Nobel Son and Cupcake Attack!
Dec. 10th, 2008 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grrgoylI've known about Rickman's new movie, Nobel Son, probably for at least a year now. I had given up hope of it ever coming to theaters, was pretty resigned to it going straight to DVD. Then I saw that it was opening here in Denver! As if we were a REAL metropolitan area!
I invited MyFriendDeb, though I had my concerns about her enjoying it. Bottle Shock was her cup of tea. This edgier, blacker tale of a son faking his own kidnapping to get his father's Nobel prize money (I think), sounded significantly less so. I did my best to warn her, but she still agreed without doing a lick of research on her own (please note![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kavieshana -- these are the actions of a TRUE Rickman fan).
Before we got to the movie, we went to Village Inn for some lunch (we both become unbearably unpleasant when our blood sugar drops). We paid our bill to a well-groomed, well-dressed man (possibly too well-groomed to be entirely straight) who overheard us talking about heading to the theater. "Ooooh, what are you going to see?" he asked excitedly.
"Nobel Son," we told him, smiling.
"Oh," his face literally fell.
"Sorry to disappoint you," we laughed. "What would you prefer we see?"
"I thought you were going to say Twilight."
"Do we look like 13-year-old girls?" I said.
"It's actually a good show," he insisted. Yep. I rest my case.
"Okay, we promise to watch it one day," we assured him before leaving. He was absolutely crestfallen that we were going to see something besides Twilight. Honestly. Sorry. If Robert Pattinson lives to be 100, he'll never accumulate the sex appeal Alan has for me. Least of all with that ridiculous floppy head of hair.
For the longest time Deb and I were alone in the theater. First to disrupt that peace was a guy who sat in the second row, and produced a Blackberry that he proceeded to fondle obsessively for the next half hour. I said to Deb, "Great. It's just going to be us and him, waving his fucking phone around through the whole movie."
Almost close to the truth. We were joined by a few other people. One couple left ten minutes in, never to return. I didn't think it started THAT badly.
Anyway, the movie. I agree with every review I've read: namely, it's unnecessarily violent, absurd and too ambitious. I'll take it a step further and add that it's one of those movies that, if you sat and really puzzled out what happens, might not actually make complete sense. And I hate movies like that. Movies that rely on you just going along for the ride and not examining them too closely. It's lazy, is what it is.
Some kind of bait-and-switch hijinks with a Cooper Mini in a mall that doesn't bear too close scrutiny, a guy's suicide is faked and no one questions it despite it being completely out of character, the kidnapped title character is suddenly in cahoots with the kidnapper, then he's turning the tables on him. Loyalties flip faster than hotcakes, and over it all is a driving, pounding soundtrack by Paul Oakenfold that did nothing to alleviate my headache, and furthermore never let up, throbbing frenetically through every scene equally so the viewer had no idea what was a significant plot point and what was transition. Also, the director seemed overly fond of lighting scenes so his actors had the same distracting, unnatural points of light in their pupils. All of them, in every scene.
Through it all, there's Alan. He wins the Nobel prize for chemistry, an award that cements his position of intellectual superiority in his own mind. He's pompous, selfish, childish and clueless, spending the entire film either pouting, flouncing or farting -- or, his specialty, acting supremely put upon. The term "chewing the scenery" never applied more than it does here. But the second scene of the film is him having very loud, exuberant desk sex with his teaching assistant, and the next to last is him handcuffed in a warehouse wearing a tight t-shirt and even tighter boxer shorts AND NOTHING ELSE. At the risk of sounding sexist (what's wrong with being sexy?) and exploitative, I must own the DVD for these two scenes alone. It's also probably your only opportunity to hear Alan say the words, "latent homoerotic wet dreams." Gah.
He runs yet again in it, very briefly but it still counts. To date the only movie he doesn't run in is, ironically, the action blockbuster Die Hard (unless you count the little dash he makes out into the lobby before firing the gun in the air, and I don't).
There's an awful lot of crap to wade through to get to Alan, but that's virtually the defining quality of any Alan movie (other than Snow Cake, which I've decided is the perfect Rickman film). I would still rather see it than Twilight, even if I had known how tedious the rest of it is going in.
Mr. Blackberry in the second row suddenly got up and walked out with only five minutes left to go. If you're going to walk out on a movie, waiting until the last scene doesn't make that much of a statement.
~*~
When I get home from my overnight shifts I'm usually starving. I don't know why, since I'm not hungry at that time the rest of the week (though in fairness I'm usually sleeping at that time the rest of the week). I crave dairy especially, so my typical after-work snack is some yogurt and a tall glass of milk. Yum.
This past week I saw a match.com commercial where the guy's whole "thing" was junk food, and he ate a Hostess cupcake at the end. Ever since seeing it, I haven't been able to stop thinking of Hostess cupcakes. So I picked up a box on my way home.
In the kitchen in the dark at 5 a.m., I wanted a cupcake bad but I also wanted to hurry up and get to sleep (I only have a 3-hour window or so on Saturday mornings before I have to be up again for the day job). I couldn't see/be bothered with the proper flap opening so I just tore through the top of the box to get to my prize. As always, the cupcake looked much more scrumptious than it actually tasted. I always forget that fact.
The next morning Tery surveyed the damage I had wreaked on the helpless cupcake box. "This box looks like a velociraptor attacked it," she exclaimed.
Never get between a woman and her cheap mass-produced pastry
I invited MyFriendDeb, though I had my concerns about her enjoying it. Bottle Shock was her cup of tea. This edgier, blacker tale of a son faking his own kidnapping to get his father's Nobel prize money (I think), sounded significantly less so. I did my best to warn her, but she still agreed without doing a lick of research on her own (please note
kavieshana -- these are the actions of a TRUE Rickman fan).Before we got to the movie, we went to Village Inn for some lunch (we both become unbearably unpleasant when our blood sugar drops). We paid our bill to a well-groomed, well-dressed man (possibly too well-groomed to be entirely straight) who overheard us talking about heading to the theater. "Ooooh, what are you going to see?" he asked excitedly.
"Nobel Son," we told him, smiling.
"Oh," his face literally fell.
"Sorry to disappoint you," we laughed. "What would you prefer we see?"
"I thought you were going to say Twilight."
"Do we look like 13-year-old girls?" I said.
"It's actually a good show," he insisted. Yep. I rest my case.
"Okay, we promise to watch it one day," we assured him before leaving. He was absolutely crestfallen that we were going to see something besides Twilight. Honestly. Sorry. If Robert Pattinson lives to be 100, he'll never accumulate the sex appeal Alan has for me. Least of all with that ridiculous floppy head of hair.
For the longest time Deb and I were alone in the theater. First to disrupt that peace was a guy who sat in the second row, and produced a Blackberry that he proceeded to fondle obsessively for the next half hour. I said to Deb, "Great. It's just going to be us and him, waving his fucking phone around through the whole movie."
Almost close to the truth. We were joined by a few other people. One couple left ten minutes in, never to return. I didn't think it started THAT badly.
Anyway, the movie. I agree with every review I've read: namely, it's unnecessarily violent, absurd and too ambitious. I'll take it a step further and add that it's one of those movies that, if you sat and really puzzled out what happens, might not actually make complete sense. And I hate movies like that. Movies that rely on you just going along for the ride and not examining them too closely. It's lazy, is what it is.
Some kind of bait-and-switch hijinks with a Cooper Mini in a mall that doesn't bear too close scrutiny, a guy's suicide is faked and no one questions it despite it being completely out of character, the kidnapped title character is suddenly in cahoots with the kidnapper, then he's turning the tables on him. Loyalties flip faster than hotcakes, and over it all is a driving, pounding soundtrack by Paul Oakenfold that did nothing to alleviate my headache, and furthermore never let up, throbbing frenetically through every scene equally so the viewer had no idea what was a significant plot point and what was transition. Also, the director seemed overly fond of lighting scenes so his actors had the same distracting, unnatural points of light in their pupils. All of them, in every scene.
Through it all, there's Alan. He wins the Nobel prize for chemistry, an award that cements his position of intellectual superiority in his own mind. He's pompous, selfish, childish and clueless, spending the entire film either pouting, flouncing or farting -- or, his specialty, acting supremely put upon. The term "chewing the scenery" never applied more than it does here. But the second scene of the film is him having very loud, exuberant desk sex with his teaching assistant, and the next to last is him handcuffed in a warehouse wearing a tight t-shirt and even tighter boxer shorts AND NOTHING ELSE. At the risk of sounding sexist (what's wrong with being sexy?) and exploitative, I must own the DVD for these two scenes alone. It's also probably your only opportunity to hear Alan say the words, "latent homoerotic wet dreams." Gah.
He runs yet again in it, very briefly but it still counts. To date the only movie he doesn't run in is, ironically, the action blockbuster Die Hard (unless you count the little dash he makes out into the lobby before firing the gun in the air, and I don't).
There's an awful lot of crap to wade through to get to Alan, but that's virtually the defining quality of any Alan movie (other than Snow Cake, which I've decided is the perfect Rickman film). I would still rather see it than Twilight, even if I had known how tedious the rest of it is going in.
Mr. Blackberry in the second row suddenly got up and walked out with only five minutes left to go. If you're going to walk out on a movie, waiting until the last scene doesn't make that much of a statement.
~*~
When I get home from my overnight shifts I'm usually starving. I don't know why, since I'm not hungry at that time the rest of the week (though in fairness I'm usually sleeping at that time the rest of the week). I crave dairy especially, so my typical after-work snack is some yogurt and a tall glass of milk. Yum.
This past week I saw a match.com commercial where the guy's whole "thing" was junk food, and he ate a Hostess cupcake at the end. Ever since seeing it, I haven't been able to stop thinking of Hostess cupcakes. So I picked up a box on my way home.
In the kitchen in the dark at 5 a.m., I wanted a cupcake bad but I also wanted to hurry up and get to sleep (I only have a 3-hour window or so on Saturday mornings before I have to be up again for the day job). I couldn't see/be bothered with the proper flap opening so I just tore through the top of the box to get to my prize. As always, the cupcake looked much more scrumptious than it actually tasted. I always forget that fact.
The next morning Tery surveyed the damage I had wreaked on the helpless cupcake box. "This box looks like a velociraptor attacked it," she exclaimed.
Never get between a woman and her cheap mass-produced pastry
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-12-11 07:33 am (UTC)Also, speaking of Alan...I know you've seen this pic before, as have I, but...I've never seen it...this...big...
no subject
Date: 2008-12-11 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-11 07:42 am (UTC)and then
Cheesecake. Or is it Beefcake?
And I actually kinda thought Snowcake wasn't horrible. Because of AR of course.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-11 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-11 11:04 am (UTC)Stuff like noticing he doesn't run seems to be exclusive to Alan Rickman fans. We notice and get excited about unimportant shit that no other kind of fan bothers with. For example, I remember seeing Galaxy Quest the first time and playing back again and again the five seconds of footage when Alan's in a Tshirt with his arm bent, and he has the most gorgeous forearms!
no subject
Date: 2008-12-11 05:19 pm (UTC)(I also thought it was very thoughtful of the DVD manufacturer to put a chapter stop exactly at the point when Alan reappears after being gone all day, so it's easy to skip over the whole unbearably boring middle part when she fools around with Norman.)
Do you really think other fans don't notice these things in their obsessions? I don't bother reading other people's non-Rickman squeeing, so you might be right. Or maybe their squeeing is just nonspecific general madness over someone's attractiveness. A scientific study might be in order.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-21 03:22 pm (UTC)Srsrly, do you have four-inch claws? I'd hate to see what you did to the gallon of milk.
My aunt has convinced me to go see Twilight with her. I don't know how I'll sit through it. She's already seen it, and has decided I should be as in love with it as she is. She's a total TwiHard and has all of the gossip and has passed on that she thinks Robert Pattinson might be replaced in the next movie. Have you heard that? If he is, I don't think (as my aunt does) it'll be because he they want someone bigger and more muscled to play the wimpy 90-year-old virgin, but because of that interview he did where he basically called the writer pathetic.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-24 08:05 pm (UTC)Yep, four-inch claws, two-inch teeth and a taste for human flesh. In fact, I guess I might as well come clean: I AM a velociraptor.
I'd like to know your reaction to Twilight. I expect it to be similar to
(Did you read the