Well, they knew they wouldn’t get the actual Pedro… too busy! Too in demand!
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The actor is Juan Pablo Di Pace. It actually looks like he’s had a decent career, including writing and directing a film last year that looks pretty decent.
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Definitly a budget Pedro… nice looking young man, tho!
And that film looks very sweet!
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This film seems to be pissing off all the right kind of people so i’m well up for watching it.
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The kid wanted to see the live action How to Train Your Dragon
It was entertaining. They did a good job with Toothless. It makes me wonder if the animators studied both cats and red pandas to get his movement down.
Was pleased to see some diversity in the casting. Nico Parker played Astrid and was a refreshing change from the pale character of the animated versions in addition to doing a great job. One of the other young vikings in the Trial of Fire is a Maori actor, Julian Dennison as Fishlegs. Another of that crew, Ruffnut, is played by Bronwyn James, showing a willingness to cast diverse body types. A very different character from her role in Wicked! They also seemed to make a point of casting diverse people, both in skin color and body type, for all the bit-part vikings running around.
I’m sure there’s a bunch of assholes pissed off about the casting. Particularly Nico Parker. But the movie is successful and was fun to watch. Lotta joy in the relationship between Toothless and Hiccup.
My kid has been pretending to be a dragon ever since we left the theater.
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Just got back from watching Superman.
Little bit corny in parts, a little bit of pacing issues, but… I felt like it did a pretty good job of taking an extremely old-school take on Superman and updating it for the present. And drama without grimdark character flaw stuff, thank goodness.
And seeing a certain part of the political spectrum melt down over a Superman who goes out of his way to save everyone, even squirrels, is certainly something.
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What’s Up, Doc? is now free on Tubi.
I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid. I remembered it being funny, but I think it’s much funnier now that I’m grown up and got some bits that I probably didn’t understand back then.
Barbra Streisand plays the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who meets up with a stodgy absent-minded professor traveling to a conference where, coincidentally, a couple of other people staying in the same hotel have the same style suitcase, one containing a collection of jewels and another containing top-secret government documents. Of course, there are government agents, thieves and even worse, a fiancée involved. Naturally, hijinks ensue.
The court scene near the end really had me cracking up.
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Kenneth Anger - Book 1 “Growing up in a hurry…”
Summary
Likely one of the most influential experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, Kenneth Anger specialized in short films dealing in homoeroticism, pop culture, surrealism, and the occult. A follower of Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger considered himself to be a practitioner of Magick who used the cinema to invoke spiritual forces. Even for viewers unconcerned with Anger’s more esoteric aims, his films are a visual and aural delight, with powerful and provocative imagery, masterful editing, and sophisticated scoring which influenced Scorsese, John Waters, and music videos in general.
These five films represent roughly the first half of Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, the nine films he made during the twentieth century which he did not ultimately disavow. The remaining four, Scorpio Rising (1963), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and Lucifer Rising (1970), primarily, in differing ways, take the violent end of the Christian Age of Pisces and the subsequent birth of the Age of Aquarius as their implicit subject.
Chronological Note: Anger, for various reasons, often edited and/or released his films years after the original filming was completed. He also compulsively re-edited most of them, so they are frequently associated with more than one date.
Fireworks (1947)
Summary
Teenage Anger’s sadomasochistic fantasies, allegedly filmed over a weekend while his parents were away. Set in a sailor filled dreamscape where the protagonist’s bedroom directly connects to a public men’s room, the homoeroticism somewhat obscures the occultism, but it’s there, with Anger personally portraying a gay Christ figure who is gruesomely killed and then surreally resurrected. Cocteau, Kinsey and Henri Langlois greatly approved. The LAPD (and John Cage!) did not.
Puce Moment (1949, 1966?)
Summary
A fragment of an uncompleted longer work, this is Anger’s homage to the glamour of old Hollywood. A Star (Yvonne Marquis, Anger’s cousin) selects her flapper gown, dabs on perfume, reclines on her chaise longue while it is wafted outside, and then walks her Borzois, accompanied by obscure acid folk songs about alienation and isolation. Hollywood Babylon starts here.
Rabbit’s Moon (1950, 1971)
Summary
Pierrot is bewitched by the moon, in which lives a rabbit, but it remains ever beyond his grasp. Harlequin bounds into the scene and conjures up a magic lantern which projects the image of Columbine, who is equally enchanting as the moon, equally elusive.
Filmed in 1950, on sets borrowed from Jean-Pierre Melville, the film wasn’t edited and released until the ‘70s. This edit, with its doo-wop (and Indonesian) score, emphasizes the romantic/tragic elements of the tale. The shorter 1979 cut uses step-printing to give a jerky, manic feel to the footage which, when combined with the repetition of merely one eccentric, psychedelic song, “It Came in the Night” by A Raincoat, displays more humor and more madness.
Eaux d’artifice (1953, 1970?)
Summary
A mysterious masked woman in sophisticated 18th-century costume walks by moonlight through the water gardens at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli while Vivaldi’s “Winter” movement of The Four Seasons plays on the soundtrack. The film is a counterpart to Anger’s earlier film Fireworks, its title being potentially translated as Waterworks. As elegant as the earlier film is crude, Eaux was considered sufficiently “poetic” to be added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, but nevertheless it would still not be amiss for audience members to get out their yellow handkerchiefs.
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954, 1966)
#UbuWeb Film & Video: Kenneth Anger - Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)
Summary
Inspired by a “Come as your Madness” Halloween party, Anger concocts a fantasia in which characters from history, myth and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) interact in the midst of a black void. A Thelemic ritual in which jewelry is eaten, bird cages are worn, and goblets are poisoned, the film is concluded with a frenetic hallucination as what was once a three panel triptych, a la Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), is optically printed onto one screen, all to the accompaniment of Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. At thirty-eight minutes, this is practically an epic for Anger, but worth every minute of the viewer’s time.
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I’m hearing good things about Superman, but probably can’t find time/afford to see it in a theater, so that’ll be one to visit a year down the road or something. Meanwhile, I have been finally catching up on Doctor Who, and just watched the 15th Doctor’s first season (not the most recent stuff, but the one starting after the Christmas special that introduces Ruby Sunday). I’ve got mixed feelings… generally I enjoyed it- I was entertained- in a way that I didn’t enjoy the 13th Doctor’s first season, which just felt incredibly dull, though I felt her episodes improved as the seasons progressed. But while certainly not dull, it was a little manic and haphazard and for the first few episodes just kind of, well… goofy and dumb?.. in a way that made me remember that I kind of liked the new Doctor Who better after Russell T. Davies left. I’ll always be grateful to him for reviving the series and he did some great episodes during his run, but his overall style never resonated as much with me as later showrunners.
I watched the first three episodes and was getting a sinking feeling, but happily I liked the remainder of the season a lot better, and came away with a generally positive impression- but one thing that continually bugged me were the plot holes. I’m well aware that Doctor Who is science fantasy, not science fiction, so I tend to cut it a lot of slack when it comes to suspension of disbelief, but I swear every single episode this season, good or bad, had a moment or two that just yanked me completely out of the story and distracted me- whether it was something that badly needed to be explained but wasn’t, or characters acting weird or delivering clunky dialogue, or the apparent rules of the episode being violated with no acknowledgment that that’s what was happening. That’s always been a staple of Doctor Who, but this is the first time I can recall it being a problem with an entire season.
So while it didn’t really ruin things for me and I’m looking forward to the next season, it’s been on my mind enough that I feel a need to vent, and maybe see if it’s just me who’s bothered by this stuff, or if I missed an explanation for some of these that might put my mind at ease. Each episode has individual spoiler tags in case anyone is only partway through the season. Apologies for the length- I’m trying to keep it brief and only point out bigger plot holes, but it’s difficult.
Space Babies:
I hesitated a long time to begin this season because of the title alone, and yep, it’s an episode full of baby geniuses, fart and snot jokes, and general dumbfoolery- so the fact that I didn’t absolutely loathe it is a credit to Ncuti Gatwa’s ability to solidly fill the role of The Doctor. But still- what is up with these babies?
There was some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it explanation of why they didn’t grow up, but it’s clearly stated several times that they’ve been there six years- so why do they speak and act like adults in some ways, and like infants in others, but not like six year olds at all?
At the end, their nanny decides to blast the Boogityman out an airlock to protect them and The Doctor goes in to save it- Nanny is clearly shown to have video surveillance of the airlock both before and after this happens, yet when The Doctor enters the airlock she apparently hates the monster so much that she’s willing to callously watch The Doctor get sucked out into space rather than closing the airlock herself?
The Devil’s Chord:
The Maestro basically pulls the same over-the-top demented fourth wall-breaking antics as the Toymaker, and the Toymaker was only three episodes ago. I think the evil deity controlling reality in a cartoonish but disturbing way thing can be effective… but not twice in a row!
The Maestro appears to drain the music out of people, and it’s never quite clear if she’s actually killing them somehow or just removing their passion for all things musical. I tend towards the latter, since if not, what exactly IS destroying their musical ambitions? Yet that would mean every single person has come face to face with a frightening orange-haired demon that sucked visible music out of their chests and left them with a hollow feeling in their souls. Seems like word would get around.
There’s a butterfly effect gag at the beginning of the episode that’s taken very lightly, but later on The Doctor mentions an event in a newspaper headline that should never have happened, and it seems that music around the world, or at least around London, became universally terrible for an unspecified period of time- maybe months, maybe years. Those events still happened by the end of the episode, shouldn’t they have an impact potentially as potent as stepping on that butterfly?
Boom:
The way the landmine reacts to The Doctor’s stress level is wildly inconsistent- it really stretched disbelief to the breaking point when he sees Ruby gunned down in front of him and the green lights apparently don’t budge.
The dead soldier’s daughter, Splice, is written to be incredibly dense and act more as a prop than a person. A man is standing on a mine that could blow up half the planet at any moment, her father is dead (or at least, in her eyes, glowing blue, transparent, and acting very strangely), people are shouting and waving guns at each other, and holding terrifying Cronenberg-y tubes of compressed corpse flesh (the one that used to be her Dad visibly has a human eyeball embedded in it), and she has no reaction to any of this and instantly forgets all of it to coo over a photo of a gazelle her holo-father shows her. And then her complete lack of grief over her father’s death at the end and the sappy ending that completely ignores the trauma they all went through and the implied horror of thousands of lives thrown away for no reason other than corporate profit… man, this one really rubbed me the wrong way. I can’t believe it’s got such good reviews, I just cannot see it.
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Good episode, and some deliberate ambiguity that’s okay, but the episode goes to great lengths to set down rules for how this “haunting” works and why those rules can’t be circumvented (the phantom is blurry if you try to magnify it, it’s always exactly this far away, Ruby instinctively knows she can’t leave by sea or air or something terrible will happen)… then never answers questions that really need answering for any of it to actually make sense in the end.
If Ruby was the mysterious apparition haunting herself all along, what is she telling everyone who approaches her (within the space of 30 seconds, even) to make them flee Ruby in terror or disgust? Either she has some form of mind control or knows some unfathomably terrible secret about Ruby… but she IS Ruby, and there’s no indication at any point that Ruby has either of those abilities- in fact, the rest of the season makes it pretty clear that she definitely does not. More importantly, why does she do that to herself? There’s no obvious reason she needs to make her younger self live abandoned and alone- she could stop the dictator either way, and after that, apparently all she needs to do to complete whatever mysterious purpose drives her is die and wave Ruby and The Doctor away from stepping on the magic circle at the beginning.
Why does The Doctor vanish, where does he go, and why does this bar the TARDIS from the inside so even someone with a key can’t get in?
Dot and Bubble: Wait, what?? Okay, I have no idea how this happened, but I actually haven’t watched this one! Somehow I missed an entire episode and didn’t realize until just now! Uh… moving on, I guess…
Rogue: The Doctor falling in love with someone he’s known for literally, like, half an hour in-universe was really a stretch, but my only main issue with this one was that when Ruby has supposedly been killed and replaced with one of the bird people, she does the neck-crack and cooing noise just like they do, just to make sure the audience knows it’s for real. Yet it’s not, it’s just Ruby all along. I certainly can’t snap my vertebrae like firecrackers and accurately imitate a penguin on command, why should I believe she can? Her scent being right is explained by her earrings or something in a throw-away line, but that doesn’t explain what the audience heard. The episode outright cheated to throw us off the track and up the stakes!
Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death:
I’ll do these together since I can’t quite remember which parts fit into which episode.
Why does a random whistle that fell out of the ceiling of the imaginary (or whatever its deal was) TARDIS control a specific laser beam thing in the real TARDIS?
Why can’t Sutekh the Destroyer, god of death and entropy, a gigantic jackal monster bristling with teeth and claws, cut a rope that’s apparently fragile enough to be severed by the edges of the TARDIS doors? Hell, why can’t he reach up and unclip it from his collar? What are those clips on the end made of, anyway, that just hooking them under the TARDIS console provides a stable enough connection to tow a struggling deity? What would have happened if he hadn’t lashed out and torn slashes in the vortex they were traveling through- would everyone in the universe still be dead?
Ruby’s mom turns out to be just an ordinary woman, not a supernatural force. Maybe she wore that dramatic robe deliberately to hide her identity from people who might witness her dropping off the child, but what causes her to suddenly accelerate past Ruby in the simulation right when she’s trying to peer into her hood to see her face? It happens multiple times and is implied to be unnatural, yet there turns out to be no reason for it to happen. Why does she dramatically point at the street sign when she’s the only person there and has no idea anyone else will be witnessing these events? How is the simulation able to recreate individual snowflakes and even detect an invisible force around the TARDIS that The Doctor hasn’t noticed for centuries, yet it can’t see a big obvious sign on a lamp post until “the VHS has been cleaned up”?
Sutekh’s plan is basically a more direct version of the Maestro’s plan- both of them want to wipe out all life in the universe so they can enjoy the silence. Does this seem right, that the god of death and the god of music should happen to share the exact same goal? If the god of jelly babies shows up, will they also have some excuse for omnicide?
The mysterious Mrs. Flood says some extremely creepy and threatening things to Cherry, Ruby’s adopted grandma, before both of them are reduced to dust. Later, everyone seems to remember what happened prior to death when they’re brought back to life. This didn’t weird out Cherry or bring up any further questions at all??
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Dot and Bubble was my favorite episode of the series. Absolutely brilliant.
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Oh, this is exciting!
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Now that I’ve seen it- mine too! And no gaping plot holes that bugged me, either! I accidentally saved the best for last.
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That’s great! It’s worth a re-watch, too. You’ll probably notice some things that snuck past you initially. I did, anyway.
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Small things like these is excellent. Cillian is devastating in it as an inarticulate coal merchant traumatised by the misogyny and hypocrisy of church and state. I did wonder why they chose a man to be the audiences eye into it but I then read Claire Keegan’s small things like these which it’s based on. She also wrote Foster which was made into An Cailín Ciuin so I’m sure all her works are in line for adaptation now!
I was worried in the cinema that somebody might find it too much and set the whole audience off. It was pretty emotional.
The week after that we saw this:
Which was an incredibly bittersweet experience. If anything I think it holds a better, more cutting, mirror up to Irish society. Things can change and any rights you win are hard fought and always contingent. Back when some of the footage on that film was from Iranian women would consider Irish women’s rights backwards. Now they are opening mother and baby homes in the US.
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Irish cinema is really winning lately… I also wanted to see that Irish language film set during the famine, but I don’t know if that ever got a wider release?
Also, Irish horror films are excellent.
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An Irish language one came out recently that I desperately wanted to go to (and the director and actor were introducing it at a local cinema I go to most weeks) but I just couldn’t make it. Not the famine one. It’s about a home healthcare worker and looked great in the trailers. I just can’t remember its name.
The first episode of the new season of the Mubi podcast is about Irish cinema. Obviously as a pretty big cinema fan who has access to the academic history on the topic as well as knowing people who make films I would disagree with some of the presentation and feel some of the gaps are more important than things that are there but I still really like it. And I tend to really like their work anyway.
Picked a random podcast feed.
I do like the ending they crafted for it. The biggest grossing film ever at The Lighthouse (a local art house cinema I was last at for a night of student films) was I’m Still Here and he was talking about how it was a huge film for the Brazilians living in Dublin. Our local Brazilians voted something like 98% not Bolsanaro! I went to a Saturday showing in a different cinema and it was half Brazilian and the atmosphere was great. He wondered what the next generation of voices would be like? So do I. The student cinema I went to was proudly very multicultural and looked all over the world for inspiration while also being rooted in the city it was made (housing horror mainly). There is now gradually an infrastructure for it. The folk horror I went to see in an archive showing last year which ran for a week or two in 1984 was the first feature in 50 years which was Irish made. There was one a year for most of the next decade. Then in the 90s more low budget stuff got made and it gradually snowballed.
I was thinking to today, because I was listening to the Amsterdam episode while out running and it focused on art spaces and squatting, how the great rise in successful Irish bands in the last five years, and as with recent cinema its stuff that I like rather than the shitty Irish cinema around when I was growing up which I ran to avoid (heritage, fucking priests and Catholic repression and it’s the fucking 1950s and I don’t care) how that developed because there were cheap spaces abandoned being used for art after the collapse and during the long recession. People handed over buildings to art collectives to look after them rather than leave them abandoned.
Some other place in the next place because that’s over here. As the Dutch episode of the podcast had it “no culture without subculture”, and gentrification kills that.
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I didn’t think there was any mystery about him. Arthur Everest doesn’t even use a secret identity.
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