For some reason, as I was leaving work today, I had Beck's "Change Your Heart", from the ETSOTSM soundtrack, on my mind. On the way home, this got me thinking about other film/music links, and soon enough I was humming Fallout Boy's "Thnx fr the Mmrs". Which reminded me of Closer (on which, more later), and I realised that Alice's famous line is of the perfect form to be @everyword-erized.
The bot's pretty simple. It's based on the standard Twitterbot framework that I've messed about with before. The wordlist is from here (which, regular readers will recall, was also used for Amy's subword finder), run through the nltk tagger to pick out the gerunds (Tag 'VBG', from the Penn Treebank project). On a crontab scheduler, the script generates a tweet, and posts it via the Twitterbot. You can find the code here, and the actual output here.
Now, Closer. A film on which I'm surprised to find I haven't written, yet, actually. But before I properly review it, trivia time:
- Clive Owen has played both male title roles. He was Dan in the opening performance at the Royal National Theatre, and Larry in the film.
- This film stars two of my links to a Bacon-number of four. I'm arguably 2-connected to Jude Law via his performance in Anna Karenina, which my cousin Laura worked on. Jude Law has a Bacon Number of 2 (via many means, but my favourite is Sherlock Holmes, Lasco Atkins, and X-Men). Julia Roberts, of course, has a Bacon Number of 1 via Flatliners, which would trivialise this, but where's the fun in that? Still working on that Erdős number via Natalie Portman, though...
- Again, as is apparently par-for-the-course among my favourite films, Closer has intimate links with (self-pitying emotional) music. The aforementioned "Thnx fr the Mmrs" paraphrases Anna as she spits "It tastes like you but sweeter!". Silverstein title a track after Larry's enraged outburst "[Have you ever seen a human heart?! It looks like a ]Fist wrapped in blood". Damien Rice contributed "The Blower's Daughter" to bookend - he wrote a piece entitled "Closer" for the film, but it was not completed in time. And, of course, Panic! At The Disco, a band who soundtracked the most quintessentially teenaged moments of my life, directly quoted Alice's words in the strip club for the names of two tracks on their debut album.
I've heard it described as "a love story for grown-ups", which (appropriately enough) hides a multitude of vicious, twisted, cruelties. It tells the story of two couples as they fall in and out of love and lust, and the lies they tell each other and themselves. Every time I come back to it, I find fresh layers to love and to hate (again, how appropriate!). Much like Fight Club, Scott Pilgrim, and Eternal Sunshine (three other favourites of mine), I love how I've watched it at different times of my life and found different things to sympathise with, to emulate, and to detest. You can probably track my progression through (not "towards"!) maturity by indexing which actions I find reprehensible, understandable, or painfully recognizable.
In fact, it goes deeper than that - with the exception of Fight Club, all three are about how love isn't simple. It isn't storybook, it isn't anything like what you expect and it's nothing you can plan for. Last minutes and lost evenings, the fire in our bellies and furtive little feelings. I believe you can probably make a pretty accurate judge of a person's emotional development by whether they've realised that, sometimes, love sucks, but that's still not a reason to give up on it.
(P.s. I swear I didn't intentionally make all the .gifs in this post of Natalie Portman. But, hey, I'm not saying I regret it...)
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