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Otter's Replies
The movie does have a wonderful melancholic beauty, a mood that IMHO would have been ruined if it had included all the little annoyances of big-city life. What if Scotty hadn't been able to find a place to park near Mission Dolores, if tourists had been taking Madeline's picture as she jumped into the bay?
Who the hell mocks Bollywood singing and dancing? They're great!
Better than the singing and dancing in this. Look, I like this movie a lot, but you could have seen better singing and dancing in a "High School Musical" movie.
Could be, she's probably costing Marvel more and more with each film, they will probably want a younger and cheaper lead female at some point. And I've heard that Marvel plans to edge out the original Avengers as the actors get older, and replace them with a new generation of characters who will be played by actors who are younger and cheaper than Downey.
But it's not like Elizabeth Olson is ready to step and be the official Avengers Babe, I find her Scarlet Witch less than impressive.
Take out the religious stuff and the film is... very, very gay! Really. Literally! The plot is about how Judah suffers because of a love-hate relationship with a handsome Roman, and claws his way back into respectability because he plays dominance/submission games with a handsome older man who "adopts" him. So after two hours of that, the religious stuff does, as previously noted, seem a bit out of place!
And yes, the homoeroticism was quite intentional, the film had a gay scriptwriter and at least one actor who played up the subtext (not Heston, nobody told him and he didn't catch on). Which makes me wonder about the original novel, which I've never read. Does it have homoerotic subtext, or is it all religion?
Germany had signed the Geneva Convention along with most of the Allies, in which both parties agreed to treat prisoners of war humanely. So prisoners on both sides were fed, housed, allowed to communicate with their families, and not tortured or used for medical experiments - and if they broke the agreement their own captive citizens would suffer. Other participants in the world war did not have such agreements in place, and captive soldiers suffered horrors.
And in the film, the highest-ranking British officer was shot by the side of the road, and I wouldn't be surprised if others were as well. The film is based on a real-life "Great Escape", it would be interesting to know how many of the escapees were "shot when resisting arrest" or were never seen again.
The animated films aren't just better filmmaking and more stylish, they even have better acting!
Honestly, if Warner's wanted to fix the mess they've created, they could do worse than to remake the anolimated films with live actors and good CGI. The rights can't cost much.
All of the above... And maybe they just weren't impressed with the material in the SW books (frankly, I never have been thrilled with any of them).
I'm sure they thought their writers could do better, or that their writers could come up with something simpler and more cinematic. If so, I can't say the resulting script was a smashing success.
I will be slightly kinder, and say that the film is an ambitious failure. It does look gorgeous, but all the pretty staginess really drains the emotional impact out of the story - it's as if the director didn't think that the story was worthy in telling in its own right. To him, it was just something to pile cinematic stunts onto.
Which isn't the only reason I think Joe Wright is a Michael-Bay-level hack with pretensions, but it's a big part of the reason.
Oh, a modern woman would bang Vronsky and feel guilty about it, start divorce procedings and plan to marry him, realize it'd never work because he was a cheating douche who was already onto his next conquest, and try to stop the divorce and go back to her boring, comfortable circumstances. But Karenin would have had it with her by then.
Of course someone could get a novel out of that, but the ending would lack the drama of the 19th century version.
Ah, but in the book, Gregory says that "Perkin Warbeck" is not a pretender, but actually Prince Richard all grown up and trying to reclaim his father's throne! So that the curse falls on Henry Tudur (Henry VII) for having him executed... which is supposed to be ironic because Elizabeth of York ends up cursing her own children. I think it's ironic because Gregory fictionalized a curse that only cared about who killed Prince Richard, and didn't apply to the supposed killer of Prince Edward.
We'll never know who actually took out the two princes, but Richard was the likeliest suspect, he had both motive and opportunity. Some historians have said it must have been someone in the Tudor camp trying to eliminate rivals and make Richard look monstrous, which is likely enough; and that Richard had no movie because he'd eliminated them as a threat by calling them bastards, which is not true. No, those boys would have been a threat to Richard as long as they lived, and being named a bastard wouldn't have stopped Richard's enemies from putting armies behind their cause. Damn, good thing someone took them out, if they'd lived the War of the Roses would have gone on for another generation or two.
Feel free to use it, I do dislike that guy.
It also makes a bit of sense for all the humans to start joining forces with each other in terms of TV writing. Now that the show is starting to wrap up, they need to stop with the disparate storylines of characters who have nothing to do with each other, and the new Targaryan invasion is a great way to involve them all in something that effects the entire continent and make them choose sides. It's the sort of thing that GRRM has been totally failing to do in the books, not even a ghost of a hint of an overall plot there!
And if you're right, that'll give Cersei the choice of marrying Urine Greyjoy or Littlefinger. Eurgh. Offer me a choice like that, and I'd choose the Silent Sisters.
No, the prequels ARE bad, just not 100% bad. The story is idiotic, the hero more so, the central romance is ridiculous, the humor falls flat, Jar-Jar deserves every bit of abuse ever hurled at him, every film is full of extraneous scenes that go nowhere, etc. But if you're an insane enough fan, you can overlook or forgive some of the awfulness, and enjoy the good things - the score, the space battles, Ian Mc Diarmuid, Padme's crazy wardrobe, and so on.
The verdict of the mainstream can be seen at any store in the world. Go anywhere from a gas station to a pet store, and you'll see Darth Vader wobbleheads, Millenium Falcon dog toys, Princess Leia dolls - there's Star Wars merchandise EVERWHERE, and all of it's from the original trilogy and the new superhyped Disney films. There's not a damn bit of merchandise specific to the prequels anywhere, except maybe in the $5 discount DVD bin, because the mainstream said "meh" and dismissed the prequels from pop culture.
FYI I find Rey a charming and engaging character, and I'm going to be polite and not say what I think about the people who have made a hobby about hating on her (or saying she's "spotlight stealing" instead of accepting her as The Hero). Sure, some of the things she's done strain the bounds of believability, but pushing those particular boundaries has been part of Star Wars from the beginning, and is in fact part of the series' charm!
I hope they can maintain the things I like about Rey in the sequels to come. She did seem like a sympathetic and likeable real person when we first met her, but maintaining that likeability while going from underdog to superhero is more of a challenge than some people realize. I can't say Mark Hammill was 100% successful at staying relatable the original trilogy, but if I go into that then I'll get started on all the other flaws in ROTJ and nobody wants that All I can say now is that Ridley seems to be a good actress, so maybe she'll carry it off, but no young actor is so good they can overcome bad writing.
So that brings me back to "we'll see".
And Robin Arryn is repulsive!
Do you think Littlefinger will propose to Cersei or vice versa? She's so desperate for allies that she's really got to marry someone with money and an army.
Also, Hooper was a shark scientist, and may have known what behaviors attract sharks and what do not, which would have helped him escape it's notice. Although that's a toughie, per Shark Week sharks are drawn to vibration and will attack things that tremble or wiggle, and who could avoid shaking like a leaf when you're in the water with a killer shark?
So no, I don't think the shark was unusually intelligent.
I can't speak for Australia, but in the US Old West, cattle drive routes were carefully calculated to go from one source of water and grass to the next. The cowboys couldn't transport enough water and hay to keep the cattle alive en route, they had to use natural sources, and make sure the cattle didn't lose so much weight during the trip that they'd lose market value.
Did you know the pioneers who crossed the great Western deserts to get to Oregon and California traveled the same way? Their covered wagons were pulled by oxen, and the pioneer trails were paths where the oxen could find enough water and grass to make it all the way.
Bugger, hit "enter" by mistake.
I also like that someone made a film about people who have nothing achieving their goals, making real friendship, finding love, having fun, working together, finding something good in a very harsh world. And even with no funding, support, or talent, they became part of film history. I love this movie.
I've seen all of Wood's films, including the little-known "Orgy of the Dead", and FYI they are unique and entertaining. Not in a way that anyone intended of course, but they're fun films if you have a sick sense of humor!
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It wasn't just the belief that kings were appointed by God and that the rightful king had to be on the throne or the kingdom would be accursed... it was that the politics of the era were SO vicious that the upper nobility thought that being king (or a kingmaker) was the only way to protect oneself and one's family.
The high nobility couldn't opt out of politics. The country was in a constant state of war, and those who backed the losing side or just failed to support the winners were likely to be accused of treason and have their heads chopped off and their fortunes confiscated by the crown. Those in the various lines of succession were born having powerful enemies who were waiting for a chance to kill them off just for being alive, and of course if your parents had quarrelled with some other noble family you were honor-bound to kill someone for revenge, or they were honor-bound to kill you. Honestly, stick me in a situation like that and I'd happily spend the rest of my life growing beets in a monastary to get away, even if that meant sticking some other poor relative with the family politics. And enemies.
So really, the only way to protect yourself from a king with unlimited powers was to become king yourself. Of course a king still had enemies out the wazoo, but every important person did. A king could do more about them.