Ok, so I am trying out themes for this thing. If anyone has any suggestions fo the future I would be more than happy to hear them because I am already struggling to work out what to do next week. This week I focussed on Beverages, as you might have guessed from the title of the post.
I tried to include a variety of drinks in these photos. It would have been a bit boring if it was just photo after photo of cups of tea, wouldn’t it? I think my favourite one from these lot is the light refracting through the glass of water. It’s nice and simple, but still pretty in its simplicity. Also, I found this new cider, which is the one in the last photo, which is pretty tasty! I tend to buy cider every Friday after work because I get paid, and like to try new ones on occasion when I see them. Most of the time they are not great so I stick with my regular brand, but this one is not super sweet but not overly bitter either. I’ll definitely grab more of these if I see them about.
This weekend looks to be kinda busy, which is exciting! Hopefully there will be enough spare time to watch the movies we’ve chosen for this week’s theme. Hope you all have a good weekend yourselves!
Man, we’re up to week ten already? Doing this regularly sure is hammering home how quickly time passes. It definitely doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing this for ten weeks, that’s for sure.
Ok, This week’s theme was “Teachers Who Can (And Will) Kick Your Arse”. Honestly, it felt like a bit of a nothing theme. I wasn’t excited for the films, but I also didn’t have a negative enough reaction to them that I wanted to skip it. There were a few suggestions that I hadn’t seen, but that was about it. Anyway, we chose two of the five and set ourselves up for a lazy weekend.
On Friday Ben had to help a friend move house, so it wasn’t until Saturday that we sat down and watched The Untouchables. It’s the 1930s in Chicago, prohibition is in full swing and Al Capone is living large. Elliot Ness, a treasury officer, is put in charge of trying to stamp out the rumrunners. After a bumpy start he finds a clever Irishman (Sean Connery) who teaches him how to be a cold hard killer.
Now, it might have been because I was pretty exhausted when I watched this, but it didn’t really grab me. The acting was ok I guess, but I didn’t really know much about the era and it didn’t really make me want to try and find out more. De Niro was good as Capone, I will say that much. It was interesting to see him from 1987, compared to him in 1997 in Wag The Dog. I think that little bit of interest was more than any interest I had for Kevin Costner (though I only just realised that was who was playing Elliot Ness) or Sean Connery. Sean Connery has looked the same for most of his life; I mean, I guess he’s doing alright for 82 these days, but he always looks old and grizzled in all his roles. I guess he was in his 50s when he was in this movie, but my point still stands. Plus through the whole film I was trying to work out who it was playing George Stone, which was Andy Garcia, who looked so young there! It’s weird how differently people age.
Ben looked up Elliot Ness after we’d finished the movie to see how close it was to the truth. Apparently not really that close at all. I think my favourite variation was either the fact that they found out where these people were going to be through wire taps and so forth, rather than some Magical Irish Old Man who somehow got the information. All in all Ben and I agreed that movie Ness came accross as pretty naiive and a bit of a jerk. I probably would have liked it more if there was more about Al Capone and less about Mr Jerky Jerk here. I was a bit disappointed with this film, because I was hoping I would really like it and proceed to want to watch gangster movies, but the reality of it was that it was a pretty forgettable film. More’s the pity.
On Sunday we chucked The Karate Kid on to watch while we did other things. That’s the original Karate Kid movie by the way, not that awful remake where mini Will Smith learns Kung Fu. No, this was about poor Daniel Larusso, who is made to move to California where he proceeds to get bullied by some delinquent teenagers. You can tell they’re delinquents because they ride dirtbikes. Also because they actually call themselves that. Anyway, Daniel get regularly beaten up by these kids, until the maintainance man for his apartment building, Mr Miyagi, helps him out and teaches him karate. Mr Miyagi also enters him into a karate tournament where he proves his worth and blah blah happy ending for all.
I had never watched Karate Kid in its entirety, so I was actually interested to see the whole story, rather than various scenes I have caught when it’s been playing on the TV. We both figured it would be good to just have on in the background, because it’s not a very concentration-intesive film, but I ended up stopping what I was doing to watch it properly. It was pretty predictable, and so very 80s; it was good for a laugh. There were a few parts that made me stop and think for a moment. First up when Daniel meets the love interest, Alli, for the first time. He just stands there and stares at her; I was getting uncomfortable and I wasn’t even the person being stared at! Also it seemed a bit farfetched that these guys hate him and beat him up but when he wins the tournament all is forgiven and here have a trophy you deserved it, man. But then again I guess the whole premise of the movie is pretty far fetched when you think about it.
Ben and I both decided that the movie would have been better if Mr Miyagi was like Monkey Magic, all levitating into the air and calling up a cloud. Mr Miyagi yelling at Daniel and beating him over the head with a stick. Mr Miyagi yelling a lot in general. That would have definitely made it better. Ben and I also found out that Ralph Macchio was in his 20s when he did this movie. 23! I feel sorry for him if he looked and sounded that young when he was in his 20s. Even photos of him now where he’s in his 50s he still looks in his 30s. He is like the anti-Connery; Connery has looked old his whole life, and Macchio looks young his whole life. I wonder what would happen if we got them to fight?
Alright then. The movies we didn’t watch were X-Men (we’d seen it before and time is limited) and Kill Bill, both 1 and 2. I wasn’t really in the mood to watch either of the Kill Bills, so we just stuck with what we watched. I think it was a good decision. We’re thinking of maybe downloading all five this week and putting them on in the background throughout the week; we’ll see if that eventuates, but it’s about Genetic Engineering, so it might not be the best theme to do this with. Either way, come back next week to see me get scared of dinosaurs.
This week’s photos show the first Japanese lunch Ben and I have had so far this year. We went shopping on the weekend to get me some new jeans and I insisted on having Japanese. Date Night used to always be Japanese food, but we’ve been too poor lately to splurge that much. This was nice because it was a lunchtime special so it still was pretty cheap, really. I regret not taking a photo of the immense amount of rain that occurred yesterday, because there’s basically no evidence of it now. It was amazing though, there was water everywhere!
Also I think the photo of the pigeon is one of my favourites. That stupid bird was so freaked out, it flew away just after I took the photo and I thought it hadn’t turned out right but instead it worked beautifully. That’s about all I can say about these photos, I guess. I think I need to come up with themes for these things so there is a bit more consistency with it all. But I’m terrible with coming up with themes. Dammit.
This week’s theme was “Friends, Romans, Countrymen: A crash course in politics, movie-style”. I was worried that it was going to be hard to decide which suggestions to watch, or that watching them would make me frustrated at politics, but it was surprisingly easy on both counts! Because of that we had a pretty easy-going weekend and watched only two of the five available.
We started off on Friday night with Election. Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is running for school president unapposed. Mr McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is going to be her supervisor if she is elected and doesn’t particularly want that, so he gets other people to run as well to create a “more democratic experience”.
This was… not what we were expecting. I think we both thought it was going to be more serious. I don’t think that it’s a bad thing that it was funnier than we thought it would be, it just took me a bit by surprise. There were a few absolute laugh out loud moments and the writing in general was pretty damn hilarious. The acting was good also; Reese Witherspoon worked perfectly as the over achieving Tracy Flick. Chris Klein’s character, Paul Metzler, was totally a big ol’ happy friendly dog personified. He was just a big dopey dude that never thought a bad thought in his life. To be honest it wasn’t until I looked at the imdb page that I realised Chris Klein was the actor; all throughout the movie I thought it was a young Keanu Reeves. I think he would have been another good choice for that character. I do feel that the film relied a little too much on the internal monologue narrative technique to make jokes, though. There were multiple times when the character narrated something which contradicted what was actually happening. This was funny but after the first few times it got a bit predictable.
Ben commented after it had finished that he felt like it had been one of those “embarrassment-comedy” kinds of films, which he doesn’t like in general, but I didn’t really feel it was. Maybe it was but wasn’t as over the top embarrassment that seems to have become more common these days. Those ones make me genuinely uncomfortable and have to turn them off. I would probably watch Election again if the mood struck.
On Sunday we watched Wag The Dog. The President has been accused of sexually assaulting some sort of Girl Guide-esque girl, so his advisers hire Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) to come up with a plan to distract the voters long enough to get The President re-elected. His plan is to start a fictitious war with Albania with the help of a Hollywood Producer (Dustin Hoffman).
I had watched this when I was in high school as an example of powerplay or something, and had subsequently forgotten almost all of the film except for the basic plot. Second time round it was hilarious. Straight up hits slightly too close to home hilarious. I was reminded how great DeNiro and Hoffman are, they played their parts brilliantly. There was a moment of realisation when I remembered a certain part of the plot and I got really excited to see it unfold. And Woody Harrelson plays crazy so well, it was perfect. The whole film was a very poignant commentary on how the media is so involved in politics these days and how artificial it all seems, but very sharply witty and entertaining at the same time. I can see why I had to watch it in high school, but now that I have a bit more intelligence and maturity I can appreciate it properly. It seems that a lot of the films I watched originally were at that point in my life where a lot of it went straight over my head, and I am a bit sad because I probably won’t watch a heap of films from back then because I initially didn’t like them. I’m glad this book is around to “force” me to rewatch some.
I read somewhere (probably on imdb or wikipedia, so nowhere reliable) that George W. Bush used lines from this movie in some of his speeches. I really wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Ben and I were talking afterwards about how this was made in ’97 but was pretty spot on about how Al-Quaeda had been handled in the press. It’s definintely making me more sceptical about what footage I see in the media; I was already pretty untrusting of all that, but this was just another reminder about how easily things can be manipulated these days.
The other films suggested for this theme were Primary Colors (John Travolta basically playing Bill Clinton), Power (Richard Gere helping politicians get into office) and In The Loop (a British black comedy about public servants). I think we chose well this weekend, it was a nice entertaining time. Next week is about Awesome Teachers, so that might be pretty interesting. It could be awfully clichéd, but it could be awesome. I guess we’ll see, eh?
Another week has passed and it’s the weekend again. There’s not that many photos this week, but here they are anyway..
We didn’t do much this week. Ben and I went to Newtown twice on the weekend and I bought two dresses, but other than that it was not particularly exciting. I have been having trouble getting up when I’m supposed to in the mornings, so I don’t have the extra time to take photos on my way to work. Still, better a few than nothing!
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