All books/writing/movies still

[petronia]

1) I think I forgot to mention this anywhere on LJ/DW, but I'm now writing regularly for The Singles Jukebox. (I suspect I immediately typecast myself as The One Who Knows Way Too Much About J-Pop.) It's been going better than I thought it would, in every way: the Jukebox covers a wider variety of releases (geographical and stylistic) than I'd assumed from occasional forays into the front end, more of that new music is listenable than I'd feared from the state of commercial radio and indie, and I turn out to have more opinions about it than I'd ever have imagined. Or maybe I've just hit the point where non-fiction comes really easily, I dunno. I just don't think I would have been able to do something like One Week One Band, or 5-10 singles blurbs a week, several years ago. Maybe it's a honeymoon period but it doesn't quite feel like that, either. XD

2) Went out and bought Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavour! It's not a large book, and I was prepared to have read everything in it already (I'm both stannish and distrustful enough of media web site longevity to want an actual hard copy). Was pleased to find that I hadn't. I really could have finished reading it in less than two hours, though.

3) Downloaded RocknRolla and watched that, mostly because We On This Here Blog have arrived at the point in the intertextual conversation where we couldn't avoid it any longer (by we, I mean me). Like, it's Ritchie so I was aware it would have deeply-set, difficult-to-pinpoint pacing flaws, and irritate me with increasingly refined iterations of gay chicken, because really? Really? Mind you, I think some of that is a kind of pro-active borrowing of vocabulary, so to speak, because dude lacks a native vocabulary in context to express relationships between straight guys. That's my intuition of the intent, I can't prove it (and I'm being generous). My intuition of the impact is that the thing ends up a goddamned BL light novel. It's like sitting bound in a chair for two hours having Guy Ritchie of all people whack your moekink buttons repeatedly with a cricket bat. I knew it would be, which is why I was avoiding it. I will say that if one had a problem with feeling sorry for Jim Prideaux, this movie actually helps. A lot.

An observation regarding Tom Hardy characters (list in progress):

* TTSS: plays a straight dude. Lady spy reveals high-level information due to apparent inability to think straight when Tom Hardy is around. Audience totally buys this.

RocknRolla: plays a gay dude. Lawyer guy hands over confidential documents due to apparent inability to think straight when Tom Hardy is around. Audience totally buys this.

Inception: ...I need to rewatch this because I don't actually remember what happens all that well, but I do remember there was A PLAN and it was not predicated on Tom Hardy just BEING AROUND, so there is that.

Comments

[brooms]

anne-marie duff's elizabeth has a hard time thinking straight when she's around tom hardy's dudley in the virgin queen.

[bladderwrack]

re: Inception: seductiveness attribute was part of the character, but only incidental to the plot, iirc? Also Hardy's dream projection turns up in drag at one point.

[petronia]

And, come to think of it, in Stuart dude was playing an alcoholic, heroin-addicted homeless person with muscular dystrophy and violent rage blackouts. XD; No one was particularly seductive in that movie.

[arboretum]

inception: as bladderwrack mentioned, i think he does project himself as female to seduce someone in the dream world at some point? :')

[petronia]

Was it? XD I remember Eames donning the female body, but not what for. And that the primary he was supposed to be copying was the Old Corporation Dude (geez, you can tell I only watched this movie once several years ago...)

I think I am making a note of this because if you gave me a list of actors I would never have said, "That guy is the Rogue build with with +7 Charisma and all his skill levels in Gather Information." Fond as I am of Tom Hardy. And yet it totally works. That's why I'm not the casting director, I guess. XD

[l_elfie]

i just spent several hours noodling around that jukebox website. good fun! XD

repost

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Mia's Bad Girls - the moment when I realized she's probably depressed! And then I suddenly had a lot more sympathy for the way she's always borrowing tragedy as a kind of backdrop to her songs. It's about living a comfortable life but not being able to block out the knowledge of tragedy going on in other parts of the world, isn't it?

I've been talking with people over here about how MIA skipped the UK and went straight to the US, and how Americans really don't understand her. There was a comment on another video that was like "Who is this Egyptian girl and why does she have a London accent"! She's asking for Ytube comments on the Bad Girls video and most of them are just sad.

Maybe it's easier to write these blurbs because you have a day job that challenges your brain but is doable? I know it's easier for me to write short one-off stuff when I have a longer project due, and I think it's easier to do STUFF in general when you're already other stuff, compared to when you're just sitting around and have to shift gears into "productive" mode.

LOL at everything in this entry about Guy Ritchie and Tom Hardy.

Re: repost

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and the Madonna video ties into her halftime show, and her halftime show tottttttally draws inspiration from that "Vogue 300" fanvid that the NYT wrote about a few years ago. I AM CERTAIN OF THIS.

Re: repost

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I saw your Tumblr about that! I didn't see the halftime show, though (being Canadian XD), and all I heard about it afterward was BS controversy re: MIA's middle finger, so I avoided.

Re: repost

[petronia.livejournal.com]

M.I.A.: You got depression out of that song? XD;; I would never have. I mean, I can't say I listened extremely closely to the lyrics (I gave it a 9 mostly because the music itself was so good), but I thought both it and the video were about street racing. I got to know an Omani guy recently who does a lot of cross-country motorsports stuff when he's back home - riding all-terrain motorcycles in the desert, that kind of thing - and the impression I got was that this was like skiing in Canada, i.e. popular for people who can afford it. M.I.A. started off a ILX darling as far as I was concerned, so "Paper Planes" hit in the States something like two years after I'd seen it discussed to death. I have not yet heard "Bad Girls" on the radio, though I heard the new Madonna single today in the mall, and Skrillex's "Rock'n'Roll" about five times.

Ritchie: Have you watched this movie? Geebus. It is a more than serviceable crime caper if you consider it is actually a terrible yaoi manga about yakuza, though by any other standard it would be said to have "plot holes". Also, a tabloid version of Pete Doherty. I'm pretty sure 80% of the flawed pacing is accounted for by 1) everyone is unsympathetic in the early stretch, particularly the ONE female character, in a way that kind of makes it boring because you don't care what happens to them, and 2) even speaking as a Doherty fan, crack pipe ramblings are not cinematographically compelling. The other 20% is... something going wrong in the editing booth, possibly.

Other than Tom Hardy, Mark Strong was in it a lot, also playing a character that's weirdly similar to his one in TTSS. No overlap in the makings of these movies, as far as I know.

Re: repost

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't seen that Ritchie movie! I've seen some of his other ones. You rly rly think it's inspired by Pete Doherty? Dude sure gets around lol.

I saw the street racing too - my comment on the Ytube video was "This reminds me of my Iranian friend, 'All there is to do here is race our cars and try to pick up girls'". I guess it was just the 'live fast die young' part, combined with her four-bar guest spot in the Madonna song, wherein the one good line ("supersonic bionic energy") is lifted from this BoA song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPmqrk0sPcM).

Re: repost

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

It's AWESOME. On the BBC superbowl broadcast, they had to do a 15 minute season highlights montage, backed by stirring trumpets and heterosexual rap, to get the manliness level back up again after Madonna's emasculating interlude.

Re: repost

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I rly rly do think. XD; Among other things. Actually it occurs to me that I have seen the "criminal confesses to other guy in his gang that he's gay, awkwardness ensues" subplot in a Japanese movie and in a Hong Kong movie, so now I'm only missing a French-language movie... It's like when I watched Wanted and was complaining to you about it XD - that is, RocknRolla is better (3/5 stars, Wanted is 2) but they're both movies that somehow sound better when you talk about them than the actual experience of watching them. Fandom likes to mine this type of movie for crossover ficstuff.

I think but can't prove that there's one Korean songwriter (or several) who really likes "-onic" rhymes, because those crop up consistently.