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igenlode"Waiting for the Out" finished on a high with two unexpected yet earned and credible happy-outcome twists: a series strongly recommended.
Marie Antoinette introduces the twist that the King is supposedly trying to get Cagliostro to heal his sickly son, Rasputin-style, which might hint at how he manages to get off scot-free from the Affair of the Necklace (Szerb, prosaically, simply says that the Count had a cast-iron alibi!) And he is all in favour of his wife having illegitimate children, poor man, because he is terrified that it is his family's Bourbon blood-taint that the Dauphin has inherited (and ironically I had actually come across that in the context of the BBC Musketeers' fictional half-brother to Louis XIII, the Marquis de Feron -- an antagonist whose character arc I liked so much that I named one of my Raouls after him!)
Kit Bellew is now firmly launched (although not yet rechristened 'Smok') on his Yukon adventure in "Smok and Malish" -- though I'm afraid that, as with the Soviet "Twenty Years After", after an initially hopeful start I was able to pick up rather less of the plot in what followed, despite the fact that large chunks of this section are completely dialogue-free, and indeed shot in what amounts to fluid silent-film storytelling technique...
Of course as a 'greenhorn' he struggles to keep up with the rest of the outfit both when it comes to staggering along under his optimistic load of equipment (the first thing to go is the shiny new gun-belt and weapon: five pounds of useless extra weight) and dealing with his fellow-travellers. He is constantly arriving exhausted long after the others have halted, and only when they are already rested and ready to go on. And he gets laughed at by a beautiful woman (who is of course having her entire equipment ferried by a string of paid porters) in the depot at the start of their journey. (I was rather surprised that one of the plot points pivots around the words NO SMOKING painted on the wall -- in English, with no fade to a Cyrillic translation and no explanatory dialogue either! Was the target audience expected to be able to recognise the shape of that phrase untransliterated? I certainly don't have any mental image of the equivalent Russian sign, though it's the non-obvious défense de fumer in French trains...)
This was presumably one of those films where your actors actually have to suffer along with the characters, as it's hard to fake something like wading through knee-high virgin snow :-( And presumably difficult to manage retakes when your protagonist is leaving ploughed tracks behind him while staggering up an enormous swath of completely untouched snowfall (and, come to think of it, you need to keep the trail of the camera operator out of shot at all times as well). Whatever Eastern European locations were used to double for Canada, there were some pretty spectacular landscape shots -- and not just library footage, either, because we see the characters moving through it.
In the end Kit gets left behind altogether, and there was a horrifying moment when he appears to get snow-blindness and I thought he had been marooned alone in the deep wilderness. I initially got the impression that he had been sent back for his own good in the company of the Indian porters (who then refused to accompany him, despite being offered double their original fee), but in fact on running the subtitles I discovered that the expedition leader had set off ahead, leaving Kit to deal ineffectually with 'those pirates' of porters to bring on the baggage -- and on running the auto-translated version I realised very belatedly that the 'leader' was in fact Kit's grandfather, who had previously refused to take him on as part of the firm, but grudgingly allowed him to tag along on the journey at his own expense! Which did at least explain where all the extra baggage he was trying to deal with had suddenly appeared from, and why anyone would have assigned that task to the obvious weakest link in the expedition...
(In my defence, going by the auto-translation of the Russian phrases I couldn't make out when I tried to look them up, there were a lot of very colloquial and/or jargon expressions (like a word for a terrible snowstorm) in there. And there were some bits where I could understand enough to tell that the auto-translation was obviously parsing the soundtrack wrong, even if I couldn't identify the actual word that was in fact being used!)
At any rate, after being outbid for the porters by Stein, the mining engineer, left behind, dazzled, and stranded in the desolate landscape, Kit manages to assemble both his own single wicker trunk and all his grandfather's trade goods together on a tarpaulin, and with a grim struggle tugs the whole stack into motion to form --brains over brawn-- a makeshift tarpaulin sledge that gathers speed down the hill in the wake of the expedition that has abandoned him ("Make way! Make way!") with Kit clinging exhilarated to the top of the load and attempting to steer it. He has the pleasure of knocking Stein headlong into the snow as he overtakes him, and finally ends up himself sliding helplessly on his stomach in the wake of his accelerating sledge, to dive head-first with some aplomb into the tent of the female prospector, who has been travelling separately up ahead and is still abed in her furs. ("Ooops, sorry -- that's not a log, it's my elbow" ;-)
First victory to Kit (and probably the plot denouement of the first Jack London short story? Again, I shall probably have to download the originals to serve as a crib... though at least they are originally in English this time!)
I can't help wondering how he is going to manage to transport all those crates when the route is no longer downhill, though. Maybe the porters will have been sufficiently impressed to consent to resume their task at the original pay level?
As I said, this section consists of a lot of what are effectively silent film sequences with the occasional 'title card' snatch of dialogue, so Smekhov's expressive face is used to convey a lot of his character's thoughts and decision-making, to my benefit; it was the actual conversations I had trouble with!
I was somewhat shocked to gather from the podcast that the composers for "Ali-Baba" apparently didn't get paid for their work; they were classified on the record sleeve as 'dilettanti' ('amateurs'?) due to not being members of the official Composers' Guild, and thus the mere glory of getting their work published and distributed was presumably supposed to be enough! (Smekhov, likewise classified, presumably didn't get paid either due to not being an officially sanctioned 'writer'... but then the project was his idea in the first place. They were just doing the music in their spare time as a favour.)
I am now several chapters into the Russian version of "The Three Musketeers" as bed-time entertainment, which does at least give me an active motive to go to bed; ironically, listening to this sort of thing is actually considerably faster than reading it, since the verbal rhythms both help to indicate the structure of the sentences and more or less oblige me to skim through the content in a way that my eye for Cyrillic doesn't enable me to do on the page. It's not that I understand any more of it (probably less), just that the process of skipping ahead to the next comprehensible bit is speeded up ;-)
'Considerably faster' is not, however, fast -- especially not when I invariably fall asleep in the middle of chapters, to find YouTube stopped on its 'Do you want to take a break now?' hourly warning the next morning :-p The audiobook does, mercifully, have a chapter index, but trying to locate the point at which you dropped off within a nine-hour recording is painful at best (the seek function is simply too imprecise at that scale). And listening takes a conscious act of focus, so as soon as my concentration starts to slip over the edge the Russian becomes simply meaningless noise.
I am somewhat amused to note that I find Aramis definitely more difficult to understand than the others -- presumably because the character makes a point of using more refined and fancy language ;-)
Marie Antoinette introduces the twist that the King is supposedly trying to get Cagliostro to heal his sickly son, Rasputin-style, which might hint at how he manages to get off scot-free from the Affair of the Necklace (Szerb, prosaically, simply says that the Count had a cast-iron alibi!) And he is all in favour of his wife having illegitimate children, poor man, because he is terrified that it is his family's Bourbon blood-taint that the Dauphin has inherited (and ironically I had actually come across that in the context of the BBC Musketeers' fictional half-brother to Louis XIII, the Marquis de Feron -- an antagonist whose character arc I liked so much that I named one of my Raouls after him!)
Kit Bellew is now firmly launched (although not yet rechristened 'Smok') on his Yukon adventure in "Smok and Malish" -- though I'm afraid that, as with the Soviet "Twenty Years After", after an initially hopeful start I was able to pick up rather less of the plot in what followed, despite the fact that large chunks of this section are completely dialogue-free, and indeed shot in what amounts to fluid silent-film storytelling technique...
Of course as a 'greenhorn' he struggles to keep up with the rest of the outfit both when it comes to staggering along under his optimistic load of equipment (the first thing to go is the shiny new gun-belt and weapon: five pounds of useless extra weight) and dealing with his fellow-travellers. He is constantly arriving exhausted long after the others have halted, and only when they are already rested and ready to go on. And he gets laughed at by a beautiful woman (who is of course having her entire equipment ferried by a string of paid porters) in the depot at the start of their journey. (I was rather surprised that one of the plot points pivots around the words NO SMOKING painted on the wall -- in English, with no fade to a Cyrillic translation and no explanatory dialogue either! Was the target audience expected to be able to recognise the shape of that phrase untransliterated? I certainly don't have any mental image of the equivalent Russian sign, though it's the non-obvious défense de fumer in French trains...)
This was presumably one of those films where your actors actually have to suffer along with the characters, as it's hard to fake something like wading through knee-high virgin snow :-( And presumably difficult to manage retakes when your protagonist is leaving ploughed tracks behind him while staggering up an enormous swath of completely untouched snowfall (and, come to think of it, you need to keep the trail of the camera operator out of shot at all times as well). Whatever Eastern European locations were used to double for Canada, there were some pretty spectacular landscape shots -- and not just library footage, either, because we see the characters moving through it.
In the end Kit gets left behind altogether, and there was a horrifying moment when he appears to get snow-blindness and I thought he had been marooned alone in the deep wilderness. I initially got the impression that he had been sent back for his own good in the company of the Indian porters (who then refused to accompany him, despite being offered double their original fee), but in fact on running the subtitles I discovered that the expedition leader had set off ahead, leaving Kit to deal ineffectually with 'those pirates' of porters to bring on the baggage -- and on running the auto-translated version I realised very belatedly that the 'leader' was in fact Kit's grandfather, who had previously refused to take him on as part of the firm, but grudgingly allowed him to tag along on the journey at his own expense! Which did at least explain where all the extra baggage he was trying to deal with had suddenly appeared from, and why anyone would have assigned that task to the obvious weakest link in the expedition...
(In my defence, going by the auto-translation of the Russian phrases I couldn't make out when I tried to look them up, there were a lot of very colloquial and/or jargon expressions (like a word for a terrible snowstorm) in there. And there were some bits where I could understand enough to tell that the auto-translation was obviously parsing the soundtrack wrong, even if I couldn't identify the actual word that was in fact being used!)
At any rate, after being outbid for the porters by Stein, the mining engineer, left behind, dazzled, and stranded in the desolate landscape, Kit manages to assemble both his own single wicker trunk and all his grandfather's trade goods together on a tarpaulin, and with a grim struggle tugs the whole stack into motion to form --brains over brawn-- a makeshift tarpaulin sledge that gathers speed down the hill in the wake of the expedition that has abandoned him ("Make way! Make way!") with Kit clinging exhilarated to the top of the load and attempting to steer it. He has the pleasure of knocking Stein headlong into the snow as he overtakes him, and finally ends up himself sliding helplessly on his stomach in the wake of his accelerating sledge, to dive head-first with some aplomb into the tent of the female prospector, who has been travelling separately up ahead and is still abed in her furs. ("Ooops, sorry -- that's not a log, it's my elbow" ;-)
First victory to Kit (and probably the plot denouement of the first Jack London short story? Again, I shall probably have to download the originals to serve as a crib... though at least they are originally in English this time!)
I can't help wondering how he is going to manage to transport all those crates when the route is no longer downhill, though. Maybe the porters will have been sufficiently impressed to consent to resume their task at the original pay level?
As I said, this section consists of a lot of what are effectively silent film sequences with the occasional 'title card' snatch of dialogue, so Smekhov's expressive face is used to convey a lot of his character's thoughts and decision-making, to my benefit; it was the actual conversations I had trouble with!
I was somewhat shocked to gather from the podcast that the composers for "Ali-Baba" apparently didn't get paid for their work; they were classified on the record sleeve as 'dilettanti' ('amateurs'?) due to not being members of the official Composers' Guild, and thus the mere glory of getting their work published and distributed was presumably supposed to be enough! (Smekhov, likewise classified, presumably didn't get paid either due to not being an officially sanctioned 'writer'... but then the project was his idea in the first place. They were just doing the music in their spare time as a favour.)
I am now several chapters into the Russian version of "The Three Musketeers" as bed-time entertainment, which does at least give me an active motive to go to bed; ironically, listening to this sort of thing is actually considerably faster than reading it, since the verbal rhythms both help to indicate the structure of the sentences and more or less oblige me to skim through the content in a way that my eye for Cyrillic doesn't enable me to do on the page. It's not that I understand any more of it (probably less), just that the process of skipping ahead to the next comprehensible bit is speeded up ;-)
'Considerably faster' is not, however, fast -- especially not when I invariably fall asleep in the middle of chapters, to find YouTube stopped on its 'Do you want to take a break now?' hourly warning the next morning :-p The audiobook does, mercifully, have a chapter index, but trying to locate the point at which you dropped off within a nine-hour recording is painful at best (the seek function is simply too imprecise at that scale). And listening takes a conscious act of focus, so as soon as my concentration starts to slip over the edge the Russian becomes simply meaningless noise.
I am somewhat amused to note that I find Aramis definitely more difficult to understand than the others -- presumably because the character makes a point of using more refined and fancy language ;-)