(no subject)
Jan. 2nd, 2012 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raincitygirlI was sick in the night. Yuck! Naturally my need to do laundry is inversely proportional to the availability of washing machines in the basement. I hate coin laundry. Well, really what I hate is shared laundry. I'd cope with the coins just fine if I could guarantee a free machine whenever I want one.
John Henry (new notebook) is delightful beyond words. However, while the people at the Apple store were very helpful at getting all my music transferred from my old machine to John Henry, the playlists didn't transfer over. And since playlists is how I organize all my music, to say nothing of organizing the fan mixes, I am having to transfer them over manually. Tedious beyond words. But John Henry has iTunes Match, which brings me back into legality with downloads.
Saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on New Year's Eve at a matinee. It was...good. It moved quite slowly at times, so it felt more like a movie from 1973 than a modern movie set in 1973, if you catch the distinction. Having seen many real movies from the seventies, they do tend to be slower-paced than modern movies. But I don't know if that was a deliberate homage or not. Mind you, it may have felt like it dragged to me because halfway through I suddenly remembered that I *have* read the book after all, though many years ago, and I remembered who the mole was. Which killed the suspense element for me, and could be why I felt the second half of the movie was slow.
Lots of talented actors in this one (quite the sausagefest), though to my mind Mark Strong was head and shoulders above the rest. But that may be because Jim Prideaux has the biggest emotional arc. Benedict Cumberbatch also excellent as Peter Guillam, but that's no surprise, having seen him in Sherlock. But seriously, I want Strong to get some best supporting actor noms for this role. Cutting for spoilers:
I liked that Guillam's homosexuality was entirely incidental to his role. It was just this throwaway "Oh yeah, he has a boyfriend, not a girlfriend," and everything else was Guillam just doing his job for Smiley. So often queer characters get defined only through the lens of their queerness. It was the same with Bill Haydon's bisexuality. HIs sexual orientation in his private life was totally incidental to the fact that he was the mole. I'm not explaining this well.
I wish the scene with Guillam and his boyfriend had been clearer, though. It wasn't clear if Guillam was kicking him out to protect his own career, or kicking him out because he (Guillam) was trying to protect him (the boyfriend) from getting caught up in the shitstorm developing at the Circus. They never really said one way or the other whether Prideaux and Bill Haydon had been lovers or not, which surprised me. My memories of the book were that Prideaux and Haydon definitely were lovers, or had been at some stage. But I last read the book in high school, so I could be remembering it wrong.
I don't suppose it matters especially whether Haydon and Prideaux were "just" best friends for decades or if there was also a romantic component to the relationship. Either way, Haydon was the only person in the whole circus that Prideaux trusted completely, to the point of warning him Control was suspicious of him before he (Prideaux) went to Budapest on the mission. And how Haydon repaid that trust, getting him captured and tortured.
Yeah, okay, he traded to get Prideaux back home, but his actions then were the final damn insult. The least he could have done is let Prideaux quietly retire with a full pension, instead of handing him a thousand pounds and a secondhand car and expecting him to disappear. As the end credits rolled I found myself hoping Smiley took care of the pension detail. Actually, technically he didn't visit Prideaux at all, just sent Toby with the money and the car. Near the end when Smiley confronts Haydon about selling Prideaux out, he blusters, "Oh, I got him back, for God's sake." I felt like saying to the screen, "Do you have any idea how inadequate that sounds?" like Annie did in Being Human when Mitchell tried to justify his actions.
John Henry (new notebook) is delightful beyond words. However, while the people at the Apple store were very helpful at getting all my music transferred from my old machine to John Henry, the playlists didn't transfer over. And since playlists is how I organize all my music, to say nothing of organizing the fan mixes, I am having to transfer them over manually. Tedious beyond words. But John Henry has iTunes Match, which brings me back into legality with downloads.
Saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on New Year's Eve at a matinee. It was...good. It moved quite slowly at times, so it felt more like a movie from 1973 than a modern movie set in 1973, if you catch the distinction. Having seen many real movies from the seventies, they do tend to be slower-paced than modern movies. But I don't know if that was a deliberate homage or not. Mind you, it may have felt like it dragged to me because halfway through I suddenly remembered that I *have* read the book after all, though many years ago, and I remembered who the mole was. Which killed the suspense element for me, and could be why I felt the second half of the movie was slow.
Lots of talented actors in this one (quite the sausagefest), though to my mind Mark Strong was head and shoulders above the rest. But that may be because Jim Prideaux has the biggest emotional arc. Benedict Cumberbatch also excellent as Peter Guillam, but that's no surprise, having seen him in Sherlock. But seriously, I want Strong to get some best supporting actor noms for this role. Cutting for spoilers:
I liked that Guillam's homosexuality was entirely incidental to his role. It was just this throwaway "Oh yeah, he has a boyfriend, not a girlfriend," and everything else was Guillam just doing his job for Smiley. So often queer characters get defined only through the lens of their queerness. It was the same with Bill Haydon's bisexuality. HIs sexual orientation in his private life was totally incidental to the fact that he was the mole. I'm not explaining this well.
I wish the scene with Guillam and his boyfriend had been clearer, though. It wasn't clear if Guillam was kicking him out to protect his own career, or kicking him out because he (Guillam) was trying to protect him (the boyfriend) from getting caught up in the shitstorm developing at the Circus. They never really said one way or the other whether Prideaux and Bill Haydon had been lovers or not, which surprised me. My memories of the book were that Prideaux and Haydon definitely were lovers, or had been at some stage. But I last read the book in high school, so I could be remembering it wrong.
I don't suppose it matters especially whether Haydon and Prideaux were "just" best friends for decades or if there was also a romantic component to the relationship. Either way, Haydon was the only person in the whole circus that Prideaux trusted completely, to the point of warning him Control was suspicious of him before he (Prideaux) went to Budapest on the mission. And how Haydon repaid that trust, getting him captured and tortured.
Yeah, okay, he traded to get Prideaux back home, but his actions then were the final damn insult. The least he could have done is let Prideaux quietly retire with a full pension, instead of handing him a thousand pounds and a secondhand car and expecting him to disappear. As the end credits rolled I found myself hoping Smiley took care of the pension detail. Actually, technically he didn't visit Prideaux at all, just sent Toby with the money and the car. Near the end when Smiley confronts Haydon about selling Prideaux out, he blusters, "Oh, I got him back, for God's sake." I felt like saying to the screen, "Do you have any idea how inadequate that sounds?" like Annie did in Being Human when Mitchell tried to justify his actions.
