Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to chris,
More than any year I can recall, in 2011 I had incredible difficulty finding gems amid the hype.
Which is kind of sad, because 2011 was a pretty respectable year for the “loud, dumb but full o’ fun” popcorn flick – though we shall not mention Transformers: Dark Side of The Moon again, and make hex signs at the inevitable fourth go round. Rise of The Planet of The Apes in particular was one of the pleasant surprises of the year – and much much better than it needed to be. So was Thor and Real Steel.
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to chris,
That Tom Cullen and Weekend weren’t nominated is a crime.
Christopher Plummer got a consolation Oscar (and a well-deserved one) for his charming but slight turn in the charming but slight Beginners, but yes Weekend was damn good. Often quite uncomfortable to watch, but in all the right ways.
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Russell Brown,
As ever at Vector, it literally depends on where you stand.
Which begs the question – why are so many venues that have “live music” in the brief from the get-go acoustic disaster zones? Yes, I know it’s tricky but if I was promoter whose livelihood ultimately depended on happy punters…
And if somebody is drunk, picking fights whilst waiting to purchase, dont sell them any more grog.
Sofie, I'm going to have to give you a time out if you keep talking nonsense like that. Actually observe licensing laws and make life a little more pleasant for everyone else? Pshaw...
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Russell Brown,
But I expected them to be rough as guts – I’ve seen them several times before.
And while I know this isn’t exactly Mr. Christie’s complaint, I don’t know why anyone would go to a live gig and complain that the toons don’t sound just like they do on the platters. If that’s really what you want, bands might as well push a button then bugger off for a drink or twelve.
As far as New Order are concerned, it seems like a minor miracle Morris and Hook didn't kill each other years back in some horrendous murder-suicide.
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Seen Ides of March yet, Craig? I was impressed but I suspect you don’t like George C like I do.
No I don't, purely on aesthetic grounds - he's a very good, if limited, actor.but as a writer/director here he just didn't manage to breath much life or energy into an essentially bogus melodrama about the perils of fucking the help.
Compared to the cascading bug-fuckery of the RW Republican primary, I guess there's no way truth couldn't be stranger than fiction. But we're endlessly being told that Ryan Gosling's character is this hotshot campaign operative, that Clooney's Clintonesque charmer is in a bare-knuckle fight for the soul of America and Jeffrey Wright is some Kingmaker who'd give Machiavelli the shits. But telling isn't showing, and that's what cinema is.
Still there were some good points: Wright does the very best he can (which is a lot) with a barely-there plot token part. It's also so damn easy to cast Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as loveable indie losers, it was a joy to see then rip loose as dueling campaign whose weary self-awareness of their own cynical manipulations make it all that much worse. Must also admit my critical facilities abandon me when I look into Ryan Gosling's cold dead eyes, just wish he (and Clooney) had stronger material to work with.
Rather doubt I'll be paying full list for The Ides of March when it comes out on DVD, but I must admit when it comes to a film adaptation of a sour, bitter (and yes, bogusly melodramatic) black comedy about presidential politics, I'll stick to Franklin Shaffner's 1964 adaptation of Gore Vidal's The Best Man. (An election year Broadway revival of the play is opening next week.)
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to Rob Hosking,
But Broadbent is carving out a nice niche for himself playing the put-upon husband of aging batty English women.
Or in Longford, playing an aging batty peer with a put-upon but elegantly exasperated wife, played by Lindsay Duncan. (She also did a rather nice Thatcher in a 2009 tele-film which wisely narrowed the focus to her resignation. Duncan delivered a performance off a decent script that took her politics – and political life – seriously. Streep delivered a clean, souless impersonation at the heart of a burlesque. Or at least if you’re going to do Carry On, Milksnatcher! do it with a wink and a wiggle like this…
(I have my doubts Ted Heath actually behaved as if his virtue was going to be outraged by every woman that crossed his path, but Samuel West gets in touch with his inner Kenneth Williams with admirable conviction. ) -
Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to Rob Hosking,
It was more that the film was unbalanced, with Streep/Thatcher overwhelming the other performers, who were mostly reduced to uttering feeder lines.
It's not even that that bothered me, but what's the point of a bio-pic of a politician where nobody involved takes the politics at all seriously? Somehow, I suspect Daniel Day Lewis will have more to do in Spielberg's Lincoln biopic than dispense ghost chips to his drunken senile old bat of a wife.
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Thank you Steven - the evidence of my general illiteracy has now been obliterated. "These are not the droids you're looking for... Move along!"
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Hard News: Can we get an adult up in here?, in reply to Craig Young,
However, the details were derrived from public register data, openly accessible to the public- which raises questions of its own.
No, you're quite right. But I'd hate to think what far-right loons would do with a hacked copy of Planned Parenthood's donor records. Using Semmens logic, they're supporting infanticide so fuck them.
Agreed there – Stratfor’s security practices seem to have been hopeless. I still don’t think that justifies the wholesale publication of the details they were supposed to be keeping safe.
Quite - and let me draw an analogy here. I'm working at the dining room table with the ranchslider open. If I go to the toilet and come back to discover someone passing by opportunistically hooked off with my laptop, does my poor security somehow mitigate or even justify that I got burgled?
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm not greatly invested in cinematic film, except on a grokking-the-zeitgeist level. But I do love the way you write about it, Craig.
Is that a subtle hint to post more. Aww, bless. Don't know if you're going to thank me for what's coming up...
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