Movies (recently seen)

[BatCountry]

I refuse to believe that Vesnic! The man who played Boromir is packing!

[Vesnic]

Oh no he isn't, Batboy! He's got a tiny tinkly winkly that might be useful only as a perfect fit for that precious little ring.

In other words, Boromir would bore me if he tried to, well, bore me.

Poor bloke. I did find him such an attractive Mellors in Lady Chatterley.

[BatCountry]

NO! LIES! How would you even know this?!

And the ring would shrink or increase in size based on the girth of his meat hammer. Remember when Isildur took the ring from Sauron? Or when anyone has it really, it shrinks to the perfect size for that individual.

[Vesnic]

Notice how you keep talking about the ring shrinking? I think that's very telling. If it has to shrink between Frodo's furry little finger and Sean's schlong, then we're in even more trouble than I originally suspected! And I know because ... I know.

[Vesnic]

Revisiting the classics...

Alfie (1966)

There are always gaps in one's knowledge. Life seems to follow that strange paradox of the-more-you-know-the-less-you-know. There are many books I'm too embarrassed to admit I still haven't read. Especially when you get pigeonholed by people, when they see you as "book person" or "movie person" or "games person", this gap can become a real liability. For this reason, I've been discovering many old classic movies recently, in a no-doubt vain effort to turn my gaping black hole of ignorance into a slightly more manageable sinkhole.

So without much ado except to brace myself and reaffirm my feminist principles, I popped in Alfie, the original with Michael Caine, all about a cockney ladies' man roaming Swinging London in search of pussy, pussy and more pussy. Alfie is rough, insensitive in the extreme, chauvinistic bordering on misogynistic and hopelessly emotionally stunted. This much is clear pretty much from the beginning, as he misses cue after cue sent his way by his lady victims and prattles on with a life philosophy that everyone but him realizes is total hogwash. Yet there's something about Alfie...

Is it the excitement of breaking the fourth wall for one of the first times in film history, being spoken to directly by this anti-hero who charms us even as we shake our heads in dismay? Is it Michael Caine himself, his amusing neologisms or his tousled blond hair or the fact that Alfie does indeed do many nice things, except only when he thinks no one can see him?

Right around the part where he picks up a girl at a truck stop and takes her home to be little more than an unappreciated servant, I thought, "Wow, this movie has aged badly." Only a few scenes later, as Alfie struggles to navigate an appointment with the wife of a friend he impregnated and a surly abortionist I thought, "Wow, this movie was pretty brave". And in another dizzying spin, in one of the final scenes, where Alfie silently watches his son from a distance, I thought, "Jesus, this movie is absolutely clobbering me".

Like Alfie himself, slick and nimble as an alley cat, the film's script and emotional power sneak up on you, pouncing before you really understand what's happening. There are many moments throughout when Alfie ceases to be Alfie and 60's London ceases to be 60's London, all of it fading away to a vast, timeless plane where the same sorrows and the same truths appear and reappear, regardless of whether the characters or the audience can see them. There is something deeply chilling and troubling about this film, with its practically nihilistic ending jarring deafeningly against the fun-and-games beginning. There is so much disconnect, so much out of step, that time itself becomes meaningless. Alfie himself begins to guess at some of this, in his own stumbling way, enriching his philosophy of life even as he dooms himself to repeat the same harmful patterns again and again.

There's also a thumping awesome bar-brawl scene that's bizarre enough to give Dali and Bunuel a run for their money.

Anyway, a must-watch, and a deserving classic.

[End Master]

I've recently seen a crapload of movies lately, and I might get around to a more detailed analysis of them, but for now I'll just say I thought the last Hobbit movie was okay. (Maybe a more detailed reason later, but too lazy right now)

[End Master]

Also, don't get too accustomed to Sansa being humiliated because that's all going to change soon. Oh, and you'll have to deal with a lot more of Bran's bullshit too. Haha! Season 4 is going to be such a MISERY for you!

Well I just watched season 4 of Game of Thrones and you were completely WRONG about everything!

Sansa continued to be unimpressive, she just got abused by her aunt instead of Cersi & Joffrey and was pretty much moping about and being a damsel in distress waiting around for someone to save her all throughout the season EXCEPT the last episode where she lies for Little Finger and suddenly shows signs of transforming into "Dark Sansa" complete with black cloak. I guess I'm waiting until season 5 before she actually does something of note.

Bran's bullshit wasn't really all that boring this time around and it wasn't nearly as frequent as I was lead to believe it was going to be. Even the stuff that they did have about him I didn't really mind.

Arya was more interesting this season than she was last season as well, but it probably helped that the Hound was with her.

Thank god Shae was finally killed off, I never liked her character.

Speaking of characters that got killed, I don't really understand all the love for Oberyon Martell and why he's considered a "good guy" by the some of the rabid fans.

To me he was just another asshole warrior prince who thought he was invincible. Liked him better when he was called Jamie Lannister. I mean yeah I guess he had a "noble" cause in that he wanted to avenge his sister's death, but just about everyone in Westeros is seeking to avenge someone for some wrong. He's not really all that special.

Not to say he didn't have some funny lines at times, but when The Mountain exploded his head because he was over doing his Inigo Montoya impression, I didn't really care about him dying.

Anyway, I liked the season and there was no misery.

EDIT:

Lol, okay well if Sansa really does start showing some growth as a character and ceases being punching bag and starts DOING something for once then good, but if you're over exaggerating then I'll pointlessly rage over the internet same time next year.

(Which I'll probably be doing anyway due to Bran)

Wow, that was in 2/20/2014 and today is 2/20/2015.

Never let it be said I don't pointlessly rage on the internet on time. (Okay so I didn't really rage, but it's the thought that counts!)

[donteatpoop]

Seriously you should read the books. They're so much better.

One of the things about the series that I don't like (though I DO like the series...) is that they casted everyone too old. Sansa in the books dreamed of fairy tales and was ELEVEN years old at the start. 11. By the point we are in the books today she's maybe 13.

In the books she has her first period and it's a big deal. She's worried that Joffrey will rape her because he's promised to do so... It's fucked up. But in the show it's like... "you're HOW OLD and you're just now bleeding from the vag?" She seems like a whiny bitch in the show instead of the character in the books who is still a child (a prissy child, but a child none the less), who dreams of knights and princesses and dragons and fairy tales. It seems less.... retarded... than in the books.

I get the whole 'cast them young and they grow up too fast on screen' aspect of it. I get why they casted them older. I'm just saying it's way more impactful in the books because of the ages and it loses some of its translation when going to the screen.

[donteatpoop]

though, to be fair, the show has had some great additions IMO. Such as the fight between Brienne and the Hound. Kick ass shit right there.

[Usoki]

Didn't one of you people mention an incidental scene in a movie where there was a guy in a dog suit and also a gimp and maybe one of them was retarded?

I thought the movie was Pulp Fiction, but it's apparently not.

[End Master]

The Shining has a brief scene of a dude in a dog suit blowing some other dude when Mrs. Torrence is running around the hotel seeing ghosts towards the end of movie.

No gimps and no indication that either of them were retarded though.

[Usoki]

The dog suit was the main thing I was thinking of, so that's probably it. If a leash is involved, that mght explain some of my mistaken comprehension... though it still doesn't explain why I thought it was Pulp Fiction, unless the gimp came up in discussion after the dog suit.

[End Master]

Goddamn it, Spock died for real this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtQUePN5y40

[Vesnic]

Spock died for real this time.

Noooooooooooo!!!!!!! No No No NO!!!

[Vesnic]

Far from the Madding Crowd

Starring that skinny chick, Baby Silverspoon and a Belgian Waffle. Oh, and Michael Sheen.
2/5 Two of Five Stars

One of the more perceptive reviewers of this umpteenth remake of the unusually happy-heart Thomas Hardy classic Far from the Madding Crowd referred to Carey Mulligan's Bathsheba Everdene as "hygienic". In the typically contradictory manner of all things, there has been a strange coalescence between the appearance of more brutal and graphic rape on the small and big screens than ever before, coupled with an attempt in some corners to resurrect many of the leading ladies of both history and fiction. I've just finished the Starz series The White Queen, for instance, and while that could also in many ways be deemed a hygienic view of history, it did at least attempt to make the valid point that there was rather a bumper crop of type-A dames flouncing their skirts around the British Isles during the Wars of the Roses. Hearing about their recorded exploits in more detail than ever before is a long overdue treat.

Fiction, however, is arguably more perceptive than history. History is not only written by the victors, it's also full of holes, omissions, rewrites and willful forgetting, even in the best of times. The only real character study of a time and place is made through fiction, proviso in place that any resemblance to real-life characters is of course strictly coincidental and does not necessarily represent the views of the...etc., etc.

Hardy's women come to us already complete, free of tattered histories or political complications. In short, they require no resuscitation or reinvention of any kind. Because they are fictional, they are true to life and to alter their nature is to alter the underlying veracity of the whole work. That's an unfortunate thing to do in an adaptation that tries so hard to take its cues from cinematic realism. The main character is not only hygienic, she's utterly unrelatable for the very reason that they worked so had to make her more likable. We seem to live in an odd age of comic book extremes, where we have either trope-crazy heroes or anti-heroes, with not much of subtlety or substance in between.

Bathsheba (an unfortunate name, even according to her) is a tough-fightin' farmerette, far ahead of her time, intelligent and fierce and unwilling to compromise, not to mention often irrationally stubborn, unable to see the forest for the trees, vain, occasionally callous, yet sexually defeated at the first sign of trouble. She's a study in contrasts and a pretty frustrating one at that, but one thing she never is is false. That's why she's a Hardy heroine and that's why the book is still in print.

Mulligan has a certain scrappy charm, but her 13-inch waist and 13-year-old face are ill suited to the tale of a hearty daughter of the earth. It doesn't help that they keep accentuating said wasp waist by accessorizing with a painfully anachronistic belt they must have picked up from the impulse-buy section at Express. The Belgian waffle's accent is all over the place and I kept getting distracted thinking he'd be much better placed in a Calvin Klein ad wearing lederhosen than schlepping around down on his luck and shooting his sheepdog. As for everybody's famous redcoat psychopath with his thrillingly thrusting sabre, he was wasted in the casting of squinty-eyed Tom Sturridge (that's Sparkles the Vampire's IRL BFF for the uninitiated), who barely looks like he could bench press a feather and was utterly lacking in the sexual aggressiveness which ultimately wins over a still girlishly naive Bathsheba. So we can show women being brutally raped on screen but we can't show the psychological underpinnings of how such things come to be in the first place? Odd. The only good performance was predictably that of Michael Sheen, whose delicately underplayed Farmer Boldwood made his admission of "such grief" at the loss of Bathsheba all the more touching. It was also a smart move on Sheen's part since his part, like all of them, was cut and slashed, with key moments omitted entirely because the lesson just will never be learned that you can't decently adapt Victorian literature to a single film under three hours in length. This is why the unsung TV miniseries with Nathaniel Parker, Paloma Baeza, Jonathan Firth and Nigel Terry is so much better.

Even worse than the poor casting choices was the loss of the most famous and beautiful line of the entire book. Early in their faltering romance, before all the trials and tribulations begin, Gabriel Oak says to Bathsheba: "And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you." Simple. Poignant. Gone. Apparently we're just too smart to be ourselves anymore. Hands washed clean, a bit of Purell for good measure, and you have the new, sanitized and instantly forgettable Thomas Hardy.