Tag: Books & Movies

Quote Of The Day

Books & Movies, QOTD

Via Insty:

“[Kathleen Kennedy] gambled some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history on the modern audience. And wow, did she lose big. To paraphrase Chris Gore, she took boy brands that everyone could enjoy and turned them into girl brands that nobody enjoyed. Men felt excluded and disrespected, and women felt patronized and pandered to. The modern audience had failed to show up, and the existing audience was abandoning ship. Kennedy’s greatest gamble had failed, and inevitably it all finally caught up with her.”

Can I be frank here for a moment?  I grant you that the destruction of these comic-book “franchises” leaves me totally unmoved because I have never been in the target audience for these infantile fantasies.  So to Star Wars, Star Trek, all those ur-Nordic fairy tales, Justice League and all the nochschleppers… good bye, fuck off and good riddance.  Ditto to the directors and producers, and indeed likewise to the actors and actresses, all of whom have made billions of dollars from filming this silly, inconsequential oeuvre  of fluff and nonsense.

A pox on all their houses.

Let me add to that the opinion that I will be really, really glad if none of these fantasies see the light of day for a generation or two so that maybe, just maybe some of those bloated production budgets might instead make their way into the production of decent movies with grownup storylines, good acting and productions that don’t rely on the deafening of their audiences.

But I risk being as naïve as the franchises’ audiences if I truly believe that any of this will ever happen.

Thank goodness for my DVD collection, which grows monthly.

Classic Beauty: Melina Mercouri

Classic Beauty

I always worshipped Greek actress Melina Mercouri, ever since I saw her in the brilliant 1960 movie Never On Sunday.  I have no idea how I got to see it during that year, being only six years old, but my memory is watching it at the drive-in theater while my parents snored on the front seat of the car.  The subject matter and storyline would have horrified my mother, had she been awake:  the promiscuous prostitute who was being swayed from her debauched life by some goody-two shoes American, with loud and sometimes violent opposition.

I didn’t understand any of it, of course, being only six years old.

But I fell in love with Melina’s character:  her blonde hair, her huge, flashing eyes, that wide, sensuous mouth and her fiery spirit.  (I adore Italian actress Anna Magnani for precisely the same reasons.)

The thing is that Melina wasn’t really acting.  When the “colonels” came to power in Greece, overthrowing the elected government of the time, she went crazy in attacking them.  And when they revoked her Greek citizenship, her response was classic:  “I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek.  They were born fascists and they will die fascists.”

Then after sanity prevailed and democracy returned to Greece [irony alert], she was made Minister of Culture — the first woman in male-dominated Greek politics ever to reach Cabinet rank.  She stayed in that position for eight years, most probably because by then she was an icon, and everybody was probably too afraid to oppose her.

And now on with the show:

Color?  Of course:

And here she is, going Full Melina:

Magnificent.  And scary.  And, of course, sexy as all hell.

Turning Back A Page

History

As you may remember, I went back to university in my mid-fifties to get a college degree, ending up with a B.A. in Modern Western European History.  There’s no reason for having specialized in that as opposed to say Classical History (which I had studied before, many years ago), because to me, pretty much all history is interesting.

Anyway, one of the courses I took was on the French Revolution, delivered by one of my favorite professors, Michael Leggieri*.  He opened the course by giving a single lecture on what exactly the French were revolting against.  It wasn’t just the monarchy and the Church they hated so much (with, it should be said, considerable justification), but theirs was a reaction to the entire societal structure, which was largely still medieval and had the effect of not only grinding the noses of the common people into poverty, but preventing them from ever rising out of that miserable state.

Small wonder they went all French (i.e. overboard) and took a long trip down Guillotine Road.  I might have done the same, in their position.

Anyway, Leggieri’s lecture lit a spark in me (as so many did), because I had no more than a passing acquaintance with the period between the Dark Ages and said Revolution in Europe.

Sadly, Life intervened and I wasn’t able to devote much time to studying that period… until now.  I was chatting to New Wife the other night, and told her that I’d been doing a lot of reading while she was gadding about Seffrica with the Beloved Grandchildren.  When she asked me what I’d been reading and I told her (history, duh), she ordered me to go to Half Price Books and get more because Aren’t You Sick Of Reading About The Same History All The Time?

Well, no;  but the point was a valid one.

So off I went, and the first book to catch my eye should be a decent gateway, I think, into further study:  the New Cambridge Modern History VII:  The Old Regime 1713-63.  It’s seems like a fairly comprehensive study, I think (after but a cursory glance at the contents pages), but it should set the scene properly.  This work was first published in 1957 so it may be free of modernistic cant, but we’ll see.

And now, if you’ll excuse me… this book isn’t going to read itself.

*I see that Mike Leggieri has left U. North Texas and ended up at the University of Florida as Professor of War, Strategy and Statecraft at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.  They are lucky, because he’s one of the best — and that’s not just my opinion, either.  (He’s also very conservative, which helps.)

Never Stopped

Entertainment, Music

Via Insty, this happy tale:

You probably know the feeling — you’re in the mood to watch a movie, so you open up Netflix. The next thing you know, two hours have passed, and you still haven’t decided what to watch. Even when I go on a streaming platform, knowing what I’m looking for, it’s easy to get distracted by a homepage flooded with endless recommendations. Eventually, it starts to feel overwhelming and all that content just blurs together into one giant, forgettable backlog.

That’s why I’ve started buying CDs and DVDs again. I recently revived some old PC setups, so I thought it was time to try taking a similar trip back in time with my music and movies. What started as a passing interest in physical media ended up highlighting everything I’m missing out on with streaming.

And the rest, as they say, was history.  It’s a lovely story, so haste ye thither and peruse the thing in its entirety.

Longtime Readers will know full well that I’ve never stopped doing that.  I’ve always had a large collection of DVDs and CDs on hand, precisely for the reasons stated in the article.  Only the recent move by media companies [spit]  towards sunsetting access and availability — not to mention editing the original releases into something… well, less — has reaffirmed my preference toward ownership over subscription.

So to all those — Olde Pharttes, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, whatever — who decide to make a similar lifestyle decision:  welcome to the club.

It’s a decision you will never regret.

Unexpected Pleasure Part 2

Books & Movies

I spoke before about reading Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo novel, the enjoyment I had reading it, and my intention to read the next two (Played with Fire  and Kicked A Hornet’s Nest ).

Well, last week I did just that.  And I enjoyed them both so much that I did something unprecedented:  I re-read the entire trilogy this week, a scant couple of days after finishing the third — and enjoyed the novels as much the second time around as I did the first.  Remarkable.

One or two things come to mind about the novels vs. the TV series argument.  Of course, the TV show is pared down quite a bit, with characters and scenarios cut out of the novels’ plots.  In the main, they make sense;  Erika Berger’s leaving Millennium  magazine to run a large daily newspaper, for example, was completely cut from the Hornet’s Nest  episode, and frankly that wasn’t a wrong decision because it had very little to do with the story’s main arc anyway.

One thing that did strike me — and it’s not altogether a bad thing — is the big difference between Mikael Blomqvist in the novels and in the TV show.  In the novels, he’s much more of a ladies’ man — he beds government agent Monica Figuerola for one:


Monica Figuerola (played by Mirja Turestedt)

…as well as both Harriet and her cousin Cecilia Vanger:

 

…but none of the three in the TV show — which gives rise to another issue.

Michael Nyqvist (who plays Blomqvist in the TV series) is a brilliant actor — you may remember him as the Russian mob boss bad guy in John Wick, to mention but one of his memorable roles — but to be perfectly honest, in the TV trilogy he’s kinda… too short, pudgy and ugly to play a ladies’ man.


Mikael Blomqvist (played by Michael Nyqvist — I know, it’s kinda confusing)

I know that chicks fall for famous men, and in the Millennium  series he’s certainly a famous journalist in Sweden, but I think it stretches one’s credulity to imagine him shagging his way around Stockholm.  Mercifully, I think, in the TV series he’s a lot more a serious character than a bed toy — he’s in a long-time affair with the married Erika Berger throughout the series:


Erika Berger (played by Lena Endre)

…and of course in the Tattoo  episode he beds the tortured and broken Lisbeth Salander — or rather, she beds him, and then only briefly.


Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace)

Those two affairs are quite believable, but to feature Nyqvist as a Warren Beatty-Lothario might have been a terrible piece of miscasting.  And fortunately, we were spared that because, and I stress the point, it didn’t affect the storyline at all.  If anything, I think it made the story a lot stronger.  And having him jump into bed with the cool and businesslike Monica Figuerola might have been fun, but it would have slowed the story down to no good purpose, especially as by that time the tale was building to its wonderful climax.

Now that I’ve read all three novels, of course, all that remains is to re-watch the TV series.  And let me repeat the admonition from my earlier post:  do not watch the Netfux adaptation because in their usual fashion, they mess the thing up completely by cutting even more scenes and characters to the point where the story becomes almost impossible to follow.

Get the director’s cut on DVD, and have a good time.  I certainly plan to.

Unexpected Pleasure

Entertainment, Literature

While New Wife was off doing girl-shopping the other day, I decided that instead of hanging around the department store looking bored (a.k.a. the Husband Exile), I’d go over to a nearby bookstore and browse some second-hand books because I’ve run out of fiction to read.

I have written several times before how much I enjoyed the wonderful Stieg Larsson “Millenium” TV series — The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest — and I’ve watched the series several times.

Anyway, I decided to read Larsson’s original novels, just to see for myself how bad they are — yes, he’s a filthy socialist but then again #Swedish so that’s not entirely surprising — and I discovered something quite rare:  the TV series is actually better than the novel series, but not by much.

What the TV show of Dragon Tattoo  did was to cut out, for example, the relationship between Lisbeth Salander and her boss, as well as Mikke Blomkvist’s affair with one of the murder suspects — both of which were quite extraneous to the plot.

More importantly, the sexual encounters between Blomkvist and Salander, which were numerous in the novel, were pared back to a only a couple in the TV episode — making their relationship much more fragile as a result.

I’ve only read the first novel so far (Dragon Tattoo) because I didn’t want to buy all three in case they sucked terribly and I would be stuck with two unread books.  But now that I’ve read that one, I think I’ll go back and get the other two because once I’d learned to ignore the rampant socialism, I rather liked Larsson’s writing style.

If you’re really stuck for some reading material (as I was), you could do a lot worse.

Better still, though:  buy the Extended Cut DVD version of the TV series*.

And do not repeat NOT buy the non-Swedish version with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, because Noomi Rapace (Salander) and Michael Nyqvist (Blomqvist) are both beyond-words brilliant while the other two aren’t.  We won’t even talk about the stunning Swede MILF Lena Endre…

 

*Be warned that the current version of Millennium available through Netfux has been severely edited, and it’s terrible:  whole scenes have been deleted and even some characters erased, making the show almost incomprehensible, not to say less enjoyable.  (Netflix delenda est)