Since my e-reader broke I've been watching a lot of this Norwegian family's movies. The pickings are strange but not slim. Each evening, I start a fire in my little cabin, turn off the light, and settle down into my burning-hot comforter (I don't know what kinds of feathers are in it--it feels like lava after five minutes), always prepared for a much happier time than it turns out to be. Alas, my back starts to hurt and the movies are boring.
I endured the dreadful "The Neverending Story" (I wish I could unsee it), and "Intolerable Cruelty," which I was dismayed to discover afterwards was a Coen brothers thing, because it was so unwatchable. On the more positive side, I basically liked "Lars and the Real Girl," most of all for the female actors (Patricia Clarkson's lines were always surprising), though Lars's social anxiety felt itchily familiar, and the facile third-person transposing of his own past onto the doll was irritating. At the end, I cried.
Tonight I was excited to start Game of Thrones, because I'm kind of curious about that blond dragon-girl (is she a natural blond?), and I've heard it has loads of sex. Also, the main thing I know about HBO is Girls, so maybe this show will be like Girls? And then there's my extreme fascination with the set and prop design of these kinds of vaguely historical fantasies.
So, hum de dum, look we passed a wall and it's winter. It kind of looks like Norway except the forest is less varied. Chopped corpses...rubber or CGI? They look nicely rubbery/solid. That guy's thinning, gelled/combed hair looks anachronistic to me. Oh no, the chopped corpses have disappeared from the clearing, now we're going to have some suspenseful thing.
Here I turned off the volume and turned on the subtitles. I'm not afraid of the dark or anything (actually, I'm totally afraid of the dark), but being by myself in a creaky cabin in the middle of the Norwegian forest which is full of moose and their predators, plus the sky which is a real star fandango and slaps me every time I go outside to pee with the fact of my own mortality (nothing is as deathly as a pristine starry sky), I cannot really handle any scary movies right now. It's not shivery/thrilling. It's a leaden tragic feeling, like "you are going to die unloved."
So: sound off. Look at that blue-eyed thing (kind of like those droid traders in Star Wars Episode 4?) kill Mr. Anachronistic Hair! And another one kills Mr. Other Guy! His severed head on the snow--is it rubber or CGI? If it's rubber, I hope the actor got a photo of himself holding it!
Sound back on. And now we move from vaguely Norwegian land to a woodeny village that looks a lot like old photos of buildings in Cogne, Italy--a bit smokey and decrepit and cold.
Oh, good--for ONCE, a child archer who isn't some kind of bullseye-hitting prodigy. I recall learning archery at Camp Riverlea. Actually, I could hit the target a little better than that boy. But it's nice to see an honest depiction of learning to shoot an arrow. I'm into it. I feel like I could get along with this show.
Up to the room where the little girl is working on embroidery. Her piece of cloth looks way too limp in its hoop. It seems like she's making it very hard on herself. Now we get a tour of her hairstyle.
And....shit. An arrow hits the bullseye. Whence? "What" "a" "surprise." That little girl is a child archer prodigy.
So that's how it's going to be. Okay. This is where my little fling with Game of Thrones reaches its conclusion. Disc ejected.
I endured the dreadful "The Neverending Story" (I wish I could unsee it), and "Intolerable Cruelty," which I was dismayed to discover afterwards was a Coen brothers thing, because it was so unwatchable. On the more positive side, I basically liked "Lars and the Real Girl," most of all for the female actors (Patricia Clarkson's lines were always surprising), though Lars's social anxiety felt itchily familiar, and the facile third-person transposing of his own past onto the doll was irritating. At the end, I cried.
Tonight I was excited to start Game of Thrones, because I'm kind of curious about that blond dragon-girl (is she a natural blond?), and I've heard it has loads of sex. Also, the main thing I know about HBO is Girls, so maybe this show will be like Girls? And then there's my extreme fascination with the set and prop design of these kinds of vaguely historical fantasies.
So, hum de dum, look we passed a wall and it's winter. It kind of looks like Norway except the forest is less varied. Chopped corpses...rubber or CGI? They look nicely rubbery/solid. That guy's thinning, gelled/combed hair looks anachronistic to me. Oh no, the chopped corpses have disappeared from the clearing, now we're going to have some suspenseful thing.
Here I turned off the volume and turned on the subtitles. I'm not afraid of the dark or anything (actually, I'm totally afraid of the dark), but being by myself in a creaky cabin in the middle of the Norwegian forest which is full of moose and their predators, plus the sky which is a real star fandango and slaps me every time I go outside to pee with the fact of my own mortality (nothing is as deathly as a pristine starry sky), I cannot really handle any scary movies right now. It's not shivery/thrilling. It's a leaden tragic feeling, like "you are going to die unloved."
So: sound off. Look at that blue-eyed thing (kind of like those droid traders in Star Wars Episode 4?) kill Mr. Anachronistic Hair! And another one kills Mr. Other Guy! His severed head on the snow--is it rubber or CGI? If it's rubber, I hope the actor got a photo of himself holding it!
Sound back on. And now we move from vaguely Norwegian land to a woodeny village that looks a lot like old photos of buildings in Cogne, Italy--a bit smokey and decrepit and cold.
Oh, good--for ONCE, a child archer who isn't some kind of bullseye-hitting prodigy. I recall learning archery at Camp Riverlea. Actually, I could hit the target a little better than that boy. But it's nice to see an honest depiction of learning to shoot an arrow. I'm into it. I feel like I could get along with this show.
Up to the room where the little girl is working on embroidery. Her piece of cloth looks way too limp in its hoop. It seems like she's making it very hard on herself. Now we get a tour of her hairstyle.
And....shit. An arrow hits the bullseye. Whence? "What" "a" "surprise." That little girl is a child archer prodigy.
So that's how it's going to be. Okay. This is where my little fling with Game of Thrones reaches its conclusion. Disc ejected.
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