Jump to content

Season Five Casting


Skywarpgold

Recommended Posts

Agreed. I cringed when every single critic was praising her after her episodes this season, just because she was a part of Breaking Bad. Alik Sakharov, Alex Graves, Alan Taylor and even D&D have all done better work over the course of the series, but have rarely ever been praised to the extent McLaren was in all the reviews. She's still pretty good though!

Yup. She is by no means bad, but I don't see anything that particularly stands out in her episodes. I agree, Sakharov, Graves, Taylor, Nutter all seem better to me. D&D warrant a special mention because I'm really impressed with how good they are as first-time directors. They have an eye for cinematic and epic moments - e.g. Theon chase, Hoster's funeral, musical chairs in the Small Council, the cold open to 4x01, Sandor and Arya in the tavern... They are surprisingly good for neophytes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

well of course taena is playing cersei. personally i don't think taena is working for anyone. i think she's just a self serving. ambitious woman who is trying to make life better for her family. but its hard to deny that cersei got much closer to taena than she wanted to, as twisted and manipulative as that relationship was. there were some genuine feelings there, from cersei's side.

when i said that taena and cersei could be genuinely good friends, i meant if they weren't obviously in the environment that they were in and if cersei wasn't so fucked up

I just meant that if we think she is playing Cersei, then we don't know what she's really like since she's obviously going to act like somebody Cersei would like...she may really not be like that at all. So we can't use what we've seen from Cersei's POV to determine whether or not they could genuinely be friends, especially since we're discussing a not-fucked-up-Cersei (which would by definition not be the Cersei we know).

The problem with Cersei is that she doesn't have friends, she has followers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It was a shame that the show skipped some of the Jaime / Loras stuff - I thought they had an interesting relationship in the books. I hope we get a Jaime / Tommen scene at Tywin's funeral. It should be different - Tommen is older and should have other things on his mind besides how bad his grandfather smells, but it would be really nice to see.

Loras is a really different character in the show though so it would not really have worked. I actually enjoy show Loras, but he's just....not the same person.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Loras is a really different character in the show though so it would not really have worked. I actually enjoy show Loras, but he's just....not the same person.

lol all show!loras does is fuck men and be ~sassy~. he's more of a plot device for cersei's arc than anything else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Loras is a really different character in the show though so it would not really have worked. I actually enjoy show Loras, but he's just....not the same person.

That's true. Show Loras has had a few good moments: the retort to Jaime, awkwardly and reluctantly courting Sansa and Cersei, the deleted scene with Renly's armor, and I liked the shaving scene. But show Loras is pretty bland and I think it is kind of a shame.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Cogman is the most significant writer on the show apart from the showrunners, but his contributions are utterly dwarfed by what they do, and I don't think he's really involved in the production aspects apart from writing.

He has co-producer credits on his episodes, and the usual arc for a writer like Cogman is to eventually develop into having more of a production role as time passes. I think that's clearly the trajectory he's been on.

As he notes, he basically carried out the D&D producer task of overseeing unit filming in Iceland, being the man on set to fix lines, tweak scripts, answer questions, point out specific things that they wanted, etc. And he's involved in the breaking down and development of the storylines, so I'm guessing he has some notions of how the production side of things shapes that.

Newstar, on 18 Jun 2014 - 12:35 PM, said:snapback.png

Hoping this is wrong -- McLaren directed both Crasterfck episodes, and Sakharov directed the Dreadfort scene, so they've both earned zero episodes of anything ever again (much less a show I like).

As others said, she just directs what they provide her. She does some very fine things -- her approach to the "wolf cam", for example, was great (no surprise, Breaking Bad is well-known for its trick shots), and she has a great eye for angles and camera positioning. The shot of Cersei and Jaime separated by the width of a bed, say, was pretty neat.

As to the Dreadfort, again, he had to deal with what they gave him. They write, it's his to turn it into visuals. Cogman notes that they had had much more expansive plans for the sequence, including a bigger fight with more people involved and so on, but for production reasons it got trimmed down to the bone. Given what he had to work with, my only real issue is his not pointing out that Yara could have thrown that ax into Ramsay's head...

Jaime thought the altar sex turned consensual in the book, but people delude themselves.

That would include Martin deluding himself?

He was assaulting a woman who had been repeatedly raped by her husband

You state this as a fact rather than as an assumption, which it is.

Cersei giving into it could have just been a coping strategy she developed long ago for being raped.

Alternatively, it's because that's the dynamic of Cersei's relationship with Jaime. Just about every scene of sexual interaction between them in the novels plays on power dynamics -- she wants Jaime to desire her so much that he can't control himself and is thus "forceful". I guess in BDSM parlance, she enjoys topping from the bottom.

It's what she gets pleasure from. Why her difficult relationship with Robert necessarily means she needs to be immediately turned off by Jaime's desire if expressed forcefully is beyond me. People are far more complex than just A=Good, B=Bad. Human experience is a continuum.

Commencing sex with somebody who is saying "no" in the hopes that the encounter will turn consensual is rape unless you have explicit permission from them to do this.

Maybe five years ago they had that conversation and she told him to remember that sometimes "no" is not, in fact, "no" when it comes to their sexual relations. You don't know, do you?

What we do know is that Martin notes that it was consensual, even though Cersei hesitated about the recklessness and stupidity of it. How often do people go ahead and do things they know are stupid, however, because they can't help themselves? Plenty of times, and this is one of those examples.

I don't know why the show runners didn't just point out the extremely dubious element of consent in the book rather than claim that they were trying to portray consensual sex.

Because it's not really dubious except in a world where all physical contact between men and women requires explicit verbal statements of approval.

What happened to Alan Taylor? He is the best director they've used.

Hollywood happened. He's working on the next Terminator film.

McLaran's episodes were underwhelming to say the least.

Not from a directon respect, IMO. The problem is she was given one brutally difficult sequence (the bear pit, where there's only so much you can do with a trained animal on the budget the show has) and then a sequence that people were really bugged by for a number of reasons. The main thing she did there that might gain opprobrium is simply her apparently trying to make things as brutal and ugly at Craster's Keep as possible, and I'm not sure that in itself was a bad decision.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jaime thought the altar sex turned consensual in the book, but people delude themselves. He was assaulting a woman who had been repeatedly raped by her husband - Cersei giving into it could have just been a coping strategy she developed long ago for being raped.

Not according to George R. R. Martin.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

lol all show!loras does is fuck men and be ~sassy~. he's more of a plot device for cersei's arc than anything else.

He's a plot device for multiple arcs! Cersei, Renly, Joffrey, Margery, Queen of Thorns, and Sansa. So funny to see her swooning over the flaming gay guy in season 1. Honestly, I think show Loras is extremely interesting and a good move.

But yes, a plot device.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You state this as a fact rather than as an assumption, which it is.

UGH CAN PEOPLE STOP WITH THIS??? robert raped cersei. this is a FACT. i don't even understand how people can spin this around. its 100% clear in the text. cersei even rmembers how robert forced her legs apart, how she had bruises on her breasts and entire body after he was done and uses the word "assaults".

its fucking disgusting that people argue over this. a villain and oppressor can also be a victim. in fact thats how the abuse cycle works, many abuse victims turn into abusers if they do not have the chance to get over that abuse in a healthy outlet, which cersei couldn't because she was raised by tywin lannister and is a woman in a position of power in a highly patriarchal cynical society

Link to comment
Share on other sites

UGH CAN PEOPLE STOP WITH THIS??? robert raped cersei. this is a FACT.

Putting it in all caps does not make it a fact. You're bringing stuff into the text that isn't explicit in it, and it's something that should be acknowledged. There are readings that are far more complex than the superficiality of SHOUTING AT PEOPLE TO MAKE THEM AGREE WITH YOU HUR HUR HUR.

It's terrible that people are unwilling to engage with the text as a text, rather than as a a byproduct of their personal views on life, the universe, and everything. They are not a litmus test. They are a story, a particularly good one with a willingness to present all sides of human nature.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

UGH CAN PEOPLE STOP WITH THIS??? robert raped cersei. this is a FACT. i don't even understand how people can spin this around. its 100% clear in the text. cersei even rmembers how robert forced her legs apart, how she had bruises on her breasts and entire body after he was done and uses the word "assaults".

its fucking disgusting that people argue over this. a villain and oppressor can also be a victim. in fact thats how the abuse cycle works, many abuse victims turn into abusers if they do not have the chance to get over that abuse in a healthy outlet, which cersei couldn't because she was raised by tywin lannister and is a woman in a position of power in a highly patriarchal cynical society

Yawn. How about people stop with ridiculous claims that things are factual that aren't? Its pathetic. Cersei consented because she had to because she wanted to keep fucking Jaime and keep being queen. The fact that she lay there like a dead fish is irrelevant, she did nothing to tell Robert that she wanted sexual relations between them to stop. He was clearly rough with her, but she was pretty rough with him too. They were both abusing each other and no one was raped.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yawn. How about people stop with ridiculous claims that things are factual that aren't? Its pathetic. Cersei consented because she had to because she wanted to keep fucking Jaime and keep being queen. The fact that she lay there like a dead fish is irrelevant, she did nothing to tell Robert that she wanted sexual relations between them to stop. He was clearly rough with her, but she was pretty rough with him too. They were both abusing each other and no one was raped.

NO

the way Robert would use her when the drink was in him, and she was unable to bring him off with hand or mouth.” AFFC, pg. 685

"Those had been the worst nights, lying helpless underneath him as he took his pleasure, stinking of wine and grunting like a boar. Usually he rolled off and went to sleep as soon as it was done, and was snoring before his seed could dry upon her thighs. She was always sore afterward, raw between her legs, her breasts painful from the mauling he would give them. The only time he’d ever made her wet was on their wedding night." AFFC, pg. 685

"For Robert, those nights never happened. Come morning he remembered nothing, or so he would have her believe. Once, during the first year of their marriage, Cersei had voiced her displeasure the next day. ‘You hurt me,’ she complained. He had the grace to look ashamed. ‘It was not me, my lady,’ he said in a sulky sullen tone, like a child caught stealing apple cakes from the kitchen. ‘It was the wine. I drink too much wine.’ To wash down his admission, he reached for a horn of ale. As he raised it to his mouth, she smashed her own horn in his face, so hard he chipped a tooth. Years later at a feast, she heard him telling a serving wench how he’d cracked his tooth in a melee. Well, our marriage was a melee, she reflected, so he did not lie.” AFFC, pg. 686

"The rest had all been lies, though. He did remember what he did to her that night, she was convinced of that. She could see it in his eyes. He only pretended to forget; it was easier to do that than to face his shame. Deep down Robert Baratheon was a coward. In time the assaults grew less frequent. During the first year of their marriage he took her at least once a fortnight; by the end it was not even once a year. He never stopped completely, though. Sooner or later there would come a night when he would drink too much and want to claim his rights. What shamed him in the light of day gave him pleasure in the dark.” AFFC, pg. 868

the fact that you can see this as anything else besides rape is fucking disturbing and gross btw

Link to comment
Share on other sites

NO

the fact that you can see this as anything else besides rape is fucking disturbing and gross btw

USING CAPS STILL DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE.

There's nothing in those quotes that make it rape. You know why? Because she hasn't said no or in any way indicated that she wanted sexual relations between a man and a wife to stop. Is he supposed to read her fucking mind? Yes, she objected about him being rough, but she hasn't told him not to fuck her. If she is able to hit him with her drinking horn hard enough to crack a tooth, she is damned well capable of saying no. She isn't afraid of him. But she cannot say no because she will lose her ability to fuck Jaime.

Learn to read.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yawn. How about people stop with ridiculous claims that things are factual that aren't? Its pathetic. Cersei consented because she had to because she wanted to keep fucking Jaime and keep being queen. The fact that she lay there like a dead fish is irrelevant, she did nothing to tell Robert that she wanted sexual relations between them to stop. He was clearly rough with her, but she was pretty rough with him too. They were both abusing each other and no one was raped.

This has always been my interpretation as well, she knows she has to "consent" in order to stay queen but she makes the sex as unpalatable as she possibly can so she can make him feel as guilty as she possibly can....but she still stays in KL and submits to it...so she can be queen and have Jamie. She hates her husband and hates having sex with him but this is the price she pays for the power she gets from it.

However, these conversations always end badly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...