#hannibal's weird plot and boring dialogue | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

disappointingyet · 4 months

Text

A bunch of movies that didn't make my final films of the year – some of them are very good, mind (and one or two really aren't).

Godzilla Minus One

Very much not to be confused with the current US Godzilla movies, this comes from Toho Studios and not only goes back to the start, but the story is all about Japan coming to terms with World War II. Our central (human) character is Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) a guilt-ridden former fighter pilot trying to get by in bomb-flattened Tokyo. He acquires not one but two found families: a young woman and the child she rescued from the rubble, and the crew of the minesweeper he finds work on. The healing for both the material and psychic damage seems underway when a massive, mysterious creature – which Shikishima encountered during the war – reappears, only bigger and with new powers…

G-M1 is a talky film with sombre stretches (there are jokes, too), with lots of grief and guilt and trying to figure out how not to make the same mistakes again*. And, in between all that, we get a big stompy monster (this is mean Godzilla, not saviour Godzilla). The special effects do the job: you’re unlikely to be awestruck, but equally I didn’t spend any time wanting to chuck something at the screen as I often do with (say) Marvel movies.

Satisfying.

(*I was trying to think of other movies where I successfully guessed what was going to happen not so much because of plot tropes as ideology… the only one that springs to mind is the Robert Aldrich-directed Burt Lancaster & Gary Cooper Mexican-set Western Vera Cruz.)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

What were the odds, in the year of full superhero backlash, that there would be a critically endorsed Ninja Turtles movie? But here it is, and yes, it’s good. Essentially, TMNT:MM is (as far as I know) lo the first post-Spider-verse film, embracing the idea that comic-book adaptations can look drawn. This is 3D computer animation, but it’s not trying to look solid or clean, and so you don’t end up with Shrekian chunkiness. It’s weird and colourful and sometimes rather beautiful.

It’s a basic origin story: how did these strange creatures come to be, why do they regard a rat as their father, what other weird animals are lurking in New York? Well, for one, Superfly, a massive insect styled after Ron O’Neal’s Blaxploitation antihero and voiced by Ice Cube.

The movie leans hard into the ‘teenage’ part of the title - these are kids, cocky, confused, bored, trying to fit in and figure themselves out (often contradictory impulses.) The script is by Seth Rogen and chums, so doesn’t take itself too seriously.

There’s an argument to be had about whether famous faces deserve to be the voice leads in animated movies - surely specialists are better at the job and anyway, much of the time nobody recognises it’s eg, Chris Pratt. But here, I think the star casting works - as well as Cube, we get Jackie Chan being very endearing as Splinter the rat, a brief but perfect turn from Giancarlo Esposito and the ubiquitous Ayo Edebiri as April.

The soundtrack is ace - and maybe gives away who the target audience is: it’s a bunch of late 1980s/90s hip-hop standards.

The storytelling isn’t groundbreaking but the visuals are so good. One of the best surprises of the year.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Essentially: ‘You know that game the kids in Stranger Things play? The one people used to get beat up for been associated with but now movie stars boast about their expertise at? Let’s do a Guardians Of The Galaxy-style film based on that.’ So they did, and gathered a more-than-decent cast: Chris Pine*, Michelle Rodriguez and Hugh Grant, and send them off on some questing. The jokes do the job, the dialogue largely non-fantasy mode, Rodriguez does all the action and Pine is the Hannibal Smith-esque generator of plans (but w/tragic backstory). As this kind of adventure movie goes, it’s comfortably above average: not as good as the first Guardians, the first Pirates Of The Caribbean or Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, but better than most of the tosh out there. *Brudenell Road’s most famous former resident!

They Cloned Tyrone

Strange things seem to be happening in the hood and a drug dealer (John Boyega), a sex worker (Teyonah Parris) and – reluctantly – a pimp (Jamie Foxx) team up to investigate. This is a comedy with sci-fi elements as well as things that would be horror if this had a different vibe. Maybe think of this as a much broader take on Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Nope or a less way-out Sorry To Bother You. Although it’s set now, there are nods to the Blaxploitation era (Foxx’s hair, various cars.) There’s a nice murky look to the night scenes, a tangible atmosphere and an excellent cast – so plenty to enjoy.

(Netflix)

Theater Camp

Fond and indulgent mockumentary made by a bunch of chums who grew up as theatre kids. Very familiar set-up: much-loved thespian institution (in this case, a summer camp) has its future under threat – will everyone rally round for a big show to save the day?

There are plenty of familiar faces here, particularly if you’ve seen Booksmart and The Bear (Molly Gordon, who is one of the directors, writers and stars of this links that terrific film and that excellent TV show.)

Ben Platt, who has become even more mocked and reviled in critical and showbiz gossip circles than his Pitch Perfect cast mates, makes the wise decision to write himself a largely dickish character to play.

Theater Camp mostly manages to be the right kind of silly – I enjoyed it a bunch. (Disney +)

Bottoms

Extremely daft although reasonably fun comedy. Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri (who are both 28 years old and aren’t trying to fool you otherwise) play a pair of unpopular high-school kids who start a female fight club with the hope of hooking up with the cheerleaders they have crushes on. It’s very silly, gets a reasonable amount of mileage out of people punching each other and has plenty of decent jokes. Had me thinking of Rock ’n’ Roll High School more than I expected.

Three Musketeers: Part 1 - D’Artagnan

Yes, yet another version of the Dumas book. This one has the virtue of being actually French. The vibe is somewhat gritty: the fights include guns and punching rather than only elegant sword work. Many of buildings are actual historic buildings rather something fairly see-through cobbled together on a computer. We get Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris as Athos and Aramis, plus Louis Garrel as the king. I’ve never really got Eva Green but she makes perfect sense as Milady. What’s added (from what I remember of the book) is a conspiracy involving a war-hungry faction at court and the Protestant rebellion.* Anyway, this is a solid and satisfying period action movie.

*To be clear, the siege of La Rochelle is in the book - it’s what leads to that that’s new here.

Maestro

Are you intrigued by the idea of current movie stars attempted many-layered 1940s accents? How about a film half in the lushest of lush black & white and half in fairly authentic-looking late 1960s colour, also rather beautiful? Tidal waves of great, great music? Fully committed performances? Some genuinely extraordinary, including a scene where biopic slips into ballet…

Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic is wildly ambitious, and it succeeds more than I was anticipating. Cooper, as often, gives a better performance than I expect him to. Carey Mulligan is excellent as Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein’s wife, even if the accent escapes her occasionally. It looks and sounds incredible.

But? It’s a big film with a small story at its heart. Firstly, what happens to a marriage between two people in the arts when their careers have very different trajectories? 'Isn’t the only other film Cooper has directed A Star Is Born?', you point out correctly.

Secondly, what happens to that marriage if it begins with the acceptance that one of this pair is going to continue shagging other people, but once there are kids to consider that seems less cool and you don’t feel like trying to explain to your daughter why her middle-aged father is chasing young men around, especially because this is only the 1970s…

I’m certainly not saying a film needs to say big stuff. But Maestro has a scale and sense of importance that seems at odds with what it wants to talk about. We do get some scenes with Bernstein pronouncing about music in grand terms – and those are the worst parts of the movie. But other than hearing the tunes, we don’t really get much of a sense of why Bernstein was such an imposing cultural figure. Credit to Cooper for acknowledging the pivot that most based-on-real-life stories take if they span a fair bit of time: things are fun, and then they are difficult. In Maestro, that fun part is not just in b&w, but the rules of space and time don’t apply. As we’re watching them, that’s clearly the case within scenes, but as we learn in the colour second half, things that you would have guessed took a couple of weeks took several years. All of that first part, it seems but is never stated, was lovely memories that edit all the tricky stuff.

Not a wholly successful film then, but one I’m really glad I watched and even a little regretful I didn’t see it on the big screen. (Netflix)

Creed III

Better than Creed II, nowhere near as good as Creed. Michael B Jordan does a decent job as the director and introduces some interesting visual elements. There’s no Stallone, which I’m fine with. The issue is a classic genre film trap: how to get the main character back to doing the thing the franchise needs them to do, even though that’s a terrible choice. Weirdly, for once, if this was hyper-realism, that wouldn’t be a problem – legendary boxers clamber out of retirement and back into the ring the whole time, often repeatedly. But in this movie, Adonis Creed seems to have too much going on – as the beautiful, successful guy with a beautiful, talented family – and to be too smart to get himself clobbered again. True to life, but somehow implausible within this fiction.

(Prime)

Babylon

Damien Chazelle’s massive, noisy discursion on the history of Hollywood is a film I definitely enjoyed talking about – there was so much to debate. But it was probably more fun talking about it than it was watching the last two hours of the movie (maybe watch the two big set pieces at the start and then stop?)

Full review here

Air

Schlubby dudes sit around in dingy offices arguing about the details of a deal for a young athlete to endorse a shoe. Not a painful watch, but nothing that Affleck/Damon manage here convinces me that this is a story worthy of cinema and not a very long Nike ad.

Full review here

Barbie

On the one hand, most of Barbie was fun, and an impressive feat of multi-level storytelling (eg, the very niche joke at the expense of fans of 1990s indie band Pavement.) Could’ve done without the Will Ferrell and Rhea Perlman bits, but a billion-dollar box office movie taking the piss out of the patriarchy is a great thing.

On the other, as much as I want to celebrate popular art, in my heart I know I’d rather Gerwig was making films like Lady Bird or Mistress America. Much as I hope Boden and Fleck’s future work is more like Sugar or Mississippi Grind than Captain Marvel, and that Cate Shortland goes back to films like Somersault and Lore instead of Black Widow.

Ferrari

In some ways, this could be a companion piece to Maestro – another film about wife who has sort-of-tolerated the chronic infidelity of her giant-of-the-20th-century husband. Although, in this case, he's only cheating with women and by the time the film is set – the late 1950s – only one woman. In Michael Mann's movie, Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, Penélope Cruz Laura Ferrari and Shailene Woodley the mistress. These people, you may have noticed, are not Italian. Yes, this is a film in English in which the actors do accents to indicate they are speaking Italian (the bit players, confusingly, talk actual Italian). I'm generally not in favour of that approach. This isn't a biopic, as such – it seemingly takes place over a few months as Enzo faces simultaneous work and personal crisis, linked by Laura, who was his work partner as well as spouse. Cruz is excellent value as the fuming, grieving Laura. Driver – has his hair ever been this short on film – is good too, and wears excellent suits. It looks lovely, too – whatever issues Mann had during the early digital switchover (Collateral?!) are long past. But the ending just fizzles out, in a way that leaves me wondering (other than Cruz being entertainingly furious) what this was all about. And the big events just before that are handled in a way I found both clunky and kind of distasteful. (I feel you need to be at least somewhat careful portraying real-life tragedies on screen. And also announcing your characters bear no responsibility when with all things taken into account, they do.) One of those films that I was very into when I was watching, but increasingly less so on the walk home.

No Hard Feelings

The sort-of-return of the once weirdly popular older-woman-deflowers-kid ‘raunchy comedy’ genre. This being 2023, the kid is a legal 19 but socially awkward, inexperienced etc (I mean, to be fair, there are a lot of people like that). Jennifer Lawrence plays the desperate-for-cash local who is hired by a Princeton-bound nerd’s parents to make a man of him. The film is well cast, and some of the jokes work… ‘the hey! we’ve all learned something’ stuff maybe less so. Pretty OK.

The Killer

Michael Fassbender plays a stat-bore hitman in David Fincher’s fan-boy-pleasing thriller. Some generally sane critics reckon it’s a blinder. I reckon it’s cliched, obvious and very grating. (Many of the arguments in its favour are based on the idea that it is Fincher taking the piss out of himself – to which I say, who cares?)

Starts well as Fassbender is patiently doing the tedious prep for a kill in Paris, but goes duff quickly once he’s off on the obligatory revenge kick. Fassbender’s American accent is horrible, the gags are thumpingly obvious and yet triple-underlined in case you didn’t get them the first time. I kept hoping against hope that one of Fassbender’s enemies would finish him off and we’d be done with all of this. Tilda Swinton is good but she only gets one scene. (Fassbender had a supporting role in Fincher’s bestie Steven Soderbergh’s somewhat similar Haywire, which – for my money – is way better.)

(Netflix)

Love At First Sight

Industry wisdom is the romcom is one of the genres people will no longer pay to see in a cinema but will consume happily on streaming. Netflix is notorious for putting out loads of them with TV-movie production levels. This is maybe one of their higher budget efforts? I saw it because Haley Lu Richardson was great in two of my favourite movies of recent times: Columbus and Support The Girls.

LAFS* feels like three different ideas chucked together. First, a high-concept romcom with lots of vibrant colours and some bollocks about fate and Jameela Jamil as the narrator who pops up in turn as a flight attendant, immigration officer, bartender, helpful passerby…** Secondly, your contemporary British comedy where the characters are all wearyingly eccentric (so many British films, whether comedies or thrillers, just try far too hard.) Thirdly, a melancholy film about two people in pain who make a connection on a transAtlantic flight. Unsurprisingly, these three ideas constantly undermine each other. (Oh, and the London geography is just distractingly nonsense.)

*The title of the book this is adapted from is The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight, which is a much better match for the theme and tone of the story.

**An idea seemingly nicked, as I’m happy to admit I didn’t know when I watched it, from Max Ophuls’ 1950 classic La Ronde, emphatically not a romcom.

(Netflix)

Documentaries

Squaring The Circle: The Story Of Hipgnosis

What was Hipgnosis, you ask? Hipgnosis was a little company that designed the covers of long-playing records, most famously for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Its founders Storm Thorgerson and Po Powell were dope-smoking chums of the future members of (The) Pink Floyd in Cambridge (the city, not the university) who had enough photographic and graphic design nous to turn a favour for mates into a lucrative career.

Everyone in this documentary talks about how grumpy Thorgerson (who died in 2013) was: ‘He was rude to everyone,’ someone says. Now, as it happens, a long, long time ago I used to interview designers and photographers about famous album covers for a rock magazine. Almost all these chats happened over the phone… except for the one with Thorgerson about the Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Thorgerson invited me over to his large, comfortable north-west London home and we sat drinking tea as he told me about how the LP sleeve had come about. As I remember it, he was an excellent host and I sat there feeling guilty about how bloody hideous I thought almost all of his work was and how unbearable his old mates’ music was. Maybe he’d mellowed by then.

Anyway, this documentary was made by Anton Corbijn, legendary rock photographer/terrible feature film director, which accounts for the interviewees being shot in elegant, flattering b&w. Corbijn’s movies are utterly humourless so it’s a pleasant surprise to find plenty of chuckles here. The heart of the film, indeed, is a series of tales from the mid-1970s in which the album shoots involve vast expense, effort, travel time and even danger… and afterwards everyone decides for all the record buyers will notice, it could have been done round the corner or just in the studio…

If you like a rock dinosaur, there’s a bunch here: Planty! Pagey! Macca! Gabriel! And the surviving Floyds, of course. Speaking of which, my big concern watching this was the presence of Roger Waters and Noel Gallagher, both extremely low-quality human beings. Fortunately, restricted to talking about album covers (both) and the early days (Waters) they are non-toxic. Just why Gallagher is here is a different question. He has no connection to Hipgnosis – not as a client nor even (as far as made the cut) as a fan. He just talks about album artwork in general, including his daughter not knowing it was a thing that exists. So he’s effectively the cut-price Bono, here to provide uninformed vibes and enthusiasm – but as the man who shot U2’s most famous images, surely Corbijn could have got the real thing?

There’s a tradition of documentaries – which I think this fits into – that work two ways depending on how you feel about the subjects. If you think the cover of (say) Led Zep’s Houses Of The Holy is a great piece of image-making, here’s the inside story of how it came about. On the other hand, if you find the aesthetics of 1970s rock grotesque or funny, then this is an entertaining account of how completely everyone lost the plot as the cash (and coke) rolled in. (Netflix)

Little Richard: I Am Everything

You can see why people want to make documentaries these days about Little Richard – he was black, he was gay, he did some drag early in his career and certainly had no truck with the 20th-century western version of masculinity. In 2023, if you want to celebrate a rock ’n’ roll pioneer, he’s more appealing than one of those white guys with their child brides. (Before we overtip the balance, it's almost certain that Richard also had sex with teenage girls when he was an adult, even if they weren’t his main area of interest.)

The big problem I had with this film – which got some rapturous reviews – is not its fault at all. What happened was that earlier in the year I had seen the BBC’s Little Richard: The King And Queen Of Rock’n’Roll, which has some of the same interviewees (plus Keef rather than Mick as their Rolling Stone), much of the same archive and – as the title suggests – the same contemporary take. I Am Everything’s director Lisa Cortes does try to do some things to make this movie-like, including having clouds of glitter and bursts of high-speed nature montages. She also has some current musicians in to a play a few songs, almost always a bad move in a music documentary. There are some good academics etc here, but alas, if you’ve recently heard all this stuff, I Am Everything doesn’t add that much. But if you’re not familiar with this story, this is a great place to start.

4 notes · View notes

audio-drama · 3 years

Text

how did adventure time make the most depressing fucking plot i’ve ever seen?? I Remember You never fails to make me sob like a baby. and that christmas episode where finn and jake steal ice king’s tapes and in the end they find the one where it’s just simon. i watched I Remember You for the first time when i was too young to process emotions that strong so now it’s the nostalgia + simon+marceline father/daughter relationship and how that was just completely lost and she was just a kid! he loved her so much! how do i cope with this. what am i supposed to do with this. i want them so much to elaborate for like 100 episodes on just marceline and simon but also that would fuck me up so bad.

the line ‘that must be so confusing for a little girl’ shows so much compassion and empathy and then to see the stark contrast of that and ice king’s stupid face saying stupid shit makes me Break Down. it just hurts so much! it hurts and like how do u expect little me to cope with that? i DIDN’T i repressed it is what i fuckin did. jesus christ

#re-reading this post almost made me cry again cuz like. fuck #AT was such an intriguing show when i was little #when i was a kid i saw this on tv next to like. spongebob and was like #'they actually have GOOD CARTOONS?? WITH PLOTS???'#and i've been hooked ever since #and now i know why #this aaaannnddd steven universe i think? the combo of the art style and the #storytelling. like it's different for both of em but they're both just So Good #anyway i will never not be fucked up over adventure time #oh god and i didn't even mention Everything Stays #GOD DAMN! that one. i still can't process emotions about that one #they just sorta sit in a lump in my chest and i gotta. i gotta not listen to everything stays #lest i go insane with Feelings #AT is very much a comfort show that i can watch when i can't do like #hannibal's weird plot and boring dialogue #the bright colours and constant movement and new words and loud noises just #help me focus on the actual content. i love hannibal but only when there's cool #corpses i think. i only remember honeycomb man and mushroom farm people #those were cool! i also like hannibal and graham's fucked up relationship #but i'm not gonna wait a thousand episodes to see it ya know?#need stimulation now #it's late this is what happens when u give me internet access at 1 am #:) i'm gonna be dead tomorrow :)#whatever i'll have another nap and go to sleep at 10 #i'll fix my sleep schedule when the sun comes back

5 notes · View notes

oatmealzz · 2 years

Text

Hannibal (TV Show) is Overrated

What’s sad was that I did like it for the first season but then I started to get annoyed with weird plot holes, character motivations, occasionally off putting music, bad acting and horrible dialogue. I binged it in three days with no spoilers. I watched it right after watching SOTL which in hindsight was a bad move because it created an expectation that was not matched at all. Something tells me that I won’t like the books either because the red dragon plot was boring as hell.

The characters were okay but I thought Will was a better character than the character the show was named after. I know it’s different actors so different interpretations of the character Hannibal but he seemed really lack luster and a little repetitive with all that cooking nonsense and talking in riddles and metaphors. Don’t even get me started on Bedelia’s way of communication through breathy whispers of constant riddles that always sound like questions than statements.

...

The one slightly hilarious thing about Bedelia was that she broke confidentiality to casually make a gay joke that only her and the viewers are in on. It was the only human thing she had ever done in the entirely of her character arc.

#hannibal #i know this is unpopular #sotl #hannibal tv #red dragon #hannibal lecter #bedelia du maurier #silence of the lambs

8 notes · View notes

jupitermelichios · 4 years

Text

So I decided to rewatch Suicide Squad and I have some thoughts...

This isn’t really a review so much as it’s just a series of thoughts and impressions. I will say that while it’s still one of the worst made films I’ve ever seen, it’s never boring, which is by far the biggest sin a film can commit. It’s bullshit but it’s consistently interesting bullshit which makes it better than something like Fant4stic, which is as bad and incoherant but also just incredibly dull. I don’t think this could ever have been a good film, there was too much massively wrong with it before shooting even started to have been salvagable, but I do think it could have been a lot more coherant if it hadn’t been for the reshoots, re-edits, re-edits of re-edits and all the the other stuff that happened to it post production. Unlike something like BvS, I get why some people liked this one.

On that note, while I am going to end on a few possitives this basically a roast so if you don’t want to read about a film getting picked apart, this probably won’t be your jam. But if like me you find critiques of bad movies cathartic, read on. I’m not the first person to do this, but I’ve spotted some stuff I haven’t seen anyone else talk about so hopefully there’ll be something new for you.

All the dialogue is just slightly off in a way that’s hard to pin down, in the way that a lot of comprehensible stuff written by computers and neural networks is just slightly off. It’s got that phishing email or pornbot quality to it. Literally the fourth or fifth line in the film is Griggs saying about the prison rations, “...Everything a growing young man needs like you”, which isn’t nonsense, but is clearly wrong, and a lot of the lines have that quality to them.

In a similar vein, Deadshot’s daughter is written like she’s five or six, but the actress looks about twelve. I actually went and checked how old she was when this released, because I know white people are often wildly bad at judging the ages of black kids and I’m bad at judging ages in general, but no, she was 12 or 13 when this was shot, so why’s she written like a toddler? She doesn’t give a good performance (which is not the actresses fault, Will Smith barely gives a good performance in this and he can do this shit in his sleep, there’s no way a kid could have risen above the terrible script and direction) which makes it even worse, because you’ve got this pre-teen delivering dialogue written for a kindergardener in a way that feel like it’s maybe the first time she’s ever seen the script, and it makes what is otherwise one of the most competant scenes in the movie feel just as off as everything else.

The Joker. A lot of people have written a lot about Leto’s Joker but I want to add two things to the discussion I haven’t seen talked about much before. Firstly, before the electro-shock torture and acid bath, he and Harley have no romance. Like, explicitly, there is no romance, or even cammeraderie there. He’s her patient. She’s his jailer. He didn’t seduce her, he just tortured her until she gave in. That’s literally shown in the film. Even after the torture when she’s now on side he still really doesn’t like her, and not in a Paul Dini BTAS he doesn’t like her but he also wants her around kind of way. He doesn’t want her in his life. He orders her to leave him alone and she fucking stalks him. That’s not even subtext, she is specifically his stalker, because apparently the solution to the relationship being abusive was to retconn Harley into also being a creep as though that somehow solves something.

Secondly, Joker isn’t smart. Not only is he no longer emotionally intelligent (and comics Joker is many terrible things but he’s probably the most emotionally intelligent character in DC, that’s a lot of what makes him so dangerous because it’s how he manipulates people) he’s not intelligent full stop. His great plan for breaking out of Arkham? Some of his goons from the outside literally just shoot their way in to get to him. Even leaving aside the fact that Arkham apparently isn’t set up to deal with that kind of violence in this world despite Batman having been opperating for a decade, that’s not a clever plan, and it’s not Joker’s plan. 'Hope some of my dudes are loyal enough to come get me’ isn’t any kind of escape plan, and nothing we see after that point suggests that this was a moment of weakness. Joker just straight up isn’t very bright in this, which is weird because that’s one of the few genuinely consistent character traits he has. He’s no Riddler, sure, but he’s really smart and that makes him hard to contain.

Ayer made Harley functionally a sex worker in this, and it doesn’t actually matter that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sex work or that sex work is real work, because David Ayer definitely thinks there is, and also really really hates women. David Ayer hates women so goddamn much. The only thing Slipknot does in the entire film apart from die is hit a woman just for being a woman.

When Waller arrives at Belle Reve, Croc is doing push ups. And that’s fine, it’s a classic movie shorthand for ‘bored prisoner is also fit and strong’, but the actor isn’t actually doing pushups. He’s got one knee tucked under his body to support his weight, and is clearly actually just sort of bobbing his head. What I suspect happened is that the prosthetics on his arms and chest were too heavy to allow that kind of movement, which would tie up with the stiff way he holds his arms throughout the film, but he’s not even bothering to pretend very hard and it adds to this pervading sense of off-kilter wrongness the film has.

Rick Flagg is supposed to be ‘the best special forces opperative this country has’, but he’s... really bad? He’s no use in any of the fights, he’s incapable of working with a team and has zero interpersonal skills, and when he’s assigned to be a bodyguard, he immediately starts fucking his client which is like, bodyguarding rule 1. He’s really bad at his job. (Which would be fine if the explanation was that he’s a fucking psychopath who’s 100% willing to just murder a civilian in the line of duty, but he’s meant to be Hannibal Smith more than Dirty Harry, and also if he is here because he’s a psychopath, why did Amanda Waller assume June Moon would be into that?!) He even has to be blackmailed into joining the opperation, so he’s incompetent, unprofessional, causes unecessary conflict, and isn’t even loyal to the project, so why him and not, I don’t know, literally any other character?

On the subject of June Moon, she goes (alone) on an archeological dig in a rainforest somewhere, finds a cave full of human remains and ancient artefacts, and literally her first action is to deliberately smash one of the artefacts, presumably just to see what would happen? IDK! We never get any explanation for that, but it’s definitely meant to be deliberate and not accidental when she smashes it! Why are archeologists in movies all so terrible?!

People have joked a lot about the fact that the movie changes the purpose of the squad from ‘plausibly deniable black ops, especially on American soil’, to ‘punching Superman’ but kept Captain Boomerang on the team, but there is actually an explanation given. A really really stupid explanation. Amanda Waller says that he’s there because ‘he faced down a metahuman and survived’, referring to him surviving being arrested. By the Flash. Who is famously non violent, and in fact in the next film in the series specifically says he’s never fought someone. So Boomer is on the team because he didn’t die when Flash picked him up and carried him to a police station, and Amanda Waller thinks that’s some kind of achievement. Like that isn’t the case for literally everyone the Flash has ever caught. And Flash is a street level hero, so that’s a whole lot of muggers and purse snatchers who are apparently capable of fist fighting Superman by Waller’s logic.

(On the same note as the Joker, Waller is also now incredibly stupid, but she’s mostly stupid for plot related reasons, so it sort of gets a pass? It gets more of a pass than the Joker at least, because making him comics-smart wouldn’t have necessatitated changing anything else about the film)

Re: Waller’s stupidity, her whole plan for recruiting El Diablo to the squad is... show him a video of him setting fire to some dudes. That’s it. She doesn’t even speak to him, she literally just holds up the video to the little window in his tank and seems surprised when that by itself isn’t enough.

And then when Flagg is like ‘hey let me try persuading him with actual arguments instead of just a weird video’, Diablo’s response is “You think you’re the first person to ask? I won’t do it. I’m a man not a weapon”, which gives us the amazing insight that in Ayer’s version of the DCU, there are apparently just... other Taskforce Xs running around. Other government agencies recruiting metahuman soldiers. So what exactly was the point of the half an hour or so of footage of her persuading the brass to go along with it? Because apparently they’re fine with this if every agency is doing it!

Tone? What even is tone. Griggs both has an antagonist but banter-y relationship with and brings cookies to the prisoners, but also he tortures them and is implied to be sexually abusing Harley, and like... you can’t have it both ways, Ayer. This is a one or the other situation. They can’t have a fun and jokey relationship with a man who is explicitly torturing and abusing them. Tone. You need to pick a fucking tone!

The decision to add a subplot about Deadshot being involved in a custody battle with his ex-wife was a fascinatingly terrible choice, and honestly tells you a lot about Ayer’s relationship to MRA talking points. Like, we know nothing about Deadshot’s wife except that she raised a cute well adjusted kid, so probably a pretty good parent, and that she doesn’t want her daughter to be spending time with a MASS MURDERER! So definitely a good parent! The comics just kind of handwave away Zoe’s mom most of the time, which was the right choice, because Ayer wants us to be on Deadshot’s side here, but it’s literally a choice between "a serial killer but you take credit cards” and a normal loving parent and somehow he thinks serial killer is the right answer? WTF happened in Ayer’s life that he thinks this is a choice where we side with Deadshot?! And it’s not even visitation rights or anything, Deadshot wants full custody. And the film thinks he’s in the right!

Not once, at any job I have ever had, one of which was a tourist attraction that required all visitors to wear a pass, have I ever seen someone wear a visitors pass on their sleeve. Not once. And it’s honestly such a good summary of the pervading wrongness of this film. This doesn’t feel like it was made by people. It feels like it was made by middlingly intelligent algorithms trying to pass as human.

Someone please tell me what the fuck any of this set is supposed to mean. The pose feels deliberate, but it’s not invoking anything I can see except the hanged man from the Ryder-Waite tarot deck, the halo of knives almost looks like it’s pseudo-religious imagery except that it’s not a full halo, the circle is incomplete on one side because of a broken piano, does the piano mean something? What about the babygrows, do they mean something? Does the Joker... want kids? Kill kids? Think Harley’s pregant? What the hell is any of this supposed to mean, and if, as I suspect, it was never supposed to mean anything why the fuck did they go to the trouble of making it?! What exactly does the hours this took to put together add to the movie?

David Ayer has a really weird relationship with both gang culture and latino gang culture specifically. He always feels the need to shoehorn them in somehow, and it’s this weird love-hate relationship where he apparently thinks latino gangs are so cool they have to be in everything, but is also so fucking racist he’s incapable of having a latino character who isn’t in a gang. Also in order to shoehorn them in here, he basically removed all of Joker’s henchmen (except for one scene which serves no narrative purpose) and replaced when with generic racist-stereotype LA gangs.

The fact that Griggs just hands Harley the phone in front of all the other guards and soliders was A Choice. Made even more so by the fact that Griggs never actually pay off. He gives Harley the phone, she tells him he’s “so screwed now”, and then... nothing. He’s just gone for the rest of the movie. He’s not even in the epilogue back in prison scenes.

I fucking love that the first thing Waller does is tell the world’s best assassin her real name. That is just... *chefs kiss* Everyone in this film is so fucking stupid.

I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming and I remembered the line perfectly, and I still had to stop the film because I was laughing too hard for “Ah would advise naht gettin’ killed by her, her sword traps the souls of its victims”. It’s the ‘that wizard came from the moon’ of film dialogue, and no one could have made it work, but the southern accent is really what makes that line delivery. I don’t know why, there’s just something about it in that drawl that it just endlessly hilarious.

It really is impressive how every character in this manages to be an offensive stereotype, sometimes multiple offensive stereotypes at once.

I love how Flagg’s right-hand woman is a samurai with a magical possessed sword that traps the souls of the damned who also isn’t military and refuses to speak English most of the time, but the squad are too weird for him. “You won’t believe it, this guy Boomerage, he’s got these bent stick things, and when he throws them they come back! I am freaking out, I can’t deal with this. Oh hi Katana, trap any damned souls lately?”

Harley is explicitly malicious in this in a way no other version of Harley has ever been, which is a Freudian nightmare when you combine it with her also being more sexualised than ever, and more infantalised than any version outside the Arkham games. Someone get Ayer a goddamn therapist. (Also in the vein of everyone being dumb in this, Harley is now an absolutely terrible psychiatrist and all her diagnoses are explicitly wrong, so that’s fun.)

The fucking pink unicorn-bundle of money switcheroo. There’s nothing to say on it that hasn’t already been said but holy shit. How do you fuck something up that bad? How? It’s like looking into Chekov’s nightmares and finding a pink stuffed unicorn staring back.

I love the way the soliders just come and go in this. Are they dead, are they alive, have they abandonned the cause? Why the fuck knows? Certainly not the editors!

I love how we’re supposed to be really sad about El Diablo being dead, but not care that Croc is seemingly directly underneath the explosion and definitely about to die, that’s fun.

I need to know if it was Ayer or Cara Delavigne’s choice to make Enchantress be just.. doing a little dance. Duing all the ‘tense’ moments. Because there are probably things which undercut tension more than the bad guy having a bit of boogy, but not many.

Enchantress gets so many costume changes, and I want to believe that they’re all from different versions of the film but I honestly think it was deliberate and I need someone on in the design department for this movie to tell me why because it add nothing.

I think the best thing about the stupidly on the nose liscenced soundtrack is that it just disappears once they arrive in Midway city. After spirit in the sky it’s original music all the way until the final scene. The great soundtrack DC stans insist this film has is literally only in the first 50 minutes and the last 2 of a 2hr+ movie.

The glorification of abuse in this is... seriously fucking something else. Twilight doesn’t have a patch on this. 50 Shades of Grey doesn’t have a patch on this. This shit is disgusting, and the fact that they pushed so hard to get it a child friendly rating is just morally bankrupt.

Possitive note to end on:

The dialogue is way too on the nose and exposition dump-y but the scene in the bar works pretty well. It fulfils its role in the story, and gives us a decent dose of team bonding.

Deadshot and Harley have great chemistry, and Boomer is perfectly cast, in a way that makes me really hopeful for James Gunn’s take on the team. A writer who knows how to write friendships could do a lot with the three of them, and they’ve been the core squad since 2011 so they’re the ones who matter. It probably helps that whatever Will Smith’s faults as an actor, you could cast him opposite a housebrick and they’d somehow have great chemistry.

#suicide squad #roasting suicide squad #bad movies #you could build whole academic careers just talking about all the things that went wrong in the production of this film #and some of it was studio interferance for sure #but a lot of it was ayer being incompetant #and trailerpark being incompetant #and kate hawley somehow being incompetant despite being fine on other movies #likewise john gilroy the creditted editor #lindsay graham and Mary Vernieu doing the worst jobs of their respective careers #i'm glad this movie didn't tank the careers of the creatives #and so upset it didn't tank the career of david ayer #how can you write this and fucking Bright and still have a job as a writer #how

8 notes · View notes

stratsandwhiskeywritestuff · 4 years

Text

Q+A With Strats and Whiskey!

We held a brief Q+A over on our Twitter, and had some awesome questions come in! We’ll post em here too for everyone to see. Have questions for us too? Hit us up on Twitter or in our ask box :D we’d love to hear from you!

Questions include asking us about the collaborative process, about writing kink together, the trust that takes, what characters we love writing most and our thoughts on writing in general!

PaleGlimmer: I asked about collab writing because I have no idea how you make it work.

WHISKEY: I’ve been collaborating on stories since I got into Hannibal. For me, it started as an offshoot of online RP. If you go back far enough you can see that, because the writing is stilted and jumpy, and you can tell that two people are writing. I’ve had three major collab partners in my fandom life and after a time our “voices” and styles start to gel and it becomes more seamless. That, for me, means that’s the right partner to write with, because you start taking on their mannerisms and descriptions, and they take on yours, and people can’t tell (or can tell very vaguely) that two people wrote a story.

As for technicalities, we just “tag” each other with part of the story for the other to continue it. Sometimes it’s short tags, dialogue, or brief descriptions, other times we get carried away (in the best way possible) and end up writing 6k a day. With Strats and I, we started with preferential characters and usually tagged for just them, but now we cover everything and everyone in our tags.

STRATS: Whiskey covered this pretty well. With Whiskey, We share characters pretty evenly now, and just write about 200-300 word chunks back and forth, but there are definitely characters we each feel more comfortable with. And scenarios we both excel at! Even if I haven’t written much, I’ll tag Whiskey in if we are coming up on something Whiskey is better at, and vice versa. (For example, Whiskey is much better at pretentious Hannibal speeches than I am, and I have a particular fondness for writing emotional breakdowns. This doesn’t mean we are the only person to write those, of course, just that we tag each other in more often.)

If I’m writing with anyone else, I usually write the same way. There’s only one person I’ll still do RP-style writing with. Usually I try to match my partner’s style, so for example, when I wrote with YAMD I focused a lot more on detailed descriptions than I usually do. I can’t really describe it, I just try to align with how my partner writes.

I’M NOT VERY HELPFUL, SORRY :D

Cuttlefishcatfish:

1. What do you love about writing?

STRATS: When you finally get to that moment, that scene you’ve been thinking about for AGES, the one you have entirely plotted for weeks.

Also, writing emotional breakdowns. Give me a sobbing panic attack any day.

WHISKEY: The moment you hit the flow point and everything just makes sense; either an idea just CLICKS or you finally get over that plot point you were worried about and you are racing through.

2. What do you hate about writing?

STRATS: god why haven’t we yet invented a way for me to think words onto the page? I’M SO TIRED.

WHISKEY: That meme? The one that goes like “I need this very specific fic and I need it immediately… which means I need to write it… but I just wanna read it, not write it”. That.

3. One writing tip that you could give to other writers.

STRATS: When I was a teenager I came across some writing advice from an author I loved (I want to say Steven King, but it’s been years). The advice was “sit down and actually write.” And I was PISSED. As a teenager struggling with motivation, I hated that advice.

Now I’m almost 27 and I can safely say that the best writing advice I can give you is JUST FUCKING WRITE THE THING. Even on days I feel like my writing is garbage, I force out a bit of garbage. Force your way through the shitty parts so you can get to the fun parts. You can always go back and edit the shitty parts later (and often it turns out they weren’t as shitty as you thought they were).

WHISKEY: Practice. I’m sorry, I’m trite and boring but honestly that’s the only way you will get better, get into a habit of writing all the time, and start to find your own voice. Practice even just 100 words a day, coz that’s 100 words more than you had yesterday.

4. One overused word in fanfics?

WHISKEY: Oh god our beta actually points these out now haha! I’m terrible for teeth/tongue/lip action (he tongued the corner of his mouth, flashed his teeth, bit his lip)

STRATS: any time someone’s smile “quirks up at the corners” or you read the words “fluttering/thrumming pulse,” that’s me. It’s always me. I have been called out on the hummingbird pulse before.

5. Have you guys disagreed on a story direction? If yes, how do you resolve that?

WHISKEY: I don’t think we have *disagreed* really, once in a while we find that a story doesn’t flow how it should, and we start over, or a character we had planned in our head ends up written differently on a tag. In that case we usually just ping the other and explain what we were after (we have a chat always open alongside writing) and figure out what works best for the story. I can think of a couple times that’s happened and it’s always a super chill and fair affair; both of us have “won” those kinds of things before.

STRATS: We gel really well together, and often our stories are at least loosely planned out from the beginning, so it doesn’t come up much. Every once in a while one of us says “so I don’t think this is working” and we usually do our best to find a way to change it around. It’s not really “fun” to write together if you’re making your partner write something they aren’t happy with, so we try to take each other’s opinions into account.

6. How did you guys manage to let the other into your thought process? Writing is intimate. With a writing partner, that person knows what your kinks, opinions about things, etc. are. Was it scary to let that person in and see you being vulnerable with your works? This is assuming that you let your personality bleed through your stories.

So, this is an awesome question actually, thanks for asking it, and the answer might sound a bit weird so bear with us! We both get a bit of a (major) crush on our writing partners when we write, and after. Not in a way that would be considered cheating or manipulative but in a way that is… intimate. You said it right that it’s intimate. Neither of us want to date the other (besides, Strats is married) but we love each other and spend a lot of time together with our writing.

There is a lot of trust there, and opening up is a process. I think with Strats and I, we started talking about a kink we shared (human furniture) and it sort of bled out from there. “Oh, I also like bondage! And I’m a huge fan of cock and ball torture, you into that?” and it grew from there.

There were some kinks that we came across that we’d both agree were not our jam and we’d just put them away, and there were some kinks that at one point were not one of our kinks but now we share them. These are interesting ones because it happened absolutely organically; neither of us ever push the other into kinks we know make the other uncomfortable, but we do offer the chance, if one of us is so inclined.

For Whiskey this was ABO and feminization, for Strats it’s underage. Once in a while we’ll push a little to see how we feel about those things, but there’s always a carte blanche to back out if anything makes us uncomfortable. It’s honestly such a safe place to explore these things that we really love it. Also both of us are super kinky and very open about it so there’s usually VERY little (if any) filter when we talk sex/kink.

Blue Posey: Where do you get the ideas from? Your stories are so varied.

WHISKEY: We shamelessly pluck ideas from the Hannigram Kinkmeme on Discord, we have about 150 saved in a spreadsheet that we random number generate from when we want a new idea. Sometimes it’s AUs of movies or other shows that we like, sometimes it’s just an idea that we’ve had that we put out into the void and one of us will freak out and connect it to something.

STRATS: we also both keep track of twitter and tumblr and will send each other prompts based on those. We are following quite a few non-fandom porn accounts…

and of course, sometimes I wake up at four am and text whiskey absolute gibberish and in the morning we write a fic.

Christina Shinn: I always like knowing about what gets writers really excited about their own fics. How writers overcome their writer's block. What motivates writers. What are some pet peeves of writers. YAY! Love your fics!

WHISKEY: 1. I get excited about fics I know people are excited about. If Strats pings me with a story idea and she’s stoked about it, I’ll catch that fever and be entirely into exploring that story. Likewise if someone commissions us or requests a story that really digs its heels in.

STRATS: 1) I’ve gotten a LITTLE less vain now that I do commissions and gifts for other people, but generally, every single thing I have written is something I’ve wanted to read, and so I love rereading it. Sometimes I’ll cringe at a typo or a mistake or an awkward line, but overall, I love everything I write. I have spent hours retreading my own fics before. Write the kind of story you want to read!

WHISKEY: 2. Writer’s block is an asshole and honestly I have no actual “fix it” for you; collab writing definitely helps because you have someone to soundboard off of, but even then sometimes we find ourselves just stuck. That’s when we start yet another original story XD

STRATS: 2) Writer's block occasionally eats me alive. If it’s REALLY hitting you, take a day off. It’s okay. Take a break. Do something fun.

But once that day is over WRITE THE THING. Write something terrible. Just do it. You can always fix it later

WHISKEY: 3. Collab writing is hugely motivating for me, it’s an immediate and awesome feedback loop of love. You tag, you send it off, and someone FINDS THAT IDEA COOL ENOUGH TO CONTINUE and ping you back, and you have new material to work with that didn’t come out of your head and… it’s great, it really is. Also feedback from readers. Even if it’s critique (note: not “I hated this” but “this could have been done differently imo”) it’s a great way to keep growing and moving as a writer.

STRATS: 3) collab writing is really motivating for me because I am a Guilt Monster and other people are relying on me. For my own stuff, I’m motivated because I’m writing something I like. Something I want to reread later.

If a story isn’t working for you (and it isn’t required for some sort of work or whatever), stop writing it. Go write something you like. It’s okay to say “actually, I don’t want to write this one anymore.”

WHISKEY: 4. I think every writer has a pet peeve regarding their own headcanons. Some people hate endearments with a pairing, but have their own pet names that work for them in their personal headcanon. In others’ work? There are certain things that irk me, but they’re also entirely personal. If I feel that a character has been written really OOC in a fic that is marked as canon for instance, it grinds my gears. THAT SAID that’s also the writer’s own prerogative.

STRATS: 4) I have too many pet peeves to mention because I am a snob, but I still have relatively low standards for what I’ll read, so I’ve read a vast variety of things.

Besides what Whiskey said about characterization, I have a few aspects of life that I’m somewhat knowledgeable about, and I can’t stand when people get it WRONG. Special mention goes to people writing children badly, which is the entire reason Family of Choice exists. If you don’t have children or know children, PLEASE do some research into child development before you write them. It drives me up the wall when kids are doing things they shouldn’t be at that age. NEWBORNS. DON’T. GIGGLE.

#stratsandwhiskeywritestuff #stratumgermanitivum #collab writing #hannigram #spacedogs #hannibal #will graham #nbchannibal #nbc hannibal #Q+A #twitter

3 notes · View notes

ghostsapphic · 5 years

Note

Top five TV shows you'd recommend to others? Top five books? :)

Thank you for the ask! This is definitely a tricky one since I don’t watch many TV shows, and I don’t really read as much as I did back in elementary school.

Top 5 TV Shows I’d Recommend To Others:

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, predictably. I’d actually say that it’s probably the “best” TV show that I’ve ever seen, at least in terms of the technical aspects. It has great foreshadowing, a cast of loveable characters, good cinematography, and amazing dialogue. It’s one of those shows where it doesn’t really matter to me if the plotlines aren’t any good, since the characters are able to carry the show better than a good plot ever could. I would also include the spinoff Angel, but definitely not if you haven’t watched Buffy first.

Xena Warrior Princess. I actually still haven’t finished watching it (I have around half a season left) since it’s not really one of those shows that I feel obligated to finish; the episodes don’t all connect to each other and story arcs usually only last a few episodes. It’s great for casually watching since the show is just as often goofy as it is intense. Plus Xena and Gabriella are both such amazing main characters that work so well in any situation. Their relationship is amazing and I just feel very happy whenever they interact (which, thankfully, happens all the time).

Merlin. It was a very influencial show to me when I was younger. I got into it through my mom, who got the boxset for the first season from a birthday or something, and it was one of the first tv shows I watched that wasn’t meant for young kids. I was also always interested in the myth of King Arthur, so there was a lot of interesting content in the show for me.

Hannibal. My recent rewatch of the show has reignited my love for it. I was kinda nervous when I started watching it since I thought it would be super gory and scary, but once I started tuning that part that out I really started enjoying it. The dialogue was always super pretentious but I loved it anyway. The main detractor from the show is the third season. It’s very boring, which sucks since there are so many good things about it too (like lesbians!!!). I’ve just been struggling to get through it. Other than that it’s still pretty good.

Wizards Of Waverly Place. This is kind of a weird one since it’s one that I really enjoyed as kid, but tbh it still holds up pretty well. One thing that I’ve always loved it the worldbuilding. For a disney channel show they shoved in so many interestings plotlines into the show while still putting the characters ahead of the plot. The show was also genuinely funny, which probably can’t be said for a lot of the shows I watched as a kid (ex. as much as I loved Hannah Montana, the humour could be predictable and dry a lot of the time). The Russo family is just so sweet I love them.

Top 5 Books/Book Series:

Maximum Ride. I’m slightly ashamed of this, mostly because the series it just genuinely not good, but I love it anyway! There’s a lot of nostalgia in the series for me since it influenced my imagination a lot when I was 10, and gave me a lot of story ideas. The series may have an infinite amount of plot holes, forgotten character arcs, nonsensical apocalypse plotlines, but there is still a lot of aspects of it that I like. The first 3 books are definitely the best ones, but I still do enjoy all the others (even though they piss me off).

Percy Jackson & The Olympians. This is the only other series that I’ve read completely more than once. The series made me fall in love with Greek Mythology, and was one of the series’s that made me start to enjoy reading. Also The Titan’s Curse is the best book in the series you can fight me on that.

Among The Ghosts. This was one that I randomly picked up but ended up loving anyway. I kept on waiting for there to be a sequel, but unfortunately that time never came. It’s also written by Amber Benson, so that’s a plus.

Witch & Wizard. This was the first James Patterson series I read, and it definitely has a lot of the same problems that MR also had. I loved the series anyway, since I had a huge obsession with fire related powers, so Wisty was kinda my childhood idol.

That’s kinda it. I really need to get back into reading.

#answers #slayers-every-one-of-us

2 notes · View notes