FisterRoboto

Samesies.

FTFY my dear father-of-two friend.

Sounds like some real Texas shit

I know. It's a bit too much awesome all at once.

Question: if I didn't like the version of JCS we watched, will I like the TV version? Like, is it really close to that version? I love John Legend and am curious, but I just really, really wasn't into JCS. On a different note, if y'all don't follow Chrissy Teigen on Twitter, first off, what are you doing with your lives? And second, her tweets about John Legend and JCS have been amazing. This is my favorite, though:

Oh! Another thing about this musical (there may be more to come over the next few days, as I've been thinking about this a lot and I don't mind talking into the dead thread void ) that's kind of weird on a more personal level. When I was a kid, my great grandmother would always hug and kiss my sister and me while singing "I love you a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck." I had no idea where it was from until I saw this musical in high school. To this day, it still makes makes me REALLY uncomfortable whenever I hear the song or see Miss Adelaide and Her Chick Chick Chickadees perform it. My great grandmother was just singing a silly song while she told us how much she loved us, but everything about this number is kind of creepster town to begin with and associating it with my great grandmother just makes it that much worse. ETA: my grandmother might have picked it up from the very popular Doris Day version of this song that came out in the 50s. And I also just realized that this song isn't in the film version, so here it is for anyone that has no clue wtf I'm talking about:

But at least that would have provided some much needed entertainment.

I know this is from months ago, but it was right at the beginning of my absence from the boards (this was actually the week of the festival where I'm basically gone from all other life for a week every year), but I have things to say about the stage versions and since I apparently can't make us watch the same movie twice.... One other notable appearance is JK Simmons as Benny Southstreet. Watching his face throughout this number is one of my favorite things. I wish I could find video of this productions "Fugue for Tinhorns" because it's a fun number, and it features Simmons a lot more. I just found this version a few weeks ago, and I totally love the choices they made with it, especially to end it as a gospel song. Part of me wishes they would have done that for the whole song because it totally makes sense. They're in a church and supposed to be attending a revival at the mission. But it's also a key, beloved song in the production, so I could see it not quite gelling with everyone if they changed it.

Oh shit! Cakebuuuuuuuuuuuuug! *shakes fist* Yeah, I was gone for a while. Bummer. I totally would have loved to have been around for that conversation Ummmm guess I'm going with one of my other choices. We haven't done any Bollywood or South Indian cinema yet (I don't think...). This is one I've been meaning to see for a while, but its availability in the US in has been super spotty. Netflix just added it in the US. It's a "masala" film, which means that it has a little bit of everything in it. There's action and romance and big dance numbers and comedy and just tons of stuff to love. So, since I failed to check if my pick had been done while I was out which would have saved me much back and forth over the past couple weeks, let's go wiiiiiiith:

Okay. So, I've had a few things in mind for a while now, and I haven't been able to decide. I had a great South Indian epic in mind. And then Netflix added a classic Bollywood masala film over the weekend. And I was really leaning that way. I had also thought about doing something more modern. But the whole time, I've also been fighting with myself about another musical. It's a classic, and it's the first one I "discovered" rather than being introduced to it by my parents. I loved this musical in high school, but I recently re-listened to a cast recording from its Broadway revival in the 90s, and it's....problematic to say the least. It might as well be called Toxic Masculinity: The Musical. So I've been writing it off. But the more I think about it, the more I really think it's the one that'll give us the most to talk about from the options I had in mind. Sooooooo now that I'm done rambling about my thought process, here's my pick for the week:

Even that didn't help. They're so bland that I can't even keep their differences straight.

I've been behind, so to catch up, I've skipped a lot of the minisodes (which I don't find nearly as entertaining if I haven't been on the boards for the ep), and I heard Paul read my stuff about storage space. One day, he might actually read one of my C&Os without throwing some Fister shade... Edit: I realized after posting it that that made me sound a lot saltier about it than I am. It honestly makes me laugh every time, especially because I'm pretty sure Paul doesn't even realize that he talks shit every time he reads one of my posts.

It's crazy to me how y'all seem to keep the two dudes straight in your heads. Like, I watched the movie and MULTIPLE times, I had to be like, "Which fuckboy is that one again?"

*cough*

Did the shark get shunned? Probably not.

I mean, it came in handy in the 1966 movie that was paying homage to as well:

I think it depends on which Batman movie is your favorite

Uh. Oh.

I GUESS NOT. I have been gone for a bit. He's still a soft cheese, right?

There's no pasta robot in that one tho...

But only if you like video game cutscenes interspersed with endless sexual harassment. If so, Valerian will be your jam.

I have a lot of Antonio Banderas-related thoughts. The first thing is that I read on Wikipedia that Madonna "introduced Banderas to Hollywood." I thought that was weird and there was no attribution at all for that claim, so I did a little googling. Apparently, in the 1991 documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare, she said she had a crush on him: Cut to 1996, and he was actually the first actor cast. Madonna ended up writing a long-ass letter to Alan Parker and telling him why she would be the best actress for the role. As her audition, she sent him a copy of one of her videos. And that's absolutely bananas. I've been working on a project recently (that I'll hopefully be able to share with y'all in the next month or so) that's tied to musicals, and one of the people working on it with me is a huge musical theater nerd. She's done a ton of work in the theater and knows her stuff really well. One thing she said recently that really stood out to me is how she hates when movies cast "actors who can sing" instead of singers. She said that unless they are trained correctly, they don't know how to sing in a way that conveys anything real. It lacks the nuance that we get when we hear spoken dialogue. When we watch musicals, we don't always catch all the words being sung, but we absorb so much of the song's meaning from the performance itself. Aaaanyway, I thought about this concept a lot while watching the movie. Madonna's not really an actor as much as she is a personality. She's been in quite a few movies at this point, but they're largely playing versions of that personality (e.g. Desperately Seeking Susan, A League of Their Own, Dick Tracy). She's a talented singer, but she's not a musical theater performer. Like, yeah, she can sing the shit out of "Papa Don't Preach", but she doesn't imbue it with anything that makes you learn more about her than the lyrics suggest. That's not a slam to pop music, and I actually love a lot of Madonna's catalogue, but that kind of depth isn't really why we listen to pop music. So in this case, we have a singer, who...can kind of act? But she's never really been in a role that demanded her to play something other than the archetype she's developed. And I think that's what holds back her performance the most. She's trying her hardest, but she just doesn't give us anything to work with. I want to sympathize with her character, but all of the things that should inform her character are missing from her performance (side note: they're also missing from the script, but that's a whole different topic of conversation). And this makes Banderas stand out even more for me. First, I was just surprised he could sing. But then I was just impressed with everything he was doing on screen.The dude is killing it from his first appearance. He's charming and funny, but there's this rebellious angry streak running just below the surface. His character is just the narrator, but I felt like I had a firmer grasp on him in his first sequence than I got on Eva over the course of 2+ hours.

It's only marginally worse than Safety Not Guaranteed, and that got him a Jurassic Park movie...