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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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Top 20 Animated Episodes of 2020 Part 1 (#20-#11)

Hello Hello Hello animation fans! And welcome to something i’ve wanted to since last year. See I had the idea for a best episodes list back in 2019: rather than do a best shows list, which would be only about half of 20+ shows anyway, I thought i’d do a best episode lists: to give as many shows a possiblitiy to shine as possible while still honoring the best of the year. But my own natural foibles got the better of me: I INSISSITED on watching everything I missed.. then just kept putting THAT off until it was was spring, shows were coming back and I just threw up my hands. I’ve regretted it ever since and vowed, especially since in the interim animation went from just being something I analyized for fun to my analyzing it for fun AND profit, to get it done this year. So I had to make a few caveats. First I gave myself at first till the 31st of the year and then due to covid and everything that happened, until the end of the first week or so of the year, i.e. today, to watch as much as I could. So several shows are missing. Some I REALLY got behind on and don’t have an excuse for (Craig of the Creek and Big City Greens), others I also really liked but my depression made it really hard to watch (F is for Family and very nearly Bojack), some I just kept putting off ever starting or forgot to start entirely (Hilda, yes even since season 1, Kipo: Age of the Wonderbeasts and It’s Pony) and some.. I gave up because as you can tell I sit on shows way too often (Ilve action wise I still need to get back to Doom Patrol), and I realized i’d rather watch stuff old and new I care about than waste time with something that I just stopped liking, i.e. Rick and Morty and Big Mouth which i’m guaranteed some flack for saying but I dont’ care. I have my reasons, and while I originally GAVE those reasons I decided to leave them out: this list is not about me bitching about why I quit certain shows. I’m a grown ass man, I can quit a show anytime, and given last year was such a craphole, I think we could use less piss and vinegar and more sugar. So before we begin, a bit about the state of animation last year: It was in flux. WIth a new decade dawning we got great new shows like Owl House, Close Enough, which in a year full of terrible suprises not only FINALLY got released but did so with a second season order, Solar Opposities, the Midnight Gospel and Kipo: Age of Wonderbeasts. Ducktales returned for it’s best season ever. Amphibia returned for a pretty good season. Disney brought back the wonderful mickey mouse shorts towards the end of the year, FINALLY given D+ some non-movie animated content. The Casagrandes got better as it went and just barely didn’t make this list and the Loud House kept on trucking and shows no signs of stopping with a season renewal and a movie coming out. And Adventure Time staged a comeback a few years after it died and while I haven’t seen BMO yet, Obsidian was fantastic and only barely didn’t make the list.

Not only that but we got great new series announced for the next two years: Lumberjanes is FINALLY getting adapted and by Noelle Stevenson herself. Gendy Tarkovsky is not only returning to children’s animation but with a wonderously weird concept about immortal unicorns turned into teens> There’s a promising show about a ghost and a plucky tween coming this summer. The Rise of the TMNT movie is still happening. Craig McCracken is also coming back. But naturally given this was 2020 the news wasn’t all good as we said goodbye to a lot of shows.. and this was after 2019 already took several from us, OK KO still being the hardest loss to this day and Star Vs very disapointing finale still leaving a bad taste in my mouth: Most gutpunchingly, the two frontrunners of animation at the time, shows that truly changed the game and probably gave other shows a chance at life they never would’ve had, including some on this list, ended.

Steven Universe took it’s final bow after we got one last trip to beach city with the Future miniseries, with the show ending gracefully and beautifully, and having pulled off it’s third succesive possible ending for the franchise and it’s defntive ending for steven’s story. Bojack did the same not long before, ending on a bittersweet but beautiful note and with a one two punch of the series best episode and i’ts second best episode, a satsifying but bittersweet finale we’ll get to. Both shows as I said have set hte standards and tones for most animation after them, and both’s absence is felt. She Ra suprisingly ended, though with a beautiful and wonderful finale we’ll, again, get to, and on i’ts own terms, but given it was the most likely to take up the shield from steven, it was another punch. Less peacefully was the ending of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a show I caught up on after it’s demise which was screwed by the network over toy sales because that’s.. still.. a thing.

There is a light of hope, as the movie is somehow still in production and if it does well we may get season 3, but it’s dim and given the show, despite it’s flaws, had found itself and the finale, which they were given weeks to put together, was spectacular and, say it with me now “we’ll get to that”, I really hope it does. And that nick learns how to run an animation company for fuck’s sake.

Infnity Train while not dead, is on life support despite having it’s best season in season 2 and an okay season that still tackeled racisim very well even if story wise the season faltered, at a time when we REALLY need to tackle racisim in our entertaiment period. Venture Bros meanwihle was just flat out canceled for no given reason despite both having as eason renewal order and you know, being Adult Swim’s highest rated and best show for over a decade. Like Infinity Train and Rise there’s a SCRAP of hope, both adult swim and hbo max are apparently looking into ways to bring it back so a finale movie or a season 6 comic are propable, but given the show ended on two big cliffhangers, and given 2020 already had pushed back a LOT of things I’d looked forward to for good reason, and had now just outright killed a show, it was a massive shattering blow and easily the biggest of the year. But coming VERY close was finding out Ducktales was ending. While the finale would serve as a proper finale, I feel the show easily could’ve had more seasons.. Disney just dosen’t let shows go on forever, or sometimes not even for a reasonable amount.. or put those shows it didn’t let go on a resonable amount on Disney Plus.. and I will be bringing that last part up until Wonder Over Yonder is FINALLY put on the platform, along with MANy other shows. Figure it out. But yeah that was ANOTHER show I thought would lead the way and like Gravity Falls lead to Ducktales, Ducktales will probably lead to more shows including HOPEFULLY a frank and matt lead Darkwing Duck.. and even that’s in jeapordy since instead it might be done by Seth Rogan’s company who while not bad people and if their working on Frakn’s reboot great.. are not the people who spent three seasons setitng up a reboot in a unvierse they already spent three seasons deftly crafting. I DOUBT Frank won’t be involved since Let’s Get Dangerous was promoted to hell and back, but again given this is disney.. it worries me and I won’t be settled on this till we get conformation of a proper reboot with frank and matt at the helm.

Point is it was a rough year for animatoin even without covid taken into account pushing back seasons and forcing a change in work habits. But as this list attests even in the worst year in recenet memory, here’s hoping 2021 dosen’t say hold my beer, there was some damn fine animation, including some of the best i’ve ever seen and the shows that did leave or are getting ready to gave us one hell of a show. Before we get started one last bit of buisness for transparency: As I said i missed some shows and others I did watch but given despite this list’s sheer size it was still VERY tight, for the record each show got four nominees a piece, and some had even more episodes considered before widdling it down, and even at the 40 episode mark there were some tough cuts and by the end it was brutal. So here’s the show’s considered.

Shows Watched: Steven Universe Future, Infinity Train, Close Enough, She Ra, Ducktales, Amphibia, The Loud House, The Casagrandes, Rise of the TMNT, Animaniacs, Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, Adventure Time: Distant Lands, Solar Opposites, Bojack Horseman, The Owl House, The Midnight Gospel Shows That Did Not Make the Final List: The Loud House, The Casagrandes, Animaniacs, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, Adventure Time: Distant Lands, and Solar Opposites. Final note: all episode’s i’ve done reviews of at the time of this list will have links in the title to said reviews in case your curious So with that in mind , here’s my top 20 list, part 1.. becasue these posts are going to be long as hell so I needed to split up gang. On with the show after the cut as this is a really damn long one

20. Fragments (Steven Universe Future) “I bow to your strength.. my Diamond” Steven Unvierse’s final act was a masterstroke. The show ended with every major conflict resolved as the Diamonds decided , if only for Steven’s sake at first, to change their ways and helped him restore the corrupted gems, while Lars made it home. Our heroes were FINALLY, after seasons and almost two in-story years, as Steven “Finally Done, Finally Us, Finally Me”, the last part being especially pogniant since, while done thanks to a horrifying action on whites part, his breif seperation PROVED there was nothing of rose left; She’s gone. So Future uses this cleverly: With the conlfict of the movie resolved things were still very nice.. but eventually Steven started breaking down piece by piece: As the series went on it became clear what it was: A deconstuction of some of the less healthy part of the mostly fairly healthy and wonderful main show. It showed just what happen when someone whose put his identity into having some kind of destiny, someone whose felt their purpose in life is to make other people’s better and solve their problems and be a good person.. has no issues to solve. Oh sure there’s an antagonist here and there and Jasper refuses to change or admit no third great gem war is coming and that peace really has come.. but his family are finally happy with who they are, and are moving on with their lives. As someone whose had people move on without them and whose clunt to people this hits close to home.. hits close to home a lot.

So as the season went on Steven clung to everything, taking it VERY badly when Lars and Sadie not only revealed their attempt at a relationship failed after years of build up, and never told steven because they thought it wasn’t his buisness, which is true to a point as them breaking up isn’t anything to do with him but someone should’ve told him it was amicable given the amount of shit he’s seen between you two, just saying. But it still meant a good chunk of his friends leaving town, and him, behind. Attempts to fillt his gap with tv watching or gardneing, aka what the crew amazingly dubbed “Depression Hobbies:”, a term that hits close to home, failed and then a far WORSE attempt to fill the void in his life by proposing to connie failed.. she turned him down firmly, but gently recognizing this was a terrible idea, they were too young, and he was clearly going through some stuff. As garnet put it “Your partner is your compliment, not your missing piece”. Another beautiful term to stick in my brain.

So as if this wasn’t bad enough his body started mutatating and it turned out the pink form he’d gained was actually supposed to just be his body’s version of adrenline, but since he’d spent years in constnat struggle, his body was treating his emotinal stress like do or die situations with predictable results. We’ll get to that more in a bit but needless to say steven’s family were concerned and Greg returned from managing Sadie to TRY and help his son.. only to drive a wedge between them as Greg’s Smothering Parents seemed like the life Steven never had, instead of obnoxious people who refused to reconcile with their son even decades later despite plenty of effort on greg’s end and Greg having to raise a child alone with only marginal support from the gems at best at first. But Greg’s tragic inablity to see his son was hurting, as with everyone elses lead to him nearly getting them hurt in a car accident and thus this episode. After getting chewed out by the gems, who tragically simply don’t realize what’s wrong with steven, can’t figure out why themselves and he refuses to tell them, Steven runs off, to the one person who would never tell the gems where he is and the last place they’d expect him to go at his lowest: Jasper. And thus we get one of the darkest and moodiest episodes of the show’s long history.

After having lost a lot of his sense of peace of mind: his best friends are gone, his girlfriend is next, his parents and sister are constantly busy, there’s no one for him to turn to. Steven NEEDS someone like him and while his family is trying they just don’t know how to reach him and deep down he dosen’t WANT them to. Like me at times, shocker I know, he fears deeply that if they knew some of the flaws about him, some of the problems he’s had, they’d hate him. When as time would bear out for both of us, as my first stint of therapy near the end of colllege proved, it just means they understand you better and can HELP YOU.

So instead he turns to Jasper, and he does so for good reason: He wants to control his power and emotions.. the problem is Jasper dosen’t WANT what Steven wants. Steven wants to feel godo again and feel healthy and be the person people want him to be. Jasper.. wants a fight. She wants a diamond, someone to serve, someone stronger than her who will LET her be what she feels she’s meant to be: a warrior, a destroyer, a breaker of worlds. So she slams that steven shaped peg into a round hole, and it’s horrifying and uncomfortable to see our hero turned from a loveable hero.. to a power obssed, almost vegeta-esque asshole .. in short she’s made him into the very thing he spent years fighting against, all because he’s so scared of himself he can’t face himself. It shows just how bad things have gotten: that steven’s hates himself SO MUCH, that he’d rather become something worse than face the truth and let his family help him. So convinced they don’t need him that he needs to be something ELSE.

And so tons of training, abuse and hard labor lead to the moment Jasper and fans had been waiting for: a rematch between the two. And.. it’s easily one of the series best fights. For a series that’s at it’s core about ending the cycle of violence and often big exchanges of words and someone emotinally healing are treated as big as victories in combat.. the show has some of the best fight scenes in cartoons period, and this being the penultimate one, we’ll get to the last one next time, it’s a brutal, dbz style slugfest, something unlike the other fights in the show, with two opponents full of rage and hate going at it with everything they have.. ending in Steven, for one breif terrifying moment having BECOME what his grandmothers and mother used to be: A sadstic monster drunk on their own power “Your right jasper, I WAS holding back”

But when we next see Steven, running into the house and ingoring his rightfully concerned family..... he’s not that guy anymore. He’s back to who he was at the start of the episode: A scared teenager who deeply hates himself and who wants to be better but is ironically shutting out the only people who can help him. And one.. whose committed murder. This was a VERY bold move to make: Steven KILLED SOMEONE. Sure it was shattering so it got past censors, but in his lowest moment.. steven did the one thing that to someone who treasures all life, is anthemia to him: he killed, did what his mother did before she changed, did what his aunts have done countless times to countless worlds. And it horrifes him, with him desperate to bring jasper back and using everything he has, his powers and his aunts essences, to try and fix his mistake. And unlike anyone else in his postion he succeeds.. and Jasper, ignoring steven’s attempts to apologize is surprised at first at being shattered, knowing what happened.. befor bowing proudly, FINALLY getting what she was REALLY after: A diamond to serve. And steven can only gaze in horror at what he’d become and at the realization he can’t go back from this and he has no idea what to do now. An utterly grippling, utterly terrifying character piece with some of Zach Callistons best character work in the show’s storied history, with Steven shifting from being drunk on his power to utterly broken at having broken jasper. One of the series finest moments.. only topped by some things the series proper did.. and some more on this list.

19. Perils of Peekablue (She Ra and the Princesses of Power)

“They are my people. Which means most of them have sworn revenge against me at some point “ She Ra was easily one of the best shows of the 2010′s. While it started out excellent, and pretty gay, it ended being a masterpiece, and fabulously gay, as is befitting something related to He Man in some way.

A masterful space opera, She Ra had some great bones in a thrilling love story, great humor, great action and wonderful characters most of them main and supporting going through some form of development. It was a wonderful, magical show and I look forward to Noelle giving Lumberjanes the series treatment, both because the series concept is frankly better built for an ongoing tv series than a monthly comic, and because after this series she has my utmost faith in whatever she does. Also her story about how she both came to terms with her sexuality and met her partner was VERY lovely. Seriously check it out. Also her partner was the one who co wrote another entry on this list, just a fun fact. Point is this show was awesome. But as I said part of the show’s strength was it’s character and that shines on this day in the limelight episode covering what’s going with the rebellion since She Ra shot off into space to rescue her best friend. We do get to see the best friends squad breifly, but their simply heading home: With Catra rescued and on the path to being a better person, and firmly in adora’s lap because again this show is wonderously gay and because it annoys her and Catra gets off on that, our heroes are wondering how everyone else is fairing. So we see that, as with the Rebellion not doing so good against Horde Prime, our heroes seek the solution to their problems with the same solution homer simpson always uses:

Well okay less starting a new life and more getting the help of the mysterious prince peekablue, who I now realize is where the whole pikablue name for merril probbaly came from.. or maybe nerds making things up in the 90′s werne’t that creative. You decide!

So we get the ragtag team of Mermista, Seahawk, Scorpia and Perfuma, as the quartet try to bluff their way to the prince for help. Naturally we get Seahawk being seahawk, i.e. an awesome ham with a voice way older than he looks, Mermista being annoyed by that and being forced to admit she tried out pyromania to see what it’s like, which naturally is the most romantic thing Seahawk’s heard in his whole life.. as well as some VERY charming ship tease between Scorpia and Perfuma as Scorpia enrouages her the two bond and Scorpia finally likes someone who both likes her back and isn’t so obssed with her sorta ex and tied up in her own issues a relationship is impossible. Look I was suprised she found someone else as everyone here, but i’m happys for her. She’s the nicest person on this show and is now dating the second nicest person on this show. It’s nice okay. 2020 didn’t give me much nice, it gave me the emotoinal equilvent of being constnatly stung by hornets.

We also get a lovely musical number from Scorpia about being a spy.. and the revelation Peekablue.. is just Double Trouble. THEIR BACK BABY. It was nice for them to make a comeback for one last apperance and they do provid vallid information.. but prove to not be too useful despite this both due to their habit of being only out for themselves, hence setting up an elaborate cabaret act under the ocean.. and because Mermista got chipped by the crowd, so now our heroes are stuck in a giant coffin surronded by the thing she can manipulate. It’s only through a harrowing sacrifice by scorpia that Perfuma and Seahawk escape but with their sorta partners now brainwahsed to the other side. To amp up the tension back home.. things are even worse as Spinerlla, whose been brainwashed for several episodes and seriously worrying her wife Netossa... has made her move and with the rest of the rebellion’s leadership gone, chipped everyone but Frosta and King Micah, who dosen’t last long, meaning not only do our two remaning heroes BARELY escape, but the horde now has, between both plot lines, four really heavy hitters, as later episodes would bear out that Spinerlla is basically the red tornado when it comes to wind powers. Point is perils is a fun, breather episode... that then turns into a still fun but also heartbreaking episode as our heroes loose and loose bad and their only hope is in our ohter heroes making it back to htem in one piece.

18. 100% No Stress Day (Close Enough) “Long story short I owe them three grand” Close Enough.. has not had the easiest existence. It was greenlit in 2017, used it’s pitch reel as the trailer meaning everyone thought it was MUCH farther along, was meant for TBS but got shelved because the show it was to be paired with, The Cops, was created by sexual predator Louis CK. And since he came up and h’es primarily responsible for this show getting shelved for so long... Louis CK is a bastard. He harassed women, literally and metaphorically waved his dick around to show his superiority, knew he could get away with it, and ACTED contrite when caught and rightfuly punished for it by loosing everything.. then has spent the last year or so TRYING to mount a come back, with the help of Dave Chapelle who I lost ALLLLL respect for in recent years, despite not having apologized or done anything that resembles him having actually learned his fucking lesson or tells me that, could he get away with it, he wouldn’t just do it again. I’m taking time out of this unrelated thing ot make sure he does not get ANY power back, as too often preadatory or abusive assholes get away with this and get right back to doing stuff, like say Doug Walker, who I only bring up to remind people he’s a bad person who enabled worst people and abused a lot of innocent critics, and let htem lovingly euologize a man he knew was a preadator in life without telling any of them about said behavior, which he coudl’ve done without outing the victim to the world against her wishes. Because as another episode we’ll get to next time briliantly put it

But now i’m done reminding people of assholes, I can get back to what’s really important: The fact this show is a goddamn miracle. Not only is it as good as I hoped, which let’s face it in this year it was just as likely the show would be the video equilvent of scabies, but it got RENEWED. Turns out it’s being delayed.. was a blessing in disguise as it sidestepped being part of a failed animation block, and instead go to be the first adult animated show on HBO Max with tons of promotion. And judging by the future lineup of adult animated programming.. it’s probably going to be the ONLY good one for a while as other offering includes the prince, about life with the royal family, and a show about a 12 year old whose constantlly going thorugh trauma because they apparently did not get the irony when watching moral orel and also skipped the entire third season. And possibly got some brain damage I dunno. Hopefully will lead to much better shows down the line and actually gets a second chance at life, and even if it clocks in at only two seasons, it’s still a damn miracle and I will acknolwedge it.

So yeah as I said the show is fantastic and was one of my faviorites this year. The show treads some familiar terroitory as it does use the formula from Quintel’s ��Regular Show”: Normal problems that spiral into bizzare chaos that still has it’s own effed up internal logic. The thing that honestly makes it BETTER in my opinon, is the passage of time. Quintel is no longer the brighted eyed fresh out of college and menial job guy he was: he’s married with a kid, and that fully informed this project, as instead of being about doofing around in your 20′s, it’s about the pressures of hitting your 30′s: from aging to keeping your relationship fresh to all the perils that come with parenting, to missed opportunities you deeply regret. There’s a lot of good stuff they dig into here, but it never overdies the comedy, simply ads a bit of depth to it. And regular show wasn’t LACKING that by any means, i’m not bashing the show.. i’m just saying Close Enough is starting at the level Regular Show was at at it’s best.. and could easily and handily suprasss it with time it now has.

And I was first given a good and proper introduction via this episode, as it leaked beforehand due to a french animation festival and I couldn’t help reviewing it, as i’d waited quite some time. But honestly while I like the first episode in the all in the show proper, quilty pleasures.. I feel this is a WAY better first episode and shoudl’ve been swapped with Quilty, as it introduces things even better and lets the whole cast shine, and thus is one of two close enough episodes on this list. The episode starts with Emily, the stable but stressed and anxious half our our main couple at the doctors office where we get a great barrage of jokes off the bat, from the laundry setting a blaze leading to one of the series best lines

Naturally this has lead to her body constnatly sleep fighting .. while she’s awake, so Josh, her husband and loveable doofus, offers to take care of errands so she dosen’t implode from the stress. This also displays one of the series best assets: While Josh and Emily are an optimistic and impulsive idiot and a stressed out, often voice of reason.. they actually LOVE each other. It’s like a far more healthy of early seasons homer and marge, where BOTH get in over their head but both clearly love and respect each other, and while Josh CAN be irresponsible.. he still holds down a decent job (Though Emily is more of the breadwinner and her job provides the insurance), is attentive to their daughter candace, and WANTS to be repsonsible. Trust me after countless dom coms where i’ve had to restrain from yelling “GET A DIVORCE” at the screen, it’s nice the tide is turning and Bob’s Burgers has become more of the norm couple wise than the exception. But yeah so the main group splits up: Josh takes candace and his best friend and local weirdo played by Jason Mantzokus every series needs, and easily my favoirite character, Alex to do errands while Bridgette, Alex’s ex husband, Emily’s best friend and both the bbay of the bunch and the most irresponsible one.. gets her high to help her relax.

Both plots are really great: The boys and candace run into a ham shortage, a joke that actually plays better in the pandemic age, and stripper clowns because in the series best gag so far, Alex explains via flashback he bet them they couldn’t make a dog, and one did so.. using his dick.

Just in case you were wondering if JG was enjoying the fact he could use adult humor now, though another part of the series charm is while it freely makes more adult jokes, it dosen’t ever get into gross or dudebro territory. It just means the censors are down and they don’t have to hide beer as soda anymore. They also have to tangle with some hamburgalers who are reselling the meat at rock bottom prices and creating the shortage.. and who deny being hamburgalers despite their tactics being backing up into houses with a large van and stealing hams. OUr heros avoid becmonig meat and naturally end up both in a car chase and then a bet for their lives in a game of Ladder World, josh’s latest game. Meanwhile Emily blazes it and we get a great getting high montage, as it shows BRidgette’s idea does genuinely help a bit.. until they run into Timothy, the teacher at cadance’s school who I hope gets an increased roll as he’s always a delight and this is his best apperance. Depsite the understandable awkwarndess and paranoia of running into your kids teacher while high, being an open minded guy Timothy offers them wine and then weed and even takes Emily punching him when her trip takes a bad turn, giving her a stern but fair “bitch use your words!” before the next seen has him helping her through her issues with some solid advice, allowing her to arrive in home just in time to save her husband and the cave goblin who lives in her house from clown strippers and meat gangsters.. which sounds like one hell of a gay porno. All in all a solid, always hilarous, always charming ep that shows the series off at it’s best.

17. How Santa Stole Christmas! (Ducktales)

“No, no.. Christmas is a SAD story?”

This is my third and hopefully FINAL time talking about this one, though given it has a high chance of showing up on the series best of list, probably not. Not that I mind, this is a VERY good episode, I just don’t have anytihing new left to say. It’s a heartwarming, fresh, engaging christmas special that uses the characters perfectly and for once actually strips down the cast effectively instead of making you wonder where everyone else is, while still giving everyone an apperance. It also has Webby giving Lena (And Violet) an adorable cheek smooch when delivering her parents and I will never not find that fucking precious. Plus it’s gay as hell with plenty of gay subtext between Scrooge and Santa, a sentence I never thought i’d say but i’m so glad i’ts my job to get to type things like that, and said kiss so that helps. But even besides that it’s just REALLY damn good. Again i’m leaving this short both because i’ve talked about this twice now, once when it came out as I do regularly for ducktales and again for my best christmas specials list, but it’s really that good and made it damn high on my bet christmas specials list and is only so low here.. because despite being a terrible year in every other respect we got some REALLY good episodes this year. So yeah this one’s a classic, I love it but i’m tired of talking about it till at least next december. Moving on.

16. Finale (E-Turtle Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shreddy or Not, Anatawa Hitorijanai, and Rise) Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles “Oh and Blue your leader now” As I mentioned in the intro. Rise of the TMNT was unjustly canceled this year and even worse got it’s season order chopped in half and was given just weeks to throw together a finale. So it’s remakrable that not only was the season pretty damn good, having the series usual problems of sometimes overdipping into the boys stupidity hence the episode where everyone but Raph keeps eating poison, but also had both great character arcs in Baron Draxum’s reformation and Splinter getting more and more fleshed out and more screne time, and great laughs. Seriously Clothes Don’t Make The Turtle, aka that episode where our heroes end up trapped in an 80′s dress up montage, BARELY didn’t make the list.

And as a longtime fan of the franchise I couldn’t be happier this fresh take, which I was aprhensive about at first because it looked like yet another dumbed down teen titans go ripoff, and given it was dumb to begin with... but instead was a fun action comedy with a lot of really unique and intresting ideas. And despite the rush to finish.. they delivered one hell of a finale and on the high chance season 3 dosen’t happen... it’s a hell of a note to go out on. First things first: yes i’m counting multi parters as one episode. Not more seralized shows like SU Future or Infinity Train, where events can flow in and out, but stories that are clearly one big story, in pieces like the old days. Since hour long episodes of shows are fair game, I felt it only fair that multi parters around the same length as an hourlong special be given the same treatment. Not that any hourlongs made it this year, sorry fans of Obsidian and “Let’s Get Dangerous”, though both are throughly EXCELLENT episodes this was just a tight list.

Okay good. So yeah the finale, split over four episodes, is an epic: taking plot threads from all season and series and weaving them into a well paced, emotoinal, finale. Like previous more serious episode the comedy’s downplayed.. but it doesen’t feel like an entirley diffrent show and works well, and the always great fluid animation was kicked up to 11 for this one. So to make a long story short: in this series shredder is a demonic set of armor, but came back wrong at the end of last season when the food clan revivied him, so while the clan now has him back, they can’t really use him. And current head Foot Recurit, a spunky foot recruit whose failed to rank up despite being tough and ambitious and worthy of it, is at a loss how to reviive her master. The turltes, naturally, end up accidently blundering into the solution as they head into Splinter’s head to find the info to beat Shredder. The show gives splinter easily one of , if not the best, backstories he’s ever had: While at the start the character was highly annoying, being a lazy asshole who didn’t train the boys and did nothing.. the show eventually give us valid reasons WHY he’s like this: he didn’t like being turned into a rat by big bad of season 1 Baron Draxum and thus has depresion over that, had quit fighting since he’d been forced to be a cage fighter by his ex for a while, his ex being a giant spider just in case you thought this would be remotely normal an forgot what show we were talking about and genrally just had no horse in the tight training he usually does in most continuties.

This episode adds another, heartbreaking lair: We find out back when he was Hamato Yoshi, Splinter’s mom left to ward off shredder when he was a boy.. and thus never came back and presumibly died. Understandably he had no time for the clan at that point, constantly defying his grandfather.. and why should he have time for them? They took his mom away for a thankless duty sacrificing herself to stop something he had no way of knowing was real, another reason he never trained the boys. And his grandfather rather than be AT all apologetic clearly, via his actions, thought of this as some great honor and was baffled why Yoshi would have no intrest in repeating his mother’s actions or have any sense of honor, duty or even love for a man who as far as he could tell, threw his mom to the wolves and had no regrets about it. So we see Yoshi as both a rebellious teen and as a movie star throwing out his grandpa.. we see those in reverse of course, but the later scenes give context to those showing why Yoshi was so rude.. because he lost his mom and it still hurts him. HOwever helping her frees the shredder.. but also Karai who bizarely, in this continuity is not only an aincent ancestor of theres but a firm ally instead of either a deadly enemy or a fremeny of sorts. Or Splinter’s dang daughter, one of 2012′s best plot elements.. that was then wasted by turning her into a snek for a while because that show really went off the rails. So it quickly turns from a heartwarming and awkard family reunion.. to our heroes and karai barely escaping with their lives as shredder demolishes the lair, and Draxum, now a good guy after a season’s worth of wonderful chracter development, and Splinter stay behind, with Draxum cleverly bluffing and pretending ot be evil again.. only to try and take out shredder.

Meanwhile we get this series take on “the turtles going to teh woods to retreat” as Raph beats himself up for being a bad leader and our heroes learn to tap into their hamato nimpo.. which basically means super magic ninja powers which allows them to bring back their classic weapons and enhances their magic, as it was never in teh weapons but in them all along. Also April gets Karai in her, phrasing, and a glowing boost to her bat. The result.. is one of the best fights of both the year and the franchise PERIOD, which is what got me to catch up to see the finale because I saw a fan video synching it up to “Spin and Burst”.. and while not a naruto fan.. that song is fucking awesome and that video showed off an utterly marvelous fight. See for yourself

youtube

Seriously I wasn’t kidding. I’ve been a fan of this franchise since 2003. This is one of the best sequences in it’s history with or without the added soundtrack: The fighting is fast, frentic, beautfully animated and cool to watch and perfectly combines the series humor, with our heroes giving out quips and callbacks at the right times, with it’s fast paced and wonderous action. It also shows how far our heroes have come: while PART of it is them having super mystic powers unlocked.. they both had to work to reach those powers, and spirtually rather than phsycially,in the third part, but each power is merly an upgraded versoin of their old weapon powers, ablities they’ve spent the entire series mastering, paticuarlly leo who went from BARELY being able to work his portals to using teleport spam here. While they did pull a power BOOST out of their ass, it would’ve meant nothing had they not been anymore skileld than when they started and it makes the fight feel rewarding and impactful. And it ends with the hamot clan as a whole, with new ally foot recurit aka cassandra jones ina great last minute reveal that they CLEARLY didn’t have time to build up better, and smoke that bitch. Also Leo’s leader now bye. It’s just a damn good finale and I dind’t even get into all the great character stuff, including the great payoff of Casey’s face turn after seeing just how much of a monster the man she always wanted to serve is, and how he’s hurting Splinter, who ACTUALLY cares about her well being despite being an enemy. It’s just good stuff that fits the franchise like a glove but iwth the series own unique stamp on it. Nuff said.

15. Toadcatcher (Amphibia) “Your not upset because you lost the fight, your upset because you lost your friend! Your upset that Anne stood up to you and things between you will never be the same again.” Amphibia was one of the first shows I covered reguarlly and along with Ducktales one of the most popular.. so yeah it’s weird it not only is low on the list, but this is the only represtintive. But this was a high volume year for quality and while the show had other standout episodes like gravity falls tribute “Wax Museum”, Marcy’s introduction “Marcy at the Gates” and noir patische “Little Frogtown”, as this list already shows it was a really tight race. It dosen’t help that while Season 2 isn’t terrible.. it’s a bit more uneven, and unlike season 1 it’s weaker stretches of episodes weren’t as easily covered, as instead of airing every weekday, it was a weekly release. Which I prefer, as it means they aren’t being dumped out en masse and are given room to breathe and the passage of time feels more warranted when it’s spread out over a few months intead of a few weeks. It just meant the weaker episodes stood out more and drained on me more.. but it also meant the stronger ones were all the more a breath of fresh air. And nowhere was this more apparent as teh worst episode of the season, and series, thus far, Quarallers Pass.. was paired with Toadcatcher, an utterly marvelous episode and followup to ironically the series best so far, Reunion.

This episode catches us up with Sasha, Anne’s former best friend who tried to kill her in a sword fight, one where the entirety of wartwood including her adopted grandpa was at sake and Sasha knew this and did not care. She then followed it up by letting go when Anne was depseratley holding on, with the help of her new family, to save Sashsa’s life.. and Sasha let go. I discussed the full implications in the review so I will avoid trigggering anyone, and I mean tha tin the medical sense anyone using it ironiclaly or to mock people using it as it’s intended can get fucked, but she clearly didn’t intend to make it, but Grime saved her and spirted her off. So we catch up with both licking their wounds from the ordeal: Sasha has decided to take the Jasper route of horrible coping mechanisms and is training constnatly, readily kiling dolls of the plantars but still unable to truly hurt Anne, burying her feelings over her guilt and her best friend rightfully turning on her and then trying to save her anyway despite Sasha trying to gut her. Grime.. is binging on the wonderfully terrible teen soap Supscion Island, coming back this january on the cw, that was intorduced last season and generally not carring the king has his best men, women and nonbinary folks out for his head.

So both issues come to a head as General Yuaan, scourge of the Sand Wars, defeater of Ragnar the Wretched, and the youngest newt to ever achieve the rank of general in the great Newtopian Army, and she’ll never miss a chance to say that, has come for Grime whose in no condition and has no will to fight back. He also finally confronts Sasha when she snaps at him for it, pointing out she’s simply burying the fact that she lost Anne, things won’t be the same, and she won’t deal with it. The episode adds real depth to grime, going from an intresting but semeingly just evil overlord.. to someone who worked his way out of a fighting pit to be given a thankfless if cushy job by the same people who threw him in in the first place, someone who to my shock at the time.. CARES about his protege. While allowing Sasha in was simply to their mutual advantage at first.. he’s grown to genuinely care about her as his friend and offers to let Yuaan have him so she can be free. but Sasha refuses. Despite her issues.. she CARES about the old toad and together, and using Yaan’s ham against her, they beat her, and decide to rebuild their army... after Grime finishes his soaps of course. Can.. relate. A thorughly good, throughly emotinally episode that dosen’t lack the series humor but does have a depth and rhthym to it that the series has at i’ts best.

14. Quack Pack! (Ducktales) Jesus I was so tired when making this I nearly forgot an entry. And shame on me as this was one of the best episodes of an already amazing Season. Season 3 is easily ducktales best and i’ve been proud to cover it. It’s been my most popular feature and while not every episodes been GREAT, only one’s really not been very good, and none have been out and out bad. While it may be the end of the shows run and not without problems, they still have trouble ballancing the adults at times if not nearly as bad as before, to the point Launchpad just sorta vanishes after Let’s Get Dangerous outside of the Christmas Specail that takes place before the season anyway, and Louie is often written VERY badly.. but i’ve talked about these things all season in my reviews.

Point is those faults are overwhelmed by the strengths; The character ballance is better, several side characters have gotten tons of payoff to their arcs and more development, and the main plot is easily the best in the series history: By having essentially one main plot with two focuses, before they merge at the halfway marker, it allows the season to be far more streamlined after the really messy way season 2′s plots were handled. It just shows the show at it’s best and has produced amazing episode after amazing episode and it was really hard to widdle it down to the ones that got selected here and even then one got left out.

But one boost I haven’t mentioned is their wilingness to take risk. While past seasons had flashback episodes and what not this one, in hindsight, has some of the more risky episodes of the series, ones you really COULDN’T do in seasons 1 and 2: a whole episode flashback to the twins, basically taking our present day kids out for the whole season, an hour long special focusing on what, to fans not familiar with darkwing duck, is simply a very engaging side character and his new sidekick.. and launchpad (The ducks aren’t OUT of the special, but they aren’t the focus and aren’t around for most of the climax). An episode with really dark emotional moments.. which isn’t unsuaul for a disney show, see next time, but for one so close to their chest it was a lot. They were settled in enough to take plenty of risks and it’s paid off. It’s not to community levels of experimentation, but it’s still nice, intresting breaks from the usual adventures.

And one of the best and boldest of these was Quack Pack. Taking our heroes and plopping them into a TGIF sitcom. Of which this plot not only happened TWICE this year, three times if you count the entirety of beef house, which I do so let’s call it three, but both cartoon examples are on this list. But both tackle it in diffrent and intresting ways so both got on here. IN this case.. during a stock plot about a family photo, complete with Donald having his Don Cheadle voice back, we get some great parodies of convetions of les.s. good sitcomes nad even some of the greats: there’s the constnat catcphrases (ranging from a sticomy version of Della’s “On the moon”, to Beakly’s “I’m not a spy.. which sh’es understandably inscnesed to find out is her catchphrase) ,and even the wacky neighbor with our lord and savior Goofy showing up in the roll, as a nice nod to the more sitcom side of the Disney Afternoon. We just get a lot of good gags.. until Huey becomes aware, starting to realize things are off, with his guidebook being empty and things just not adding up. We even get a great bit of him being forced to do a disney channel/that 70′s show dance transtion only to react with exesntial horror. Naturally, given their lives,a genie did it, Gene, played by Jaleel White in a pefect bit of casting. Having been imprisoned in his lamp since the 90′s. Gene’s a bit behind on how sticoms work, but was just granting a wish, Donald’s wish, which the family figures out by trigggiring a flashback, Goofy VERY MUCH included. where we find out it was, unsuprisngly Donald’s fault.. though in his defense, and in the best line of the episode, when confronted about wishing for a normal life “I wish for that 30 times a day. How was I supposed to know a lamp was under me this time?”

And we find out why and it’s heartbreaking: Donald just wants a normal family, where everyone’s safe and, most tellningly “No one gets lost.”. It’s the climax of a series long HATRED of going on these adventures. For everyone else it’s fun, thriling, good stuff.. to him.. it’s not only a reminder of what cost him 10 years with his sister and his adopted sons their mom for that time, but a reminder of a lot of pain and humilation. To him he just wants the normal life he used to have back, despite that not being an option and his kids to be safe and his sister not to leave again. Granted his refusal to undo the wish is selfish.. but i’ts understandable. And while the rest of them try to break the wish, and end up fighting the horrifying audience it’s GOOFY who gets donald to see all families are diffrent and that there is no normal: just what you make and enjoy. It makes donald realize that as hectic as his life is.. it’s his life, his family.. and maybe. it’s not so bad. After years of denying how much he used to love adventuering.. he realizes part of him stilld oes and no amount of turning against it will fix what he lost... he just has to enjoy NOW. It’s good solid character development for my favioriote member of the cast, and overall a fun, genre spoofing episode that pokes fun at the genre but reallyg ets how it works.

13. Growing Pains (Steven Universe Future)

“ What do I do? How do I move on from all the stuff I've been through? How do I live life if it always feels like I'm about to die?! “ So yeah big recap of steven’s emotional well being to get into future earlier, but rewinding a bit, this one takes place with our hero at a low point. Not “oh god I comitted murder what am I now oh god” low as we got to earlier and the series itself wold get to later, these lists make time warped and space bendeble, but still pretty damn bad. As mentioned before Steven tried proposing to connie, not helped by Ruby and Sapphire both being fully on board, as both are hopeless romantics seprate but when combined as a Garnet their shared braincell can get working properly and has settings other than “emotoinal pain, peppy (ruby), a bit distant but kind (Sapphire) and horny”. While it was as beautiful a propsal as you’d expect from Steven.. Connie gently rejected it since you know, he also wanted to be permafused and their not even legal marrying age left. He’s 17.. despite what this episode claims. She’s 15 or 16. They aren’t ready and she knew it not even ruling it out entirely, just saying “not now”. But as this episode bears out.. Steven really isn’t an emotinal state where he could properly process that way and after shooing her away, even though she WANTED to talk it over and genuiely make sure he was okay as she damn well knew this wasn’t easy on him, but also knew it’d probably be bad to press him while he was clearly in pain. So like everyone else she made the mistake of leaving. So Steven’s binging on junk food, and bemoaning the fact that even dogcopter is getting married.. also Dogcopter is gay. Given the show he’s a fictional character in, you THINK i’d of been less suprised but you’d be wrong. Point is steven isn’t dealing well and is going pink and with the gems gone for the weekend, and Greg unavaliable due to being busy as a manager, Steven is getting worse and his body is starting to warp. Thanfkully connie comes to check up on him and insits he see a doctor.. and since her mother’s a doctor and thankfully had a cancelation. Unthankfully it turns out, to Prianka’s understandable frustration.. Steven’s never been to a doctor. Which does make sense, Greg taking him in might’ve alreted authorties to his lack of schooling or his injuries from age 13 onward, plus he had no idea of knowing how his body would react to tests. That being said given by this point in the series Gems are well accepted and known around town and everyone loves and adores steven, Greg had no real excuse by this age especially after the second gem war. And that’s proven by the fact it turns out steven’s body has tons of internal scars which, due to him turning out to have a wolverine style healing factor, mean h’es alive and without brain damage, but still has plenty of internal scars. It’s a godo metaphor for his mental trauma: he came out of his various happenings ALIVE.. but not mentally okay and with PLENTY of ptsd. When Prianka asks him to list his traumas.. he dosen’t even get past season 1 before she’s understandably horrified, though she’s figured out exactly what’s causing his pink mode: as mentioned before his contstant life of danger and having the threat of a fight at any moment over his head for 2 solid years, maybe 3 given the third light game shows he still had a lot of work to do before the movie and future, and honestly still does at times during both, mean his flight or fight response has been shot so the adrenline charged pink form, meant to protect him from danger.. is triggering for EMOTIONAL pain and suffering.

Steven dosen’t take it well and keeps enlarging when pressed.. and accidently spills the beans about the proposal... and understandably, even if she was FULLY in the right can’t be around Connie: while she had every right to reject him, it dosen’t mean it hurts any less. Sometimes even when you do the absolute right thing.. it can still hurt to be on the receiving end of that. But Connie is still Connie, aka the most emotinally stable and mature person in the main cast very much including the sentient space rocks who are centuries older than her, so she called Greg who naturally dropped everything because his son needed him. It shows the genuine conflict, one, again that I’ve grappled with: Steven is so obssed with not boterhing those he loves, he fails to see they’ll help him when he needs it without a second thought. So Greg thankfully calms him down and taks over the failed proposal with no judgement or anything just support. Sadly things go downhill from here but it’s a good episode that turns the entire series on it’s head with some damn good character work.

12. Annhilation of Joy (The Midnight Gospel)

“Again? How Many times is this guy gonna die?” “Until he learns” The Midnight Gospel was a plesant suprise. Penndelton Ward’s return to animation after leaving Adventure Time, the show is a collberation between him and podcaster Duncan Trussel. It was a suprise both in how quickly it came together, and in how it’s real nature wasn’t properly expressed in the trailers: while the series does tell us the trippy adventures of Clancy, a 40 something “Spacecaster” who uses an illegal simulator to visit worlds to interview various people.. said interviews are expercts from Trusseul’s own podcast, the Duncan Trussel Family Hour, something this series has badly made me want to listen to. As such while dealing with zombie apocalypses, a quest to avenge a dead lover, being processed as meat and meeting death herself while looking for his hose, Clancy interviews his subjects, including Death herself, and talks on various subjects related to medation and spirutality, throughly fascenating interviews greatly woven into trippy visuals. Hopefully the show will be back for round 2 at some point as both Ward and Trussel are game, but for now the first season stands on it’s own as a throughly trippy, throughly wonderful blend of Trussel’s words and insight and Ward’s boundless imagination. And the best of these, narrowly beating out the final epsiode which uses an interview with Truseel’s late mother to inform clancy’s own actions, as Clancy’s Mom is dying from cancer same as Trussels tragically did. But I like this one slightly better due to it’s great blend of the subject with the plot. Once again Clancy is ignoring his pain, and his sister’s calls, by diving into the space vagina of his simulator, taking a weird form, and easily my faviorite of his shapeshifted forms of the season: a living rainbow that wouldn’t be out of palce in a pbs kids show, complete with the fact he makes musuical chimes when touched not unlike a children’s toy and has chosen this form to enter the simulator’s jail. It’s there he gets engagled, literally, with Bob and Jason. Bob is an angry, upset prisoner who chewed his own tounge out years ago, and Jason is his soul bird, a represntation of his pain bound to him by blue rope that Clancy got tangled in. So Clancy is taken along for the ride with them as every time Bob dies, the celestial beings in charge of the prison put him through weird emtional torment, pluck out his heard and weigh it against a feather plucked from jason.

Thus while Clancy and Jason have a spirited conversation about Buddishm and about not treaing spirutality like a game with levels and having to earn progress but as an emotinal journey, Bob goes through a buddishm inspried journey of his own, mixed with a bit of edge of tommorow. He dies, gets tourtured then resets.. but slowly learns to empathize, to let go of his anger and violence and help those around him. It’s an utterly mesmering journey to watch this angry green big headed man go from a violet convict who will gladly shoot and stab.. to a pacfisit eager to help those around him. And it’s thorughly convincing and backed wonderfully by the interview and easily a sign of what this weird and unconveintonal series can do at all cyllnders. Seriously Netflix you’ve been on a loosing streak decisionmaking wise. Make. More. Of. This.

11. Save the Cat (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) "C'mon Catra. You're not done. Not yet..."

God that image is unsettling. Anywho back to She-Ra, and somehow this is the second time i’ve had to rewind the progress of a season by about an episoide. Weird. Point is saved the cat is one of the most tightly packed and thrilling episodes of the series.. and the crux of Catra’s character arc. Before this Catra had hit her lowest point, having lost ..j well everything. She pushed everyone from adora, to the nonambigiously a couple trio, to her own best friends away through her shitty behavior and inferoirty complex and somenoe she THOUGHT was her friend.. turned on her for money. Oh and as an added stomp on the tail all that betryal, all the blood spilled in her name.. was for nothing. Horde Prime made her irrelvant: she couldnt’ manipualte him because a combination of a god complex and an army of loyal drones meant he had nothing to hide and eyes everywhere. She had nothing. Eveyrthing she did every sacrifice she made every worse and worse turn she made a s a person... amounted to NOTHING. So it was at this point she and glimmer, despite you know killing Glimmer’s mother, were forced to work together.. and Catra sacrificed herself both to get Glimmer safe and because for once.. she wanted to do something right. Her self loathing, some of it warranted, a lot of it already there from an abusive childhood, left her with one option: sacrifice herself and HOPE, something good can come of it, Apologize to Adora, hte one person she ever loved and hope she can at least surivive this. Naturally, Adora having seen her friend/love of her life has not only REALIZED what she become, but sacrifice herself.. isn’t having this, and after an episode of repairs both on the ship and emotinally, our heroes are naturally, despite any personal hangups with her ready to save Catra. Naturally this hits snags. On Bow and Entrapta’s end, they accidently free a horde clone she mistakes for hordak and, having no other real option and with the guy being useful, Wrong Hordak is born! I love me some Wrong Hordak. What a guy, makes you cry, und I did.

The main issue though is Adora let herslef be captured.. only to find Horde Prime is a sadstic bastard and has not only chipped Catra, but is using her newfound peace of mind to play with adora’s head, using Catra’s heartbreak from the past to manipulate Adora in the present.. and force them to fight because hey he’s a sadistic jackass with a god complex. They make their own fun. But Adora gets through to her .. only for Prime to decide fuck it and try killing her with Adora BARELY saving her with her power, and Catra, as she fades, wondering why Adora even bothered. And the why is simple.. as a wise fictional version of a wise president once said “Dying is easy young man, living is harder”. Not the last time that quote will be relevant in this top 20 list, but the point, and it was delebrate on Noelle Stevenon’s part, was to subvert this kind of thing> The bad guy gets redemption but then dies seconds later. Instead.. Catra has to LIVE with what she did and make up for it, become a better person and work for redepmtion, instead of just getting to end in some big blaze of glory. But at the same time.. it’s the better route. The harder one sure.. but she gets to have a life and to undo the damage and maybe for once.. actually live instead of just trying to surivive. IT was the right call in a series full of them.

But yeah the day is saved, our heroes have two new roomates and Catra weakly greats Adora.. but with genuine warmth for the first time in .. years I guess? I don’t know this series time span. Point is the healing and the ship tease for our finale can begin and this episode is a tense, well put together masterwork. The pacing really is what put it up this far, as it really ratchets up the tension, and being the last season, meant there was no guarantee anyone, including catra, was going to make it. Excellent stuff all around.

So that’s where we leave off for now. i’ll be PUTTING PART 2 HERE WITH A LINK. once i’ts finished For now watch this space and..

#best of 2020 #2020 #best of list #Steven Universe #Steven Universe Future #She Ra and the Princesses of Power #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #save rottmnt #ducktales #amphibia #the midnight gospel

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cinemavariety · 4 years

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Cinema Variety’s Top Favorite Films of 2019

To quote Principal Duvall from the 2004 teen comedy classic Mean Girls: “I just wanted to say that you’re all winners, and that I couldn’t be happier the year is ending” 2019 was both a super difficult year personally, but even more so, I feel as if it was one of the weakest years for cinema in recent memory. Thankfully the last few months of the year have made up for it with a surplus of absolutely incredible cinematic experiences, many of which are reflected in this year’s rankings. I present to you my favorite films of 2019. Check out my rankings from previous years by checking out the links below:

Top Picks of 2018 List Top Picks of 2017 List Top Picks of 2016 List Top Picks of 2015 List Top Picks of 2014 List Top Picks of 2013 List

Honorable Mentions: Midsommar Uncut Gems Parasite 3 From Hell The Death and Life of John F. Donavan **THIS LIST IS IN ORDER AND CONTAINS SOME MILD SPOILERS**

#16 - Ready or Not Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

Ready or Not looked entertaining enough from the trailers, but it certainly wasn’t anything I was dying to go see. Especially in a movie theatre. However my brother convinced me to go with him and it ended up being one of the most consistently fun and entertaining theatrical experiences of 2019.

There were a lot of similar plot elements to the brilliant 2013 horror film - You’re Next (which by the way is one of my favorites). The plot is about a young girl, who grew up an orphan, marrying into an insanely wealthy family. The family has a tradition of playing a game on the wedding night, and she ends up choosing a game of hide and seek. Unbeknownst to the bride, the family is actually planning to hunt her down and murder her in order to perform some type of satanic ritual.

Horror comedies only work for me about half the time, but his film has enough graphic violence and intense situations to counterbalance all of the humor throughout. They complemented each other well and the result was a super funny and super bloody cat and mouse hunt of social classes.

#15 - Doctor Sleep Directed by Mike Flanagan

Helming the sequel to The Shining is no easy undertaking whatsoever. Kubrick’s arthouse horror masterpiece will forever remain not only one of my favorite of his films, but also as one of my favorite genre pieces in general. I was immediately relieved when I discovered that Mike Flanagan signed on to direct the adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel - Doctor Sleep.

I already knew beforehand that Doctor Sleep was more of a fantasy story than a direct horror, and also wasn’t one of the most popular of King’s works. The film ended up being a pretty epic fantasy thriller. Flanagan excels in creating his own universe while also honoring the source material, as well as paying homage to Kubrick’s film. However, it shines more when it does its own thing instead of trying to be nostalgia porn.

Most of the film worked for me, some of it didn’t. The recasting of Jack Torrance’s character left a slightly sour taste in my mouth. Ewan McGregor does a great job as the recovering Danny but it is really Rebecca Ferguson who steals the show with her villain character Rose the Hat.

Doctor Sleep proves that Flanagan has become one of the most consistent horror directors working in the industry. There’s always a pulse to be discovered in the foundations of his storytelling.

#14 - High Life Directed by Claire Denis

Claire Denis, one of the most polarizing French auteurs, debuted her first English language film in 2019 with High Life. I had the pleasure of seeing the film on a big screen, and even though I felt a little underwhelmed as an initial reaction to the finale, the film seemed to linger in my subconscious like a haunting unresolved dream. It held up even better on a re-watch, which you can view for free if you have Amazon Prime.

It’s definitely unlike any space film that I have ever seen. The premise surrounds a group of prisoners on death row who are sent to the farthest depths of space on a doomed voyage. All of the occupants are corralled by Juliette Binoche’s character, who plays some type of mad space scientist, is obsessed with collecting their semen in order to create new life in the abyss of the cosmos.

High Life is a slow burn, often minimalist film, which relies more heavily on atmosphere/score/visuals than it does on dialogue or forced plot elements. It’s bewilderingly nihilistic in how it depicts human behavior gone horribly awry. Robert Pattinson gives an understated performance and seems to provide the only glimmer of what seems to be hope by the end of the film.

#13 - Too Old to Die Young Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Too Old To Die Young finds the celebrated auteur, Nicolas Winding Refn, sharing his view of humanity and society at its most despicable. Hate seems to seep out of the cracks of every neon-soaked frame in the limited series. Amazon gave Refn free reigns in creating his phantasmagoria.

All of his usual motifs and creative decisions are employed in full force with Too Old To Die Young, sometimes to an almost unbearable degree unless you are a truth Refn aficionado. His long takes, infinitesimal silences between lines, neon lighting, synth score and characters belonging to a criminal underworld are all utilized to great affect within the series.

I won’t lie, I found it to be some of Refn’s most challenging work to date. There are so many aspects to be found within this series that went over my head, it is art that demands a re-watch. And while I believe that Refn’s sensibilities are best conveyed through a film medium, the limited series allows Refn to explore what he wants to convey like an artist adding layer upon layer of colors onto a blank palette.

#12 - Age Out Directed by A.J. Edwards

A.J. Edwards returned in 2019 with his sophomore directorial effort - Age Out (originally titled Friday’s Child). Edwards has served as one of many creatives who worked on the editing team of Terrence Malick’s films in the last decade. Malick’s influence on the director is quite noticeable. Edwards directed his first film in 2014, The Better Angels, which was a decent debut. Whereas The Better Angels oftentimes felt too close of a mimicry of Malick’s style, Age Out utilizes certain aspects of the style while also allowing Edwards to have his own authorial voice.

The film centers around a young man named Richie as he is about to “age out” of the foster care facility in which he was raised - a frightening reality for countless youth in America and around the world. Richie is left to navigate the difficulties of the adult world at a mere eighteen years old, without any family or parental figures to help him along the way. He makes friends with a seedy townie who revels in delinquency and causing ruckus. Also, there is a romantic subplot between Richie and a girl named Joan, portrayed tenderly by Imogen Poots. This relationship seems to be the only saving grace in Richie’s life. However, a turn of events soon reveal that Richie’s traumatic past has gotten the better of him and threatens to doom his entire future.

Edwards shoots the film in a boxed style with a 1.33 : 1 aspect ratio. This aids with the sense of claustrophobia and paranoia that invades Richie’s life. As aforementioned, many of Malick’s motifs are used here: a floating steadicam guiding the audience along, hushed dialogue, montages with classical music, and even some voice overs. However, this aesthetic isn’t heavy handed in any way. In fact, it’s a joy to see directors whose work can almost go into the Malick canon as the auteur has had such an influence on a lot of young, upcoming directors. Age Out is both a coming of age story and a cry of warning for unhealed trauma.

#11 - An Elephant Sitting Still Directed by Hu Bo

An Elephant Sitting Still now holds the spot as the longest running film that I have ever seen. It sits in at just under four hours, and it completely delivers without ever feeling like it drags on unnecessarily. The film technically premiered in 2018 and is considered a 2018 film among critic circles. However, the epic didn’t get a widespread distribution in the U.S. until this year, so I am overlooking this discrepancy. The film was marked with somewhat of a controversy after the director Hu Bo took his own life right after post production was completed. Hu Bo is an author turned director and An Elephant Sitting Still marks his first foray into cinema. It’s one of the best directorial debuts I have ever seen.

The film centers around four different characters during the span of a single day. All of these characters are marked with some sort of tragedy, and many of their stories intertwine in a synchronistic fashion. It reminded me of other masterpieces such an Inarittu’s Amores Perros or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. The film takes place in the industrial regions of Northern China, and the barren landscapes reflect an inner emptiness that emanates from all the characters.

There is a hollowness to these people as they navigate through life. An Elephant Sitting Still is nothing short of nihilistic. It’s an angry, desperate and hauntingly beautiful cry of pain from a director who was most certainly haunted by his own inner demons. It manages to be both an odyssey of human cruelty and a swan song from a young man who didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.

#10 - Joker Directed by Todd Phillips

“It’s getting crazier out there, isn’t it?” These are some of the first lines to be uttered in Todd Philip’s pitch-black satire on society. These lines are what best exemplify the themes that Philip’s was pushing: our society is profoundly sick, everything seems to be getting worse, we have no saviors in sight and hope isn’t always on the horizon. Just from these first utterances, it is clear that Philips is taking all of the political and socioeconomic turmoil of the last four years and has created a problem child that is Joker.

Joaquin Phoenix turns in one of his most disturbed and flawless performances yet - which is no surprise. However, I have yet to see him embody a character so genuinely as he did in The Master. But this isn’t Paul Thomas Anderson, this is Todd Phillips. And the fact that the comedy director even created this piece of art is something that still has me scratching my head. Subtlety is never at play in the film, and there are quite a few plot points that are a little too on-the-nose, even for me. However, all of the other elements redeem it and make this one of the best films of the year. The cinematography is pleasing for the eyes, and the menacing cello scores echoes an existential loneliness that I felt permeate my very being.

The last thirty minutes are exactly what I was hoping from this film. It’s a breath of fresh air to see Hollywood actually stick to creating a nihilistic film that doesn’t once try to water itself down.

#9 - Luce Directed by Julius Onah

Director Julius Onah decided to really step up his game with his latest film Luce. After the dumpster fire that was The Cloverfield Paradox (seriously, thanks for completely ruining what was becoming a dope anthology franchise), Onah has proven that he can be a master of his craft with the proper source material. In regards to the story being told, every element of the film works to its advantage: editing, performances, direction, and most importantly - the screenplay. It’s one of most well written screenplays I have come across in 2019. I immediately could tell from the dialogue that this movie must have been adapted from a stage play, and sure enough upon searching, I found out it was. Not all stage adaptations work, in fact I’d say more than half don’t end up being too effective, but this one stuck its landing and then more.

The story revolves around an overly concerned teacher who contacts Luce’s parents after he writes a paper that comes off as threatening. The paper in question seemed to hold a sentiment in which violence was called for in order to overcome colonialism. It’s important to note that Luce was a child soldier in his native country before being adopted by his parents - played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth who both gave stunning performances. The rest of the story is an investigation into who their son actually is, which eventually results in moral debates regarding race and identity.

Luce is also a film that effectively helps the audience empathize with the main character, while at the same time questioning whether his intentions are genuine, or a coy to hide something much darker. The truth isn’t always black and white, and this was my biggest takeaway from the movie.

#8 - Monos Directed by Alejandro Landes

Monos felt like a hybrid of elements inspired from great works such as Lord of the Flies, Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Apocalypse Now. This is only the third film to be directed by Alejandro Landes, however it looks and feels as if it was created by a seasoned veteran of the industry.

A group of children guerilla soldiers hold base on a mountaintop where they keep a hostage, watch over a prized cow, and act as a defensive force against an unbeknownst group of enemies. There is little to no exposition in the film. Landes drops the audience off right in the middle of the chaos.

We aren’t exactly sure what these children are risking their lives to fight for, or why they are doing it, but it goes to show the conditions in which they were raised for them to find normalcy in the violent lifestyle of a guerilla soldier. The landscapes are absolutely gorgeous, and there are even a few scenes where I questioned how they accomplished such shots/stunts with a low budget.

#7 - The Beach Bum Directed by Harmony Korine

The Beach Bum might not be the best film that Harmony Korine has directed (it’s certainly no Spring Breakers), but it is easily the most fun. It’s been almost seven long years since Korine’s last project, and I had been waiting in eager anticipation to see what he would do next. He was originally going to do a gangster crime drama called The Trap, which is what I was really hoping from Korine, but that fell through and he ended up making one of the best stoner comedies I have ever had the pleasure of watching.

The Beach Bum is probably Korine’s most accessible and audience-friendly film he’s ever done. I say that lightly though, because it still remains just as highly divisive as his other work. The plot is loose. It follows the misadventures and antics of Moondog, a washed up poet and complete burnout. He is soon sent to rehab for all of his illegal activities, in which he breaks out with the help of Zac Efron’s character, who might have just been my favorite character of the film. Korine seems to have a consistently solid knack to create dirty, seedy and absolutely enthralling characters.

I am really happy that he decided to keep a very similar visual aesthetic to his previous masterpiece, Spring Breakers. Benoit Debie, who is the king of neon lighting and discombobulating camerawork, does a masterful job at creating the textured and visual world of The Beach Bum. Hell, it’s probably one of the main reasons why I decided to see it twice on the big screen.

I’m not the biggest fan of comedies, mostly because I have a very bizarre sense of humor and find most of them to be completely hollow. But Korine’s darkly nihilistic sense of humor suits my sensibilities perfectly and I found myself laughing out loud at various points throughout The Beach Bum. It’s a fun, and even slightly endearing film at certain points thanks to the presence of Isla Fisher’s character as the wife. I look forward to whatever Korine decides to do next. At this point, who knows where he will decide to go with his career. I just hope I don’t have to wait another five plus years to see more of his work.

#6 - A Hidden Life Directed by Terrence Malick

Malick isn’t “back” - he never left. A Hidden Life isn’t a “return to form”. His form has always been there, it’s been evolving since The Tree of Life. In fact, the structure and flow of this film is extremely reminiscent of his past three films.

How far are you willing to walk the path of righteousness, even when the path is marred with pain and unanswered sufferings? How long are you able to cling to your faith when it feels like all hope is lost? How do you fight for what is good, when everyone around you is telling you to submit to forces of absolute evil? These are some of just many questions explored in Terrence Malick’s newest tour de force. As with many of Malick’s recent work, these aren’t questions that are necessarily outright answered during the film. They are instead questions of morality meant to be repeated throughout the story, almost like a mantra or an ode to pure faith.

A Hidden Life is Malick’s first return to chronological and narrative-driven filmmaking since The New World. It has garnered praise almost universally among critics, and is regarded as his best film in ten years since The Tree of Life. While I am in the few who don’t exactly agree that this is Malick’s best film in a decade, I might even dare say that it is among my least favorites of Malick’s recent output, I am still not denying the sublime mastery instilled in every single shot of this film.

A Hidden Life tells the noble true story of Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian conscientious objector, who refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II due to his religious beliefs and is eventually executed for it. He is decades later deemed a martyr by the Church - all the more telling as to why Malick decided to tackle this story. The heart of this story is told through letters that Franz and his wife Fani exchange throughout his period spent as a political prisoner. Fani seems to be one of the only people in Franz’s life who sticks by his side. No matter how soul crushing Franz’s decision is for Fani, she understands him well enough to know that death is a better option than spoiling your soul and humanity. “Better to suffer injustices than to do it,” as one character painfully states in the film. And while I wasn’t as emotionally wrecked as I thought I would be by this film, I instead feel inspired by Franz’s commitment to his innate goodness. The back and forth perspectives of Franz and Fani are well executed - we as an audience get reprieves from the dreary confines of a prison cell to the majestic grandeur of the Austrian mountainside. The mountains and surrounding nature are characters within themselves. Near the finale, as Franz is face to face with his mortality, his mind wanders back to riding his motorcycle through the village on a sunny day as the mountains loom in the background. These are the final desires of a doomed man, something as simple as having the freedom to go outside and feel the grass beneath his feet - to experience the wonders of nature that most people don’t think twice about.

As mentioned earlier, it is far from my favorite of Malick’s oeuvre, and is not without its slight misgivings. It was stated that this was Malick’s return to “narratively focused” filmmaking. But he still utilized his signature elliptical style, and for me these moods oftentimes clashed and kept me at a distance emotionally. I rarely say this with a Malick film, but more of a reliance on dialogue would have worked wonders for me. There are quite a few sequences in which Malick opted for montage instead of a more fleshed out scene, which I believe would have further added to the power of the story.

These are all slight issues, and I myself might be a harsher critic than most simply because I hold Malick to such a high standard. Once you can give yourself to the film, A Hidden Life becomes a true zen experience. It managed to instill a sense of serene presence within myself. I felt very grateful for the most basic and common details of my life and this world. Malick’s work can be such a sensorial rush, and making even mundane objects and rooms look absolutely gorgeous, that it’s as if “everything is shining” in my own life after seeing the film. I look forward to returning to The Church of Malick very soon.

#5 - Ad Astra Directed by James Gray

Ad Astra got a lot of unwarranted hate this year in my opinion. It truly is a shame because I believe that James Gray has struck gold once again. While I don’t adore it to the same degree as I did Gray’s previous feature, The Lost City of Z, Ad Astra succeeds in being one of the most understated space films made in the 21st century.

It’s not exactly a wholly original story, or a plot that is something that we haven’t seen before. It’s the way Gray goes about telling this story and exploring these themes that makes it so very special. It’s not forcing any overreaching philosophical or ethical message onto the viewer, it’s not overly complicated or overly long, and rather than trying to present completely senseless physical explanations to the audience, it just accepts the fiction aspect as “science fiction”.

Hoyte Van Hoytema is a brilliant Director of Photography and he crafts some of the most breathtaking space shots in recent memory. He really captures the breathtaking enormity of the cosmis abyss. The scenes that take place near Nepture during the finale are jaw dropping. We see two characters wrestling each other while suspended midair and the camera pulls out to reveal their absolutely terrifying ordeal while splashes of Neptune’s purple color emanates behind them. What I enjoyed most about the film is this sort of serene, zen atmosphere that Gray creates through the visuals, the score and Brad Pitt’s heartfelt but quietly somber voiceover.

Pitt portrays a lonely, broken and existentially conflicted astronaut. He finds the quiet infinitude of space to be a reprieve from the chaos of conflict happening down on Earth. He feels more at home among the stars than he does on the planet in which he was born. His perspective reminds me of the blue God from Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan, when he’s dwelling peacefully on Mars and laments his feelings toward Earth and all the people on it: “I am tired of Earth. These People. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.”

James Gray’s Ad Astra, much like his previous two films before this, detail the pains and tribulations of undaunted pioneers as they explore foreign territories. The final monologue of Pitt’s washed over me like a gentle breeze: “I will rely on those closest to me, and I will share their burders, as they share mine. I will live and love.”

#4 - Anima Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Interprative dance, experimental film, and visual albums are three of my absolutely favorite art forms. The real MVP of modern cinema, Paul Thomas Anderson, has collaborated with one of the real MVP’s of modern music, Thom Yorke, to create a fifteen minute long music video on the power of human connection.

Thom Yorke plays a sleepy commuter, a passive bystander, a human sheep, a functioning cog in some great machinery. He makes brief eye contact with a pretty woman on the train, and notices that she leaves behind a briefcase. The rest of the short details his efforts as he dodges through obstacle after obstacle trying to find the woman and return the briefcase to her. I couldn’t believe my eyes as Anderson concocts the innermost desires of being seen, understood, and loved. The results are strokes of flashing light projections on concrete walls, bodies undulating as they separate and conjoin simultaneously, giddy humans running through fog, and lovers meeting in the union of hearts.

The final section, Dawn Chorus, is one of the most gentle and blissful experiences I have ever witnessed, let alone one in a film distributed by Netflix. Paul Thomas Anderson and Thom Yorke’s project had me understanding why I fell in love with this medium in the first place.

#3 - 1917 Directed by Sam Mendes

1917 takes the spot as my favorite war film of the decade. Personally, I found it to be one of the best war films ever made in general. What director Sam Mendes and DOP Roger Deakins have created is nothing short of a miracle. It’s the first “single take” war film to ever be made, mainly because this is a feat that is far from easy to pull off. Mendes and Deakins shot the movie in extreme long takes, and spliced them all together to make the whole movie come off as a seamless single take. These tracking shots never leave the side of the characters, we are in their footsteps on the journey the entire time.

1917 has a pretty simple premise: two young British soldiers are given a near impossible mission to cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on over 1,500 soldiers - one of them being the brother of one of the two soldiers sent on the mission. The familial aspect contributes added emotional gravitas to the plot overall.

1917 is more of an experiential war film than it is a action or battle focused war film. It’s best to be seen in an IMAX because the sound design and the invasive tracking shots make you feel as if you are walking along these two soldiers as they face grave perils on their quest to deliver the message. I very much so enjoyed that they kept the plot small and intimate, without resorting to constant firepower to keep the audience engaged. That isn’t too say that the movie doesn’t have more than enough of its fair share of nail biting action sequences, and also plenty of gruesome shots depicting the carnage that World War I brought. These soldiers have to army crawl over rotting corpses, while rats and crows are seen pecking and chewing through the remains. The filmmaker doesn’t turn a blind eye to the horrors that war produced. To me, this is one of many reasons why I believe 1917 is superior to other popular recent war films such as Dunkirk. I don’t want my war films to be sanitized. War needs to be portrayed as it truly is - acts of complete inhumanity.

Dare I say that 1917 is Come and See for the 21st century. While Come and See is most definitely the superior film, there were echoes of the classic Soviet Union masterpiece that ring throughout 1917. Maybe it’s the expertly crafted tracking shots, maybe it’s the maddening use of sound design/editing, or maybe it’s the shell shocked expression that is engraved on one of the main characters faces near the finale.

1917 does an amazing job of being very loud, but also utilizing silence in certain scenes to great affect. The juxtaposition is most expertly crafted during one scene that involved flares popping off in the sky, lighting up the ruins of a city, as one the characters runs away from enemy fire. It’s an absolutely exhilarating scene. I ended up bawling by the end of the movie, mostly just because of all the pent up anxiety and distress I felt throughout. You don’t see many films that take place during World War I anymore. But 1917 shows it is not a time period to be forgotten about.

#2 - The Lighthouse Directed by Robert Eggers

I had been eagerly anticipating Robert Eggers’s follow-up film after he released The VVitch back in 2016. At first it was reported that he was going to be doing an adaptation of Nosferatu, which I still think would be a great story for Egger’s to adapt, especially after witnessing what he instead decided to make - The Lighthouse.

Shot gorgeously in black & white on gritty 16mm celluloid, the film looks like it comes from a completely different era (the dialogue as well). There were many shots that had a similar look to some of Bergman’s early work on the Faroe islands.

The Lighthouse has a fairly simple plot. Robert Pattinson plays Winslow who goes to work for a seasoned lighthouse keeper named Thomas who is played by Willem Dafoe. Winslow is new to being a wickie and Thomas takes him under his wing to show him the ropes. Thomas orders him about incessantly in a brute and abusive manner.

There is a minimalism to the plot, however all of the other elements are done so perfectly that the daily grueling routines of these wickies becomes nothing short of hypnotizing. The sound design and score ratchets up the harsh conditions of the island. Wind sounds like its constantly shrieking outside - a reminder of the unease that seems to be building to an overflow. The dialogue, diction, and accents are all completely authentic to the time period and setting that the story is taking place in. Eggers commitment is second to none when it come to detail and authenticity with aspects such as the character’s accents and inflections. A real case of cabin fever befalls the two men who both seem to become obsessed with the mystical light that emanates at the top of the light house.

While I really enjoyed The VVItch, I absolutely adored The Lighthouse and find it to be a much stronger work from Eggers. I think what I vibed with most about it is that the movie doesn’t feel the need to be confined to one particular genre. Whereas The VVitch was literally about a witch bringing misery to a Puritan family, it was constricted to be somewhat of a horror film. However, The Lighthouse manages to be many different tones: a fever dream surrealist film, an arthouse horror, a slapstick comedy, and a nautical retelling of many ancient sea myths. And all of these different tones worked together and bounced off each other in perfect harmony.

I found myself both laughing and completely repulsed by the images I was seeing - especially within the last act of the film which succeeded in shaking me up and making me feel both bewildered and slightly nauseated. It ends up being a gritty, dirty, and uncompromising journey into total psychosis. By the conclusion of the film, the audience comes to the same realization as the two characters - there really was enchantment in the light after all.

#1 - Waves Directed by Trey Edward Shults

Waves is an operatic cry for people to be better to one another. It is by far my favorite film of the year, and I truly believe it to be one of the finest films ever made. It earned itself a well deserved spot in my Top 25 Favorite Films of the Decade.

Trey Edward Shults started out his cinematic career on a strong note with Krisha. He delivered once again with his sophomore debut - It Comes at Night (even if I do find it to be easily the weakest of out the three he has directed). But for me, Waves is where Shults really experiments with his style to such a fine tuned degree that we find the director not calming down his vision or becoming more “grounded”, instead he expands upon his prowess with one of the most powerful family dramas I’ve ever seen.

Shults is another director who made my list this year who is somewhat of a protege of Terrence Malick. Shults worked as an intern for Malick on both The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time. It is quite clear the influence that Malick has on Shult’s vision. But Shults, even more-so than Edwards who also made my list this year, has taken Malick’s inspiration and created something wholly his own.

Shults has created an experiential rollercoaster of actions, consequences and the toxic fallout than can come from such actions. Waves is essentially two films in one. The first half is the energetic, chaotic and traumatic first half in its depiction of toxic masculinity taken too far, to the eventual accident that changes all of the characters lives. The camera is constantly floating in this portion, or shall I even say flying through the air and around the characters. The camera has no limits in what it can do and that along with the editing, and most noticeably the insanely perfect soundtrack/score, this portion ends up feeling like one prolonged anxiety attack.

The second half of the film switches character POVs masterfully. There’s a psychedelic shift of perspective from the brother’s eyes covered in flashing lights from the back of a police car to his little sister’s eyes in the back of their parent’s car (you have to have seen the film to completely understand what I am referring to of course). This second half of the film is where the camera slows down a little. This portion is more character focused and less interested in being flashy through its aesthetic. We get more dialogue, more character details, and a lot more tears in this half. It’s like a long cathartic release after experiencing an hour of trauma and abuse. It succeeds in tearing you apart, to only slowly piece you back together.

As mentioned previously, Shults’s soundtrack decisions were the cherry on top for me. Tame Impala, Animal Collective & Tyler the Creator are three of my favorite artists and their music is utilized perfectly within the story. What made this film so special to me, other than the fact it all takes place in the state in which I grew up in, was that no other film has better reminded me of my own humanity in years. This film makes me want to be a better brother, a better friend, a better son, and a better person in general. You never know when a single moment can shatter your entire world. In the end, it left me with a strong message that struck me to my core: appreciate what you have in life, and tread carefully.

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onestowatch · 5 years

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The Wombats' Matthew Murphy on Picasso, “Black Mirror,” and Solo Project, Love Fame Tragedy [Q&A]

After 17 years at the helm of the English indie rock band The Wombats, Matthew "Murph" Murphy decided it was time for a change. In a two year span, The Wombats toured with The Rolling Stones, Weezer and The Pixies, released their fourth studio album Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life and made sure to hit up all the spots on the festival circuit this summer. When he wasn't on the road, Murph was spending time in Los Angeles – ultimately moving there from London – and working on new material that didn't quite fit The Wombats' mold. He played a little of what he calls "contact list roulette," recruiting musical collaborators to work with him in the studio on some new songs. And that's where Love Fame Tragedy was born – the solo project sees Murphy exploring different musical avenues and creating an entirely new sound. "I just wanted to try something new," Murphy said in a statement. "Something that didn't involve any politics." He found inspiration for the name after visiting a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. "It triggered a lot of things," he said, "and a lot of songs flew out after that." Love Fame Tragedy finds Murphy joined by a cast of companions, including The Pixies' Joey Santiago, Alt-J's Gus Unger-Hamilton and former Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Chamberlain. The singles had been trickling out slowly all summer, but, at long last, we have the full EP.

I spoke with Murphy over the phone a few days before the EP dropped. We chatted about the project, as well as drawing inspiration from the likes of Picasso, moving to LA and Black Mirror. Get a look inside Murphy's solo project, Love Fame Tragedy, and make sure to check out his debut EP, I Don’t Want To Play The Victim, But I’m Really Good At It.

OTW: Let’s talk about the name “Love Fame Tragedy." I understand you saw a Picasso exhibit and were inspired by one of the paintings. What in particular inspired you?

MM: Whenever I have days off, I go to museums or try to get some inspiration in some form. I saw this Picasso exhibition and it was so hilariously dark because, you know, the whole premise behind “Love Fame Tragedy” is him painting his mistress out of town whilst his wife is in Paris and he’s in the countryside… it’s pretty dark shit. I was also looking for something that had, like, a looping kind of comic feeling, which I think “Love Fame Tragedy” does. I think [the paintings] are kind of linked, and one leads into another. I just liked it. Before I knew it, I’d completely ripped off a Picasso exhibition and that was the name of the band.

OTW: When I first saw the name, I couldn’t help but think of The Wombats’ debut, A Guide to Love, Loss, and Desperation. You certainly have a thing with threes.

MM: Yeah, I do. Well, three’s a very powerful number, apparently.

OTW: Both the sound and the music videos have been pretty experimental for this project. What was the songwriting process like?

MM: The songwriting process for me is the same as it’s always been. It’s just me trying to excite myself. For this project, I’m working with this one guy Tyler Cunningham. He lives in LA. He and I are doing the videos and doing all the artwork together. It’s exciting to be creating this long thread, which I’ve never really done on an album before. It’s always different directors for this, the label wants to do that, whereas this is very much streamlined. It just means I can be a bit more creative and clever with artwork, videos, and general content.

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OTW: LA is such a creative hub; almost everyone there is a transplant. What are some things you’ve gotten from immersing yourself in the city?

MM: LA’s been such a special place for me. I met my wife and had a baby there. The essence of collaboration that’s running through the water there is important. I’ve been inspired by that. That’s why I’ve had other people guest on this record, and I just feel 10-15 percent happier there. It’s a very New Age-y place, and that kind of rubs off on you. I just feel like happiness and sadness are really conducive to creativity, but happiness even more, so I’m really thankful for LA for providing me with that.

OTW: You mentioned all the different guests on the record. You’ve worked with some iconic names like Joey Santiago (The Pixies) and Matt Chamberlain (Pearl Jam). How did having all those different minds working together impact your thought process?

MM: It was all pretty chilled out. Me and Joey played golf beforehand; we kind of bonded on the Weezer/Pixies tour and I said, “Do you want to come to the studio?” And that’s what he did. There wasn’t too much overthinking. Collaborating with people and making new friends all the time is a much better existence than locking yourself in a room in London and writing for ten hours a day like I used to.

OTW: I loved how you let the songs trickle in slowly, kind of building the anticipation for the full EP. MM: I didn’t really decide to do it that way (laughs) I wanted to make a Love Fame Tragedy album, and all I’ve been doing is writing the songs, getting them recorded and being happy with them. But I am excited about the way it’s coming out. It’s exciting for me. There are going to be two EPs and then an extra handful of songs, which will all make one big, pretty long album at the end of it, next year. But it is fun doing EPs because you can treat everything like a mini album; everything’s got its own title, its own artwork. It’s kind of a cool way of doing it and a way I was happy to go along with. It just seems like a much more exciting way to do things.

OTW: You performed some of the new songs at the Reading Festival. What was that experience like? MM: It was horrendous! (laughs) Everything went wrong. It was a baptism of fire. It was kind of amazing that that happened because every show since then has been so great and so strong and exciting. I think we got all of the bad juju out. It wasn’t that bad a gig, I just had no guitar for the whole thing so it was just really weird. The other guys were great. We had the voice and we had the rest of the band. We just didn’t have my guitar, which was pretty interesting. But people seemed to like it.

OTW: I feel like sometimes happy accidents like that help you grow as a band.

MM: I think so. I mean, I’d met the guys way before that, but it was definitely a real bonding experience.

OTW: What do you hope your fans will get out of these live performances?

MM: Same reason I write music: I just like to make a connection with someone, and want them to feel something. That’s kind of all I do. There’s no dramatic or political statements or anything I’m massively pedaling. They’re just confessional songs and I hope they hit people the way some of them have hit me.

OTW: I think the subject matter in the songs resonates with a lot of people. Like in “My Cheating Heart,” I noticed themes of self-indulgence, materialism, temptation… love, fame AND tragedy all kind of combined into one explosion of a song. “Backflip” kind of reminded me of modern dating.

MM: “My Cheating Heart” is about a state of anxiety, really, and a lot of things that I felt when I first moved to Los Angeles and how I dealt with it… or didn’t deal with it. And “Backflip,” I guess, is about modern dating. I feel like that’s more so because of the video and the visuals and things.

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OTW: Very Black Mirror-ish.

MM: Yeah, it’s completely ripped off from “Metalhead!” I had the idea for all these shifting shapes, or whatever, which apparently is an idea people had a few years ago. I just said to the director, Watch ‘Metalhead’… can we just make it look like that?” I think we did a pretty good job.

OTW: Hey, Quentin Tarantino says he steals from every movie ever made, so don’t feel bad.

MM: (laughs) Oh no, I don’t feel bad!

OTW: What other themes do you think you’ll explore with this process?

MM: A lot of the songs are barking up the same tree I’ve always barked up. Problems with relationships… maybe relationships are like a metaphor for me having problems with the outside world? I don’t know. When I find them, I’ll be sure to explore them.

OTW: Before we go, who are your Ones to Watch?

MM: I really like Emily King. Me, my wife and daughter listen to her every morning. I think she’s pretty special.

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#matthew murphy #the wombats #interview #alternative #pop #indie rock #love fame tragedy #I don't want to play the victim but I'm really good at it

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curiosity-killed · 5 years

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sweet tooth

@apaladinagain I am. so sorry that this took 87 years (& also that it is The Cheesiest shit)

Word Count: 2247

28. knocking on the wrong door au

The knock comes at 3:31 PM. It’s the time of day when, normally, the light slants in his window at just the right angle to turn his computer screen to a perfect mirror no matter how high the brightness is and to give him a wicked headache even if he relents and puts on his reading glasses. Normally, the hour passes him by unless he’s checking it to calculate how long he has until 11:59 rolls around and he has to submit the assignment he’s trying to finish. Now, he mutters the time under his breath until it nearly loses meaning. These goddamn cookies are going to be edible. Opening the door, he finds a stranger standing there with their hands shoved deep in their pockets. He's not from the apartment building, because Shiro would recognize him. That jawline isn't exactly forgettable. "You're not Pidge," the stranger greets.

"Uh," Shiro says, "no? Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Pidge," the stranger says. "She gave me this address." He's squared his shoulders, dark eyebrows pinching together in the middle. The insistence with which he speaks makes Shiro a little uneasy, but he tries to temper it. Just because he doesn't recognize the stranger doesn't mean he's a bad guy. Shiro doesn't know all Pidge's friends, of course. "Sorry, she must've written it down wrong. If you tell me your name, I can let her know you came by," he offers. He's not about to tell the stranger which of the neighboring apartments is Pidge's. If he's being over-cautious, then the worst case scenario is that one of her friends will have to take an extra bus ride out here some other time. The stranger's shoulders slump, all the irritation and tension suddenly gone slack. He reaches a hand up to push back through his bangs, clearing them from his eyes and giving Shiro a better view of his face. If Shiro weren't worried about his intentions, the guy would be pretty – the kind Shiro would approach at a bar if he was feeling brave. "Shit," the stranger says on an exhale. "Sorry. I'm Keith. We're supposed to work on a paper for our ethics class. I can just message her." "Wait – Keith?" He knows that name. Pidge has talked about a Keith before – Lance, too. Shiro relaxes, his protectiveness easing like a sigh. The stranger eyes him a little warily, and Shiro hurries to get ahead of any misinterpretations his sudden relaxation might engender. "Katie just had to take care of something with her family, but she should be back in an hour or so," he says. "I'm Shiro – her brother Matt's roommate. If you don't want to bother with bussing back and forth again, you can hang out in our apartment till she gets back." Keith still holds himself a little tautly, turned so that he's almost in a defensive posture, and eyes Shiro a minute longer. Shiro does his best to look non-threatening. In athletic clothes and a flour-encrusted apron, he can't believe he looks that intimidating. "You don't mind?" Keith asks. "Nah, I'm just watching Lord of the Rings and making cookies," Shiro says. After another uncertain beat, Keith nods and relents. "Okay," he says. "Thanks." "No problem," Shiro says, stepping back to hold the door open and let Keith through. He's not as short as he looked slouching in front of the door; smaller than Shiro, sure, but probably still enough taller than Pidge to annoy her. Keith stops just inside the door, as if unsure where to go next, and he follows readily when Shiro leads the way into the kitchen. His laptop sits on the peninsula, Gimli frozen in mid axe swing on the screen. As Shiro goes around, tapping the space bar as he passes, to check on the cookies, Keith settles onto a stool. "Sorry, it's right in the middle," Shiro says once he's sure the cookies aren't scorched yet. In his periphery, Keith shrugs his shoulders. “I’ve never seen these anyway,” he says. Shiro straightens up fast enough to nearly knock his head into the open cupboard door; his hair still clips it. “You’ve never seen The Lord of the Rings?” he asks. Keith hunches his shoulders, tucking into himself, and Shiro mentally chastises himself as he hurries to soothe it over. “I don’t mean – sorry, I was just surprised,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like a bad thing.” He regrets opening his mouth with every word. “I mean, there are a ton of classics I’ve never seen,” he continues, wishing his mouth would just stop. “And they’re so long it’s definitely a commitment.” Keith’s tilted his head, watching Shiro with something like a smile pressing at his lips. Shiro closes his mouth, gives a sheepish smile, and turns to cleaning up the kitchen’s worth of dishes laying around on the counter with screaming and kill counts as background noise.

“The music’s cool,” Keith says when Shiro’s wrist-deep in sudsy water and Helm’s Deep is lost. “Yeah?” Shiro says, trying to remind himself how to respond in moderation. “Yeah,” Keith says. “One of my friends is really big into music. He’d like it.” Rinsing off the last bowl, Shiro shakes the soap bubbles from his hands before turning off the tap. “Howard Shore, that’s the composer, wrote a bunch of the themes before they’d even filmed,” he says. “And they like, grow and change with the characters so it’s really part of the story, too.” The water slows in a puddle halfway down the drain, and Shiro scowls at it, debating whether it’s better to turn on the disposal and drown out the movie or to let the water slowly drizzle down on its own. He’s never been good at waiting, but it seems rude to interrupt the show. “So is this like your favorite movie?” He looks up in surprise. Keith is watching him instead of the movie, and Shiro almost wants to pause it so that he doesn’t miss out but manages to hold back. Grabbing the towel off the rack over the sink, he sets to rubbing his hands dry instead. “Uh, not exactly. I always watched them with my grandma over winter holidays,” he explains, “so they’re kinda near-and-dear.” It had started with The Hobbit, back when he was so young it was hard to tell the story from his own dreams and imagination. She’d read it to him at night, lulling him to sleep with the cadence of her voice and the rhythm of the words. She’d always done her best to sing the songs from the book, making up the melody as she went. Even after he’d seen the movies, it was her voice to which the songs belonged. “So what’s your favorite then?” Keith pressed. He really was missing some of the best scenes, and Shiro focused on folding the towel in thirds and hanging it from the rack so the edges were even. It’s not like he hasn’t seen this movie a dozen times already, and if Keith isn’t interested, he’s not going to force him to watch. Even if it feels like a kind of blasphemy to talk over them. “Uh, Star Trek?” he offers. Keith wrinkles his nose, surprise a startled exhale as he smiles. It seems a reflexive reaction, as if he hardly has control over it. “Those cheesy old space movies?” he asks.

Shiro shrugs, grinning. He refuses to be sheepish about this. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, sure they’re silly and the special effects are, well, ancient, but it’s got a good message and it’s fun.” To his surprise, Keith doesn’t laugh at Shiro’s explanation. His smile softens, turns from something startled and laughing to something almost soft. It gives his whole face a different cast, like a flashlight traded for a candle, its light gentler as it traces over the sharp angles of his face. “Is that what made you join the Garrison?” Keith asks. This time, Shiro laughs. It’s not the first time he’s been asked, but usually it’s not within twenty minutes of meeting him. “Nah,” he says. “I was obsessed with space as a kid, so it was kind of the natural path. I got a kiddy space suit when I was like six.” A grin pulls up the edge of Keith’s lips, one-sided. Shiro leans his hip against the counter, folding his arms together loosely. “What about you?” he asks. “I’m guessing it wasn’t a movie.” “No,” Keith agrees, shaking his head. “Mom’s a pilot, and I grew up just like twenty minutes from the Garrison.” Shiro mentally runs through the pilots he knows, trying to place one who could be Keith’s mom. He gives up pretty quickly; there are just too many and no way of telling who could be it. “I didn’t know there were any towns that close,” he admits. The nearest one he knows is an hour away. It doesn’t totally surprise him that there could be some po-dunk little town out in the desert, but he is curious. Over the years, he’s covered a good bit of ground on his bike. “There aren’t,” Keith admits, rubbing the side of his neck. “We kinda lived in the middle of nowhere.” Intrigued, Shiro raises an eyebrow but resolves not to pry. A pilot and her kid living out in the middle of the desert alone is certainly not the strangest story to ever come out of the Garrison – but it does raise a few questions. Before he can ask, the oven timer squeals, and Shiro jolts hard enough to bash his elbow into the edge of the counter. Swallowing down a litany of profanity and blinking back some tears, he grabs the oven mitt from the counter and tugs out the baking sheet. The cookies, once he’s settled the sheet on top of the stove, don’t look terrible, exactly. They’re not quite the color he expected, and there are deep cracks running through the tops – but that just means they’re baked through, right? He can feel more than see Keith lean over to get a better look. “Are you making those for something?” he asks. His voice is carefully neutral. “No,” Shiro admits. “I just really wanted cookies.” Behind him, Keith breathes out a chuckle that sets Shiro to laughing, and, in minutes, they’re both laughing aloud. He’s braced his hand against the counter to keep from folding in half, shoulders shaking with it. When he can finally straighten up, it’s to find Keith biting his bottom lip, as if to contain the laughter still apparent in his eyes and grin. “They might be edible?” Shiro offers. Keith shrugs, tips of his teeth peeking out. “Only one way to find out,” he says. Shiro turns back to the cookies, eyeing them uncertainly. There’s a quiet thud as Keith drops down from his stool, and walks over to settle just to Shiro’s right side. Heat radiates off him, enough that Shiro skin pebbles up. He glances up to find Keith studying the cookies as if trying to find the least terrible one by sight alone. “You really don’t have to,” Shiro says. “I don’t want to make you sick before Pidge even gets here.” Keith shrugs, an easy roll of his shoulders. His focus has shifted back to a grin when he looks up, and there’s a glint of something like a challenge in his eyes. Oh no, Shiro thinks. He’s going to get me in so much trouble. Not that Shiro’s ever had a problem on his own – but usually one of his friends at least acts like something approaching impulse control. Keith’s look now has Shiro doubting there’s anyone who could stop him. “Nah, we’re in this together,” Keith says. “Come on, which one are you trying?” Wincing, Shiro finally selects the one with the most obvious chocolate chips. They have to drown out whatever other weird flavors and textures are happening. Keith plucks up one that’s still got weird little spikes and peaks sticking out of it, as if the dough didn’t settle at all after Shiro pulled it off the spoon. “Cheers,” Keith says, tapping their cookies together. They bite in at a same time. It’s…dense. Chewing takes longer than Shiro would have expected, and the bite sticks in his throat when he swallows. Aside from the chocolate, there isn’t much taste at all. He’s pretty sure the dough he swiped off the spoon had more flavor. Keith’s expression is neutral, almost thoughtful as he chews. There’s a long moment after they both swallow where they simply stand there in contemplation with ugly cookies in one hand each. “Honestly,” Keith says finally, “they’re better than my mom’s.” Shiro is pretty sure he shouldn’t admit that. At least not out loud. Keith takes another bite and crunches down through the rest of the cookie. Despite himself, Shiro finishes off his own cookie. “They’re better than last time,” he concedes. Last time, they hadn’t been edible. The only way to tell where the chocolate was by looking where the gaps in the charcoal were, like the chocolate had been vaporized. “Sorry we missed the movie,” Keith says, leaning against the counter to look over his shoulder at Saruman standing before his army. “It’s okay. I’ve seen it before,” Shiro says. Keith makes a noise like a hum, low in his throat. He looks back at Shiro, considering, before raising his eyebrows. “Wanna watch it again?”

#sheith #voltron ficlet #voltron fic #my writing #lakdjsh i am so sorry dude

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letterboxd · 5 years

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Leaking Secrets: The Gavin Hood Q&A.

“Does every person have to get to the end and succeed in overturning the evil empire? Life isn’t like that. Life is full of these small, difficult questions that cross our path.” Official Secrets director Gavin Hood on spies, lies and the scoop that made him feel like a journalist.

Keira Knightley yelling “It doesn’t make any sense!” at the television news is all of us, these days. The case for the invasion of Iraq, we now know, was based on non-existent weapons of mass destruction. There were many public servants who knew, even then, that the intelligence that was being gathered to make a case for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow was shockingly debatable.

Official Secrets, directed by Academy Award-winner Gavin Hood, tells the true story of one such public servant, Katharine Gun, a British intelligence specialist who worked as a Mandarin translator. In 2003, Gun leaked an NSA memo that sought Britain’s help to collect information that could be used to blackmail United Nations Security Council members into voting in favor of an invasion of Iraq.

As a spy tale, it’s not all cut-and-thrust action, foot-chases and explosions. The tension lies in Knightley’s performance as a furious and concerned Gun, wrestling with the decision to leak the memo, and in The Observer newsroom, where journalists (played by Matt Smith, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans) debate whether to publish it. Later, it turns courtroom drama, with Ralph Fiennes at the helm as Gun’s civil rights lawyer.

Some of the story’s details—as they often are in biopics—have been massaged for the big screen. In particular, a spell-check disaster by a young journalist on The Observer’s foreign desk is played out in front of a larger audience. And the film stops when the war starts, whereas Gun’s life continued to become more complex. Nevertheless, it’s rating well on Letterboxd for its taught and powerful portrayal of a small chapter in a huge and damaging political collusion.

South African director Gavin Hood won his Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 2005’s Tsotsi. He is best known for his work on blockbusters X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Ender’s Game, and helmed the political thrillers Rendition and Eye in the Sky. Hood worked on the script for Official Secrets with writers Gregory Bernstein and Sara Bernstein, who had been working on the story for over a decade when it appeared on The Blacklist (they share their story about the script’s development on The Blacklist blog).

We spoke with Gavin Hood in-depth about his role in bringing the political drama to life. (This interview with Hood contains spoilers for the film’s ending, but as it’s a true-life story, the details are all on public record, so proceed as appropriate.)

From left: former intelligence specialist Katharine Gun, director Gavin Hood and journalist Martin Bright. / Photo: Chris Ferenzi/National Press Club

What made you feel that now was the right time to tell Katharine Gun’s story? What compels this reflection on recent history? Gavin Hood: I’d like to give you an easy answer but part of it is that you struggle to get the film made—it’s been three years since we first started working on it. So, in some ways the timing felt right when I first heard about Katharine Gun, and then you think ‘oh my goodness, is the landscape going to change? Is politics going to change?’ and of course it hasn’t. If anything it feels more timely in this strange post-truth world.

It might sound odd to say that, but at the time [US president George W.] Bush and [UK prime minister Tony] Blair were spinning their lies for what they genuinely believed was some higher purpose. I think they at least would have felt a certain shame in being caught out in a lie. Certainly [former US National Security Advisor] Colin Powell did when he discovered that everything he said at the UN was a lie. He described that it was the low point of his career and he’s devastated by it and he’s apologized.

In the world that we live in now I don’t think certain politicians even care if they get caught out in a lie. What is truth? It doesn’t really matter what’s true. Say what you want to say.

What I liked about the story was the rather simple idea that truth matters, and certainly being true to my own conscience matters because what else are we in a democracy but a bunch of individuals? You have to make up your own minds and act on what you believe to be the truth.

That’s an easy thing to say but not always an easy thing to do. I like the fact that Katharine Gun was not some larger-than-life political figure, she was very ordinary in many ways. She’s quite like you and me when you meet her.

Katharine is not someone who seeks the limelight. She didn’t ever really think she’d be known around the world, and even now she tends to shy away from it. But what she had was a moment where something came across her desk at her place of work that she just felt was wrong and her conscience couldn’t live with it. That’s something that’s quite simple.

You had to build suspense from these small actions with most of the dramatic implications offscreen. How do you ensure a dialogue-driven film like this has the weight you need it to have to make its impact? The challenges you’re suggesting did give me pause. She doesn’t ever—as one studio executive said to me—“when does she ‘don her cape’ as the hero?” Are we really in this ‘don the cape’ world where every story has to be about someone saving the world or otherwise it doesn’t count? Does every person have to get to the end and succeed in overturning the evil empire? Life isn’t like that. Life is full of these small, difficult questions that cross our path. We make moral and ethical decisions of big and small kinds every day and that’s what gives us our life.

This isn’t a story about a person who changed the world, it’s a story about personal conscience and those little moments that suddenly, in her case, turned into a huge story. When it came out in The Observer newspaper, it was a big story, but what was sad about it was—and please excuse my choice of words—what trumped it 24 hours later was a bigger story.

What was that story? It was the story of us invading Baghdad. All of a sudden the news media—quite understandably from a purely commercially journalistic point of view—is not looking at how we got into the war because what do we want to see? Video footage of the bombing of Baghdad. Everyone was glued to that, and then it was about the embedded journalists with the troops and the almost Hollywood movie stories.

How we got there, the reasons for it, and whether we were lied to, took ages to come around again after they didn’t find the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that they suggested [were] the reason they had to go in. As you know, the reason they had to come up with the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ argument was because they needed a legal reason to go in.

Under international law there are only two ways you can legally justify invading another country; one is that you have a UN resolution and we all go in together to stop a genocide—which is what they were hoping to get—but Katharine’s leak thwarted the plan because these non-permanent members refused to vote after it was discovered they’d been spied on. They never got that UN resolution which would have given them perfect cover.

They had to rely on the second legal justification for war in international law, which is self-defense and that was that they had to show that [Saddam Hussein] is a genuine threat to all of our safety. “He's so bad that he could launch chemical weapons on London in 45 minutes” was the Blair claim, and it turned out to be absolute nonsense.

The desire for a regime change and the belief that they would create a lovely, flowering democracy in the Middle East was their, I think, naïve agenda, but it allowed them to lie to us and then they got caught in the lie. Katharine is an ordinary person who’s part of the story of how those lies came about.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun.

Since this is recent history, you had the opportunity to talk extensively with many of the film’s subjects. What values did those discussions have that you could not get from the source book, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War? The book mostly focused on Katharine’s journey and the politics around the time. After I read the book I asked if I could meet Katharine Gun myself, and [producer] Ged Doherty flew me to London. I spent five days with Katharine and some interesting things came up in our conversations that I hadn’t found in the book.

I did the same with Martin Bright [journalist at The Observer, portrayed by Matt Smith] who was not covered extensively in the book. I got a great deal of information from him. He referred me to the other journalists, Peter Beaumont [portrayed by Matthew Goode] and Ed Vulliamy [portrayed by Rhys Ifans], who told me a great bit about their sources, and then I went to speak to Ben Emmerson [Katharine’s lawyer, portrayed by Ralph Fiennes] and with him I got the most significant information that was not in the book.

I’ll give you two examples. First of all, he very carefully described how he came up with the defense of necessity that he used. He was going to call for these documents that he knew would show that the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had consistently said for over a year that war without a UN resolution would be illegal under international law.

Three days before the war, Goldsmith changed his mind and came up with a bizarre idea that the 1991 Gulf War, which had been authorized by a UN resolution, had never really ended and so they could still use that. It was such a crazy fringe idea because we hadn’t won that war and the motion of that war was nonsense in the end.

I said to Ben, “How did you know when you called for those documents that you’d get what you needed? How could you be so sure that Goldsmith said what he said?” There was this pause, then he said to me, “Well you know [his Deputy Attorney General] Elizabeth Wilmshurst has resigned, right?” I did know that, but she never said why.

Well, he called Elizabeth and asked if he could come round and have a cup of tea with her. I said, “Wow, that’s never been in the press.” I ran back to Martin and told him how Ben told me the contents of the conversation that he had with her, which is depicted in the movie [Wilmshurst is portrayed by Tamsin Greig] and I asked him if he knew about this. He said, “Gavin, you’ve got a scoop!” and I replied, “Jesus, I feel like a journalist!” I’ve never made a movie where the people are still alive. I normally make up fictional people, but journalists do this every day.

The other example was that Ben told me about the conversations he had with the director of public prosecutions Lord Ken Macdonald, who’s a member of the House of Lords. If you’re in America, that’s like saying a senior senator is involved. Ben told me that they both had beach houses in Norfolk and they have known each other for many years, and Macdonald arrived unannounced at Ben’s home and started chatting to him about the case. It was very uncomfortable, and Ben said how it’s not appropriate and they can’t be talking about this.

At the coda [of the movie], Macdonald comes to Ben and says, “It wasn’t me who chose to prosecute,” and this interaction actually happened. I discovered with a bit more research that the director of public prosecutions in England has great autonomy to decide who to prosecute and who not to prosecute without any influence from any member of the government, except in cases involving the Official Secrets Act. It turns out that in order to prosecute, the director of public prosecutions must get the permission of the Attorney General.

That means Ken Macdonald must have asked Lord Goldsmith to get his permission to prosecute Katharine Gun, which was obviously given because they charged her. And then they must have said, “Lord Goldsmith, they’re asking for your documents, what do we do?” So, what we don’t know from a journalistic point of view is why did they drop that case? Our film ends with the case being dropped. Was it because Lord Goldsmith got a fright and didn’t want to show his documents?

I think it’s highly likely, because it took until 2010 when those documents were finally released to the public and showed exactly what they [had] suspected and what Wilmshurst said they would show. There’s an opportunity for a scoop here; for a journalist to go press Lord Goldsmith on this case. I think some have tried and he gives no comment. But what is the truth?

What is interesting is that although Katharine and Ben were relieved that she wasn’t going to prison, they actually felt they had a strong defense. Both of them to this day feel they never got their day in court, when they actually wanted their day in court. That is why Ben jumped up as the prosecutor was dropping the case and said, “Surely my client is entitled to know why, indeed the public is entitled to know why this case is being dropped.” He said to me he just had to get that on the record because they were shutting them down.

So this is an interesting thing, because as a piece of normal narrative filmmaking it just won’t fit into the box of ‘the hero is wronged, they go about overcoming the antagonist and set the world right’. Real life is seldom like that, and so the question became ‘is the real-life story still worth telling?’ and I think yes because the story isn’t over and we’re just a tiny part of an ongoing understanding of that war.

Martin Bright has said it’s both a film—because it’s performed by actors—but it’s also in some way a piece of journalism. I hope that we’ve discovered things that weren’t in the book, to answer your question. Maybe someone will pick up [where we left off]. I think that when it comes out in Britain, more so than America, where it’s far more personal to the British, there’s some significant questions Lord Macdonald could be approached [about] and asked why he really dropped that case.

Matthew Goode and Matt Smith in ‘Official Secrets’.

Katharine yelling at the news on TV was refreshing; a reminder of how frustrating it was in 2003. Things remain complex in world politics. What’s your advice for staying invested in politics while not getting exhausted? We are exhausted, and the danger of us being exhausted with the seemingly endless bitterness between both sides of our democracy—certainly here in America—and the flagrant disregard for truth by our current president, it’s easy to become jaded and give up. The problem with authoritarianism is that it relies on people giving up.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa in the ’70s and ’80s. I know what it’s like to watch a country get worse and worse in terms of its security legislation, especially in the ’80s with the state of emergency that literally had laws saying “you can be detained without trial indefinitely, without a right of access to a lawyer”. That’s how bad it got. It’s almost inconceivable to most people.

It’s very easy to get exhausted, stop focusing on our world, and stop voting. I think our greatest obligation is to do our little part. We don’t think it’s a big part, but if each of us plays our part that’s the only way our democracy works. The minute we’ve become exhausted, we’ve given up on the only system that works. Democracy is messy but it works in our favor as citizens. When we give up on it, we give way to tyranny. It sounds dramatic but I think it’s true.

I think we have to accept the frustration. We have to say “yes, it’s frustrating, it’s never suddenly going to be fine, it’s always going to be messy and require debate”. We have to embrace the messiness of it all and not give up and say “I have to do my job—I don’t have to be politically active every day, but I do have to be a good citizen, apply my mind to what’s out there, and vote”. That’s the only way our democracy survives.

There’s something interesting about what the Australians do in their voting system. They don’t actually say “you have to vote” but they do say every citizen has to go to the polls. Some people interpret that as everyone has to vote, but in fact you can abstain at the polls. You have to mark across the line that says “I don’t vote for anyone on this list”. At least for a moment every citizen is compelled to make a statement about what they think.

Lastly, what film made you want to be a filmmaker? I grew up very disconnected in South Africa. I never saw a TV set because there were none in the country until 1976. It was part of the government’s desire to not allow the outside world in. What I used to do with my parents was rent movies on 16mm, projected onto a sheet hanging in the living room. For me, every movie I saw was fascinating because it gave me a glimpse into the world overseas, but they were always about the people from overseas.

One day when I was about ten years old, I went to the cinema with my friend to watch a little South African movie called E’ Lollipop [also known as Forever Young, Forever Free, released in 1975], about a little white boy and a little Zulu boy who are friends. I remember being white-knuckle glued to my seat. It wasn’t because it was a thriller, it was because it was a story where people spoke with my accent and were telling a story about where I came from.

I’d never seen anything like it and it spoke to me. “Oh wow, films can be made about us— I can make a film about anything!” It doesn’t just have to be about something that people from overseas do. And I think that’s when the bug bit. I haven’t told that very often, thank you for asking.

‘Official Secrets’ is in US theaters now and plays at the London Film Festival next month.

#gavin hood #official secrets #keira knightley #iraq war #british intelligence #whistleblower #whistleblowing #leaking secrets #matthew goode #matt davis #rhys ifans #ralph fiennes #wolverine #letterboxd

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modernlotrhobbitthoughts · 5 years

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Gimli, Son of Gloin - Day Seven

Gimli, Son of Gloin, our lovely anger child. To start, I want to share a couple notes that I found for him from a couple years ago:

Will #fightyou

Closet sci-fi geek

Shows love by trying to ruin his friend's lives

Solid Gryffindor fight me on this

The WORST photographer

Gimli, by itswhitneykay (etsy)

Gimli is one of my favourite characters, and he’s so amusing to me, and I can’t figure out way. First of all, I love his friendship with Legolas. They’re such an unconventional couple, not only because of the elf/dwarf thing, but also because Gimli is tiny and rude and messy and will literally fist fight you with his body, and Legolas is majestic and literally just the best at everything and pretentious and royal. It sounds like I’m just hating on Gimli and adoring Legolas, but I actually love both of them.

Legolas and Gimli, by mako_105

First of all, they meet by literally trying to murder each other in a broad sense. Second of all, they pretend to hate each other even though they “tolerate” each other. Third of all, they finally get along and are friends. Fourth of all, Legolas ultimately smuggles Gimli into the undying lands. Incredible.

Gimli honestly has the best relationships of anyone in the series, not necessarily because he’s super kind or anything, but more because he has an energy that makes people gravitate towards him against their better judgement. He’s the first character (so) far that I will legitimately call trash, in the most loving sense. Really, he’s just garbage, but we love him.

I found a lot of cool fanart for Gimli, but so many of the pictures were too small! (Also, I was only my school’s network while searching, and they don’t let me look at things... ☹️ )

Gimli in Art Nouveau, by cam-miyu

Gimli, by angesick

Gimli in Helm's Deep, by gustavocomparim

Gimli, by ???

Forty Two, by Matt Stewart

Samurai Gimli, by mycks

I love this guy’s art!

Honestly, what an icon. The guy uses a giant battle axe to cut down his enemies, got named Elf Friend despite being a little bitch to the elves, and literally volunteered to join the Fellowship because he thought Legolas was shady. Also like, Galadriel, one of the oldest and most powerful beings in Middle Earth? Fëanor, possibly the strongest elf man to ever live, the guy who CRAFTED THE FREAKING SILMARILS, asked for her hair three times, and she refused, then gave three of her hairs TO A DWARF. I mean, what more can you literally ask for to prove that this guy is actually the best. Like, I don’t even know.

Modern AU - personal thoughts time: In high school, Gimli was that guy who’s popular, but no one knows why? He always had a problem with authority, not necessarily because he disliked rules, but more because he disliked the concept of people telling him what to do. (And it probably didn’t help that Gloin was such a relaxed dad about rules and punishment and such.) He somehow passed all his classes, despite never seeming to do any homework. He and Legolas were involved in a constant rivalry, through sports, classes, and outside work. Everyone kind of thought they were secretly dating, and honestly, they may have been, who knows? He went to college to get a degree in fire science as well as to become a registered EMT. He got a job as a firefighter, and trained under Dís Durin, ironically enough. He was a really good firefighter, saved a lot of people’s lives. When the war came around, he enrolled, mostly because he knew Legolas has enrolled (though we don’t know what his exact thought process was). He ended up serving under Aragorn with Legolas, and the three of them helped end the war, by recruiting a band of rogues and disgraced soldiers in a mountain pass, Aragorn promising them pardon, and posing a sneak attack on the opposing army. Gimli returned home, quit his firefighter job and lived a surprisingly mellow and comfortable life with Legolas (still unknown, but highly probable, that they were involved in a romantic relationship).

I love my trash son. He’s very strong and inadvertently funny. I love the scenes in both the books and the movies with him in it, as well as his interactions with other characters!

Gimli, by LucioL-2zR

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xtattlecrimex-blog · 5 years

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Why Are The Fannibals So Obnoxiously Obsessive?

I’m actually getting more at the fact that they are mentally ill. Basically all of them. Once again, I am referencing the specific group of hardcore fans who throw thousands of dollars at their obsession, or still run multiple Hannigram blogs day in and day out despite the show being cancelled years ago. The 200 or so women who hang around on Tumblr and Twitter and devote their lives to worshiping Bryan Fuller and their precious pairing. Those women. People have asked me why they are so obsessive and why the vast majority of them seem to have considerable problems with mental illness. The answer is pretty simple and quite obvious. The show glamorizes mental illness.

Look at Hannibal Lecter, for example. He’s a murderer and a cannibal. Now, in the past (such as the books and then later the original movies) This was framed as a bad thing. Though Hannibal Lecter in both of those materials had some level of style and good manners, he was also portrayed as monster. Described as one too. From Red Dragon all the way through Hannibal (the third novel). I don’t include Hannibal Rising for reasons I’m not going to get into here. The point is, that in the original source material and the movies based off of the original source material, Hannibal was portrayed as creepy more so than stylized, sexualized, and handsome.

However, when you take a look at the show, how is Hannibal portrayed? Well, by a very handsome Danish man. Someone who actually won the award of “Sexist Man In Denmark” at least once that I know of but actually may have won it more than that. A very tall, chiseled, Nordic looking dude. I get that he’s not to everyone’s specific standards of handsome, or sexy, and some people find him downright ugly, but let’s all just admit he has far more appeal to the ladies than Anthony Hopkins. At least, far more appeal to Tumblr aged teenage girls. They were already in love with the likes of Matt Smith, Bill Skarsgard, and Benedict Cumberatch, so Mads really fit right in there along with that. Oh Alex Skarsgard too. The thing is that as much as he may have a very specific look that only appeals to a very specific number of people, well it doesn’t mean he’s not handsome or meant to be played as such. I personally think Mads is very attractive even if I can recognize that his very severe face may not be for everyone.

They take Mads and they turn him into Hannibal Lecter. They give him amazing suits and lots of money. He’s high society, he’s a chef, he’s smart, and he’s a psychiatrist. They show him well before his incarceration as well, and at first they shy away from making him seem too evil so you can empathize with him to some extent. They also really excuse and gloss over his behavior, justify it as him taking care of Will or getting rid of rude people. Cannibalism is bad, yes, and they do show that, but they do it in such a way that it seems fancy and delicious not in the horrific way that it actually is. It’s portrayed at nice dinner parties not in some captive and horrid situation. As much as he is a “bad guy” they put very little emphasis on this. They also have him “taking care” of others, so it seems like that makes it kind of “okay” for him to do the things he does because he’s somehow benefiting society by doing these things, not destroying it. That’s why you will see so many of these over zealous fannibal family fangirls repeating the phrase “eat the rude”.

Next, we have Will Graham. They shy away from ever actually saying he’s autistic in the show but it is heavily implied. He slowly goes insane (thanks to severe mental abuse from Hannibal) until he becomes a murderer as well. Since Hannibal is portrayed in such a “good” light, with minimal focus on the murdering and cannibalism, then this also isn’t seen as a bad thing…not really. It’s justified. Will is doing it because he’s either out of control or he’s so in love with Hannibal he wants to become Hannibal. Or some third thing. There’s ways to justify Will’s violent behavior as much as Hannibal’s. Not to mention Hugh Dancy is attractive and was known in certain circles as a heart throb well before this show aired. He already had a fanbase of fangirls who were in love with him. This allows these people to justify the horrid behavior as well as identify with it. Will is weird, socially awkward, mentally ill, but it’s also completely fine because he’s totally “in love” with Hannibal. I mean by their point of view, not what actually happened in the show.

Then you couple all of this with the fact that the show portrays death as beautiful and artsy. Edgy too. You never really see a gross corpse or the reality of death, what it does to a person, how they’d actually look, the fall out of losing someone in such a way. What you see is a beautiful sculpture of the corpses left over. Very few of them were legitimately gross dead bodies. Everything was stylized to look as pretty as possible while also being as dark as possible. In the actual world if you took someone and skinned their back open to make it look like wings, or used someone’s body to grow mushrooms on, the actual reality of the horror that would create is far worse than what the show did show on screen. Perhaps it was a style choice, and perhaps it had to do with censorship, maybe both, but the reality of death and destruction of all of these things was put through a filter. Rose colored glasses.

The fandom is so full of mentally ill people because it attracted them in this manner. It excused horrible behavior because of mental illness and made them pretty, beautiful even. It went out of its way to justify the behavior of a cannibal and the horrid abuse he put another man through in order to force a bond with him. That’s what it did. It attracted people with substantial problems because it dismissed all of these problems within the main characters and wrapped it up in a very pretty bow then threw it into high society like being mentally ill was some kind of status symbol. If you add that to the fact that the first season of the show was primarily advertised through Tumblr, and we all know what types of people are on tumblr, then one can’t really be surprised that what we have left of the most hardcore and devoted fans, is a mentally ill cesspool of special snowflakes.

One must wonder what the show might have been like had it gotten a normal PR campaign. Had it been advertised like a TV show should be or usually was. What kind of audience it may have attracted (and ratings) if a different creator had been at the helm and how well the should could have done if it hadn’t catered to mentally ill and overly obsessive Tumblr fangirls. There is a longing to know what could have been and a disappointment in knowing what never can be.

#Hannibal #Hannigram #Bryan Fuller #Mads Mikkelsen #Hugh Dancy #Fannibals #Fannibal Family

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rotomakervfxservices · 2 years

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Best VFX Painting services - Rotomaker

VFX created or enhanced surroundings will “ eventually be undetectable from reality,” said Oscar winner Craig Barron at AMPAS’ Monday program.

Film surroundings created or enhanced by visual goods will “ eventually be undetectable from reality,” said Academy VFX Painting branch governor and Oscar winner Craig Barron, speaking Monday during the final session in the Motion Picture Academy’s “ VFX Convergence” series. Barron and VFX branch member Theresa Rygiel moderated this cross correctional look at how dull oils and set extensions are evolving in movie making.

Formerly, some created surroundings can be indistinguishable from real life. Two- time Oscar winner Rob Legato (Titanic, Hugo) demonstrated this by showing exemplifications of the escarpments and ocean in Shutter Island.

He also showed work on Hugo, which was characterized by an enhanced reality with a “ storybook sense.”

Panelists also screened clips from flicks with fantasy surroundings, including Oblivion and Avatar.

Speakers including Rocco Gioffre — whose work includes Life of Pi and forthcoming The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (a exercise of this film was well entered at the recent CinemaCon) — refocused out that there's noway a single answer to how to achieve these creations. “ There’s always a many different approaches,” Gioffre said. “ Some produce commodity from nothing. Others try to shoot practical when possible.”

STORY Cinema Con Fox Defenses First Footage of Ben Stiller’s‘Walter Mitty’

Rotomaker won Two- time Oscar winning product developer Robert Stromberg (Alice in Wonderland, Avatar) agreed, noting that the choices of how to use and combine product design, matte oil and digital set extensions is “ frequently grounded on what the camera is doing, as well as budget.”

Stromberg showed some of his work on Oz The Great and Important, saying this was a combination of disciplines though about 60 percent was digital.

But the VFX Painting services in USA pro turned art director — turned director, as he'll coming helm Disney’s Maleficent — explained that while they went with a stylized look on Oz, they also had corridor of sets that were real to “ give actors commodity to touch, and directors of photography commodity to light, and directors commodity to block.”

Stromberg’s talk underlined how the disciplines are also incorporating. “ I started painting on glass,” he said. “ Dull oil came this place where you could produce and you were in charge of that world. … These aremicro-production design jobs — the perfect training ground.”

But he reminded the followership that tools can’t replace a trained eye. “ You can have this important stuff, but you still have to know why commodity doesn’t look right.”

Colorful speakers emphasized how digital tools give filmmakers complete freedom with camera movement. speakers emphasized How to do Vfx Painting Outsourcing service.

Guy Williams (Iron Man 3) cited as an illustration that in making his King Kong, Peter Jackson wanted to produce a completely-CG interpretation of New York from the air, to allow him to place the camera anywhere in the climatic sequence at the top of the Empire State Building.

He said “ We're chancing further and further, if we've the (digital) set, we're creating new shots and new moments.”

On May 6, an Academy program will explore the work behind Life of Pi, with speakers including members of its Oscar winning VFX platoon.

#rotomaker #rotoscopy #visualeffects #rotoscope #vfxservices #vfxpainting #VFXPaintingservices

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Secrets of Marvel’s Eternals

https://ift.tt/2Z6GLNH

This article contains Eternals spoilers.

It’s not hard, when a Captain America or an Iron Man movie hits, for Marvel to have a comic on shelves that new fans can be pointed toward as an accessible way to get to know the characters. The same can’t be said for The Eternals. In a lot of ways, Jack Kirby’s most bizarre creations – god-like beings, created by the all-powerful Celestials to do battle with the deformed, wild Deviants – have endured despite their relative scarcity. The sum total of what can be reasonably called Eternals stories only runs to about 50 issues. So the task of centering them ahead of their big movie debut in November is both a blessing and a curse, even with an all-star cast and an Oscar-winning director at the helm.

Enter Kieron Gillen.

Gillen is a Marvel veteran and no stranger to the company’s cultural juggernaut side. Counted among his greatest hits are a long run with Kid Loki in Journey into Mystery, a thematic touchstone for the MCU’s biggest television show to date. And he authored what is likely going to be an important comic to the MCU going forward in Young Avengers. When he’s not creating the source material for potential future blockbusters, Gillen is fairly skilled at playing with mythology: his creator-owned book for Image Comics, The Wicked + The Divine (co-created with his Young Avengers collaborators, Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson) mashed-up pantheons from around the world with pop music culture, and was a smash success. So Gillen was a natural choice to set on the weirdness of Eternals.

For this new series, Gillen finds himself teamed with a pack of superstars on his Eternals relaunch – Esad Ribic, one of the most talented and epic line artists who’s ever worked in comics; Eisner winner Wilson on colors; and beloved star letterer Clayton Cowles lettering and doing the data page design work. We had a chance to chat with Gillen about his approach to the concept and what he’s got coming next.

Den of Geek: Late period Kirby stuff is pretty dense and odd, and generally tough to follow up on. I know Eternals is something that’s only spottily been touched through the course of Marvel history since he did it and usually to great effect. What was your first principle coming into this to make sure that you weren’t flattening the Eternals concept into just another superhero book, and at the same time, keeping it friendly to new readers who might have had limited exposure?

Kieron Gillen: My actual approach is very much the opposite, in terms of trying to flatten it into a cape book, because I think when they flatten into a cape book, they lose any point of existing. The Marvel Universe is such a busy place…a lot of the niches are filled.It’s like, if you were at DC, you couldn’t, for example, make a new hero, who is the paragon of all that’s good and everyone in America really likes him, because that’s Superman’s job. In any of these highly populated universes, you’ve got to look at, “Okay, how can I make them different? How can I find something that’s really just them?” So my approach is much more into drilling down to what makes them weird, what makes them different for audiences. And also things that have been implicit in the concept, I can perhaps put a spin on and make it even moreso.

One of the core things originally that I looked at is how when Kirby originally created Eternals, it wasn’t really for the Marvel Universe. They were folded in, and the work done by generations of creators there has been really interesting. But they sit differently in a universe where there’s actually gods, because their entire thing was they are people who have been mistaken for gods, and were actually aliens. There’s very much riffing on the 1970s Chariot of the Gods-ness of it all. Except of course, if you’ve got a universe where you’ve actually got gods, that starts to fray at the edges.

So what was a niche in the Marvel Universe that isn’t filled by the gods? I ended up with the idea that, if you actually look at it, even in the original Kirby stories, they’re people who’ve been mistaken for gods. In reality, they are a species of eternal unchanging immortal beings who have been created by actual space gods (the Celestials that are the gods in this metaphor) in eternal battle with these demon-like creatures [Deviants].

I picked up some of the stuff that Neil Gaiman added to the concept, in terms of their immortality. Eternal is a very different word. You talk to certain theologians, there’s a debate whether angels have free will. Humans probably do. I’m not a theologian so don’t trust me on this, but the idea of whether angels have free will is a much more interesting question in lots of different ways. So I leaned into the idea that Eternals are angels. They’ve got this job and their job is to protect us, or at least the Earth, from demons. I pushed them into those elements, so all that stuff is very much let’s make them more weird.

My broad theory is with DC characters the problem is the world. They are beautiful and perfect people who are facing a world that is corrupt. So Batman’s life is fine and then his parents were killed. Wonder Woman is sent as an ambassador to this warlike species of man. I think Wonder Woman is an interesting one to compare to because the closest Marvel character is really Thor. Thor is somebody who was sent to Earth because he was an arrogant shit [laughs]. To save the world, yes, but he is also the problem. So for me, the heart of Marvel characters, even though they try to save the world, they’re also the problem.

And for me, the Eternals didn’t really have that, and that’s why I’ve led to this idea that there’s this awful secret that when they die, they have to take a life to carry on living. And that’s, at least, one reason why Ikaris had to be my lead. Because Ikaris is such a good guy and the idea of, “Wait, when I do stuff, it’s not just my life I’m risking.” I know it’s not something [he’s] going to move past easily. He’s clearly going to be guilty, dealing with this for a very long time and there’s the relationship with the family and all that kind of element. And that seemed to be really interesting, especially because, and this goes into other areas with more Eternals, is that I always wanted them to be a society.

A lot of the Eternals don’t care. They’re ambivalent about this and in some ways they’re the bad gods. The idea of the Eternals includes people with very different ideas and yes, their job is to protect the Earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean protecting humans.

I’m fascinated by the comparison to angels because where they’re left at the end of issue six is very much a Paradise Lost situation where, not only are they fallen, but they’ve decided to cast themselves down. That brings Thanos in conceptually too. What was the most mentally complicated part to integrating Thanos into this new Eternals mythology for you? Because he’s more an external force of nature in the broader history of the Marvel Universe than he is really tightly aligned with Eternals history. But now with the Deviant stuff and the fallen Eternals, he feels much more integral to the concept than he used to.

When you think about Eternals, we’ve got the original Kirby stuff and then the generations of creators that have tried to integrate them in different ways into the Marvel Universe. It’s notable that some of the best stuff in Eternals has become everyone’s stuff, like the Celestials. But the Celestials are such a great fit. They’re one of the best visuals in all of Marvel. So many different people have touched on this connection between the Eternals and Thanos, [but] not much has ever really been done with it.

One of the aims for Eternals was to take continuity and turn it into mythology. So I was looking at all that 40 years of comics and trying to work out okay, let’s pretend they were all made by one person and it was all one big fabric. The creation of Thanos in my mind was always planned all along, and this is a fundamental sin of the Eternal people. It wasn’t that they had a kid who turned out bad. Kirby’s original idea was 100 Eternals, 100 Deviants, then only the Deviants breed.

So there’s only ever been 100 in this weird static family unit, but what happened with Titan? What were all the schisms for? Where did Thanos come from? Thanos was really an attempt to extend the Eternal line, which went very badly wrong. You mentioned Paradise Lost, but I just got the Titanos Schism, which is an event in the history anyway, but I built up to being the equivalent of, I don’t know, one of those stories in Lord of the Rings, set 500 years earlier that’s in the appendix.

This is actually some of the stuff we cover in [The Eternals: Thanos Rising,] the Dustin Weaver special we’re doing. We talk about the background of all this. They argued whether they should actually have true Eternal children. They split. A’Lars AKA Mentor, met up with Sui-San on Titan. They work out a way to have Thanos (which is what the special is about) and hooray, they can breed. And then “oh no, this is what happens when we breed.” Thanos is really the worst case scenario.

But the other interesting thing is, of course, Thanos gets to meet his other family. The idea there’s a whole extended family he’s interacted with very little, which is really interesting to me. In the first arc, I’ve written him as Frankenstein or the Phantom of the Opera. He’s just the Alien. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s regarded as a force of nature.

I do this a lot in my books. People always say, I don’t really like villains. As much as I enjoy Thanos chewing the scenery and talking about poetry and death, I write them as people with powerful needs. The question becomes what will they do to get them? The answer, of course, [for] people like Thanos, is almost everything. But what’s always interesting for me is what won’t they do as well? If you can emotionally connect to all the characters, even the ones you hate, even the ones you want to lose, that’s when stuff becomes interesting for me.

Movies

Marvel’s Eternals Will Reveal Why The Eternals Didn’t Interfere in Infinity War

By Alec Bojalad

Movies

Marvel’s Eternals Trailer Breakdown: Who Are The New Characters of the MCU?

By Mike Cecchini

Which Eternal was your hook when you first started thinking about the book? Who was your path into the world and did it change as you went deeper into it? Who do you hope readers attach to from your story as they head to theaters to see the movie?

Originally Ikaris and Sprite were the two, and I made them the point of view characters for two reasons. One, Ikaris is the most straight shooting character, therefore he was the person who would most be hurt by the twist. He’s the classic hero, so let’s put him through the grinder. And Sprite, of course, had been outside the story, so she’s useful because she doesn’t know stuff.

I’ve got a version of Sersi who is a kind of depressed party girl. She’s been an amazing party girl figure. She’s always been enormous fun and I love that. I just wanted to do the alone on the dance floor kind of vibe, where there’s a certain sadness because she’d been doing hedonism for so long, what’s it covering up. Sersi around Eternals is a little bit different from her around humans. I think Sersi is, in some ways, the most complicated and messiest of the characters. I hope she’s the one I think we’re most attached to.

It’s a very different take on Gilgamesh. My biggest regret of the first arc is I couldn’t find space to use Makkari or Ajak, so I’m very glad that I got to do the specials.

That’s kind of what Kirby did. One of the interesting things about Eternals in the original run is that it’s cut off early while he’s still introducing stuff. It’s not like it reached the midpoint. You’ve still got new characters coming in. All the way through he’ll throw a random issue in with a different Eternal. It’s very free flowing.

There’s nobody in comics right now that does grand spectacle like Esad and Matt together. Did having them attached on art change how you approached the scale of the story?

I must admit I think I knew Esad was on the book before I started writing anything seriously. So leisurely it was, you know those amazing deep focus panels Esad does when you’ve got a city and something in the distance. I always think about that bit in Thor with Jason [Aaron], where you have the enormous dead giant in the background [note: Thor: God of Thunder (2012) #3 page 9]. I remember that and the moment, oh no, no, we’re going to have a lot of deep focus shots. I’m always looking for chances to do that with Esad because why wouldn’t you? [laughs] Obviously, I know Matt really well, having gone through all manner of growing with him, so I know how adaptable and how amazingly he responds to different characters, or different artists rather.

His colors for Dustin Weaver are really amazing in the Thanos Rising special. The fact it’s a story set earlier in the timeline he’s doing a modern take on old ‘70s coloring. It’s really psychedelic and pop, but the whole thing is clearly a modern comic, but at the same time, clearly lifting notes. But with Esad, it’s always how can I do something that allows Esad to actually provide the scale of things? Because it’s a very chatty book, but I’ve got to find interesting ways to make things chatty, interesting things. It doesn’t just have to be a battle scene. Even just an establishing shot is a thing of beauty.

There’s these six Eternal cities I’ve codified. And the idea of, okay, when we go to those cities, it’s going to be the magical moments. In the same way, when we introduce New York in the first issue, that’s also a magical moment because it’s New York. In many ways, especially to a British person, New York is as magical a city as Olympia. There’s that kind of thrill.

Do the data pages help you get out of your own way or get out of Esad’s way on the art a little bit more?

A little bit. They’re a useful compression device.. At least part of the appeal of Eternals is its scope. Esad makes it really big visually, also big in the ideas of what we’re describing. There’s entire cast members and there’s political systems and there’s those groups who hate each other or like each other and I’m bearing all that in mind when writing it. And the data pages are a really good way of doing it.

Jonathan Hickman’s been doing it forever. I remember. When his Nightly News dropped, it was fascinating, but I’ve been really glad he’s managed to open up a bit of space in the mainstream for people to do that. Because it’s the thing I said I want to be a bit careful around this. I said, I always use a lot of text stuff in my indie work and there’s bits of all manner of text stuff I did before. I think it’s much more notable with Jon because Jon’s the designer so he can just do his own. With me, it was always a case of my interest in text and image and things you can do with that were limited by the fact that the resource I could have.

But what I was trying to is not just do what the X-books have done as well. [This] is the first time [Clayton Crain]’s done design internally and he’s doing amazing work, but it’s also stuff like the spread in issue three where we’ve got all those names. I literally programmed my own Deviant name generator. This generated 1,200 names on that page that Clayton laid out. We’re still working out how we’re going to release that online.

What are you most excited for people to see in the second arc of the book?

The first arc’s been all about remaking the Eternals, as in here we are, we’ve got a new status quo, more heroes are dealing with the fact that there is a corruption at the heart of their system. Can they change it? Can we change this unchanging system? That’s the tragedy of their heroism to me.

The second arc, I’m trying to do that to the Deviants. Not as radically because I don’t think the Deviants need it as much. What are the Deviants for? What are they like? If the Deviants were our lead characters, we would be absolutely petrified of the Eternals and now they’re living here. So we get to really meet the Deviants, we get to understand their life and their tragedy.

There’s an enormous battle. That’s something to look forward to. There’s romance and sadness, and there’s also really cool guest stars in the background, which I don’t want to talk about, but it’s important for me to ground this in the Marvel Universe. But also this is a world of humans. It’s not just weird Eternals falling around their fortresses. If an issue doesn’t have humans in it, I feel a bit off because for me that’s another thing about Marvel. Part of the fun of Spider-Man was always that I could look to my left and imagine Spider-Man flying past me, so trying to keep the element, the world outside your window, while still doing something with the scale of what we’re doing, that’s the trick. So I’m hoping that comes across in the next arc.

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Eternals: Thanos Rises #1 is on sale on Wednesday, September 15th in local comics shops and online. Eternals: Celestia, the story featuring Makkari and Ajak, hits shops and the web in October, and Marvel’s Eternals is in theaters the following month.

The post The Secrets of Marvel’s Eternals appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3Ej4GcR

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Banks Adopt Military-Style Tactics to Fight Cybercrime

By Stacy Cowley, NY Times, May 20, 2018

O’FALLON, Mo.--In a windowless bunker here, a wall of monitors tracked incoming attacks--267,322 in the last 24 hours, according to one hovering dial, or about three every second--as a dozen analysts stared at screens filled with snippets of computer code.

Pacing around, overseeing the stream of warnings, was a former Delta Force soldier who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before shifting to a new enemy: cyberthieves.

“This is not that different from terrorists and drug cartels,” Matt Nyman, the command center’s creator, said as he surveyed his squadron of Mastercard employees. “Fundamentally, threat networks operate in similar ways.”

Cybercrime is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most lucrative industries. At least $445 billion was lost last year, up around 30 percent from just three years earlier, a global economic study found, and the Treasury Department recently designated cyberattacks as one of the greatest risks to the American financial sector. For banks and payment companies, the fight feels like a war--and they’re responding with an increasingly militarized approach.

Former government cyberspies, soldiers and counterintelligence officials now dominate the top ranks of banks’ security teams. They’ve brought to their new jobs the tools and techniques used for national defense: combat exercises, intelligence hubs modeled on those used in counterterrorism work and threat analysts who monitor the internet’s shadowy corners.

At Mastercard, Mr. Nyman oversees the company’s new fusion center, a term borrowed from the Department of Homeland Security. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the agency set up scores of fusion centers to coordinate federal, state and local intelligence-gathering. The approach spread throughout the government, with the centers used to fight disease outbreaks, wildfires and sex trafficking.

Then banks grabbed the playbook. At least a dozen of them, from giants like Citigroup and Wells Fargo to regional players such as Bank of the West, have opened fusion centers in recent years, and more are in the works. Fifth Third Bank is building one in its Cincinnati headquarters, and Visa, which created its first two years ago in Virginia, is developing two more, in Britain and Singapore. Having their own intelligence hives, the banks hope, will help them better detect patterns in all the data they amass.

The centers also have a symbolic purpose. Having a literal war room reinforces the new reality. Fending off thieves has always been a priority--it’s why banks build vaults--but the arms race has escalated rapidly.

Cybersecurity has, for many financial company chiefs, become their biggest fear, eclipsing issues like regulation and the economy.

Alfred F. Kelly Jr., Visa’s chief executive, is “completely paranoid” about the subject, he told investors at a conference in March. Bank of America’s Brian T. Moynihan said his cybersecurity team is “the only place in the company that doesn’t have a budget constraint.” (The bank’s chief operations and technology officer said it is spending about $600 million this year.)

The military sharpens soldiers’ skills with large-scale combat drills like Jade Helm and Foal Eagle, which send troops into the field to test their tactics and weaponry. The financial sector created its own version: Quantum Dawn, a biennial simulation of a catastrophic cyberstrike.

In the latest exercise last November, 900 participants from 50 banks, regulators and law enforcement agencies role-played their response to an industrywide infestation of malicious malware that first corrupted, and then entirely blocked, all outgoing payments from the banks. Throughout the two-day test, the organizers lobbed in new threats every few hours, like denial-of-service attacks that knocked the banks’ websites offline.

The first Quantum Dawn, back in 2011, was a lower-key gathering. Participants huddled in a conference room to talk through a mock attack that shut down stock trading. Now, it’s a live-fire drill. Each bank spends months in advance re-creating its internal technology on an isolated test network, a so-called cyber range, so that its employees can fight with their actual tools and software. The company that runs their virtual battlefield, SimSpace, is a Defense Department contractor.

Sometimes, the tests expose important gaps.

A series of smaller cyber drills coordinated by the Treasury Department, called the Hamilton Series, raised an alarm three years ago. An attack on Sony, attributed to North Korea, had recently exposed sensitive company emails and data, and, in its wake, demolished huge swaths of Sony’s internet network.

If something similar happened at a bank, especially a smaller one, regulators asked, would it be able to recover? Those in the room for the drill came away uneasy.

“There was a recognition that we needed to add an additional layer of resilience,” said John Carlson, the chief of staff for the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the industry’s main cybersecurity coordination group.

Soon after, the group began building a new fail-safe, called Sheltered Harbor, which went into operation last year. If one member of the network has its data compromised or destroyed, others can step in, retrieve its archived records and restore basic customer account access within a day or two. It has not yet been needed, but nearly 70 percent of America’s deposit accounts are now covered by it.

The largest banks run dozens of their own, internal attack simulations each year, to smoke out their vulnerabilities and keep their first responders sharp.

“It’s the idea of muscle memory,” said Thomas J. Harrington, Citigroup’s chief information security officer, who spent 28 years with the F.B.I.

Growing interest among its corporate customers in cybersecurity war games inspired IBM to build a digital range in Cambridge, Mass., where it stages data breaches for customers and prospects to practice on.

One recent morning, a fictional bank called Bane & Ox was under attack on IBM’s range, and two dozen real-life executives from a variety of financial companies gathered to defend it. In the training scenario, an unidentified attacker had dumped six million customer records on Pastebin, a site often used by hackers to publish stolen data caches.

As the hours ticked by, the assault grew worse. The lost data included financial records and personally identifying details. One of the customers was Colin Powell, the former secretary of state. Phones in the room kept ringing with calls from reporters, irate executives and, eventually, regulators, wanting details about what had occurred.

When the group figured out what computer system had been used in the leak, a heated argument broke out: Should they cut off its network access immediately? Or set up surveillance and monitor any further transmissions?

At the urging of a Navy veteran who runs the cyberattack response group at a large New York bank, the group left the system connected.

“Those are the decisions you don’t want to be making for the first time during a real attack,” said Bob Stasio, IBM’s cyber range operations manager and a former operations chief for the National Security Agency’s cyber center. One financial company’s executive team did such a poor job of talking to its technical team during a past IBM training drill, Mr. Stasio said, that he went home and canceled his credit card with them.

Like many cybersecurity bunkers, IBM’s foxhole has deliberately theatrical touches. Whiteboards and giant monitors fill nearly every wall, with graphics that can be manipulated by touch.

“You can’t have a fusion center unless you have really cool TVs,” quipped Lawrence Zelvin, a former Homeland Security official who is now Citigroup’s global cybersecurity head, at a recent cybercrime conference. “It’s even better if they do something when you touch them. It doesn’t matter what they do. Just something.”

Security pros mockingly refer to such eye candy as “pew pew” maps, an onomatopoeia for the noise of laser guns in 1980s movies and video arcades. They are especially useful, executives concede, to put on display when V.I.P.s or board members stop by for a tour. Two popular “pew pew” maps are from FireEye and the defunct security vendor Norse, whose video game-like maps show laser beams zapping across the globe. Norse went out of business two years ago, and no one is sure what data the map is based on, but everyone agrees that it looks cool.

What everyone in the finance industry is afraid of is a repeat--on an even larger scale--of the data breach that hit Equifax last year.

Hackers stole personal information, including Social Security numbers, of more than 146 million people. The attack cost the company’s chief executive and four other top managers their jobs. Who stole the data, and what they did with it, is still not publicly known. The credit bureau has spent $243 million so far cleaning up the mess.

It is Mr. Nyman’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen at Mastercard. Walking around the company’s fusion center, he describes the team’s work using military slang. Its focus is “left of boom,” he said--referring to the moments before a bomb explodes. By detecting vulnerabilities and attempted hacks, the analysts aim to head off an Equifax-like explosion.

But the attacks keep coming. As he spoke, the dial displayed over his shoulder registered another few assaults on Mastercard’s systems. The total so far this year exceeds 20 million.

#cybercrime #cybersecurity #banks and cybercrime #Mastercard

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kevrocksicehouse · 3 years

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With Traffic, Oceans Eleven and Erin Brockovich, Steven Soderbergh went from a box-office high of $36 million to more than eight times that per picture. A few other indie directors who made “the jump.”

Pulp Fiction. D: Quentin Tarantino (1994). “Reservoir Dogs,” made Tarantino the hottest director around but only grossed $2.8 million. Bolstered by massive word of mouth, Pulp Fiction beat that by about $211 million and suddenly every other movie was about hip criminals.

Fargo. D: Joel Coen (1996). Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers biggest movie, up to that date, was a respectable $36 million. Fargo almost doubled that business as well as getting them Oscars for Best Screenplay. Joel also got one for the wife (Frances McDormand) which was nice.

The Matrix. D: The Wachowskis (1999). The Wachowskis action-movie treatise on the nature of reality made $463 million, about $456 million more than their first movie, Bound. Not as much as the $742 million the sequel made, but we all know that one sucked.

The Bourne Supremacy. D: Paul Greengrass (2004). Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday about a massacre at an Irish protest in 1972 (It’s good. See it.) made a fraction of its million-dollar budget. But somebody saw that shaky camera and figured Greengrass was perfect to helm the second movie in the Matt Damon Franchise. He turned it into a huge hit ($288 million first run) and turned the shaky camera into the most influential action movie directorial style of the decade.

The Guardians of the Galaxy. D: James Gunn (2014). As if a movie with a bunch of obscure comic-book spacemen (and raccoon) (and Groot) wasn’t a big enough gamble, The guys at Marvel films decided to give the director’s chair to a guy whose last movie (2010’s Super) didn’t make a million dollars. $773 million later, the gamble paid off in spades. And that’s not even counting the soundtrack money.

#steven soderbergh #the jump #box office #indie movie #kevrock

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whatifitscool · 3 years

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PPV Impressions – AEW Full Gear 2020

By Timmy Daytona

Despite the continuing pandemic, All Elite Wrestling has achieved a level of consistency that competitors in the wrestling industry have struggled to match. In their final PPV event of the year – Full Gear – it featured a sizeable card featuring some possibly exciting match-ups. Did it help them go out with a bang?

World Title Eliminator Tournament Final: Kenny Omega vs Hangman Adam Page

Prior to the match starting, it’s worth noting that Omega’s entrances have gotten longer since his and Hangman’s tag team championship loss at the hands of FTR. His introduction to his ring entrance included these digs at Hangman:

“He has headlined more PPVs, scored more AEW singles wins, has a better AEW winning percentage and has 8 more years’ experience than Hangman Page.”

Kenny’s interviews before the tournament presented a version of himself that is laser-focused on returning to singles glory. To demonstrate this intent, see his squash of Sonny Kiss. All business, his attempts at sportsmanship after the match looked insincere and the flashes of arrogance on the way to the final may be teasing a heel turn at some stage.

Since their days in NJPW, the Elite have enjoyed success in their storylines of friendships disintegrating and they have not disappointed when incorporating that drama into their matches. Omega and Page’s tag team match against The Young Bucks at Revolution is still the top-rated match of 2020. Their chemistry shines whenever they face one another.

That chemistry was evident in this match which felt realistic in its depiction of a competitive match-up of two former partners who know each other’s arsenals so well. It was hard-hitting, they countered each other repeatedly throughout but towards the end, Page missed a Buckshot Lariat and was hit with two V-Triggers and a One-Winged Angel before succumbing to the 3-count. This was perhaps Page’s best singles performance in AEW’s young history. The man can go and because we haven’t seen the two former partners really explode since Page betrayed the Bucks and was kicked out of the Elite, there is a sense that there could be more confrontations down the road.

The camera lingered on Page’s lost and dazed expression following his defeat. Omega barely acknowledged him and did not wait for Page at the end of the match. And Page appeared later, watching from a distance following the Bucks’ match. These subtle but significant developments are as exciting as the matches themselves.

Orange Cassidy vs John “4” Silver

In the second match of the night, Orange Cassidy and John “4” Silver would settle their short feud. As number 4 in The Dark Order, you’d think that he’d just be a generic villain but it’s great that AEW remain committed to giving opportunities to wrestlers – who aren’t main draws – their moments to shine. Silver definitely did shine – the man is a beast. The way he manhandled Cassidy, unleashed those roundhouse kicks and how he powered out of a swinging DDT, Silver showed potential that he is quickly becoming a threat. Also, how great was it that he ripped out Cassidy’s pockets and put them in his mouth? His loss to Cassidy was never in question but AEW consistently teases that unexpected wins could happen at any time. The presentation of the product is that it is a place of elite wrestlers so hypothetically, anyone could win (see Private Party’s elimination of the Young Bucks).

TNT Championship Match: Cody Rhodes (C) vs Darby Allin

Darby Allin and Cody Rhodes battled for the TNT title and the honour of being the face of TNT. Including the latter brought even more focus on AEW’s intent to elevate the TNT title to a level of importance. The package for this match was brilliant. Cody exaggerated his “victories” over Allin, casting doubt on whether Allin could be the face of TNT. They tried to sell that Darby’s unconventional appearance is not suitable to be that face while Cody came across as someone believing too much in his own hype. He stated Darby could be the face of TNT but the silent shake of his head at the end of that sentence negated that sentiment. Awesome.

Cody hadn’t handily defeated Darby twice. So it was fitting for the championship to go to Allin. He’s the first wrestler to be portrayed as confounding Cody. Cody’s overconfidence and showboating tendencies were on full display. During his first run with the title, he was once the babyface but in a reversal of roles and in particular on this night, he had become the bully in an almost David vs Goliath encounter.

Some complaints were that Darby was shown to be too resilient and while he took a beating, he got a lot of his trademark offence in throughout the match. It was a great touch on Cody’s part to drop to a knee to present the title to Darby and later put it on his shoulder.

Whatever comes next, it is great that Cody went out on a high note and his hold on the TNT title is over. It will be exciting to see what comes next during Darby’s reign for AEW’s strong and diverse mid-card.

AEW Women’s Championship: Hikaru Shida (C) vs Nyla Rose

Nyla Rose and Hikaru Shida’s last championship meeting was a decent outing. There were reasonable expectations that they could deliver a solid match in this next instalment in their feud. The result was solid, if unspectacular. There was the avalanche Falcon Arrow but it didn’t pop as much as the sight of Shida V-Triggering Nyla into a casino chip back at Double or Nothing. Also, Nyla’s “claw” to the knee looked silly and unbelievable. This could be wrong but Nyla’s diving knee drop onto the back of Shida’s knee looked like it actually connected. Was this a botch? In a more obvious botch, Vickie Guerrero was seen visibly failing to catch Shida’s foot in her attempt to trip her up. The ending sequence also looked like both competitors were gassed. And were the cameras meant to show Nyla asking Vickie to slap her? Let’s hope this feud is over as the overall performances when these two meet are mixed.

AEW World Tag-Team Championship: FTR (C) vs The Young Bucks (Stipulation: If Bucks lose, they can never challenge for the tag team championship again)

With the stipulation in place, the result of this match was telegraphed well in advance. There was no doubt that the Bucks would walk away with the titles. Cody had already fallen on his own sword with his stipulation for the World Championship so AEW and The Elite couldn’t afford to put themselves in a similar situation for the Young Bucks. How could they demonstrate they are The Elite if most of them are ineligible to challenge for titles?

Though the result was predictable, arriving there was very fun to watch. In a love letter to tag team wrestling, both FTR and the Young Bucks brought out finishers from tag teams that have likely influenced both. Seeing FTR use Meeting in the Middle to the Bucks performing the Hardy Boyz Twist of Fate – Swanton Bomb finisher was just a sample of the awesomeness on display. Despite their high-flying tendencies, it was a simple Superkick from Matt’s injured leg that ended it. Fitting because that was the leg FTR attacked prior to the PPV but you knew it was going to factor some way into the match’s finish.

While the Young Bucks have looked better in other matches, they certainly put over FTR who looked great. Let’s see what happens next for FTR – some sites have suggested they could form a new iteration of the Four Horsemen stable but they will likely be challenging for the tag team titles again in the near future.

Elite Deletion – Matt Hardy vs Sammy Guevara

With good reason, many were probably worried as to what could happen in this match. From Hardy getting hit by the wrong prop chair to the near-tragedy suffered at All Out.

In this COVID-era, cinematic matches remain a viable alternative to a live match and with the seemingly cursed combination of Sammy Guevara and Matt Hardy, this pre-recorded match in a controlled environment was possibly the safest option to see them conclude their feud.

Some of it was genuinely fun to see. Sammy’s golf cart was crushed by Hardy’s monster truck. Sammy performed a moonsault off the top of one of the monster truck’s wheels. Fireworks were used. Calling on his past, Gangrel appeared in support of Sammy while the Hurricane appeared in support of Hardy. The Lake of Reincarnation allowed Helms to transform twice. A small touch that was nice to see was Sammy’s creative counter out of a Twist of Fate. It was mostly the level of bonkers befitting a Matt Hardy match.

Entertaining goofs included seeing the cameraman’s shadow as Sammy drove up the driveway, the skull on the Staff of Mephistopheles flew off when Matt swung it and the fireworks disrupted the audio feed preventing Matt’s voice from being recorded. If there were minor criticisms, the commentary fell flat in spots.

In terms of major criticisms of the match, there was the near replication of Matt and Sammy crashing through a table, instead busting Sammy’s head open in a reversal of their roles from All Out. Sammy then staggered trying to get to his feet, appearing punch-drunk. Up to this point, all that could be said is that Matt has always drawn on stories or situations from his personal life. The breakdown of his and Lita’s relationship and her cheating on him with Edge became a feud in WWE. So it stood to reason that he would draw on his history with Sammy including the dangerous botch at All Out.

But then it ended with a Con-Chair-To to Sammy’s head on the floor. While some could accept them recreating the All Out botch, this ending was likely what turned most people off. It was a horror movie ending that was so shocking that it really took viewers away from this cinematic match. It was so brutal, verging on snuff and it’s a wonder they chose to end it on this note.

While these attacks or finishers have been seen on other wrestling shows or in films like The Raid, it shouldn’t have to be part of AEW simply to elicit shock. And then it ended with fireworks and a shower of Alize. Talk about tonally jarring.

Le Champion Chris Jericho vs MJF (if MJF wins, he joins the Inner Circle)

After seeing the end of the Elite Deletion, a traditional match was a good call to move on to and Le Champion and MJF had a decent outing. Jericho received a hero’s welcome during his entrance, smiling while the crowd sang Judas acapella. It was so great seeing Jericho utilise the camera to flip off MJF. It was even better seeing the Jericho of old hit the Lionsault before yelling “come on, baby!” He even brought out the Frankensteiner. But in a battle of the heels, Jericho would be outdone in this capacity. MJF’s influences have seen him look like the dirtiest player in the game but he definitely called on Eddie Guerrero when he played dead towards the end ,before rolling up Jericho for the 3-count. Simple but effective storytelling. This match served its purpose and it will be fun to see how it all blows up. Please let there be a big hoss fight between Wardlow and Hager.

Or have Jericho reveal to MJF and Wardlow that while they’re part of the Inner Circle, there’s an Innermost Circle within it that they aren’t a part of.

I Quit Match for the AEW World Championship: Jon Moxley (C) vs Eddie Kingston

“You’re gonna have to kill me! You better get ready to kill me! You better get ready! This is real! This is real!”

Eddie Kingston is still one of the best signings for AEW. He isn’t a ring technician but he’s as venomous as a freestyle rapper on the mic and harder hitting in the ring.

With that promo in particular, Eddie Kingston was at his most captivating. The barely contained rage as he said those words with Moxley behind him likely had many on the edges of their seats. Kingston sounds like he is one of the hardest bastards in the sport.

This was a stiff-looking match with plenty of the clubbing blows that Kingston makes look real. It had the violence that Moxley has loved to put on display since leaving WWE. They were both on the receiving end of attacks using barbwire. Schiavone even asked, “What the hell are we watching?”

This was not athletic or as protracted as the Lights Out Unsanctioned Match Moxley had against Omega at Full Gear last year. It certainly had less plunder. But this looked just as painful. The rubbing alcohol poured over the wounds Moxley incurred on the thumbtacks would have had many wincing, as if they felt the pain themselves.

You’ve also got to love Kingston’s defiance. Casually flipping Moxley off, he then had to endure being choked with barbwire before quitting. The measure of respect Moxley had at the end for Kingston was also believable. These two put on a brutal showing and tore the house down in a style that suited them both.

Did Moxley just tease Blood and Guts at the end?

It could be argued that this is the strongest main event Moxley’s had since Full Gear 2019. While his title match at Revolution was fun when he revealed that he wasn’t blind in one eye, his chemistry with Kingston and their physicality should be applauded. They seem convincing as brawlers and this was a great brawl.

Conclusion

This was yet another strong PPV card for AEW. While nothing screamed instant classic or was anywhere near the fun of Stadium Stampede, it’s the long-form storytelling that is the key strength to AEW’s dominance in professional wrestling. The seeds laid out for feuds-in-progress or setting things up for the future are as tantalising as the matches on display.

In terms of what they had, the opening bout, the tag team championship and the main event were easily the strongest matches on the card with Cody vs Darby III being the next best. Despite a weak Women’s World Championship match, everything else that could have been seen as filler either progressed or ended storylines appropriately.

AEW ends their 2020 PPV run on a high note. But the year isn’t over yet. As they’ve said in recent weeks, “Winter is coming”. Can’t wait to see what they do to close out the year.

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