Game of Thrones Season 5 Begins

by on April 13, 2015 at 9:40 am
Posted In: Test

GOT-S5-PosterWell the first episode of season five of A Game of Thrones has finally arrived and so far I’m very pleased.

For the most part I’ve been avoiding most of the rumors about where they’re going with the plot this season. But most of what I’ve been hearing is since the publication of the latest book, Winds of Winter was delayed for another year, this is the first season where they start to diverge from the book deliberately. Admittedly they’ve been doing this since season one but for the most part it was in the way that a television show has to make little changes whether they want to or not and these changes gradually snowballed into big changes. This is the first time when they are doing major alterations to the plot on purpose.

Along with these plot changes they are shuffling the events of Feast For Crows and Dance With the Dragons together (sensible since they take place at the same time but are divided by the location of viewpoint characters.)

There were other big changes but I think I’ll wait until they happen in the show before I mention them. For the most part I don’t have a problem with this. I’ve mostly been listening to the audio books. One of the side benefits of this is that Roy Dotrice’s reading feel like a separate performance to me, complete with different actors, and because of this I’ve never had any trouble separating the book from the show. In fact I look forward to not knowing what happens.

Anyway like most of the season openers the plot spends most of the time showing us where everyone else is. Cersei and Jaimie are at the Sept of Baelor mourning the death of their father who had been killed by their brother Tyrion. Tyrion has just arrived in the city of Pentos in a box. Brienne and Poderick are wandering around the Aerie where unbeknownst to them one of their quarry Sansa is under the “protection” of Littlefinger. Meanwhile in the north Jon Snow and the rest of the Night’s Watch are recovering from the attack on the Wall by the Wildings and banging heads with King Stannis Baratheon who is camping his court and army at Castle Black.

Already we start with big changes from the previous season. Both Brienne and Sansa’s plots have been changed completely the rest are be more subtle. Loras Tyrell is not part of the King’s Guard, since he is the only Tyrell heir (in the book he’s the youngest of three sons so can afford to give himself over to the crown in his mourning for his lover Renly Baratheon) King Tommen Baratheon is about twice as old as he is in the book which means while he’ll certainly be easily pushed around by Cersei he wont be passing death warrants just because he likes to sign his name on any bit of paper put in front of him. Robin Arryn is being fostered out so he is no longer a pawn for Littlefinger to femove at his leisure…. The list goes one.

And now that we see where the pieces are placed in this year’s game of thrones let us see who will make the next move.

This is going to be fun!

└ Tags: , , ,
Comments Off on Game of Thrones Season 5 Begins

Wednesday Double Feature

by on April 8, 2015 at 8:57 am
Posted In: Rhapsodies-New

I’m not sure this was one of my better ideas for a selection theme but I did it anyhow.

As a fan of Quentin Tarantino’s early work (haven’t seen more than a half hour of both Kill Bills, haven’t seen Inglorious Bastards or Django Unchained) I had long known that Tarantino would frequently put in snippets of dialogue from his favorite obscure B films. I decided to investigate this and watch some of the films that were given tribute throughout Pulp Fiction.

19944863The first film on the list was the source of Samuel Jackson’s famous misquoting of Ezekiel 25:17; “The Bodyguard” (also known as Chiba the Bodyguard or in the original Japanese cut, Karate Chiba) Sonny Chiba plays… well… Sonny Chiba, a master martial artist, declares a one-man war on the drug trade by hiring himself out as a bodyguard to anyone who is willing to confront the mob. A mysterious woman who claims to have information to use against the mob and that’s where the action begins hires him and that’s where the action begins.

For all I know this movie was okay in the original Japanese cut of it but the American version I watched was painfully bad. Lousy writing, no acting, gratuitous nudity and violence (even by the standards of a seventies action and the fakest fake blood I ever did see (I swear it was almost crimson) On top of that for all his being bad ass Chiba was a pretty lousy bodyguard. Most of the times he had to rescue people from harm it was because they had let them get through in the first place

220px-Charley_VarrickThe second film the source of the “blowtorch and needle nose pliers quote Charley Varrick was much better. A tense crime thriller, it is the story of a small time bank robber played by  Walter Matthau who robs a mob bank by mistake and what happens afterwards. I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen Matthau in a serious role and he plays Charley as a cold intelligent professional willing to do what it takes to escape both from the police and the mob. We watch him go conduct his plan and at first we think he’s stupid (especially when several people drop a dime on him) but as the movie we realize he’s just setting bait for the final trap.

└ Tags: , , , ,
Comments Off on Wednesday Double Feature

New Workout

by on April 3, 2015 at 10:16 am
Posted In: Test

I had a very bad April Fools day with two “pranks” pulled on me. One involving a cop explaining to me in no uncertain terms that stop signs exist before six 0’clock even when there are no cars on the road (not counting the police cruiser directly behind you) The other was someone deciding to take my bike seat when I was making my Wednesday film selection at Scarecrow. The problem was in neither of these situations ended with anyone saying “April Fools”

Anyway this left me tetchy and paranoid that big brother was watching me for the next 48 hours and also figuring I should not assume once was a fluke if I want to be perceived as a good citizen I would have to rethink my morning workout even if it meant kissing any chance of repeating my best time of 32.5 minutes good bye.

So the current plan is to bike to Green Lake at a fast but orderly pace, obeying all traffic rules and then do my real workout of two laps around Green Lake (which only has two traffic lights but nothing like the ones that always stop me) and then go back to my apartment in a fast but legal pace.

It went okay the not worrying about any of the lights on the way was certainly less stressful and I did the six and a half miles around Green lake in twenty three minutes and fifty six seconds (I let myself get stopped by one of the lights and I haven’t topped off my tires in the last two weeks so there’s much room for room for improvements) RunKeeper said this was a new record (though part of this was because it was doing a different category of activity and part of it was that it was the first activity of the month)

All in all the only problem I had was mentally the workout felt over after the two laps and my trip home was a little too orderly rather than my usual attempt to get home from Green Lake in five minutes) perhaps I’ll start doing three laps around Green Lake to compensate for this… but then we start getting into issues like time and masochism.

└ Tags: , , , , ,
Comments Off on New Workout

Wednesday Double Feature

by on April 1, 2015 at 9:32 am
Posted In: Test

For this week’s selection I decided to do something new. Two movies based on the same source material.

The book in question is “The Hunter” the first of Donald E. Westlake’s “Parker” novels, written under the penname Richard Stark. Parker, one of the quintessential anti-heroes in pulp literature, is a brutal methodical and thoroughly professional criminal and “The Hunter” tells the story of the roaring rampage of revenge he takes when he is betrayed by his wife and partner.

So far there have been three films based on the book; although Westlake never allowed the name Parker to be used in any of the movies in his lifetime. Also, for the record, I haven’t actually read the book, but I’m a huge fan of Darwyn Cook’s extremely thorough graphic novel adaption.

225px-PointBlankPosterThe first of the two movies is John Boorman’s Point Blank starring Lee Marvin as “Walker”. Boorman uses the book as an outline, taking quite a few liberties with the plot. But that doesn’t matter, what is left is like a fine brandy – boiled down to just the key elements. Lee Marvin turns up his trademark intensity to 11 as he hunts down his betrayers and then goes after their bosses in order to get back the money that was stolen from him.

Boorman does some incredible work, the pacing is fast and lyrical in ways that make things seem even more intense that they actually are. My only real problem with it was a weird use of overlaying flashbacks best described as ‘trippy’. One critic’s theory is that the flashbacks made it feel as if the whole film was Walker’s revenge fantasy while he was dying of his wounds from the initial betrayal.

220px-PaybackPosterThe second movie was Brian Helgeland’s Payback, starring Mel Gibson as “Porter”. I had put off seeing it ever since I saw a commercial for it, but it was through this movie I first ever heard of Parker. Payback came out about the time that the Lethal Weapon franchise had degenerated into a buddy cop comedy series, the commercial seemed to suggest that Payback would be putting Mel Gibson through more of the same by emphasizing that the amount of money Porter wanted (straight from the book, uncorrected for inflation) was a ridiculously low amount for all of the effort Porter was putting into his revenge. It didn’t help that what few snippets of the film I had seen were from some of the relatively comic scenes from the book. When I finally got around to seeing the film this week I went with the director’s cut.

It turned out to be nothing like my assumptions, and, other than an updating of the story from the early sixties to the late nineties, and a few embellishments involving some crooked cops, and a triad gang led by Lucy Liu, it was actually a lot closer to the book than Point Blank and a LOT more brutal. However, it seemed to lack the focus that the book and the previous film had. It was almost as if they wanted to make Porter more vulnerable and more of an everyman, despite being a crook and a murderer, instead of the original unstoppable Parker from the book whose only redeeming feature is his professional code.

└ Tags: , , , , , , ,
Comments Off on Wednesday Double Feature

John Oliver on April Fools Day

by on March 31, 2015 at 11:06 am
Posted In: Test

Most of what made April Fools Day fun I outgrew by high school and other than being amused by a few news stories on how people fell for certain pranks (that time all my fellow Rhode Islanders started hoarding spaghetti after a new report telling how a late frost had destroyed that year’s crop comes to mind) I mostly go out of my way to ignore it.

Thank you John Oliver for making this official.

└ Tags: ,
Comments Off on John Oliver on April Fools Day