Ahhhhh I've been so busy lately with work and holiday-ing and all that that I've barely had time to blog!
Inside Out (2015)
8.7/10 on IMDb
98% on Rotten Tomatoes
Pixar is no stranger in giving us feels in strange ways, yet their most recent film gives us feels through the personification of feelings themselves! Inside Out looks at five of our core feelings: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. We take a look at the control room of our mind and how these feelings operate within us in the emotional roller coaster that is life itself. Our main human being controlled by these feelings is Riley, an 11 year old girl with a love for hockey, silliness and her family. But as we look at the events that take place and how the control room of feels operates, we go through all the ups and downs that Riley faces with this.
I don't want to delve too much into the plot as I think it's better to not know too much, but I also think that the plot isn't really the main driver of the film here. The concept itself is what got me interested and the concept itself is what kept me interested.
The notion of everyone's feelings being controlled by these small creatures in our mind is so fascinating, and it actually did a great job in trying to explain a lot of weird things that the human mind goes through. Like why do happy memories sometimes become sad memories? Why do some people think that their opinions are facts when they're clearly not? And why do we sometimes not perform the same way we used to? Why do we forget certain things and why does our personality change over time? These were all integrated into the story and it worked pretty well. As someone with a history of depression, I thought they handled all of these changes and just the concept of sadness really really well.
Amy Poehler was great as Joy (I have been getting into Parks and Rec and I absolutely love her), but Phyllis Smith's Sadness was so spot on. It was actually the perfect voice casting to personify sadness itself. The others (Bill Hader as Fear, Mindy Kaling as Disgust, and Lewis Black as Anger) were great too.
The only issues I had with this were that some of the jokes were a bit lame, but as it's a kid's film I can't really fault that. They do have some great laughs in it and a lot of the jokes they have would be better understood by adults rather than children, as I guess children haven't really experienced a lot of the things that happen in the film, so it does appeal to everyone. Another issue I had was when one of the features of the mind didn't make sense, but that's a spoiler so I won't discuss it anyway and it's sort of just nitpicking.
So it's a short review but that's because I don't want to go too much into the plot. The film was great in tying together all these concepts of the mind, such as our thoughts, feelings, personality, memory, and dreams, and for that alone it is worth the watch. But even more reason to watch is how many feels this movie gives you. It's just so relatable, especially because it is the first Pixar film to focus on normal human beings, and it does a good job at balancing "It's all in your head" with "The problem is a very real problem and not just you".
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Also, over a week ago I went to this Medieval Faire called
Winterfest! It was in Parramatta over the weekend and as I love Medieval-themed things, I was super keen to go to this (and I even conned my mum into going by saying she can take all the photos she so desires).
I heard about it from this great blog that has a
calendar of any and every single family-friendly event in Sydney. It's pretty amazing how she compiles all of it together and every now and then when I'm super bored I'll have a scroll through.
There's also another Medieval Faire happening at St Ives in September.
Here's the video for it. They have more stuff than Winterfest, including a trebuchet, medieval-styled food, archers, a pike and musket display, and more.
But here's the run down on the Winterfest Faire:
The first event was the 'Skill at Arms', a sort of warm-up for the Joust, and I think it was the best event. Each knight and lady would ride up on horses and compete.
There were three components: the big shield, which they need to hit and they get points based on how many times it turns around; the small shields, which there are four of and they get a point for each shield they hit; the small rings, which there are four of and they get a point for each ring they hit, and an extra point for each ring they manage to keep on their lance.
It was pretty fun, and this guy in the picture was my favourite. They had a lot of different competitors, about 6 or 8 of them, so it was really exciting. It was also crazy to see how insane some of the horses went. One girl fell off her horse and rolled on the floor, the guy in the picture had his horse once sort of go crazy and he was hard to control but the knight had to control him with one hand which looked really hard, so... respect.
They also did a few demonstrations just for fun. Like here is a guy cutting a melon mid-air. They went through about 5 melons I was so shocked at the wastage!
Up next was the Birds of Prey demonstration. They showed all these birds that Medieval people would have used to hunt wild animals.
They had some owls and falcons, but the craziest was this eagle that they had. It was huge, its legs looked like the arms of freaking monkeys, and they had to cover its eyes so it wouldn't randomly attack anything. They even had to tell people who brought their dogs to stay well away from the area.
These birds were able to hunt small animals, and the eagle was able to hunt even a deer or something. It could land on a kangaroo and crush the kangaroo's skull with it's beak. All the lords and kings and stuff would have eagles because the bigger the bird, the more important you were. He likened birds to sports cars: people would go anywhere with their bird just to show it off.
Then there was a bit of free time and I went around to all the market stalls. It was all pretty cool, they had heaps of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones-related merchandise, but it was all too expensive so I didn't buy anything.
I did get this obsidian arrowhead (or, rather, Dragonglass to kill the White Walkers) which was pretty cool.
Apart from that, I didn't get much else.
I wanted to get this cool shield for $20 to hang up on my wall. It had a knight's helmet with two swords on the front, but it wasn't symmetrical and when I picked it up it was way lighter than it looked, which just meant dodgy quality. The lady also bullshitted her way into saying that it was handmade in Spain (just because the hanger on the back said Spain) so I was just like yeh, nah...
The coolest stall was the woodworking one, where one guy had this amazing wooden lathe set up:
The string is tied from branch to branch, and he winds it around the piece of wood he is working with, so that when he steps on the lower branch, the up and down motion causes the piece of wood to spin like a lathe.
There was also a stall from a company called
Schloss. They have these things called 'Castle on a Hill'. It's a piece of wood that's been carved so that when you flick it upside down, a castle comes up, and you can just push it back down to become one piece of wood again. I wanted to buy them but the medium sized ones, which I think were the best size, were still too pricey for me.
There were also some cool re-enactors walking around, as well as some people who dressed up in the medieval spirit.
There was a 'Village' section where they showed how people lived in the Medieval period, including knights having lunch from a roast on a fire, medieval women weaving and knitting, and all that.
They had a stall which was run by a company called
Stoccata School of Defence, where they had people demonstrating one-on-one how to use different swords, like fencing swords, rapiers, bigger swords, etc.
The same guys that did this also did some public demonstrations looking at the evolution of sword-fighting from the 18th century, and they had people doing non-choreographed fighting.
There was also some fencing school that did a choreographed skit where they had different people pretend to conflict with each other and then fight. Because it was choreographed, it wasn't too exciting, but it was pretty funny and one guy even had a prosthetic leg, which is pretty amazing.
They also had a stall which taught people how to do Archery, but I didn't end up doing it as my mum was getting really tired from walking around all the time.
At the end of the day, they had the Joust. It was a bit of an anticlimax; there were only two knights in the Joust. It was pretty crazy though, you could see the lances getting completely destroyed and it looked really dangerous. Like it must take a lot of guts for them to actually do that. My mum got a shot where the lance is actually hitting the guy's helmet, which looks insane.
After the Joust there was a Grand Melee, but my mum was too tired to stay so we ended up leaving. It was getting a bit dark and cloudy anyway so she had no more motivation to take any photos.
But all in all it was a fun day and I'm keen to go to the one in St Ives, which looks bigger and much better than this one did.
