Control

Just finished episode four. The amount of sexual violence is starting to get a bit stomach-churning, actually.

There are lots of great actors, and these lame-os are taking their jobs.

Probably an unpopular choice, given the demographics around here, but John Cusak has been phoning it in since 2000, and his presence in any given film makes me less interested in seeing it. He's even been in a few decent films since then, and been ok in his role, but virtually any other actor would have been just as good or better (e.g. THE PAPERBOY).

Noah Wyle and Patrick Wilson are two actors it's hard to give a fuck about. Both are perfectly acceptable actors, but why not get someone else?

I went with the "don't look up anything" strategy. It's been equally as unsuccessful as the "do some research" strategy, but it doesn't take as long.

Fuckbucks. Edited. Thanks for the heads up.

Box Office Transformers: Age of Extinction X-Men: Days of Future Past How to Train Your Dragon 2 Maleficent The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Godzilla The Expendables 3 22 Jump Street Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Jupiter Ascending A Million Ways To Die In The West Neighbors Edge of Tomorrow Lucy Rotten Tomatoes How to Train Your Dragon 2 Neighbors Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Godzilla Guardians of the Galaxy Lucy Sin City: A Dame to Kill For A Million Ways to Die in the West The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Maleficent X-Men: Days of Future Past Expendables 3 Jupiter Ascending Transformers: Age of Extinction Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RT is a difficult one to pin down. They're all potential turds. Tie Breaker: How to Train your Dragon 2: $242,320,005

Apparently Go is out with an injury, so all of our predictions are boned.

Good call. Dude's sound is stellar.

Akebono is out of all remaining CC matches. I've read that it's a relapse of his pneumonia, but I dunno. Hopefully he can recover in time to wrestle the CC winner; I think they've done a decent job of getting him over as a formidable champ, and it would be a shame if all that build went nowhere.

She's also a breathairian. Which means she's better than you, obviously.

So, maybe the rape scene will serve as a leaping-off point for Cersei's character, where she goes from narcissistic and kinda dumb to straight up batshit crazy. I mean, the double-whammy of seeing her son murdered and getting raped by her "brover" has gotta have some ill effects.

Totally thought you were talking about Gretzky here.

What the hell's a "Maybach" anyway?

“It’s a friendly place. Nobody worries who you are, where you’re from. If you’re a good bloke, you’re all right. You know what I mean?” So, if I'd remembered to post a countdown thread, I'd have included the following warning: WARNING: If you don't want to see kangaroos get killed, don't watch this film. Because some kangaroos totally get killed. The footage of the kangaroo slaughter comes from a kangaroo hunt, so it wasn't set up for this particular film, and would have happened anyway. If that makes things more palatable, so be it. WAKE IN FRIGHT has been described (perhaps hyperbolically) as one of the most important films of Australian cinema. No idea if it is, mind you, but it's pretty fucking cool, and the negatives were almost lost for all time: Read all about it! So is WAKE IN FRIGHT a horror, or a very black comedy? It's hard to say. Certainly it's a horror for John Grant, the effete schoolteacher who gets stuck in that shit-hole, Bundanyabba, after losing all of his money in the world's dumbest game of chance. And all "the Yabba" has to offer is astonishing heat, some good ol' boys, and tons of beer. WAKE IN FRIGHT's horror, and comedy, comes from its intense focus on out-of-control, working-class masculinity. "The Yabba" is a hellish place, where you either farm, work in the mines, or go boomer hunting, and each of those things pays poorly and will likely kill you. To survive, you spend most of your free time drunk. You and your mates form strong, homosocial bonds, with barely a woman in sight. And what's held up as truly masculine is all the stereotypical nonsense, like drinking and fighting. So, Grant gets stuck in the Yabba, and his horror is the horror of both not fitting in and fitting in. Not to fit in is to be a pussy or a fag, while fitting in is to be a chauvinistic asshole. It's really lose-lose. And so, predictably, Grant aims for fitting in, as best he can, and his journey into mateship is a journey into hell, capped off with a nightmarish kangaroo hunt that works as a kind of twisted coming of age ritual for outback manhood. It's a horrifying experience for Grant, and so perhaps it should be a horrifying experience for the audience as well (when the film was screened at Cannes, this scene resulted in a lot of walkouts). Following that, Doc Tydon (the amazingly amazing Donald Pleasance) gets freaky with Grant, which is hardly surprising, given the homoeroticism (and plain ol' homosexuality) at the root of any sort of social system that so thoroughly valorizes masculinity. Which is not to say that the men of the Yabba are evil--they've just got nothing else to do.

If I was Martin, my deal with HBO would have been "the show outpaces my writing? Fine. Tell your own fucking story." Really. Then you get the TV show being its own thing, and the books ending their own way. I don't see it significantly hurting his book sales either. Oh well.

So we're still doing this? Guess I'll try to put up the WAKE IN FRIGHT thread tomorrow or Monday.

But he's amazing in CHOPPER.

It's easy to pull for Werdum; dude has been around forever, fought a ton of big names, and is incredibly talented and likable. Travis Browne is just some tall beardo who lost to Big Foot. I dunno if I could pick him out of a lineup. I think Craig's right, though, that most of his absence has been his decision.

Really pulling for Werdum here. Browne's a good heavyweight, but it's hard to give a shit about him.

Probably true. Roger Ebert's review of GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES might give a good idea of why this is true, and why it might actually be a particular strength of animation: I swear I also read or saw him talk about the film elsewhere; he pointed out that, by using animation, you can bring in a sort of universalizing; in the instance of GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES, this means that instead of witnessing the horror of a specific child or child actor starving, you're presented with the idea of a (generalized) child starving. In Ebert's discussion, this would mean the difference between evoking tears in the audience, or causing grief. The second is much more powerful. I'm not sure that anything Pixar has done has touched on the humanity of GRAVE, but I think that something similar is at work.

Not only does someone need to make a mini-series out of the original premise, I'm surprised that no one has made an ongoing series out of the film version. You could have a rotating "hero" for each new season.

NSFW trailer for Cronenberg's latest, MAPS TO THE STARS. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ok4a6_exclu-la-premiere-bande-annonce-de-maps-to-the-stars-le-prochain-film-de-david-cronenberg_shortfilms

Edit: never mind

Phrasing.