So, I know I don’t really talk about my personal life on here that much, But I think maybe I want to. I guess I can start with the news that I have quit my job! I handed my resignation letter in last week, and my last day is tomorrow. After that I will be deliciously unemployed again and get to start the ever-enjoyable job application process once more.
This is a big, scary decision that I am really glad I made. Normally I overthink things a lot and delay the inevitable when it comes to things like quitting, and I did that to a degree this time, but I made the decision to quit and actually resigned fairly promptly compared to how I usually go. I think it took me about four days to get my stuff together and write the letter and hand it in (after talking it through with Ben first, of course). Since that day I’ve been so much more relaxed than I have been since starting this job. It’s amazing how much happier I am, even though I’ve still been having to deal with the same issues as I did before. My freedom is looming and things don’t seem to matter as much any more.
I didn’t talk about it on here because it feels a little too public, but if we have hung out in person (or on some places on the internet) in the last three months then I am pretty sure I have ranted about the people I work with and how angry they made me. I am almost positive that everyone I talked to about this told me to get out of that place and it still took me three months of working there to really realise that I didn’t want to be there enough to stop making excuses and actually leave. I’m not really sure what is going to happen from now on. Obviously I need a new job, but I don’t really know what sort of direction I’ll be heading in. Maybe I’ll get another office job, maybe I’ll go back to retail? I do like the regularity of office work, and am enjoying having my weekends free, so that looks like the most likely scenario, but if I find a retail job that sounds awesome I can just go for it. There are so many options out there for me that it’s a little daunting, but I am also really excited to see what happens.
Money’s going to be tighter with me not working, but I am still strangely positive about all this. I can do this, I can find a job that doesn’t make me feel like a terrible person. I am also going to try and be more creative these days. I’ve been so stressed lately that I haven’t wanted to do anything at all, no drawing, no writing (hence why these entries haven’t been super wordy), I didn’t even feel like taking shitty instagram photos, I just went through the motions. Since officially resigning I have all these things I want to do. It’s liberating and a bit overwhelming; I have all these ideas, I don’t know where to start.
Hopefully on Wednesdays I will write posts like this, about what I’m doing and how things are going; it might just be a drawing I’ve done, or an update on crafts, or even just a blog about the week. I also want to actually work on making this site look more like how I want it to. Baby steps. So here’s to the future, in all its terrifying glory. Here’s hoping it doesn’t fuck me over.
This week’s theme was “Chris Nolan: Mastermind”. Fairly self-explanatory, five films directed by Christopher Nolan. I like the director themed weeks, because they are interesting to see the common themes or styles that occur in the different stories. This week, however, I only watched one film. Ben and I realised that we had both seen four out of the five suggestions, but I hadn’t seen the one Ben had and vice versa. Seeing we had one on dvd and would have had to download the other, I made the choice to go with the dvd.
So on Sunday I watched The Prestige. Two magicians in ‘Victorian England’ start as friends then turn into rivals, both trying to out-trick each other and get revenge for previous slights between the two of them. They become obsessed with outdoing each other which ultimately destroys them and the people they love.
I watched this a few years ago and loved it. I remember we bought it on a whim because it was one of those ‘three for the price of two’ deals and it sounded interesting enough. I don’t remember there being much publicity for it at the time and there was another magician-themed film out around the same time that did a lot of publicity so The Prestige seemed to be overlooked. I think that’s a bit of a tragedy because this film was really well done. I have tried to get Ben to watch this for a while (he read the synopsis on wikipedia when I first told him about it, so he knew the twist and subsequently didn’t care any more) but he really didn’t care for it. He watched a bit before going back to his computer because it was boring. I on the other hand was really excited to watch it again because it had been a few years since I watched it last and remembered enjoying it a lot.That being said, the movie doesn’t really work well with multiple viewings.
Once you know the big twist at the end it is interesting to go back and see the clues throughout the film, but it also makes it a bit boring. There’s not really any mystery to keep you watching. Add to that a few dodgy accents (David Bowie, I’m looking at you) and I didn’t really connect with it like I used to. It’s interesting because I still feel like it was quite a well made film that dealt with obsession and the lengths that people go to fulfil that obsession. The actors were very good and I did appreciate the complexity of the roles. The story was interesting in that all the threads were tied up neatly and in a way that still kept you wondering how it all worked. The film had the three acts of a magic trick that were mentioned in the film: the pledge, the switch, and the prestige. It was entertaining; I just didn’t seem to care any more once I knew the end.
I guess that ties in with what was said throughout the film. Once people know how the trick has been done they don’t care about the trick any more. Magicians should never tell their secrets to people because it ruins the magic. So I guess in that respect the film had another layer to it and made it that bit more complex. But I don’t know if that was intentional; it probably wasn’t. I’m pretty sure most film makers don’t make a film just to be watched once.
The other suggestions were Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (we’ve both seen these and didn’t feel like watching them), Inception (seen it, have it but couldn’t access it because itunes is dumb) and Memento (Ben has seen, I haven’t, would have had to acquire it). I feel like maybe I should have watched Memento instead this week. Reading the description it sounds interesting but I was just super lazy this week. This whole Movie Book Challenge I decided to do has started getting a bit tiring. I’m going to keep it up because I still like doing this, but sometimes I am just sick of watching movies and want a week off, or want to watch silly trashy films instead. Next week is about ‘Interracial Clashes’, so we’ll see how I go with that one.
Seeing last week was a veritable failure on the movie watching front, I was a bit worried I was going to just stop with this whole shebang out of laziness. It was nice to have a break from movies for a week, but I have been doing so well with this that I would be really disappointed if I gave up now.
This week’s theme was “Babysitters Who Simply Shouldn’t Be Trusted”. Sure there are plenty of movies of babysitters that are lovely and wonderful that change little kiddies’ lives, but what about the bad babysitters? The messed up people who screw with innocent children’s heads? They need fair representation too. That’s what this week is all about.
Now seeing as I broke my good habits of being organised in regards to this, and being social again, I only watched one movie this week. And that movie was Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead. A family full of awful, selfish children think they’re going to have the best summer holiday ever, as their mother is going to Australia for two months. Unfortunately for them she hires a nasty old lady to be their babysitter (who subsequently dies) and they have to fend for themselves, to hilarious ends.
This was one of those movies that I tried to watch when I was younger and just didn’t get it and turned it off after probably ten minutes. I was a bit hesitant about trying it again because if it’s still boring then I’ve wasted time downloading this thing. But I’m glad I did, because I actually get the jokes now. Who would have thought that jokes about having to work would make more sense now that I have actually been employed!? Also, while it is a bit dated these days, it’s held up pretty well over time. While the outfits and hairstyles were a bit hilarious at times, on the whole I was able to look past those things and just enjoy the movie, which has been proven to be a bit hard to do in previous films.
While this movie was suggested because of the terrible old lady at the beginning, I think it works pretty well in the theme when talking about the older siblings being the babysitters. The eldest child (Sue Ellen) goes and gets a job, and the stoner second-eldest is left in charge of looking after three unruly kids. Obviously this is played on and the kids run wild (and hurt themselves), but I guess you could look at it from that perspective. I wonder how it would have been if the old lady hadn’t died and if having such an overbearing babysitter for those two months would have been good for that family. Of course we’ll never know.The movie is essentially saying (in a funny way) that having the responsibility that comes with having to be self sufficient is supposed to be a good thing for the family and how they grow as people as a result of the old lady carking it, but I still would have found it interesting to see how they dealt with her. I guess it wouldn’t have been as funny a movie if she had hung around, unless they stayed little shits and terrorised her the whole film? I think ultimately I like this story better.
I also downloaded one of the other movies, Raising Arizona, but didn’t watch it. I figured I would hold out on watching Nic Cage movies until the Nic Cage week. Oh yes, there’s a Nic Cage week coming up. The other suggestions were Halloween, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and The Night Of The Hunter. Next week is all about Christopher Nolan films, which should be fun!
Ok, so, I haven’t been taking many photos lately. This might be because I’ve been fairly stressed, especially because of work. I guess that puts a dampener on one’s photo-taking mood. Anyway, here are some from the last two weeks.
The last four photos are from my trip to visit my family. It seems strangely appropriate that I don’t take photos of my family, but of my old cat. Willow’s nearly 10 years old now, so she is suitably grumpy, but she still seemed to remember who I was and get lots of pats from me. I kind of wanted to take her home with me. I wonder how Tiger and Scout would have felt about that.
Welcome, once again, to this week’s Movie Reviews. I thought maybe because of the long weekend we would watch more of the suggestions than usual, but two of the suggestions were actually multiple films, so that ruled that idea out. Instead we took two out of the five down to the south coast while we visited Ben’s parents and figured we could watch them together.
This week’s theme was “Wizard Death-Match”. Marc Fennell chose the films for this theme in terms of strange wizards, rather than particularly impressive or “noble” ones. While this is an interesting take on the theme, he still chose some obvious films to suggest, and I feel like it would have been a more interesting theme if he had made a few different choices.
We started on Friday (after a deliciously sacrilegious dinner of Chinese food) with Big Trouble in Little China. Tough Guy Trucker Jack Burton (Kurt Russel) accidentally gets caught in the middle of a feud in San Francisco’s Chinatown between factions of the Chinese population. Somehow this also involves some powerful (but cursed) wizard-emperor guy who is looking for a specific lady to marry to break his curse. Or something like that.
Ben and his family had seen this film a fair few times, so they knew all the funny lines and commented through it. Ben’s Dad likes to do this a lot, and I can’t decide whether it annoyed me more than usual because I hadn’t seen the movie before, or because I’m normally doing that and it made me realise how annoying I am probably being to everyone else. To all my friends who I’ve watched movies with, I apologise for being irritating.
In regards to the movie, I took notes while watching it because it was so strange and I knew I was going to forget things. It devolved pretty quickly into comments on how terrible Kurt Russel’s hair is. Seriously, every film I have seen him in has him sporting a spectacular mullet. He seems to never learn. Some of the notes I can’t even remember what I was referring to. One of them was “Jack Burton, so manly he defies physics”; I think maybe he jumped to kick someone and flew through the air? There was a lot of that going on, so I guess it could have referred to any number of scenes.
I don’t know if I am being overly sensitive these days from having to deal with racist coworkers, but I felt pretty uncomfortable while watching this. For me it felt kinda racist, in the same way that Monkey Magic does; it was cheesy and the effects were a bit dodgy so it seemed harmless, but something was still a bit off. I understand that Chinese culture and history and religion is pretty confusing to westeners in general and Big Trouble in Little China play on that and refer to that throughout the film, but I just can’t get past the fact that most of the time it felt like I was laughing at the silly Asians and their silly culture. Look at them; so funny with all their elaborate hells and they’re all good at fighting because they all study martial arts, right?
Ben gave me a different perspective on it, which I think helped me to understand it but didn’t really make me feel any less uncomfortable by it. He feels that every character in the film is a cliché, not just the Asian ones. Jack Burton is a stereotypical action hero tough guy thrown in the middle of a strange situation; Gracie Law is a clichéd plucky attorney trying to get more information about ‘evil’ Lo Pan; even the journalist is a clichéd ditzy woman being pointed towards a story and missing it entirely. The Chinese characters may also be stereotypes but they seem to be more self referential, in that they also realise that certain aspects of their culture is batshit crazy.
That being said, even though I was not entirely comfortable with the film, I did enjoy it to some extent. Jack’s reactions to the increasingly insanity was a nice touch, and Lo Pan’s character in general was hilarious. I did enjoy the way it was the opposite to a normal buddy comedy film; the big tough guy was actually pretty useless while his slightly weedy sidekick is actually pretty proficient in beating people up. I think I’ll have to watch this again by myself or just with Ben to catch the bits I’ve missed and see if I feel less uncomfortable the second time around.
The next night we watched Excalibur. The plot’s fairly obvious, it’s just the story of King Arthur and Merlin.
My real point of reference with the Arthurian Mythology is the TV miniseries Merlin, with Sam Neil in that role. I think that because of that I judged Excalibur a bit harsher than I would have if this was my first experience with the story. Of course a lot of the (2 hours and 15 minute) viewing consisted of us making snarky comments on the film. I pointed out British actors I recognised, asked why Arthur’s accent was completely different to the people who raised him, noticed that Arthur looked more and more like Dave Grohl; you know, the usual film-watching stuff. The film is pretty dated, effects-wise, and the acting is pretty camp so I couldn’t really take it that seriously. Plus it went for ages; I realised we’d been watching it for an hour and a half and still had to get to the holy grail part of the story and just wanted it to be over.
The character of Merlin was actually pretty interesting, though. Nicol Williamson, who played Merlin, had an interesting take on the role. He was still pretty camp like the rest of them, but there were times where he seemed so frustrated with the people around him. He just keeps trying to help men but they keep not listening to him and doing stupid things all the time; then they keep asking for him to help them fix what they screwed up! I can see that being really annoying if I was in that situation. Ben mentioned that at times he seemed to be portrayed as a kind of jester at the court, which makes Arthur asking him for his advice at times take a more mocking feel, and I guess makes the character of Merlin a bit more tragic. He was definitely the most interesting of all the characters in the film. I really think I need to watch this again without Ben’s Dad making a running commentary, but it’s so long and I am lazy, so I probably won’t. What I have really taken away from this film is that I want to watch the miniseries again.
We meant to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail this weekend also, but figured it would be best to leave that until we were back home, and then watched the new episodes of our latest favourite TV shows instead. I’ve seen Holy Grail before, and the wizard in that s not really a hug part of the film so I couldn’t really be bothered watching it all for that one section. The other suggestions were the Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings series, and we don’t have enough hours in the day to watch all eight Harry Potter films and the three Lord of the Rings ones, so they also got rejected. I can see why they were chosen though, the main wizards in both series are pretty quirky compared to the stereotypical all-knowing sorcerer in a lot of fantasy stories.
That’s it for this week! Next week is going to test me to see if I am claustrophobic or not, so it might not be as successful as some of the previous themes. I guess we’ll have to see how it goes, eh?
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