lördag 13 april 2013

The Fassbender in pictures

hehe...oh yes...

Beautiful man

Michael Fassbender is one of the few men I love just as much with a little stubble as clean shaven.
Usually I prefer my men clean shaven. 


Dapper, fashionable and stubbly

wow, hot!

goddamn!

you rascal Fassy :P hahah

fredag 12 april 2013

Space Cowboys

Continuing my quest of seeing everything that brilliant actor Toby Stephens has ever been in; my Friday night movie (and it was in the middle of the night, mind you) was Space Cowboys from the year 2000.

I couldn't remember if I had seen it or not, but as I was halfway through the movie I realized that I had indeed seen it, but it must have been back in 2000 because it wasn't recently, I can tell you that. 

Here's for some reason, the french title (I thought it was the prettiest)

And here is the more modern action-edition:

As I had read up on what character Toby plays in this one, I was ready to not see a lot of him. Still, I think they could have made that wierd blue screen, well, not blue, we get that it was the past anyway, without taking away any colors, or adding odd blue color. In this movie he plays "young Frank" who gets cheated out of going to space in 1958 and he and his team is replaced by a monkey. 

young Frank and young Hawk fight

Hawk and Frank get questioned by the boss

Then an announcement:

a closeup, *sigh* isn't he handsome?

Team Daedalus are replaced by a monkey

Love that little scowl, only Toby can both sound and mimic Clint Eastwood to such perfection <3
Actually he sounded so american that I didn't recognize his voice at first.

After the team is replaced by a monkey we fast forward 40 years and Frank is now played by Clint Eastwood. NASA needs Frank's help capture an old sovjet communications satellite before it falls out of orbit, and Frank is the only one old enough to understand the outdated technology, since he is the one who designed the Skylab guidence system from which the Sovjet satellite system has been copied. He agrees to help on one condition, if he and his team get to go to space to capture the satellite themselves. 

team Daedalus


The satellite. I got to say, this thing was SCARY.
I'm not kidding, that thing scared the shit out of me!

Nice view of Earth there, Eastwood?
Yes, I would say so.

Bonus:
I absolutely love Tommy Lee Jones, and he is as lovely in this movie as he is in everything! 

Extra bonus:
Donald Sutherland is also one of my favorite actors and I love him in this too, he is a huge flirt as Jerry.

torsdag 11 april 2013

Fish Tank

So the other day when I was at the library returning The Great Gatsby, that left me feeling sad and as far as the Toby Stephens movie I haven't seen yet, I'm thinking "nooooo!" Well, in the library I took a look around and saw the dvd's. I must not have been in a library in a long time because I had no idea one can lend dvd's for free! :D

As my eyes ran over the movies some familiar name caught my eye. Fish Tank. I was like 'wait a minute, Fish Tank, who's in it?' and then I remembered 'Michael Fassbender!' and I immediately picked it up. It has great reviews so I thought; why not make it my Thursday movie.


I basically went from a novel that left me feeling sad to a movie that left me feeling sad. 

Fish Tank is about a girl who has more enemies than friends. Her mother is a real bitch to her, her little sister is equally ill behaved as she is. Mia is a 15 year old girl who loves to dance, she lives in "the hood" as I'd call it and doesn't have much in way of love, money or comfort in her life.


One day when she's in the kitchen her mother's new boyfriend comes down half naked (that made me drool quite a bit) and compliments her on her dancing. She seems kind of wierded out about this guy at first, who is all nice, sweet, caring and fun but she soon starts to be intrigued with him (and with his natural charm, who could blame her). 

nice arse there Fassy ^_~..eerrr I mean Connor

dear lord...

ahem...

*Spoilers*
This guy is about the only one in her life that treats her nice and doesn't want anything from her. At first she is a bit suspicious, and also a bit jealous (especially that scene when he's having sex with her mother) but in her own way she starts to trust him and probably imagines herself in love with him. 

He takes her family out for a "fishing trip"

Carries her when she's injured her foot.

 And plays around with her..
..asking if his perfume smells good

She makes friends with a boy whose horse she tried to "set free" and brings him over to Connors workplace, probably to try and make him jealous (which later on turns out to actually have worked.)


When her mother is passed out drunk one day and Connor is drinking on the sofa he asks her if she'll show him the dance to an audition she's signed up for. She dances, then sits on the couch beside him, and the sexual tension is by then so thick you could cut it with a knife. He then seduces her.



Right after having had sex with Mia, Connor realizes that that was probably pretty stupid of him. He says that they'll talk about about it the next day, but when Mia wakes up he's taken his things and left. Mia chases after him and somehow finds out where he lives. 



It comes to such a shock to Mia when she finds out that he's actually married and has a little daughter that she has a sort of panic attack and kidnaps his daughter when no one is looking.
After almost causing the child to drown, she returns the child to her home and walks back home.

In THAT scene, when he sees her walking on the road and chases her down and strikes her, I am SO fucking angry at him and at her for not saying what I would have said:
"You fucking bastard! You LIAR, how DARE you come in to my life and my mother's life under the pretences of being all good and nice and seduce both me and my mum! You took my virginity you fucking asshole! I LOVED you! I TRUSTED you! You were the only person who ever treated me good in my entire life, you shit head! How DARE you? How could you do this to me? To US? How can you live with yourself?"

But she didn't say that. She didn't say anything. But later on when she went over to the horse-boy and found out the horse was dead, she finally cried. I kept wondering throughout at how she could go through all of that   and not cry, even once. But then she did. The horse being dead was the final straw. 

'
In the end I guess she just had to get over it somehow. She's moving to Wales with the horse-boy and we see that at least her relationship with her sister, (whom she is hugging good-bye in the picture) and her mum improves. I love the scene when they dance together to Nas' "Life Is A Bitch" (and then you die).



Conclusions: This was a great movie in that it set you up to think that this beautiful, cheerful, considerate man was going to be the turning point in their lives, and then he turns out just to be another dissapoinment. That is also the most horrible thing about it. It is a bad thing to just live your life in quiet misery, knowing what a shitty life you have and can depend on it remaining that way. It is a worse thing still to have your hopes up for the future, to get a glimpse of the way things might have been and then to have it all stolen from you at the drop of a hat. Just when you are at your most vulnerable. Connor hurt the whole family, not just Mia, but also her mother who was heartbroken when he left, and her little sister who could've looked up to him as a father figure. It left me feeling very sad for Mia (though with the prospect of her "getting over it") and I can't help but feel like that song is really the theme for not only this movie but life in general "Life is a bitch, and then you die."

That being said, it WAS a great movie. It was beautifully filmed, the actors were amazing and you get really caught up in this girl's life and sucked in by the chemistry between Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender.

lördag 6 april 2013

The Camomile Lawn

Today I watched the first two episodes of The Camomile Lawn, a British TV adaptation from 1992 of a novel with the same name by Mary Wesley. Curiously the novel was published the same year that I was born, in 1984.


The story starts in 1939, just before World War II broke out. As it says in wikipedia the story is about the lives of Richard and Helena Cuthbertson and their five nieces and nephews; Calypso, Walter, Polly, Oliver and Sophy. As I am watching this almost exclusively because of Toby Stephens I will not keep a detailed record of the events of the story, but only write about the parts that interest me, as I usually do ^_~


Jennifer Ehle as Calypso and Tara Fitzgerald as Polly
Tara has also starred in Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall with Toby Stephens.

In the beginning there is a lot of talking about the impending war, one cannot escape the tenseness of that fact, yet this hardly seems to affect the younger generation, who go about in their frivilous ways on their vacation and talk proudly how they are going to join the marines and such. Oliver arrives in town, returned from the Spanish Civil War and has a crush on Calypso.

 Toby (Stephens) shocked me when one of the first things he says is "May I fuck you? Now, at once." It shocked me because all the roles I've seen him in have been very romantic (so far) and so it never struck me as something he would say. It makes me wonder what other treats I can expect from him... 



Though Oliver says he wants to marry Calypso, she will not have him, she says she'll only marry a rich man. (Stupid girl, when Toby Stephens asks you to marry him, you NEVER say no!) :P

A scene I thought was hillarious was when they had done The Terror Run and Oliver and Calypso stand there alone catching their breaths in the middle of the night and he holds her close to him and they go:


looking down on his thing

Calypso - "Oliver, what's that?"
Oliver - "It's me, my cock"
Calypso - "It's enormous!"
Oliver - "It's quite ordinary, I've got an erection, I want to poke it into you."

LOL, that made me laugh so much! 



Their little cousin Sophy is only 10 years old and she is fond of all her cousins coming to visit, but she is especially fond of Oliver. Before the first episode is concluded Oliver declares that he's joined the army.



In episode 2 Calypso marries a rich man whom she does not love, Oliver shows up to the wedding, taunting her and spends the rest of the episode trying to have sex with her, unsuccessfully. 



This series is better than I expected. It's sometimes hillarious, sometimes confusing, sometimes a little sad (but never really sad) and very naked. Very, very naked. If you want to see lots of naked women, by all means watch this one. I'm looking forward to watching the remaining 3 episodes.
Will Calypso leave her emotionless marriage? Will Oliver realise he is a fool for loving this heartless woman? I think he should just move on and find someone who is worthy of his passion and devotion. 
We'll see...

onsdag 3 april 2013

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Two days ago I finished reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë.
So, this evening I could finally watch the filmatization of it from 1996 starring Toby Stephens <3 <3 <3 and Tara Fitzgerald with Rupert Graves as Mr Huntingdon.


For the person unfamiliar with the story it is about a young girl, Helen, who falls head over heels for a man who we today would call a "playa" (or player, as it is correctly written). He is a man of fashion, too fond of drinking and gambling and has no concept of what a marriage is really about. Helen is but a girl when she marries him, and despite seeing hints of what is to come marries Mr Huntingdon far too soon and believes whatever vices he has, she can make him change. 


She soon learns that this is not the case, however when she's faced with his verbal abuse, his cheating, gambling and excessive drinking. He humiliates her in every possible way, but what can she do, she's stuck with him. 
the not-so happy family

When Huntingdon starts to take an interest towards their son however, determined that he'll not be as cold as his mother, and involves little Arthur in his depravity, then Helen starts to think again. She realizes that if she is to spare her beloved son the misfortune of ending up like his father, she must leave him and take her son with her. She writes to her astranged brother and asks that he help hide her in their old childhood house, Wildfell Hall.


She moves into Wildfell Hall, dressed as a widow, pretending she doesn't know her brother who is her landlord and hopes to live a quiet life, supporting herself and her son as a painter. The neighborhood becomes interested in this mysterious, cold, haughty woman who has decided opinions on alcohol and child rearing. Mr Gilbert Markham then takes an interest to her.


They both fall in love, but are unable to do anything about it because she is still married, and on the lam so to speak. He can't figure out why she's so reluctant to have a relationship with him, but mistakenly ascribes it to the rumours the village has started about her and Mr Lawrence (her brother).

Lawrence & Arthur

When Helen, who then calls herself by her mother's maiden name (Mrs) Graham, she over time starts to trust Gilbert and feels she needs to explain her situation to him, before he falls even more for her. Thus we are told of her tragic tale of an unhappy marriage to a scoundrel, through her diary. 



It was a very realistic and rather accurate filmatization of the novel, except for a couple of things in the end. It would have been perfect had a scene that I thought beautiful in the book appeared where she picks a flower to give to Mr. Markham and says "This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, or its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look Gilbert, it is still as fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals. - Will you have it?"
Of course the rose, enduring hardships is a symbol of her heart, that is maybe not as beautiful as the other flowers in the summer, but it is strong and still stands, and she is offering it to him.



Fans of Toby Stephens will not be disappointed, he is so beautiful and young and it is him. He has an undeniable presence and it delights me to see him in every scene as the good and passionate Mr Gilbert Markham. And there is only one actor in the world who can deliver a fairly simple line with that kind of passion.

this is my copy, pleasant to the touch and beautiful to look at

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall book:
*Warning! Spoiler!!*
 I think Wildfell Hall has a lot of things for one to think about. The advice is basically not to undergo marriage unwisely or too much in a hurry, or to really know who you are marrying. It touches on subjects like adultery, alcoholism, and explores men's relationships to women and women to men. It moved me because it is basically a story about a woman freeing herself from a destructive relationship and doing whatever is in her power to save her son, even if it goes against the norm and socially accepted behaviour. (Leaving one's husband wasn't heard of back then, or it was deeply shameful.) Ultimately she does it for her son, so that he won't grow up to be like his father who ruined himself and ultimately died because of his alcoholism. It is about what we do to save the ones we love, and a bit of feminism, as some discussions are about how boys are raised as opposed to how girls are raised and wether or not they should be shielded and exposed equally. And lastly, it is about second chances. She is lucky enough that she had a second chance at happiness with Mr Markham, who was a man worthy of her, as she was a woman worthy of his love.