FYI LOTR filmmakers

FYI

 

I've thought for a while now that whoever is making the next LOTR films should really get Phil Harding to play Tom Bombadil.

Sure, he's older than in his Time Team days, but some hair filler/extension, some prosthetic make-up, and maybe some CGI, etc. whatever, he would make the best Tom Bombadil. If you've ever watched Time Team (I love Time Team so much and they really ought to bring the show back) you will know Phil Harding's laugh. 

 

(There's Raksha's laugh going on at the same time, so you have to distinguish Harding's laugh. Anyways you just need to watch episodes of Time Team to see and hear it. LOL)

He is literally Tom Bombadil. He knows old artifacts like Bombadil. He also has Bombadil's build.

I'm telling you, if the people making LOTR don't get Phil Harding to play Tom Bombadil they are making a grave error.

Yeah, sure, he would be an unexpected Tom Bombadil - but he would be the best. For one his accent is the oldest of English accents. And I mentioned his laugh - it's that and his infectious, put-you-at-your-ease-but-still-somewhat-strange demeanor.

"Rogue One Is Still the Best Star Wars Movie of the Disney Era" --Caitlin Chappell

And that ain't saying much. LOL

It's funny, you know. I watched Rogue One, and right after it I watched Revenge of the Sith, which I had seen a couple times before, way back when. And oh my goodness, it was night and day.

I remember when I saw Revenge of the Sith in the theater, and in the first five minutes I was like, "Alright, here we go! Lucas finally has his shit together!" And that held throughout the entirety of the movie.

On the latest viewing I found myself especially appreciative of this exchange of dialogue:

Anakin Skywalker: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

Obi-wan Kenobi: "Only a Sith deals in absolutes."

I had forgotten Anakin's remark that prompts Obi-wan's: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy." This is the stance of the sectarian absolutist. He no longer submits to absolutes but has become a dealer in them. Which is the highest form of relativism.

Contrasted with Rogue One, some positive things were apparent to me about Revenge of the Sith that make it good:

-Not using music in every single fricking scene. Unlike Rogue One, which constantly employed swelling music to make up for its utterly grey porridge lack of rhythm in storytelling.

-Not using flashbacks, which nine times out of ten are leaden and labourious and add absolutely nothing to either story or character. Unlike Rogue One which is basically opened up with a flashback. Weighed down from the get go. All of this stuff is better left to be developed in the mind of the viewer as the film progresses and unfolds.

-Characters speaking in their own natural tone (relatively). Unlike Rogue One, with its characters speaking in the now ubiquitous severe gravel undertone while straining and sombering their emotions in every single fricking scene instead of actually acting.

The Mandalorian is enjoyable, but it's kind of basic.

The premise and bulk of the Star Wars universe, both in general and in specifics, owes its existence to Jack Kirby - a short, cigar-smoking, street-scrapping, Brooklyn Boy who produced his prodigious output in the basement of his middle-class house on a kid's drafting table while sitting in an uncomfortable wooden kitchen chair.

You know, that reminds me of something. Oh what is it now...something about how some other major studio owes the bulk of its existence to an unsung artist/writer while attributing it to someone else who was only responsible for a tiny fraction of it...oh come on, it's on the tip of my brain...oh yes, that's it -- Marvel Studios! Which owes its existence to...oh, who was it now? Oh yeah, that's right, Jack Kirby!

LOL

"Do me a favour will ya and stop watching Star Wars!" --Sir Obi-Wan Kenobi

Chernobyl

I thought the HBO miniseries Chernobyl was very well made, and recommend it. Some of the Soviet/KGB stuff is Hollywoodized/sensationalized/fictionalized. The way things fell out was much more banal, bureaucratic, and not as sinister as portrayed, and there wasn't one solitary woman hero investigator, but several investigators.

Nonetheless, every episode had me, and I credit this series with making me understand how nuclear reactors work (basically) in a way that was gripping.

I think 'gripping' is the operative word in describing the whole series. I was heaving sighs regularly just to relieve the tension and creeping dread throughout. Film is the aesthetic experience of time; when it depicts nuclear energy gone wrong, it's a kind of horror that just gets to you.

Five out of five stars and two thumbs up!

Misc.

At the grocery store one evening a young man was playing the public piano; it was one of Chopin's etudes. You know the one: the rolling, windy, rollicking, unhinged, mad one. He was getting ahead of himself a bit, stumbling and jumbling the keys; he clearly had just learned the piece, but that was irrelevant. It was a Chopin etude being played in a grocery store. To hell with the simpering emotional cliches on the speakers. It was great to be checking out items while listening to his playing...until I turned and saw the woman beside me with her mobile device out recording it. That turned me off. The thought that she was doing it for material to post on her facebook or on whatever was one thing, but the overestimation she was giving to the incident - a piano beginner sort of stumbling on a piece that's not particularly complicated in comparison to the composer's other works - had the paradoxical effect of cheapening it. The charm, the ordinary human charm, was blasted in an instant like it was more than her right to suck all the good vibes out of this natural occurrence of blooming human culture. Good grief, like I said, it pissed me off.

*

I had atemoya fruit the other day for the first time. I know it's not the finest regarded of the moyas, but is still considered top notch. I let them ripen properly like avocados, and I know I didn't have the ultimate tree-ripened specimens, still, all that considered...I could easily go without. The full on sweetness, sure, it was nice, and the texture too, great. Except it was also kind of horrible. So smooth, the way the fruit flaked apart in nice creamy but firm sections, the mouth feel: what in all other circumstances should have been sublime had the opposite effect of reminding me very distinctly of fully cooked, mild, white fish meat falling off the bone, like tilapia. Indeed, I started thinking of tilapia while eating the atemoya, and I began to gag and would nearly have thrown up if I didn't keep it in check with a will of iron.

So for those of you who will eat atemoya in the near future: remember, whatever you do, do not, I repeat, DO NOT THINK OF TILAPIA!

*

The neo-formalist school of poetry is basically a load of humbug. I say that entirely from the perspective of poetry reader. I haven't written a poem in my life - or at least that's the way I feel about what I have written. But the New Formalist cult has all the weary preening bullshitting of the thoroughly auspicious appropriators; poets who cling with too much attachment and with too much science to the effects they have felt from poetry, and fall into the trap of reproducing it - and that is precisely the failure - by execution, by imitation.

*

I came across a news article saying that the 90's show Mad About You is going to get rebooted, and I was quite delighted - even more delighted to hear that Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt regularly get together about every month for lunch because they care about each other a lot. That was very sweet, to know they weren't just actors doing their thing and that the sense I had from the show was that there was something real being produced between them. Yes, I would watch the show when I was in high school. It just had a good feeling about it. That, and I had a crush on Helen Hunt.

*

Listening to anti-Francis Trads more and more is like listening to someone making sounds inside an aquarium inside an echo chamber inside a lead-coated underground bunker. Completely obsessed with symbols, they reduce and dehumanize and are quite superstitious. Good luck with that!

You have got to be kidding me

!

:)

Love it.

I've been watching this old series of documentaries called Hands (go here at youtube) on Irish traditional crafts.

The series ran from 1978 to 1989. I came across it by chance algorithm, and after watching a good number of them without knowing anything about it, I can understand after the fact, why it is referred to as the greatest Irish TV series of all time.

This is some of the best film-making I've seen. Each episode has the same craftsmanship put into the film-making as the subject being filmed. And I think it's because the filmmakers honour the subject before the film - they linger with the subjects. The film is a bridge. The commentary has to do with the most interesting: how the things are done, how the things are made. Yet it's not "how to". It's about the people and their long traditions of work diminishing, yet not a whiff of preaching or the typical highly informed social commentary you get with today's documentaries.

Solid, down to earth. Intense focus, yet leisurely. The pacing is perfect.

Highly recommended.

Satire

I've been revisiting SCTV. I watched it quite a bit through high school and a little while thereafter. Its got me thinking about satire and what makes it good and what makes it not so good. One of the reasons I've been thinking about it is because I was equally acquainted with Monty Python, both the show and the films, but I never found them funny, never got them, in spite of trying. I had friends who were total Monty Python geeks and I wanted to get it, but didn't. But I found SCTV very funny, and sometimes found it so funny the show seemed a miracle.

I'm pretty sure this is what makes good satire: the one wielding the scalpel can wield it, by necessity, only from the source of some initial openness that is uncomfortable because it is a place of anticipated humiliation, and the anticipation is already humiliating. It can't be conjured. Evelyn Waugh was such a great satirist because he had this ability, which within the satirist feels like a disability. You see it especially in the acting of John Candy. I watched an interview of him on Letterman in which he seems to be painfully aware that he's starting to come across as a bore, and suddenly, almost in spite of himself, he turns it into a source of laughter for the audience. It's like he didn't even need to try. He was just funny. Joe Flaherty and Martin Short were also great in this regard. Those three guys were just so damn funny.

Monty Python always seemed too easy, too towering, too one-sided, too overbearing. SCTV though had a certain light regard that was a two-way scalpel. That special zone they were able to create, light as a feather, was like an endless progenitor of cutting satire that was deadly funny yet didn't injure. And that's the greatest laughter. The more it cuts, the more the healing laugh, and vice versa.

Today there is absolutely no good satire whatsoever - at least not mainstream. Certainly there are good comedians out there. Kevin O'Brien is one actor/satirist who I find very funny. But mainstream like the way SCTV was mainstream, there is nothing. All of it is just a competition to see who can out-vulgarize the other.

I wonder what that says.

We got a real good show for you today

Is watching Game of Thrones a mortal sin?

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

2354  Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.

The pornography of Alessandro Serenelli's time was basically the sort of stuff that sailors would have pinned up beside their bunks. It was a major influence and corruption in his life. He lost his mind to it.

What would he say of the material in Game of Thrones? People call it "soft porn" because it gets compared to the "hardcore" stuff on the internet. Yet Game of Thrones is totally hardcore in comparison to the pornography of Serenelli's time (from what I've read in descriptions about the show).

Isn't it interesting, the relativistic sliding scales we use in order to immediately excuse ourselves?

I was thinking about this because I just read this article at StAR about Game of Thrones.

Oscar Night

It's been a night of surprises at the Oscars. The first major award of best supporting actor went to some guy and he thanked some people. Everyone was expecting whatshername to win best actress but her expectations were dashed when the award went to Weepyface for her understated and controversial role in Feministchoicehistoricalrevisionismwhatever. Guyinsuit won best actor and in a speech that received a standing ovation from three quarters of the crowd he said this was for all the whatsitcauses that are getting more fasionable. Director, Ferableaumex Kaumoulouis was much elated as he went up a second time to receive the Oscar for best picture for his film One Night of Orphan or some other kind of person in Street, Exposing Urban Something or Other, or possibly Unflinching Look into the Arab World and into Drastic Dire Changes in Something or Other World, or whatever the title of the film was. The Oscar host, Funny Person, got many laughs, especially when he said something that was really funny. At one point though, there was dead silence and some boos when he said to whatshername not to worry because there is always next year, so don't stop starring in roles as drifting losers or something.

In all, it was a good Oscar night, and I'm glad I didn't watch it -er, glad I'm not watching it.

Keep awake and watch

"Television is about visible fallacy, something that appears real but is not. Adoration is about invisible truth, something that cannot be seen but is present nonetheless. Worshipping the Holy Eucharist in silence is profoundly countercultural in an age filled with electronic sound and fury signifying nothing. But to present that presence as a digital image on a glowing box is to thrust it back into the realm of the unreal. To remove adoration from physical proximity to the Real Presence is to neuter it entirely."

--Daniel Mitsui in a good essay, The Eucharist and Mass Media.