Last Movie Watched

I love The Last Kingdom. The material culture is dogshit (it's better than Vikings) but the story is better, more realistic, and doesn't make me violently angry every 20 seconds.
 
Damien said:
I love The Last Kingdom. The material culture is dogshit (it's better than Vikings) but the story is better, more realistic, and doesn't make me violently angry every 20 seconds.
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I binged the two of them back to back and really liked both but had viscerally different feelings about both. Vikings is ridiculous but the performances felt more lived in; it felt more like a story about a story than historical fiction. Vikings was a myth full of lies and vibes. Last Kingdom wanted to be historical fiction and felt more like a superhero tale where someone is aggrandizing their family line, but despite that made for one hell of an adventure. Writing wise, Last Kingdom felt like history changed deliberately to make it do what the writer wanted it to do, where Vikings felt like someone lying for lying's sake, if that makes any sense.

Or maybe: Vikings felt like a story you tell from memory around a campfire, and Last Kingdom felt like a NYT bestseller. Both have merits and flaws. But both actually had a depth of character and time WITH those characters that made Northman, despite being FUCKING BEAUTIFUL, feel a bit unsatisfying. I wanted more time to care about everyone.

Also the movie finale of Last Kingdom made me angrier than any film wrap up ever. Wait seven seasons to introduce a gay character and make him a villainous idiot. And while both shows fridged a lot of women, when Last Kingdom fridged a woman, it felt poorly done (when Vikings fridged a woman it was usually because the actor was leaving the show, which is both better and worse, I guess).

And the Vikings spinoff is OBJECTIVELY TERRIBLE.

(Sidebar: Harry McIntyre from the Last Kingdom is DM for the Natural Six actual play and he is one of the most wonderful professional DMs I've ever seen work. Like most actors who play vile characters, he seems to be a delightfully empathetic, joyful man who loves stories.)

The most surprising thing about the Northman was Ethan Hawke feeling like a good fit in a film like this. He's aged into an elder statesman of his craft and I love that for him, every time he opens his mouth right now I like him more, but I did NOT expect him to pull off aged warrior king as well as he did. That was cool to see.
 
docsilence said:
I binged the two of them back to back and really liked both but had viscerally different feelings about both. Vikings is ridiculous but the performances felt more lived in; it felt more like a story about a story than historical fiction. Vikings was a myth full of lies and vibes. Last Kingdom wanted to be historical fiction and felt more like a superhero tale where someone is aggrandizing their family line, but despite that made for one hell of an adventure. Writing wise, Last Kingdom felt like history changed deliberately to make it do what the writer wanted it to do, where Vikings felt like someone lying for lying's sake, if that makes any sense.
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I come at it probably from a different perspective because both shows are very clearly telling history. Both shows get that history wrong, but Vikings gets it like... so... so much more wrong. And the material culture of Vikings is also so much worse. So what ends up happening is that it doesn't look and feel like something -from that era of history-, and that is a huge problem even if (especially if) you're viewing it through the lens of someone just telling lies and mythologizing. Because it doesn't look, feel, or behave like the world they're even mythologizing about.
The Last Kingdom is quite literally told through the perspective of the main character. He narrates it. It becomes, then, infinitely more forgivable when it tells like a superhero story set in the medieval period. Of course it does. Uhtred is telling the story about what a great hero he is. In fact, I would say that the Last Kingdom reads, in book form, pretty much exactly like actual historical records we have of people recounting stuff that happened to them.

Vikings feels like a show made by someone that heard a couple of stories about Vikings and just totally made up the rest without a single bit of understanding of even what time period they lived in. It's essentially bereft of any accurate details you would expect to find in someone that is mythologizing or lying about the past. It's like turning on the video game Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and seeing giant stone castles and huge wooden churches in 9th century NORWAY and England. Nope. You already lost me.

Also, coming at it from an angle I don't expect many/any people here to understand; I hold a massive grudge against Vikings for being almost solely responsible for spreading and solidifying really fucking stupid 'Norse' stereotypes to the unlearned; from the stupid hair styles to the tattoos to the biker leather outfits to the axes. All of it fucking sucks and I hate it. I don't just dislike the show itself, I hate that it even exists.



docsilence said:
But both actually had a depth of character and time WITH those characters that made Northman, despite being FUCKING BEAUTIFUL, feel a bit unsatisfying. I wanted more time to care about everyone.
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The reason I like Northman as much as I do is that it feels like a saga. Of all the Norse-inspired stuff out there in the world to watch, it's one of the only things that really feels like sitting down and listening to an actual viking telling a story he heard. Right down to having a random part in the middle where the main character just encounters a fucking draugr as if that's a thing that can just happen.
But it's a very different type of viewing experience than a traditional (modern) bit of storytelling. My one main criticism of Northman is that it feels too long for what it's trying to do. It needed to be shaved down by like 20 minutes or so.
The material culture of Northman also blows everything else away.


docsilence said:
Also the movie finale of Last Kingdom made me angrier than any film wrap up ever. Wait seven seasons to introduce a gay character and make him a villainous idiot. And while both shows fridged a lot of women, when Last Kingdom fridged a woman, it felt poorly done (when Vikings fridged a woman it was usually because the actor was leaving the show, which is both better and worse, I guess).
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Back on some ancient version of Fwoosh, in some thread I can't remember (TV thread, movie thread, neither?) I think I wrote like 20 fucking paragraphs on how angry I was about the TLK film. They did such an amazing job for so long and then pissed all of it away in like 2 hours. Ignored history, ignored previous characterizations, ignored geography, ignored literally everything that got in the way of 'do the big battle.' Which is like.. a super important historical battle. But, best case, this needed to be one more entire season. They tried to wrap up like three books into a single made-for-TV movie and it went .... well, it actually went worse than expected, but not by very much.


docsilence said:
(Sidebar: Harry McIntyre from the Last Kingdom is DM for the Natural Six actual play and he is one of the most wonderful professional DMs I've ever seen work. Like most actors who play vile characters, he seems to be a delightfully empathetic, joyful man who loves stories.)

The most surprising thing about the Northman was Ethan Hawke feeling like a good fit in a film like this. He's aged into an elder statesman of his craft and I love that for him, every time he opens his mouth right now I like him more, but I did NOT expect him to pull off aged warrior king as well as he did. That was cool to see.
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Hard agree with all of this. Harry McIntyre is great - I hated him so much. And I couldn't even believe that was Ethan Hawke at first.
 
Damien said:
Back on some ancient version of Fwoosh, in some thread I can't remember (TV thread, movie thread, neither?) I think I wrote like 20 fucking paragraphs on how angry I was about the TLK film. They did such an amazing job for so long and then pissed all of it away in like 2 hours. Ignored history, ignored previous characterizations, ignored geography, ignored literally everything that got in the way of 'do the big battle.' Which is like.. a super important historical battle. But, best case, this needed to be one more entire season. They tried to wrap up like three books into a single made-for-TV movie and it went .... well, it actually went worse than expected, but not by very much.
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It took me a solid ten episodes to warm up to Last Kingdom but by the last season I was WILDLY invested and that movie finale was utterly insulting to the cast, characters, and audience, probably in reverse order. It should've been a season for sure, and it needed a LOT of fixes to the script. It was one of those finales that made the entire run worse for existing.

Damien said:
Hard agree with all of this. Harry McIntyre is great - I hated him so much. And I couldn't even believe that was Ethan Hawke at first.
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I love that traditionally the biggest asshole characters in any production are usually played by the most genuinely beloved actors on set. It's like writing horror - to play a cruel person you need to understand people and be empathetic enough to know how to hurt them, so guys like him, or Jason Isaac who always plays great pricks, or Jack Gleeson from Game of Thrones, you ask a cast member about them they're always everyone's favorite human and most hated character. Any time I see someone playing a real piece of shit really well on camera I know he's probably a goddamned cupcake of a human in real life.
 
docsilence said:
It took me a solid ten episodes to warm up to Last Kingdom but by the last season I was WILDLY invested and that movie finale was utterly insulting to the cast, characters, and audience, probably in reverse order. It should've been a season for sure, and it needed a LOT of fixes to the script. It was one of those finales that made the entire run worse for existing.
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You could fix that movie by about 33% at least just by ditching the 'he's gay, so obviously all of his problems are related precisely to his choice of sexual partner.' I legitimately cannot believe that film was made in the 2020s, to be honest.


docsilence said:
It took me a solid ten episodes to warm up to Last Kingdom but by the last season I was WILDLY invested and that movie finale was utterly insulting to the cast, characters, and audience, probably in reverse order. It should've been a season for sure, and it needed a LOT of fixes to the script. It was one of those finales that made the entire run worse for existing.


I love that traditionally the biggest asshole characters in any production are usually played by the most genuinely beloved actors on set. It's like writing horror - to play a cruel person you need to understand people and be empathetic enough to know how to hurt them, so guys like him, or Jason Isaac who always plays great pricks, or Jack Gleeson from Game of Thrones, you ask a cast member about them they're always everyone's favorite human and most hated character. Any time I see someone playing a real piece of shit really well on camera I know he's probably a goddamned cupcake of a human in real life.
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I feel so bad for Jack Gleeson. Didn't he basically quit acting because of how much actual vitriolic hate he got from people that, apparently, did not understand that Game of Thrones isn't real?
 
The gay subplot in TLK's finale was so offensively outdated I was like did they teleport this script from the mind of someone in the 1950s? They also killed off a few women so swiftly and brutally I almost shut the thing off and gave up so I wouldn't ruin my entire experience with the show.

And yeah, Jack stepped back but he's actually great in the House of Guinness that just came out this year, so he's still working.

(Also on the Vikings thing - agree on how awful the fetishization of Viking culture among modern white folks has gotten. The running joke of if you hear a band that leans in on that stuff you have to google to find out if they're Nazis or not. Or like how Werewolf the Apocalypse had to delete the entire Get of Fenris because white supremacists coopted it for Nazi werewolves...)
 
I'd be pretty stoked to have a neighbour blaring Heilung.


In theory.


In practice, if I'm not currently listening to music it's because I don't want to and I don't even want to hear music I like coming from somewhere else. But like, it's better than the kind of shit that people do tend to blare from their cars and houses.
 
I forgot I'd been blasting Heilung in the car when I'd parked one day this summer, got in the car, rolled down the window, and my dumbass phone started autoplaying and I sounded a LUNATIC in the parking lot. It was amazing.
 
docsilence said:
I forgot I'd been blasting Heilung in the car when I'd parked one day this summer, got in the car, rolled down the window, and my dumbass phone started autoplaying and I sounded a LUNATIC in the parking lot. It was amazing.
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When I worked as a delivery driver for a garden centre, all my days were spent in in a dump truck or a cube truck running sod, gravel, mulch, and large floral deliveries.

Funeral parlors and churches were some of my regular stops.

One day I was purely on autopilot and I knew that historically I would just take these flowers, run in, the secretary would stamp something , and I would be on my way within two minutes.

So I left the truck running with the windows down and the alternative rock station on high.

When I came back there was a crying entourage escorting a coffin from hearse to grave.

And Chicago's q101 was playing REM Everybody Hurts at high volume from my open truck cab.
 
docsilence said:
I'm always six months to a year behind on movies but watched the Northman yesterday.
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I fear you might be a little further behind than that.
Damien said:
Also, coming at it from an angle I don't expect many/any people here to understand; I hold a massive grudge against Vikings for being almost solely responsible for spreading and solidifying really fucking stupid 'Norse' stereotypes to the unlearned; from the stupid hair styles to the tattoos to the biker leather outfits to the axes. All of it fucking sucks and I hate it. I don't just dislike the show itself, I hate that it even exists.
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I'd be interested to learn more about this. Not interested enough to read a nonfiction book, mind you, but I'd take a Wikipedia article.

You already drilled the "Medieval peasants wore colors" thing into me. Now I annoyingly tut-tut it anytime I see a 12th-century farmer in gray.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I fear you might be a little further behind than that.
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99% of the time if someone asks "have you seen...." a movie or TV show I'm like nope. I think part of it is I don't second-screen anything, so I only watch something when I can give it my full attention.

There's usually one show at a time I'm keeping up with if they DO NOT release it for binging, and 2-3 movies a year I'll watch as soon as they come out. Otherwise I'm already behind.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I'd be interested to learn more about this. Not interested enough to read a nonfiction book, mind you, but I'd take a Wikipedia article.
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Short version? Not all Vikings used axes (and there's no evidence they were a preferred weapon generally). We have no evidence whatsoever of Vikings with tattoos*. The very scant evidence we have of Viking hairstyles never suggest anything like the weird side-shaved bullshit we see in Viking media sometimes thanks to Ragnar and Bjorn. We have no evidence that early medieval people, Scandinavian or otherwise, wore biker leather outfits, and they very rarely wore black because it was expensive/difficult to make until later in the medieval period - so black leather is DOUBLE wrong. Viking clothing was probably wool 90% of the time, mixing in linen for certain garments/seasons and silk for rich people (sometimes). But like, mostly wool.

And as a sidenote to that; medieval craftsmen were like... actual craftsmen. They knew how to make things. These outfits with giant visible seams and huge stitching and all the patchwork-looking bullshit? Not a fucking chance people that cared about their appearance, as medieval people did, would be caught dead wearing stuff that looked like it was pasted together with macaroni by a blind child.

And another goddamn thing; Vikings wore fucking armour. What is this show's obsession with the richer and more important a viking is, the less they protect themselves from being killed? In fact, at this period (9th century) it would have been almost only the rich vikings like Ragnar that would have been wearing mail. And most would have tried to have a helmet. And they would not have been fucking 16th century burgonets... SAXONS. Jesus.

*YEAH.. FUCKING IBN, I KNOW. That doesn't count. They were Rus.
 
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