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Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2017 8:58 pm
by dongregg
Reminds me of when my preteen granddaughters typed in "cheerleaders" as they looked ahead to high school. Oy.

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2017 11:40 pm
by sauvin
Yeah, or "teen model". Mostly what they're modeling is skin.

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 3:14 am
by ltroifanatic
A lovely old lady I used to work with searched "pussy".She was a cat lover.I know it has a different meaning in USA as she quickly found out. :o :shock:

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 7:02 am
by sauvin
ltroifanatic wrote:A lovely old lady I used to work with searched "pussy".She was a cat lover.I know it has a different meaning in USA as she quickly found out. :o :shock:
I tawt I wath gonna thay I thaw a puddy tat!

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2017 9:03 am
by sauvin
Image

Lightly touched screenshot. Abby is at the hospital window saying goodbye to Thomas. What's specifically changed is white balance overall, a splash of purple under the eyes and nose, and a suggestion of red added to the whites of the eyes. She isn't crying, exactly, but I found the existing snow melted on the plate glass a thematic propinquity.

At this point of the story, Abby's solved Owen's Rubik's Cube and thrown up on his candy, but the scene in which Owen doggedly asks her to go steady has yet to happen. She's probably grateful that Owen seems to want so much to share his world with her, but probably doesn't realise that he looks on her as more than just somebody to be buddies with at the video arcade. As far as she knows, perched on the ledge just outside Thomas' window, when Thomas passes, she'll be alone in the world again.

She isn't crying, but even without these tiny enhancements, she sure looked and sounded like she was having a hard time keeping it contained. Is it just that she's about to lose her helper? Is it that she's about to lose some forty years of her past, a comfortable pattern of existence she knows can never be repeated exactly with somebody else? Maybe, and maybe, but the scene of tenderness in her kitchen suggests to me that knows what real love is, as shown over the course of said forty years by a man who gave her his life - all of it - in itty bitty bits and pieces. I suspect she returned that love, even if imperfectly, by not just abandoning him when he started getting older, slower and weaker.

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2017 10:10 am
by ltroifanatic
She does look so sad.As you said after 40 years of being together there would have to be some emotional attachment involved. Especially because,unlike Hakan,Thomas was once just a geeky little boy who just wanted to help her. :wub:

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2017 3:09 pm
by dongregg
Splendid job on this one! A few delicate enhancements trump a whole world of CGI!

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2017 4:38 am
by PeteMork
You just get better and better at this. Abby's humanity shines through in this one.

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2017 6:38 am
by sauvin
Image

As before, white balanced and with just hint or two of purples and reds around the eyes and nose to enhance the suggestion of the sniffles. Well, and Thomas lost all his colour because I wanted attention focused on Abby.

This is one of two scenes where some folks might get squicked out at the suggested impropriety of their relationship, the other being in the kitchen as he was preparing for his final shopping sortie.

My personal take on it is that she is in and of herself inherently so far and so incontrovertibly transverse to the moral ecliptic that no relationship with her can ever possibly be even remotely "proper" unless it ends with her perishing in a fire, in sunlight or having a sharpened telephone pole rammed clean through her chest. Since he failed to arrange any of these things, he himself became an implicit accessory to any death she caused after he'd learned the truth, and thus an traitor to the human race in its entirety. Worse, since he took her part, at first probably as a facilitator and subsequently as an active partner, he became every bit the enemy to the entire human race that she herself is. On these grounds, I could argue that no relationship with him could ever be "proper" unless it ends - quickly - with his becoming a corpse.

Maybe he even understood this, and maybe that understanding had already come to him before he clambered into the photo booth with her.

The truth about their relationship is that we don't know all the details about it. We can make some assumptions, but we'd have to understand that many such assumptions are necessarily a matter of projection. Maybe he really was like a father to her when he died, maybe he'd been like a brother when he'd been Owen's age, and maybe - just possibly maybe - the uncoloured monster in this image was a virgin when he died.

But we can't doubt that they actually had some kind of relationship, and it wasn't just business. More or less the same give-and-take happens in LdRKI happens in LTROI: sometimes, he's the one doing the yelling (and she's the one whimpering), and sometimes she's the one doing the yelling. I interpret Thomas yelling angry profanities into the night as he goes to clean up after her meal in the tunnel not as a man who's being forced against his will to do work, but that of a man who has to go cover up the evidence that his loved one even exists out of fear that she might be discovered and imperiled, and is upset not because he has to work, but because he fears her careless impulsiveness is going to be her undoing. What other man could ever consider rinsing his face with a jar of acid (battery or muriatic?), even with such motivation?

In terms of moral convention, he's a paradox. Most men who marry and have children will occasionally face the same irresolvable conflict between what's "right", what's best for the community, what's best for the family, and what's best for a particular family member, and most reasonably intelligent men understand this even before they start dating. For the Thomas seen in the movie, there's no conflict: Abby needs what she needs, and nothing else matters. Nobody else matters.

I don't happen to believe he might be in her thrall, that his mind and will aren't his own. There's no sleeping reason here producing monsters, but I suppose an argument could be made for Thomas being a metaphor for the monstrosity of the emotion we call love, that if it's true that "love conquers all" then maybe said conquest doesn't always result in pastel-coloured baby blankets and big billowy clouds of cotton candy.

All I know, writing this at the wee hours of the morning, is that this particular image conveys "a pained and bitter tenderness" to me.

Re: From the light of a different sun

Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2017 7:57 am
by dongregg
All I know, writing this at the wee hours of the morning, is that this particular image conveys "a pained and bitter tenderness" to me.
And conveys it successfully. :)