And 5:30 in part 3 is just pure WIN!

I guess this is canon now

“Richard Alpert is not immortal… You are!”

Maybe that’s stretching it a bit too far, but I’m always looking forward to a new one. Yesterday I saw the latest ad, with Macaulay Culkin – it’s quite funny, although I don’t think it’s one of the best – but then the best are incredibly brilliant.

So here they are, most of them.

First, the “greats”:

Patrick Swayze as “the silent hunter”. Pure genius.

Darth Vader. Impossible not to love it…

I don’t care about Orange’s service or tariffs or anything else. If I hadn’t had an Orange SIM already, I would have switched to them just to join the power of the Orange Side.

Michael Madsen – recent entry that deserves a place among the greats. “Hello, Sarah…” I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen it, I know perfectly well what’s going to happen, but I still laugh at the ending:

Steven Seagal’s ad is also very good. Lots of action in this one! Romantic comedy? Lol…

And Sean Astin’s epic romantic comedy…

And some others, in no particular order:
Verne Troyer, John Cleese, Daryl Hannah, Mena Suvari, Roy Scheider, Carrie Fisher, Spike Lee, Val Kilmer…

If you go to the movies a lot, you start learning the lines – at some point I think I knew all the lines for Patrick Swayze’s and Lord Vader’s… But give me mr Dresden and the phone box killer a hundred times rather than something like this!!! Yeah, nice ad, but try to watch it a few times and you’ll want to kill yourself. Or Svetlana.

Ok, I’ve never cared about BSB, but I’m sure Snowball will be happy, and this can only be a good thing for the world.

“Set around a series of galleries in an old monastery, the museum allows death, in the form of human skulls, to stare you in the face from every angle. [...] In glass cabinets, hanging from walls, peeking out at you from round corners, deathly creations are everywhere. [...] You can also find depictions of skeletons playing basketball, or drunken skeletons engaged in a poker game.“

Weird enough to make me curious about this “Mexican Day of the Dead“. I always like to read about different cultures and customs, and I found the Wikipedia entry a very interesting read. But while I thought I knew nothing about it, I kept having a feeling that the Day of the Dead celebration was not new to me. It was odd, because I have never been to Mexico, let alone celebrated the festival of the dead. Maybe a movie? A previous life? Hmm…

…Why was I sure I knew this guy??? Or at least someone who looked a lot like him…

Then I realized:

… GRIM FANDANGO!!!!!

(from Wiki:) “The story unfolds in four episodes, each set a year apart on the Day of the Dead, November 2. It is from this festival that much of the game’s imagery is drawn — most of the game’s characters look like skeletal calaca figures.”

No wonder those calaca things looked familiar!

Released in 1998, Grim Fandango would be Lucasarts’ last truly great adventure game. It had everything: it was fun, touching, with a great storyline, unforgettable characters, witty dialogue and plenty of STYLE. 

There were so many memorable moments, it would be hard to choose just one scene, one line, one character - although Manny Calavera is up there with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe – only funnier.

“Manuel? Are you… in love with her?”

“Love? Love is for the living, Sal. I’m only after her for one reason… she’s my ticket out of here.”

Eat your heart out, Bogey!

It’s been almost ten years now since its release, but Grim Fandango has lost none of its appeal. Even the graphics - that now are nothing special from a technical point of view – work well, thanks also to the flawless art direction, in giving the game its unique atmosphere. Seeing someone sprout is always a powerful view.

And the voices? Perfect.

“Oh Manny… so cynical… What happened to you, Manny, that caused you to lose your sense of hope, your love of life?”

“I died.”

I’ve no doubt I wasn’t the only one who felt a bit sad when it ended. But, as with a good book, I am not sure I want to “live” it again. After all, Manny, Glottis, Meche, they all will be doing something else now. Enjoying the trip.

I’ve just noticed there both the men and the women are showing their tits smiles in this photo; Don Giovanni is also showing his tongue to the posh guys dressed up as Raouls in the first box and Donn’Anna is about to fall into the pit:

With Erwin Schrott as the Don, Anna Netrebko as Donn’Anna and Kyle Ketelsen as Cousin Itt.

This one is a bit blurry; less tits and more faces though… and no tongue!

“Rugby football is a game I can’t claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench.”

But it made me think about the city I grew up in, Naples. What are the stereotypes people associate with Naples? The usual things: spaghetti, mandolino, Pulcinella, pizza…

…wait a minute. It might not be reason enough to live in Naples, but pizza is the best thing the city has now.

So I decided to make the most of these days in Italy and devoted yesterday to the sacred god of Food (in a more prosaic way, “to eating like a pig”).

There are some places where you can eat very good pizza: Michele, Salvo (excellent but a bit far from the city centre), Sorbillo and a few others…We went to Di Matteo, right in the historic centre.

I have nothing against American style pizza – the “deep pan” kind, nor against any of these. I only hate it when I read things like “the original Italian-style, thin and crusty” pizza.

The “original” Italian pizza is the Neapolitan pizza. And it’s definitely not, NOT “crusty”!!!!! It MUST NOT be crusty, because you have to be able to fold it in four (into a “wallet”) and eat it that way without it cracking or going to pieces!
Well, you don’t have to do it… but you have to be able to if you want to. See?

After all, pizza is street food in Naples. You can stop outside, grab your pizza and go. 

There were three of us, and for €23 we got:

three pizze, two margherite and a marinara (olive oil, oregan, tomato, garlic)

four – where’s the fourth? – crocchè (potato croquettes, but I think the picture is self-explainatory…);

and a pizza fritta. This thing.

I mean, look at its size…check the hands of the guy. He’s not a dwarf. And that’s  not a miniature-sized plastic cup.

This kind of pizza fritta (fried pizza, or deep fried pizza) is not the creation of a bored scottish cook; it’s made with pizza dough, filled with ricotta, mozzarella or other stuff (we wanted salame in ours but for some reason got ham; eated it anyway…) and deep fried instead of oven-baked:

Oh, and four cokes.

£15. And I don’t mean per person. Ok, you get the plastic glasses, but that’s part of the experience.

The start was interesting. Through a wall covered in random mathematical formulas came three women dressed up as Christmas trees the tree Norns (Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Marina Poplavskaya and Yvonne Howard). I thought their singing was very good, but halfway through the first scene – which is actually the prologue – the man in front of me was already in deep sleep. At least that’s when he started swinging his head back and forth – for what I know, he could have been sleeping since the lights went out, or maybe even before that.

And he was sitting behind the sleeping-man-from-Die-Walküre, who, of course, was doing the same. Seriously, I thought this time Pappano would turn and see him and poke him with his stick.

But last night the sleeping wasn’t limited to the audience…Even Hagen, a couple of scenes later, dozed off in his chair, despite having Brünnhilde and Waltraute singing a few feet from him, and didn’t wake up until the end of Act I!

Being asleep, he forgot to leave the stage, so he was present (although not awake) while BOTH GUNTHER AND SIEGFRIED reached the top of the mountain and the latter spoke to Brünnhilde, who, understandably, didn’t know who to look at; after a moment of uncertainty, she went for Gunther – after all, he wasn’t the one with a Rubik’s cube on his head.

The horse skull was still there. I guess I wasn’t the only one who had forgotten about it, since Brünnhilde, after entering the stage visibly happy, stopped, saw the skull on the floor and went serious for a fraction of second, probably trying to remember where she had seen that finding a dead horse’s head in your bedroom is not a good thing.

But horse skulls are fine if the singing is good; unfortunately I didn’t enjoy it as much as in Die Walküre. Lisa Gasteen was amazing again, I don’t know if she sang all the notes she had to but I don’t really care, I just love her Brünnhilde. I didn’t like John Treleaven as Siegfried very much – his incestuous mum and dad were far better…makes you wonder if Siegmund really is his father.

Emily Magee portrayed Gutrune as a weak woman, not in an unsympathetic way. I liked her; Hagen seem to like her too because he couldn’t keep his eyes off her a** . I suppose her acting was good, since she was carrying an Oscar (it might have been for another performance though, and in any case she threw it away right after Siegfried had died).

As for the other men, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Gunther. Peter Coleman-Wright wasn’t bad, bad I didn’t care much about his character in this production. At least most of the times I could understand what he was saying. I can’t say the same thing about Hagen – I couldn’t understand him when he was singing! And Kurt Rydl is Austrian, so I guess his German is perfect, but he wasn’t clear at all, not to me at least. A pity, because I usually like villains. Loved Peter Sidhom’s Alberich though.

Actually I think I know why I didn’t like Kurt Rydl. At some point I realized who he reminded me of. The Italian singer Lucio Dalla.

I mean, if you don’t know him you can’t understand, but trust me, from that moment on I couln’t look at him with the same eyes. I tried not to think about it, but I kept having visions of Hagen singing – and dancing – “Attenti al lupo“.

But then, now that I think about it, John Treleaven looks a bit like Paolo Limiti.

Watching Antonio Pappano was very enjoyable, especially during the most energetic bits. The two guys in front of me (sleeping beauty’s mates) spent more time watching him than the stage.

Some curtain call pics:

John Treleaven and Lisa Gasteen, who looked MUCH HAPPIER at the curtain calls this time (even if at Die Walküre there was the loudest cheer in the ROH’s history – well, it seemed so).

Tonino Pappano & friends looking in the direction of the sleeping-man-from-Die-Walküre who was probably still asleep:

Loge, who came onstage for the last scene for his canonic “set stuff on fire” bit, with the Academy Award (the bigger version).

Must have been pretty hot up there: the cast of Les Miserables, who appeared every now and then during the opera, took off their shirts and remained in vests and trousers; the Rheinemaidens took off everything.