Rachel and Leeman talk about the shows, movies, books and other things that we like to come back to over and over and over and over and over again.
Topics Discussed and/or Spoiled and/or Obsessed Over
Once Upon a Time, Star Trek, Babylon Five, Room 237, Arrested Development, UK Office, Scrubs, Crimson Tide, Air Force One, When Harry Met Sally, Enchanted, Stardust (movie and book), Pride and Prejudice (Colin Firth lake scene), Gilmore Girls, Family Guy, Farscape, Get Smart, Batman the Animated Series, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Pratchett, Bujold, Gaiman, Tolkien, Martin, Austen (the regulars), Tom Jones (the book), Lovecraft, Jane Eyre, Dracula, Homestar Runner, Geekson, Webcomics Weekly, The Vlog Brothers, and The Bible and Liturgical Year.
Our Outro is Debs and Errol’s Let’s Vomit Exclusively
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My go-to-movie is The Machinist, for some reason it always cheers me up. There are some atmosheric and soundtrack similarities between The Machinist and The Shining. Regarding Room 237, Kubrick is definitely confessing to filming the Apollo11 mission in a studio under duress. This has been a tin foil hat conviction of mine ten years before the documentary Room 237. Regarding canon, I would remove the book of 3rd Corinthians from the Syriac bible.
I see what you did there.
I think the Bible story I reread the most was Joseph. It’s really the best for kids; there’s enough conflict to make it interesting (not like “God told Noah to build an ark and get some animals, and Noah did. The end.”), but there’s nothing there to challenge a six-year-old’s sensibilities. There’s no Moses getting barred from the Holy Land, no Samson killing the Philistines but dying blinded and humiliated in the process, no David and Bathsheba’s son dying because of their sins (or Jesus dying because of ours, for that matter). Sure, Joseph gets in trouble for things he didn’t do and his brothers are cruel to him, but everything works out happily in the end. Unless you’re the baker. Sorry, baker.
As for my entertainment go-tos . . . Buffy. Buffy Buffy Buffy, with Buffy sauce. I’ve probably reread Neverwhere, Harry Potter, Ender’s Game, The Shining and Dracula about 500 times apiece, too. (Speaking of Dracula, Rachel, remind me of Mina Harker’s awesomeness next time we Facetime. Dracula is tied with Ender’s Game for my favorite book, and I have too many thoughts on Mina to share here. I’d be up typing all night. Bottom line: I absolutely love how in the scene where she’s forced to drink Dracula’s blood, Jonathan Harker is pure agency-free damsel in distress. He’s utterly helpless and exists only to be a stick Dracula uses to threaten Mina. And that’s everything you need to know about how great the gender stuff is in Dracula.)
The story of Joseph, seen from the outside is very peculiar and dark.
I want to commission a play some time about an Egyptian cup-bearer who, having watched his kingdom slowly taken over by this strange foreign vizier and dream speaker meets with a once-prominent women who talks about how she was assaulted by this same strange foreigner and together they plot all during the arrest of Benjamin.
I also wonder if the story of Potiphar’s wife is the ur-story of the scheming woman accusing rape falsely.
Leeman,
I’ve had that same idea, writing stories from the POV of minor bible characters – never actually that one though. Are you sure there’s enough story meat there? (Forgive my term “story meat.”)
I never thought of it that way. It could be worse, though. Think about the wanton wiles of Ahasuerus’ evil foreign witch-queen, who poisoned him against the one adviser who saw her for what she was, then raised up an army in his own land to slaughter his people!
Aronofsky has managed to scrape the Noah material into a upcoming film. You can scrape a movie out of anything as long as you have conflict and the stakes are high – drama not required. (I have written my own Noah screenplay.) As for Buffy, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a complete episode, you see, I misspent the late 1990’s and early 2000’s playing Starcraft. Leeman might know something of what I speak.
Oh yeah.
I was almost as proud of myself for finishing the Silmarillion as I was the first time I finished the Old Testament. I must say that I do enjoy the creation myth at the beginning of the Silmarillion very much. It’s possible that I named my cat after one of the characters.
Rereading old favourites always unnerves me because I’m afraid that I won’t enjoy a book as much the second time through. Sometimes this happens when a book speaks more to me at one point in my life than at another, and then I just feel disappointed. Plus, I’m generally too busy reading new books to go back to old books (unless I need to reread the first part of the series in order to get ready for a new book – curse you George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan).
Scene from TV that I can rewatch without needing the buildup of watching the whole story: Spike arriving in L.A. and doing his sarcastic narration of Angel. Yay! It’s possible I’ll just go rewatch it now…
I could read Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell a thousand times.