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The_Triple_Lindy

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Posts posted by The_Triple_Lindy

  1. Posted

    I think when it comes to modernized Shakespeare adaptations, the far-out ones can be built around a solid core concept (ie. McKellan's Richard III as a Nazi allegory, or the hyper-stylized Luhrman R&J) but can become exhausting in terms of the viewing experience, which is exacerbated by the fact that the shortest of W.Sh. plays is 90 mins. Somehow, the adaptations that are a bit truer to historical context, like Branagh's Othello (with Lawrence Fishbourne) or even the more recent Merchant of Venice with the woefully miscast Al Pacino as Shylock, don't wear me out the way that some (not all) "updated" versions can feel.

    If you want an updated version of Shakespeare, I think you'll have a better time going with the 10 Things I Hate About You or Lion King route -- same story but new characters, setting, and language. Although, the best counterargument to this might be, ironically, the updated of Othello of O with Mekhi Pfiffer. 

    Along these lines, I just recently watched Spike Lee's Chi-Raq, which is a very interesting retelling of Lysistrata. It's not the original text, but it is written in verse with contemporary vernacular, so the whole movie has a battle-rap feel. Again, gets a bit exhausting toward the end, but it's built around an interesting central conceit.

    • Like 2

  2. Posted

    3 hours ago, Cam Bert said:

    At it's core I think it was a neat way to adapt it, but yes it's pretty bad. Still I would take it over a lot of the Romeo and Juliet knock offs.

    It's just soooooo over-the-top and heavy-handed. And the final scene, with Ian/Richard screaming across the battlefield in a panzer screaming, "A horse! A horse!" -- it's unintentional comedy gold.

    • Like 2

  4. Posted

    29 minutes ago, Cameron H. said:

    Since the world is full of hope again, it might be nice. If anyone's interested, we could go back to first Friday per month. 9PM EST. Sound good? 

    I would love to see if we could coax some of our old friends back for this...

    I've been out of the musicals loop for a while. No need to put me back into the MM rotation but I would love to get the Classics watch parties going again.

    • Like 2

  6. Posted

    51 minutes ago, Cameron H. said:

    The rest of those lyrics, however, don’t seem, to me anyway, to suggest that it was ever just an act:

    And the postman sighed as he scratched his head
    "You'd really had thought she ought to be dead"
    And who would ever suppose that 
    That was Grizabella, the glamor cat

    Since the movie never plays with irony, I think we have to take it at face value. She was truly a glamour cat, and now she isn’t. Or, maybe, she still is, but is no longer recognizable as such.

    I also have to go back to my theory of “jellicle” being synonymous with a kind of self-actualization. If her jellicle nature is “glamour cat,” then existentially, she can’t lie about that. In my opinion, either she was or she wasn’t. 

    I don't know. For me, the word "glamour" will forever be tainted by its association with "Glamour Shots," which are decidedly "lower-class-aping-upper-class."

    taking-glamour-shots.jpg

    Taking your point about what "jellicle" means, I don't think that precludes the possibility that Grizzabella was the most "glamour-shottiest" of all the jellicle cats.

    • Like 3

  7. Posted

    1 hour ago, Cam Bert said:

    Look I know the scale of the cats has been talked about to death but the main issue I had with scale were the cockroaches and mice. The average mouse's body is 95 to 120 mm in length and from the band scene we can see that they are roughly two matches tall. The average match is 40 mm so this checks out so far. Meanwhile the roaches are about the size of two strawberries. Strawberries come in a variety of sizes but I'd argue that an average store bought strawberry and a match stick are roughly the same size with a strawberry being a tad smaller. Which means that mice and roaches would be roughly of equal size. That means these cockroaches are also in the 95 to 120 range. The world's largest cockroach, the megaloblatta of central America, can grow up to 97 mm meaning these are indeed terrifyingly large cockroaches. 

    However, if we want to take this a step further we can extrapolate some information as to the size of these cats. The cats interact with the mice and roaches and pick them up. When they are holding the roaches they are the about the length of the cat's fingers. Your middle finger is approximately the length of your palm, so the cat's hands are approximately double that of the mice and roaches, putting them in 190 mm to 240 mm range. Studies have shown that our body is made up of many ratios that tend to be consistent. One is that your height is about nine times that the size of your hand. So take those numbers and doing a little math show that these cats are 1.71 m 2.16m tall. Given that that roaches were slightly smaller than the mice let's focus on the lower end of the spectrum and say that these cats are 1,71 m tall which is the mean height for adult men globally. These are indeed human sized cats.

    Not just human-size, but above-average humans. I'm 6'8" which translates to 2.1m, roughly ... I only know that because I learned my metric height before touring Germany because literally any time I meet a stranger, they remark about how tall I am.

    So a cat that's 2.16 meters tall is slightly taller than the tallest person your average person has ever met in real life (if we go by what I'm told during these conversations). 

    See ... we were having a nice little chat about poetry and prostitution, and you had to bring math into this.

    • Like 3

  8. Posted

    On 11/21/2020 at 11:21 PM, Cameron H. said:

    I’m not sure we should just breeze right past the fact that Paul referred to Grizabella the Glamour Cat as...the “sex worker” cat?!?

    The cats in the movie are supposed to represent real cat personalities, traits, and behavior. For example, Rum Tum Tugger is supposed to evoke a horny alley cat, while Mungojerry and Rumpleteezer represent the more mischievous nature of cats. Even the more fantastical cats like Mr Mephistopheles, represent cats who do amazing, seemingly magical things. You know what cats aren’t known for? Sex work. I’m...not even sure what that would even be.

    Basically, Grizebella is a cat who was once beautiful and pampered. She had a cushy life, but has since fell on hard times. She would have been a cat you’d put in a competition or something. And while it’s never mentioned explicitly, I believe the audience is supposed to come to the conclusion that, as she grew older and her beauty began to fade, she was abandoned by her owners. This leaves her in a decidedly un-jellicle existential dilemma. What happens to you when you can no longer be the thing you were born to be? Not only that, what happens when you lose your entire support system when you learn that the love you thought you had turns out to be superficial and conditional?

    The song “Memories” is Grizebella remembering the good life she used to have, wishing she could go back there, accepting that she can’t, and trying to find the courage to carry on.

    So, while there is certainly nothing wrong with sex work as a profession, no, Grizebella is not meant to represent a “sex worker cat.”

     

    14 hours ago, Elektra Boogaloo said:

    I hate to disagree with you, forum Paul. But I do think that is a logical conclusion based solely on the film. Sure the poems are for kids and it’s a family musical, but in the FILM the cats are weirdly sexualized. And the Taylor Swift song , if I recall correctly, has catnip and it is sort of implied she is bewitching them. I don’t know. I got the impression she was once like the Taylor Swift cat and then she sort of fell into prostitution. Why else is she out on the STREET? She became a streetwalker! 

    I don’t think Andrew Lloyd Webber would say she’s a sex worker... but, again, the movie is weirdly sexual in a way that I don’t like. And that is what I thought she was as well until I fell down the poetry rabbit hole (still mad at T.S. Eliot). 

    Obviously everyone has read "Prufrock," but who else here has read XJ Kennedy's "A Prominent Bar is Secaucus, NJ"? It's a narrative poem about an old woman -- who could be seen as either a prostitute or maybe just an old floozy -- who talks about how she used to live the high-life before she became an old junkie. The speaker in the poem made her life sound pretty glamorous in her youth, but the climax of the poem is her being led away by police as she says:

    "For when time takes you out for a spin in his car
    You'll be hard-pressed to stop him from going too far
    And be left by the roadside, for all your good deeds,
    Two toadstools for tits and a face full of weeds."

    The woman in the poem sounds like she could be a Grizzabella- type ... once a gorgeous dame who in her prime had money and attention, smoked cigarettes rolled in gold, bet on the horses, and stayed at the best hotels. Now, she's an old woman who causes a scene at the bar and gets arrested. Maybe a sex-worker, or maybe a girl who took all advantage of her lot in life to party hard while she could. Of course, the main difference is that while the speaker in "Prominent Bar" lived the high life in her story, Grizzabella's song tells a different tale:

    "She haunted many a low resort
    Near the grimy road of Tottenham Court
    She flitted about the No Man's Land
    From "The Rising Sun" to "The Friend at Hand"

    So Grizzabella is not from the same side of town, it would seem. But that doesn't automatically make her a sex worker -- perhaps she was just aping upperclass glamour, and now that she's been brought low by time and age, everyone around her takes a certain schadenfreude in her current state. 

    • Like 2

  9. Posted

    I'm not sure that this was mentioned in the episode but -- there actually is a Heaviside Layer. The Kennelly-Heaviside Layer, to be exact.

    wpdc867bf8_05_06.jpg

    Apparently this layer is reflective of radio waves, and bouncing these waves off the sky makes it possible for them to reach beyond the horizon.

    I suppose this could mean that sending a Jellicle to the Heaviside Layer for a new life could literally mean just sending them into the stratosphere so that they'll land somewhere far away, thereby beginning a "new" life?

    The layer was discovered by British physicists in the 1920s, which is around the time Eliot started writing poetry, so odds are this was a word he overheard at a tea party sometime, and 20 years later, he used it in his cat poems.

    EDIT TO ADD: the dumbest thing about this is that it was named for the guy who discovered it -- Oliver Heaviside.

    • Like 2
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  10. Posted

    22 hours ago, Elektra Boogaloo said:

     T.S. Eliot ... can go fuck himself).

    I think Eliot just used his own cat’s nickname. But I tend to think this because I do not like these poems and think it’s all dumb and people pretend all his poems are great because they had to read PRUFROCK in school. 

     

    21 hours ago, Cameron H. said:

    I tend to agree. I think, because of Eliot’s erudition and the density and scope of the allusions found in his work, that there’s a bit of literary FOMO - now and from his contemporaries. I always felt, particularly in college, there was a fear that if you admitted that you didn’t like him, you were opening yourself to accusations of “not getting it” regardless of whether or not your criticisms had any merit.  (Personally, I’m more of an e e cummings man.)

    But, yeah, with these inviolable literary genius types, there always tends to be a move to over analyze their work — even when all signs point to it just being something they threw together on a lazy afternoon.

    I'll admit that I like "Prufrock" -- not because it's a particularly great poem, which it isn't, but because that post-war nihilistic stuff is what I most enjoy reading. It's basically the only thing Eliot wrote that I ever enjoyed reading ("Wasteland"? More like "waste" of time, amirite?). 

    I put Eliot in the same category as Matthew Arnold -- their poems are pretentious and melodramatic and pedantic because they're critics on top of being poets, so all their work has the air of self-gratification and certainty in how brilliant they are. Their poems are so much "uncontainable expression of self" and more "flexing what I know about good poetry." Eliot reminds me of what I remember someone saying about Axl Rose during the Use Your Illusion records -- every song has to do everything that that Axl Rose knows how to do as a musician, just to show that he knows about great music.

    • Like 3

  12. Posted

    Shout out your favorite plagiarized lines from Velocipastor! My top two were:

    1. "War is hell, and hell never changes" -- pretty much straight ripped off from every game in the Fallout franchise. 

    2. "I want you to have 11 kids and spend 15 minutes with each of them" -- very reminiscent of something Danny Kaye says to Bing Crosby at the start of White Christmas.

    Is that reaching? Maybe ... what else is there to say about a movie that's so in on its own joke, every thing we might point out could be shrugged off as touch-in-cheek.

    I guess I mainly think that the schvitz duvet thing sounds cool. I love a good sweat. But also Catholics don't wear their rosaries as necklaces, the cross with flame logo that's on the outside of the church is actually a Methodist symbol, and blah blah blah.

    • Like 3

  14. Posted

    On 9/1/2020 at 12:08 AM, muttnik said:

    I hated this movie, but I did wonder about Dylan's downstairs neighbor. Between the Olympic rings, glass partition smashing, and all manner of ranting and raving, that must have been rough stuff.

    As someone who shares walls with noisy neighbors whom I hate, I feel this in my heart.

    • Like 2
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  15. Posted

    Can I say that I've listened to this episode three times now and think it is one of the funniest they've done in a while and that I've laughed harder this week than I have in months?

    Also, Paul, please ... we just GOT to hear more about June's self-reincarnation theories -- who she's reincarnated from, how her system works, when she started to believe this, the works. We "put it over there for a minute", but it's been many minutes now, so dish.

    • Like 6

  16. Posted

    18 hours ago, gigi-tastic said:

    You obviously have never lived with a environmentalist  grandma who believed in washing and reusing aluminum foil, 

    So again, maybe just evidence that his soul is grandma-aged? Saves and reuses aluminum, signs his texts, works out on rings like Charles Atlas, and scribbles his notes on old parchment rolls.

    • Like 4

  17. Posted

    19 minutes ago, Cameron H. said:

    That makes absolutely no sense! That means he spent 1500 hours flying a plane and then all of the sudden developed a phobia? 

    I have a feeling the movie thinks getting your pilot’s license is just a written exam. 

    Or that maybe you can get one through a flight simulator? I don't know. It's almost as if the logic of 2:22 is flawed.

    • Like 4
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  18. Posted

    38 minutes ago, Cameron H. said:

    I find it highly unlikely that an aviophobic air traffic controller (and expectant father), who was once under review for nearly causing a deadly collision, would have the means and the time to accrue the prerequisite hours of flight time required to become a commercial pilot in just under a year. According to Dr Google, he would have to put in AT LEAST 1500 hours just to be considered  (which works out to just under 38 weeks) -- and that's assuming he can afford to rent and fuel a plane for 8 hours a day, five days a week. This isn’t even take into account for training time lost due to convalesce after a grievous gun shot wound to the kidney.

    I mean, there's a reason why people don't just decide to become a pilot on whim.

    The woman who conducts his review and suspends him says that he's already gotten his pilot's license. Clearly he had to be able to fly at some point. I know there are different types of pilot licenses, but how long would it take between license and employment?

    • Like 3

  19. Posted

    3 hours ago, The_Other_MikeD said:

    Since the film took place over 4-5 days, why did Daario have to write the repeating pattern on everything he could get his hands on? He wrote it on a notepad, then transferred it to the windows in his apartment. I was waiting for the string board to be next. No work and all conspiracy make Daario a crazy boy.

    That reminds me:

    When Dylan decides to start writing everything down, the first thing he grabs is a roll of paper (wax paper? shelving paper?) from what looks like a kitchen drawer. Among the items in the drawer is a random piece of oddly folded aluminum foil ...

    1569765122_ScreenShot2020-08-29at5_19_27PM.jpg.be98ea68998be990c7487dcceea492fd.jpg

    ... and is that a hat? Is that a tinfoil hat? Is there any other plausible explanation for pre-worn, previously-crinkled tinfoil kept in a drawer like that? And if he's the kind of person who is prone to tinfoil-wearing to keep the satellites from reading his thoughts or whatever, then is this movie telling us upfront that Dylan's about to go totally off the deep end? That would call into question his entire reliability as a narrator and, I daresay, tosses the ending of this movie into Jacob's Ladder territory.

    • Like 8

  20. Posted

    3 hours ago, UltimateTrekker said:

    When your boyfriend tells you he is the man that killed you 30 years ago and will again it’s best to get away as fast as possible 

    This movie should've just been called "Red Flags Ignored" ... Sarah becomes immediately invested in a guy she's known less than a week, and when he totally makes a sense at her place of work, and then starts talking crazy about letters, and she becomes convinced he's gone mad, she should have said, "to hell with this ... I just got out of a too-intense relationship with a long-haired moody psycho model asshat -- I don't need this shit in my life." 

    • Like 4

  21. Posted

     

    8 hours ago, DrGuts1003 said:

    3. Dylan ended every text message with "D."  You are not sending letters or even email, you do not need to indicate who you are in every text message.  What an unnecessary waste of time.

    Don't forget that although Dylan's body is 30 years old, his soul is at least sixty. Which makes sense because signing your name to your texts is a total boomer thing to do.

    • Like 8

  22. Posted

    So the three people who died in 1987 were reincarnated because their souls left their bodies when they were killed in entered the bodies of babies born that same day.

    Ergo, this movie is positing that babies don't have souls until they are born. Fetuses must not have souls.

    Which makes this the most pro-choice movie ever. Interesting how a movie that's all about fate is REALLY all about the right to choose.

    • Like 7

  25. Posted

    Two questions:

    1. Where is Sam Shepherd's security detail at the moment that he is shot while fly-fishing? I know that his personal bodyguard/lackey is busy getting himself blown up (again with a ball-bearing shrapnel body, which for a solo-target car bomb -- why?) but if he's really a senator, shouldn't he have Secret Service on him too? Seems like someone at Homeland Security dropped the ball.

    2. Why does Hugh Jackman have to be American in this film? Why can't Stan be Australian so that Hugh Jackman doesn't have to put on a fake accent? Vinnie Jones is there speaking with his normal cockney voice, which I'd argue makes even less sense because why would a British man care about American homeland security interests ... but there is nothing in the script that demands Stan be American. Sure he has an American child but she's barely ever been around him so she wouldn't have picked up his jargon. That kind of thing get explained away all the time in movies: Why is Sandy Australian in Grease? Because her family moved to the states last summer for her dad's work. Easy -- one line explains it away and it never has to be brought up again. 

    • Like 3
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