everyone likes the game of '80s thrones

Even though its sort of a faux throwback, I love this remix of the opening credits for Game of Thrones, '80s style. Kept waiting for Larry Hagman or Joan Collins to show up ...

favorite song friday: game of thrones

Getting ready for my favorite show to come back (Sunday!) I couldn't resist sharing this as my song pick this week. Here is a wonderful cover of the Game of Thrones theme song by a quartet of talented musicians:


And here is the official series theme song, along with its creative Westeros animation, from Season 1 (Sean Bean, [sniff]):

mirror mirror

Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror had a lot of potential to be more fun than it was. A Bollywood-like closing number captured the essence of what the film could have been — fanciful, colorful, silly — a cute update of Snow White. There was just one kink in its armor — Julia Roberts. In what must have seemed a coup at casting time, getting an A-list actress to pull in a big audience, unfortunately ended up being a huge miscasting that threatened to sink the film at every turn of the Queen's voluminous hoop skirts.

Julia Roberts, overwhelmed by costumes and character

Mirror Mirror apparently didn't even need to be made in the first place. According to New York Magazine's Vulture column,

“Relativity's decision not to co-finance Snow White and the Huntsman with Universal and instead make their own film to compete with [them] wasn't a wise decision.” Given the limited-to-youth appeal of the Mirror Mirror trailer when compared with Huntsman’s darker, racier, and visually stunning materials, “people are waiting for that ‘Snow White’ film.”

Snow White and the seven dwarves

It doesn't help Mirror Mirror that ABC's much-watched television series Once Upon A Time, with its Snow White/Evil Queen conflict at its heart, is much more compelling viewing than this Roberts vehicle. Why should folks rush out to see this movie? They shouldn't and didn't. The Hunger Games once again dominated the box office last weekend while Mirror Mirror took 3rd place and $19 million — not much considering its over $85 million budget.

As the film opens, Roberts intones in a strangely accented voiceover, that this story will be about the Queen, rather than Snow White. And therein lies the rub. Roberts has been a welcome presence in rom-coms in the past, but she is definitely a most contemporary actress. When she tries to act in a story that isn't set in the current day the results, like Mary Reilly, are disastrous. Mirror Mirror is a fairy tale, and Roberts is much too far out of her element. She lacks the arch delivery needed to make her Queen truly evil. She's just mean and bitchy and bored, and not much fun to watch, despite the fabulous costuming by the late Eiko Ishioka. What's worse, she knows she is not right for the part and telegraphs her discomfort in a series of lackluster line readings, each word delivered seriously, without a hint of irony or wicked glee. In two scenes she even desperately utilizes her trademark guffaw, but it is out of context and inappropriate.

All the costumes by Eiko Ishioka are exquisite, but the animal headdresses at a ball are especially fanciful

What a different film this could have been if Michelle Pfeiffer had been cast as the Queen. Or Uma Thurman or Meryl Streep or even Kim Cattrall.

But there are a few highlights. Tarsem Singh (The Cell, Immortals) brings his usual visual flair to scenes, playing with scale  and injecting a sense of the fantastical into the proceedings. There is a lovely animated opening sequence, a Beast that lurks in the forest, and some lethal puppets employed by the Queen that all add to the film's imagery. Mirror Mirror's best scenes include Snow (Lily Collins) with the seven dwarves, who are a combination of the usual cutesy personalities with a grittier approach, reminiscent of Time Bandits. Snow and the Prince, played by Armie Hammer (frequently shirtless, one of the other high points of the film), are also great together. Nathan Lane is always fun to watch, and tries to have fun with the banter in his scenes with Roberts, but you can tell he would have been beter paired with someone who could have bantered back. Sean Bean aso makes a brief but extremely welcome appearance as Snow's father, the King.

Sean Bean and Nathan Lane are welcome additions to the cast

I couldn't help thinking of Notting Hill, a film with Roberts that I like, where she plays the ultimate American movie star who falls in love with an English bookshop owner, played by Hugh Grant. During the course of the film there are clips of some of Roberts' fictional blockbusters, including a Joan of Arc-like science fiction space saga, and the filming of a version of a Henry James novel. It's one of the film's in-jokes that she is not really suited for these roles. It's not so funny that her career is now becoming this fiction. At some point Hollywood has got to give up on stunt casting with a big name to rake in a few bucks. If they simply aren't suited for the material it is bound to backfire. Like most everyone else, I'm holding out hope for the upcoming Snow White and the Huntsman, which comes out on June 1, and looks like a more interesting twist on the Snow White fairy tale. Charlize Theron will play the Evil Queen, an actress who I have no doubt will not only be able to portray true wickedness, but more importantly, have fun doing so.

game of thrones ... the joy of adaptation

I watched the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones and loved it. I tuned in initially for Sean Bean and the medieval vibe, but kept watching for the great acting and wheels-within-wheels intrigue. I hadn't read the series of books by George R. R. Martin that the series is based on, and didn't really intend to.

Once the first season drew to its emotional and startling close I found myself actually missing the characters. So one day I found myself staring at a picture of Sean Bean seated on the Iron Throne in a paperback reissue of the first book of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, and picked it up. I literally have a stack of books next to my bed that I have to read, but I pushed them all aside as soon as I cracked the cover. It was nigh impossible to put down. Not only is Martin's book as good as all and sundry have claimed, but as each chapter progressed it was clear that HBO had done a fantastic job of adaptation. [Note: after reading A Game of Thrones, I have re-watched the first few episodes on-demand and I am really impressed on how much they packed in and that I missed the first time around viewing the story as an uninitiated newbie.]

How did book differ from television? While reading A Game of Thrones it was nice to have a lot of the characters more fleshed out. There were also many subsidiary characters that there was clearly never time for in a 12-episode television series. Martin writes very well and the settings, characters and supernatural histories are meticulously rendered. The character of Jaime Lannister was also a strong, but frequently shadowy, character in the book. His actions, or potential actions, influence a lot of the other characters, but he was rarely seen.

Obviously the show creators were also big fans as they managed to convey much of Martin's world. Through the power of the visual, a lot of the details that work so well in the book — the explanation of Dothraki power structure and Khal Drogo's blood riders, a deeper explanation of Catelyn and Littlefinger's early days, how remote the Eyrie actually is, etc. — still work as well, or even better when shown in images. Eddard "Ned" Stark's character and ultimate fate is actually more emotional onscreen than in the book, not just because of the visceral nature of images, but because in a filmed close-up the audience can get closer to Ned, feel with him. And Sean Bean was right-on in hs portrayal of the honor-bound, out-of-his-league ex-soldier.

Martin has worked as a screenwriter in the past for the television shows Beauty and The Beast and Twilight Zone. He also wrote the script for the Game of Thrones episode "The Pointy End," which was one of the best of the season. While reading A Game of Thrones the sense of visual is also there, but at no time does one feel as if they are reading a spec script. Martin creates a world, with a complicated history. The geography of Westeros is extremely well depicted. As much as there are the inevitable comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the sore points for me while reading those books was that for all of Tolkien's endless descriptive prose about the places the Fellowship was walking through, I never felt the reality of the geography. I never "saw" it. Martin's Westeros not only feels like a real country, but from Martin's descriptions of terrain, from The Wall to Winterfell to King's Landing to the Eyrie to Vas Dothraek, I had a real feel of the land. The mysterious creatures that live in these places seemed real as well.

The book is structured by character, with the story being told progressively through various people. This deepens all of the characters, because we get to see Ned, for example, not only through his eyes, but also through the eyes of his wife, his children, his enemies.

Did I mention direwolves? They are in the television show, but in the books the reader gets a better sense of how important the wolves are to the Starks, and how immense and powerful they are. Martin's inclusion of all of the various Westeros ruling families and heraldry gives the reader a sense of how medieval knights might have chosen their emblems.

from The Road Less Travelled

There is sex in the book, but nothing near as gratuitous as in the series, which added some HBO After Dark-like encounters that were totally unnecessary. As this was the most consistent complaint from viewers, and practically the only real complaint anyone could have with the show, it will be interesting to see if HBO tones it down a bit next season, or at least depicts sex as Martin does in the book — as serving the story, not just for titillation.

Favorites in the television show also were favorites in the book. Tyrion Lannister, or the Imp, as he is more frequently called, is just as sympathetic and witty as Peter Dinklage's wonderful portrayal of him. It is as great to read about Daenerys going from an abused-by-her-brother meek bartered bride teenager to the kick-ass woman that she becomes once she realizes her true potential as a Khaleesi of the Dothraki people, a lover of her husband, Khal Drogo, and the last dragon of the Targaryens. If Daenerys is the heroine of A Game of Thrones I suspect that Jon Snow, Ned's bastard son, will become the hero. We will see how things play out as Daenerys makes her way west across the sea and Jon goes up against the Others and whatever else lurks beyond The Wall. Because winter is coming.

I loved A Game of Thrones as much as I did its televised adaptation. But now I have a real dilemma. It is so tempting to dive into the next book in the series, and Martin has even recently released the latest entry, the fifth book (of seven), A Dance with Dragons. But do I want to spoil myself for what is to come before the series next airs (in Spring 2012)? And what about my neglected stack of to-read books?

he'll always be siːn biːn to me

[major plot spoilers and phonetic pronunciations abound]

The first time I think I saw Sean Bean (siːn biːn) was in the movie Stormy Monday. It's a nice little '80s noir, with a great cast. Probably not many have seen it. I walked in for Sting, but walked out adding Bean to my list of interesting actors to watch. I know he played a hero in the Sharpe series of movies in the '90s, but they ran on public television when I didn't have a TV, or wasn't around most nights. I know he was in the Derek Jarman film, Caravaggio.

I started calling him Siːn Biːn sometime after Stormy Monday and before Caravaggio. It was a joke that I shared with my best movie buddy Mary, and we basically infected everyone else we came across with our special pronunciation. It was geeky and nerdy and an in-joke that was funny and understandable to probably no one but us, and we loved it. It cemented him as one of "our" actors. I know that other friends started referring to him with all long vowel sounds as well. It became such a habit that I frankly can't pronounce his name correctly anymore. I have to catch myself when taking to someone new about him — not that I do talk about him all that often, but Game of Thrones has caused his name to come up a bit more frequently of late.

Post-Caravaggio, the next time Sean Bean made an impression (although I know that I must have seen him in other things) was in the great thriller Ronin, where he played what has become his signature character — a weak man who aspires to be a big man but is hopelessly out of his league. Bean's character was pathetic and at times icky, but his portrayal was always downright wonderful.








More recently Bean was also wonderful as Boromir in Lord of the Rings. He was the absolutely perfect person to play that character, a conflicted, almost-hero who wants to do what's right, but just can't. His death at the end of The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is tragic, and also one of the best scenes in director Peter Jackson's trilogy. It's a much more emotional scene than Gandalf's fall into the abyss. Because even if you haven't read Tolkien, every literary and filmic trope tells the audience that Gandalf will be back. But Boromir's death, and Bean's portrayal, are achingly human. He ends up dying a hero's death — the moment his eyes clear from the spell cast by the Ring he gives his life to save his hobbit friends.

So I should have known, should have been prepared, for what was coming in Game of Thrones to Bean's Eddard "Ned" Stark. But like Ned, I was hoping that somehow, some way, he would get a last-minute reprieve before the sword blade came down. But Ned's death was the perfect book-end to his execution of a deserter in the first episode of the series, "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword." Ned's philosophy of life was in direct opposition to just about everyone in King's Landing, especially Joffrey Lannister.

I absolutely love the HBO series, which is based on the books by George R. R. Martin. I haven't read the books. Apart from reading Dune way back when I haven't really read much fantasy. I haven't missed the genre for any particular reason. I just have so many books to read all the time. I do have Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy waiting in the wings. (Since the series ended I picked up the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, on sale at Target, but after I read it, I really don't want to read ahead. It's going to be a long wait for the second season, which doesn't begin until next spring. Maybe I'l get a chance to finally read Earthsea in the meantime.)

So I wasn't in the know about Ned's fate, although as the first season progressed, it seemed more and more likely that not just Ned, but no one might get out of Westeros alive. But for once Bean seemed to be the clear-cut hero of the piece. His character was stubborn and clueless, a Bean specialty, but he was also a leader — strong and brave, with a sense of honor. Unfortunately, he was also the only character who talked and walked that way. Poor Ned.

His stint is over in Game of Thrones, but he has a bunch of movies in the pipeline, and there are plenty of movies to watch from his catalogue in the meantime. Bean is a go-to guy for screen villains in action movies, too. Some of his better known bad guy parts have been in National Treasure, GoldenEye, and Patriot Games. Whether he's playing a terrorist, or a would-be hero, or an abject failure, or even a dramatic role as the stubborn son of Richard Harris in the magnificent film The Field, Sean Bean always fascinates. That's Siːn Biːn ...

I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.—Oscar Wilde

I'm an opinionated gal (in case you haven't guessed) and the internet is a great way to share opinions, ideas, and general natterings.

Luckily for me, some of my needing to share is starting to pay off. I'm now a "Yahoo Contributor" for television, which means I get to write about shows I watch and like or don't like and even get a little scratch for my troubles. I guess it's official, I'm a writer.

My first article is about three current cable series, "Lots of Sex and a Little Violence in 'Game of Thrones,' 'The Borgias,' and 'Camelot'"

In case you haven't seen these shows, you need  to catch up with The Borgias and Game of Thrones as soon as possible. Camelot, not so much, but like I said, that's my opinion.

xoxoxo e