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Watched, Watched, Watching: Saltier Things Part One


Corvinus85

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On 6/25/2022 at 9:36 AM, felice said:

You could always get the DVDs!

I actually did this just a couple of years ago when they started replacing the OG version on streaming services with the really shit "HD remaster" version, just to make sure I could watch both Buffy and Angel in a decent format.

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15 hours ago, Ran said:

The funerary rituals were 100% drawn from a contemporary account of a Rus Viking funeral, and the ritual fireside dance before the raid on the Slav village is an extrapolation based on, IIRC, 7th century Germanic depictions of some sort of group ritual dance led by a figure wearing a horned helmet. 

The opening adulthood ritual is certainly entirely speculative, although the roleplay as wolves actually fits an aspect of manhood rituals in Indo-European culture that had various survivals through antiquity (the Roman Lupercalia) and into the Norse era (saga accounts of young men wearing wolf skins and living off the land). 

So, I don't know, they have some grounding in at least speculative reality, even if they may seem odd to us now. And the funeral is pretty much 100% spot on.

Yes, that's the likeliest explanation -- his brother received a commission after serving as an enlisted man.

They actually removed a fair amount of sexual violence from Ibn Fadlan's account. The slave woman was raped multiple times by the Chieftains men before being executed. I imagine they figured that was 'too much' for a modern audience to engage with. Otherwise, it's fairly close to Fadlan's writing.

The berserker ritual seems based on the Torslunda plate. I thought the war dance was an interesting idea, though I really disliked the Conan style costuming with them running around in their underwear. Even in the plates the wolf-warrior seems to be wearing clothes. There's debate as to what exactly bear-shirts meant. Some think it was a kenning for mailcoats (Anders Winroth has suggested this) and there's no evidence they existed outside of sagas.  Like Shieldmaidens its a fuzzy area as far as I know - exists in the mythology, not much hard evidence for it. 

I've no idea what the initiation thing was, and that one did strike me as a bit silly, especially with the dog-growling and the fart sniffing. 

 

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1 minute ago, Ser Drewy said:

They actually removed a fair amount of sexual violence from Ibn Fadlan's account. The slave woman was raped multiple times by the Chieftains men before being executed. I imagine they figured that was 'too much' for a modern audience to engage with. Otherwise, it's fairly close to Fadlan's writing.

Right, I was going to say it was decidedly less rapey in the film. Ibn Fadlan's account is pretty hair-raising, especially not just that she's raped multiple times, but that there's two distinct phases of the ritual where she is raped multiple times. You'd think once would be plenty for any ritual purposes, but... not the Rus, I guess.

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First two episodes of Only Murders in the Building Season 2 have dropped. So far as good as the first season.

I particularly liked

Spoiler

The Brazzos reboot with the young female lead and the previous main character relegated to a supporting role.

 

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On 6/26/2022 at 1:02 PM, Tywin et al. said:

I get that too, it's not an issue for me, but overall we each have certain comforts we're expecting and a festy doesn't always offer them. Out of curiosity is there a difference for you between indoor and outdoor venues? 

 

Has anyone here checked out The Stand miniseries? I'm four episodes in now and the show is so confusing. It bounces all over the place without a ton of explanation. 

 

Not really. The typical outdoor weekend musical festivals of the UK (Glastonbury (never went), Reading, V (went to both multiple times)) will have such big crowds camping there, that it can take you 30 minutes to 'pop back' to your tent if you want to leave the main arena and walk to your tent and back. You can't go anywhere in a hurry, it's like continual commuter rush hour in any direction. I like camping and I never minded roughing it, i.e. the lack of washing, toilets, limited food options etc. Just the people. :)

I heard that The Stand was bad and I wanted to watch it, but in the UK it's on one of the channels where you have to buy another subscription just to watch that show. It's possible it's on the same channel as Station Eleven actually.

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47 minutes ago, Isis said:

I heard that The Stand was bad and I wanted to watch it, but in the UK it's on one of the channels where you have to buy another subscription just to watch that show. It's possible it's on the same channel as Station Eleven actually.

I bailed after the fourth episode. It's an incoherent mess.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I bailed after the fourth episode. It's an incoherent mess.

Yeah, every review I read was so terrible that I didn't even bother starting it.  Which is a shame, because that's one of my favorite King books.

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The flash forwards they used eliminated all possible suspense and made the narrative a jumble for no benefit.  I wanted it to be good because I've read The Stand several times....but it made the 90s miniseries, which was not good at all, seem great. 

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2 hours ago, briantw said:

Yeah, every review I read was so terrible that I didn't even bother starting it.  Which is a shame, because that's one of my favorite King books.

I've heard it's one of his best and will probably check it out at some point. It's a bummer King's works just don't translate that often. I read two of his books during the pandemic that were put to screen and both were disappointing. 11/22/63 isn't bad, and it was for the most part a faithful adaptation until the end of it when they changed so much that it didn't work for me. Hearts in Atlantis might be my favorite King book, it's probably between that and The Green Mile (an example of the adaptation working perfectly) and what they did with that film is a joke. The book is a five part anthology with two longer stories and three shorter ones were the lives of three main characters and one side character are weaved together to tell an incredibly beautiful story. In the movie they cut out the three middle stories and slapped the end of the last story onto the first story and it doesn't work at all. They didn't include anything from the actual story called HiA which oddly would have been the easiest part of the book to turn into a standalone movie. 

1 hour ago, Cas Stark said:

The flash forwards they used eliminated all possible suspense and made the narrative a jumble for no benefit.  I wanted it to be good because I've read The Stand several times....but it made the 90s miniseries, which was not good at all, seem great. 

As mentioned above I haven't read the book and was so confused by the editing. It was really hard to tell what was even happening because it was bouncing all over the place while not really establishing anything. I was mostly enjoying the first episode and then at the end it just jumps forward without any warning and completely changed the story and the few characters we met. 

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