to either Lem or Kubrick, and makes me want to go watch his other films. Yeah, I'm really late to the party but that Tarkovsky guy--wow!
And while I know this film is compared a lot to
2001, the film that came most to my mind when watching this was
La Jetée, one of my favorite sci fi films of all time.
La Jetée came out in 1962 and was so well regarded that it's hard to believe Tarkovsky did not see it and perhaps was influenced by it.
Anyhow, enough about films!
Yesterday I worked more on Swedish, and did all the reviews for Swedish 1 and 2 on Memrise, which are the only modules for Swedish I have done so far. I suppose I could do 3 now.
I also worked a bit on Swedish phonology--my recall for vocabulary is strong (I only got 3 wrong in all those Memrise reviews) but my pronunciation is in a sad state.
I've watched a lot of LeSteam on Twitch. I haven't been watching any Twitch since Christmas so it was nice to get back to that, just having a French live stream up on my monitor as I worked on my OC writing and other things. I watched some of their tabletop show, a segment on MCU movies (where they repeatedly pronounced "Benedict Cumberbatch" in the French-iest way possible) and their most popular show, Le Récap. In the latest intro for the Le Récap they have a graphic where the PogChamp emote disintegrates from view, which I thought was pretty funny (sorry to anyone who doesn't know what that's about--I'll only say that LeStream is opposed to COVID misinfo and I like that).
Today was less productive because I was fighting a migraine for most of the day. While I didn't work on any of my rotating languages, I did read
this article in Irish on the classic Irish rock band Thin Lizzy and
this article in Spanish on the prehistoric ancestor of the black Iberian pig.
This afternoon, to help ease my migraine, I took a nap and I dreamed about doing exercises in a grammar workbook for Galician and all the sentences were like the sentences from the Clozemaster course.
Fitness challengeYesterday I did some aerobics and upper body work, and for my conjugation practice, I did
mögen.
Because of my migraine, I took today off.
OC progressYesterday I wrote 1112 words in French, most of it in response to the prompt "Tu vas faire ce week-end?" I wrote about my plans to make orange sesame chicken tomorrow night as well as other things.
Today I wrote 550 words in Irish, about the film
Finky. I spend too much time looking up vocabulary and had to stop after about 90 minutes because my head was hurting too much.
SC progressI read about 60 pages of
De synthèse yesterday. I didn't do any SC reading today.
Last night I watched one episode of the Swedish series
Störst av allt (Quicksand) on Netflix. The premise is a little...uncomfortable for me, but I'll give it a few episodes and see if it's worth it. I also re-watched an episode of
Toon. Then today I watched the 2 films mentioned above.
French Films : Books : Spanish Films : Books : Celtic Films : Books : Germanic Films : Books : Russian Films : Books : 
I wrote about making my vegetable and bean soup the night before, about how it snowed here earlier in the week and about a dream I had the other night where I was speaking Gaelic. For the French writing, I wrote about a memory from college.