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ithoughtthiswastwitterbutfr · 3 years

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Wanda vision thoughts of episode 6 spoliers ofc

It’s startttttinggg I’m so excited I’ve heard good things.

I love the new into im trying to think of what show it’s related too it’s defiantly familiar.

The way it’s filmed like a show with the talks to the camera is making be very happy.

I LOVE WANDAS SCARLETT WITCH COSTUME. Visions too

“I don’t remember it like that,”

“Probably because you suppressed a lot of the trauma,” Now they’re saying it like it is.

“Mom and Dad have been not fighting just different?” Vision is still on edge as he should be honestly

AWW TOMMY IS A MINI QUICKSLIVER THATS SO CUTE.

Ugh now the sword agents are here with the plane and nasty Hayward.

Hayward is trying to pin the whole thing on Wanda again.

“We can’t outgun her and clearly antagonizing isn’t only making things worse,”

He brought up Monica’s mother then quicked the trio off the mission ig.

They took out the sword agents escorting them.

It’s back to the trick or treating and Peter/Pietro said “Raise hell demon spawn,” I may be reading too deep into this but that made me kind of suspicious.

“Do you remember we were in the orphanage after mom and dad died what was the name of that kid who was always trying to steal your boots. He had the... He had the skin thing?” Wanda to Peter/Pietro

“You’re testing me,” Peter/Pietro

“No I’m not,” Wanda

“Hey it’s cool. I know I look different,”

“Why do you... look different?”

Wanda knows this Pietro is different and doesn’t have the same knowledge as the other one which is why she was testing them she just doesn’t know where this version of him came from she’s still clueless to (the multiverse) that world.

This has to be like Uncle Jesse a bit he keeps calling himself Uncle P

“Say it again now all the candy has dissapeared?” Herb then cuts to all the kids looking down cause their candy is gone.

“And now all the jack-o-lanterns have been smashed?” Product of Quicksilver and the twins they’re using powers very openly this episode.

She just found out Vision wasn’t on duty

“Is there something I can do for you Wanda? Do you want something changed?” Herb

She seems caught off by the question I’m assuming that’s her subconscious trying to make up for the fact that vision lied to her and she wants to fix it.

Now she’s confused again.

He sees this woman who is glitching and crying she is trying to put a ghost decoration up over and over again. The she pain she is in is seeping through and I guess the control over her isn’t allowing her to do anything else but struggle to put up the decorations.

“I’m so hungry I’d eat anything,” Commercial snacked on Yo-Magic the kid is too weak to open it and they died. Yo-magic the snack for survivors. Still trying to figure out this commercial

“I got shot like a chump on the street for no reason and the next thing I know I heard you calling me. I knew you needed me,” Pietro/Peter very suspicious it’s a different multiverse Pietro but he definitely has bad intentions. He also brought up “isn’t that what you wanted?” Hinting to Wanda calling the shots.

Tommy had super speed now great now he’s running everywhere after Wanda told him to take it slow because she can’t control him.

“Do go past Ellis Lane,” I’m assuming that’s where that’s where hex cuts off.

The people near the edge are barely moving because they’re out of Wanda magic reach I think.

Also where’d Wanda get all those kids from there were none before.

Monica and the Jimmy and Darcy trio found out Hayward is tracking vision so now they can find out how sus be really is.

Vision is flying up to see everything and he here’s Halloween phrases and he sees a parked car

Should be Agnes from the trailer.

“ Town square scare. Where is it?” Agnes

“Oh, well the Town square I expect,” Vision

Agnes let out a creepy laugh.

“Took a wrong turn got lost,” there are tears in her eyes.

“In the town you grew up in?”

Vision pulls her out of the control.

“You... you’re one of the avengers youre vision are you here to help us?”

“I am Visuon. I do want to help. What’s an Avenger?” I guess Wanda does have some control over him if she was able to make him forget about everything before hand or maybe because he doesn’t have the mind stone he doesn’t have the memories but Shuri said without the mind stone there were so much vision still there. I’m gonna assume it’s Wanda

“What why don’t you remember?” Agnes “Am I dead?”

“No why would you think that?”

“Cause you are?”

“I am what?”

“Dead,” She confines to shout that she is dead.

She has brought up how no one leaves Wanda won’t even let them think about it. Her witch laugh is definitely a sign on Agatha she’s even wearing a witch costume and Peter Wanda and Vision all have their comic costumes on.

AHHH THATS WHY THEY CANT GO PAST ELLIS LANE BECAUSE THATS WHERE EVERYONE STOPS MOVING. They can’t move and it’s almost like they’re dead. There stuck in a cloud of Wanda grief.

I think Monica‘s powers are coming in because Darcy is talking about how her Energy in her cells on A molecular level is being rewritten and it’s unsafe too go back in the hex. In the comics Monica can turn herself into any form of energy I believe she can turn herself into pure energy.

“It’s changing you,” Darcy to Monica

Monica wants to stop Wanda’s grief.

Darcy is trying to breakthrough the into what Hayward is hiding which is the fact they’re trying to weaponize Vision.

“Where were you hiding all these kids up until now?” Pietro/Peter.

"What?” Wanda

“ I assumd they were all sleeping peacefully in their beds no need to traumatize beyond the occasional Holiday episode cameo, am I right?”

“No I dont-”

“You were always the empathic twin. hey don’t get me wrong you’ve handled the ethical considerations of this scenario as best as you could, families and couples stay together, most personalities aren’t far off from what’s underneath, people got better jobs, better haircuts for sure”

“You don’t think it’s wrong?” Wanda

“What, are you kidding? I am impressed seriously it’s a pretty big leap from giving people nightmares and shooting red wiggly-woos out of your hands” Like in age of ultron reaching into the Avengers biggest fears. On the other hand the phrase wiggly-woos is very cute.

He’s telling her how he can’t talk to her. And she said she doesn’t know how she did it she only remembers feeling completely alone and empty. So she was grieving and depressed. She just saw the gunshot wound and the white eyes on Pietro like she did to Vision with his head crushed earlier on. She’s losing touch to this made up world and is now getting glimpses of reality.

Darcy is almost at my into Hayward’s stuff.

Idk if these names are important but they’re in Hayward’s email so I’m gonna write them down.

James D. Gadd,

James J. Alexander

James X-ND Seckler.

James woo wasn’t listed in his contact either. He’s either been blocked or was never there.

Vision is at the edge of the hex HES breaking through now. He’s halfway out. Now he’s all the way out. The hex is pulling him back in and now he’s falling apart because he’s exciting.

THE BILLY CAN HEAR VISION SCREAMING

Hayward doesn’t want to help Vision so he’s handcuffing Darcy too a car.

Y’all really made Vision die again.

“It’s not like your dead husband can die twice,” Peter/Pietro she flung him backwards at that.

He can also see the soldiers and could hear Hayward. The hex is expanding outward to reach Vision and it swallowed Darcy and many other soldiers turning them into Circus performers and clowns. All the cars and shops it swallows turn into things to fit the aesthetic of her town.

I’m not sure if the hex is still moving outwards she opened her eyes so I think that was a signal that it stopped when her eyes went back from red to normal. Guess I gotta wait till next week.

#wandavision #wandavision spoilers #wanda maximoff #jimmy woo #monica rambeau #darcy WandaVision #Tommy and Billy #Vision #pietro maximoff #quicksilver

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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The Legend of the Three Caballeros: Shangri-La-Di-Da and Sheldgoose Squaredance Reviews: The Last Ride (Comissoned by WeirdKev27)

SALUDOS AMGIOS.. THIS IS IT! The finale review of my retrospective on the Three Caballeros THE RIDE OF THE THREE CABLLEROS. It’s the final ride. While there will be, as i’ve said the last few time, a little epilogue to celebrate finishing this, as clocking in at 15 reviews, one best of list coming next week and covering a film, two sizeable comic book stories, and 18 episodes of television, this has been one of my largest projects and one of my proudest. But there will be time to look back next week. For now i’m amped up, excited about this series and excited to finish. So after the cut join me for one last full ride as our heroes face their final hour!

Shangri-La-De-Da: Our penultimate adventure begins with the Cabs returning home after training with King Arthur, where they apparently got a years worth of training in a day.. because apparently Camelot is one giant hyperbolic time chamber. But the training’s paid off as our heroes are now at their most skilled and most powerful: As a result Jose skifully and perfectly cuts an orange in seconds, Panchito ropes an apple from a nearbye stand (and the owner’s really cool about it since Panchito gives him the money for it “Thanks magic rope!”) and Donald.. breaks everything but in a really impressive ways. Our heroes are at their best and ready to take on Feldrake when the time comes, while Ari and the Bear.. are hiding what happened last episode with the girls investigating. Hey can’t win em all. Meanwhile Sheldrake is leading Sheldgoose into the Manor.. after a few goofs on him running into the barrier because he’s a petty asshole. They decsend into the depths bellow leaving Leopold to guard.

Back at the Cabana Donald just wants one more thing... Daisy.

I’ve.. gone on about why he shouldn’t do this last time. He deserves better. Xandra is right there and while she’s treated him shabbily from time to time. it’s more human error versus... everything with Daisy just everything. This plot point has been nothing but pain and suffering for me and it’s not changing that track record in these last two episodes, though thankfully it’s barely in the finale, so my own track record of screaming about daisy in text form every time she shows up will also remain in tact. He does this because Xandra offered them a vacation so he won’t be distracted.. again why isn’t she the love intrest? I dunno maybe sh’es more into Jose. And Daisy sucks on arrival, phrasing, as her response to Donald’s call wasn’t to just.. tell him no but to go to his place to clearly tell him no to his place saying “Let’s recap, you abandoned me in a bad part of town, spent our date in the bathroom all night in a hula skirt, then brainwashed my nieces into helping you trick me with a dummy”. Okay Daisy, you want to recap, you insufferable, pompus, selfish, self absorbed, overly demanding, overly haughty, golddigging rose colored shrew?

Let’s fucking recap: He left you in a bad part of town because he got FIRED from his job and found out his house burned down, something you REFUSED to let him explain. You found out about this and then proceded to berate him over dinner, saying he couldn’t possibly help people. While he did spend a while in the bathroom with a hula skirt nad never explained it the ONE point you have.. he LEFT to go help his friends, with you once again leaving instead of letting him come back and explain later or leaving but going to his place to hash this out or just dump him. THEN, something you CAREFULLY omitted, you moved on which is fine.. as a way to make him jealous, bringing the guy to his door to rub his beak in your new relationship with not a hint of shame,a nd ran off whie he was fighting for his life clearly. Now seeing things were more complicated, you asked NO follow up questions, imposed a date on him and while he did lie your nieces WERE NOT FUCKING BRAINWASHED. This was of their own free will you unbleivible she demon. You are so up your own ass you can’t even see the obvious. And then you came here JUST to say all this and be mean to Donald one more time. While Donald shoudln’t of called you up it’s not because of all that it’s because your a heartlress, selfish, shrivled husk of a person. You care about NO ONE but yourself, and that includes Donald. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

So Xandra just zaps them away and says she’s perfect for Donald.

Donald and Daisy end up in the himlayas.. cue the music.

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Why isn’t this game on Switch? Questions for later. Point is our heroes find a cave to duck in and a yeti.. who after clearing their throat reveals Xandra left them at the entrance for Shangri-La, and the inside is intorduced.. with a very lackluster musical number. A weak note for the songs to go out on but not bad, though Donald is pissed off because that’s his schtick here.. though credit where it’s do: Since I didn’t know everything and hadn’t finished it turns out his anger was delebrate.. but we’ll get to that and why it dosen’t work in a moment. Back at the Cabana the boys fence with bread before Panchito gets a flash as Sheldgoose puts the first amulet into..some kind of melting pool... and the girls confirm what happened seconds later. Feldrake has the amulets, which were used to seal him last time as revealed in last episode, and is melting them into his own power. The final battle is nigh! So Xandra goes to fetch Donald.. and comes back as she CAN’T. Donald and Daisy signed a contract and they can’t leave till ALL their problems are solved. And given Donald is carried off after his anger issues not only are evident when, given a pillow representing his frustratoins he destroys it, but he DENIES having anger issues, he’s dragged off to some extreme thereapy.. i.e. a Self Reflecting reflecting pool that manifests his anger as a giant, sausgey, pissed off version of himself and he reacts as you’d expect and gets flattned. Back at the Cabana, Xandra breaks the bad news.. and whie Jose TRIES to reassure them, his amulet is next to go so he gets a flash of it being destroyed and our heroes now have to scramble to take on Sheldgoose.. WITHOUT Donald. Back at donald’s inner hulk.. man I love this fucking job, Donald is pounding away until his own flash breaks things for a moment.. and sends him into his own head. We’re then treated to an acid sequece, an homage to Donald’s surreal reverire from the original movie that while not as wild, is still gloriously bizzare. Donald rencounters the teapot ghost thing that’s apparently part of his psyche from the first episode that gets him to consider why his life is like this and he goes through a lot of moments of the first episodes.. conviently eddting out daisy’s questionable behavior and the fact some things had actual catalysits. See the idea of Donald FACING his anger issues and growing from them is fine. But this has two faults. One, it assuems you can just.. cure anger issues. You can’t. Anger is a normal emotion and as someone with them I hope to generally work thorugh mine with a therapist.. but I know they just don’t magically go away and therapy is a process and your mental issues are lifelong things you have to grapple away. It’s not the MOST insulting treatment of emtoinal issues i’ve seen, as Total Drama you know had someone with MPD cured with a fucking button press, but it’s not great. And the second is this was poorly set up. Donald was an angry asshole all series yes and it was an issue.. but it wasn’t really FRAMED as a character arc. Just Donald being donald. So while having that be the source of his issues is a good idea for a character arc for im it comes off sloppy and forced because it’s been treated more like a joke or a character trait and less like a SERIOUS issue or the problem with him and Daisy. Hell they put the whole Dapper duck thing in there when he was fine that episode and is rightfully angry about that if at the wrong person. This whole thing just feels rushed, forced and unsatsifying and is a hsame for such a good idea

The payoff is good though, as when Donald awakens and let’s his anger wash away.. he just stands as the anger donald tries to beat the crap out of him.. but can’t do anything to him since he’s calm. He’s fine, and he’s released.. and his shock collar is disabled. Good quick gag. Meanwhile our heroes aren’t sure what to do despite having tons of magical items.. until they think what would donald do.. and he’d just at least try and thus corm a GIANT FUCKING MAGIC CANON OUT OF THEM. Very nice. They blow the doors off.. and through the back.. and into the money bin where we get a scrooge cameo.

And he’s voiced by Eric Bauza.. which is sadly not great because it’s far from his best work and dosen’t even really attempt a scottish accent.

But our heroes storm the gate.. after Xandra easily disposes of the dog guards.. who Sheldgosoe apparently raised to do this... still not entirely over that. They find the staircase and the triplets op to go back while the rest charge in and prepare to fight leopold.

Back at the Cabana, Donald and Daisy return via tub and Donald, seeing the swirling vortex of darkness outside sheldgoose manor, tells daisy he has to go his friends need him it’s his destiny, gives her one hell of a kiss she dosen’t deserve.. oh and earlier he told her “Thanks for being patient with me” and she tells him it was worth the wait. Ha ha... I hope you get hit by a rusty tractor you unfathomable blight on duck kind.

So part one ends with Donald heading for the treasure chamber to armor up.

Sheldgoose Square Dance: Part two begins with Sheldgoose putting the staff in place, and an egg emerging. Weird.. and as a result of that Leopold sense his ‘Daddy’ and leaves, and before the cabs can charge in donald shows up, now confident, at full strength and after tripping as you’d epxct, with the other cabs armor and in his. The guys suit up, and we get to see both jose’s.. amazing.. toned.. stomach.

And Panchito’s big belly.. which I have one of those so we’re twinsies. And Xandra of course watches Jose change slyly. Eh i’ts a bit creepy but I can’t blame her for sneaking a peak as long as she didn’t linger.

So our heroes are suited up, look awesome and have their trademark weapons Let’s fucking go!

Back at the ranch, the Nieces talk to daisy and having grabbed a weird document last time, are trying to piece it together. Daisy.. is suddenly really good with puzzles and helps them with it. They reform it and.. don’t really do much until after the danger has passed and I avoid another cornary yelling innterally at this unpleasant pile of hippo excrement.

So while the Cabs dash to stop feldrake feldrake awakens.. as a demon baby. And Sheldgoose has about a minute of mockery before feldrake smacks him around with telekensis and agrees while his mind’s affected by his current state, he’s still fully aware and can talk and seeing the cabs are coming gives him a bit of power, i’d say about as much or a little more than what feldrake had as a staff, and sends him after the cabs.

So we get one of the most awesome moments if not THE most awesome moment in the entire series as something from EVERY episode makes a come back as shelgoose, after trying some zaps, back in full robe and cloak, MAKES HIS OWN ZOOM POINT. Thus it becomes an utterly awesome back and forth as sheldgoose summons one thing from the past and xandra summons another to counter. And it avoids reptititon as the sheer sight of characters from each episode battling it out, and never knowing which ones next, keeps it intresting.

In order: Sheldgoose summons the moon bots, Xandra summons the roman gods to hack them to pieces, after the boys get some shots in too. Sheldgoose blocks the way with lava lizards, the cabs respond with a goblin army who block the lava river and use a cat launcher against them, courtsey of king vomit. Sheldgosoe unleashes the tengu, the cabs unleash king arthur.. and we get the immortal line from donald “Thanks king arthur!”. Sheldgoose summons his ancestors, the cabs summon the ghost presidents! And in a call back that had me clapping Sheld summons the termintes.. and xandra summons THE MINOTAUR! And Sheldgoose thirsts over him. .huh.. so shledgosoe is bi good for him. And for a final distraction sheldgoose summons.. the dragon.. that was from the adventure they just had he had no way of knowing about.

So with that out fo the way our heroes and villians both reach feldrake.. whose awakened and is.. this

Really.. weird , if still threanting, deisgn aside, Feldrake now at full power turns new quackmore into the psycadelic starry battlefield we saw in the intro to the series and thus the final battle begins. We see the fight from the start.. but it’s now even MORE beautiful and glorious with context. Before we saw three strangers, if ones we knew from other works fighting some evil we never met. Now we’ve seen our heroes grow, both as people, and as heroes, learning from every encounter, getting stronger with every fight and slowly getting noticably more compitent: going from falling all over themselves just to work a ship, to defeating dragons, tengu, and other horrors as a team. And we’ve seen jus thow petty and cruel feldrake is.. and how serious the stakes are and what our heroes tand to loose should they fail. It’s not perfect.. we could stand to loose daisy and new quackmore dosen’t mean much, though Sheldgoose gets to zap regina into a worm, but it’s still AWESOME and feels like a tremendous payoff and Donald’s predator bro fist thing with Panchito has more weight. Our heroes have risen to their peak and now they face one last obstacle to becoming legends. The fight is fluid, awesome and gorgeously animated and utterly epic in every sense of the word and we catch up to their seeming defeat.. only for something we DIDN’T know about last time to help.. Xandra who gets htem out of the way. It’s a long and fantastic fight, with our heroes eventaully getting knocked over to a pool while Xandra tries her best to hold feldrake off, but is clearly wearing down despite doing her best.

Yeah while itw as established Feldrake was melting down the amulets and we saw a pool of resdiual magic, so teh magical pool of stuff the cabs find them at WAS set up.. but what happens next remotely wasn’t. The cabs fall in and commuincate with blazebeak the creator of the amulets who embues them with their power. Where he came from, why he’s just showing up n ow.. I dunno, it comes off as a really badly setup deus ex machina.. but it still dosen’t hurt the finale that bad. A little yes, as everything else is so well paced and feels like so much payoff.. but the awesomeness of our heroes glowing with their signture colors, rushing in to save xandra and then ari, who swiped the rest of the magic goop, giving it to xandra to reivvie her.. overrides it. Sometiems somethings too stupid to be awesome.. and sometimes it’s so awesome it overides common sense. So yeah poorly set up yes.. still fucking awesome also yes.

Our heroes tear feldrake apart and realize once they see the now empty staff floating in the void they can simply reseal him. Sheldgoose interupts it.. but the nieces arrive riding on humphrey and knock him inot a golden toilet... again I fucking love this job. Our heroes then try ghost bustering him back into the staff and SHeldgoose tries saving him by breaking it. And it seemingly fails.. new quackmore is restored, Sheldrake’s gone and the town remembered EVERYTHING, cheering at their new heroes and saviors. Sheldgoose finds the staff gone and bemoans his lost master.. and soon looses his presidency as regina strips him of it. With his own powers gone Sheldgoose flees on Leopold, and while Regina tries to take the presdiency for herself.. the girls reveal the document explains if a sheldgoose is absent.. a coot takes his place. And since Donald is the only remaning coot apart from Della and she’s busy actually raising her kids in this continuity apparently, Donald is the new president. While Regina vows to beat him in an election.. our heroes are now happy, with the lawyer from the first episode backing Donald’s claim up. So Donald now has a new job, a new purpose in life, his girlfriend back, which is negiably a good thing, and a new family he dearly loves and tells them as much. Awww. Also he gets the mansion, which our heroes promptly plan to move into. Donald and Daisy fight, of fucking course, our heroes claim roms and Xandra and Jose share a moment. The series gets a truly satsifyign and happy ending.. and a sequel hook as it turns out feldrake is now in sheldgooses body and the tow are going ot have to share it as Sheldgoose has leopold take them to a house with legs.. so the baba yaga then. Sadly we’ll probably never see with this leads.. and this is the end.

Final Thoughts on the finale two parter: While the first half is a bit weak in the yeti stuff, the rest of it is incredibly strong and Sheldgoose Square Danc,e while having the worst name of the series.. is easily it’s best episode, tying everythign together greatly and being one, tense and epic finale the whole way through. A true masterpiece and a clear sign the series would be even BETTER going forward had it actually been allowed to live and a true shame.. but even with the sequel hooks aside.. it’s still an utterly sastifying, joyous note to go out on and i’m GLAD I saved this one for last, as it provided a great capper for both the series and this retrospective.

Final thoughts on Legend of the Three Cablleros:

This series.. was excellent. While at first I wasn’t sure it’s rep was warranted, as the first three episodes were good but had flaws and four and five were not great.. everything after that is sublime. The series has it’s flaws, the character devlopment is uneven, the characters can be made into caractures of themselves once in a while and the writing on Daisy is horrid and i’ve said enough on that to last me a lifetime and is easily the worst part of an otherwise fantastic show. But yeah.. as I said OTHERWISE fantastic, as while the daisy stuff is very bad, it’s for the most part in the background of a VERY good show with great voice acting, fun pacing, and beautiful animation. It’s a loveletter to clasic disney animation, holding tons of mythology gags and refrences and having humphrey as a main character, but with unquie touches like letting the nieces have a starring roll and everything about xandra and sheldgoose. It’s a unique, wonderful and awesome addition to the disney animated canon and deserves a second season or some other sort of revivial. This was a wonderful note to go out on and I’m throughly glad I finally watched it. So with this the Ride of the Three Cablleros is almost over.. but come back, let’s say next week, for one last party as we count down the top 12 cabs moments and celebrate these happy chappies in matching serapes one last time. Until then.. it’s been a pleasure.. and Kevin.. thank you.

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jadelotusflower · 3 years

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Roundup - September 2021

This month: Saving Fish From Drowning, Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, Anne Boleyn, Cruella, The Chair

Reading

Saving Fish from Drowning (Amy Tan) - I've always enjoyed Tan's work (particularly The Joy Luck Club, both the book and film) - Fish is somewhat of a departure, following a group of American tourists in Myanmar, narrated by their recently deceased friend Bibi Chen. The novel begins with a preface in which Tan explains she drew inspiration for the novel based on real events chronicled by a San Franciscan psychic's "automatic writing" channeling Chen's spirit (in truth a complete invention on Tan’s part, both literary device and metaphor).

Bibi is a compelling narrator, full of wry commentary of her friends as they bumble their way through their trip, the tone of the novel quite light despite some of the dark subject matter around the political situation in Myanmar (the novel was written in 2005 and set several years earlier) and the nature of intervention - the title referring to fisherman who "save fish from drowning" by netting them. It was at times difficult to keep track of all twelve (!) of the main characters and who was who outside of the few who get the most attention of the narrative.

An interesting read, about the stories we tell ourselves and others, and the fictions we believe for comfort and hope.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there (Lewis Carroll) - I've been making more of an effort to work on my novel lately, which makes some reference to these works so thought it was due for a re-read. It seems impossible to consider these separate novels given how conflated they have become in pop culture - even the Disney film takes elements from both - they act as either a duology, or alternatively a single story told in two parts.

I personally much prefer Looking Glass, perhaps because I imprinted on the 1985 miniseries as a child (which adapts both novels, but we only had the second part on tape) - best known for it's celebrity cameos in silly costumes - including Sammy Davis Jnr, Donald O'Connor, Ringo Starr, and Carol Channing, among others, and the danger of the Jabberwocky as a manifestation of Alice's fears quite a nice idea that isn't found in the original text.

Perhaps Looking Glass, while remaining absurdist, is more cohesive than Wonderland with the chess motif and central motive for Alice to reach the Eighth Square and become a queen. I do however find the constant poetry tedious, and wonder whether both Wonderland and Looking Glass are better remembered for the concepts rather than the actual text.

Watching

Anne Boleyn (episodes 1-3) - I didn't think we needed another film/show about Anne, but I was always going to watch it. This series relies upon familiarity with history as it begins with Anne's final, doomed pregnancy - opening with the haunting words “Anne is the most powerful woman in England - she has just five months to live.”

There's nothing especially new here; rather a mood and character piece as Anne's isolation and desperation grows. It is of course built around the central, compelling performance of Jodie Turner-Smith, in every single scene and not afraid to shy away from Anne's sharper edges while remaining profoundly sympathetic, surrounded by a court of whispers, her existence on a knife's edge. We know only what Anne knows, and we see the smaller, heartbreaking moments usually passed over in other adaptations - in her grief following the stillbirth, Anne sits up in bed almost catatonic, milk leaking from her breasts, her attempt to walk back the infamous “dead man's shoes” comment, and the long days of her imprisonment.

Then there’s the beautiful costumes - in a court of dark furs, Anne wears bold primary colours and velvets that catch the light, that them become more subdued prints once she is in the Tower.

The other notable feature is the casting - described as "identity conscious" rather than colour-blind, representative of the othering of Anne and her relatives. Another standout is Thalissa Teixeira as Anne's cousin Madge Shelton, fleshed out as her confidant and the only one who remains true to her. It's a fresh perspective and a worthwhile watch, particularly for Turner-Smith's performance.

Cruella (dir. Craig Gillespie) - Spoilers. I wasn’t planning on bothering with this, but my sister wanted to watch it and I’d been told by several people that it was actually quite good. Look, I'm not saying they lied, I just think they were able to look past things that I was not.

Because actually, the core story has potential and the film has enjoyable elements (notably Emma Thompson), but simply falters every time they try and shoehorn references to the source material, and there are some truly egregious attempts - Roger is the Baroness’s lawyer for some reason? And writes the familiar Cruella De Vil song about how awful she is when she's just given him a puppy?

It doesn’t work as a prequel, or villain origin story, or even a reboot, since Cruella’s character journey is over by the end of the film (I have no idea what the purported sequel is going to be about) - in fact "Cruella" is just a persona Stone's Estella adopts (complete with a terrible affected accent), and there is no conceivable way for her to become the wannabe puppy murderer we know from the book or any of the film adaptations. Oh, and Pongo and Perdita are siblings! Well done, Disney. Slow clap for you.

Also, with a runtime of 2 hours 16 minutes it is Interminable and the whole thing is saddled with a terrible, unnecessary voiceover. Seriously, they should show this in film class to demonstrate when v/o hinders not helps.

They were likely going for a Maleficent-style re-imagining, but where that succeeded (somewhat) in a completely new retelling right down to a different ending to the source material, this wants to have it's cake and eat it too - it wants to have the Cruella aesthetic (the car, the hair, Hell Hall, the camp accent) but doesn't ever let her be a villain, or even the beginnings of a villain, but that's that's reason she's so memorable in the first place. It puts all the pieces in place for the story we know, and yet that story simply cannot happen with this version of Cruella.

In the end, it's a story of a fundamentally decent person who maybe goes a bit overboard in retaliating to bullies, and swindles a sociopath to reclaim what's rightfully hers. Cruella De Vil! I just couldn't get over this fundamental misapplication of the source material.

In many ways, it almost feels as if this was pitched as a sequel, with Cruella in the Baroness role. It would have fit a lot better with the aesthetic, the time period, and the concept of punk disruption of classic fashion. Or, it was a completely unrelated story of a plucky orphan who rises in the fashion world, that at some point was grafted onto the Dalmatians property. Either one would have worked better, frankly.

I am probably being overly harsh. If you switch off your brain and enjoy the clothes it’s fine. But honestly, if you want your live action Cruella fix, just watch the Glenn Close version, because it is superior in every way.

The Chair (season 1) - I watched this for Sandra Oh, and I was not disappointed, because I got to watch Sandra Oh. On the other hand...it's not that I didn't like it, I just...wish it had been better?

The story revolves around Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman (let alone woman of colour) to become Chair of English at a "minor Ivy" university, as she tries to juggle the clash of old style academia and new, raise her daughter as a single mother, and deal with a series of controversies caused by one of her professors (and love interest). It's the latter I feel sucked up way too much time and was ultimately unsatisfying - particularly the end, which was played like a moral victory but really rubbed me the wrong way. If this gets a season 2, I hope they dump Jay Duplass' fuckup sadsack because hoo boy, am I sick of that kind of male character.

But Sandra Oh is wonderful.

Writing

The Lady of the Lake - chapter 5 posted, 4215 words (10,261)

Against the Dying of the Light 1954 words (11,976)

Here I Go Again - 414 words (12,948)

Novel - 1039 words (1484)

Total this month: 7,622

Total this year: 48,435

#roundup #reading watching writing #september roundup

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joebloggs88 · 3 years

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Candyman 2021 review

Director - Nia Dacosta

Studio - Universal Pictures.

Spoilers Ahead…

This film tells the story of another candyman. A new legend and a completely different candyman. The themes of this movie are very much the same as the original and focuses on the gentrification of the area and also focuses on racism against the black community. This time putting a black cast leading the film with the main protagonist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) a new artist trying to make a name for himself learning about the candyman curse, using it in his art and eventually finding out he is connected to the original candyman curse that was established back in the 90’s. the movie chooses to expand the candyman Lore and explains that the curse is created when a black person is killed violently at white persons hands and because of the violent and unfair nature of the deaths the curse is born. It goes into the history of many men throughout the years who have fallen victim to hate crimes in America and eventually going all the way back to the original candyman Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) all these flashbacks are done in a beautiful haunting silhouette style which really added a new unique style to the film. When Anthony learns about the candyman (who in this movie was a man named Sherman Fields who had a hook hand. He liked giving sweets to children in the 90’s. Was wrongly accused of murdering a child and was murdered by police officers.) the more Anthony dives into the curse the more he begins to change and alter. While the candyman ghost stalks him and claims victims who see Anthony’s art and don’t believe in the curse. Eventually at the end of the movie Anthony is found to be the baby who Helen Lyle rescued from the fire pit in the end of the original candyman. This was a great way to tie the original movie and the new one together! Anthony ends up on the run from the police as he is believed to be the new killer. (Just like Helen in the original) Anthony is eventually tracked down as the candyman has almost taken over his body entirely and is killed in front of his girlfriend by the police (again this shows the very real problems the world is facing where white police officers are choosing the shot first ask questions later method because the person is black) she is arrested and put in the back of a police car. In here while being racially victimised she says candyman in the mirror and revives Anthony making him the new candyman completing the curse and passing on the mantle to him. This continues the legacy and the curse for anyone else who dares cross it. Tony Todd appears as a cameo in the closing scene as Anthony’s candyman gets covered in bees Anthony’s girlfriend goes over to her newly resurrected husband and instead of Anthony Daniels face is revealed. The film closes with him saying “tell everyone.” Warning people that the candyman is real and will kill if provoked. I really enjoyed this movie! I was sceptical wondering how they were going to pull off a sequel to an already famous horror movie. I was nervous that re casting “Candyman” that no one would be able to live up to Tony Todd’s iconic performance in the original. However I was pleasantly surprised.

Rating ��️⭐️⭐️⭐️

#candyman #say his name #tony todd #nia dacosta #horror

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imjustheretoseetheprivateblogs · 4 years

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The Lost World Rewrite

So, I recently watched the Lost World: Jurassic Park for the first time and all I gotta say is...

Yeah. So, in spite of the fact I feel that it would be Superfluous and self-aggrandizing, and a maturely written well thought out review would be a better use of my time, I decided to do a rewrite of the Lost World to make it a half-decent movie. I apologize to any fans of the film in advance. This is a rough Idea based on what could be done without completely throwing out the script. Here we go...

The film starts the same; little girl gets mauled by Compies on Isla Sorna

Cut to not Ian Malcolm; there is no Ian Malcolm in this film. There will never be Ian Malcolm in this film. Instead, we cut to Dr. Sarah Harding (played by Julianne Moore) who’s photographing a crocodile nesting. We learn a little bit about her from her assistant, Nick Van Owen (played by Vince Vaughn), namely that while her theories on Dinosaur young rearing are as on point as Alan Grant’s raptor research, she’s not so hot at rearing young herself. Case in point, she’s late for her daughter’s gymnastics performance.

Her daughter is of course Kelly Curtis played by Vanessa Lee Chester, who in this version will have a larger role and more developed personality. Kelly is Sarah’s adopted daughter and the two have been at a loss at what to do with one another since meeting. Kelly is the daughter of one of Sarah’s oldest friends who died while traveling and Sarah took her in. While their relationship isn’t horrible, it’s definitely awkward. Like when Sarah bursts through the gymnasium doors to see Kelly has completely finished her routine and the seat reserved for her has been given to someone else (maybe Michael Crichton or Steven Spielberg in a cameo?)

Later that night, Sarah is called by a mysterious voice on the phone, telling her to pack a suitcase and go outside. She does so and a black SUV pulls up. “Get in.” a man’s voice tells her.

“OK,” Sarah says, annoyed, “who are you people and what’s with the G-man routine?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a G-man routine.” says a familiar voice.

We pan over to reveal John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) sitting across from Sarah.

“Can I offer you a drink?” he asks.

The conversation is much the same as the movie with Ian Malcolm (Hammond explains Site B, tells Sarah about the JP incident, etc.). Only this time, there’s a big difference: InGen wants to cut ties with the Jurassic Park debacle and intends to let the Costa Rican Government fire bomb it. Hammond wants to get people onto the island and document the animals to drum up environmentalist support for turning it into a preserve and at least stave off the destruction until a humane solution can be found.

“How can I say no!?” Sarah says. A chance to photograph real Dinosaurs. Never in 65 million years did she think she’d get this chance.

The team she’ll be going to the island with includes herself, Hammond, Van Owen (“Nick’s the best person for the job” Sarah insists), equipment manager Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), Dr. Robert Burke (Thomas F. Duffy) (“are we sure he’s not a country singer?” Sarah asked, eyeing the supposed paleontologist’s ten gallon hat and beard), celebrity big game hunter Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite), and InGen executive Peter Ludlow, Hammond’s own nephew (“I made the mistake of trusting too many people last time,” Hammond said, “this time, I’m playing it close to the vest.”)

The team arrives on the Island, where Peter suggests setting up camp in a low clearing, much to Tembo’s chagrin (“that,” Tembo said, rolling his eyes, “is a game trail, Mr. Ludlow. Carnivores hunt on game trails. do you want to find dinosaurs or serve them lunch?”)

The group wanders through deep Jungle, Hammond and Ludlow being the slowest, one due to their age the other due to being a little on the wimpy side. As the journey goes on, it becomes apparent that there’s some friction between Peter and John, with Peter second guessing John every chance he gets and trying to act like the leader of the group.

They finally come across a family of stegosaur and we get that adorable pet the baby scene from the movie. Eddie is flabbergasted, Nick is taking pictures like crazy, Burke’s having a conniption, Hammond swells with pride, and we don’t really know what’s going through Peter and Tembo’s heads.

Something startles the Stegs (Tembo reached for his gun. “No!” Nick grabbed the barrel of Tembo’s gun.)

Nick fumed “An animal that hasn’t been seen in over a million years turns up and the only way you can express yourself is to kill it?” Tembo smiled. “Remember that chap about twenty years ago? I forget his name. Climbed Everest without any oxygen, came down nearly dead. When they asked him, they said why did you go up there to die? He said I didn't, I went up there to live.” (cryptic, no?)

“What could have set them off like that?” Wondered Burke. Roland, however, scented the air. “Smoke,” he said simply, pointing “coming from that way. They must have thought it was from a forest fire.”

The group rushes back to their camp, discovering the campfire burning. Eddie and Burke make to smother it. However, the camper door opens to reveal—

“I was gonna have dinner ready when you got back.” Kelly said.

Sarah and Kelly have an argument inside the camper, about how Sarah’s never there for her and how she just washed out of her gymnastics team (“I got bronze,” she said, “not that you’d know. You didn’t even stick around long enough for that part.”)

Kelly convinces Sarah she can stay. We cut to a scene of the group in jeeps, riding through grasslands in a heard of various Dinosaurs. Nick’s in the jeep with Tembo, Peter, and Hammond, while Sarah is with Kelly, Eddie, and Burke. (Tembo turned to Nick. “get in the outrigger. You're closing in on a parasaur.” “Parasaurolophus,” Nick corrected smugly.” “Whatever,” said Tembo, “The one with the big red horn! The pompadour! *Elvis!*”)

Nick climbs into the outrigger and begins to film the dinosaurs. In the other jeep, the group is trying to coax Eddie into their own outrigger.

“No way I’m getting into that thing,” Eddie said “not surrounded by dinosaurs.” “We’re gonna need better shots if we want to save these dinosaurs,” Sarah said, “and you’re the only one who knows how to work the equipment.” “So do you,” Eddie said, “Why not pull over and let me drive? I used to drive cabs for a living.” “I know how the use the camera.” Kelly said. Sarah stared at her. “You do?” “I was in AV club before gymnastics.”

The group snaps Kelly in and they begin their own filming process. For the first time in a long time, Kelly and Sarah seem to be having fun together.

After that moment of chipperness, we cut back to camp. (Roland nodded to Nick. “Tree hugger got a great shot of a Pachy... a pachy... oh, hell. One of those fatheads with the bald spot, Friar Tuck!”) Peter and Hammond are looking over a map. Peter insists that they should go to the abandoned worker village on the other side of the island, where they can find easy shelter and supplies (“IT runs on geothermal power, so it’ll still have power”). Hammond disagrees. (“Absolutely not,” Hammond said, “that part of the island has been overrun by Velociraptors.” Peter frowned “What’s that, veloc-o-?” “Velociraptor,” Burke said, “Carnivore, pack hunter. About two meters tall, long snout, binocular vision, strong, dextrous forearms, and killing claws on both feet.” “That doesn’t sound promising.” said Peter. “You should read Alan Grant’s latest paper on them,” said Burke, “It’s like he met one in real life!”)

Meanwhile, Roland Tembo is now kneeling, looking at a track.

“Come take a look at this.” he says. Everyone gathers around. “do you know what this is?” he asks. Sarah’s eyes grew wide. “We have to leave.” she said. “Why?” asked Kelly. “That’s a T-Rex track!” Burke said. “A T-Rex!” Eddie looked as if he was about to break for the beach and try to swim home. “That’s impossible!” said Hammond “the satellite photos showed that the Rex territory is nowhere near here.”

The group decides to risk staying in the area. Later that night, Kelly hears a noise. Curious, she goes outside to investigate. In the moonlight, she sees a team of unknown men in night vision goggles capturing the dinosaurs that they had been filming earlier that day. As the drive off, Kelly grabs onto the back of one of the trailers to follow them.

We cut back to Sarah’s tent. She’s asleep, not having been roused by her daughter’s departure. But she is roused by what sounds like deep breathing outside. She surreptitiously looks around and sees a massive snout sticking into her tent. It’s the Tyrannosaur!

Just then, Peter Ludlow comes out of his tent with a roll of toilet paper, but upon seeing the dinosaur lets out a scream that wakes the whole camp. The rex turns and bellows at him, trashing their camp all the while in a show of dominance. Soon, the whole group is running through the forest. Hammond is almost eaten by the thing if not for Tembo’s intervention.

Soon, however, the groups are separated from one another. Hammond slips down a river bank into a ravine, Peter just up and vanishes, and Sarah, Van Owen, Tembo, Burk, and Eddie run behind a waterfall with the rex in pursuit. The dinosaur, unable to follow, gives one last roar of anger and leaves. Out of all the people, however, Tembo looks the least scared. He looks…thrilled, actually.

Meanwhile, we cut away to Hammond. He rises (roughly) shaking away the delirium. He looks around, wondering where his party got off to. The T-Rex’s roar is heard in the distance. Better find the others, he thinks. He begins to follow the river; if the group has any sense, they’ll make a new camp on the water. But then he hears a noise and looks down. It’s a Compy.

We get a very similar scene to Dieter Stark’s (Peter Stormare’s) death in the movie (which was based off of John Hammond’s in the first book) with one or two caveats. First, we don’t cut away in the middle. We maintain the scene and the suspense as long as possible (with Compys popping out of the woodwork the more Hammond tries to get away from them). The second…

There was a sound of rifle fire. The Compys scattered and Hammond felt himself pulled up from the shallow water, finally able to breathe. “Tembo,” he coughed.

“If you have any more suicidal ideas,” said Tembo, “keep em to yourself.”

Cut back to Sarah’s group as Hammond and Tembo rejoin them.

“Has anyone seen Kelly?” Sarah asked, worried.

“I think I saw her run in the same direction as Ludlow,” said Tembo.

“Hopefully, they’ll be safe once they leave the Rex’s territory.” said Burke.

“Don’t bet on it,” said Sarah, “Tyrannosaurs have the second largest proportional olfactory cavity of any creature in the fossil record.” “What’s the first?” asked Eddie. “Turkey vulture,” said Burke, as casually as someone would talk about the weather.

“Any idea where we are?” asked Eddie, desperately trying the change the subject. “Somewhere west of the worker village, I think,” said Nick, examining a map of the island (one of the few they managed to salvage from the camp) “It’d be an easy hike there.” “Maybe that’s where Kelly and Peter are,” said Sarah, turning to Hammond. “Yes, but if they did go there, they’re in grave danger.” said Hammond. “Velociraptors,” said Burke, trying to be helpful.

“Danger or not, we need a radio,” said Tembo, “that buck tore the hell out of our camp and I don’t think we can contact the mainland with smoke signals.” “How do you know the T-Rex was male?” asked Sarah.

Before Tembo can answer, a different roar is heard. A helicopter passed overhead.

“I thought you said we had a few weeks before they started razing the island?” Sarah said. “We do,” Hammond replied, “I don’t know what that helicopter’s doing her.” “It was headed towards the worker village,” said Tembo, “so, if we want to see what’s what, I think that’s where we’re headed.”

Cut to a scene of the group walking through the forest at night. Finally, they reach a vantage point overlooking the worker village…and it’s anything but abandoned.

More than three dozen people, some of them armed, are walking over the compound. Chain link fence ran the perimeter of the camp, newer than the rest of the camp. Tents, vehicles, mobile generators, the works.

Dozens of dinosaurs sit in cages, all bearing the same logo

“It says InGen on the side of that truck!” Eddie said. Everyone turned to look at Hammond. “I had no idea about this,” said Hammond, “why would I ask anyone to come here?” “I think I know who we should ask,” said Nick, pointing down at the camp.

It’s Peter, down in the camp, talking with the armed guards.

“What’s he doing down there?” asked Sarah. “I think,” Hammond said, sadness in his voice, “I’ve made the same mistake twice.” “Anybody seen Tembo?” asked Eddie.

Indeed, Tembo has disappeared.

Cut to Kelly, hiding in one of the trailers. She’d managed to evade her captors, but for how long she can continue to do so is up to debate. Stealthily, she creeps out of the trailer and around the camp over to one of the cages. She undoes the latch. She moves on to the next cage. Rinse and repeat.

Cut to inside one of the tents, Peter and several other people, all InGen personnel, stand around a card table where plans labeled ‘Jurassic Park San Diego’ are lain out.

“San Diego?” One man (a high ranking InGen worker) asked. “it’s already famous for its animal attractions,” said Peter, gesturing to plans on the table, “San Diego zoo... Sea World... The San Diego Chargers.”

“I don’t think John Hammond would have approved of having these animals on the mainland.” An InGen executive said.

Peter frowned. “Well, Hammond’s not in charge anymore. I am.” He turned to another man, this one a hunter by the look of him. “How’s the hunting going?”

“We’ve got plenty of plant eaters,” the hunter said, “some eggs. no raptors though. And our man hasn’t brought in the T-Rex like he said he would.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “What makes you think people want to see a bunch of veggiesaurs and eggs! They’re gonna want a T-Rex!”

“We’re trying, sir!” the hunter says, “but we haven’t seen any raptors since we got here!”

Suddenly, a worker bursts into the tent “The baby’s gone!” he said.

Almost as suddenly, a Triceratops bursts into the tent, smashing into the table and scattering the group. The camp is in chaos! Dinosaurs are running amuck. Vehicles overturned, people tossed into the air. But this is the chance Hammond’s group has been waiting for. They make their way down to the village in the bedlam, and make it into the main building of the worker’s village. Eddie manages to contact the mainland, and things are looking up. But then, we hear an ungodly moan from behind a nearby door. Slowly, Burke heads towards the door, picking up a nearby screwdriver to use as a weapon. He jerks the door open to reveal…

“Kelly!” Sarah cried. Kelly sat inside a broom closet, in her arms a baby T-Rex.

“They just left him tied to a stick out there,” said Kelly, “and I think his leg is broken.”

Despite the limited materials, the group sets to work splinting the baby’s leg. It’s pretty much the same as in the movie. Until the sound of a rifle cocking is heard behind them.

“I’ll be taking that rex now, Dr. Harding,” Roland Tembo said. Tembo has been on Ludlow’s payroll since the beginning. He was never here to protect the group. He’s here to hunt the T-Rex. He was the one who staked the baby out, to attract it’s parents.

Outside, the cacophony has died down. The Dinosaurs have mainly been recaptured. Hammond’s group has been brought before Ludlow, who looks at them condescendingly. “You really thought you were still CEO when you got here, Uncle John? I bought you out the day you asked for my help. We’ll still use the footage you took for our attractions, don’t worry.” “So, you’re going to reopen Jurassic Park then, is that it? Despite my warnings?” “No, not reopen. We’re moving these animals to the mainland so we don’t have to fly out here every time there’s a problem. You put us six million dollars in debt every day since you started making dinosaurs. It’s time to see good on that investment you promised. And the board agrees with me.”

InGen Exec: it’s nothing personal John. Why have a dinosaur and not use it?

“These are animals,” Sarah said, “they deserve respect”

“They’ll have the best of care.”

“And what if they break out! What then?”

Cut to part of Hammond’s team (Hammond, Sarah, and Kelly) being shoved into a trailer with the door locked behind them. Sarah tries to force the door open, to no avail. Kelly runs around, trying to open the windows. Hammond just sits down, despondent at the betrayal of his own family.

Sarah (trying to yank the door open): come on! You stupid…

A familiar roar is heard. A car flips past the window.

“What is it?” Hammond asked, “What’s going on?”

Sarah: I think things just got complicated.

The buck T-Rex from earlier has tracked the them to the Worker village and crashes through the fence. Suddenly, another roar is heard from the other side of the camp. It’s the female Rex, and she’s even more pissed than the male.

“There’s two of them!?” Sarah asked, incredulous. “We spared no expense,” Hammond said.

The rexes wreck the trailer the rest of Hammond’s team is in. Nick, Eddie, and Burke make a break for it. The female Rex sees them and gives chase. She and her mate bare down on them and soon capture Eddie, each taking one end in their jaws and pulling him apart for a snack.

Afterward we get a faceoff between Roland Tembo and the male rex (one that would have been really cool in the movie but we didn’t get it).

Tembo wastes two shot gun blasts on the rex. Out of ammo, he switches to tranquilizers, which finally manage to bring the beast down. The other rex is soon felled after. Subdued in special harnasses, the rexes are air lifted by helicopters to a boat waiting of the coast of Isla Sorna. All in all, the bad guys’ mission is a success. Well, Tembo wouldn’t say so. If you’d told him a year ago he’d get to hunt not one but two T-Rexes he would have kissed whoever told him that square on the mouth. But in the end, it had been so stupidly simple to catch them he just feels crapped on. Didn’t even get a trophy.

“You know, I remember the people who've helped me, Roland. There's a job for you at the park in San Diego if you want it.” Roland turns him down.

Cut to a group of hunters patrolling the tall grass outside the worker village. Suddenly, one of them is pulled under. A hunter a few feet away looks in his direction. “Manolo?” he asks. Another nearby hunter is pulled out of view. The hunters are starting to get scared. “Look alive, people.” one of them says. We hear a familiar coughing sound.

A velociraptor jumps out of the grass and mangles one of the hunters. Soon, pandemonium ensues. The crafty raptors had been evading the InGen hunters, watching them, waiting for the right moment. And with two dinosaur attacks in a row and both rexes out of the picture, now was the time to strike! (And there are no tails sticking up out of the grass cartoonishly! Raptors are supposed to be dangerous, not goofy).

Back at the camp, Roland runs towards the danger while Peter climbs aboard one of the waiting helicopters. “Get me out of here!” he cries.

The raptors swarm the camp. Roland manages to kill a few, but not before they massacre most of the InGen workers there. Tembo even has to watch Burke die in front of him. We get a scene where Hammond’s group escapes their trailer, Kelly defeats a velociraptor with gymnastics and the group plus Tembo manages to get onboard a helicopter.

The rest of the movie follows the actual TLW movie pretty closely with a few differences. Namely, there’s more than one dinosaur rampaging through San Diego, Tembo is helping the remaining team route the dinos back to the ship, we acknowledge the fact that the car they picked in the movie was due to reasons of masculinity, and Peter suffers a nervous breakdown when the dinosaurs break out of the ship’s hold and allows himself to be eaten by the baby rex out of guilt.

Roland fires a tranquilizer shot at the buck rex before it can clear the door. When that’s done, Sarah asks him what he’s going to hunt next.

“I believe I've spent enough time in the company of death.” he said.

We cut to Kelly and Sarah asleep on the couch while a TV plays news coverage of the boat being returned to Isla Sorna with a statement from John Hammond (once again CEO of InGen).

His speech is pretty much the same, ending with “as someone once told me, life finds a way.”

The final shot of the film is the rex family, the stegosaurs, all the dinosaurs back on Isla Sorna. Content as the Jurassic Park credits theme plays in the background.

So, what did you think? Like it, hate it? As always, I welcome feedback and comments!

#Jurassic Park #The Lost World #the lost world: jurassic park #Jurassic Park 2 #Jurassic Park II #Steven Spielberg #Rewrite #Re-Write #Dinosaurs #My Writing #Well Sort of #Fix It Fic #Sarah Harding #Roland Tembo #John Hammond #Kelly Curtis #Nick Van Owen

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avaantares · 4 years

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FFVII:REMAKE - A Review

So I beat the game two weeks ago and started writing down my thoughts while they were fresh in my mind, but I didn’t post anything then because my one IRL friend who is also playing it hadn’t finished it yet and I didn’t want to risk posting anything spoiler-y. But the extra time has allowed me to play through the game again on Hard difficulty, which has allowed me to reconsider and elaborate on some of my thoughts. And frankly at this point I just need to dump my Very Big Opinions somewhere, so... here ya go.

I discuss visuals, gameplay, character and story below. I’ve tried to keep spoilers minimal up front, though obviously if you want to go into the game totally cold, don’t read this. All major spoilers are clearly tagged. All of it is below a cut to spare your dash.

Also, there are pretty pictures, because why not?

First, my background with this franchise: I played through the original FFVII multiple times; I’ve watched and rewatched Advent Children and Last Order, played Crisis Core, gave up on Dirge of Cerberus despite my deep love for Vincent Valentine (sorry, VV, but your game was just a mess), and lamented that Before Crisis wasn’t available in my country. I even played (and own!) Ehrgeiz, the obscure fighting game that featured the main cast. (Still bitter that they didn’t keep Miki Shinichirou as the voice of Sephiroth. He’s one of my faves.)

^ Ehrgeiz, a mediocre fighting game that forever endeared itself to me by including Turks!Vincent Valentine as a playable character. 💖

In short, I’ve been waiting for this game for DECADES.

So. Here we go. My thoughts on Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE.

The good:

The character models are very pretty. With individual pores, threads and scuffs visible, they’re so detailed that it’s almost impossible to reconcile them with the mouthless sprites from the original game – even more so than Advent Children (and dear goodness, that was over a decade ago now, wasn’t it?). Still, they’ve kept the costume details and absurd proportions largely intact (Barret’s fists are literally larger than Tifa’s entire head, yet somehow it works visually), so it’s not too much of a departure from the familiar.

They’ve kept the aesthetic. I was afraid the game would try to update the iconic world of Midgar, but by and large, it’s full of visually-arresting designs that preserve the gritty-industrial look and feel of the original.

Japanese version is included. BLESS YOU, Square Enix, for including the Japanese voices and character animations. Not only is it impossible for me to hear Cloud in anything other than Sakurai Takahiro’s voice, but the Japanese script is a bit nicer to the characters. I’m not really keen on the English dub… but more on that below.

They fixed the spelling of Aerith’s name. This may seem like a minor point, but considering it’s been 20 years and I’m still bitter that Devil May Cry still hasn’t corrected “Nelo Angelo,” it’s a small victory.

Improved combat. Admittedly, I wasn’t sold on the new combat system at first, but after playing through the game twice, I’ve come to really like it. It has a few rough edges and can get chaotic in some battles, but it does a decent job of blending the feel of an action game with turn-based strategy. The fact that you can switch to a more traditional turn-based system if you prefer is also nice. (I haven’t tried Classic mode yet, though.)

Weapon customization. The Skill Points system allows you to upgrade your loadout instead of acquiring new gear. The tutorial was somewhat lacking (I didn’t quite figure out the multiple-core-unlock thing right away), but I appreciated the ability to add materia slots or stat buffs rather than just cycling through a dozen swords that Cloud apparently keeps in his back pocket.

Background dialogue management. On the whole, the conversations as you run through town enhance the story without slogging down the gameplay; you don’t have to stop and talk to every single resident, because snatches of their conversation reach you (and your on-screen chatlog) as you pass. You can stop and listen for more detail if you want, or you can just keep moving. The extra worldbuilding is really nice.

The music. The orchestrated versions of the original themes are excellent (and some of those music cues gave me goosebumps… Did I spend way too many hours immersed in the original game? Probably). I can take or leave some of the collectible jukebox tunes, but the background music in general is good. (But did I earn that Disc Jockey trophy? Yes, yes I did.)

Supporting character development. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge actually have characters! And personalities! Clichéd ones, admittedly, but it’s an improvement over the original game killing them all off within the first few minutes. The game also does justice to the Turks, and actually surprised me with how much depth of character it gave Reno and Rude in particular (perhaps setting them up for a mini redemption arc so players forgive them for dropping a plate on tens of thousands of slum residents?). Their moments of concern for each other and (brief) crises of conscience made them more than the stock villains they were in the original game, more in line with their temporarily good-aligned characters in Advent Children. Tseng, likewise, was on point. However, I do have to qualify all this with one irate question: Where the heck is Elena?! Seems like the female characters are always getting left out… /sigh/

Improved plot devices. REMAKE cleans up some of the more questionable and outdated content from the original. As you likely already know from the demo, the new game somewhat exonerates the protagonists by having Shinra blow up their own mako reactor to turn public opinion against AVALANCHE (possibly because someone finally realized that it’s hard to sympathize with characters who are willing to melt down an entire reactor and kill a bunch of innocent civilians). AVALANCHE are still eco-terrorists, but they’re… terrorists with a conscience? I dunno, at least they feel bad when people die now… Likewise, the weird and uncomfortable Honey Bee Inn segment of the original game has been reborn as an amazing dance extravaganza. Less voyeurism/prostitution, more Vegas floor show (complete with minigame choreography) and makeover. The whole Don Corneo scenario is still hella creepy, but frankly, there’s nothing that can fix that.

Series references. Fans of the original will appreciate all the inside jokes and direct references to the original game and other franchise entries: One-off comments about Chocobo racing; a broken console in Wall Market that shoots at you; a framed picture of the original 32-bit Seventh Heaven; ads for Banora apple juice; side mentions of characters and plot devices from spinoff games; PHS communication… The game definitely pays tribute to its history. They even recreate the original loading screen and several of Cloud’s iconic poses/animations throughout the game:

The neutral:

Recycled gags. Look, I know Advent Children was the ultimate evolution of FFVII for a while, and admittedly, it did some things very well. The running gag with Rude’s sunglasses and the victory fanfare being used as a ringtone are some of the best moments in the film, in part because they were so unexpected. But as much as I enjoyed the repeated nods to AC in this game, they felt a little desperate, like there were no new jokes to insert so they had to double down on the ones they’d used the last time this franchise had a renaissance. (See Rude’s broken sunglasses, below.) And fitting into the series as a whole, it feels a little weird. Why is Rude’s ringtone the same as the clones’ from Advent Children? Does Barret really need to sing the victory fanfare over and over when he defeats an enemy? Is there supposed to be some history behind that song that was left out of the worldbuilding? It just feels too meta.

Arbitrary localization of names. I don’t really grasp why it was necessary to rename so many items and characters for the English market. Some changes make sense for localization (e.g. Whack-a-Box certainly works better for an American audience than Crash Box), but others seem arbitrary, like changing Aniyan Kunyan to Andrea Rhodea or Mugi to Oates (a play on the meaning of his name in Japanese, but... does it matter?). And then… well, I don’t want to spoil A Major Plot Element, but there’s another thing that changes names from one English word (in the Japanese track) to a different English word. Why? No idea. It doesn’t affect gameplay, and it’s not really a problem, but listening to the Japanese track, I found it jarring to have the subtitles contradict what I was hearing.

Underutilized characters. While the whole gamut of original FFVII characters make appearances, several of them aren’t used to full effect, or aren’t used at all to advance the story. Rufus Shinra’s bossfight is a decent challenge, but while his character was vital to both the original FFVII and Advent Children, his presence in this game is little more than a cameo. His fight could be cut or swapped out with any other boss, and it would have zero effect on the plot. Similarly, while Hojo is a key player in the full story (which this game doesn’t cover, since it’s only a fraction of the original timeline), he’s largely wasted here, except as a means of extending play time by making you wander through corridors and fight a bunch of monsters for “research.” (I have no idea what his motivation is; you’d think he’d be more interested in recapturing Aerith or Cloud, but instead he just... opens an elevator and lets them leave? after they beat up some midbosses.) Reeve Tuesti actually has a solid presence in this game, but since he’s ONLY ever active as himself, there’s no explanation for the random Cait Sith cameo in one scene (players new to the franchise probably have no idea why a random cartoon cat showed up for a few seconds and was never mentioned again). Obviously the plot arcs have to change when the game is covering only a few days’ time in a much longer story, and the major players need to be introduced at some point if they’re going to feature in later games in the series, but from a narrative standpoint, there are an awful lot of superfluous characters doing things for no reason in this installment.

The bad:

THE PADDING. Dear goodness, there is so much padding to make this a standalone game instead of just the first chapter of a longer adventure. I got really, really sick of running literally from one end of the map to the other on side quests – and that’s me, an avowed trophy hunter who spends hours scouring dark corners for collectible items in other games, saying that. So much of this game felt like time fill that didn’t really advance the story. It’s also full of unnecessary new characters with improbable Squeenix hair, like Roche the super-annoying motorcycle SOLDIER (below), or Leslie, Don Corneo’s doorman who somehow merits his own backstory and side quest. (Though in fairness, every FFVII sequel has added superfluous characters, with Crisis Core possibly being the worst offender.) But it just felt really drawn-out and bloated for a game of this generation. If this game had been as compact and tightly-written as the other games I typically play, it probably only would have taken me 15 hours to beat instead of 50. (I don’t actually know how many hours I spent on it the first time through, as I didn’t check the play clock before restarting on Hard difficulty. I do know it took me over 110 hours total to complete the game on both modes, though much of the second run was spent dying repeatedly on a handful of nasty fights. Hard mode removes items and MP replenishment, and if you run out of MP at any point during a chapter, you’re going to die. A lot.)

The pacing. Related to the above... the Midgar portion of the original game was just the setup for a larger story. It wasn’t meant to have its own complete dramatic arc so much as to introduce you to the world and the major players. Consequently, there are some really odd beats in this story, as well as a total lack of urgency in your mission. There are no natural places to slot in the side quests and minigames, so they’re shoehorned awkwardly between plot sequences. “Quick, our friend is in mortal peril and needs our help!” "Okay, cool, we’ll go rescue her after we spend ten hours running around town doing random errands for townspeople and playing games with the local kids.” Uh... what?

The graphics just aren’t as good as they should be. While the character models are gorgeous, there are a lot of low-res background textures and weird polygons that don’t quite match up with other components. Most egregious are the Shinra logos, which frequently get close-ups as part of the fixed camera work and, frankly, look like lossy JPEGs. (See image below, screencapped from a PS4 Pro. Those jagged edges on the logo are present throughout the entire game.) There are weird clipping errors and artifacted images and reflective surfaces that don’t reflect, making the game look more like something from the PS3 era than a 4K late-gen PS4 game. (And it’s not that we don’t have the technology: Uncharted 4 was released back in 2016, and the rendering of its vast world was twice as pretty. Devil May Cry 5, released in early 2019, has far more realistic textures and object interaction. Granted, those are different types of games with fewer NPCs to render, but I feel like there’s no excuse for a game this big to look this mediocre.)

The HUD could be better. The lower-corners concept is okay, though it took me a while to train my eyes to travel between both sides of the screen and track the fight action. But for a long time, I didn’t even notice the commands in the upper left corner of the screen, and after playing through the game twice I still have no idea what they say because I couldn’t focus on the tiny text long enough to read them while trying not to die in combat. (I just looked it up; apparently they’re combat control shortcuts? Huh, that would have been useful to know.) It wasn’t until my second time through that I realized there even WERE separate controls on screen during the motorcycle minigames; I had resorted to panicked button mashing to figure it out the first time through because there was no tutorial (you’re just dropped into the action) and, having ignored the small text for the previous hundred combats, I had no reason to look for on-screen instructions there. Not that it would have helped, since on many backgrounds the text in the upper left is really difficult to read (see below). It’s worth noting that I have better than 20/20 vision and played this game on a large TV screen and still had trouble reading some things; on a smaller TV, or for someone with less acute vision (like my sister, who is blind in one eye), I think even the basic menu controls would be difficult to see. While you can resize the font for subtitles, my cursory glance through the menu did not uncover an option to increase the size of the HUD.

Inter-fight menu mechanics. Specifically, the inability to save (or save loadout settings) between fights in a multi-part sequence. There are several back-to-back fights in which it is necessary to switch characters or change gear between bosses. The game treats them as one continuous fight, though it does allows you to access the equipment menu by holding square during key cutscenes. Which is good, if you only have one of a particular materia or accessory that you need to switch between characters, and in most cases when you die the game lets you restart just before your current fight instead of restarting the whole sequence -- also good, since some multi-stage bosses can easily take 20-30 minutes to beat, and if several of those are strung together in sequence, you’re in for a long play session to get past them. But since it’s treated as one fight, you can’t save between bosses (more than once, I had to leave my PS4 running in Rest Mode overnight and just hoped we didn’t have a power glitch), and if you happen to get killed and need to restart the fight, your loadouts reset. Which means if you’re, say, fighting the end boss on Hard difficulty and get killed in the first two minutes -- which happened to me a lot -- by the time you restart the fight, sit through the unskippable cutscene, access the menu and rearrange all the materia and accessories you need, you’re spending five or six minutes gearing up for two minutes of play, and then doing that over and over again every time you die. It gets really old.

The English dub script. *deep breath* Okay, look, I know I can be a bit elitist about translations, but I really do not like the English adaptation of this game. It makes Cloud come across as less socially-awkward and far more of a deliberate jerk, Aerith is mouthy and even swears (which is not accurate to her original character), and it downplays some of the symbolism that’s more obvious in the Japanese script. One quick example: When Aerith gives Cloud a flower, she says (in Japanese), “In the language of flowers, this means ‘reunion.’” It’s subbed/dubbed in English, “Lovers used to give these when they were reunited.” That’s a subtle difference, but since the concept of “reunion” is a freakin’ huge part of the FFVII plot, and since Sephiroth was on screen literally seconds before that line is delivered, my brain automatically went, “OMG REUNION!!!” while I’m guessing people listening in English only picked up on the romantic subtext. It’s a pretty minor thing, and of course translation is always a complex balancing act between literal meaning and local market understanding, but the English version just seemed to me to have a different vibe overall. (Unfortunately, the English subtitles are the same as the dub, so unless you can understand the Japanese audio you’re kind of stuck with that dialogue.)

[WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT]

- …And my #1 complaint about Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE is…

…it’s not actually a remake.

Sure, the game starts out the same way and covers a lot of the same events, but fundamentally, it’s a sequel, not a retelling. It’s evident from Cloud’s future-oriented visions throughout the game that something else is going on, and the ending MAKES NO SENSE if you don’t already know the story. Heck, even the rest of the game doesn’t really make sense if you don’t know the story -- Sephiroth’s presence is never explained; Zack isn’t even introduced, just shows up randomly at the end; Cloud’s flashbacks of Tifa and her dead father in Nibelheim are left as a complete mystery (and since she evidently remembers the burning of her town, judging by her dialogue outside Aerith’s house, why doesn’t she even react when Sephiroth shows up?).

The core elements of the plot – the Feelers (Whispers) preserving a specific fate; the three entities from the future (whose weapon types just happen to correspond to certain named characters) defending their timeline; the return of post-Advent Children Sephiroth (the only time we’ve seen him in human form with one black wing), who has inhabited the Lifestream since his death and promised that he would never truly disappear, who in the end appeals to Cloud directly for an alliance rather than attempting to control him, because he knows now that Cloud is strong enough to defy the Reunion instinct; the change in the outcome of story events in which Biggs (and, unconfirmed as to which timeline he’s actually in, but quite possibly Zack) now survives his intended death -- all point toward Sephiroth trying to manipulate destiny into an alternate outcome in which he is victorious, and using this naive version of Cloud to facilitate it. That means this game is taking place in an alternate or splinter universe, created at some point after the events of the original Final Fantasy VII, and possibly even after the events of Advent Children.

All of that is fine from an overall continuing-story perspective – it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, like the fact that Aerith might survive now that Cloud has seen prescient flashes of her death (among other events), and there are opportunities for more story twists and changes from what players might expect. But touting this as a remake of the original game has the potential to confuse players who are new to the franchise. FFVII was groundbreaking back in 1997, and it defined JRPGs for an entire generation of Western gamers. But that was more than two decades ago, and a lot of current gamers weren’t even born then, so while they’ve probably heard of the classic game, they aren’t necessarily steeped in its lore. FFVII:R relies heavily on prior knowledge of the series to carry its twist ending, so it largely fails as a standalone game.

Also, speaking as a longtime fan of the franchise… I honestly found the ending rather lackluster. It was a twist, of sorts, but not the sort of shocking, mind-bending revelation that made the first game so iconic. Granted, it’s hard to follow an act like revealing that your protagonist’s entire identity is a lie, not to mention killing off one of your main characters a third of the way into the story! But when the surprise ending is just, Surprise! We’re going to change things up a bit this time around so you aren’t entirely sure what’s coming! Also, here’s a gratuitous Sephiroth fight because everyone expects that, even though it doesn’t serve the main story at all nor resolve any conflicts previously established within this game! it smacks of Different for the sake of Being Different, not for the sake of a really amazing storyline they’re hiding up their sleeve. It’s a bit of a let-down, and I find that I... just... don’t really care that much. Which, for someone who’s been a fan of the series for nearly a quarter of a century, means there’s a Big Freaking Problem somewhere. If you’re not keeping the attention of your die-hard fans, how do you hope to build a fanbase of players new to the franchise?

Given the pacing and story issues inherent in this game, I’m not convinced that the following game(s) in the franchise are going to be structured any better. Considering the amount of pure side-quest padding they did in Midgar, I have no idea how they’ll maintain that same tone on something the scale of the World Map portion of the original game, unless they just completely eliminate things like Fort Condor and the submarine and the spaceship side quests. I have a feeling the Gold Saucer is going to be reduced to a Jessie flashback, a Chocobo race (probably to win a key item), and a battle arena run like the coliseum in Wall Market in this game. If they include all the story elements and side characters from the original, this series is going to be a dozen games long.

Still, on the whole this game was enjoyable, and I’m glad I played it. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but they haven’t completely killed off my interest, so I’ll probably continue with the series whenever the next game comes out. Though I’m not really sure if the higher-priced edition I pre-ordered was worth the extra money, so I may wait and see how the next game is shaping up before deciding which version to get...

But if they don’t give me a really pretty (playable) Vincent Valentine in the next installment, I may riot. I do have priorities.

#final fantasy vii #final fantasy vii: remake #ff7:r #final fantasy 7: remake #ff7 remake #video games #long post #review

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arecomicsevengood · 4 years

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More Movies I Watched. Should I Just Join Letterboxd?

Is Letterboxd fun? Not really sure if anyone gets anything out of these posts being located here, but also not sure I have any desire to join a website I’m not sure anyone I’m friends with is on, don’t necessarily feel a yearning to be around more people with too many opinions, who are maybe trying to parlay their “expertise” into writing jobs.

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2020) dir. Celine Sciamma

I’m going to consider this a 2020 movie as that’s when its wide release was in the States; also, this movie’s great and if considered a 2020 movie is easily the frontrunner for best of the year. Well-shot enough I felt I was in good hands from the very first minutes, which feel vaguely reminiscent of The Piano (which I don’t remember super-well), this movie ends up also have a very intense relationship with music as well. This is a lesbian love story between a woman betrothed to be married to a man she’s never met and the painter who is making her portrait for the approval of said man. The painter is initially working on the portrait secretly, the film’s attention is tuned to the two leads’ furtive glances and studies of one another, the gaze intensely felt, but returned and mutual. Lots of great stuff, real delight taken in faces, the ability to change another’s expression by making them laugh. the power of music, the incommunicable aspects of subjective experience. I watched this director’s other movie, Girlhood, but don’t remember it, and this is a lot better. This is also a lot better than Blue Is The Warmest Color, where the only thing I remember is the long and graphic sex scene. This movie has no such scene. One of these actresses led the walkout when the French film industry gave Roman Polanski an award.

Summer Hours (2008) dir. Oliver Assayas

Just did an IMDB search and found out Assays cowrote a movie with Polanski a few years ago? That sucks. This one’s about an artist’s estate being sold off after a widow dies, as the kids need money. Plenty of nice bits about the subjective value of art and nostalgia. Assayas is not my favorite filmmaker by any means but he’s consistent enough. I guess Personal Shopper is my favorite of his?

Two Friends (1986) dir. Jane Campion

TV movie about two teenagers, told somewhat in reverse order for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Not great.

The Day Shall Come (2020) dir. Chris Morris

Beginning with like a series of “establishing shots” of Miami that eventually get to college kids partying is such a terrible way to begin a movie, really signals a degree of indifference to the language of film in favor of a a product of constant churn of content that “television” once served as shorthand for. Chris Morris comes from TV, of course, so I should know what I’m in for, and British comedy of a subversively-intentioned sort puts it in the wheelhouse of things I pay attention to anyway. That’s not to say I laughed at this thing, but I sort of observed it and its intentions — it never really wants you to be comfortable enough to laugh, and while the posture it takes to its black leads is sympathetic there’s still a feeling of anthropological indifference as part of its satirical thrust. Film comedies are meant to work in a theater because of the contagious properties of laughter, and when you lose that you end up with a thing that, even if I don’t want to subject it to “Hm, this seems kinda racist” thinkpieces that are the worst-case scenario, everything about the movie seems like the best case scenario is a reaction of “I see what you did there.”

Midnight Special (2016) dir. Jeff Nichols

Fits into the tradition of not-a-superhero-movie-but-basically tradition of Scanners and The Fury, but while those are basically the X-Men, this kid, kept from the sunlight because his dad think it will hurt him but really it’s good for him, is basically The Ray, of the 1990s Christopher Priest series I didn’t read consistently but liked a few issues of. The first half of this movie, spent speeding down streets at night, while some weird things happen, involving government agencies and a cult, is considerably better than the payoff, which is the child (a kid from Room and later, Good Boys) is an angel and is going to ascend to heaven. Part of it is so low-key and tense (but in a way where it feels like if it were on mute nothing would appear to be happening) and then the other part of it has these special effects that are fairly corny? So while the whole “indie guy makes a more mainstream movie” thing generates some interest, the idea of what constitutes a mainstream movie at this point in time (while also being a throwback in some ways to eighties Spielberg, or riding an It Follows/Stranger Things wave) means being forgettable.

Atlantic City (1980) dir. Louis Malle

This was a rewatch, which normally I avoid doing, but it turns out I had forgotten basically everything about this movie, besides vague memories of shots of stairwells, the sprawl of its plot, the roaming camera. That, still, is sort of the main thing to take away, because I love how the plot sort of swirls around this apartment building, and the streets of the city, the casino where Susan Sarandon works. She plays a woman whose husband left her for her sister, and they have rolled into the city with a large amount of cocaine. Burt Lancaster plays Sarandon’s neighbor, who lusts after her, but watches after another neighbor in the apartment, an old gangster’s ex-lover. Maybe I would suggest this as a good first Louis Malle movie to watch? Then you could watch Au Revoir Les Enfants, Murmur Of The Heart, Elevator To The Gallows, and My Dinner With Andre, and some of those are maybe better movies but this is arguably the most “accessible” in terms of its relationship to gangster/crime stuff while nonetheless feeling expansive and deeper than that. It relates to Burt Lancaster’s larger career but also has such a depth of feeling it’s not just a film history thing. Wallace Shawn has a cameo as a waiter also, it’s nice to see him.

Cat People (1982) dir. Paul Schrader

This movie’s a rewatch but I remember it being “watchable” but not really good, at least not nearly as good as the original. If memory serves, this has pretty much nothing in common with the original, but there’s a scene in the original that’s very memorable that’s reprised here. There’s a lot of gratuitous nudity in this one, and it even ends with a scene that seems perverse enough it should be memorable- Where Nastassja Kinski’s limbs are tied to a bed in a bit of bondage before she has sex and gets turned into a panther, so she can safely be put into zoo custody, but I didn’t remember at all on account of it feeling more perfunctory than indelible. Also I thought there was a scene where you see a naked man climb out of a cage at the zoo but maybe that’s in another movie too. Remember when Paul Schrader made a facebook post asking whose were the best tits in the history of art?

Affliction (1997) dir. Paul Schrader

When there was a little featurette documentary on Criterion Channel where Alex Ross Perry interviewed Schrader, Schrader cited Affliction as one of his best movies. Takes place in a snowy landscape reminiscent of Fargo and A Simple Plan, the vision of small-town life feels slightly familiar from Twin Peaks too — all of these things feel “nineties” in a way. About the cycle of domestic violence being passed on from fathers to sons. Stars Nick Nolte, with Willem Dafoe as his younger brother, who narrates intermittently. Mary Beth Hurt plays Nolte’s ex-wife, Sissy Spacek plays his current lover. James Coburn plays the abusive father but I kept thinking it was Rip Torn.

Rancho Notorious (1952) dir. Fritz Lang

Another solid Fritz Lang movie, that I believe was a favorite of the French new wave filmmakers? (Who didn’t like his German stuff for some bullshit reason.) This one’s a western. A man’s fiancee gets murdered, and he tries t to track down the guy who did it, in search of revenge. There’s a recurring bit of a song narrating his desire for revenge that’s pretty bad. It turns out there’s a large ranch, run by Marlene Dietrich, where criminals can hide out if they don’t ask questions of one another and give her a share of their haul. He forms alliances, does some crimes, gets his revenge, there’s some great technicolor shots of landscapes, it’s unclear how real his feelings are for Marlene Dietrich or if they’re partly put on to win her affections, I don’t think Dietrich is that appealing personally. The thing that makes this movie cool or interesting (and maybe makes it feel particularly American, but seen from an outsider’s perspective) is this sense of bonhomie that is maybe just a total front for long-standing resentment, with love as a conditional thing.

Slightly French (1949) dir. Douglas Sirk

I found this one pretty watchable. A rough-around-the-edges fairground actress is recruited to play a French ingenue in the press as part of a long play for a director to get his job back with a studio he was fired from after alienating the original lead actress and everyone above him. The director basically only cares about making movies, and is sort of a psychopath, but she falls in love with him. The director’s sister, who warns that she also has no feelings, ends up being paired off with the producer who competes for the star’s affection for a while. Written by a woman, and feels very psychologically insightful and unjudgmental about women’s tendency or willingness to fall in love with people who treat them poorly, and to allow for the movie/genre expectations to respect that choice as the right one.

A Scandal In Paris (1946) dir. Douglas Sirk

Apparently Sirk considered this his best movie. It’s before his melodrama period, and is based on a memoir, so there’s a bit of a biopic quality to it, though it does try to be fairly concise and well-structured. About a criminal who solves a crime he committed in order to become chief of police, ostensibly to become an even bigger criminal who pulls off a huge robbery, who then goes straight instead. The criminal is also a casanova type, who seduces a series of women and makes them fall in love with him and forgive him his crimes. I would probably have liked this movie more if it was a stylized seventies thing and/or liked the actors better.

Story Of A Cheat (1936) dir. Sacha Guitry

This movie’s wild! One of the best credit sequences I’ve ever seen, establishing a pattern that the whole thing will be told mostly via narration, and this narration goes on to tell so much of the story that the visual storytelling almost seems redundant, or illustrative of the text, in a way I’d never seen in a movie. It’s structured as a man writing his memoirs, and is more literal about that structure than we normally see. But then there are parts where his writing gets interrupted and these scenes use dialogue and employ elision to discreetly set up punchlines… Really cool. Criterion’s website says this was an influence on Orson Welles, and maybe they mean F For Fake?

The Immortal Story (1968) dir. Orson Welles

I hadn’t seen this one, despite being an Orson Welles fanatic, I guess because most people would not consider it a feature film, as it’s under an hour long, and made for French television. It’s not great, kind of feels like a long short film. Welles plays an old rich man who hates the existence of fiction so much he tries to make a story that’s basically a Penthouse letter become true, casting Jeanne Moreau in the role of the woman and a much younger man as the dude who has sex with her. Based on a story by Isak Dinesen, which I’m just learning now was the pen name of a woman.

If You Could Only Cook (1935) dir. William Selter

So I kept on watching Jean Arthur movies, binging them before they left Criterion Channel at the end of June. You would expect them to blend together, and maybe they will in time but having just watched this one it’s great. Totally absurd premise becomes legit funny. The master chef from History Is Made At Night here plays an Italian gangster. The two movies would be a pretty solid double feature, as both feature pretty involved, absurd plots, based around love stories, but also featuring this weird comedic element. This one features Jean Arthur as a down-on-her-luck woman who strikes up a conversation with a guy on a park bench, convincing him they should get a job together working as a butler and cook team. He is secretly rich, and gets lessons in being a butler from his butler, and falls in love with her, a week before he is scheduled to get married to a rich woman he doesn’t actually care about. This movie is just over seventy minutes long. I am pretty unfamiliar with the screwball comedy genre and really wonder how they play with a different lead actress.

The More The Merrier (1943) dir. George Stevens

This one’s great too. Super comedic, with sort of intricately choreographed visual gags, but then the romance culminates in a scene that’s wildly horny, bordering on the pornographic despite the absence of any nudity. That’s a seduction shot in close up, where a sort of oblivious and distracted conversation occurs absentmindedly as kisses move from hand to neck. Jean Arthur rents a room to a domineering older dude (Charles Coburn, the guy from The Devil And Miss Jones, who’s funnier here) who then rents half of his room to a man he thinks would be a good for her. Feels like a big part of the comedy in these is people being absolute nightmares who force other people into going along with things they absolutely hate, and as much as I hate the idea of being someone who can’t handle an old comedy because of my modern cultural mores, such scenes are pretty nerve-wracking to me. Still, there’s something to the storytelling in this, how the initial gags build on themselves when it’s just the two of them, then the introduction of the second man sort of continues the sort of jokes that were already being made, how the comedy sort of snowballs but then takes the shape of this very real romance.

The Impatient Years (1944) dir. Irving Cummings

This was originally conceived as a quasi-sequel to The More The Merrier. It is a weird one, with a vaguely comedic premise it takes a pretty emotionally intense first act to set up. The first half hour has these long dialogues filled with tension of people not really being able to communicate. It’s written by a woman and you can really tell, holy shit, it’s closely observed. But the whole premise is fucked! Begins with a court hearing for a divorce. Jean Arthur has been hit by her husband, and her father (Charles Coburn again) who witnessed it says he can’t recommend a divorce, because then the judge would have to give a divorce to all the couples who got married too quick before the man shipped off to war. A flashback structure shows him, freshly home, smoking cigarettes above the crib of the child he’s never seen before and pretty irritable. The father argues the issue is the married couple has forgotten while they’ve fallen in love. Coburn basically sucks too- he’s in all these movies as this railroading paternalistic figure, and apparently was in his real life a white supremacist? And while The Devil And Miss Jones shows him learning to not be a piece of shit, this movie basically takes his side and argues for him being right. The judge agrees with this plan that they should spend four days retracing the steps of when they first met, before he shipped off to work. And it works, they fall back in love in the movie’s second half. But basically Jean Arthur’s whole behavior at the beginning of the movie is predicated on her having the responsibilities of a mother? And the movie just sort of argues that she’s got to learn to be a wife too, and she agrees, pitching it as this sort of romantic thing, but the actual central cause of tension is never resolved. So this movie is flawed and kinda nonsensical, but it’s interesting, partly because the beginning is like Bergman-level brutal before the contortions of a plot push it into this unnatural light comedy shape.

Arizona (1940) dir. Wesley Ruggles

This one has Jean Arthur as the female lead, opposite William Holden, but is more notable for its scope as a Western. A pretty good example of the genre being about society in microcosm, being forged from this conflict between the wild and domestic spheres. Jean Arthur both brings this semi-feminist sense of freedom to all of her roles, and she also built up a body of work of populist politics and class consciousness. This one has her as a rugged individualist frontierswoman, who runs a series of businesses as a way to make more money and accrue wealth, which ends up being a good vehicle, from a storytelling perspective, to increase the scale of action consistently. The villain runs a series of scams/conspiracies to win a profit via dishonest means. This culminates with a wedding where the man leaves his bride immediately afterwards to murder the person who’s been trying to take over her property. Probably the best western I’ve seen where the threat of Native American violence is a major plot point. It does lack the sense of atmosphere and landscape I value in a western, favoring a more storytelling more focused on plot and characters. Ends with a scene where a dude gets married and then immediately leaves to go kill someone waiting in a bar for him. (I should try to track down the George Stevens western Shane, that also features Jean Arthur.)

Whirlpool (1934) dir. Roy William Neill

This isn’t as top shelf as the other Jean Arthur movies but it’s pretty good. A man goes to prison, fakes his own death for the sake of his wife so she’ll move on. Jean Arthur plays the daughter, who meets him once he gets out, but needs to keep him a secret from her mother, who has remarried but would probably wreck her life for the other man’s sake. This is a pretty weird movie, both structurally, and because the father-daughter relationship feels quasi-incestuous: She abandons dates with her fiancee to spend time with her father, etc. The movie handles it semi-innocently, but I guess I had just been hearing about how when things like this happen in real life, and adult children meet their parents for the first time as adults, there often is an irresistible desire between them. So the movie kind of feels like it’s basically about something super-fucked-up but is trying to depict it as innocent, but also just the raw emotion Jean Arthur displays as she cries when they meet for the first time is really intense! She doesn’t even show up until like 1/3 of the way through the movie but she gives it such emotional weight.

Party Wire (1935) dir. Erle Kenton

This movie’s charming and watchable but yeah not one of the better ones. It’s about a pretty interesting thing- In small towns in this era basically cheaper for there to be a telephone line everyone can listen in on. This ends up being a movie about small town gossip and resentment, where the villains are old women with too much time on their hands. It’s also about Jean Arthur being a wildly charming “real” person who wins the heart of a rich man who every woman is after, so while she’s good in the part there’s an element of formula executed better elsewhere. Here she has a father who’s drunk all the time, his alcoholism is a big running gag that gets a little exhausted. Also apparently there’s an app now that’s basically a party wire?

The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) dir. John Ford

Felt pretty ambivalent about this one too, which is more of an Edward G Robinson vehicle. This is meant to be a comedy, but I don’t really think the jokes come off that well, and the sense of reversals feels a little pat. Realized my best friend from high school looks sorta like Edward G Robinson now and worked out a way to remake it starring him. The Robinson version is about a guy who works as a clerk in an office, writes on the side, but learns he is the doppelganger of a killer gangster who just escaped from prison, who’s played by Robinson as well. This leads to his worldly coworker he has a crush on developing an interest in him, but also a lot of cases of mistaken identity with the police, who give him a note saying that while he looks like the person they’re trying to arrest, they’re not the same guy. The gangster then reads about this in the news and breaks into his apartment to get this “passport” from him. The remake I envision plays off of the fact that people are no longer famous for doing crimes enough to attract the attentions of a savvy young woman. But what if it was some dumb Youtube prankster, who is constantly committing crimes, that has the police after him? And then it’s basically the same movie.

Public Hero No. 1 (1935) dir. J. Walter Rubin

More of a heavy-duty crime thing, about the head of a gang busting out of prison, reuniting with his gang to do crimes, not knowing the cellmate he broke out of prison with is an undercover cop. Jean Arthur ends up caught in the middle, falling in love with the cop (not knowing he’s a cop) while being the sister of the criminal she hopes goes straight. She enlivens the movie quite a bit but it’s a familiar enough plot to still come up a little bit short. Would maybe benefit from more atmosphere in the crime bits and less comedy bits about an alcoholic doctor slowing it down.

You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939) dir. Frank Capra

Watched these for Jean Arthur, though they are classics for being Frank Capra movies, Jimmy Stewart movies, and sort of archetypal in their depiction of sincerity and the opposition of the rich and powerful. So that is to say that while my favorite movies I’ve watched recently have felt genre-less, or like they participate in every genre, these feel far more like you know where they’re going pretty much from the start: In the case of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington that’s partly because of things like there being an episode of The Simpsons that parodies/reuses it.

Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936) dir. Frank Capra

Also has Jean Arthur as the female lead, here playing opposite Gary Cooper. When they remade this as an Adam Sandler vehicle, Winona Ryder took the Jean Arthur role. Gary Cooper inherits money, comes to the big city, everyone wants the money, Jean Arthur writes news articles mocking him as a rube while slowly falling in love with his sincerity. In the end his decision to give the money to the poor outrages everyone in power and they try to argue he’s not mentally fit. All these Frank Capra movies are longer than the other Jean Arthur movies, (two hours, as opposed to an hour and a half) and also are not really focused on her, though she’s the best part of them.

Ball Of Fire (1941) dir. Howard Hawks

Billy Wilder cowrites this, and it’s maybe his best comedic script? Lot of good jokes in this, feel like this would’ve blown people away in 1941. Gary Cooper plays a naive nerd grammarian who in the course of realizing he needs cover modern slang for his encyclopedia runs into Barbara Stanwyck, as a gangster’s moll, hilarity ensues, they fall in love, both leads are great, supporting cast is big and funny, Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds plays a somewhat naive hayseed, the character here is similarly out of his element but it’s because he’s a big nerd, which is a lot funnier. Stanwyck’s world-weariness giving way to affection for a bunch of old people while continuing to use language they don’t understand and sort of run all over them as they fall over here is a great bit. Really well-written, there’s a Billy Wilder movie starring Jean Arthur (A Foreign Affair, from 1948) I haven’t seen but would like to track down. Sort of fascinating preoccupation with gangsters in these movies, but also positing innocence as a virtue, but in a way that runs counter to “virgin/whore” reductionism. I guess a lot of this comes about because it precedes the post-war mass migration of white people to the suburbs? Organized crime was a big part of people’s lives. I hadn’t seen any Howard Hawks movies until recently I think? Unless I saw one of his westerns or screwball comedies in college. He’s good!

The Sniper (1952) dir. Edward Dmytrk

This one’s interesting in terms of feeling very ahead of its time but also like it would never be made now. About a dude whose misogyny causes him to shoot women with a sniper rifle, the same rifle that apparently any ex-soldier would carry. Probably a pretty tough and upsetting watch, as it’s just about a dude being insane, hoping the police arrest him, and him having interactions with women where he very quickly becomes upset when they realize he’s weird, so he follows them with a gun. Director was blacklisted, the only real overt political sentiment is “get perverts and people who assault women serious mental health care after their first offense.”

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dukereviewsmovies · 4 years

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Duke Reviews: Avengers: Age Of Ultron

Hello, I'm Andrew Leduc And Welcome To Duke Reviews Where We Are Continuing Our Look At The Marvel Cinematic Universe...

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By Talking About The First Sequel To The Massive Blockbuster Known As The Avengers, Avengers: Age Of Ultron...

This Film Sees Earth's Mightiest Heroes Reuniting To Battle A Threat Created By Tony Stark And Bruce Banner Called Ultron, Who Is Out To Create What He Believes To Be The Peace Of Our Time When Really He's Causing Massive Human Extinction....

Will The Avengers Be Able To Prevent The Age Of Ultron With The Help Of Enemies Quicksilver And Scarlet Witch And A New Ally Who Calls Himself The Vision?

Let's Find Out As We Watch Avengers: Age Of Ultron...

The Film Starts In Sokovia With The Avengers Launching An Attack On Baron Von Strucker's Fortress And Forces...

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(End At 4:30)

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(End At 4:25)

Searching Strucker's Secret Room, Tony Finds One Of The Chitauri's Leviathans Before He Finds Loki's Scepter But Before He Can Grab It He's Blasted By The Other Olsen Twin Who Gives Him A Vision Of The Avengers Failing To Save Earth Because He Failed...

And It's This Vision That Changes Tony Completely And Makes Tony Believe Every Decision He Makes From Here On Out Is The Right One Even Though To Others It May Seem Like The Wrong Choice...

As Kick Ass Zooms In We Get A Title Card As Tony Grabs The Scepter...

Returning To The Newly Dubbed Avengers Tower, Hill (Who Now Works For Tony After The Downfall Of S.H.I.E.L.D.) Tells Cap About Scarlet Witch And Quicksilver While Hawkeye Gets Healed And Tony's Iron Legion Returns From Sokovia...

But As All That Goes On Tony (With Help From J.A.R.V.I.S.) Analyze Loki's Staff And Discover That While The Scepter Is Alien, The Jewel Is Housing Something Inside That's Like A Computer As J.A.R.V.I.S. Discovers Code...

Telling Banner This By Showing Him The Data Of The Jewel, Tony Thinks That It Is Perfect For His Ultron Program That Tony Is Making For His Iron Legion And Asks For Bruce's Help With It.

Despite Being Against It At First And Wanting To Tell The Rest Of The Team, Bruce Eventually Caves And Decides To Help Tony While They Have The Staff For The Alotted 3 Days That Thor Is Allowing Them To Have...

As Tony And Banner Get Ready For A Party Tony Is Throwing In Honor Of The Avengers Defeat Of Strucker, The Ultron Integration To The Iron Legion Is Complete. But As Ultron Awakens, He Questions His Programming Which Leads To Ultron Malfunctioning And Using Advanced A.I. Abilities To Kill J.A.R.V.I.S. As He Creates A Body Out Of One Of The Iron Legion Armors

Meanwhile, At Tony's Party Everyone Seems To Be Having A Good Time Even The Avengers Themselves, Rhodey (Who's Back As War Machine From Now On)

Guess Iron Patriot Didn't Well With Focus Groups After All...

Sam (Who's Been Helping Cap Track Down Bucky Since The End Of Winter Solider) And Stan Lee Who's Cameo Is Here...

Stan Lee Cameo!

Anyway After Everyone Is Gone The Avengers Along With Rhodey And Maria Hill They Hold A Contest Of Who Could Lift Thor's Hammer With Cap Being The Closest Only To Be Interrupted By Ultron, Who Reveals He Is On A Mission To Destroy The Avengers With The Help Of Stark's Iron Legion...

Escaping Through The Internet, Ultron Goes To Strucker's Castle Where He Can Build Himself A New Body...

With Everything Gone From Their Computers And Loki's Staff Gone As Well, They Discover The Computerized Remains Of J.A.R.V.I.S. As The Team Worries About Ultron Hacking Into Nuke Codes....

Knowing That They Have To Not Only Get The Scepter Back But Stop Ultron, They Ask Tony Why Ultron Is Trying To Kill Them And Of Course It All Goes Back To The Battle With The Chitauri And Tony's Vision That Scarlet Witch Gave Him...

Speaking Of Scarlet Witch And Quicksilver, In Sokovia, Ultron In A New Body Recruits Them To Help With His Plans To Save The World By Getting Rid Of The Avengers As We Discover Why Scarlet Witch Let Tony Have The Scepter Which Is Because She Saw Tony's Fear And That It Would Control Him And Make Him Self Destruct...

Uh, Self Destruct On Him? How About Self Destruct On You Or Do The Words Civil War Not Mean Anything To You, Wanda?

And Why They Are Who They Are And That's Because They Believe Tony Stark Killed Their Parents As One Of His Companies Missiles Killed Their Folks And Nearly Killed Them As They Were Buried Under Rubble...

Discovering Reports Of A Metal Man Or Men, Someone Making People See Old Fears And Memories And Someone Too Fast To See Breaking Into Robotics Labs, Weapons Facilities And Jet Propulsion Labs All Over The Globe, The Avengers Continue Their Search For Ultron...

But When Strucker Is Found Dead In His Cell With The Word Peace Written In Blood, They Start Going Through Hard Copy Files When Everything They Had On Strucker Is Gone From Their Computers...

Eventually Tony Discovers That Someone He Once Knew Named Ulysses Klaw With Connections To The Home Of A Certain Black Panther And The Vibranium That Not Only Powers His Suit But Captain America's Shield...

Traveling To Africa, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch And Ultron Do Buisness With Ulysses Klaw (Played By Supreme Leader Snoke) To Get Vibranium Only For Ultron To Cut Of Klaw's Hand When Ultron Says Something That Tony Stark Once Said To Him...

Ooh, Foreshadowing....

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(Start At 1:10)

Blasted By Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, Cap And Thor Have Visions We Start Black Widow Who Sees Visions Of Her Time In The Red Room (Which Is The Black Widow Training Ground) Then Move On To Cap Who Is At A 1930s Dance Hall Where He Dances With Peggy Only To Have A Symbolic Moment, I Guess Which Has Him Realizing That Everyone He Cared For Back Then Is Gone...

And Finally Thor Who Sees That Asgard Has Turned Into Christian Grey's Playground Only To Be Confronted By Heimdall Who Sees That Thor Will Lead Them Into Hell And He Will Destroy Them (Which Obviously Isn't True)...

Anyway Aside From Those Moments Of Either Foreshadowing Or Just Scenes That Have No Reason To Be In This Movie, Tony Eventually Destroys The Version Of Ultron That's There Only To Now Deal With A Rampaging Hulk That Scarlet Witch Has Turned Loose On The City Which Forces Tony To Activate The Hulkbuster Suit To Take Him Down...

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(Start At 0:30, End At 4:50)

With Banner Calmed Down, The Avengers Decide To Lay Low As Hill Deals With The Press And The Police On The Attack In Africa But The Question Now Is Where Do They Go?, Luckily, Hawkeye May Have The Answer They're Looking For...

Taking Them To A Rustic Farm (That Looks Like It May Already Be Occupied By The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, April O'Neil And Casey Jones) Hawkeye Introduces The Team To His Family...

Wow, I Didn't Know Velma Dinkley Was Married To A Superhero....

While Ultron, Scarlet Witch And Quicksilver Visit The Team Doctor, Helen Cho In Seoul So She Can Create A Living Body Into A Reanimation Cradle That Her And Tony Have Been Developing For Ultron To Download His Consciousness Into, Refusing, Ultron Decides To Convince Helen To Help Him Using Loki's Scepter...

Back On The Farm, The Team Has Some Moments On The Farm Which Eventually Lead To Tony Talking With Nick Fury In The Barn, Who Aside From Telling Tony To Cut It Out With The Maximoff Vision Crap, Is There To Help The Team...

Telling The Team That Ultron Isn't Having Any Luck Getting Nuke Launch Codes As They're Changed Frequently By Unknown Sources And That His Contacts Believe That Ultron Is Actually Building Something Which Leads Banner To Realize That Ultron Is Trying To Evolve Above Humans As He Believes Humans Are Significantly Insufficient Hence Helen Cho...

And Speaking Of Dr. Cho, She Is Just About Done With Ultron's New Body Only Thing That Needs To Be Added Is The Stone From Loki's Scepter Which Is Revealed To Be The Mind Stone...

With Steve Taking Natasha And Clint With Him, Tony Heads To Oslo To Do Reconnaissance From There While Fury Takes Banner Back To Avengers Tower So He Can Pick Up Hill Who Will Help Him With Something Dramatic...

But You're Probably Wondering Where Thor Is...

Well, Unable To Get Scarlet Witch's Vision From His Mind Thor Decides To Take Off To Get Erik Selvig To Take Him To The Spa Of Sight That Will Allow Him To Re-Enter His Dream To Find Out What He Missed...

Uh, Unless You're Into Weird Fetishes, Thor I Highly Doubt You Missed Anything...

But Miss Something He Did, As It Shows All The Infinity Stones Except For The Time Stone And I Guess Ultron's Plan...

And Speaking Of Ultron's Plan, Wanda Looks Into The Mind Of The Body That Is Inside Of The Reanimation Cradle And Sees Ultron's Ultimate Plan To Destroy The World...

Believing That Ultron Lied To Them, Wanda Snaps Dr. Cho Out Of Her Mind Stone Hypnosis And She Stops The Download Which Forces Ultron To Kill Her And Her Team As The Maximoffs Escape...

As Cap, Hawkeye And Widow Arrive With Enough Time To Save Dr. Cho, Ultron And His Metal Minions Take The Reanimation Cradle Onto A Truck Only For Hawkeye To Spot It From Above So Cap Can Jump On It And Fight Ultron...

With The Help Of The Maximoff Twins, Cap Was Able To Stop Ultron And Save A Runaway Train While Widow Gets The Reanimation Cradle On The Quinjet With Hawkeye Only For Widow To Get Captured By Ultron's Minions

Talking With The Maximoffs Afterward, They Ask Where The Reanimation Cradle Is Only For Cap To Tell Them That It's On It's Way To Tony, Which Leads Wanda To Believe That He Will Only Make Matters Worse By Using It To Fix Things

And Right She Is, As Tony To Convince Banner To Help Him Place The Person Who Has Been Beating Ultron All Along Into The Reanimation Cradle, J.A.R.V.I.S

Turns Ultron Didn't Attack J.A.R.V.I.S. Because He Was Scared But Attacked Him Because He Was Afraid Of What He Could Do, So He Went Underground And Scattered His Memory Throughout The Net To Try To Stop Ultron...

Believing That After All That's Happened It's A Bad Idea, Banner Decides To Do It Anyway. Luckily, Cap And The Maximoff Twins Arrive To Stop Them Which Leads To A Heated Argument Of Right And Wrong Between The Team Until Thor Arrives To Get Everyone To Shut Up And Bring The Body In The Reanimation Cradle To Life...

Forming Clothes And A Cape Out Of It's Skin, Thor Tells The Others About His Vision And That Tony Is Right The Avengers Cannot Beat Ultron Not Alone...

Telling Cap And The Others That Unlike Ultron He Is On The Side Of Life Where Ultron Isn't And That He Doesn't Want To Kill Him But The Pain He Is Creating Will Roll Over The Earth If He Isn't Destroyed Which Kind Of Gets Them To Trust Them...

But None Of That Matters Now As Barton Has Located Ultron With Nat In Sokovia And Need To Go Now...

With Tony Downloading A New A.I. Named F.R.I.D.A.Y. To His Suit And Ultron Knowing That They're Coming The Odds Are Stacked Against Them So, The Priority Will Be The Evacuation Of The City While Discovering What Ultron Has Been Building At Strucker's Fortress And Saving Black Widow At The Same Time Which Banner Does Only So They Could Run Afterward...

But Knowing That She'll Be Unable To Live With Herself If That Happens, Widow Pushes Banner Down A Hole So He Can Become The Hulk...

(Imitating Baby Plucky) Hulk Go Down The Hole!

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On Board The Quinjet, The Hulk Gets A Call From Black Widow Asking Him To Turn Back But Instead He Decides To Go Off On His Own To Take A Nice Vacation In Sakkar As Vision Destroys The Last Ultron Minion, Destroying Ultron Once And For All...

And With Everything Done, Hawkeye Decides To Retire From The Avengers To Spend Time With His Family While Tony Builds A New Training Facility/Alternate HQ For The Avengers Where They Can Train...

But Unfortunately It's Going To Have To Be Without Thor (Who Is Going Off To Solve The Mystery Of Who Is Making The Infinity Stones Appear Out Of Nowhere) And Tony (Who Is Going Spend More Time With Pepper And Build Her A Log Cabin) But Just Because The Team Is Down A Few Members It Doesn't Mean That They'll Be Short On Team Members....

Nope, Not On Your Life As Scarlet Witch, The Vision, Falcon And War Machine Join The Team As New Avengers...

Sadly, There's No End Credit Scene But There Is A Mid Credits Scene Which Sees Thanos Grabbing The Infinity Gauntlet And Deciding To Take Matters Into His Own Hands...

And That's Avengers: Age Of Ultron And...It's Okay...

While The Action Scenes Are Great, The Villain Is Good And There Is Loads Of Character Development Throughout The Movie, The Color In Some Of Those Fight Scenes Are Not Good Especially The Ones In Africa, Having Both Scarlet Witch And Quicksilver As Bad Guys Was Completely Pointless (Yes, I Know In Their Comic Book History They Were Bad Guys Before They Became Good Guys But Without Magneto And The Brotherhood That Part In Their History Is Pointless)...

There Are More Reasons Why I Don't Like This Movie But I Feel Like I've Been Writing This Review Forever And I Just Want To End It Also I Can't Think Of Any Other Reasons Right Now So, For This One I Would Say Skip It But I Honestly Don't Know If It's That Bad To Skip So I'll Leave This One Up To You Guys....

Till Next Time, This Is Duke, Signing Off...

#avengers age of ultron #robert downey junior #chris evans #chris hemsworth #jeremy renner #Scarlett Johansson #elizabeth olsen #aaron taylor johnson #james spader #samuel l jackson #colbie smulders #Iron Man #Thor #captain america #The Hulk #mark ruffalo #Black Widow #Ultron

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jamiefairfaxisntcool · 5 years

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/mu/core album review | Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

/mu/core album review #1

this week on /mu/core album review, we look at:

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Ah yes, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The album that’s mostly known as either, “that one weird album from the 90s,” or, “/mu/ basic bitch meme music.” If you’re anywhere past a casual music fan, you have most-likely heard some songs off this project, if not the whole thing, doubly so if you’re into 90s culture, Indie, or any sort of Art-Rock or Folk movements. As I type this, the most popular YouTube rip of the album has about 4.3 million views, a playlist separating each track stands at 500,000 views, and the title track has a remarkable 40,733,956 plays on Spotify. Holy shit, to put that into perspective: AV Club writes that, “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was originally slated to sell about 7,000 copies,” that’s roughly 5,819 times the predicted sales numbers of the album on just that song. This also means that this song has been listened to for approximately 131,163,338 minutes, a total of around 131,163,299 more minutes than the actual album length. Humanity has spent a collective 249 years listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Oh, and that’s just the title track.

If I couldn’t spell it out so clearly there, this album is fucking outrageously popular.

Even if you haven’t heard any material off the LP, this album is memed pretty heavily in the music corners of the internet. I don’t think I can find a single music meme page or forum that hasn’t jumped upon the ITAOTS or NMH bandwagon.

At this current point in time, ITAOTS has became a permanent resident in the zeitgeist of internet music culture. NMH, and by extension, it’s creator, Jeff Mangum have been elevated to a cult of personality status. The band and this project are accompanied by a never-ending choir: 15-25 year old sad white boys who cry while sing-screeching about semen and Anne Frank and poorly play open chords on their detuned Ibanez acoustics.

It’s oddly beautiful.

The album is so deceptively simple, so creatively cryptic and has all the elements of a slog faux-folk fest filled with whining that would bore me to so many tears that they could rival the sad boy indie kids who lose their e-girls to their more socially active explore-page bait counterparts. To a person not familiar with it, ITAOTS could look like an over hyped, masturbatory depression tape. It looks boring. It looks like it should be boring.

If it should be boring, then why have I only listened to it and absolutely nothing else for the last two days?

This isn’t a joke, I revisited the album of course to refresh myself before sitting down and writing this review. I kept listening, over the course of a school day, in-between production and songwriting sets, while playing games, and as I write this, I just finished my eighth spin of the record. Before those last two days, I had only listened to the album probably twice.

I remember listening to it back in seventh grade and not particularly disliking it. I was really into Yes and a lot of other Prog and Psych bands, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with the almost yuppie voice that Jeff had used on the record compared to vocal beasts like Freddie Mercury, Bowie, and Jon Anderson. Later on, I listened in freshman year, and I appreciated it much more, and had a few songs come up in my shuffle play, but thought nothing much of it.

Now, war had changed.

part 1: i’m the fucking carrot king

As I plopped down in my computer chair, my window crackled and banged like a distant firecracker with the smack of heavy rains on a Summer afternoon. I placed my headphones firmly atop my ears, closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. I heard the opening chords of The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1 and tried not just to hear the instrumentation, but also pay attention to the lyrical content of Mr. Mangum.

When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your feet

Okay, so what the fuck is actually happening here?

Upon my listens, I inferred that Jeff is speaking to another party here, most likely a female love interest, in what seemingly starts in a nostalgic tone. This sounds almost like a picturesque, coming-of-age, Americana film. Maybe one starring Molly Ringwald and River Phoenix, with a surprise cameo from someone famous back then like Jack Nicholson. Maybe John Candy, with a John Hughes script. Everything would have those faded out, classic colors, a hearkened back era. Quickly, by halfway through the first act, the tone shifts. A darker mood, a stark, grim reminder that life wasn’t always sunny and shinning in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for

The Mang informs us of a horrific family life, specifically about what seems to be his dad’s, stepmom’s, and stepsister’s interpersonal relationships. The lines are obvious and straightforward, the life of our protagonist was rife with unhealthy familial and sexual relationships, and a sense of love and sweetness was not found there. Keep that in mind when thinking about later songs such as Oh Comely.

After the somber intro of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1, we reach my personal least favorite track on the album: The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 2 and 3.

Look, I know the meme. “I LOOOOOOOOOVE JESUUUS CHUHRIEEEIISSSSTT,” and all that shit. I’m not even worked up about that line in particular, I just dislike Pt. 3. It’s the weakest of the upbeat songs on the album, with the weird yodel-screech voice that Gumman performs with really takes me out of the experience, which sucks because the buildup and atmosphere of Pt. 2 felt pretty amazing. Luckily, Pt. 3 is fairly short, so we don’t have to worry about it too much.

part 2: earth angel’s thesis

The title track for this album is one of the best songs on this album, no fucking contest. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Oh Comely, The Fool, and Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2 are top contenders when discussing this album. If you like the faster, fuzzier, upbeat songs you could probably substitute The Fool for Holland, 1945.

The title track has a familiar sounding chord progression and we can hear Gum from Jet Set Radio’s saccharine but yelp-y voice belt out from atop the mountains his undying love and admiration for... Anne Frank?

What a beautiful face I have found in this place That is circling all round the sun What a beautiful dream That could flash on the screen In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

In the first verse, Geoff mentions meeting or viewing a beautiful person on this fleeting rock circling round the Sun. He also matches this with the idea that it’s truly futile for him to chase after this beauty, as it is only a dream that could escape him when he awakes. El Jefé has actually mentioned that some of his surrealist lyrics are derived from dreams. Perhaps these lines could imply a more literal dream fading? I don’t exactly know, all I know is what I interpreted.

The instrumentation of this piece is nothing straying from NMH’s usual repertoire: Mandrake on Guitar and Vocals, Scott Spillane on the Horns, Robert Schneider on Bass and Production, Julian Koster playing... something. What is he playing? Wait, give me a second.

He’s playing the Singing Saw? I thought it was like, a Theremin. What the fuck is a Singing Saw?

Oh.

Okay sure, you can play that, however the fuck you do that.

And finally we have Jeremy Barnes on Drums.

The personnel handle the music with a light, bouncy feeling, and the tone and timbre remind me of a faded, old, seaside town on the east coast. Another thing to mention is that the chord progression is G-Em-C-D; I-vi-IV-V. A funny thing I noticed is that this song shares a chord progression with tons of songs from the 50’s and early 60’s, which adds to the waning Americana feeling, but it more specifically shares that progression with Earth Angel by The Penguins. In the 80’s film, Back To The Future, Marvin Berry covers the song with his band for the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance where Marty’s dad and mom have to dance to ensure that the future stays intact. There’s no further real connection, but I thought that was kinda cool to mention.

After looking through the lyrics for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I will admit, as a brainlet Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1 eluded me. Patrolling through Genius and some other reviews, I guess the consensus about this track was that it was about Anne Frank again? Manta Jeff’s cryptic lyricism continues to fool me. Besides the lyrics, this track mostly remains a piece of really good filler.

part 3: stop the military occupation of my brainwaves

The Fool is amazing, anyone who says it’s filler is wrong. I know I might anger some people by literally implying that Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1 was filler, but seriously The Fool just makes me a feel a way. My brain creates a scene reminiscent of a depressing diesel-punk Les Misérables. Even though Scotch Spillage’s fantastic piece for horns is beautifully imperfect, it lacks lyrical content and is short and length. So, let’s instead talk about Holland, 1945.

This awesome, uptempo, almost punk-like piece of fuzzy brass is groovy son. It’s probably the song you could show someone not familiar with this project and they’d be like, “Oh, is this Cake? Why is the lead singer singing so high now?”

Holland, 1945 is a song that you can just listen for the instrumentation. Holland, 1945 is a song that promotes peace and love. There’s so many great things I can say about Holland, 1945. How it’s theme is so perfectly fitting for today’s political climate, how it manages to blend these psychedelic and bluesy timbres with a fast and loud sound and how well it continued the semi-conceptual narrative of Joff’s admiration and love for... Anne Frank.

Okay, fuck it, I have to say it. It’s bothered me ever since I discovered it.

Why Anne Frank? Like, I know why Anne Frank, but I mean like, why, y’know? I’ll say I admire Anne Frank, she was trying her best to live a normal life in a terrifying time to be alive, but I never wanted to fuck her. xxJeffxx’s mentions of Anne kind of make me raise an eyebrow. Especially because the album’s not just about her either. When he gets sexual, it’s difficult to determine whether he is mentioning a third party or Anne, which would be pretty weird, as she was 15 when she died and Heff was 28 when he wrote this. Maybe this is just some patrician music shit that I’m too plebeian to understand, like heated toilet seats or drinking for fun rather than to drown the pain. Maybe I haven’t sat down and watched enough flowery-squarespace-sponsored-lofi-hip-hop-muzak-using-pretentious video essayists to understand it, but what do I know.

part 4: the proletariat cries

To wrap on the second half of the album, this is the half that I cried in.

Communist Daughter is a good song, but with how short it is, it left me wanting more. This track is one of the few that actually features a soft-spoken Jeffen, and its open and dark but dreamy atmosphere left my jaw agape. The mountaintops weren’t the only thing stained.

Oh Comely, Oh Comely. Oh Comely is a song that deserves its own review. The lyrical chops of The Mangum Magnum are on full display as he belts somber, brutal verse after verse, with plenty of juxtaposition between sickening, sexual and vile situations alongside a description of a sweet, innocent young girl, just trying to survive with a guitar by her side. This beautiful, lovely girl gets taken advantage by someone, some people, perhaps even Yeff himself, only seen as an easy lay, a whore, like the ones her father visits often. He disgustingly describes semen in the garden, and her making miracles with her mouth, but I didn’t get a tone similar to so many songs about “sexual-empowerment.” The song is about self-deprecating depression leading to her being used, perhaps even abused. A situation all too real, too close to many of us. As I type this, I don’t know what to think. A woman should of course have individual sexual freedom, but this song doesn’t describe that. It describes trauma, emotional, psychological trauma. Meaningless sex, a rotten smell, staining the flower of a woman, all of this language that could be simply described as gross. This isn’t a happy song about fucking bitches. This song is about how a girl wanted to play music, pluck vines and was taken advantage of, reduced to her roots, and deflowered. Fuck. I wish I could save her. In some sort of time machine.

Two-Headed Boy could refer to a number of things. I have a head canon. This girl, Comely, is being used by the Two-Headed Boy for sexual favors. The Two-Headed Boy then “repays” her in friendship and music, playing their silly little songs. On the surface, Comely assumes the Two-Headed Boy trusts her and cares for her, but really all he wants is sex. Comely, living in a broken home and without a proper male figure in their life, is conned by the Two-Headed Boy, and just wants to live a normal life. Comely is trapped. She’s living in a place that is surrounded by the texture of scum and she knows it, she just can’t call upon the strength to leave. She’s trapped in a home, a ghetto, wanting to live a normal life, but she’s been placed here by the Two-Headed Boy, who knew her mother and father were broken, and she would be too. The Two-Headed Boy broke in, claimed to be her friend, and supports her, before defiling her. Comely was pretty, bright, and intelligent. She was just in a bad situation.

Comely was Anne Frank.

Not to say that they were literally one in the same, but I mean J. Mangum (private eye) is comparing two children, ripped from their lives by this awful world, and intertwining them, blurring the lines.

Who’s the Two-Headed Boy? As I said, it could be a number of people. Nazis, Peter van Pels, hell, even Jeff Manga himself could be the Two-Headed Boy. It doesn’t matter as long as we realize the relationship between oppressed and oppressor.

There is a glimmer of hope for Comely though. Read the closing words from Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2:

Two headed boy, she is all you could need She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires And retire to sheets safe and clean But don't hate her when she gets up to leave

Comely and the Two-Headed Boy split away from each other. Comely leaves the Two-Headed Boy, and the narrator says not to hate her when she leaves. On a deeper level, this could be an introspective Jeff Mangum relating on his past. I don’t really know.

outro

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

9/10

What did you think? Was I way off the mark, or do you agree? What should I have covered? What did you like, what did you dislike, I’m all ears. Leave a follow and a like if you liked it and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

#neutral milk hotel #music #music review #james fairfax #mu #/mu/core #folk #fuzzfolk #rock #anne frank

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amandajoyce118 · 5 years

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Avengers: Endgame Easter Eggs And References

Okay, Avengers: Endgame has been out for over a week now, so I’m actually getting my Easter eggs up on time this time around instead of waiting nearly a month. That being said, if you haven’t seen the movie, there are spoilers here. So. Many. Spoilers. Do not read this if you haven’t seen the movie.

Got it? Good.

I did not include general pop culture references or, “hey, we last saw this character in this movie,” moments. Easter eggs, comic book references, and things you might have missed are what you’ll find below.

Again, SPOILERS!

The Opening Credits

When MCU movies roll their opening Marvel logo, they’ve slowly been adding the characters they’ve added to the franchise. You see images of Black Panther, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel in the last few flips, for example. This one devotes most of the images to the core six of the Infinity Saga. Most of the images you see belong to Black Widow, Hawkeye, Hulk, Iron Man Captain America, and Thor.

Tony And Nebula

A lot of people like the opening dynamic between Tony and Nebula because it’s something different for us to watch, but there are a couple of callbacks there. While Nebula getting to win a game of “football” is cute, it’s also important because, growing up, Thanos always pit Nebula and Gamora against one another. He made them compete for everything, and despite all of her “enhancements,” Nebula always lost. In fact, those “enhancements” are a result of each time she lost at a competition, prompting Thanos to find a way to “improve” her. Also, the last of the food they have? Tony tries to share it with Nebula, but she lets him have it. Tony sharing his food is a THING in the MCU. In the first Avengers movie, Robert Downey Jr. would actually tuck bags of candy, chips, nuts, etc. into drawers on set so that he could eat between takes. Eventually, Tony just started eating snacks on camera as well. This scene is a callback to him offering food to Chris Evans on camera and it staying in the movie as Tony offering Steve a snack.

The Garden

The planet where Thanos decides to retire is called 0259-S, but Nebula calls it The Garden. That alpha numeric sequence doesn’t appear as a designation in the comics, but The Garden does exist. In the comics, a Celestial known only as The Gardener lives in the blue area of the moon where he literally tends The Garden. That’s what he’s chosen to do with his life. The power of the Time Gem is what keeps his garden thriving while he’s meant to care for it. Thanos, of course, is the one to take it from him in the Infinity Gauntlet storyline. The name for the movie is likely a nod to that aspect of the comic book story, while him “retiring” to a farm is also right out of the comics. So is the scarecrow made from his armor.

“I went for the head.”

Thor says this as a nod to Thanos telling him what he should have done when he didn’t defeat him in Infinity War. There’s also another callback to their fight later in the movie. During the huge battle sequence at the end of the movie, Thanos presses Stormbreaker into Thor’s chest just as Thor did to him in Infinity War.

Creator Cameos

During the sequence for Cap leading the support group (a nod to a piece of advice Falcon gave him in Captain America: The Winter Soldier), there are a couple of cameos. Joe Russo, one of the writers and directors, appears as the member of the group talking about his date. The man who asks him about it? That’s comic book heavyweight Jim Starlin. Starlin also gets a special thank you in the credits at the end of the film. He’s the man who created Thanos. (Sidenote: Joe Russo’s kids all have roles in the film as well. His daughter Ava even plays Hawkeye’s daughter Lila.)

5 Years Later

Not an Easter egg, but some timeline clarification here. With the five year time jump, the big confrontation takes place in 2023 as the start of the movie is very close to the events of Avengers: Infinity War, which started in 2018.

An Underwater Earthquake

When Natasha has her conference call with Rocket, Rhoadey, Carol, and Okoye, they briefly discuss an underwater earthquake near Wakanda. Okoye brushes it off, but there is an underwater nation that doesn’t particularly get along with Wakanda in the comics. Atlantis. Their leader, Namor, is not T’Challa’s biggest fan. I like to think this is a hint that he’s coming. (When Steve visits following this scene, you can also spot Natasha’s ballet slippers on a chair. Looks like she was feeling nostalgic in more ways than one.)

New Hair

Steve and Tony go back to their trimmed looks for this movie, but someone else gets a new haircut. After the five year time jump, Carol’s haircut is closer to her modern comic book look than what we’ve seen in the movies before.

616

The storage unit where all of Scott Lang’s belongings are, including the van and the rat that helps him escape the Quantum Realm, is marked as unit 616. That’s a nod to the 616 universe in the comics, the one that features the main continuity.

“...Only to make conversation.”

So, when Scott asks Steve and Natasha is they known anything about physics, Natasha gives this response, which on first blush, might sound like her being a smartass. It’s not. As a spy, she literally learned enough about subjects to sound like she understood them when meeting a target. The first target she took on in the comics? Iron Man, whom she needed a working knowledge of physics to banter with.

“...regular size man.”

Rhoadey calls Scott this as a reference to the last time they saw each other in Captain America: Civil War. Rhoadey was the one to proclaim, “tiny man is giant now.” It’s a nice call back

The Necklace

If you look closely at Natasha’s neck when they start recruiting Avengers for the time travel idea, you’ll notice she’s wearing a familiar necklace. It’s the same arrow she wore in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a nod to Hawkeye.

Howard Stark

Tony gets to see his father in the flesh during the time travel segment of the movie, but we get a teaser for him earlier in the movie. When Tony picks up the photo of himself and Peter in his kitchen? There’s a photo of his father on the shelf as well. (Side note: when Tony asks how far along Howard’s wife is in the 70s? It’s because he’s born in May and they arrive in April.)

Morgan

Looks like Tony went ahead and named his kid Morgan just like the dream he had in Infinity War. Morgan was also Tony’s cousin in the comics. (Also, how great is Morgan playing with what becomes Pepper’s helmet? Pepper’s armor, though it isn’t named, is a recreation of her Rescue look from the comics.)

Ronin

Though the name isn’t used in the movies, the name Hawkeye goes by in the comics when he decides to start cutting down all the bad guys in his path, is Ronin. The name comes from the word to describe a samurai without a master. It literally means “wandering man,” and is portrayed in artwork by the bones of a warrior inside their samurai gear. That depiction is exactly what you’ll find in Hawkeye’s tattoo sleeve, and it’s why Black Widow finally tracks him down in Japan. It’s also fitting that his sword doesn’t look like a traditional samurai sword to me. It looks more like a bow fashioned into a sword.

Akihiko

The guy that Clint fights in Japan is based on a comic book character of the same name. In the comics, he worked for a SHIELD rival that was also a branch of the Yakuza.

Recruiting Thor

Thor only comes out once a month for supplies? Sounds like Aquaman only coming in on the King Tide to provide for the people, but I’m hoping that’s just a coincidence and not them poking fun at one of DC’s good on screen characters. The whole thing with Thor yelling at the mean kid Korg is gaming with though? Did that feel like them shouting at the guy’s living in their mom’s basement who claim to be comic book purists to anyone else? Just me?

Also, I appreciate that New Asgard is supposed to be in a Scandinavian country. I do. Tonsberg is supposedly where Odin led his people to war against the Frost Giants thousands of years ago. And it’s where the Red Skull found the Tesseract. However, this is clearly the part of the movie filmed in Scotland. Why? There’s a half empty bottle of Irn Bru (Scotland’s national soft drink, and my personal favorite) sitting on a table behind Thor through most of that sequence. I’m glad someone on set has good taste in soda.

New Asgard also existed in the comics, but as a merging of New York and Asgard when realities collided, and also as Asgard floating above Oklahoma when it fell from the sky.

Ben And Jerry’s

Does anyone remember Dr. Strange and Wong discussing the Avengers ice cream flavors in Infinity War? Looks like Bruce finally got to try some as he’s eating a Hulk-sized container of Ben and Jerry’s during the brainstorming sessions.

Budapest

Just what was the mission in Budapest? Will we ever know? It clearly made an impression on Natasha and Clint since it’s been referenced by them twice before. We also know Fury spent time there thanks to his listing of the B countries in Captain Marvel.

“That’s America’s ass.”

Someone on set knows the internet has an appreciation for Chris Evans’ ass. Who? Who knows? But someone has clearly seen the gif sets.

The Elevator

When we see Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, and Ant-Man return to 2012, not only do we get to see another point of view for The Avengers, but we get some nice callbacks. Cap in the elevator with a bunch of menacing SHIELD agents (hey, Sitwell and Rumlow who are off to give the scepter to Liszt, the same guy that got Wanda her powers!) who are actually Hydra evoked that amazing fight scene in Captain America: Winter Soldier. This time, he doesn’t knock them all out though. Instead, he gives a “hail hydra” to avoid the fight. That in itself also evokes the recent comic book storyline that featured a rewritten reality where Captain America was hydra all along.

“Lunch, then Asgard.”

Back in 2012, Thor tells Secretary Pierce they’re going to lunch before he goes home.That lunch is the Avengers shawarma post credit scene.

“I can do this all day.”

As the most iconic Captain America line at this point, I don’t have to tell you how often he’s said it. I’m sure there’s a gif set on tumblr for it.

Stan Lee

Stan gets a posthumous cameo driving a muscle car with a license plate that includes the numbers 420 while he spouts on about making love, not war. He’s clearly a hippie, and it’s not a subtle cameo. You’d only miss it if you left the theater to run to the bathroom here. You might have missed his “Nuff said” bumper sticker, which was a phrase he often used in his responses to letters to the editor.

Community Cameos

The Russo brothers like to feature actors from their other projects. In the MCU, they’ve included at least one actor from Community in all of the movies they’ve been involved in. This time, there’s two. Ken Jeong plays a security guard at the storage facility while Yvette Nicole Brown plays a SHIELD agent in the 70s.

The Terminal Beach

When Ken Jeong’s security guard pops up early in the movie, he’s reading a book instead of watching the cameras. The book he’s reading is The Terminal Beach. It’s a collection of short stories. One of those in the book had a familiar title. It’s called “End-Game.” It’s not about superheroes, but instead about a man waiting his execution.

The 70s Eggs

Speaking of the 70s, let’s get a few of the Easter eggs and references in this sequence out of the way. The military base is the same one where Steve initially trained and was chosen for the super soldier program. The name on Steve’s uniform? That’s Roscoe for Roscoe Simons, a man who took over for him in the comics, and then was promptly defeated by the Red Skull. When Steve calls Hank about a package? We see the original Ant-Man helmet on his table. It’s pretty impossible to miss. The photo of Steve on Peggy’s desk is one of the images used for the first Captain America movie, and I believe one from the file she had in Agent Carter, if I’m not mistaken. When Tony encounters his father, he’s looking for Arnim Zola, the man who programs his mind into the computers at that same military base and appears in Captain America: The Winter Soldier there. When Howard leaves, that’s James D’Arcy still playing Jarvis and acting as his driver. Jarvis appearing in the movie is the first time a character originated on an MCU TV show to cross over to the movies. It’s a small step, but one in the right direction that might mean characters from Agents of SHIELD, Runaways, or Cloak And Dagger could eventually do the same.

“Get the rabbit.”

The Asgardian guards share Thor’s belief that Rocket is a rabbit because they say this while following him when he gets the aether.

“Daughter of Ivan, son of Edith”

Edith was in fact Hawkeye’s mother in the comics. She died when he was young, leaving Clint and his brother as orphans. Ivan, on the other hand, was not exactly Natasha’s father in the comics. Instead, one story sees Ivan Petrovich as a benevolent stranger who raises Natasha as his own when a woman gives him baby Natalia Romanova from a burning building. Retconning sees that as a fabrication as Ivan was actually a soldier and agent of the Red Room who got Natasha into the program. Still another sees him as her “uncle Ivan” whom she cared for so much that she gave up her freedom, joined the Red Room, and got them both the super soldier serum to save his life. Just how that will play into the MCU remains to be seen in the upcoming Black Widow movie.

The Big Three

When Thanos lets his weapons loose on the Avengers compound, the three that go out to meet him while everyone else is scrambling are Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. These are the three tentpole franchises of the MCU. While Hulk had a solo movie, it was distributed though Universal and starred another actor. It’s a nice full circle moment for the MCU.

Captain America Is Worthy

When it seems like Thor is headed for certain doom, his hammer finds a new target - and a new person to wield it. Cap is one of the many heroes who wielded it in the comics, but the moment he catches Mjolnir is a callback to Avengers: Age of Ultron. In the movie, the Avengers take turns trying to lift the hammer, but only Cap seems to shift it, though he’s still unable to pick it up. The implication, of course, is that by the time this movie rolled around, the things he’d been through made him worthy.

Also? That shot of him all alone, ready to take on everyone? That’s an homage to the Avengers taking on Thanos in the comics. At one point, everyone else was down and out, and Cap was the only one left standing.

Captain America’s Shield

As Thanos shatters Cap’s shield during the fight, it echoes Tony’s talk of his vision earlier in the movie. There’s talk about how Tony wanted to build a suit of armor around the world, and that wish was a result of the vision Scarlet Witch put in his head in Age of Ultron. That same vision showed Cap’s shield broken in the same way it ends up broken here.

“On your left.”

We all know that this is one of the first things Sam said to Steve in The Winter Soldier, right? It’s a cute callback.

“Is that everyone?” “You wanted more?”

Dr. Strange and Wong have this exchange as the wizards stop opening portals all over the battlefield. Not only is this a nod to the sheer number of characters in the battle sequence, but likely a nod to their being more heroes out there that aren’t in the scene. After all, none of the TV heroes are visibly present.

“Avengers, assemble!”

Is this the first time Steve actually gets to say this on the big screen? He’s been cut off while saying it in the past, so I think it is, even if he gets to say it all the time in comic books.

Pegasus

Where exactly did Valkyrie get her flying horse? We saw it in the story of her past in Thor: Ragnarok, but we’ve not seen one used in the MCU lately, so while it’s a nice callback to her past, it’s an odd one.

“We’re on it, Cap.”

Wasp gets this line when Steve needs a new quantum tunnel up and running. After, she and Ant-Man share a look because he once told her only Steve’s friends call him Cap.

Instant Kill Mode

When Peter learned his suit had this in Spider-Man: Homecoming, it freaked him out, but here? Not so much. He uses it when he gets desperate.

The Ladies Of Marvel

There is a moment during the fight with Thanos where all of the female heroes on the ground manage to congregate around Peter Parker and Captain Marvel. Their aim? Protect Carol from Thanos’ army. Some cynics have called it pandering, but it makes sense. The woman, half of whom have the power to fly, have been following the glove around the field, trying to keep it out of Thanos’ hands. While the guys are still fighting, they form a team. It looks an awful lot like an A-Force team up in the comics, but it also echoes a moment in Infinity War. When Wanda is told she’s going to die alone in battle, Natasha and Okoye step up to protect her, with Natasha saying, “but she’s not alone.” At this point in the movie, Natasha is gone, but Wanda is still following her lead, protecting the other women on their team.

“If I tell you what happens, it won’t happen.”

The first time I saw the movie, I saw this as the opposite of a self fulfilling prophecy. But seeing it again, I actually think Dr. Strange was unsure if Tony would do what needed to be done if he told him the truth about their one shot. He knew to end the Thanos problem, Tony would have to snap his fingers. It makes me think Dr. Strange underestimated Tony’s commitment to saving the planet.

“I am Iron Man.”

This is Tony’s big response to Thanos, but it’s also the most iconic movie from the first Iron Man film. Why? It wasn’t even scripted. The original script had Tony keeping his Iron Man identity under wraps. During filming, Robert Downey Jr. ad libbed the admission that he was Iron Man and it stayed, changing the route of the films.

Also, Tony wielding the gauntlet he made is a nice homage to the comics, where he was actually the first human to successfully create and use one.

Captain America’s Suits

So, we see Steve wear his first Avengers suit. But, at the beginning of the movie, he’s also wearing his Winter Soldier suit. Later, he gets a brand new suit, probably courtesy of Tony. That one combines the look of his Civil War and Winter Soldier suits. But, it also adds the chain mail look that’s prevalent in the comics. So, he gets the chance to be pretty much every version of Cap we’ve seen on screen in this movie.

Harley Keener

The Avengers, their family, and Tony’s family are all present at his memorial, but so is someone else who wasn’t in the movie. The tall teenager at the back? That’s Harley from Iron Man 3, and he’s still played by Ty Simpkins. The kid had a real growth spurt that fits the timeline.

Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart

We all remember this was a gift set on display for the Iron Man movies, yes?

Morgan Wants A Cheeseburger

Like father, like daughter. When Tony got away from the Ten Rings, he had Happy stop at Burger King on the way to his press conference because he wanted “American cheeseburgers.”

Asgardians Of The Galaxy

I know this is just Thor being Thor, but… there is a comic book team called the Asgardians of the Galaxy. Like the guardians, they travel around in a spaceship and do good deeds, but they’re all from Asgard.

“You’re taking all the stupid with you.”

In the first Captain America movie, Bucky Barnes went to war without his best friend. He told Steve not to do anything stupid until he got back. The above line was Steve’s response. Their roles (and lines) are reversed when Steve travels through time to return some Infinity Stones and Mjolnir to their rightful points in history.

Captain Sam

When the elder Steve Rogers returns to his departure point in the timeline, he does it with a new shield, and passes it on to Sam Wilson. In the comics, an older Captain America who had the super soldier serum removed from his blood did the same thing. Sam even had his own Captain America comic series for a while. (Other heroes who have been Captain America in the comics include Bucky Barnes, Sharon Carter, and Peggy Carter, in case you’re wondering.)

“It’s been a long, long time.”

Could the song title be more fitting for Steve and Peggy? And yes, this is a branched timeline. And yes, the song has been used in the MCU before, in The Winter Soldier.

The Clang

Post credit scenes are an MCU tradition, but this movie doesn’t have one. Instead, it has a clang. That noise is the sound of hammer hitting metal. Specifically, the sound of Tony’s hammer hitting metal when he created his very first Iron Man suit in the 2008 film, signalling the end of an era here instead of the beginning of one.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got! Tell me if I managed to miss anything.

#avengers endgame #endgame spoilers #endgame easter eggs #marvel easter eggs #mcu

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anotheruserwithnoname · 5 years

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A Jenna Coleman DVD/Blu-ray library

About a year or so ago, I did a quick survey of Jenna’s film and TV work and its availability on home video. With the recent UK release of Victoria S3 and questions over whether there might be a DVD release of this week’s National Theatre Live broadcast of All My Sons, I thought I’d do an updated version. (I’m generally focusing on physical releases - I’m aware some shows unavailable on DVD or Blu-ray may well be available on streaming - though if I know about legal online availability I’ll mention it.)

A text break first as this will be a bit lengthy. (And corrections are always welcome if I goof anything here.)

Summer Holiday: As I was compiling this list I noticed that this has been added to her IMDb listing. This is dated 1998 and is the title of a play Jenna appeared in when she was about 10. An IMDb listing implies that a video has been released, but I know nothing of this. IMDb is also notorious for including dubious listings. I’ve looked around and general consensus is this video does not exist or maybe there’s a snippet someone shot from the audience and somebody decided to make an IMDb listing for it.

Emmerdale: There’s been no DVD release of Jenna’s era on Emmerdale. With about 140 episodes featuring her, it would need to be a very big box set. ITV Hub streams the show, but only recent episodes it seems. I’ve also seen a reference to BritBox but I don’t know if the 2005-2009 era is included.

Waterloo Road: Jenna was featured in Series 5, which has been released to DVD in the UK. For the rest of the world (and those who didn’t get the DVDs), the production company behind the series has made the entire series - including Jenna’s arc - officially available for free on YouTube. (Episodes are edited to remove opening and closing credits, however.) Her first episode can be found here.

Maria’s Story: Around the time she was on Waterloo, Jenna made a PSA for a an organization dedicated to addressing cruelty to children. She performed a dramatic reading of a survivor’s letter and it’s heart-wrenching. The IMDb lists her as the executive producer but I don’t know if that’s accurate. Being just a PSA it’s not on DVD anywhere, but you can view it on Youtube here. This one slipped by many fans because some of the posts don’t mention Jenna (who is uncredited in the video) and the one place she was mentioned, they misspelled her name.

Imaginary Forces: During her year in America, Jenna filmed a role in a Jacobs Ladder-esque horror short that has, as of 2019, never been released. All we have is the trailer which was posted to YouTube in I think 2010. That original post appears to no longer exist (or it didn’t show up on a search anyway), but the trailer was reposted by a fan account for one of the actors about 6 years ago. You can hear Jenna’s early attempt at an American accent and she appears on screen for about one second.

Unknown pilot episode: Jenna auditioned for a large number of TV shows during her time in America. Some of these auditions have circulated on YouTube. According to an interview she did film a pilot for a sitcom in which she played an Australian character. I’ve looked around for a few years and have not found any indication as to the title of the production or anything else. It has never been broadcast, at any rate. But it’s always possible it might turn up somewhere. Maybe in a box set alongside Imaginary Forces. LOL

Captain America: The First Avenger: The Marvel Cinematic Universe classic is obviously widely available and is undoubtedly the biggest-seller of anything on this list. I believe that, for a while, Jenna technically had the biggest box office take of any former companion because of her cameo in this movie, until Karen Gillan joined the MCU as Nebula. Natalie Dormer also has a cameo.

Titanic: The 2012 miniseries has been released to both DVD and Blu-ray worldwide. In Canada it also seems to get rebroadcast quite a lot on cable. There were several Titanic productions in 2012; this is the 4-episode one with Jenna and Perdita Weeks (and Jenna’s picture is on the DVD cover too!)

Room at the Top: The original broadcast of this two-part adaptation of the novel (previously filmed in the 1950s), originally scheduled for 2011, was delayed a year due to rights issues (ending up with it airing around the time Jenna debuted as Oswin Oswald). These same rights issues are presumably the reason behind the fact there has never been a home video release anywhere. Amazon’s streaming service apparently has it available in the UK only. The BBC website once had it available for streaming (again only in the UK) but it’s not available. No idea of its Britbox status.

Dancing on the Edge: This five-episode minseries has been released worldwide on DVD and Blu-ray, though it might be a bit hard to find now. I assume it’s on streaming somewhere. This is the one that also features Tom Hughes, though he shares no scenes with Jenna.

Doctor Who: Obviously, Jenna’s era in the series is available widely both in physical and streaming formats, though some of the spin-off work she did for the 50th such as the Five(ish) Doctors Reboot and The Ultimate Guide might be a bit harder to track down. In Canada, for example, the only way to see these was on a bonus disc in a Matt Smith Era box set. I don’t know if they’ve been put on streaming. Likewise I’ve never bothered to look to see if any of the minisodes she made (especially Clara and the TARDIS), available on the DVDs and Blu-rays, are on streaming.

Death Comes to Pemberley: Widely available on DVD and Blu-ray. However the North American release put out by PBS stresses that it’s the UK version. That implies that (much like Victoria) the US broadcast was different in some way. I’ve never seen the PBS edit so I don’t know if there is actually a difference.

Me Before You: Widely available on DVD and Blu-ray, which also feature a rare appearance of Jenna in a gag reel.

Victoria: All 3 seasons are out on DVD and Blu-ray in Europe and North America. The North American release features the ITV edit, and thus does not include the additional scenes featured in the longer PBS broadcasts (it also often omits some of the special features like commentaries in the UK release). I’m hoping that, when Victoria finishes its run, somebody will release a box set that includes the extra footage for the benefit of UK fans and for those who watched the PBS version. There are some very nice sequences featuring Jenna that are technically missing. I hear mixed messages as to whether the PBS streaming service features the Masterpiece edits or ITV.

Thunderbirds Are Go: Jenna did a guest voice in the second season premiere of the CGI remake of the Gerry Anderson classic, again doing an American accent. The season has been released on DVD in the UK and elsewhere but not in North America. As far as streaming goes, it appears to belong to Amazon.

The Cry: The miniseries has been released on DVD in the UK and Australia, but at present is not available in North America due to Sundance Now holding the streaming rights. There’s no indication as to if or when we’ll get a physical release here. My guess is probably not until Sundance Now has exclusivity for at least a year.

National Theatre Live: All My Sons: During his recent radio interview with Jenna, Graham Norton brought up the idea of All My Sons getting a DVD release. Jenna couldn’t answer, however National Theatre Live’s website states that they don’t do DVD releases and there are no NTL releases other than a documentary marking an anniversary listed on Amazon.co.uk. All My Sons would have been recorded because NTL’s website is already listing encore broadcasts for next February in the United States so it’ll probably get filed in some archive.

Inside No. 9: Jenna has a guest role in the upcoming 5th series of this comedy show. The series does get a DVD release in the UK, but not in North America where once again we’ll be restricted to seeing it on streaming (via Britbox, apparently).

#jenna coleman #our queen

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grimelords · 6 years

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My July playlist is here, just in time for September! Four hours of hits from Lana Del Rey, Iannis Xenakis, KISS, Cameo and everyone in between. Please enjoy.

This Is What Makes Us Girls - Lana Del Rey: This is a really underrated Lana song I think. It's such a beautiful song and it's so heartbreaking the way she sings "they were the only friends I ever had". It's like an origin story for her whole thing detailing how she got bitten by a radioactive pabst, I love it.

Walking Into Sunshine (Larry Levan 12" Mix) - Central Line: A powerful good mood song that quickly takes on a vibe shift near the end when he says I've got to do it now, I've got to walk into the sun' which carries a different meaning than 'walk into the sunshine' to me. Embracing positivity versus self immolation in a nuclear furnace.

Fine di Cobb - Stelvio Cipriani: This is the most jamming harpsichord I think I have ever heard. This is from the soundtrack to an italian cop film called Mark il Poliziotto (Mark The Narc) that I found in a spotify playlist called Best Of Eurocrime that I cannot recommend enough. https://open.spotify.com/user/cinevox/playlist/1o3c0Con0ormlKc9r1gqxgSince

Last Wednesday - Highasakite: Highasakite might be the worst band name I've ever heard and they're so lucky this song is as good as it is that it cancels that out.

Hilary $wank - Joey Bada$$: I was originally just going to post the instrumental of this because the beat it just so, so good. So busy without being cluttered and nicely melodic without clouding the space for the vocals. I also like this song a lot because just by virtue of being so upbeat it escapes the worst parts of a lot of other Joey Bada$$ 'real hip hop' type songs that are going for a throwback vibe but end up just sounding dated.

Girls - Royal Headache: Girls! Think they're too fine for me! Oh Girls! And I'm inclined to agree!

Something To Tell You - Haim: I'm slowly coming around to Haim's second album and I've finally decided it's good actually. I just hope they do a live album or something soon because their songs are so tightly structured that I think it's almost to their detriment, and every live video I've seen of them they really pull them apart and expand them in a nice organic way that just doesn't come through on the album.

Lavender - BadBadNotGood & Kaytranada: I can't tell whether I like this orginal version or the Nightfall remix with Snoop Dogg better, the verses are just regular Snoop but the vocals they put on the chorus are so good I sort of wish there was a third version that was just them with some other rapper.

New Seeds - Boards Of Canada: Realising that the sound at the start of this is extrapolated from mobile phone interference was a shocking moment for me.

Alligator Engine - Hunters & Collectors: Hunters And Collectors early albums where they sounded like the Talking Heads of the Mad Max universe don't get enough respect because of their huge regular sounding hits a few albums later and it's areal shame because this song is pure primal funk.

Fly Like An Eagle - Seal: This is the song that plays on the little muzak speakers in the cryogenic chamber for the four minutes you're still conscious while your body cools to absolute zero. Then you wake up in 400 years still humming it.

Come To Dust - Boards Of Canada: I was having such a huge moment with this album this month and lamenting the imminent end of our favourite earth The Earth, and this is really such a peaceful sort of resolute song right near the end of the album before the real ending of Semena Mertvykh makes you feel like a body dumped in the desert for scientific research into the nature of decomposition.

Kiss You All Over - Millie Jackson: I'm still not sure how I feel about this new Millie Jackson album that's old multitracks re-mixed by Steve Levine. The whole thing sounds kind of whack. What's good however, is when she adlibs "I wanna bite you on the ankles baby" out of nowhere near the end, and then says "on the ankles.. on the kneecaps.." as the song's fading out.

The Sorcerer - Twain: My girlfriend sent me this song and I have no idea where she found it but I love it. As soon as I heard the opening line I was completely hooked. It's such a beautiful and foreboding song that I really can't get a proper read on, I love it.

Men Today - Health: I'm looking for a chrome extension that makes this song play at maximum volume whenever anyone makes a post containing the phrase 'men today'. Huge wall of noise. Bloodthirsty drums. All the dirt owns us now, what we were ends in the ground.

Where Love Lives - Frankie Knuckles: I'm eagerly awaiting the day coming soon that 90s piano house goes from naff to revered and rockets back up the charts.

Nein König Nein - DJ Koze: This is the B side to Seeing Aliens off of DJ Koze's new album and I really love it, mostly for the groove it get into about halfway through, it reminds me of High Fidelity by Daft Punk where it's just chopped to hell and builds these sort of disparate rhythmic cuts into a really melodic frankenstein.

Blush - Leon Vynehall: I think I found this song and the next one by Spotify Radio off of the DJ Koze song above. I got into a real groove at work one day and these two were the best two to come out of it. The bassline/strings melody that centres this whole song is so good and so circular it could feasibly play for two hours and I wouldn't notice.

Last Land - John Talabot: The way the vocal sample just keeps bleeding into itself is hypnotising here, and it's also maybe the best and most unique kick sound I've heard in a long time.

Suzinak - Ross From Friends: I almost feel bad for Ross From Friends because he's making some really amazing music but he's stuck with this dogshit soundcloud name. The Durutti Column sample that forms the basis of this song is really nicely placed without just feeling like a rip-off, but where this song really shines is in the last minute or so where it magically transitions into a crunching guitar driven thing that sounds like it's playing next door.

Canary Yellow - Deafheaven: The most incredible thing about this album is the sense of optimism that pervades it. This isn't a genre that really lends itself to hope or beauty but somehow Deafheaven have captured it in a way I didn't really think possible. It feels like they've expanded the emotional palette of the whole genre with this album, without sacrificing any of what makes it great.

Strutter - Kiss: I had this song stuck in my head the other day, but I'd remembered it wrong and had it mixed up with the chorus of Lovers And Sinners by Dallas Crane. In my version he's saying 'strutter' the way they say 'lovers'. There's an incredible song in there somewhere, but the original is pretty good too.

Lovers And Sinners - Dallas Crane: See above I guess. It's interesting listening to Dallas Crane now as a new generation is reappraising and being inspired by pub rock all over again and somehow the difference between Dallas Crane and Jet versus Bad//Dreems and Peep Tempel couldn't be more pronounced despite their shared roots. Where the former idolises the glamour of a bygone age of rock and roll the latter are reapprorating it in a more directly emotional, less flashy way.

Evryali - Iannis Xenakis: From what I understand from reading the wiki article on this piece this was generated by doing about five different kinds of extreme nerd graph maths and then turning that into music via more maths and when he finally turned up with the completed score it was so fucking stupid it had notes that don't physically exist on a standard piano in it. Now that's rock and roll. It's hard to make sense of this without the context of its composition because it feels incredibly random, but this performance by Stephnos Thomopoulos really brings meaning to the total chaos of it. I think solo piano is such a good medium for generative-type works like this because it feels like the simplest way to see everything happening without the tonal clutter of synthesised or orchestral sounds muddying the already extremely muddy waters.

Easy Way Out - Money For Rope: I love bands with two drummers and Money For Rope really know how to use two drummers, which is simply use them exactly like you would one drummer but pan them left and right so I can hear when they do different fills at the same time and get a thrill. A really good song about killing yourself when you're old(?)

Sophisticated Lady - Art Tatum: I've been having a big Art Tatum phase recently and it's hard to overstate just how much I believe Art Tatum came from another planet to teach us about the piano. He is really and truly from another dimension. So off the charts insanely good at making a whole universe from a simple tune. It's like every single note gets its own full trip around the block before he moves on.

Stay As Sweet As You Are - Art Tatum: This is an absolute odyssey in five minutes. Without ever losing focus, or losing track of the central theme, it's like he takes it apart piece by piece and reassembles it anew every single bar right before your eyes.

No Line On The Horizon - U2: 2000s U2 gets a bad rap, and it's mostly deserved but there's still some very good stuff in there. This song is so good, and so nicely produced it's a real shame that it opens the album that eventually contains Get On Your Boots.

Tools Down - The Presets: Not only is this song great, but they use the exact same synth sound as the one they used for Madeline's voice in Celeste, which has the nice side effect of making it seem like Madeline is singing along to this great song.

Open Sesame (12" Version) - Kool & The Gang: I've definitely put this on my list before but this is probably the best song ever recorded. It's incredible top to bottom for all 9 minutes and never fails to put me in a great mood.

Peril - Martin O'Donnell: I was thinking about the Halo 2 soundtrack and was shocked to remember correctly that this strange Enya knock-off made it into the highest selling game of 2004.

Drumgasm - Weiss/Cameron/Hill: I cannot belive I haven't heard of this album before now. It's Janet Weiss from Sleater-Kinney, Matt Cameron from Pearl Jam and Zach Hill all playing drums for 40 minutes and it's incredible. I would never have expected Weiss and Cameron to be the sort of drummers to do something like this, but they absolutely nail it. The different styles of the three really meld well and they all seem to lead at different times. This album is the sort of thing that seems like it would be extremely exhausting, and probably would be in most circumstances but somehow they pulled it off. It's engaging and for the most part, driven, purposeful music with direction; which is saying a lot for an album of three drummers just going absolutely hard as motherfuckers for most of an hour.

Apollo - St Paul & The Broken Bones: I love this song but the way he sings the first line makes me laugh because it sounds almost exactly like Drew Tarver's Donny Gary character. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9ArjvUUptw and I'm blessed to have this song about reusing mcdonalds cups play in my head every single time I'm in a mcdonalds.

Million Times Alone - Bad//Dreems: This is maybe the best song about working night shift and having depression I've ever heard. The part about sleeping in the day in the bright sun in a boiling hot house is an especially vicious sense memory for me.

Slow Mover - Angie McMahon: My girlfriend showed me this and I absolutely love it. I also feel extremely old because I just googled it and apparently it's an Unearthed song that made the Hottest 100 this year and I didn't even notice. The best approximation I can make of how I feel about this song is the google autocomplete when you google it that goes 'angie mcmagon slow mover meaning?' and the top comment on the Genius page for it that says 'I cried my eyes out when I first heard this song.’

Drop The Bomb (feat. MF DOOM) - YOTA: Youth Of The Apocalypse: This is the new band from the non-Clash guitarist and bassist from Gorillaz, as well as Jamie Reynolds from Klaxons and I'm so glad it exists because the new Gorillaz album was such a snore and this really feels like what it should have been. Somehow it seems Damon Albarn is not the thing that makes Gorillaz great, it's the other guys which is very very strange.

Word Up - Cameo: Mostly thinking about this song because of Carl Tart's extremely good episode of Comedy Bang Bang where he spoke in the cadence of this and the other Cameo song for the whole episode https://www.earwolf.com/episode/word-down/

Lee - Tenacious D: I don't know what's going on but I got into a real Tenacious D thing this month. Thinking deeply about comedy music for some reason. Anyway this song is so much fun and it reminds me of Tony's Theme by Pixies.

Tony's Theme - Pixies: I love the idea of writing a nonsense song about your friend Tony, who you love, to put right in the middle of your otherwise pretty serious alt rock album. If you know any other songs in the genre of Lee and Tony's Theme please reply and tell me them because I think it's really funny genre.

Burning Down The House - Tom Jones & The Cardigans: I woke up one morning with the sound of Tom Jones singing 'strange but not a stranger' in my head and it took me so much googling to find out it was this version of Burning Down The House that I was thinking of, without having heard it in probably ten years. I like that this song is ostensibly a duet but Nina Persson has such a thin voice and Tom Jones is the most powerful man to have ever lived that she's sort of just automatically relegated to backing vocals by default.

Horseshoe Crabs - Hop Along: I heard about this from the Jason Mantzoukas What's In My Bag video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecfWVhz-wyc. I cannot believe how her voice sounds, it's just incredible. The way she sings "baby's heading home" at the start shocked me, it sounds like recordings of three different people cut together. It's just amazing. I already loved this song a lot and then when I looked into it I found out it's about Jackson C. Frank and it made me cry.

Long Wat - Khun Narin: This is another one I got from the Jason Mantzoukas What's In My Bag video, it's a Thai pschedelic street band and it's quite simply the jam of a lifetime.

listen here

#playlists

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jasonfry · 5 years

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Continuing my movie education with a whole bunch of classics everyone’s seen but me. As always, a reminder that I’m not a movie critic, just a fitfully interested viewer with a particular eye for storytelling.

Adam’s Rib (1949)

You know what? I think I’m missing the Hepburn-Tracy gene. I feel bad about it, but it’s the truth. After I was left cold by “Desk Set,” people told me I’d picked the wrong one. Well, this isn’t the right one either. There’s some good courtroom patter, but nothing really comes to life, and the denouement has not aged well, to say the very least: Adam’s stunt with the gun isn’t funny, but cruel and abusive. Additional demerit because David Wayne may be the most annoying neighbor in the history of living arrangements. I wanted Adam to actually shoot him at least a reel before he pretended that was the plan.

The Awful Truth (1937)

There isn’t a lot going on here, truth be told: Cary Grant, Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy are charming, as is canine star Mr. Smith, but it’s all pretty slight. Still, it’s a good time, with Grant’s expression after he maneuvers Dunne into an encore of her humiliating dance with Bellamy worth the price of admission. This is probably not screened often in Oklahoma, given Grant’s smiling stiletto of a quip that “if you get bored in Oklahoma City you can always go to Tulsa for the weekend!”

Let’s Make Love (1960)

Even not-trying-very-hard Marilyn Monroe is a force of nature, but goodness this movie is a mess. The premise is so unlikely that you can never suspend your disbelief -- French tycoon Jean-Marc Clement investigates rehearsals for a play mocking him, goes unrecognized and so winds up playing himself, which lets him court Monroe. Come again? The idea that a billionaire -- in 1960! -- would go unrecognized in New York City for a half-second, let alone several days, is too flimsy to support even a tissue-thin comedy like this. And even if you give the movie a pass on that, it doesn’t execute. The songs are lousy (even Cole Porter’s is lackluster), the movie screeches to a halt for a series of preening “Love Boat”-style cameos, and Tony Randall’s character essentially disappears half an hour in. Skip this mess.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

Orson Welles’s follow-up to “Citizen Kane” is arguably more famous for what’s missing than what remains -- RKO took the film away from Welles, recut it and slapped on a horrific happy ending, the excised footage was lost, and nearly 80 years later film buffs still trade conspiracy theories about complete prints that might have escaped destruction in Brazil. (If you’re interested -- and you should be, as it’s a heck of a story -- read this.) As a newcomer to the film and its cult I knew none of that, so I found myself plunged into an exceedingly weird, fascinating movie. “Ambersons” feels like a trial run at filmmaking techniques that never got adopted -- the scenes where characters talk over each other are much more true to life than film usually is -- and it has a number of dazzling setpieces, from the opening narration to the mutilated but still impressive plunge into the Ambersons’ gala. I finished watching it not quite sure what I’d seen, but worrying it all over in my head. And the movie has stayed with me since, demanding a second look.

Panic in the Streets (1950)

Makes surprisingly little use of New Orleans given that it was shot there, and overall just a weird film. It sometimes feels like two stories competing for space -- simultaneously a thriller in which Richard Widmark’s doctor tries to track down a killer who’s been exposed to plague and a domestic drama with Widmark and Barbara Bel Geddes. Those two stories never fuse, but feel disconnected throughout. But this is still an interesting film, with consistently terrific framing of shots and very strong performances: there’s Widmark’s intense-to-the-breaking-point doctor, Paul Douglas’s slyly cynical cop, Zero Mostel’s sad-sack criminal, and Jack Palance (in his film debut) as the killer. Palance is so thin and raw-boned that he looks like a modernist sculpture, but you can’t take your eyes off him. He all but drips danger, and you see immediately that he was going to be a star.

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

An earl with a penchant for gambling loses his very proper English butler, Marmaduke Ruggles, to a tasteless, nouveau riche American from Red Gap, Washington. Charles Laughton has a blast as Ruggles, mugging his way through increasingly grandiose expressions of horror at his new employers’ lack of taste and breeding -- though he’s even funnier when he’s trying desperately to suppress those reactions. Laughton’s heartfelt recitation of the Gettysburg address -- which, to be honest, sort of comes out of nowhere -- is credited for bringing Lincoln’s speech back from obscurity. Who knew?

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

A master thief and a lady pickpocket meet up in Venice and decide to fleece a lady Parisian tycoon, only to have the thief fall in love with her and develop qualms. I admit I hadn’t really grasped what “Pre-Code” meant in moviemaking until I saw this film. It’s fast, funny and frankly dirty -- dirty enough that it was disappeared by the studios for more than three decades. The actors are obviously having a great time -- particularly the feline Herbert Marshall -- and you will too.

#movies

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