I should change the name of my silly little blog to “The ultimate home of contradictions and hyperbole” because really, that’s all I do. Maybe I can shorten that a little. Hmm, a bunch of unrelated stories that contradict themselves and use outrageous and extreme claims to get the point across? Maybe I’ll call it… Ok, most of you see where I’m going here and since this is not a religious rant, I’ll stop now.
A few weeks ago I was whining about being typecast, how you play a role and some people never let you out of that pigeon hole. Like with most things, it’s okay for it to exist until it is applied to me directly.
Last night I watched one of my favorite movies again. When Teresa’s authors have new books come out, she re-reads all the books in the series up to that point. I’ll never understand that. It means when she gets to the eighth book in the series, she’s read the first book eight times! But then, I’ll watch certain movies over and over again and she doesn’t get that either…
“A Man For All Seasons” is just incredible. Thomas More is an honest man. He refuses to sign the petition for the Pope to grant Henry VIII’s divorce. He is torn between his duty and friendship with the King but he must do what he believes is right. People plead with him to give in, people try to frame him but he stands firm and he is executed.
It’s the same story you’ve seen in many other films. One man standing on his beliefs and convictions in the face of terrible punishment or even death. Resisting the corruption of the system and even the coercion of powerful men. It’s been done a thousand times but I like these types of movies. I could have done without Orson Welles looking like he was about to burst through his skin and die but come on, it had Quint from “Jaws” in it! “That cardinal, swallow you whole. There’s three tons of him!”
I don’t do the ‘celebrity birthday’ thing but I woke up this morning and heard that John Hurt turns sixty nine today. It seems like he’s always been old. He is young in this movie but even when he was 40, he looked 60 to me. And he always plays the villain. I looked through his IMDb page and okay, not always the villain but that’s what comes to my mind when I think of him. Every time he hits the screen I think, “What conniving underhanded shit is he going to pull this time?”
And for the record, I also watched the rest of “The Bucket List“. Not impressed. I already saw the beginning and the end on HBO and decided that it looked decent enough that I should watch it all the way through so I NetFlix’d it. The beginning and end are all you need. The middle was boring. There wasn’t enough story left to tell, they should have either shortened the movie or filled it with a few more “action” sequences from the list. It was a cute movie but overall I’m not impressed. The only thing it gave us was one more movie with Morgan Freeman narrating and while I am fully aware that he has done many more movies in which he doesn’t narrate, this brings us back to typecasting and a nice tidy ending to this post.
Morgan Freeman will always be the narrator, Robert Shaw will always hunt sharks, Alec Guinness will always be Obi-Wan Kenobi and and John Hurt will always be the bad guy.
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