A quick test to post from MarsEdit
Setting up my personal site for IndieWeb…
Twitter Harasses Ed Sheeran into Deleting His Account
Ed Sheeran Deletes His Twitter Account After ‘Game of Thrones’ Cameo Gets Mixed Reaction
While some people were delighted to spot music star Ed Sheeran in Sunday night’s Game of Thrones season seven premiere, others were less enthusiastic, arguing that the singer’s cameo struck a jarring note in the show’s fantasy world.
I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, but never heard of Ed Sheeran, much less knew his face or voice. The thing that stuck out at me was not the extraneous singing, but the excessive niceness of the Lannister soldiers. There is no precedent for a crew of such squeaky-clean soldiers. That was outrageous. But the Ed Sheeran cameo? That fit right in.
Movie: Funeral Parade of Roses
If you saw David Lynch’s Mullholland Falls and thought, “too conventional,” then Funeral Parade of Roses is a film for you. Describing it as a transsexual love triange set in 60’s Japan makes it appear more conventional than it is. It pulls just about every cinematic trick in the book and runs them through a narrative blender. The nonlinear narrative removes any orientation the viewer might hope for at the beginning of each scene. Some scenes seem to fit the narrative, only to be revealed as movie sets by a crew of young film radicals making a movie about transsexuals. An argument between two characters is shown in on-screen speech bubbles. Fights are sped up, Benny-Hill style, complete with organ circus music. It ends with a revalation of incest and gory visuals of a transsexual blinding herself with a knife.
After the Fox
Last night’s move at the Austin Film Society: After the Fox. Peter Sellers plays a master criminal who stages a bogus movie production to smuggle a load of stolen gold into Italy. Directed by an Italian, set and filmed in Italy, partially dubbed in English, starring Peter Sellers as an Italian, speaking English with an Italian accent. Oh, and a script by a budding Neil Simon. It’s kind of a weird mish-mash that probably couldn’t exist today, but somehow seems natural coming from the 60’s.
All this manages to fit perfectly with the ridiculous tone of Sellers hoodwinking an entire Italian village that he is a famous Italian director. It’s a movie-making-fun-of-movies movie, with an aging Hollywood has-been and Italian movie industry serving as the butt of the jokes.