Last movie watched...

[Spikes]

The Shawshank Redemption. One of those films that i have to watch whenever its on telly.
Reading about The Kill List on here, i really wanna catch this (checked out the clips on utube, looks great) so as ive still got an HMV voucher from Xmas to get rid of, and ive a day off on Friday, thatll be my next one i think.

[Gonk]

1962 Orson Welles version of Franz Kafka's "The Trial". Anthony Perkins of Hitchcock "Psycho" fame plays K. and there is an appearance made by Welles who plays the Advocate. Kafka meant this story as a comedy and I think lots of people have misinterpreted it as being a tragedy. The whipper part in it I found hilarious.

[TordelBack]

Kafka meant this story as a comedy and I think lots of people have misinterpreted it as being a tragedy.

Surely it's both?

[Gonk]

I personally don't think so Tordel. K.'s character is not heroic enough, as say a Hamlet type character, to be seriously considered tragic.

Joyce's characterisations are the same. This is one of reasons, apart from the style they were written in, that modernism, when it first appeared, was so violently rejected by the literary establishment and the reading public. The human condition was being portrayed as insignificant and alienated. The characters did not become involved in any portentuous events, they were mundane, mediocrities.

The T. S. Eliot poem "Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" is another good example of a character who's lack of heroism and election is a cause for laughter and scorn, and not admiration.

[TordelBack]

I personally don't think so Tordel. K.'s character is not heroic enough, as say a Hamlet type character, to be seriously considered tragic.

That seems a fairly narrow definition of 'tragedy' you're using there, but literary criticism isn't really my thing. All of Kafka's work that I've read elicits both laughter at and sympathy for the situations the characters find themselves in - reading The Trial as purely a comedy seems very strange, since I'd be fairly sure Kafka intended us to empathise with K.'s predicament in order to see the horror of it.

[Gonk]

Kafka was very strange.
Sympathy is a key word here, I'm glad you used it. In Frankenstein, which is an unmodern novel, we are invited by the narrator to feel sympathy for characters in his account.

Walton explicitly asks the reader to participate in the relating of the events by asking the reader to feel sympathetic feelings towards Victor and his monster. In fact Victor created his predicament by creating the monster; he doesn't confess even to his family he's created an abomintion of nature and so spare their lives from the wrath of his monster.

In The Trial, it's not explicitly said in the story, there is no sympathy for K. at all. He is merely foolish. A joke of an identity.

[Hoagy]

The Sound Of Thunder. Based on a Ray Bradbury short, but looks very much like an old Future Shock made into film. Can any uberfans enlighten me to which time-loop story consisted of breaking up the present with the accidental demise of a butterfly in the Cretaceous period thanks to a money making Time Safari ??

As for K being comedic, it goes much deeper than that. Sharply satirical in his beligerent ignorance is possibly more to the point.

[Professor Bear]

I started watching Sound of Thunder but got put off by some of the ropey FX, and then whilst distracted realised it was an expansion of an old Ray Bradbury Theater episode of the same name - which means it was originally a short story, I would imagine.  It also bears remarkable similarities in story and visual terms to an old Future Short, too.

Might give it another look later.

[Hoagy]

I started watching Sound of Thunder but got put off by some of the ropey FX, and then whilst distracted realised it was an expansion of an old Ray Bradbury Theater episode of the same name - which means it was originally a short story, I would imagine.  It also bears remarkable similarities in story and visual terms to an old Future Short, too.

Might give it another look later.

Are you meaning the particularly ropey time plank?  That is particularly ropey. Then the shoddy insect swarming in the first wave had me reaching for the off button. If it wasn't for the fact I needed something a bit fresh to me for some doodling motivation it may have ended there.

Then, there're some nice creature designs coming up after that and the story rolls a bit less choppy as it gets into a stride of some sorts. It's strapped together with some really bad muguffins but what the hell, thoughts of that old Shock kept me in play.

[Tiplodocus]

The first 3 episodes of ALIAS.

Fab stuff. I think I'm nearly as much in love with Jennifer Garner as the producers were.

I have all five seasons for a fiver. Hope it maintains the quality.

[Roger Godpleton]

Got the complete Arrested Development. This is one funny show.

[Professor Bear]

I have all five seasons for a fiver. Hope it maintains the quality.

You might want to call it a day around season 3.

[Gonk]

"The Invisible Man" another film that's had many versions. I have not read the book, so maybe someone on the forum knows whether the film sticks close to the original plot or not.

[Gonk]

?

As for K being comedic, it goes much deeper than that. Sharply satirical in his beligerent ignorance is possibly more to the point.

That's interesting, I sometimes see K's character as Chaplinesque, but without Charlie's thick layer of sugar coating.

[Gonk]

John Wayne's last film from 1976 "The Shootist". This film has it all for a cowboy film. An opening montage of John Wayne westerns documenting the evolution of this genre. A commentary on how this myth of the old west evolved through the sensationalised ghost written autobiographies by unscrupulous hacks trying to make a quick buck. An exsistential approach to the theme of death and the Nietszchean impulse to transcend the human condition. On top of this there is plenty of action and violence, and Lauren Bacall.