Harrowing
Because our washer and general plumbing system is kind of hosed up (ha, I see what I did there), one has to keep a weather eye on the works so that it doesn't drain all over the laundry room floor. I had to wash The Teen's jeans last night, so I was up late. God bless Netflix.
An aside--I refuse to have the tv upstairs. We don't have a terribly big house anyway and to have a television upstairs would make concentration and peace impossible. It's a good arrangement really--the kids can be sent down there, and between my office (delusions of grandeur for the mud/junk room), the tv area, and Spouseman's mancave, we all have a sufficiency of space among us.
Anyway.
So I was noodling around on Netflix streaming, mentally muttering about how all the movies I want to see are not available in streaming (like RocknRolla), when I remembered the movie Hunger with Michael Fassbender.
Remember Michael Fassbender? Hottie Magneto in X-Men: First Class, who kinda stole the screen from James MacAvoy? (Not an easy feat.) After I saw the movie in the theater and detected the ghost of an Irish accent, I did some research and found out he's half German, half Irish. (That combination seems to yield some amazingly pulchritudinous results, according to some folks.) I also read that his performance in Hunger was extraordinary. And whattaya know, it was on streaming. So I watched it.
And it's rough. For those of you who don't know, Hunger is a sketch of the 1981 Irish hunger strike led by Bobby Sands (Fassbender's role) in 1981. We see the briefst glimpses of the situation--never an overview of how the Irish and the British came to such a sorry pass, which might have been useful to some folks. On the other hand, I don't think writer/director Steve McQueen was interested in that--I think he wanted his audience to get their noses right up in the shit (yes, I said shit), in the rotten food, the maggots, the trunchons. It really was like a taste of hell on earth.
And looking at the fluffery of X-Men, and the whole Marvel Comics movie machine (which is boring the crap out of me by now), who'da thunk that Fassbender would turn in such a performance? Sure, the razzledazzle is the spectacle of this man, who was slim to begin with, losing 40 pounds on a 600 calorie-a-day diet for 10 weeks. But the meat is his performance--the scene between his character and Liam Cunningham's priest is quietly startling.
Do not see this movie if you have problems with feces, maggots, naked men, unrelieved beating, and blood.