.: so comes snow after fire :.

Last entry before departure: I got my tickets, I got my passport, I got my suitcase. Hope I didn't forget anything important. I got a make-up bag full of medicines because I get super anxious everytime I have to leave the country. I'll take pictures on my phone because that camera is way better than the actual camera I bought in 2012.

The last few days were spent taking long walks downtown to build up my stamina, marathoning all the X-Men movies (except for the ones Days of Future Past made irrelevant, because those two suck anyway), going to the cinema to watch Beauty and the Beast, which I loved. Today we're going to visit Tati's sister and her baby, and then I hope I'll be able to sleep, because I'm always anxious the night before I have to take a plane.

See you on the other side! \o/

Just came back from watching Rogue One, so here's the obligatory spoiler-free entry: it was brilliant, in every aspect, the perfect blend of beautiful plot and character development, nostalgia and modern storytelling. I loved every character in that fantastically diverse cast, I loved Jyn to pieces, and Andor, and that scene with Vader in the hallway was worth the price of the ticket alone! I got chills, I cried, I squeed in delight. The cameos and nods to the original trilogy were handled amazingly well, perfectly woven into the story without being jarring. And those cgi characters were seriously well-done, kudos.

But most of all the story, the dialogue, the characters! The way they depicted the Rebel Alliance, in a way they'd never done before, and that I wasn't expecting at all. The beaches. Yavin 4. My new otp, which is incredibly easy to identify if you know me. The music! The fight scenes with the X-Wings, that looked even better than in The Force Awakens! The more I think about it, the more I love this movie. \o/

Comments will probably contain spoilers, so if you've seen this wonderful movie, come squeal with me!

Just like I hoped, my birthday has been a turning point for me. I tend to fixate on dates and anniversaries, even too much, but sometimes that obsession does help. I feel like my birthday ended the awful year of illness and pain, and now I've started a new year of healing. I know it sounds a bit weird and new-ageish, but you know what I mean. I've spent a great week at home, I've made some wonderful new friends (thanks to capracotta, who is amazing), I've been to the bank and the restaurant and I've done laundry and everything feels normal and new at the same time. I feel like I'm taking control of my life once again, a life that includes monthly trips to the hospital, but also hanging out with my friends, going to the cinema, making marmalade with my aunt. I can do it. ^^

And in this spirit, here's an old meme because I need to start posting regularly here again, instead of only when I got news about chemo. New leaf.

day one • a song
day two • a picture
day three • a book/ebook/fanfic
day four • a website
day five • a youtube clip



And now, some fandom news! I finally watched that new Shane Black movie, The Nice Guys, and I loved it. It was funny as hell, the mystery was intriguing and had me on the edge of my seat trying to figure it out first, and Ryan Gosling and Russel Crowe have excellent chemistry. Plus the little girl was amazing, I can't wait to see more of her. I wish Shane Black did more movies, and that they did better at the box office. I think I liked this one even more than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and that's one of my favourites. Highly recommended.

Brooklyn Nine Nine and Star Vs The Forces Of Evil are back, and they're both still amazing. I know I'm overdoing it with that adjective, but it's true, they're both objectively amazing shows. I still have to watch that new Once Upon A Time episode, mostly because I got derailed by Final Fantasy Type 0: I played it for a month more than a year ago, then stopped just before leaving for the final dungeon. I can't remember why. Then last weekend I finally finished it, witnessed the incredibly depressing ending (even sadder than Crisis Core's, come on!), and now I'm replaying it from start because I'm not ready to let go of these characters. And I love the gameplay. ^^ Also I hurt my shoulder playing drums. Probably the most metal thing I did all year.

So that's it for me today, but I promise to be back tomorrow.

Managed another update before the next chemo, go me! I'm so lazy when it comes to updating, I know.

First things first, last sunday I managed to take a shower all by myself! My aunt left for the week to take care of her parents (who are over 90, have dementia, and live a thousand kms from here). She was so worried, but I felt like I could do it. I also asked my uncle to sit outside the bathroom in case I tripped and fell, because I'm not dumb. Luckly it all went fine, and I was so proud of myself.

On sunday we had the first snow day of the whole winter! Which is weird considering we live on the mountains. I was so excited I sat for hours at the window taking pictures while everyone else made fun of me. I was born and raised by the sea, snow always fascinates me, I can't help it! Today it's already melting, which is a good thing because on friday I have to be at the hospital by 8 am, and it's already a one-hour-long trip without the snow. I'd rather not show up looking like a zombie because I had to get up at 4 am.

What else? I watched all of Mr Robot in two days. I liked it, although not all of it. I still don't understand what the point of Tyrell even is. Like, why is he in the show at all. He doesn't contribute anything to the plot. I don't get it. And I wasn't expecting them to focus so much on Eliot's mental illness by the end of the show, to the point that all the hacking and revolutioning plot was left off screen. Also Angela was way out of character by the end of the show. I really loved the soundtrack, and the acting.

Yesterday I watched Won't Back Down, a 2012 movie about public school with Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Oscar Isaac. I found it hard to follow at times because even after all this time the Americal school system is still hard to understand to me (I just couldn't understand why they couldn't change the school and keep the Union at the same time), but other than that it's a really beautiful movie. Great acting from Ms Davis and Ms Gyllenhaal (like, really stunning), and Oscar Isaac plays an elementary school teacher who plays the ukulele and sings and dances with the kids. He short-circuited my brain everytime he was on screen. I'm trying to focus on the movie, stop being so adorable!

I'm very excited about the Gravity Falls finale next week, I just finished watching the special and I'm trying to prepare myself, but who am I kidding, I'm definitely going to cry like a baby. ^^

Guess what? It's movie review time! Yesterday I was feeling so much better my uncle decided to take us all to the local cinema to watch Spectre. Two weeks ago, before chemio, my back hurt too much to even consider staying in a sitting position for more than ten minutes at a time. Yesterday I managed to watch the whole movie, and today I even went out shopping with my aunt and bought a new pair of shoes! The second appointment is on friday, and I have to say I can't wait: if this is how I feel after 1/8 of this cure, I'm excited to see what the second dose will do!

Sorry, back to the movie. As some of you may recall, I'm not a Bond fan. I watched most of the classics, but I didn't like them. Not my kind of humour, I guess. Then I watched Casino Royale, and I loved it. And when I watched Skyfall, I fell head-over-heels madly in love with that movie, watched it four times in the cinema, and countless times at home. Needless to say, I was very excited about a sequel from the same team. As it turns out, I found Spectre to be deeply disappointing.

Spoilers to follow because I want to rant a bit, and I'm the last one to see this movie anyway.

Sure, there are things that I liked, like the locations, the London team, the cast. But the plot was all over the place. Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux have zero chemistry, and the villain's motivations were ridicolous. We're supposed to believe that James Bond leaves his job for a woman he met two days before, had almost no dialogues with, but for one rushed sex scene because they were high on endorphins from a recent brush with death. I get it that they wanted to retire this incarnation of 007, but this was a very messy way to do it. There are a lot of movie couples who fall in love in the span of a few hours and are perfectly believable (Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, anyone?), but by god this was not the case.

Waltz's character was so petty and ridicolous I was shocked it was written by the same guys who gave us Silva. Apparently "for a couple of years when we were kids my dad liked spending time with you more than with me" is a villain origin story now. And this is supposed to be the guy who controlled all the previous villains - and cursed Bond's dick too. His words, not mine. :D Plus the only thing that was fascinating about him was his Terminator ability to survive death in the most absurd ways. Not really what I was expecting from the boss of Spectre.

The whole villains' plan was rushed and messy, and the way the good guys won made zero sense. By killing the guy who proposed the law, it would seem that law would be automatically made null and void. They crashed a chopper into downtown London, and yet the double-O program is supposed to be safe by the end of the movie? Shouldn't their actions convince the public even more that they need that surveillance program? I know it's a spy movie and everything, but things need to make a bit of sense, or the whole thing crumbles down like a house of cards.

I loved seeing more scenes with Q, but I was so sad they wasted the character of Moneypenny: she followed M around and googled things for Bond when he was busy. They could have done so much more with her.

I'm so going to watch Skyfall again in the next few days, and remind myself of how much I love these characters.

Lots of things happened last week. Mainly, I had a very important medical exam, where at first they told me the situation had gotten worse, and then they told me nope, it was all as before. Cue panic attack, visions of my own mortality, and then murder plans. Thankfully I had therapy right after, and I felt a lot better after that, but still. Some doctors aren't just meant to interact with human beings at all.

Speaking of therapy, my therapist asked me if she could write about my case, keeping it anonymous, for a medical study. My first reaction was to feel very flattered. As in, my problems are worth studying, that makes me feel important! It's dumb, but sometimes that's the way my brain goes. :D



For the "A Book Outside Your Comfort Zone" square, I read Joyce Carol Oates' 1992 novel Black Water.

I went with that square because while stream-of-consciousness novels aren't outside my comfort zone per se (that would be biographies, my least favourite genre), this particular one hit all my triggers. I still went with the "I liked it" stamp, because it is beautifully written, but I wouldn't have read it if I had known more about it beforehand. It is a fictional retelling of the Chappaquiddick incident, so for those who already know about that, that's basically it.

One night at a party, a young woman meets a Senator she's always admired, and after some flirting they decide to leave the party together. Some reckless driving on his part gets them into an accident, and the car ends up in the water. He manages to escape, while the woman is stuck inside, with the water slowly filling the habitacle. Terrified and in pain, she thinks about her life, how she met the Senator, and about the pain and terror she's in, and her faith that he'll come back to save her. Her thoughts get more and more splintered and chaotic the longer she's stuck in there, with the black water slowly drowing her.

In a word, it's brutal. It's powerfully written, a fascinating insight on that period, but holy shit, it's not for the faint of heart. It gets more and more realistic and disturbing the longer she's stuck there, and quite frankly I don't feel like recommending it to anyone. Hey, you're my friend and I love you, read this traumatic novel and have nightmares about it! You're welcome!

In other news, I finally watched Interstellar, and I loved it! I know, I'm incredibly late to the party. :D But hey, what a fantastic movie! The science was so accurate for a sci-fi movie, the acting was great, and Nolan finally abandoned his trite depictions of female characters, and went in a completely new (for him) and wonderful direction! Could have used more diversity, but other than that it was a truly wonderful movie. ^^

I also watched the Shaun The Sheep movie, after a friend of mine, who has a little niece, recommended it to me, saying it was fun for all ages. She was right! It was cute and funny, and the choice to have it basically silent was a lovely touch. I must check out the tv series now! *____*

And I finally watched Jurassic World! Super late to the party, I know, but I got scarred for life by those awful sequels, and the trailer for this one left me all kinds of meh. So I waited for an HD copy online. Sorry.

In conclusion? If the original one is a 10, this one is a 7. Really worth watching, but definitely not as good as the original. When the kids entered the park for the first time, and the music started, I had big fat tears rolling down my cheeks. I loved that they kept a lot of references to the original, but they didn't build the whole movie on them. The dinosaurs were cool, and the fight scenes were great. And thank god Owen's sexist remarks were no more than what we had already seen in the trailer. I liked Claire a lot, her and her indestructible shoes. Seriously, I gotta get me a pair of those. And the way they used the T-Rex was fantastic.

I think the main problem is, that we don't have any bonding. In the original movie the characters spent a lot of time together, falling in love with the dinosaurs who weren't trying to kill them, exploring, running for their lives, and they grew to love each other, and we them. But in this case they sacrificed all that for cool chases, and for the evil guy's plot. Which were really interesting, and cool to watch, don't get me wrong, but by the end of the movie I didn't really care at all if the humans survived or not. And it still irked me that they tried to humanize the raptors. That's because I first saw that movie 20 years ago, and to this day that kitchen scene is still one of the best scary sequences I've ever witnessed. You desperately want the kids to survive, because you care about them, but at the same time you're in awe at the raptors' intelligence and hunting abilities. Bringing human emotions and puppy eyes in all that, meh. It didn't work at all for me. Thank god they did that wonderful final shot of the T-Rex. Hell yeah, that's the queen of the island!

In conclusion, good movie, thrilling ride (ah ha), and I'm definitely going to watch the sequel, but it was only my brain that enjoyed it. My heart was only involved when the original theme played. I get teary-eyed just thinking about it! Hope they'll hire a better screenwriter for the next one. Especially for poor Owen. He's the most one-dimensional character ever, and it's only Chris Pratt's acting that makes him a bit sympathetic. The way he's written, he has as much personality as one of those holo-dinosaurs.

I'm going to listen to the soundtrack some more now. ♥

Tomorrow is the 14th anniversary of my sister's death. Anniversaries hurt me an awful lot, that's usually when panic attacks happen. I have always had this fixation with dates, which helped a lot with exams back at uni, but which doesn't help at all with overcoming traumatic experiences. So since this time it falls on a Sunday, I'm planning on spending tomorrow hidden in a blanket nest, forcefully ignoring everything and everyone. Here's hoping the plan works, but if I disappear for a few days you'll know why.

And now on to the non-real life part of the entry, my favourite part. Yesterday I had a wonderful Kingsman evening just like I planned: I made an enormous bowl of popcorn, wore my new Kingsman necklace, and watched it in all its 1080p glory on my tv. I fell in love with it all over again. And I also finally, truly understood all the My Fair Lady references in it, because Eggsy's chav accent was freaking incomprehensible and I had to stay so focused to grasp what he was saying that I gave myself a headache. And I had no problems with the thick New Zealander accents in The Almighty Johnsons, nor Gene Hunt's in Life on Mars! South London, you have bested me. *shakes fist*

We had another season finale, with Elementary. It was a subdued finale to a somewhat disappointing season. It wasn't a bad season per se, but there was really too little character development, in favour of the case of the week. A sad step back, considering how much I loved the first two seasons. I'm crossing my fingers the writers will go back to their roots next fall, and spend more time on the main characters. There's much room for improvement, guys.

And today I found out that next july they're releasing a bluray boxset of The Third Man, full of special features, and I rushed to pre-order it. I adore that movie. Mom and I bought a vhs tape of it something like 12 years ago; it was from a series meant for people who wanted to learn the language, so it had the original audio and italian subs. We knew nothing of the plot, and we were completely blown away. I remember screaming in surprise more than once. Now, I strongly disagree with people saying that "old movies were better", or that "they don't make them like they used to"; much like with everything, blind nostalgia is never the right approach, and like with modern cinema, back then there were masterpieces and there was garbage. That being said, in every genre there's one particular movie that encompasses and sublimates everything that is great about that genre, making it the best possible expression of it. This is what The Third Man is for the noir genre. It came out in 1949, and it's already absolutely perfect, the platonic form of the noir film. I can't recommend it enough. Everything about it is mindblowing. Wish I could say more of what it is about, but for those who haven't seen it yet, the plot twists are so amazing you'll kill me if I spoil anything, trust me on that.

And there's that soundtrack. Man, the soundtrack. It would be worth watching only for that.

In other news, I've been watching Arrested Development on Netflix. Most of the time it's me going "ooohh, that's where that joke is from!". It's really funny, but it's also very dated, in a way. The first three seasons are from over ten years ago, and sometimes it takes me a while to realize what they're talking about, to pinpoint what exactly was going to shit in the world in that particular moment. I just started the fourth season, the 2013 Netflix one, and I'm more on solid ground. :D Still enjoying it a lot!

And now off to dinner I go!

Yesterday I spent the day with Tati. The weather was wonderful, warm spring weather, and we went to the cinema and had ice cream. This is definitely my favourite time of the year. Summer here is usually hot and humid, but spring is absolutely perfect. ^^

In the evening I watched Birdman on my laptop, really late to the party. I did like the first half of it, and the actors were all really good, but I have to say by the end I thought it was very disappointing. There was no growth in the characters, one way or the other, the story went nowhere, and even if on paper filming it all as a tracking shot, or at least making it look like one by cleverly hiding the cuts, works, after a while it was too obvious: the actors were obviously sidestepping the camera, pirouetting like ballerinas, and it was very distracting.

I think what ruined it for me was the ending though: it tried too hard to be artsy, that it forgot to say something, anything at all. What a shame, because it looked like the kind of movie I usually would love. Oh well.

In unrelated news, they released the first trailer for the second season of True Detective, and it's one wonderful minute of Fiona Apple wistfully singing what I hope is the new opening song, and a collection of scenes that tell us nothing but that it looks amazing. June can't come soon enough. *_____*

I'm quite proud of myself this week. Even with no therapy (no sessions last week), I feel like I'm making a lot of progress: I did some baking for the first time in months, and yesterday I went to the cinema all on my lonesome for the first time since last summer. I did a couple of errands, and arrived at the cinema just in time for the 5pm screening of Kingsman The Secret Service. And I loved that movie to pieces. Which isn't actually a surprise, because Matthew Vaughn is one of my favourite directors ever, and everyone on tumblr was posting reviews about how much they loved the movie, but still. There was a lot of squeeing on my part, it was even better than I hoped!

It's basically to old Bond movies what Kick-Ass was to superhero movies. It's thrilling, funny, fascinating, and the soundtrack is awesome. The fight scenes are edited in a way I'd never seen before, and that's saying a lot. I didn't think it was possible to do something original there, but they managed to create a editing style that's so quick the gory stuff flashes by and your brain keeps catching on half a second later. Also bonus points for Gazelle, a disabled fighter who uses her disability as a unique way of fighting and is never sexualized. Didn't think it would be possible (especially after seeing the poster), but turns out I was wrong. She's basically the Toph of the movie. Great job there, guys!

(God, Free Bird is never going to be the same)

If I have to find one flaw, it's the final shot. I get the joke, but I think it falls flat. It could have worked better if there had been a few more scenes after, dealing with the aftermath of the movie, but as a final scene it doesn't work. Other than that, no complaints at all. Except that it loses a lot in translation. The Italian voice actors are great, as always, but there's no equivalent for the cockney/posh talking, as everyone is speaking in the same perfect, polished Italian, and some jokes make no sense at all. Hope we'll get a decent version on the net soon, I don't want to wait months for the dvd before I can watch it as it's meant to be.

And now it's time for some baking! I'm making cookies, so this afternoon I'll have one batch ready for my therapist, and one for Tati. *_____*