What have you been watching lately?
You Have Been Watching
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Are there any other good accessible Shakespeare adaptations you’d recommend for watching with kids (she’s 10)?
LION KING, maybe?
10 is a little young for the teen movie “Classics” adaptations like 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (The Taming of the Shrew) or CLUELESS (Austen’s Emma). And the other good modernized adaptations like Ralph Feinnes in Corialanus or Ethan Hawke in Hamlet aren’t for kids.
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I saw that the Fassbender Macbeth from a few years ago is free on Amazon Prime and wondered about trying that, as we’ve read a version of the story together and I remember Macbeth as being relatively easy to grasp in general when I was a kid.
I love the Kurzel version of Macbeth, but it’s extremely dark and adult; I don’t think it’d be fun for kids. (Brilliant for adults though, or for 17-year-olds in an English intensive course.) Actually, the Polanski version would probably work better for younger audiences, because it’s a bit like a medieval fantasy story. Well, if you don’t mind all the cutting off of limbs and all that.
Speaking of fantasy stories, though, the 2010 version of The Tempest wasn’t very well received, but it’s got a good cast and what looks like very nice visuals, so it should be an entertaining spectacle if nothing else.
And I’d go for the comedies really – Brannagh’s Much Ado about Nothing is fantastic viewing for all ages, that’s what I’d try next with for a ten-year-old. That one really managed to nail how purely fun Shakespeare can be in a way that hardly any of the movie adaptations do.1 user thanked author for this post.
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True Detective Season 1
This has garnered itself quite a rep since 2014 – yes, it was that long ago, deal with it. Did it live up to it? Pretty much.
One of the interesting aspects was the heavy culture of Christianity that was laid on Louisiana, of how that affected attitudes and mindset, which in turn shows why Cohle would be the way he is in response to that. To my vantage point, it is a pretty alien culture, but intriguing to view from a distance.
Both lead characters could exasperate the viewer on a regular basis, Hart’s hypocrisy being particularly so.
The show’s visual language is smart and sustained. One trick done from the start that it took me ages to pick up on was starting with the view of Hart on video camera, which gives an immediate impression that the DVD quality is crap!
The other element I found well done was that theme tune and credits intro sequence – those don’t always show up anymore and this one was a very creative fusion of sound and imagery.
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The other element I found well done was that theme tune and credits intro sequence – those don’t always show up anymore and this one was a very creative fusion of sound and imagery.
God, I love that intro!
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Stumped for what to watch last night, Trainspotting popped up on one of the streamers – wife was keen to rewatch for the first time since the 90s and I’d never seen it.
Quite a ride, the performances are good and any suggestion that the film glamourises or romanticises heroin use is unfounded. They’re all terrible people, though aren’t they? Obviously some great visuals and music cues, and some commentary on the hypocrisy of some drugs being “bad” or “poison” while others are fine.
Kinda weird that Johnny Lee Miller wasn’t a bigger deal – good actor, classically handsome. He’s worked regularly since but I feel like he should have reached greater heights. I forgot he was married to Angelina Jolie briefly. Oddly his second/current wife shares her birthday.
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Kinda weird that Johnny Lee Miller wasn’t a bigger deal – good actor, classically handsome. He’s worked regularly since but I feel like he should have reached greater heights. I forgot he was married to Angelina Jolie briefly. Oddly his second/current wife shares her birthday.
I really enjoyed him as Sherlock Holmes in the TV series Elementary.
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Quite a ride, the performances are good and any suggestion that the film glamourises or romanticises heroin use is unfounded.
Yeah it doesn’t at all, there’s some pretty horrific stuff overall. Tommy gets AIDS, the baby dies, Renton reaching into the disgusting toilet in desperation.
I think it was just the controversy was of its time for showing anyone enjoying any aspect of heroin at all. Looking back to the 80s there was quite a moral panic in the UK over drugs and everything in any drama was uniformly negative. A heroin user in a film or tv show was gaunt, miserable and about to die. I remember in school we had a unit on drugs and the video showing effects of various drugs they were all like – you vomit, shiver, probably die.
Trainspotting was probably part of getting past that stage and being more realistic as to why anyone would take them in the first place.
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I think it was just the controversy was of its time for showing anyone enjoying any aspect of heroin at all.
Also it was the marketing. It had that very striking poster campaign featuring a bunch of hip young stars-in-the-making looking cool and a bit dangerous. You couldn’t go anywhere at the time without those characters and the orange typography in your face. Apparently they were some of the most stolen posters from advertising hoardings.
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Very true and I think that’s an extension of the same point, that a lot of the cast were cool and attractive and that the film was often funny. That kind of thing wasn’t ‘allowed’ before.
It was interpreted by some as promoting or glamorising when if you follow the actual story it still fucks everyone up. Renton has somewhat of a happy ending but it’s one that says he has to run far away from that lifestyle and start again.
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Got around to watching Warren Beatty’s RULES DON’T APPLY and it turned out to be a very good film. It certainly is the kind of movie you don’t often see anymore but you’d expect that from Beatty. Much more in the style of BUGSY or BULWORTH.
Though everyone called it his “Howard Hughes” movie, Hughes is much more of a mysterious presence and the main leads of the story, two young “nobodies” are trapped in his antagonistic orbit. Despite his influence, there really aren’t that many films about Howard Hughes and the best ones are often centered around people affected by Hughes. THE HOAX is likely the best of those. In this one, Hughes is a major character but the story is really about the young people who came to Hollywood in the 60’s (like Beatty) and were constrained by their Puritan morality that told them either what they wanted was immoral or that didn’t deserve it.
That unhealthy rule still applies to many people today.
Quite a ride, the performances are good and any suggestion that the film glamourises or romanticises heroin use is unfounded.
The basic premise behind those accusations always irritates me, too. People that make those arguments seem to assume that movies should be morality plays. That’s not what movies and entertainment are for. They allow people to release tension built up from behaving morally in our daily lives. That has been known at least since the days of Ancient Greece (when Plato made the same boneheaded argument and Aristotle countered it with The Poetics). Our culture grew up to counter natural instincts toward violence and unhealthy behavior in an increasingly unnatural and artificial society and civilization. Morality is unnatural and it creates terrific tension in individuals and we will find ways to release that.
To go back to the general theme of RULES DON’T APPLY, there is a puritanical streak in America that thinks that tension should always be there 24/7 and anything that lets us release it is evil — and so we get Salem in the 1690’s and variations on that every generation.
Orson Welles once said (or probably repeated from one of his mentors) that “the stage is a safe place for dangerous things.” So we have murder, intrigue, infidelity, tyranny, and everything terrible in our plays, movies, comics, books, all forms of narrative art – video games, too, because we don’t really want it in our actual real lives. So the more we censor and censure our comedians, filmmakers, actors, comic book creators, video game creators, YouTubers and so on for what goes on that much larger stage we have today, the more we diminish the primary method civilization has developed – storytelling – to keep those terrible, tense things from violence to oppression from dominating and destroying our lives.
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Quite a ride, the performances are good and any suggestion that the film glamourises or romanticises heroin use is unfounded.
I think that the problem you run into with something like Trainspotting is that when it shows these attractive young junkies (well, at least Jonny Lee Miller and Ewan McGregor) running around saying clever things and doing cool things while kitschy old music blares on the soundtrack, it’s going to glamorize the lifestyle no matter how badly the fuck up their lives. Even the bit where Spud shits his girlfriend’s bed is played for laughs.
It’s kind of difficult to depict drug addiction on screen and not glamorizing it without turning it into a horror show. Even Breaking Bad really on did this once with the tweakers who were trying to break into that stolen ATM machine. Otherwise, the rest of the series just kind of glosses over the rotten teeth and sores to keep showing us what a brilliant badass Heisenberg was.
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The question would then be – does it matter?
If you look at the UK, the period with the highest heroin use is the 1980s, which is where and when the movie is set (it’s missed by some it’s a period piece set 7 or 8 years before it was released, the bit in the nightclub and rave coming in is an addition to the book written a bit earlier and with less hindsight) . It was on a decline before and after Trainspotting was released.
It may be different if you went full out to almost make an advertisement but while it shows heroin users can be sexy and funny the final conclusion of the story is their lives are pretty crap and one of them dies because of it. Similarly in Breaking Bad while parts are shown as cool it’s hard to derive from it that being either a meth dealer or user is a good idea.
In the same period we got accusations that Tarantino was glamorising crime and violence but it was with a backdrop that violent crime in the US was in pretty constant decline from the early 90s onwards.
The relationship between fiction and reality is interesting in many ways because in truth we already knew clever and funny and glamorous people took heroin with the likes of Lou Reed, Boy George, Keith Richards, Kurt Cobain on our news.
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You know, I was thinking, it’s kind of a shame they went with such an assinine plot for both the humans and Mechagodzilla in GvK, because for once, they had the opportunity to actually do something relevant and interesting with the usually boring and unnecessary human element in these monster movies…
The idea of humanity finally being fed up with these gigantic monsters and taking matters into their own hands by building a gigantic monster of their own to kill those pesky monsters is actually a good idea… there was no need for Stranger Things chick and her posse of nerds, there was no need for the “hollow earth” nonsense (and those horrid Tron ships), there was no need for the cartoonish “villain” (who was actually right to do what he did)… they could’ve played this a lot more seriously and with an interesting plot for the humans…
Oh well…
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Watched Pacific Rim. Into the Black. It was fun if surprisingly dark.
Dota dragon’s blood has the most plot I’ve ever seen in such a short space. I don’t know anything about the game but dear god, there was so much happening. It was ok though. Weill watch the second season if it gets one.
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You know, I was thinking, it’s kind of a shame they went with such an assinine plot for both the humans and Mechagodzilla in GvK, because for once, they had the opportunity to actually do something relevant and interesting with the usually boring and unnecessary human element in these monster movies…
The idea of humanity finally being fed up with these gigantic monsters and taking matters into their own hands by building a gigantic monster of their own to kill those pesky monsters is actually a good idea… there was no need for Stranger Things chick and her posse of nerds, there was no need for the “hollow earth” nonsense (and those horrid Tron ships), there was no need for the cartoonish “villain” (who was actually right to do what he did)… they could’ve played this a lot more seriously and with an interesting plot for the humans…
Oh well…
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The idea of humanity finally being fed up with these gigantic monsters and taking matters into their own hands by building a gigantic monster of their own to kill those pesky monsters is actually a good idea… there was no need for Stranger Things chick and her posse of nerds, there was no need for the “hollow earth” nonsense (and those horrid Tron ships), there was no need for the cartoonish “villain” (who was actually right to do what he did)… they could’ve played this a lot more seriously and with an interesting plot for the humans…
That’s a really good point. There is no reason that Apex could not have been operating openly with the support of the public while Monarch gets less popular for protecting these monsters. It would be like some company working in secret in the real world to find a way to prevent hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. No, they would be openly doing that, and no one would be arguing “let the hurricanes fight!”
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Trainspotting was my favorite movie from age 14 to my early 20s. Still love it to bits. The sequel is really good too. Not capital-G Great like the first one but unlike a lot of belated sequels it makes a strong case for its existence.
Watched Harakiri yesterday (the original from 1962, not the more recent Takashi Miike remake). It’s a staggering film, just perfect on every level. Acting, direction, cinematography (gorgeous b&w), music, script… everyone involved is firing on all cylinders. Premise is a destitute ronin requests that he use a lord’s courtyard to commit seppuku and uses his suicide, and the back story he reveals in increments before his request is granted, to expose the hypocrisy of the samurai code of honor. But I really don’t want to say any more than that, it’s a movie you best go into cold.
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I watched Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead this afternoon. The script is as sharp as ever, even if it tends towards the tasteless in typical James Gunn style, but in hindsight all the warnings about Snyder were there all along. As the movie progresses, it goes from just telling the story quickly and efficiently, to being increasingly concerned with style over substance. The slow-mo becomes more and more frequent, the naturalistic tones are replaced with heavy-handed colour grading, and the editing becomes more erratic, with lots of lovingly framed shots of shotgun cartridges hitting the floor. Even the sound effects become stylised, with the shotgun blasts taking on an almost musical tone. And then of course it ends with the tricksy video-camera footage of the final attack over the end credits.
The first half is still great though – it gets plus points for getting into the zombie stuff about 5 minutes into the movie.
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(it’s missed by some it’s a period piece set 7 or 8 years before it was released, the bit in the nightclub and rave coming in is an addition to the book written a bit earlier and with less hindsight)
I… did not realise this.
The contemporary music in the soundtrack throws a lot of people with ‘Born Slippy’ becoming a hit off the back of it but yeah the book is set in the late 80s and so is the film. The actual music played in situ rather than as a backing is stuff like ABC and Blondie. The fashions too are all 80s, Begbie’s loafers with white socks and Pringle top and Renton’s stonewashed jeans are bang on late 80s.
The nightclub scene towards the end of the film provides the biggest clue it’s around 1988 as that was the ‘second summer of love’ when house music started infiltrating and ecstasy becomes the drug of choice. They even have a guy in a smiley face acid house t-shirt.
“The music is changing, the drugs are changing” doesn’t work in a 90s set film but they also go and confuse it a little there by using a dance tune made in 1993. Really they should have used this:
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There’s no overt mention of like Thatcher or Reagan either, from memory – some kind of dead obvious giveaway, which is odd.
No there’s nothing overt there at all, I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming it’s set when it came out. There’s just the few subtle pointers and you’d probably need to be British and around at the time t0 spot some of those.
It’s more obvious in the book and Boyle has confirmed in interviews it’s the late 80s but I suspect he may have made it rather subtle deliberately as it was marketed as a ‘zeitgeist’ movie rather than a period piece (albeit pretty recent period).
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We’ve been defaulting to a few eps of Bob’s Burgers on Disney+ when stumped for something to watch in short bursts
I love most of the characters in Bob’s Burgers more than members of my own family. I think it’s an amazing show – easily my favourite animated show of all time – and I genuinely think it’s one of the most realistic portrayals of a family on TV.
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I finally need to watch the second one. Maybe I’ll find the time this week; I know I’ve noticed it’s currently on one of my streaming thingies.
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Just watched Godzilla vs. Kong. It’s not worth getting into the plot, other than to say Millie Bobby Brown’s subplot was completely surplus to requirements. It delivered on the big set-pieces though – I was genuinely laughing with joy at that final showdown.
Some of the CGI was a bit basic – it needed more atmospherics, motion-blur etc. to give things more of a sense of scale. It often looked too crisp and video-gamey, but the fights were nicely directed, and the destruction was impressive. Also the sound design was great – I had my sound system cranked up to wall-shaking level. It would no doubt be incredible in a cinema.
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Watched The Art of Self-Defence yesterday.
Pretty good movie starring Jesse Eisenberg as an loner kind of guy, an accountant without any social skills whatsoever, whose life is thrown into turmoil when he is randomly attack by some motorcyclists in the street. This leads him to look for ways of defending himself, and he ends up at a karate dojo where the sensei is teaching his pupils not just karate, but also violence and ultimate manliness. There’s a low-key humour that works pretty well for the movie, and even if the thought of “Hey, didn’t Fight Club already do all this and do it better?” kinda has to occur (and even if this kind of kinda-autistic-seeming loner protagonist is getting old, too), the movie works well enough on its own terms. Not necessarily must see, but worth watching. -
Watched The Only Living Boy in New York yesterday, a coming-of-age movie by Marc Webb that wants to be deep and clever about love and sex and relationships and sons and fathers and literature and growing up and New York, and… for some reason it just doesn’t work. Part of it is that Callum Turner, who was completely fine as the other Scamander brother in Fantastic Beasts, definitely can’t carry the movie. He’s just boring to watch, devoid of any charm and of any personality that’d make you interested in the characters as a viewer. The other big problem is that this movie not only fails the Bechdel test, it takes it behind the barn to shoot it. The female characters don’t exist beyond being available nor non-available objects of affection, two-dimensional targets of love. Kate Beckinsale is very charming – and very beautiful – and does what she can with what she’s given, but she’s given basically nothing; her character is entirely two-dimensional and exists only for Pierce Brosnan’s and Callum Turner’s characters to fall in love with. Jeff Bridges can’t help but turn in a great performance because he’s Jeff fucking Bridges, but he could play the alcoholic excentric writer character in his sleep, of course.
I wanted to like this movie, and parts of it worked – the developments towards the end were actually pretty satisfying – but in the end, it just wasn’t all that good.
Huh. 33% on the tomatometer. Tough, but about right.
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The contemporary music in the soundtrack throws a lot of people with ‘Born Slippy’ becoming a hit off the back of it but yeah the book is set in the late 80s and so is the film. The actual music played in situ rather than as a backing is stuff like ABC and Blondie. The fashions too are all 80s, Begbie’s loafers with white socks and Pringle top and Renton’s stonewashed jeans are bang on late 80s.
I think the sequel messes up the timeline then, though, because it’s set twenty years later and there’s smartphones and all that talk about instagram and whatnot.
Um, I finally saw Trainspotting 2 yesterday, and it really was very good indeed. Should’ve probably re-watched the first one to prepare for this, but even with hazy memories, it still worked. Maybe it worked even better, because seeing the past through a bit of a fog is maybe part of what the movie is about. It just feels so good to see these characters again, and of course that is the great strength of the movie, that these guys all feel the same way about being together again and all want to relive the glories of the past so badly, and that’s exactly the trap. It’s all one great midlife crisis wrapped in a movie really, it’s about mourning the loss of youth, which is a fantastic idea for this kind of sequel, and not one that’s been done before, I think? Maybe the greatest scene exemplifying this is Begby acting out the stories Spud has written down, drawn into the past and the love they all had for each other back then. That’s an amazingly touching and sad scene.
Danny Boyle’s direction is as awesome as ever, too. Obviously. And man, I’ve missed Robert Carlyle. Been ages since I’ve seen him in anything, feels like.
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Anyways, I watched the Melissa McCarthy Thunder Force movie, and yeah, it’s about what you’d expect: a trashy Melissa McC movie, but this time she dresses up as a SH.
What I find odd is… well two things, 1) I don’t know who thought this was a good idea, because we alrady had a bunch of these type of comedic SH movies in the mid 2000’s and none of them were good and none of them worked, so it seems odd that they would even attempt a new one.
2) Who the fuck is this for? What’s the target audience, besides Melissa McC fans (if there’s even such an audience)? It’s a mediocre comedy, mediocre SH, and it’s about two 50 years old women in spandex… I’m struggling to see who they’re trying to please with this movie… specially since it’s not entirely a spoof, it’s only half-way there…
Anyways, yeah you can skip this shit… nothing of value to see.
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I think the only audience for a Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone film, is Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone.
Feels very much like the Adam Sandler shtick of hanging out with your mates while you make another shite “comedy”.
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eh, it’s like the proverbial car crash on the freeway… but don’t worry, I didn’t reward them =P
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Terrible comedies will always have a broad appeal. Adam Sandler’s movies for Netflix were the most watched films on the service at the time of their release. One of the most popular shows for a while on BBC1 was an abomination called Mrs. Brown’s Boys, which is beyond awful, but still used to get around 10 million viewers in its heyday.
At the risk of sounding elitist (heaven forfend!) there are a lot of not very bright people in the world.
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Terrible comedies will always have a broad appeal. Adam Sandler’s movies for Netflix were the most watched films on the service at the time of their release. One of the most popular shows for a while on BBC1 was an abomination called Mrs. Brown’s Boys, which is beyond awful, but still used to get around 10 million viewers in its heyday.
At the risk of sounding elitist (heaven forfend!) there are a lot of not very bright people in the world.
A lot of people want comfortable, unchallenging media, be it low-brow or uncomplicated comedies like Adam Sandler or Melissa McCarthy specialise in, action movies where stuff goes boom and the baddie gets their comeuppance like most superhero movies.
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Terrible comedies will always have a broad appeal. Adam Sandler’s movies for Netflix were the most watched films on the service at the time of their release. One of the most popular shows for a while on BBC1 was an abomination called Mrs. Brown’s Boys, which is beyond awful, but still used to get around 10 million viewers in its heyday.
At the risk of sounding elitist (heaven forfend!) there are a lot of not very bright people in the world.
I don’t think liking simple entertainment is necessarily to do with lower intelligence. While Mrs Brown’s Boys isn’t to my tastes either, it comes from a tradition of pantomime-style broad humour that a lot of people really enjoy.
These things move in and out of fashion and that show was definitely part of that move back towards broad humour in sitcoms in the late ’00s/early ’10s (see also the massively popular Miranda).
I guess you could see it as a reaction against the more low-key naturalistic stuff that became so popular in the late ’90s/early ’00s (like The Royle Family or The Office).
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I don’t like Sandler’s movies either but I admire the fact that he got Netflix to pay him an obscene amount of money to basically go hang out and play with his friends for weeks at a time while someone occasionally remembers to film a joke or two. He’s played the streaming game very well.
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He’s had that con going before Netflix. Grown Ups was just him having a foreign destination reunion with his SNL friends (and Kevin James as new-Chris Farley) on a movie studio’s dime.
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Since it’s now on Disney+, I watched the Star Wars 2D Clone Saga. I hadn’t seen it since it first aired.
It still holds up today. The story is brilliantly executed with absolutely no fat. Genndy Tartakovsky is a fantastic storyteller who knows when to the characters speak and when to let action do all the talking. He will have minutes go by with no dialogue but the characters’ expressions and body language, along with beautifully choreographed action, tell you everything. The 2D animation is also a definite plus.
If you haven’t watched Primal yet, watch it as soon as you can. It is a masterclass in storytelling and action sequences.
I would love to see him direct a live action superhero movie.
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But I definitely think the kind of person who enjoys Adam Sandler’s type of humour is somebody I’m not going to have anything in common with.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t go as far as to see that as someone most defining characteristic, but Adam Sandler comedies (and the same does go for the McCarthy/Falcone ones, I think) are definitely just crap. And yet, yes, they will always be popular. And I’m with Lorcan that that doesn’t mean the people watching them are dumb, but I do think they have shit taste in comedies.
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Saw Contagion. They got a lot of things right in this movie, it’s quite fun to see them talking about R and about social distancing and the like. There’s belief in a pseudo-miracle-cure too, and even anti-vaxxers (towards the end). Some stuff is obviously different, as the disease in the movie is deadlier than covid is. And we actually handled some things better – it was funny to see everybody still running around instead of just staying at home and locking the doors, and even towards the end, people weren’t consistently wearing masks.
Other than that, the greatest strength of the movie is also its greatest weakness – there’s lots and lots of interesting characters doing interesting things, but at the same time none of these characters really gets developed because there is just so much going on. (Lots of famous actors, too, and many of them are dead within five minutes of popping up, which is quite nice.) So the movie doesn’t manage to really draw you in. But still, very interesting to watch especially these days.
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Comedy is just so subjective though. My wife looks at me like I’m an idiot because I kill myself laughing at stuff like The Naked Gun or Vic & Bob or whatever. That stuff just doesn’t make her laugh and when you have that reaction it’s hard to understand why others can enjoy it so much.
Comedy is one of those things where it’s a very instinctive, almost primal reaction, I think. It’s very difficult to convince someone intellectually that something is funny; they either laugh or they don’t.
So I wouldn’t ever look down on someone else for their comedic preferences, even when I don’t share them.
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So I wouldn’t ever look down on someone else for their comedic preferences, unless they think the JACKASS films are funny.
FTFY
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Comedy is just so subjective though. My wife looks at me like I’m an idiot because I kill myself laughing at stuff like The Naked Gun or Vic & Bob or whatever. That stuff just doesn’t make her laugh and when you have that reaction it’s hard to understand why others can enjoy it so much.
Comedy is one of those things where it’s a very instinctive, almost primal reaction, I think. It’s very difficult to convince someone intellectually that something is funny; they either laugh or they don’t.
So I wouldn’t ever look down on someone else for their comedic preferences, even when I don’t share them.
Dammit, Dave, now I have to go watch Naked Gun again.
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Dammit, Dave, now I have to go watch Naked Gun again.
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Dammit, Dave, now I have to go watch Naked Gun again.
I’ll be honest: I preferred the 6 episodes of Police Squad! to the movies.
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I’ll be honest: I preferred the 6 episodes of Police Squad! to the movies.
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“I’m a locksmith. And I’m a locksmith.”
So many quotable lines…
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I love ’em all. To this day I can’t talk to anyone named Shirley without chuckling.
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Police Squad is obviously great too. But the first Naked Gun movie just has such a high hit rate for its gags. It’s one of my all-time favourites.
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So, anyone’s watched that Whedon Nevers thing? I’m gonna pop it in later…
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I’ll be honest: I preferred the 6 episodes of Police Squad! to the movies.
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I’ll be honest: I preferred the 6 episodes of Police Squad! to the movies.
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“I’m a locksmith. And I’m a locksmith.”
So many quotable lines…
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Comedy is just so subjective though. My wife looks at me like I’m an idiot because I kill myself laughing at stuff like The Naked Gun or Vic & Bob or whatever. That stuff just doesn’t make her laugh and when you have that reaction it’s hard to understand why others can enjoy it so much.
Comedy is one of those things where it’s a very instinctive, almost primal reaction, I think. It’s very difficult to convince someone intellectually that something is funny; they either laugh or they don’t.
So I wouldn’t ever look down on someone else for their comedic preferences, even when I don’t share them.
Its almost as if different people have a different sense of humour
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Rewatched The Last Temptation of Christ the other day. One of Scorsese’s very best, definitely top 5 (mine is: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation, Goodfellas, King of Comedy).
I can’t think of a more perfect actor to play Jesus than Willem Dafoe. Usually his features are used in film to express menace but his face can also emit the purest love. He gets the balance between Jesus’s humility and eternal wisdom just right.
I understand why the film was so controversial in its day but by making Jesus struggle with his sacrifice Scorsese made his moral journey actually accessible to people wishing to emulate it, rather than the sanitized, unattainable perfect being seen in most Christianity.
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I can’t think of a more perfect actor to play Jesus than Willem Dafoe.
I agree, but I think Jim Caveziel in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was perfect casting too.
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I think perfect casting would have been been someone of Middle Eastern descent and not European.
I was taught that Jesus was Irish, so….
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I think perfect casting would have been been someone of Middle Eastern descent and not European.
I was taught that Jesus was Irish, so….
I went to Catholic school in Boston for a few years so, uh, I’m going with this explanation too…
(Really, though, I was just so in love with Dafoe’s performance I forgot to note the problematic racial aspect of his casting. 1988 wasn’t that long ago, it was definitely possible to use Middle Eastern actors just as Scorsese used Tibetan actors for Kundun.)
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Two men fought their entire life about whether Jesus was Black or White. The two men died together in a car accident. Finally when they reached the gates of heaven Jesus walked up to them and said “BUENOS DIAS!”
source: http://www.jokes4us.com/religiousjokes/blackorwhitejoke.html
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Oh my god did I ever love Police Squad when it first aired.
Probably my first experience of dealing with those “that just don’t get it”.“Cigarette?” – “Yes it is”.
“We would have come earlier but your husband wasn’t dead yet.”and I’m not even a minute into Police Squad Greatest Moments
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I think perfect casting would have been been someone of Middle Eastern descent and not European.
Not at all, I think they were to be applauded as progressive early examples of colourblind casting.
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Oh my god did I ever love Police Squad when it first aired.
Probably my first experience of dealing with those “that just don’t get it”.“Cigarette?” – “Yes it is”.
“We would have come earlier but your husband wasn’t dead yet.”and I’m not even a minute into Police Squad Greatest Moments
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I watched the director’s cut of Michael Mann’s Blackhat last night and it’s great. Now I’ve seen all his features except Public Enemies and they’re all 4 stars or above. Blackhat is easily a 5. More than most films of its ilk it captures the horrors of a world where digital advances have rendered our systems obsolete.
The director’s cut only airs on cable with ads for some stupid reason but I found a fanmade cut that combines ripped footage from the director’s cut with better quality scenes from the theatrical cut. It’s really well done, almost seamless, except for one two second shot where the guy had to use stock footage of a nuclear power plant. If anyone wants a link to it, hit me up!
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Watching a few episodes of Sword Art Online with the kid. It’s a lot of fun but man I really wish anime would stop sexualising young kids. Bloody hell.
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Yeah, with Riverdale we’re talking like 18-year-olds played by mid-twenties people though. In SOA, it’s only animation of course, but there’s kids who are clearly supposed to be way pre-puberty whose skirts keep flying up titillatingly.
Again, that does also go back to the puritanical streak that’s infected entertainment for at least the 1800’s in America (imported from the UK) that did not happen in Japan so much which has its own versions of repression, though. The thing is that kids have sexuality – even little kids – and they aren’t the neutral, innocent things that censors have considered them to be for quite a long time. We all were kids at some point in our lives, we know what it was like, but it seems like we agree to forget that when we’re adults or when people become parents. I was sexually attracted to girls when I was first grade, and I didn’t even know what sex was, but I wasn’t the exception in my class.
So, if it’s a teen or younger protagonist in the story, then it is natural for them to be exploring light sexuality in the course of the plot and if it’s aimed at a teen audience then it is going to appeal to them. Many popular anime shows are already teen sex comedies without any actual sex – which is the main source for the comedy. An incredibly average, but nice, young boy finds himself in an improbable living situation with a number of beautiful and sexy housemates or schoolmates who are all attracted to him for various unlikely reason, and he’s very attracted to all of them but refuses to engage because he’s also terrified of them. And the shows where the characters do engage in sex like Interspecies Reviewers are considered outright pornography in the West though very popular and mainstrean in Japan and Asia, so we don’t get those on any mainstream Anime sources here – again, due to the puritanical nature of our culture in relation to sex in general.
I do wonder if it affects parents more than kids, though – in the sense it is introducing or exposing childhood sexuality before the parents are ready to address it. Here in the US – at least for a long time, but it may be changing – parents have a tendency to avoid really talking about sex (or violence) with kids until they are in their teens, and then treat it like a big deal and kinda scary actually. I actually imagine the same is mostly true in Japan, too, for the most part. So, naturally – as most of us likely remember – when that discussion happens, the kids already know a lot about sex because they were dedicated researchers actively seeking that information out long before the parents thought it was the right time.
I mean, watching SAO, have you discussed the sexuality in it with your kid?
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Just watched Palm Springs and enjoyed it. It’s a decent romcom with a bit of bite that makes good use of the Groundhog Day concept without feeling too much like a retread of similar stories, and the leads have good chemistry. And it’s just the right length to wrap up before it outstays its welcome.
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mean, watching SAO, have you discussed the sexuality in it with your kid?
Oh yeah, he thinks it’s really weird, too.
I don’t know, man, you can call it puritanical, but there are very good reasons indeed why sexuality is a strong taboo when it comes to underage kids, and it’s not like those anime are only being watched by kids. Given that in Japan there is stuff like JK cafés and “chaku eru” and that owning child pornography was legal there until 2014, maybe the problem isn’t the West being too puritanical.
I was surprised by it, like Russian Doll, in that sense. Apparently there is a teen romantic comedy version out now as well of the same idea. And HULU also has BOSS LEVEL which is a John Wick version of the idea, but I haven’t seen that one. Could be good. It’s interesting all these are coming out within a year or so of each other – another “micro trend” in movies along with a movie like SYNCHRONIC which is not exactly a time loop.
There’s also a Netflix short movie, “Two Distant Strangers”, which has been nominated for an Oscar.
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Plus, you can see my great-grandfather’s jail cell in the prison scenes.
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I’m still plowing through the 90s [b{X-Men cartoon[/b] and have just reached the last clutch of episodes, which were ordered by the network on top of the original run, but after the production company overseeing the animation outsourcing (Graz) had gone out of business. And wow, there really is a marked change in the animation. The show’s animation quality had been pretty mediocre at best immediately after the pilot, but this a whole step below that. There’s a ineffable wrongness to them, just like AKOM’s episodes of Transformers. Weird frame rates, odd colours, strange direction, off-model characters.
It was interesting getting to watch the four part (intended) season finale again for the first time in years. I’m not sure I’d seen all of it before, actually. I definitely remember the last episode. I’m not sure it really hangs together that well. Bishop spends three and a half episodes just walking. The reveal at the end that the crazy guy bugging him is Immortus doesn’t work at all either. I remember that from back in the day and being utterly baffled by it, because there’s no context for who he is revealed form is; unless you’ve read a comic with him in (which would be a small fraction of the audience) he’s just a guy in an odd costume. But it doesn’t really explain why he was in disguise and bugging Bishop as he was. Just odd.
Lots of nice cameos in that episode though, including Rachel Grey, Typhoid Mary, Mesmero, Karma and what I think is meant to be an off-brand Guardian of the Universe from Oa.
Not sure sure who the guy in the back in the armour is meant to be though. Overmind with an added cloak? Anyone know? -
Not sure sure who the guy in the back in the armour is meant to be though. Overmind with an added cloak? Anyone know?
Looks like Stryfe?
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