#i wanna watch it with my dad so bad he loves horror/suspenseful movies and we used to watch em whenever id visit him

[todayisafridaynight]

NOOOO RIGHT 'CAUSE LIKE... the way the Arakawa Family specialize in faking deaths already, I'm sure Jo was so on top of everything. And who better to walk Masato through it right... flight's the perfect time to get started if it's gonna take like fourteen hours...

BUT YES. YEAH. Like The Day Of he's just paralyzed with worry and caught between wanting to do something and not wanting to go against Aoki... maybe at most he chances calling Arakawa telling him to be careful, because that's not too conspicuous given his role in the dissolution, but Arakawa just gives him the old I'll Be Fine Worry About Yourself... and, you know, why shouldn't he; they've always had their enemies and he's Arakawa the Assassin, he can handle himself... he can let himself have that fleeting hope, but deep down... and THEN he finds out and has to act like he didn't mean anything to him and has to go back to his duties like nothing happened... OUGH

Can I just say. Literally such an insane fucking series of scenes in Coin Locker Baby. Because you get Jo's despondence when he's saying he might have killed Arakawa--he's being a bitch to provoke Ichiban into a fight, but it's also an admission his inaction played a part, isn't it... and then you get him expressing that he's familiar with Ichiban's need to protect Arakawa... and then you get the sheer desperation and insistence in his voice when he says he could never kill him... and then you get--I'm not totally sure how clear it is in English--but you get him actively saying his feelings go deeper than Ichiban's without really explaining how... and then you get the tinge of fondness when he's thinking back on the old days when Arakawa lived up to his name... Like. Why Did They Do That. Any Of That.

ALSO. GOD. I've gotten so much shit the past couple days because I said I want to lock Jo, Kume, and Tendo in a room for five minutes For My Entertainment. Reading those tags felt like coming home honestly 😭 Like, even Ichi was ready to kill someone over Arakawa, and Jo was out here threatening to disembowel people [in the dub]. And I Think They Should Be Allowed To. As A Treat. So FOR REAL the biggest "I'm so glad we get to talk" 😭😭😭

On that note genuinely so funny that I took an extra ten minutes re-rendering the video because I forgot to put the "flashback" part in Arakawa's subtitles at first but then nobody read it 😭

But it's also something I've been mulling over because I'm delusional. Getting actors as high-profile as Nakai and Takei back for just A Flashback is kinda crazy to me because Arakawa and Jo's screen-time took up a full four percent of the entire game [over ten percent of the cutscenes] originally. But then if it's multiple flashbacks equivalent to that... what exactly is going on here that the past is so intertwined...

And Because My Brain Is Evil there is the fact that technically speaking, Yokoyama only said that line was from a flashback, and specified Arakawa wouldn't be appearing in the main story. Now of course a normal person would interpret that as him reassuring the audience he won't appear in any present-day scenes, but part of me was like. Oh So A Side Story Is On The Table [<- it's not it's fucking not it will not be in a million years]

JUST. WHAT ARE YOU GUYS COOKING WHY IS THE KITCHEN DOOR CLOSED WHY ARE THE WINDOWS BLACKED OUT

ANYWAYS that's enough from me for today I am [as always] glad you enjoyed One Missed Call and Kyouen, ABSOLUTE bangers

YAYA THATS WHAT IM SAYIN YOU GET IT. UNSURPRISINGLY BUT YOU GET IT ಥ▽ಥ

no but thats what i MEAN like i already was jokin with myself like 'jo and arakawa probably had A Thing right lmao' BUT THEN THE WAY JO TALKED BOUT ARAKAWA AND OBVI THE GENERAL FACT HE COULDNT KILL HIM REALLY JUST MADE ME (。・∀・??) AND REAALLLY LOOK AT EM CLOSER THE SECOND TIME AROUND like genuinely for what. it will fuck me up until i'm dead and gone SOOO unnecessary and yet they did it..

wack that people wouldnt want to see kume and tendo stuck in a room with jo like. from what i know everyone is a part of the We Hate Kume gang so. cmon. kume will be shredded into candy floss within five minutes. it'll be fun (๑❛ᴗ❛๑)

OK BUT NAKAI AND TSUTSUMI'S STATUS WAS A BIG REASON WHY I DIDNT THINK ARAKAWA NOR JO WOULD BE BACK FOR LAD8 THAT'S SO VALID TO CONSIDER THAT its that idea that just has me especially wondering what the plan is. im not expecting them to have MAJOR parts (or in arakawa's case too many flashback segments) but they MUST have a SUBSTANTIAL amount to warrant bringing them back right..

#long post #snap chats #when it comes to Famous Persons Coming Back i was also just like 'theres no way they could get george takei back right' #LISTEN i know the eng dub is not to be spoken of but it exists and it cant be denied takei's REALLY prolific in the states yeah #so i HAD to ask it was WORTH asking myself. unless they decide to swap arakawa's eng VA but w/e its not overly important #moving on. its ok most people dont read anyway no worries about missing a subtitle </3 a painful reality but. we take W's where we can. #OH BUT TO END /MY/ NIGHT THO i LOVED One Missed Call UGH such a good horror movie #i wanna watch it with my dad so bad he loves horror/suspenseful movies and we used to watch em whenever id visit him #KYOUEN'S A DARLING OF A SHOW SO FAR I THINK IVE SAID THAT ENOUGH but yeah......... BIG love........ #i'm almost done with it. if i said i finished it earlier i think i lied i cant remember POINT IS I JUST HAVE THREE EPS #i plan on watching them before stream time tomorrow so that'll be cute :] #buuuut speaking of finishing watching things i Just finished watching the first We Make Antiques movie and UGH #love. love love love it was so silly but also really fascinating to watch... team of forgers thats WILD and i loved it.. #i wish i had access to the sequels tho like PLEAASE i wanna watch these two be losers more.... #they became domestic with each other so quickly like goddamn.. money can do anything #it can make two dudes trying to con each other work together.. its beautiful..... #ok now thats all from ME for tonight. id talk more on the jo and aoki bits but theres a good chance ill do that during stream #or. ill draw it during stream. me drawing is the same as me talking now innit Let My Bullshit Speak For Me etc etc #ok thats all from me fr this time BYE

[filmstruck]

Six Questions With FilmStruck: Larry Karaszewski

FilmStruck: What was the movie that made you fall in love with movies?

Larry Karaszewski: That’s a really complicated question. I fell in love with movies when I was very young, like 9 years old. It wasn’t a specific movie and it wasn’t like most kids who fall in love with movies when they see SNOW WHITE or they see THE WIZARD OF OZ. My parents got divorced and my dad got me one night a week and he sort of didn’t know what to do with a kid and he liked to drink beer, so he would go to the drive-in and drink a case of beer and fall asleep. I would watch these insane early 70s drive-in triple bills. So for me it wasn’t a specific movie, but it was more like a place. It was the Moonlight Drive-In in South Bend, Indiana. A lot of times when you see double features now there’s some kind of thought behind them, there’s a plan for playing the two films back to back. But when I was a kid there would be a new release like DR PHIBES playing with (Gillo) Pontecorvo’s BURN! or THE STERILE CUCKOO or KLUTE. You would see these absolutely insane combinations of movies that really had nothing to do with each other. For me being a little kid, they were completely age inappropriate, which I always thought was a good thing. I think one of the problems with audiences right now is from an early age everything is aimed directly at them. When you’re a kid you can watch The Disney Channel, then Nickelodeon, and everything is aimed directly at you. When I was a kid, I don’t want to sound too much like an old guy saying get off my lawn, but when I was a kid there were only three networks, so you had to watch whatever the hell was on. So if MANNIX was on, I had to watch MANNIX even though I didn’t know what the hell was going on and I was bored out of my mind. It made me learn to sit around and wait for the pay off and know that I would be rewarded. That was definitely the case with me seeing so many R-rated films that pushed the envelope. Crazy stuff that you would never show a kid like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which I saw at a drive-in at a very young age. 

If I had to specifically answer your question, though, in terms of an early movie I saw that changed me in a big way in terms of love for film I would say HORSE FEATHERS with the Marx Brothers. because I saw it fairly young and it was one of the earliest movies I saw that was not of my era.  I remember seeing HORSE FEATHERS and not knowing who the Marx Brothers were and just being blown away at the freshness and the rapid fire comedy of it all. That Groucho could break the 4th wall, that there could be surreal moments in the middle of a movie. That Harpo could bring out a candle burning at both ends. There was sort of a magical quality to that, with this spirit of anarchy. Groucho’s opening song goes “whatever it is, I’m against it.” Definitely that’s something that appealed to me as a young kid. I think that’s why the Marx Brothers came back so strong in the early 70s. It was that sense of giving the finger to everybody. HORSE FEATHERS is a very good entryway for a young person because it’s giving the finger to a school. It made me love black and white movies. It made me realize black and white movies aren’t stuffy. Black and white movies aren’t dull. Black and white movies are crazier than the movies that other kids were seeing. My friends were seeing Disney kind of movies and I knew that HORSE FEATHERS had more going on than that.  

FS: What was the movie that made you want to go to film school and make movies?

LK: The movie that pulled the switch in my mind was THE CONVERSATION by Francis Ford Coppola. I was born in 1961, so I must have been 12, 13, 14 when I saw that film. That was the first movie that I saw where I put together that there were people who made the film. That there was an intelligence behind the lens. When you first start watching films you only think about the actors.  In the sense that you’re a kid and it’s like “Hey that’s the star! That’s Paul Newman. He’s cool in COOL HAND LUKE. I really want to be Paul Newman!” You don’t really say “I wanna be Stuart Rosenberg,” because you don’t really know what the hell that guy is doing. But when I saw THE CONVERSATION, I knew that there was a person telling me this tale. I could sense that there were filmmakers laying the story out in a certain way. I believe that was 1974. I may have even seen THE CONVERSATION on a double bill with CHINATOWN. They’re both Paramount and they were re-released together at a certain point. 1974 is full of really interesting films. I was coming of age in 1974, 1975 and you’ve got THE CONVERSTAION, CHINATOWN, GODFATHER II, DOG DAY AFTERNOON, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, NASHVILLE. These movies are coming right on top of each other and so when the match was lit by THE CONVERSATION there were lots of things to follow up on. It was like “Holy shit. There are voices in American cinema.”  And later when I actually got to work with folks like Milos Forman - it was a dream come true.

FS: How has your love of movies been expressed in your own films and television projects?

LK: That’s kind of an obvious one with me. My writing partner Scott Alexander and I have actually made films about filmmakers. ED WOOD is a complete valentine to joys of being both a filmmaker and a film fan. Just the love that Ed shows Bela [Lugosi] and film in general. Before we made that movie Ed Wood was always seen as a comic figure. A guy who made bad movies. We looked at him a little differently. We said why don’t we concentrate on his passion, why don’t we concentrate on his love of film. He came out to Hollywood and made a handful of movies. Very few people can say that and he pulled it off. He worked with his friends and he worked with his hero. Ed loved movies so much that he just had to make them. So his movies are trying to please himself. He is trying to make the movies he loves. If you look at some of them now, if you look at GLEN OR GLENDA, it’s hard to laugh at all now at GLEN OR GLENDA. It’s a strange, experimental film, a guy putting his life on camera. He wrote, directed, and starred in that movie and it’s about his personal dilemma. For Scott and I, it was the idea of putting our own passion up there. Scott had worked on a bunch of low budget horror films. I had worked on a television show in the Midwest that was made by teenagers. We had both made Super 8 movies. We knew what it was like to be the outsider wanting to make movies and we both had such a passion for film we wanted to transfer that over to Ed.

FS: Are there any films that inspired the structure of American Crime Story?

LK: When we were doing American Crime Story the films we were looking at were some of the films from the same era we were talking about earlier, films like ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, NETWORK, and the work of Robert Altman. DOG DAY AFTERNOON was another one we talked quite a bit about. Like with ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, there’s that idea that you know the end. You know what’s going to happen, yet still it has the qualities of a thriller. By going into the minute details of how everything was found out and delivered, it makes it suspenseful even though you know Nixon is going to resign. We talk a lot about Altman when we were writing initially because usually a television show has a protagonist and you follow them the entire way. We saw the O.J. trial as a big Altman movie where everybody thought they were the lead. Everybody was being miked. Everyone thought that they were starring in their own movie and the other people were supporting characters. Like an Altman movie, like NASHVILLE where there are so many characters and when people are on screen they are living their part of the story - that was our goal for THE PEOPLE VS. O.J..

FS: What was your first introduction to the Criterion Collection?

LK: I was an early adopter. In fact, Criterion should give me a reimbursement check for all those LaserDiscs that I bought. Criterion was the first place on home video that I felt treated the movies with respect. In order to get them initially you had to have a LaserDisc player and nobody had a LaserDisc player. So I got a LaserDics player and my friend Dan Waters, the screenwriter of HEATHERS, got a LaserDisc player and we just became these LaserDisc freaks who would go down and buy all of these things. We would have a big discussion between CLV vs. CAV, which means absolutely nothing to anybody today, but it was an extra 50 bucks if you were buying the disc back in the day.

FS: I’m sorry I’m a youngin’, what does CLV and CAV mean?

LK: It was the amount of information on a disc. You had CAV was the highest quality you could get. CLV was a little lesser quality. With LaserDiscs you had to switch sides, so sometimes only one side would be CAV. Criterion was the first place to do commentary tracks, so it really was like going to film school again. I remember my demonstration disc, when people would come over and I would tell them about LaserDiscs and the Criterion Collection and they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, so I would throw on the last side of TAXI DRIVER with Scorsese’s commentary track. People couldn’t believe it. They were watching the movie with Martin Scorsese and Martin Scorsese is talking about how and why he made all these decisions. Martin Scorsese was talking about Travis sitting outside and talking about ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS playing inside the apartment. I remember that was my go-to because whenever I put it on for somebody, the following week they’d buy a LaserDisc player, or at least they’d say “can I come over again next Sunday and watch something else?”

FS: Do you remember what the first one you bought was?

LK: I still have most of them. The first memorable one was TAXI DRIVER, but I bought so many back in the day. I was pulling them out for talking to you guys and so many are still unopened! I paid $100 for VENGEANCE IS MINE on LaserDisc and it just sits there unopened. 

FS: You could sell that on eBay!

LK:  Yeah for like $5. The only laserdisc from Criterion that was worth a lot of money on eBay was SALO when you couldn’t get it any other way. 

FS: What was the first film you streamed on FilmStruck?

LK: I remember the first day I went on FilmStruck, I actually didn’t watch any movies. I watched a bunch of intros. The film writer Kim Morgan did a bunch, like Bergman and Kubrick and Guy Maddin. I love Kim’s writing so I wanted to see what she had to say about the films. My first great movie experience on FilmStruck was I MARRIED A WITCH, which I had never seen before. For some reason I had always avoided it, even though I love Veronica Lake in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. For some reason I had an “Oh it’s I DREAM OF JEANNIE or BEWITCHED” in my head. When I saw the movie it was so light and so funny and so magically done, no pun intended, I was completely blown away. So that was my gateway into FilmStruck.

FS: If the world were about to end what five movies on FilmStruck would you recommend everyone stream before we all died?

LK: [laughs] The problem is I don’t know what they’ve watched before. Like, BADLANDS is one of the top ten films of all time and you’ve got to watch BADLANDS, but hopefully you’ve already seen BADLANDS. Hopefully if you are dying in my nuclear bunker, you’re one of my friends and I’ve shown you BADLANDS before. I’m gonna spotlight some lesser known films on FilmStruck. There’s a Russian film called COME AND SEE, which I think is a masterpiece and probably one of the best war films ever. There’s a film by Jerzy Skolimowski  called MOONLIGHTING with Jeremy Irons playing a Polish worker in London in the 80s. I’m a huge fan of a movie from the 30s called DODSWORTH directed by William Wyler. You can never go wrong watching a William Wyler movie. Here’s a movie from the 70s that doesn’t get talked about very much: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, John Huston’s big adventure movie. It doesn’t get talked about much because it doesn’t really feel like a 1970s movie in the sense that it isn’t R-rated, it isn’t gritty, it isn’t one of those kind of movies; It’s more of an old fashioned adventure movie, and Huston knocks it out of the park. I’d throw in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, which was a huge influence for Scott and I when we were writing BIG EYES, particularly the first part of it which spotlighted the nightclubs in North Beach in San Francisco. The Hungry Eye, The Purple Onion, and sort of that way that Walter Keane just kept working the room wherever he went. So we would watch SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS a lot when we were writing those nightclub scenes. I think that’s a solid list of films to stream as the world ends on our watch.

You can follow Larry Karaszewski on Twitter here. The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story airs Wednesdays at 10pm on FX. 

#FilmStruck #Larry Karaszewski #Criterion Collection #Six Questions With FilmStruck #American Crime Story #The Assassination of Gianni Versace #ACSVersace #Network #Veronica Lake #I Married A Witch #The Marx Brothers #Ed Wood #Badlands #Sweet Smell of Success #Francis Ford Coppola #Marya E Gates

[cviperfan]

OKAY DEATH NOTE 2017 THOUGHTS

Under a cut for length not spoilers because honestly who fucking cares

-So the movie commits many sins but principle among them are two 1) The Death Note is basically just a vehicle for gore porn, pretty much indistinguishable functionally from any other 'Cursed Object' type horror movie.  There's lip service paid to the suspense trappings of the original work but Wingard is clearly much more interested in the kind of brutal deaths that can be extracted from the Death Note's flexibility of options and far less in the moral quandaries that such an object would create, and Wingard's pre-release interview that expressed an interest in creating a Hard-R version of the story was at least for me a clear indicator that he was Wrong for the project, since grisly deaths are not what makes the story interesting, or in fact are even a priority.  The fact that the default way the Death Note kills in the original canon is a heart attack (by all intents a fairly 'clean' method of death) is there for a reason, as is the 2017 version's curious decision to specifically omit that detail.

(In Wingard's interview he expresses a desire to include the "adult themes of anime" which specifically include "nudity, swearing, tons of violence" to him, which suggests that his familiarity with the medium starts and ends with Ninja Scroll and nothing else and that he probably didn't actually watch Death Note outside of a cliffs notes he had an intern scribble out or something)

2) And this is much more fundamentally antithetical to the original work, but Light's transition from Villain protagonist to Reluctant Misunderstood Anti-Hero.

in the original canon it's certainly possible to find Light's end goal aspirational, even if the actual empathy with Light himself doesn't last very long, and part of the paradox of the manga/anime is Light being a pointedly and unmistakably Terrible Person while also being a compellling and interesting protagonist.  Even if you don't necessarily want Light to succeed, watching him operate and maneuver through various obstacles on the path to his goal is fascinating on its own terms.

Death Note 2017!Light, by contrast, is given great, excruciating measures to make him Highly Sympathetic to the audience, and indeed we are meant to interpret him specifically as a Good Kid Who Took A Wrong Turn and is now Way In Over His Head.  His mom died at the hands of Joe Chill a crook who got away with it, giving him a nice clean Batman justification, he's bullied at school, is extremely concerned with his actions being percieved as good and perhaps most crucially, tries to limit his body count outside of criminals (American!Light reacts extremely negatively to the mere IDEA of killing his dad when he calls Kira out, whereas canon!Light, while certainly not enthusiastic about the idea, was right there weighing the pros and cons, reasonably prepared to do so if he proved to be enough of a problem).

He doesn't even use the Death Note initially of his own volition; Ryuk has to be there to straight-up Devil on His Shoulder-him into it (in a hilariously over-the-top introduction, more on that later), and Misa (sorry, MIA) is constantly pushing him to go darker when his resolve wavers, and indeed seems way more into the idea of using the Death Note on a visceral level than Light is.

All of this is contrary to one of the crucial points of Death Note in its original form-- Light was a person of privilege surrounded by a loving family and with infinite potential who had absolutely no reason to have become a power-hungry arbiter of "justice" with a god complex, and yet when a bit of power happened to fall into his hands that's exactly what he became.  He didn't need a traumatic event or a bad situation to become Kira, just the possibility that he could do it and get away with it.  

But even in a Death Note adaptation where the first death we get is someone's head being cut off at the jaw with a fucking ladder, this seems like too dark a conclusion for Adam Wingard to come to, so even when his body count starts rising we get constant excuses and reminders that he's A Good Kid, Honest, He's Really Trying To Do The Right Thing He's Just Got So Many Bad Influences That Pushed Him This Way and in the face of the original work's frankness (and Wingard's talk of "adult themes") this just comes off as cloying and toothless.

Nevermind that in light (heh) of the extremely whitewashed nature of this adaptation, the almost fetishistic effort of the writing team to sanitize Troubled White Teen Boy Light Turner (Who Has His Whole Life Ahead Of Him) of as much active culpability as possible is certainly quite telling isn't it

Okay that out of the way, time for some just Random Bad Shit lol

-just so we know exactly what we're dealing with and what director Adam Wingard thinks is cool one of the very first shots of the movie is Misa (sorry, MIA) at cheerleading practice but see she's not like THOSE OTHER SHEEPLE who are all ACTUALLY PRACTICING AT CHEER PRACTICE SHE'S A COOL DISAFFECTED REBEL BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T WANNA PRACTICE AT CHEER PRACTICE god look at these PHONIES all having fun and laughing OUR GIRL IS SO COOL SHE'D MUCH RATHER SMOKE AND LOOK BORED WHAT A BADASS -And like later in the movie she's all to Light "I'M A CHEERLEADER nothing i ever did mattered before i met you!!" like then WHY ARE YOU A CHEERLEADER WHY WERE YOU THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?????? YOU CAN DO LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE MY KIDDO -So the Light/Mia relationship is kind of a mess because not only do they try and play it up as the emotional lynchpin of the narrative (no, for real) but the reversal with Mia being the one who becomes super obsessed with the Death Note (even to the point where she tries to set up Light to die so she can get it) and her being the Other Bad Influence on Light really manages to make even the original Death Note's bad track record with its women fucking shine by comparison.  If the original Light/Misa dynamic was basically a Joker/Harley setup written by someone who understood that it's an abusive relationship, new!Light/Mia is the Hot Topic Romanticized Joker/Harley but also Joker is the Real Victim here apparently -Like they literally get off to using the Death Note together and make out while scanning the internet for targets-- like there COULD absolutely be a place for there to be commentary on Bored Well-Off White Kids abusing power for the fun of it, but again there's no room for insight when there's those practical gore effects to throw around -Dear god there is not a HINT of subtlety in this fucking thing, an especially egregious stylistic choice when the manga/anime is (while ofc prone to Light's.... extreme and borderline comically evil reactions) overwhelmingly grounded with-- especially compared to many anime and manga in general-- comparatively moderate supernatural elements and touches, especially in terms of its visual detail and art direction.  Wingard's Death Note on the other hand, has thunderstorms AND flickering lights that accompany Ryuk's appearances until they... don't (ARE YOU PICKING UP THE SUBTLE FAUSTIAN ELEMENTS HERE AUDIENCE????????), a trip through a Spooky Dark Abandoned Mansion that features a close-up of a busted doll accompanied by a creepy child's laugh NO REALLY IM SERIOUS and deaths that frequently end in torrents of blood because that's what we're really here for apparently -Speaking of a lack of subtlety, while I get the logic in casting Dafoe for Ryuk he ends up being both underutilized and a sadly uninteresting choice, since the apparent direction for him to go more Norman Osbourne really takes away any degree of ambiguity Ryuk has as a patently neutral party in the whole thing (at least as far as the original goes; this really wants to set him up as a Red Herring possible antagonist in a thread that goes absolutely nowhere and ends up meaning nothing).  Like I think he could have worked if the performance was a little lower-key and he had not-terrible writing to work with, but at least someone's having fun in this mess so wth -L fans are gonna be fucking pissed off because HOLY HELL they didn't not fuck him up either -Canon L: Sherlock Holmes but with sweets instead of hard drugs and also he sits weird sometimes -Death Note 2017!L: Fucking Weirdo Asshole With Bizarre Rituals galore and also he can't sleep without Watari awkwardly singing the greatest hits of Celine Dion SHUT UP IM SERIOUS because okay -So the wierd race bullshit definitely doesn't stop at Light because the framing of L (who is played by Keith Stanfield, a black actor and OH BOY I CAN ALREADY HEAR THE IMNOTRACISTBUTS COMING IN) is pointedly, aggressively antagonistic.  Rather than giving Stanfield the collected, analytical, somewhat awkward detective characterized in the source material, Death Note 2017's L's erratic tics and behaviourisms are meant to make the audience find him uncomfortable rather than compelling in his own right, because autistic-coded super detective is such an interesting and not at all gross and played-out formation of a character.  Because again, the movie has no real interest in being suspenseful or focusing on the cat-and-mouse game, L figures out that Light is Kira with very little deduction or buildup, and indeed aside from a pointedly brief midpoint conversation and a completely stupid and pointless chase scene near the end, the two barely interact, so the whole aspect of two strong wills directly competing within inches of each other is tossed aside. -Also WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT A SCENE OF A YOUNG BLACK MAN BEING SLAMMED INTO A TABLE AND NEARLY CHOKED OUT BY A WHITE COP WITH ANGER ISSUES AND A SELF-RIGHTEOUS STREAK IN DEFENSE OF A GUILTY WHITE KID WHO ULTIMATELY GETS AWAY WITH IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TASTE WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT -Speaking of poor taste we couldn't find more than one Japanese actor for a speaking role (Watari, natch, with barely a handful of lines) BUT WE CERTAINLY COULD FOR THIS SEX CLUB SCENE WITH A ROOM PACKED FULL OF DEAD JAPANESE PEOPLE IN FETISH GEAR -Ryuk himself also looks Fuckin Bad and they know it since the overwhelming majority of his shots are him BLURRED THE FUCK OUT IN MIDDLE DISTANCE OR OFF IN THE CORNER -"many people have tried to write the 4 letters in my name into the Death Note but nobody has gotten farther than 2 :)" your full name was literally in there but ok -"all the deaths have to be physically possible" Ferris Wheel magically collapses for no reason to facilitate a death -"I need L's full name to kill him, I'll just take control of Watari with the Death Note EVEN THOUGH WATARI IS A FUCKING ALIAS" and also if this was in fact his real name and L knew it WHY WOULD HE HAVE LET HIM GO AROUND WITH HIS FACE UNCOVERED LIKE????????????????????????????????? -Reveals L without ceremony during the nightclub murder investigation/pretends like there's a mystery and a reveal to be had for the audience and awkwardly attempts to re-enact bits of the original introduction to the character anyway

Ultimately there's more that I'm probably forgetting but wow Death Note 2017 is just impressively dumb.  Like, original Death Note could get pretty dumb especially in the last half, but that was more a case of working itself into a corner over time and its reach extending beyond its grasp on occasion.  This just has no aspirations to even try.

Like, shit, I honestly don't like Death Note all that much but I can at least appreciate that it has some weight to it and made an effort to build a complex character-driven narrative while proposing a thoughtful moral paradox, which is more than I can say for the 'fans' who wanted to adapt it and decided this was the best possible approach lmao

#death note 2017 #WHENS THE RIFFTRAX

[wordswrittenbymclou]

Dear future significant other, Hi, nice to meet you. I wonder what you're like, physically and soulfully. I bet you that you'll have the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen, and that I'd stand by that till the day I die. I don't think your eye color will matter, whether you have glasses or contacts on. I'll still want to stare at your irises whenever you aren't looking at me (I always shy away from eye contact. I'm sorry.) (I'm also very apologetic. I'm sorry.) You must be annoyed in the future, because I'll always fuss with your hair and mention what you'd look like with red hair. Unless you have red hair, then I'd wonder what you'd look like with ebony hair. And I'd be thoroughly amused if you ever agree to getting your hair colored one day. You will always get compared to my dad. He likes talking with me, throwing in funny banters and caressing/pinching my earlobes (which is a habit of mine sometimes.) I don't tell a lot of people that I want to date someone like my dad, except more sensitive. You will probably do a lot of the talking at first. I like listening to people, hearing their opinions and what they really love, even though I don't fully understand it. I will let you rant on why your day wasn't dandy or loathe about a recent series of events. You must probably be pretty out of options, if you've chosen me as your significant other. I think I expect too much from people, and expectations are crazy to live up to, you know? I'm sorry if I expect too much of you, if I expect you to change into someone who I imagine and someone who you aren't. Someone who'd watch basketball games with me at three in the morning. Someone who'd read all the poems and thoughts I wanna say. Someone who'd ask me to sing late in the night. Someone who my siblings will get along with. Someone who is as against misogyny as I am and is all for equality. Someone who would introduce me to music and movies, without degrading me to a person who lives under a rock. (You can tease me. But for fucks sake, know your limits. A person can only take so much.) But even if you aren't someone I expect, I will love you. I will love you so much, it makes me wonder why I can't love myself the same way. And I hope that you'll love me too. Not in the sense that "I love you so much it hurts," but in the sense that "Damn, I love her, and I need her because I want her." Surely, I won't be the first person you'll ever love. You probably had relationship with other girls that are just unfathomable. By the way future significant other, marriages scare me. I don't know if you and I will ever be husband and wife, because the idea of it scares me. I haven't even told anyone so. You will probably be the first person I would ever tell and admit that to genuinely. I wonder if you're afraid of it too. The good thing is that I wouldn't expect you to propose, I just expect you to stay with me. I mean, I really hope you do.  And maybe you'd like to adopt a child too. I really want to adopt a child instead of having one. I don't know why, maybe to make a conundrum with my mom. More on that when we actually meet, future significant other. We have lots of time on our side. I'm indecisive and moody, dear significant other. I'm also impulsive and a good actress. But I really hope you can tell when I'm being sarcastic and when I'm being stupid, when I'm feigning happiness and when I'm truly angry. You can knock some sense into me, if you'd like. I might even thank you for it. I'm a worthless toothpick in the kitchen, so I hope you know how to cook. I'm also bad at math, so you have to help me with budgeting and hold me back from buying too much food.  I'm scared of people, and you will always have to order and talk to employees when we're in public. I'm really sorry. If you're just like me, socially awkward and socially unbearable, can we agree to just stay inside, hold hands and I'll make you some coffee? Or tea. Whatever you'd like. Dear significant other, tell me your fears. If you fear heights, I guess I can go on roller coasters alone. If you fear drowning, I can swim in the pool by myself. Just let me know, I'll adjust. I could stay with you by the pool side and we could just eat cotton candy by the kiddie rides. I wouldn't mind, your company would probably be my utmost favorite company. Maybe it's a good time to let you know that I'm scared of a lot of things. The dark, the ocean, horror movies, suspense movies, gore movies, thriller movies, animals, my loved ones dying. Yeah, the list is pretty long, I'll tell you the rest in person. Or, I'll probably type it all up and send it to you on Facebook. I don't know how to be face to face yet with somebody, let alone the love of my life. And I've been so accustomed with instant messaging, so forgive me a lot... Oh, and when I bring up the past people I liked, do know that you are incomparable to them, even if I happen to compare our relationship to my past relationships and what ifs. I loved you, I love you, and I will love you future significant other. If there's one thing I want you to know and remember from this massive letter, that's it.

#texts #don't even read this