Friday Ephemera
Goodness, that’s a big one. || Suboptimal sights. || They bend. || It turns out the Minecraft world is actually quite big. || Attempt at playful belly-rubbing not entirely successful. || Desire me now or I will call you names. || Radical appliance relocation. || Attention, shoppers – you are being watched. || Wakey-wakey. || Oh, we’ve all done it at least once. || At last, a Letraset database. || Librarian training of note. || Law and order. || The thrill of drains. (h/t, Richard Cranium) || He’s an educator, you know. || Classroom scenes. || The constellation of Orion. First one to find the Horsehead Nebula wins a beverage voucher. || Girl’s got reflexes. || A festive treat. || And finally, fiendishly, it’s perhaps a tad excessive.
I’m not often frightened by Halloween pumpkins, but…
*eyes water*
I’m not often frightened by Halloween pumpkins, but…
Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.
~~ Carol Burnett
I’m not a big fan of superhero movies so I didn’t see this when it was announced over the summer. Natalie Portman is going to play…The Mighty Thor? 85-pound-soaking-wet Natalie Portman? Apparently she’s having trouble “bulking up” for the part on her vegetarian diet.
https://torontosun.com/entertainment/movies/im-in-so-much-pain-natalie-portman-on-thor-training-to-get-in-shape
Are people really paying to see these movies?
Desire me now or I will call you names.
I am finding it hard to distinguish between ‘trans lesbian’ and ‘imminent rapist’.
I’m not a big fan of superhero movies
Wise. Best to ignore them altogether. I try to and TBF it is easier now I am unable to take long haul flights…
You might think dripping wet Natalie Portman is a good thing for a movie. Don’t be fooled. I thought ‘Cate Blanchett in kinky spank latex’ was worth the ticket. Really very not.
https://torontosun.com/entertainment/movies/im-in-so-much-pain-natalie-portman-on-thor-training-to-get-in-shape
🎼Thorlene, Thorlene, Thorlene, Thorleeeene…🎼
Double You Tee Eff? WHY is Natalie Portman playing the god of thunder? Well, okay, because they’re paying her a lot of money. But why on earth would you pay her a lot of money to play Thor?
Pro tip for high-tech hamster hunting: my electrician has a battery powered device with a viewing screen and a teeny camera with light at the end of some fiber-optic cable; he uses it to look inside walls (via small, discreet drill holes) for wiring issues and connections — works well for scouting mammal hide-outs. Also, come to think on it, would be helpful when experiencing the joy of drains, for clogs and valuables which have found their way down into the P-trap.
Don’t judge me.
I actually enjoy superhero movies. Or I did. Until now.
I have a condition called pre-triggering…
Two male feminists review Star Wars
Steve E:“I’m not a big fan of superhero movies so I didn’t see this when it was announced over the summer. Natalie Portman is going to play…The Mighty Thor?”
Well, we’re trumping that, since this is a real person who existed.
I’m about to commission a set of playing cards depicting our 55 Prime Ministers, to go alongside the book I’ve got coming out in November. . . . .
Want.
Deck and book.
It’s 2020, and there is news of someone’s latest entry for a flying car.
That is the backpfeifengesichtest backpfeifengesicht I’ve seen in many moons…
It’s sort of analogous with the idiot trying to pet the leopard.
Our leftist faculty adjunct doesn’t seem to realise that in real-world violent revolutions, as opposed to the ones in his head, noodle-armed narcissists who are merely titillated by sociopathic fantasies often find themselves in the shadow of actual sociopaths who aren’t overly fussy about whose teeth are being shattered on the nearest kerbstone. The actual sociopaths who thrive in such scenarios are essentially mad dogs, irretrievable monsters, something to be put down or bricked up in a dungeon. But if anything, I think I’m more disgusted by the preening little twats who would enable them and cheer them on, from a distance and to everyone else’s cost, because it gets them hot.
Also, as Instapundit often quips, “Maybe letting the enemies of our civilisation teach our children was a mistake.”
He Protec.
He Protec.
Yeet indeed.
Well, we’re trumping that, since this is a real person who existed.
The real issue for this with me is not whether or not it’s dramatically plausible – and I would suggest that having Turner-Smith would be highly implausible unless the intention is to deliberately break the fourth wall or else introduce some other element of surrealism.
On stage, in live theatre productions, almost all of which take place or start life in London, you can make these kind of casting decisions without having any adverse affect on the plausibility of the storytelling.
I have seen, for example, a black British actress play Nora from Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and a white Lithuanian actor play Othello (sans any skin-darkening make-up).
In both cases, the plausibility of the performance was not in the least bit marred by the ethnicity of the actors for the roles they were playing because in each case (and many others like it I could recall) it made not a jot of difference to the plausibility of the story to a modern audience.
Everything is carried by the delivery on stage and the plausibility really stands or falls on the quality of the performance.
But what will work fine on stage, simply won’t translate to film, and certainly not a ‘straight’ historical drama.
However talented an actress Jodie Turner-Smith might be, playing Anne Boleyn on film (again assuming that this proposed drama is not consciously trying to be surreal or play with audience expectations) cannot be anything other than wildly, and therefore distractingly, implausible.
I had this experience recently in watching Armando Ianucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield.
The production designers had done an absolutely phenomenal job in recreating a highly plausible vision of England and London of the 1850s – costumes, architecture, interior design of the rooms and so on.
But all this served to do was to amplify the sheer bizarreness of having, for example, at least half of all the boys at Copperfield’s boarding school be played by young black actors, as well as having white actors be the parents to non-white cast members resulting in suggestions I can only assume were unintended.
Naturally, there are some who will try to dismiss my concerns about plausibility as simply a fig-leaf for racist bias, but what I’m saying is that casting Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn in a historical drama will be as distracting as a Sci-Fi series set in another galaxy in which the characters lick postage stamps and attach them to envelopes with handwritten letters, or in which they make phone calls using phones with the old plastic-wheel dials, or sit down to a Big Mac and fries out of a brown paper bag.
You can do all those things, but unless you do it for dramatic or artistic reasons you simply make your story implausible and unconvincing.
Honk
via Orwell&Goode
RIP Sir Sean Connery, the first cinematic James Bond:
https://twitter.com/SkyNewsBreak/status/1322518553157754881
The spam filter’s still being twitchy. If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me (top left) and I’ll rattle the thing.
This – in the Guardian, naturally – is too unintentionally funny not to share:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/31/we-left-the-uk-for-portland-expecting-a-liberal-dream-that-wasnt-the-reality?
You can do all those things, but unless you do it for dramatic or artistic reasons you simply make your story implausible and unconvincing.
The words colonising history come to mind.
[ Added: ]
As the thing hasn’t aired yet, it’s hard to say much. Ms Turner-Smith may give a strong performance and her skin colour may be part of some cunning dramatic device. Though my first impression is that the producers seem to value their self-imagined daring more than historical accuracy or suspension of disbelief. (Katherine of Aragon did, I think, have one black musician in her extended entourage, a horn player named John Blanke, or ‘John Blak’, but that’s about it for Tudor society, so far as I’m aware. Passing historians are of course welcome to correct me.) And assuming there isn’t some cleverly ironic conceit at work, one that will justify the ostentatious distraction, the message being sent is this isn’t history. Which is a little odd for something that is, at least superficially, a historical drama featuring actual historical figures.
This – in the Guardian, naturally – is too unintentionally funny not to share
TLDR; a racist brown-skinned communist authoritarian Londoner who is terrified of the outdoors, guns, white people, the police, freedom, capitalism and Trump doesn’t enjoy moving to America.
He Protec
What goes on in the mountains near me.
What goes on in the mountains near me.
[ Watches fox sitting in garden. Waits for dramatic struggle with passing eagle. ]
[ Watches fox sitting in garden. Waits for dramatic struggle with passing eagle. ]
Just have patience….
Just have patience….
We do occasionally see, and hear, a woodpecker. And once, a kingfisher.
Foxes, woodpeckers, kingfishers – what sort of enchanted sylvan glade do you live in?
what sort of enchanted sylvan glade do you live in?
Edge of town. Oop North.
[ Wafts magical sparkle dust across lawn, beckons badger. A duet ensues. ]
Heh.
Anything like what we…occasionally see and hear..?
Foxes! Where’s my rifle? Damned smelly killers – they’re worth $A10 per head dead here in Victoria, Australia.
Anything like what we…occasionally see and hear..?
More like this.
Anything like what we…occasionally see and hear..?
You’re lucky. I haven’t seen a pileated woodpecker in our ravine in at least 10 years. We get lots of these fellows and these fellows too at our feeder. Oh, and these guys show up in the spring. I’ve never seen one like David has seen.
You’re lucky.
I know almost nothing about birds, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. But I think that’s the closest to what I saw.
People getting agitated about the prospect of a black Anne Boleyn should remember that only recently a film depicting a lesbian Queen Anne did notably well at the BAFTA’s, the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes. It’s no longer considered entertaining enough to simply depict actual historical events and people, you have to sex them up to get noticed and preferably upset a few traditionalists in the process.
It’s Halloween … but what is really scary? That this female votes!
I know almost nothing about birds, so it’s possible I’m mistaken.
I’m sure you’re right. We don’t have the great spotted woodpecker in North America which is why I’ve never seen one.
More like this.
What is “amusing” about even those smaller ones here in FL or the smaller ones in GA is that in mating season they like to peck away on the metal street light housings or, not so amusingly our chimney cap, so as to most broadly advertise their prowess. As it were..
Hi Daniel,
Some doctors think you can build up your neuroplasticity all your life, and Sonkitten has done so. Of course he’s autistic, not silly! 😁
No trick or treaters tonight, thanks to Covid hysteria. It’s normally from 1800-2000 around here, and does slack off as night moves in, but this is the first time and place we’ve had none.
I’m so old I remember when trick-or-treat ended when the last people on the street turned off their porch light.
Darleen, what is Karen yelling about in that video? I didn’t understand.
David, re your YouTube video—I will go out on a limb (ha!), and state that I believe that is unquestionably a bird.
Darleen, what is Karen yelling about in that video? I didn’t understand.
If you turn up the volume you can catch that this woman was in the park with her kids when the evil people with flags turned up and she called 9-1-1 because she finds them scary. She keeps shrieking at the cops to get them out of the park while the poor guy is trying to calm her down and says “it’s a public park, they get to be here, too.”
She’s having none of it – those American flags are down right scary and the cops are complicit in that scariness.
Best line of the video is her demanding a police escort out of the park and the cop saying “No, we aren’t going to escort you.”
As the thing hasn’t aired yet, it’s hard to say much. Ms Turner-Smith may give a strong performance and her skin colour may be part of some cunning dramatic device. Though my first impression is that the producers seem to value their self-imagined daring more than historical accuracy or suspension of disbelief.
Although it’s quite true that very little is known about the production so far, I feel a sense of dreary resignation as to the highly predictable road it’s almost certain to go down.
Yes, I suppose it’s just about possible that they will give the Anne Boleyn story a kind of Quentin Tarantino/ Guy Ritchie-esque treatment with lots of breached fourth-wall moments as Turner-Smith talks to directly to camera while in the background, Henry VIII slurps loudly on a four pack of Stella Artois lager (because the popular nickname for Stella Artois is ‘wife beater’) while watching reruns of Tudor United FC on a TV.
It’s possible.
But even if does do that, you still just know that Henry VIII is going to be molded into the supreme image of misogynistic toxic masculinity, a serial sexual abuser and perpetrator of intimate partner violence.
In short, bathed in straight white male privilege, bedecked in gold, strutting entitled to everything within reach, inevitably means that whoever gets to play him, and my money’s on Rafe Spall, Sam West, or Rory Kinnear if they go for a relatively younger king, Hugh Grant if they go for an older one, will be directed to play him as a feeble caricature of Trump-meets-Farage-meets-Weinstein.
(Of course, seeing as it will be a part that calls for all the emotional depth and psychological complexity of Widow Twanky or Buttons it’ll be a complete waste of some otherwise talented actors, but anyway …)
And of course, added to that is the fact that Anne Boleyn’s story can easily be written as one of a woman whose first marriage was refused by two white, male patriarchs (the Earl of Northumberland, her lover’s father, and Cardinal Wolsey), whose sister, Mary Boleyn, King Henry VIII was already sleeping with when he tried to get into her bed, and – note well – Anne Boleyn was the woman over whom Henry VIII finally had England break away from Catholic Europe in a kind of Tudor Brexit moment.
So casting a black actress in the role then becomes a wholly predictable move in what will inevitably be a tedious, sermonizing Woke pantomime. (Hugh Grant’s own long ago Hollywood ‘tryst’ would help to emphasise the oppressor/oppressed exploitation narrative if he were to be cast in that role)
In light of Dr Philip Kiszely’s comments on a recent production of A Christmas Carol, which you (David) posted here recently, something along these lines appears to be practically a foregone conclusion.
I feel a sense of dreary resignation as to the highly predictable road it’s almost certain to go down.
Well, quite. The politics of our arts and media class being what they are, and so remarkably uniform. And the words “feminist lens” didn’t exactly lift the heart with thrilled anticipation.
I feel a sense of dreary resignation as to the highly predictable road it’s almost certain to go down.
TBH as a Jane Austen fan I have never recovered from the 1999 Mansfield Park adaptation: cringeworthy faux lesbian scene and the frankly weird interrogation of New World Slavery. It marked the beginning of my woke awakening. I suspect Miss Austen would have required the ministrations of smelling salts if she had seen it.
I don’t have a problem with, say, a black man playing Julius Caesar if it’s because he loves Shakespeare and wants to do some of the great roles. What gets my goat is all this politics.