Currently Watching

Started by Steve, July 14, 2007, 17:49:04

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MeltingMan

En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

Ulrich

The holy city breathed like a dying man...

MeltingMan

"Fashion Victim: The Last  of the G*cc*s" (1998)

Quote from: Taylori guess it's better to be happy on a bicycle afterall...

👍🏻
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

MeltingMan

Hedda Gabler parts 1 and 2 (staged in 1977 in Bochum) on YT 👌🏻
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

Ulrich

Tonight I wanna re-watch a movie I saw years ago; "Halbblut" in the German version (tonight on "arte").
Back then (25 years ago or so) I liked it, will see what I make of it this time...

"Thunderheart" is the original title:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105585/

The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

CLASSIC DR WHO PLUS 1996 DR WHO MOVIE

We just finished watching the 1996 Dr Who movie - which is sort of the bridge between the classic series and the modern series. This was after concluding our project of over five years, to watch all available classic Dr Who episodes (1963-1989). Brett is a huge fan from way back and has basically all the available classic Dr Who plus novelisations, audio dramas etc etc - and he writes Cyberman essays for Gallifrey Base.

Clearly, Brett had seen most of the classic episodes before, but I wasn't a Dr Who fan when I met him. That's because every time I accidentally chanced on the programme as a teenager in the 80s, all I could see were cheesy props, a male cast as a hero and females in the role of dumb blonde (e.g. Jo, in the 70s re-runs), half-naked eye candy (Leela, in the 70s re-runs, and don't forget Peri's amazing inflatable gazongas in the 80s), peril monkey (lots of them) and/or Greek chorus (ditto), and this didn't appeal to me at all - I had zero interest in what I saw as space soap opera for males. I didn't really like science fiction anyway, although I very much enjoyed reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a mid-teen.

Having now watched the classic series, I do think my original criticisms are still valid for lengthy stretches of the show, but I've also come to appreciate the exceptions - the significant amount of times the more enlightened script writers wrote solid, useful, intelligent female characters, or improved the on-screen lot of an established "peril monkey/screamer/dumb but nice sidekick." Actually the original companions back in 1963 weren't bad in that respect (but I wasn't around to see it back then and never saw re-runs) - Susan was an intelligent child, Barbara and Ian were intelligent adults, interactions were civilised and not particularly gender-biased.


The original crew

The rot didn't really begin to set in until we got Jo as a sidekick to third doctor Jon Pertwee. Although she was formally a significantly qualified character (intelligence and self-defence training), she came across as self-infantilising, and was an awful "peril monkey" who screamed enough to shatter glass. It didn't help that Pertwee's doctor was rather paternalistic. The Pertwee era had started with the promising female character of Liz Shaw, a Cambridge scientist drafted by UNIT - good for girl (and boy) audience members of this children's/family programme to see. Jo was eventually replaced with journalist Sarah Jane Smith, a far better female character, smart, independent, a problem-solver and not a regular screamer.


Sarah Jane Smith and Dr Who

Sarah Jane was unfortunately replaced with Leela a couple of years into Tom Baker's stint. I rather liked Leela as a character - she was independent, strong, smart, and in those ways a good role model - but the me Tarzan/you Jane outfit with full display of cleavage, very short skirt and "FM boots" made her the first overtly sexualised Dr Who companion - and sexualised for the purposes of being eye candy for the male audience, with some of the production team admitting the idea was to give the fathers watching the show something to look at (God I wanted to shoot them; deliberately dressing an actress that way in order to give not just men, but married men someone to leer at - I wonder how Louise Jameson, who played Leela, felt about this - it's rather like the ridiculous contemporary insistence by male sporting bureaucrats on female beach volleyball players wearing revealing clothing, such as male competitors of course don't have to wear, and fining them when they wear clothes they find more comfortable - there's a difference between people choosing to wear something revealing, and being forced to do so by others). This is a decade after the start of Dr Who and a retrograde step, and it spoilt what was otherwise a good show - Tom Baker's early years are some of my favourite years from classic Dr Who.


Get your kinky outfits right here

I'm mostly going to skip over a gender representation analysis of the rest of the classic era, and just say that Colin Baker was my least favourite Dr Who ever, in part because of the way he played the character and in part because of uninspirational writing. His predecessor whose name escapes me because I always think of him as Tristan from All Creatures Great and Small was OK towards the end of his tenure, and his successor Sylvester McCoy was a gem who nailed the role, in spite of not getting anywhere near the best stories written for the classic series. I love his acting, and the character he constructed for Dr Who. The less is said about Mel, the better - and by now we're in the late 80s, how ironic is that (but watch Ashes to Ashes for a satirical depiction of sexism and other -ims in the 80s - and above all, watch it because it's an excellent show).


Dr Who and Ace in WWII

After Mel came Ace, which resulted in a very good mentor-young person dynamic - Sylvester McCoy's doctor was never patronising and Ace was no doormat; it was nice to see such a healthy, positive, productive relationship between a middle-aged (actually ancient, he's over 800) person and a young person. I bet lots of high schoolers would have enjoyed being taught by someone with the seventh doctor's good attitude, thoughtfulness, solid ethics, comedic theatrics, joie de vivre and respect for others, including young people.

It's very sad that the BBC axed the classic series during McCoy's run, and that by the time he was Dr Who, the scriptwriting and production were mostly lacklustre - his acting deserved better. And he briefly did get a chance to showcase his considerable skills in a better kind of production, when he opened the 1996 Dr Who movie, before transforming into Paul McGann.

We watched the Dr Who movie a couple of nights ago, as our bridge from the classical to the modern series - in which I have never seen the Christopher Ecclestone years (except The Unearthly Child episode which I loved) and most of David Tennant's (I don't like his Dr Who, much as I liked him in Broadchurch, but do love the episode Blink - it's excellent and he's largely not in it). I'll be very happy to re-watch the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi eras - I liked both their takes on Dr Who - plus the best episodes from Jodie Whittaker's tenure (I largely don't like the writing and production values of the current series, which is a shame - there's just so little space to breathe and reflect anymore, for example, just constant bombardment with action and noise).

The 1996 movie was a co-production between the BBC and the team of an expat British childhood fan now working in American TV production. Overall I really like the film - with the exception of the apparently inevitable cliches that are thrown into productions for a part-American audience: Namely, the gangsters, the shootings, and the car chases - all of which I can do without, thank you very much, and that bit didn't feel like Dr Who to me, although admittedly, this story was set in America and I guess you can just say, "Well, he's visiting America and all that BS is culturally normal there."


The infamous green bubble-wrap monster

It was nice to see Dr Who with some glossy production for once - although I also firmly like the best of the old stage-play-like approach in the classic series, for example, The Monster of Pelodon, and I actually dislike overly glossy modern productions - and though green-painted bubble-wrap monsters are a bit of a stretch, I did enjoy the audience having to use their imagination rather than being spoon-fed ready-made CGI monsters - and I do like to see how the art departments made props within the financial and material constraints they had (you get this at length in the specials).

To me, the very best thing about the 1996 Dr Who movie was the acting by both Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann, who are both brilliant in different ways. If you watch McGann's Dr Who audition, you can see why he's compelling - look at how he goes from almost still features to a fireworks of expressions in a moment - look at the enthusiasm:


There was a bit of criticism about this Dr Who incarnation engaging in snogging, but I thought it would have been strange if he'd not kissed a person who he was clearly falling in love with, and it was all tastefully presented - neither twee nor excessive, just natural. After all, Dr Who didn't sign up to the Catholic priesthood in any of the adventures I ever saw, and it's not as if this was his travel companion - although when given a chance to become one at the end, she chooses her own life instead, having learnt a lot about who she is and intending to employ the new understanding - and I thought that was an excellent ending: Sometimes just the change in yourself and the memory of a set of experiences are enough.

I think it's a terrible shame they never made proper seasons with Paul McGann in the lead - it had so much potential. He re-appeared briefly in Night of the Doctor, which we've seen before but are going to watch again, before getting into Christopher Ecclestone's stories.

A closing note: If anyone out there ever decides to watch or re-watch classic Dr Who, might I recommend the very hilarious companion blog called Adventures with the Wife in Space, in which Dr Who devotee Neil Perryman did the tour of the entire classic series with wife, also called Sue, and recorded her responses as they went. Those two are nearly as much fun as Giles Coran and Sue Perkins doing their documentary tour of food through various historical periods, in which they dress up for each era and then go try it out - for education combined with laughs, not even Horrible Histories can beat this pair!
SueC is time travelling

MeltingMan

Tiny Houses in Gefahr: Mini-Häusern droht Abriss | Markt | NDR (YT)
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

MeltingMan

FENDACE (V*rs*c* x F*nd*) | Full Show 😲
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

Ulrich

Late last night I watched this movie on telly (it was alright, but nothing "special"):

The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

AND THIS FROM THE BBC?

Warning: Rant ahead

We're currently watching Series 2 of Down to Earth, and do not recommend it. (I commented on Series 1 as part of a recent book review of the material the TV series was allegedly based on here). The BBC managed to turn an interesting true story into a soapified confection. I originally only saw Series 1, and caught one or two episodes of the two subsequent series on the hop, but missed most of them. This is why we decided to keep watching to see what became of the TV version.

It got worse. We're five episodes into Series 2 and have watched with increasing chagrin, and boredom. The difference between Series 1 and Series 2 is that at least Series 1 had a focus, while Series 2 bumbles along like a terminal soap opera from one episode with nothing to say to the next, ad infinitum. Brian gets worse - he's always been inept and shouty; now he's becoming totally self-centred, he's a blowhard and a bully as well as a professional victim when things inevitably go wrong - and he appears to learn nothing from his many mistakes.

We've just sat through an episode where, after the death of his mother, he develops malign theories about other people and goes to confront a harmless old man who was a friend of his mother's, convinced he was trying to con her out of money. Brian approaches the old man rudely and hostilely in his own home and isn't interested in his side of the story, he just shoots off, judge, jury and executioner, leaving the old man in tears. Later on he physically and verbally assaults the man at the funeral, even though he's already aware he was wrong in his original assumptions. Then he repeats the pattern with another person - and really, he's been yelling and bullying as part of his modus operandi all along.

What is the point of a TV series which has the central male character behaving badly on a regular basis, hurting and harming other people, without any apparent critique? You get the strong impression that the writers, like his TV family, thought, "Oh, that's just Brian." Each time Brian hurts others, he ends up feeling sorry for himself instead of the people he's hurt, and mostly the family just "there, there" him and enable his big-baby behaviour. That's not OK. The standards we walk past are the standards we accept. It's no different in our own families - people are responsible for their own behaviour, and need to be held to account when their actions hurt and harm other people.

Holding a person to account is not walking them back to a place to get them to apologise for their behaviour. That's what you might do with a child, but in my view it's not appropriate to do that with an adult - the apology needs to come from them, be their idea, and their own undertaking. The idea that an adult should have another person to parent them into good behaviour is absurd. An adult needs to parent themselves into good behaviour when necessary, and they can consult other people for help if they need it.

We watched a brilliant film about hurt, harm and the culture of misogyny earlier this week. The film showed that misogyny isn't just perpetuated by males, it's also perpetuated by females. That's entirely my own experience as well, both from childhood and from adulthood. Women can internalise misogyny and pass it on to their own offspring, and they can dish it out in the workplace and other public spaces. It seems to me that misogyny is part of a swathe of general human toxicity that abounds in the general population, and that infected people pass this kind of thing on to other susceptible people (such as children in their care, and adults with low empathy and/or low capacities for critical and independent thinking). Also, the system itself is infected with this stuff and perpetuates it.

So after watching that film, I find it positively toxic that the BBC would show a programme like Down to Earth where a male (or anybody, but this is a male) perpetrates his BS on other people around him year after year, with so little attempt at critique and with what looks to me like way too much enabling from his own family and society, and we're supposed to go, "Well, that's just Brian for you, and Faith clearly loves and forgives him!"???

Brian is an emotional three-year-old who holds other people to ransom on a regular basis. In transactional analysis terms, he swings from child to authoritarian parent and spouse, and back again, but never seems to act like an adult. Faith is the adult in the relationship, but too often she also parents Brian, as if he's a mentally incapacitated child she has to make allowances for. The expectations on him are way too low. People will often live down to your expectations if you lower them enough, instead of expecting better from them. Whether it's a politician or a spouse or a child, BS is BS and if we accept it and walk past it, we enable it. The problem is a two-way problem - the person with the bad behaviour, and the lack of consequences from their networks.

Brett and I both agreed that neither of us could love or would want to remain with a partner who routinely treated other people like shit, and didn't mend his or her ways. While she is a strong character and speaks her own mind freely, Faith too frequently provides a soft landing for Brian to fall back on when he turns into a self-pitying man-baby after once again perpetuating another abuse cycle. This perpetuates misogyny by sending the message that this is somehow OK. He, and the people around him, learn nothing useful when that kind of behaviour is rewarded with hugs and loving attention, instead of an adult-to-adult talk about how you're not going to stand by and watch him treat people like shit and then be his teddy-bear when he comes to you crying because it's backfired.

People like Faith, by putting up with people like Brian, end up spending their lifetimes living with big, irresponsible babies instead of self-educating, self-correcting adults with whom they can have a truly loving and egalitarian adult relationship - and they model that pattern as acceptable and normal for their own children, and wider society. Misogyny is the expectation that women will caretake male needs - household, sexual, emotional, career etc - that it's their job to bend over backwards, as a gender, to further the agendas of the other gender. A decent relationship rises above toxic gender stereotypes like this and is about healthy cooperation and people bringing out the best in each other, and mutually supporting each other, and being responsible for their own behaviour and lives.

I've gone out with people like Brian and had a marriage proposal from someone like this, and his own mother told me, "Don't do it, he's just like his father, and you'd be as unhappy as I am." I had no intentions of marrying someone like this, once I could see it - I then decided to raise the standards of what I would accept from other people, and as a result I'm married to Brett, who's not a bully or a big baby but a creative, interesting, responsible adult and my equal. It's not that we're not flawed, but that we're fundamentally both adults who take responsibility for their own lives, enjoy continuous learning and care about being fair to others.

The culture of misogyny is a complicated thing, and of course, misogyny is just one particular form of entitlement, of many - of people thinking they're somehow better than others and deserve more than others. But we're the ones who need to set our own standards of what we find acceptable treatment of self and others and what we don't, instead of just absorbing the various toxicities of our families of origin, societies and cultures, and perpetuating these. It's not a simple thing, but mindless treatments on TV shows like Down to Earth are really unhelpful and just normalise things that are offensive and deeply unfair.

I'm not saying don't watch it, I'm just saying watch it critically if you're gonna. And yeah, there's also many better things to watch, which ask questions and demand your careful thinking and will further your ability to become a better version of yourself, rather than seek to anaesthetise you into accepting unacceptable things as "normal".

I'm not quite done ranting. The musical score for this series was really nice first time around, but each passage is repeated endlessly in the series until it becomes predictable: Oh look, here's the "sad" passage again. Here's the "action" piece again. Here's the "hoe-down, hey, we're in the country." Couldn't they afford any new music for three long years?

Also, there's lots of animals in the series, but particularly in Series 2, the animal handling, animal husbandry and alleged animal behaviour become a joke. Horses in a free-range situation do not run over people coming to them with food, nor will one after the other be trampling the person - they stop short, especially if a person has left the feed bucket and is running away, as happened in the series - they'd never pursue a person when they can see the bucket on the ground. You can be stampeded by cattle, but horses don't behave that way. Furthermore: Horses knee deep in grass aren't hungry. You don't keep a steer in a stable if you've got a field of grass in the springtime that he could be feeding himself on. You don't buy a farmer who just had anthrax spores found on his property new livestock as a present, not until the anthrax situation has been cleared. And it's not believable that a farmer is bonding with two sheep who are clearly restrained with off-camera ropes on their halters and who are rebuffing repeated attempts at having food shoved in their faces. Those animals didn't want to be there, no matter what the script said, and this would have been obvious to anyone with a reasonable amount of exposure to farm animals.

It's not often I've been disappointed by a BBC production. Maybe I've not been watching enough of them to find one that seems to me to have the low standards found in many commercial channels...
SueC is time travelling

MeltingMan

Benny Hill - Supersonic 😂

En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

MeltingMan

Al Shares A Bed With Marcy! | Married With Children 🤣

En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

MeltingMan

G*cc* Love Parade

For the first thirty minutes I felt like I was in the Overlook Hotel. The background music managed that alone. And another classic film (besides The Shining) literally imposed itself: Chinatown. I don't have to say a lot about the show: G*cc* doesn't always hit the nerve, but very often. Pure goosebumps! By the way, thank you for the cooperation with TNF.

23:41 😄

PS: I'm a little ambivalent about the film, which will also be shown in German cinemas from December 2nd. Not everyone can identify with Lady Gaga. She will undoubtedly be nominated for one or more Academy Awards, but on the catwalk and in interviews she documents her own personality and not necessarily her attachment to the brand / film role. I find that a bit insensitive. It's different with Jared Leto, who was also quite 'distorted' in the role. Was it necessary to alienate such a handsome actor? Couldn't his part have been taken over by one of the 'old stars'? After all, more than two main roles (male / female) were cast here. Open questions ...
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

MeltingMan

Neighbors from Hell (by piddleass)


I was and am in a similar situation. Although the rest periods (10 p.m.-6 a.m., 1 p.m.-3 p.m.) are required by law in Germany, carpeting is not (anymore). If I were to work, I would have to wear silicone earplugs all the time, unless the 'polluter' above me is not in the house. The problem is also that the landlords shy away from any potential conflict. When listening to music, the "silence afterwards" is very important. Even if I've seen a 90min film. This has not been possible for years because I keep hearing steps, voices or annoying noises of any kind. The solution would be a more expensive apartment, and there certainly is. At the moment it is unclear whether and when I will be ready.
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

MeltingMan

QuoteSong: Peine Perdue - Amour Paresse (2014), released on the album No Souvenir
Film: L'Amour Braque (1985), directed by Andrzej Żuławski

En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)