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aster-aspera · 3 years

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Don't cover yourself with thistle and weeds

CW's for this chapter: minor character death, semi-graphic descriptions of injuries, parental death, unsympathetic Remus

Relationship: romantic logince

This prompt was suggested to me by the lovely MizzMarvel on ao3

Chapter title is from thistle and weeds by Mumford and sons

This is Logan’s backstory in my superhero AU. You can find the whole thing on ao3 here or on the masterlist here

As Logan walked home that morning, he felt invincible, untouchable. All the grey days at school fell away, all the teasing and bullying and all the fear was suddenly gone.

He felt like he was soaring, floating somewhere high above his life. He was so much more than himself in that moment.

Maybe, he didn’t want this to end. However terrifying chasing after criminals was, that particular high almost made the danger worth it. He mourned the fact that it would be over soon. That they would put the gang away, file away the info they had collected and go back to school, alone in the knowledge of what they had done.

The ecstatic feeling faded when he entered his garden and noticed the front door was open. His blood ran cold.

Logan dropped his bag to the floor, frustration written in the lines of his posture.

“Hey sweetheart, how was your day?” His mother called from her office.

“It was uneventful as always and I am not in the mood to discuss it further.” He replied shortly.

His mother rounded the corner and took in his drawn face and the force with which he set his books down on the table.

She held out her arms invitingly and Logan let himself be wrapped up in her embrace, savouring the feeling of safety it gave him.

“Are the other kids giving you trouble again?” She asked.

The other kids were the least of his worries, currently. He could handle their childish taunting. His other problems were related to the more dangerous, night time aspect of his life. But he couldn’t exactly burden his mother with that.

She would worry too much and while he wouldn’t exactly blame her for that, he didn’t need her nagging atop all his worries about Roman and Remus.

So he just nodded and left it at that.

His mother didn’t pressure him to say more. She understood that he didn’t always feel like talking.

Once he was finished with his homework, he locked the door to his room and grabbed the locked box he kept hidden away at the back of his dresser. He opened it and carefully arranged the papers inside into orderly stacks.

The box contained a wealth of information, information that could likely get him in serious trouble if it got into the wrong hands. These files were the fruit of months of research and careful surveillance.

Supply routes, lists of buyers, lists of couriers, the entire ledger, even the names of the most elusive members.

This information could dismantle the entire gang and that was their goal. A few more weeks and they had all the evidence they needed.

Public scandals that would knock the leaders off their thrones, accounts of crimes and evidence so solid no judge would be able to refute it.

They would just have to drop it off at the police station and the gang’s fate would be sealed. It made Logan feel a little better whenever he looked at it. Despite the dangers, they were doing something good, something that would make this shithole of a city just a tiny bit more liveable. And hopefully, would help Remus.

Logan had to admit, he didn’t have that much faith in Roman’s plan. In theory, rolling up the drug rink so Remus lost his debts and could leave without fear of repercussions made sense.

But that theory was heavily relying on the fact that Remus even wanted to leave. He seemed way too comfortable in the criminal environment than Logan cared to see.

His phone started ringing and Logan picked it up without looking away from the supply route he was copying onto another paper.

“Hey erlenmeyer trash, you ready for tonight?”

Logan sighed at the nickname.

“Hello Roman, I told you at school I have everything prepared for tonight. I don’t see why you felt the need to call.”

“It’s just...something feels off. I’m scared something’s gonna go wrong.”

“Did something happen to make you feel like this?”

“No, not really. Well, I haven’t seen Remus in a while and he was acting weird the last time I called.”

“Remus dropping off the map or acting strange is not usually a cause for concern. He is prone to doing things like that.”

“Yeah, I know. I just…” Roman sounded uncharacteristically quiet. He must really be nervous.

“Is there anything else that caused this concern?”

“No…”

“Then we will be alright. We know what we do is dangerous, but there are no signs the gang is aware of what we are doing. We have gone undetected for months, it is improbable they would suddenly know now and not give us any sort of indication. But, if you really are worried, we can call tonight off.”

“No! No, the sooner we get this done, the better. And if you say we’ll be alright, I believe you.”

“So you’re listening to me for once. How novel.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it, specs.”

Logan rolled his eyes.

“Just don’t forget the flashlights this time.”

“You’ll bring back up ones anyways. I don’t see why I bother.”

“It’s important to be prepared, definitely if you’re trying to fight crime with someone as scatterbrained as you.”

“You sound like Batman.”

“Good, that’s what I’m going for.”

“Well, caped crusader, I gotta go make dinner. See you tonight.”

“Yes. Don’t forget your scaly panties, robin.”

Roman signed off with a snort and Logan continued looking through the documents. But Roman’s words kept running through his head and his feeling of unease grew. Maybe it would be better to call it off for tonight.

No, Roman was right, they had to get this done as soon as possible. The longer they waited, the more time the gang had to discover what they were doing.

He decided to head downstairs. He had done all his prep work for tonight and sitting in his room feeling anxious wasn’t helping anyone.

Downstairs, music was playing and his mom and dad stood in the kitchen. They held each other close and were sloppily slowing along to the music, horribly off beat.

His dad noticed him standing in the door opening and beckoned him over.

They took him up in their embrace and his dad kept trying to dance, even though Logan was tripping over his own feet and his mother was laughing too much to follow along.

“Logan! Don’t tell me you don’t know how to slow.” His dad exclaimed as Logan bumped awkwardly into his mother again.

“It’s not like I’ve ever done it before. Nobody slows anymore, dad.”

“What a disgrace. My son should at least know how to slow. What if a pretty boy asks you to dance?”

Logan rolled his eyes but his dad was not to be dissuaded and grabbed him.

“Just follow along to the music.” He instructed.

They ran through the steps slowly and after a while, Logan felt himself loosen up a little. His steps became less mechanical and more like an actual dance.

He smiled as he imagined himself dancing like this with Roman, the other boy was sure to enjoy it, always one for outdated romantic gestures.

His mom laughed and then grabbed his father.

“As important as teaching our son outdated school dances is, I still need your help with dinner.”

They finished making dinner together while Logan set the table.

“ Lettuce eat.” His dad called as he set a bowl of salad down on the table and Logan groaned and hid his head in his hands.

“That pun was souper bad.” His mom groaned.

“Stop.” Logan whined.

“What, don’t you loaf my jokes?” His dad asked.

“They’re terrible.”

“I think they’re sub lime. ” His mom laughed.

Logan lay in his bed, the light from his phone lighting up his face as he waited for his parents to go to bed.

Finally Logan deemed it safe enough to leave and he slunk out of the house.

He walked through the silent neighbourhood till he reached the busier, less ideal parts of town.

There, he found Roman leaning against a wall, in a red leather jacket and heavy black boots, blending in with the crowd of people out on a friday night. Logan felt his heart stutter at the careless way Roman was slumped against the wall, his face cast in stark shadows by the neon lights from a nearby club.

He reminded Logan of the devil, of the incarnation of pride, everything about him inviting yet dangerous.

Logan stopped staring and walked over to join him, trying to lean against the wall with the same graceful abandon but only managing to look like an awkward stick.

“Hello, my dark night.” Roman said.

“You forgot the panties.”

“Oh no, what a tragedy. Guess I can’t be your Robin tonight. Maybe I can be your batwoman?”

“Batwoman’s gay, you dolt.”

“I mean, same.”

“And they’re cousins.”

“Yeah, nevermind.”

“Come on, we have a job to do.” Logan reminded him.

They stayed out all night. Skulking in the shadows and trailing couriers all over the city. Logan felt a strange thrill every time he looked over at Roman. His eyes glinted with excitement and adrenaline.

During the day, they were just teenagers, being pushed and shoved and keeping their heads down as they walked to class.

But now, they were so much more. They became a part of the city, let her bustling energy envelop them. They slipped out of their skin under the streetlights and let themselves disappear into the hubbub and danger that prowled the city streets.

They were angels bringing her justice, they were devils tearing her apart.

They hid behind dumpsters in cold alleyways and walked along the busy promenades, holding each other and pretending to get lost in the others touch, all the while keeping their eyes trained on their mission.

Finally, when the sky was turning a murky gray and Logan’s eyes felt gritty with sleep, they ended up on a bench two streets from Logan’s home. In the suburban neighbourhood, nothing was stirring and, even in the city, it was too early for even the earliest risers.

Roman curled up on the bench and stared at him. Logan stared right back, too tired to care about being seen as weird.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Roman asked, his voice breaking the quiet of the park.

“The evidence we have collected is irrefutable, as long as we take care to deliver it to the right people, there is no reason it shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, I know that. I meant Remus. You said he might not come back, even if he is relieved of his debts. What if he’s really just in it because, I don't know, he likes it? Or he just feels like he fits in there?”

“I don’t know your brother as well as you do. If you have faith in him, then I believe it will work.”

“That’s the thing, I don’t know if I have faith in him. He’s just… So different nowadays. It’s like I don’t even know him anymore.”

“Roman, it will be alright. Your brother may have made some mistakes, but it doesn’t mean he is changed forever. Sometimes people just have trouble figuring themselves out. And either way, whether he makes the right choice or not, at least we did our best.”

Roman smiled at him, his mascara smudged and the glow of the street light lighting up his frizzy hair in a halo of golden light.

“You’re a great friend, you know that right?”

“I try my best.” Logan said with a soft smile.

Roman sat up and leant forward. He reached out and gently traced his thumb over Logan’s jaw. Logan looked up into his eyes, his breath stopping somewhere along the path from his lungs to his mouth. Roman’s thumb came to a stop on his lips.

“Is this alright?” He whispered.

Logan just nodded, his usual eloquence rendered mute.

Roman moved in closer and gently, ever so gently, slotted his lips onto Logan’s.

It was soft, and sweet and when he drew back, he pressed his forehead to Logan’s with a bubbly laugh. He threaded his fingers through Logan’s hair.

Finally, after a long moment of his brain incoherently looping the last moment over and over again, he managed to regain some mobility and placed his hand over the one Roman had cupped around his cheek. He turned his head and placed a kiss on Roman’s palm.

“We’re going to change the world.” Roman breathed, ecstatic with sleep deprivation and adrenaline.

“Together.” Logan whispered back.

As Logan walked home that morning, he felt invincible, untouchable. All the grey days at school fell away, all the teasing and bullying and all the fear was suddenly gone.

He felt like he was soaring, floating somewhere high above his life. He was so much more than himself in that moment.

The ecstatic feeling faded when he entered his garden and noticed the front door was open. His blood ran cold.

Had his parents noticed his absence? He had no idea how he would explain this to them.

He entered the house quietly, trepidation burning in his stomach. Should he call out? Maybe he had just left the door open?

But Logan distinctly remembered checking it was locked before leaving.

Downstairs, all was quiet. Everything looked as it should have been except that muddy footprints tracked in from the door to the stairs.

That was disconcerting, there was a very strict ‘no shoes upstairs’ policy in the house.

Logan’s unease grew. He crept upstairs.

“Mom? Dad?” He called out hesitantly.

The house stayed dead quiet.

With a deep breath, he kept moving. He looked in his room first, as it was right next to the stairs.

The door was pulled open. Strange, Logan could swear he had closed it.

His breath hitched when he saw his room. All his drawers were pulled open. His papers were strewn out over the floor.

The box!

Logan found it upturned and shoved in a corner of the room. All the papers were gone. All the evidence they had collected missing.

Ice cold terror clenched around his heart.

They knew.

Without a second thought, he tore out of his room and ran to his parent’s room.

“Mom! Dad!” He choked off when he entered the room.

No! No, no, no, no!

This wasn't real. This was just a nightmare. He would wake up any second. This just couldn't be real.

Blood painted the walls and bedsheets. It looked like a scene from a horror movie, almost comical in its goriness. If he had seen this in a movie he would have scoffed at the overuse of fake blood.

He hesitantly stepped closer and kneeled next to his mother, who was sprawled out on the floor, her entire back a mess of torn flesh and blood and glistening things Logan didn’t want to examine too closely.

“Mom?” His voice came out waveringly.

He reached out. A pulse, he should look for a pulse. He tried to take her arm but recoiled from the blood that covered it.

It was warm and sticky and already seeping through his pants.

“Mom, wake up.” He whispered.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, I’m sorry I stayed out all night, just please, wake up.” He begged, like apologizing would fix anything.

She still wasn't moving and neither was his dad. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Logan was aware that begging wasn’t doing him any good. He needed to call for help.

But all that came out of his mouth were more pleas.

“Mom! Stop ignoring me! Just wake up!” He yelled and then he started crying, great gasping sobs that tore all the air from his lungs.

He needed them to wake up, he needed to feel their arms around him, needed their comfort. They couldn’t be gone. Not like this, not now, not when just an hour ago, Roman had kissed him, not when outside he could hear the trucks thundering by. This wasn’t real. It just couldn’t be.

He screamed, desperate and heartbroken.

Wake up .

His eyes got caught on a flash of green on the walls and he looked up.

On the wall, painted in a bright neon green, was the symbol he had been studying for months, the gang's symbol, a sword pointed downwards, and underneath it, like an artist’s tag, a sloppy R.

Remus.

Logan felt anger curl in his gut. After everything they had done to help him, this was his answer.

He would pay.

This wasn’t the end. If they thought they could stop him with this, they were wrong. He would get his revenge, he would burn that gang to the ground and he would destroy Remus.

This was personal now.

#sander sides #sanders sides fic #logan sanders #ts logan #roman sanders #ts roman #u!remus #unsympathetic remus #logince #romantic logince #superhero au #ts superhero au #my writing #tell me if i forgot to tag something

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venusmages · 3 years

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Cyberpunk 2077 non-spoiler review

Anyways here’s my writeup about my least favorite parts of 2077 for people who are interested in seeing if it’s for them. Both going to talk about content as well as gameplay. This is for PC version, too, because I know last gen consoles are suffering terribly rn and I wouldn’t recommend the game if you’re not going to be playing on PC. At least not until it’s on sale or the issues have been resolved. It really, really shouldn’t have been released on last gen consoles at all in my opinion - or at least should’ve been released on consoles LATER.

If you like Saints Row, GTA, Mass Effect, Shadowrun, or the Cyberpunk genre in general - I definitely think this is something you might want to take a peek at! I wasn’t anticipating the game until about a month or two before release - so maybe that’s why I’m having a blast - but It’s one of my favorite stories from the past decade as far as sci-fi goes. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and It’s really impressed me. I can’t even go into detail about all the things I LOVE because I really want folks to experience it themselves. Just know there’s a very intricately detailed world, all the characters are memorable and insanely well realized and complex, and the story is great fun. Also made me cry like 5 times. It’s become one of my FAVORITE games very quickly.

I’d also recommend Neon Arcade if you want someone who’s been covering the game for quite a while, including the technical and game industry aspect. He does well to go into some detail and even though he’s a fan, I’ve found him to be largely unbiased. I’m not going to go into industry politics here because I feel that’s up for everyone to decide on their own terms.

No spoilers, things to keep in mind, content warnings, etc. below!

CONTENT WARNINGS and issues with plot/story

this setting is dark. very dark. if you struggle stomaching things like dystopian landscapes, body horror, physical, mental and sexual abuse, corporate and gang violence, abuse of children, harsh language, and concepts that mess with the perception of reality - this game might not be for you. It’s a very mature setting, and I don’t mean that in the Adult Swim kind of way. I mean it in the ‘oh shit, it went there’ way. In my opinion I haven’t run across anything in it that was handled distastefully when it dipped into the depressing, but dark and gritty isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I wanted to give a disclaimer.

The game’s universe in advertising and working for the lower class also exploits sex/sex work quite a bit. This is part of the lore itself because in this universe everyone’s become desensitized to sex and violence to the point that marketing embraces it and makes it ridiculous. I feel it’s very obvious that it doesn’t condone this message and is instead a commentary on consumerism - but people still might be uncomfortable seeing a lot of suggestive stuff all over the place regardless.

Women in game are naked more often than men - even though there is nudity for both. This is likely a mix of appealing to the Gamer Boy demographic (even though the story does NOT actually), or the fact that media is way more cool with seeing naked women than seeing full frontal nudity on men. They probably had to tone some of it down to avoid going above an M rating.

The story is amazing, but sometimes it dumps a lot onto you at once. It’s one of those sci-fi stories that you have to really be following the names, faces, and concepts continually to get it all down. There’s a lot of betrayal, background players, etc. I think by the mid-way point I’d mostly had it, but It’s pretty dense. However it’s still amazing. You might just need two playthroughs before every tiny detail clicks - because there’s a LOT of details.

Honestly I think it would help to read up on the lore first so you’re not going ‘what’ constantly. But people have seemed to manage fine without that also! Neon Arcade has a really nice series of videos (like 2 or 3) that get you up to speed with the universe. It also helps you decide if the tone is right for you.

I think the main story should’ve been longer, also. I don’t mind a 20 hr story, especially in a massive RPG, but It feels like they really struggled to cram as much into that time frame as possible. It skirts the edge of being nice and concise, snappy, and tight - and needing just a few more moments to take a breath and wait a second. This is helped if you do a lot of side quests.

The straight male romance option, River, is INCREDIBLY well written but he doesn’t tie into the main plot in any way whatsoever. It’s very strange and feels like they either ran out of time with him, or slapped together a romance with him at the last second. All the other romances at least know what’s going on with V’s story - meanwhile River has no idea, and you can never tell him. He’s an amazing guy though and I highly recommend his questline. He appears in ACT 2.

In general I’d say not to bother with the romances. There are only 4 total, and while the romancible characters on their own are really well written, the romances themselves are just kinda meh. One romance you don’t even meet until act 3. I don’t think they should’ve been included in the game at all, because they definitely don’t feel as fleshed out as everything else.

CDPR also sometimes forget that women players or gay men exist. Panam and Judy have a lot more content than River and Kerry for example. I don’t think this is intentional, they just have a large fanbase of dudebros. It only shows in the romance content and the nudity thing though.

Johnny, Takemura, and Claire should’ve been romances and I will fight to the death on that.

There are gay and trans characters in the game and their stories don’t revolve around their sexualities. It’s very Fallout: New Vegas in it’s approach to characters: IE. you’re going to love them. All of them.

V’s gender isn’t locked to their body type or their genitals- but to to their voice. I don’t think it’s the best solution they could’ve used but given how the game is heavily voice acted I assume that was what they had to work with.

Some of the romances are locked to both cis voices AND body types (not genitals if I recall but body shapes). That’s disappointing but I assume it was because of scripted scene issues and/or ignorance on the dev’s part considering the LGBT NPCS are so AMAZINGLY done. There’s no homophobic or transphobic language in the game - though there are gendered curse words and insults if that bothers you.

Some characters MAY suffer from ‘bilingual people don’t talk like that’ syndrome. But it can be hard to say for sure given that translators exist in this universe and the way they operate aren’t fully described. It’s only momentarily distracting, not enough to take away from how charming the NPCs are.

The endings are really good don’t get me wrong but I want fix it fic :(. All of the endings out of like 6 (?) in the game are bittersweet.

Both gender V’s are very good but female V’s voice acting is out of this world. If you don’t know what voice to go with/are neutral I’d highly recommend female V. Male V is charming and good but he feels much more monotone compared to female V.

V has their own personality. To some this won’t be a detractor - but a lot of people thought they’d be making absolutely everything from the ground up. V is more of a commander shepard or geralt than a skyrim or d&d pc, if that makes sense. You can customize and influence them to a HUGE degree, some aspects of V will always be the same.

Streetkid is the most boring background - at least for it’s introduction/prologue.

GAMEPLAY/TECHNICAL

If you can run your game on ultra, don’t. It actually looks best with a mix of high and medium settings. Unless you have a beast that has ray-tracing - then by all means use ray tracing and see how absolutely insanely good it looks.

There are color blind modes for the UI, but not for some of the AI/Netrunning segments in cutscenes. Idk how much this will effect folks with colorblindness but those segments are thankfully short.

There was an issue with braindances being an epilepsy trigger because for some reason they decided to mirror the flashing pattern after real epilepsy tests - probably because it ‘looks cool’. I don’t have epilepsy but it even hurt my eyes and gave me a headache. Massive oversight and really goddamn weird. Thankfully this was fixed.

There is no driving AI. Like at all. If you leave your car in the street the traffic is just going to pile up behind it. It’s one of the very few immersion breaking things I’ve encountered.

Sometimes when an NPC is driving with you in the car, they’ll drive on the curb and/or run into people. It’s kind of funny but can occasionally result in something weird. Feels very GTA - but nothing excruciating.

The camera angle feels a little too low in first person mode when driving on cars. You get used to it though.

The police in this game feel slapped on and I hope they improve it. Right now if you commit a crime, you can never tell what will actually trigger it. And if you just run away a few blocks the police forget about it.

Bikes are just way more fun to ride than the cars are.

You CANNOT respec your character after you make them. Ever. it sucks. Go in with an idea ahead of time what you wanna do - it’s better than being a jack of all trades.

as of now you also CANNOT change their appearance after you exit the character creator. This, also, sucks. Make sure you REALLY like your V or you’re gonna be replaying the openings over and over like I did.

Photomode on PC is the N key. Had to look it up. The mode itself is great though

Shooting and Mele fighting feel pretty standard. I don’t have a lot of shooter experience besides Bethesda games so anything feels better than that to me. So far I’ve enjoyed stealth and mele the best, but that’s just my own taste! The combat and driving aren’t groundbreaking by any means, but they’re still very fun. I look forward to running at people with swords or mantis blades, and zipping around the city on a motorcycle to see the sights. The story, lore, and interesting quests and characters are the real draw here.

I haven’t encountered any game breaking bugs in 80-ish hours of play time. One or two T-poses, a few overlays not loading or floating objects - but nothing terrible. Again, my experience is with Bethesda games. This is all usually fixed by either opening your inventory and closing it again, or exiting out and reloading your save.

The C button is mapped for crouching AND skipping dialogue by default. That’s terrible. Change it in the settings to be HOLDING C skips dialogue and you’ll be gucci.

There’s apparently a crafting system. I have never been inclined to touch it. But I also play on easy like a pleb so IDK how it all scales otherwise.

The mirror reflections can be a little bit weird, at least on my end. They always end up a teeny bit grainy despite my computer being able to run everything on Ultra Max. You can still get good screens out of it though!

So many people text me to sell me cars and I want them to stop. Please. also the texting menu is abysmal. The rest is ok tho

It’s pretty clear when you’re going to go into a ‘cutscene’. all cutscenes are rendered in-engine BUT you often will be talking to other characters at a specific angle or setting. The game locks you into this usually by having you sit down. It works for me - after all we do a lot of sitting- but it IS very obvious that it’s a way for the game to get you in the frame it wants to display.

That’s all I can think of rn! If you’re interested but wanted to get a slightly better idea of whats going on, I hope this helps. I’m really enjoying it and despite my issues it’s exceeding my expectations. I’m going to be thinking about and replaying this game for quite a while.

#cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2077 review #2077 review #cp2077 #rosetxt #txt

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aesirfalling · 4 years

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From your writing asks: #1, 8, 10, 26, and 28 :) I wasn't sure if you had wanted me to answer any specific ones myself, but since it was an ask I wanted to respond properly~

I definitely wanted you to answer some specific ones yourself :^)

What themes would you like to write about that you feel don’t get explored very often?

I think this is obvious to everyone who’s read my more recent fics (so like... my fics from 2016 onwards?), but I like to write “realistically,” especially in regards to joys and pain. When people write about angst things like breakups and depression and physical illnesses they are sometimes hesitant (rightfully or understandably so, in many cases) to really get into the nitty gritty, and in many cases, uglier parts of them, but like, they’re a part of life and people in our lives don’t have a good time (or even many good moments at all) when these kinds of things happen to them. Those moments are still important, though, and I personally feel like embracing the dark aspects of those things makes getting through them in the end more emotionally and existentially powerful? If that makes sense. I’m definitely still wrestling with, like, the extent to which I should write such things (esp. since like, in most cases, fic readers are not reading your fic to suffer), but I think my underlying sentiment as a writer is to examine/meet feelings and life unflinchingly and with some kind of grace.

(I’ll get to the joys eventually. I swear. I have that draft of the second chapter of Lost and Found in my Google Drive. There’s Radiance and the mood in that, too. I just don’t like to write too much preemptive joy.)

The other thing I want to bring up as well is a kind of like... infrastructural realism? Or is it like, socioeconomic, worldly things? Like we’ve talked about this as well RE: how I’m covering Hope in my fics and how you worldbuild a lot around missions and such in yours. I think this is mostly a fic thing since to do this well requires a longer fic with a lot of forethought, and most people don’t have time for that. And honestly most people don’t like Hope for the structural engineering work he put into building new planets either

Favorite dialogue in your wip? (If asked more than once, respond with a new piece each time)

Oh man this interlude is going to be CHOKE FULL of dialogue that will kill me and most of them haven’t even been written yet

But the things that I’ve already put down on my dump file are like all dialogue

Here I just wrote up this thing

Snow: Go on then. Tell me that you don’t miss the stars. Tell me that you are okay with just sitting here day by day, pretending that you don’t know anything, pretending that you don’t have regrets and wants. Tell me that you don’t care if I won’t invite you to the wedding with Serah, if Light finds another man, or if some orphanage is burning on the other side of town. Tell me -

Hope: I don’t think you understand. I never needed anyone to motivate me.

Hope: I needed someone to stop me.

What scene was the most fun to write for you and why?

Hmm... we might have to establish a definition for ‘fun’ :P

I think in more recent memory, I’ve had the most fun writing the dialogue between Hope and E1 in the Intermission, because I relish all opportunities to write him (especially in FWWCH where I’m usually banned from writing in his POV) and writing two of him is just double the fun. I also adore all occasions where introspective idiots have to talk to other versions of themselves because it’s kind of like. The inevitable 404 error when they realize they are actually empathizing with themselves is tearjerker and heartwarming central.

What do you feel like you need to work on as a growing writer? How can you improve?

Oh lordy there are so many things. Lemme just list a few off the top of my head

1) Linguistic ability: There is definitely a part of me that is sad about the fact that leaving my home country at the age of 11 has left me in a place where I am kind of bilingual but kind of... not really “Native” in either. Like, I have this lingering feeling that I’ll never get to the level of a “Native” English speaker/writer, and I definitely hit like language ability walls all the time when I write - things wouldn’t feel naturally lyrical, I’d run out of words, I wouldn’t know how to describe something the way it should be described, the sentence structure variety is pitiful, etc. I think it’s especially apparent when you’re writing a long fic, where like you have to deal with the same things over and over (e.g. writing Hope cooking, or how Lightning physically perceives him, etc) and there’s more of a limit on where natural inspiration can take you. I should read more good prose (since that’s apparently how I get better at English) but, ugh, effort.

2) Characterization: how many times have I whined about how much I suck at writing Lightning lmaooooooo I think the general thing is like, everyone is decent at writing someone they personally relate to, but we struggle when we try to write outside of our comfort zone. Lightning is definitely the poster child of “character unlike me that I’m trying to get a hold of,” but I think I struggled even more trying to write Fang, and I’d probably struggle trying to write someone like Cid seriously. I think a large part of the struggle is trying to morph yourself into that character (or, like, dissociating from yourself and just... “becoming” that character depending on how you view writing meta??) since like, just understanding someone is not enough. Just understanding someone won’t let you write convincing dialogue where they talk and move around the way they usually do. You have to like, become them and that’s really hard when you have a strong writer’s ego (I know, shocking, coming from me.)

3) Worldbuilding: wtf am I even doing with Hope’s White Lotus thing lmaoooooo anyway a world could always be more interesting, consistent, realistic, nuanced etc. And not necessarily through more word count on the worldbuilding-y stuff. I think it’s more about understanding the factors driving the world than anything else. Like what the resources are, who has power/agency, how things are done (e.g., in our world, decisions are mostly made by individual nation states, although large corporate entities often have immense political influence). AND THEN JUST LIKE CHARACTERS THERE’S THE STRUGGLE WITH EXECUTING THEM - like just because I understand there are rich oligarchs behind things doesn’t mean I’m good at writing the Great Gatsby. I dunno, I have a perpetual sense of imposter syndrome when I try to understand and write things about the world, regardless of whether or not the world is real. I feel like a large part of this goes back to the fact that I’m still only in my 20s and haven’t seen much of the ‘real world’ as they say, although I guess I’m technically still way ahead of most fic writers.

4) General writer’s attitude: this influences themes and the heart of one’s writing. When I say that I care a lot about the grace and dignity of my narratives and my characters, it ties back into this - I want to tell human stories, and I want to tell stories that reflect on our struggles and our faith despite said struggles. It’s the kind of lens that I filter all my words through and impacts every word I write. The obvious problem, then, is that my writing’s only ever going to be as perceptive or sympathetic as I am, and that’s something that I can and should always work on. Am I too obsessed with tragedy? Am I honestly far better at posing questions than providing solutions, even when I highly value solutions? How do I become the kind of writer and person that I want to be without driving myself insane or losing touch with the people that I want my writing to speak to?

5) Discipline: Am I ever going to finish FWWCH (or H&L or any of my other WIPs lmao)? Stay tuned.

I think a lot of my self-doubt as a writer comes from just how much I know I can improve on tbh

Do you need background noise to write? If so, what do you listen to?

I wouldn’t say I work with “background noise” - I work with mood-appropriate playlists (did you know I’ve been gratuitously naming all my fic chapters after songs?), or you know, the good ole 2 o’clock cosmic silence. It’s pretty interesting to me actually, since I also have an engineering degree and like... I need silence when I’m trying to logick things like math or the correct wording for a formal writing thing (e.g. a grant or policy proposal). So my creative hemisphere wants stimulation while my mechanical brain wants silence. Figures.

#thank you for sending these in ;_;#writing tag #long post

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a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives · 4 years

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The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold Book Review

Jun 26, 2020. By: Drew @ The Tattooed Book Geek

The Last Smile in Sunder City (The Fetch Phillips Archives #1).

Luke Arnold.

352 pages.

Urban Fantasy.

My Rating: Hellyeah Book Review.

Book Blurb.

I’m Fetch Phillips, just like it says on the window. There are three things you should know before you hire me:

1. Sobriety costs extra. 2. My services are confidential. 3. I don’t work for humans.

It’s nothing personal – I’m human myself. But after what happened, it’s not the humans who need my help.

I just want one real case. One chance to do something good. Because it’s my fault the magic is never coming back.

Book Review.

I received a free copy of this book courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

There was once magic in the world and magical creatures, dragons, gryphons, elves, werewolves, vampires, gnomes, dwarves, giants, ogres, wizards, gremlins, goblins, banshees, sirens etc. If it is a fantasy creature that you have heard of then the chances are very high that Arnold has included it in The Last Smile in Sunder City and then you had humans, flesh and blood, non-magical and ordinary human beings.

After a devastating event that has come to be known as ‘the Coda‘ where humans who had hoped to harness the power of magic ended up breaking the world. The magic didn’t just cease to exist and leave the world, it also left the magical creatures too making them non-magical and decimating the population. Ageless elves aged, dragons could no longer fly and fell from the skies, unicorns went deranged and, consumed by madness and now run crazed across the land, werewolves got stuck part-way through their transformation leaving them as disfigured monsters, dwarven forges went cold, goblin machinery failed and stopped working and the blood, the sustenance that had sustained the vampires no longer had any effect, it no longer replenished them and they are now, withering. All of the creatures that didn’t outright die when their connection to the magic was severed became ordinary and are slowly fading from the world.

In Sunder City, six years after the Coda Fetch Phillips, a former soldier is now a ‘Man for Hire’ which is a Private Investigator. Fetch receives a phone call from the Principal of the Ridgerock Academy, a cross-species school in Sunder City when a faculty member, Professor Edmund Albert Rye, a three-hundred-year-old vampire goes missing and hasn’t turned up to teach in over a week. Rye is respected and liked, he has even tried to put the old ways behind him and has embraced his new existence in the post-Coda world as best he can and it is entirely out of character for him to no show his lessons. However, when one of Rye’s students, a young siren also goes missing and other vampires are found dead too what was a single disappearance turns into something more with wide-reaching implications.

Sunder City was built on top of a huge underground fire pit. Originally it was a factory mining, smelting iron, making bricks and employed blacksmiths and metal workers and the only citizens were the workers. But, as more and more of the workers decided to stay after their employment ended and over time, it transformed, houses and businesses were built, culture was introduced alongside the production from the factory and it turned into a metropolis. When the Coda hit the fires that Sunder City had been built on were immediately quenched and the city suffered. It is barely hanging on, turning into a slum, many of the residents are destitute, the streets aren’t safe and life there is both dangerous and bleak. Due to the Coda, there is a festering animosity and resentment towards humans. There is still some good left in the city, not much but some, a religious group of winged monks who help the most in need. Devoting their lives to caring for the destitute and the poor. There is bad too, Nail gangs. Roving gangs of humans whose sole intent is to kill the dwindling magical races, erasing them from the world and consuming them to history. That is where the name ‘Nail gang’ comes from as they want to put the final nail in the coffin of the various species, wiping them from existence.

The Last Smile in Sunder City is narrated in the first-person by Fetch Phillips over duel timelines, the past which features a series of flashbacks of important events over the course of Fetch’s life and the present. Fetch is trying to be a better man, trying to redeem himself, atone for his past mistakes and he is taking the first steps on the road to redemption. He is a self-loathing alcoholic who drinks to forget, to numb the pain and who tries and fails to find solace in the bottom of a bottle. His past haunts him, he is full of regrets that weigh heavily upon him, he has made more than a few mistakes during his life, suffered loss and he is drowning in a sea of self-pity, shame and guilt. He hates both himself and humanity and he plies his trade as a Man for Hire solely for the now non-magical races. It is his penance as being a human he is better able to cope with the new world than they are as they attempt to adjust to their new magic-less half-lives.

There is a melancholic charm to Fetch, grit and a dogged determination to him. He has demons but he hasn’t yet fully given into them. He is a terrific main character and narrator, cynical, jaded but wholly likeable. You want to see Fetch solve the case, pull himself up from the brink and redeem himself, not put the past behind him, it is a part of him and always will be but finally come to accept it, that he can’t change the past or erase his mistakes but he can move forward and try to make a difference in the present.

The story is definitely not action-packed, it’s not needed. The few action sequences that are featured add to the overall story which is very character-driven with an additional focus on the world-building. Throughout the course of the story, you learn a lot about Fetch, the magical creatures, Sunder City and the world, in other words, every aspect of the book. It is only a small niggle but, what you learn can feel like information dumping. However, the information is always interesting, adds depth and detail and takes the outline and pencil sketch and transforms it into a full-colour and meticulous picture.

The writing itself is descriptive with some rather unique phrasing and use of words by Arnold giving him his own distinctive and quirky voice.

“His laughter rattled like a sandpaper saxophone”.

To go along with that uniqueness there are also some passages that are laced with meaning and that show a more thoughtful side to the writing.

“You don’t measure age in years, you measure it in lessons learned and repeated mistakes and how hard it is to force a little hope into your heart”.

I’m not the biggest fan of urban fantasy, in fact, it is a genre that I rarely enjoy and that I tend to stay away from. However, I found The Last Smile in Sunder City to be an accomplished and very satisfying debut that I thoroughly enjoyed. It is gritty and grimy fantasy noir and in Fetch Phillips, you have someone to root for who is the beating and damaged tortured heart of the book.

- The Tattooed Book Geek:

#luke arnold #the last smile in sunder city #review

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readwithmichelle · 4 years

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Books I Read in June

Sorry for the lateness of this one - holidays and other shenanigans got in the way of me finishing this write up. Anyway - For the Month of June I’ve read Ninth House, Gideon the Ninth, The Last Temptations of Iago Wick, and The Empress of Salt and Fortune.

Ninth House is now my third Leigh Bardugo book. This one is her adult fiction series - and it is reflected in the content. Ninth House is much more harrowing than her young adult titles. Alex is the survivor of a multiple homicide, and no one knows how. She’s tapped to go to Yale on a full ride on account of her ability: Alex can see ghosts. So now she’s plunged into the world of Yale and it’s Secret Societies, where she fulfills the role of accountability for these Secret Societies. In this book, magic is not some beautiful flowing thing. It’s gritty. Characters are up to their elbows in gristle and bones and flesh. It’s gross. Alex’s backstory too, is quite horrifying. The Ghosts she can see are horrifying. It’s a roller coaster of uncomfortable storytelling, but at the same time I was completely hooked - I wanted to know where this story would go desperately. Ninth House is essentially a procedural mystery novel, not necessarily a fantasy like her previous novels, though fantasy elements are present. The plot of the book revolves around several crimes, all of which have to be solved by the end. There is the murder that Alex survived, Darlington’s disappearance, the death of the Bridegroom and his Bride, and the death of Tara. All of these incidents have strings that lead all the way to the end of the book in an explosive end that reveals the truth of it all. Ultimately, this is probably one of my favorite adult fiction books that I’ve read. Leigh Bardugo is a masterful writer, and I found myself on the edge of my seat with this one, too. Watch out for this one, folks. Also, a warning - a LOT of content of this book would be considered triggering. Several horrifying things happen, so enter at your own risk. 5/5 Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir was the next book I read in June - though I started it in May. Boy, this one was a bit of a slog fest. That is perhaps a fault of my own, and not necessarily that of the author’s or the book’s, though. I’m really not into speculative fiction/science fiction at all - I recently went through my Good Reads shelves and realized that I’ve read less than 10 science fiction novels in my entire life. They just do not appeal to me - and it’s for a reason that Gideon the Ninth falls into as well - the book intentionally obfuscates for about 150 pages - it’s majority of the time an info dump about the technology of the universe that has been crafted for the story. I don’t enjoy that - in fact every time I run into it I can feel my eyes glazing over and boredom setting in. That was largely why I ended up putting it aside to read other books first. Once I came back to it, however, it was still a slog for a bit before the story actually began to pick up. The story follows Gideon Nav, who is a disgruntled indentured servant of the Ninth House - one of the nine necromantic houses in the galaxy that serve an undying Necro-Lord Emperor. She is forced to become the Prime Cavalier of her house in aid to the Reverend Daughter - Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is the strongest necromancer the house has ever produced. She and Gideon, however, have a past - they absolutely hate each other. The nine houses of the galaxy have been called to the first house, and all of them are to participate in a contest to see who can become a Lyctor - basically a suped up Necromancer in service to the Emperor. That’s basically the gist of the main plot - there’s also a bit of a murder mystery that takes place because necromancers and cavaliers start dropping like flies, but the core of the story is the interpersonal relationship between Gideon and Harrow. It’s a decent enemies to lovers trope done well - though I would argue they don’t actually become lovers at all - merely come to an understanding about their own pasts. Their relationship can be very much defined as toxic co-dependence. Ultimately the story was alright - I wasn’t very wow-ed by it, as the world building felt extremely thin, though I did find the necromancy aspect interesting. Gideon and Harrow are both interesting characters on their own, but ultimately the story wasn’t extremely gripping for me. My biggest gripe of it all, however, is that I never found out what exactly the Emperor was fighting against. What is the great threat to the existence of the galaxy that makes Gideon dream to be a part of it, what necessitates the Lyctor trials even being called once more? I never found that out. 3/5 After that I decided to breeze through some smaller books - if they can even be called books at some times. The next book I tackled was The Last Temptations of Iago Wick - it’s a self published book by Jennifer Rainey, and follows two demons working for Hell in 19th century New England. It has a bit of a steam punk flare, though it’s not hugely present, and is whip crackling funny. It very much reads like a Good Omens alternative universe fanfiction that got tweaked for publication, but honestly, that doesn’t bother me because it’s simply that enjoyable. Iago is to be promoted into essentially a regional manager in the efforts of Hell against the forces of Heaven. He specializes as a Tempter - creating Faustian Bargains after Bargains with finesse and panache. His partner in his efforts and in his Demonic life is one Dante Lovelace, a “Catastrophe Artist” who specializes in mass mayhem and death. He is described as Byronic and gloomy, with taxidermied animals all over his apartment. Iago and Dante’s relationship is so refreshing - they are queer without fanfare. There is only passing references to period typical homophobia, but their relationship is sweet and presented without drama and trauma. Iago’s current assignments are to essentially take down the Order of the Scarab - a secret society pulling the strings in Marlowe, who have murdered and bribed and intimidated in order to further their own ends, but a demon hunter stands in his way of accomplishing his goal. The book has some interesting segments about free will, the nature of Heaven and Hell, which if you know me I’m wont to eat up eagerly. This book was a nice change of pace after the frustrations of Gideon. 4/5 The final book I read for the month was The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. This is more of a novella than an actual to goodness novel, but it was extremely satisfying and well done. This was the book that made me go “well maybe a book doesn’t have to be 200 pages to convey a proper story.” I don’t want to give too much of this book away, as I feel it is an experience that needs to be truly embraced blindly. It reads much like a kind of flowing, poetic prose, however, and the overarching theme of the novel is primarily that of the vengeance and rage of women against an unjust world. I highly recommend this one as a breeze read, though if you are anything like me it will leave you more than a bit emotionally compromised after. 5/5 For the month of July I have mostly taken a break for the first few weeks, just enjoying some time to myself. I have read the first season of Lore Olympus and that will be included in my July write up, but for July I intend to take some time to decompress and deal with wedding planning. I still hope to read a few books though, and my July list is The Vine Witch by Luanne G. Smith, The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, and Merchants of Milan by Edale Lane. I actually began The Vine Witch in June but it has not exactly kept me riveted to its pages, so hopefully I can finally slog through it. See y’all at the end of the month!

#booklr #books I read in june 2020 #litblr #2020 reading

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in-flagrante · 6 years

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Godless review – Netflix's wonderfully wicked western fires on all cylinders ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jake Nevins - Wednesday 22 November 2017 09.47 EST

Godless, Netflix’s new seven-part miniseries, opens in 1884, in Creede, Colorado, with a thick cloud of smog shrouding the camera. The haze slowly dissolves to reveal a chilling landscape: parched bodies being tended to by swarms of flies; a man, sedentary, with a gunshot through his head; a train-wreck near which a young boy hangs from a noose; and a woman, crouched over a corpse, singing mournfully about Christ. It’s a near-wordless several minutes, a triumph of mood and cinematography, that evokes the sort of rough-and-tumble anarchy of the great filmic frontiersman. Soon after, we’re in La Belle, New Mexico, where we learn who’s responsible for the massacre, and from thereon it’s guns blazing.

Written and directed by Scott Frank and executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh, Godless is grim, exciting and visually arresting. It’s slow, but necessarily so, patiently offering vital exposition while its classic, western plot unfurls itself violently. That violence can be pegged, mostly, to Jeff Daniels’ Frank Griffin, a menacing, one-armed outlaw who’s looking for a man named Roy Goode. Goode, played by Jack O’Connell, was once a member of Griffin’s criminal cabal, but when a train heist turns savage and Goode saves a woman who’s being raped, he bucks town with the loot, staves off Griffin and his 32 men, and lumbers to a farm owned by Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery).

Fletcher, who Dockery plays with brutal, soft-spoken gravitas, is twice-widowed and lives with her son, Truckee. After a catastrophic mining accident wiped out most of the townsmen, La Belle has become a colony of tough, strong-willed women, the sort of place one imagines Julie Christie’s Mrs Miller might have resided had McCabe not been in the picture. A bit of internet digging reveals that La Belle was actually a real town, in Taos County, New Mexico, named after Belle Dixon, the wife of a gold miner; though it lasted just 16 years, it makes a weird kind of sense that it’s been revitalized in 2017 as a proto-feminist pasture, shot in a sweeping 2.39:1 aspect ratio where horses roam and women rule. And the show sets itself up for those women to stand their ground against Griffin’s outlaws.

Godless was originally intended to be a movie, but Soderbergh encouraged Frank, who co-wrote the screenplays for the films Logan, Marley & Me, and Minority Report, to turn it into a miniseries. After watching the hour-plus-long first episode, which only plants the seeds of what’s to come, and the equally lengthy ones that follow, it’s no wonder Soderbergh thought the script a better fit for television. Characters are developed richly but steadily, and much needs to be established before Griffin and Goode’s inevitable confrontation, the lead-up to which is beautifully protracted to give weight and import to several other characters, among them Merrit Wever’s Mary Agnes, another of La Belle’s gritty, gun-toting widows, and her brother Sheriff Bill McNue (Scoot McNairy), who is hot on Griffin’s heels and delivers wonderfully hokey one-liners like, “You don’t seem all that much like a desperado so much as you just look desperate.”

It’s hard to pinpoint one standout performance; Dockery is superb, wielding her gun with mighty force, and so is Wever, who’s been a stalwart supporting player on shows like The Walking Dead and Nurse Jackie; Daniels is a convincingly boozy villain, whiskey dribbling down his beard as he looks to exact revenge on his old protege; and McNairy, O’Connor and Thomas Brodie-Sangster, as the town deputy Whitey Winn, each turn in authentic, understated performances. It would not be surprising to see one or two or even three of them in the Emmys conversation next summer, which tends to emphasize plucky, period-piece roles like these.

The plot may be too slow for some – which, in addition to the genre, might drive viewers away – but Godless is worth it if only for aesthetic pleasure. Shot by Steven Meizler, who worked with Soderbergh on The Girlfriend Experience, the long, vivid tracking shots are lyrical and impressionistic, and there’s a scene in a church, where Griffin implores the townspeople to steer clear of Roy Goode lest they suffer like Christ did, that brought to mind the great face-off between Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday of There Will Be Blood. That the series is so full of cinematic references both visual and narrative is part of the fun; Godless doesn’t resist its classification as a western with a capital W, and instead embraces the genre’s outsize influence in the American film canon.

Godless is now available on Netflix worldwide

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/nov/22/godless-review-netflix-wonderfully-wicked-western-fires-on-all-cylinders

#michelle dockery #jeff daniels #Jack O'Connell #godless #netflix godless

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onelifemedia · 4 years

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CINEMATOGRAPHY OSCAR NOMINEES ON AUTHENTICITY AND AVOIDING VFX https://ift.tt/2OZteQ0

The DoPs behind 1917, Joker, The Irishman, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood and The Lighthouse reflect on the bold choices they made to bring dynamic visions to the screen.

Cinematographers are moving both forward and backward in technological terms this year, ironically in pursuit of the same goal: authenticity.

Avoiding VFX and instead opting to shoot reality has been a central theme. Robert Richardson used real Los Angeles backgrounds for the driving scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood. Roger Deakins contended with real explosions and fires in Sam Mendes’s 1917.

Rigging equipment has also been a common talking point for DoPs in 2019. Deakins pushed the boundaries of stabilising devices to enable extended tracking shots for the continuous-take approach of 1917, while Papamichael explored the limits of large-format cameras, putting them in positions that would have been impossible a few years ago (on a low mounted arm attached to a racing car, in one case). Perhaps most complicated of all was Rodrigo Prieto’s “three-headed monster”, a three-camera set-up used to aid the CGI de-ageing process for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.

These and other top cinematographers no longer debate analogue versus digital, with plenty saying it is digital and film, rather than digital or film. This is in part due to rapid advances in camera technology by companies like Arri, with films including 1917 utilising a large-format digital camera that, according to Deakins, is as good as any film camera.

Mixing light sources has also been in vogue, with Lawrence Sher using harsh fluorescents and urban streetlamps to create the heightened eeriness of Joker and grittiness of the city.

Whether they are using old-school filmmaking techniques or the latest technology, these cinematographers are creating brave new worlds for audiences and their craft.

Lawrence Sher - Joker

SOURCE: NIKO TAVERNISE

LAWRENCE SHER ON THE ‘JOKER’ SET

Lawrence Sher has been known primarily for his work on comedies including Todd Phillips’ The Hangover trilogy, Paul, The Dictator and I Love You, Man, before he reunited with Phillips to create the dark, sinister world of Joker.

While Joaquin Phoenix’s performance threw up regular surprises during the shoot, Sher was a ready and willing partner for the award-winning actor, and says his own work plumbing the depths of the DC Comics arch villain — which won him Camerimage’s Golden Frog award in November — is not as big a departure as it initially appears.

What was the shooting schedule like for Joker?I read the script about a year before, did an early scout in March [2018] and then prepped for 10 weeks. The shoot lasted 60 days with one day of shooting lost due to issues with the LED lighting on the New York City subway sequence.

What was your approach to Joker’s colour scheme?My main colour palette was drawn first and foremost from real lighting fixtures that exist in the city. I also looked at movies of that era in which the movie takes place [1981], the colour of the film stock at the time and how it would capture all of this mixed light. The colour palette is a mix of utilitarian light and uncorrected fluorescents — we kept their crappy look so it wouldn’t be clean.

We changed out some of the streetlights so they would be sodium vapour, as opposed to LED which many streetlights are now. When we shot at dusk, you have that blueish light that mixes with the sodium vapours and suddenly you have the colours that I think people associate with the movie: the blues, greens, oranges and greys. You can see the messiness of the city.

How did you approach working with the actors to capture their performances?On set we maintain a certain rhythm for the actors. If they have to go back to trailer, even for 20 minutes, there is a momentum loss. So if I can shoot fast, they never have to leave the set. It helps everybody, especially the scene.

Todd Phillips encouraged improvisation, for instance the bathroom scene where Joker starts to dance after killing the men in the subway. Did that approach affect the shooting?That shot was improvisational. He was going to come into the bathroom, hide the gun, wash off the make-up and stand in the mirror and laugh. But with Todd, the movie is constantly being rewritten so you are discovering it as you make it. All of the planning is there but he’s always flexible. With that scene, he wanted to try it non-verbally. He played a piece of music — he didn’t tell the camera operator what was going to happen — and we got that scene in one take.

Was your approach to Joker different to your other films?My lighting approach is not any different. We are not servicing comedy [in Joker]. Some of the compositions come to the forefront perhaps, more than in my previous works. But my approach, particularly with Todd, is to allow for flexibility and freedom. A lot of it is co-ordination with production design and needing the freedom to be able to light a big space. To have the world lit as opposed to focused on a specific person on a mark.

Which sequence was the most challenging to shoot?The subway scene where he kills three Wall Street guys. We shot on a stage and with LED panels. It was challenging because while we had more money than other independent films, it’s still a budget issue. Todd had always described it as a fever dream — this kind of escalating light show. We accomplished it with a very expensive row of LED lights on both sides, though not too many LEDs because we tried to keep to the light as they had it in the 1970s and ’80s. I was taking the New York subway all the time and shooting with my iPhone to figure out the lighting for that scene.

How did you find working with Joaquin Phoenix?It was a transformative experience watching him act and getting to know him. I didn’t say anything to him during prep; he was a little bit intimidating. He apologised to me for acting weird and I said, “No man, do your thing.” We grew to have a good relationship, where we would challenge each other with the choices on set.

Rodrigo Prieto - The Irishman

SOURCE: NIKO TAVERNISE PICTURES

RODRIGO PRIETO WITH MARTIN SCORSESE ON THE SET OF ‘THE IRISHMAN’

Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto has worked alongside acclaimed directors including Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) and Pedro Almodovar (Broken Embraces). The Irishman marks his third feature with Martin Scorsese, after The Wolf Of Wall Street and Silence.

Prieto describes the epic crime drama as one of his most challenging projects to date: an intensive 108-day shoot involving more than 300 set-ups, with the added challenge of managing a complicated CGI de-ageing process for the main actors, which incorporated a “three-headed monster” camera rig.

Although Martin Scorsese is an avid supporter of shooting on film, you had to use digital as well to achieve the de-ageing technique.Yes, 56% was shot on digital and 44% on film. The overall look I thought had to be based on film negative because of the memory aspect. Scorsese talked about home movies, this sensation of remembering the past through images, so I developed looks based on still photography, Kodachrome and Ektachrome.

For the visual effects, it was necessary to shoot with digital cameras where the face had to be replaced with CGI. Visual-effects supervisor Pablo Helman from Industrial Light & Magic needed three cameras synched for every angle and the shutters had to all be in perfect sync. The challenge of getting three cameras to move in unison meant that using film cameras from a practical standpoint was nearly impossible.

Was it Pablo Helman who came up with the idea of using CGI to de-age the actors?Yes, when we were shooting Silence, Pablo said he thought there was a way to make actors look younger through computer-generated imagery. He came up with a three-headed rig where the central camera, the Red Helium, is capturing the shot and two witness cameras, Arri Alexa Minis, are sat on either side of the main camera to read the infrared map of the actors’ faces. We called it the “three-headed monster”.

Can you talk about the stages of the de-ageing process and how that was achieved?There are several different stages. Prosthetics were used to make the actors look older. Make-up could make the actors look younger, for example making a 70-year-old actor look like they were in their 50s. VFX and CGI de-ageing were used when the actors are close to the transition to make-up, and that was complicated as the ageing transition was subtle, say, only a few months in time rather than several years. The technical and make-up teams had to be sure the transition was smooth.

How did you map out the visual arc of a film that spans five decades over three-and-a-half hours?We did not want to make it over-stylised or flashy. Scorsese wanted the camera to reflect the way Frank Sheeran [played by Robert De Niro] approached his job, which was simple, methodical and repetitive. The audience sees the same shots with Frank — the camera pans around at the same angle. When we were with other characters, like crazy Joe Gallo, the camera behaves differently.

How did the fact the film was made to screen first and foremost on Netflix affect the way it was shot?For the most part it wasn’t a consideration. Scorsese designs his shots in a way that helps the story. The one thing we did change was the aspect ratio. Normally, Scorsese would use widescreen but in this case we thought we had better use 1.85 because it would fill up home screens. It also fit Frank’s personality more, as well as helping to show the height difference between the characters. Frank was a tall man so we made special shoes for De Niro and boxes with cushions where he sat. For accuracy, we also changed his eye colour to blue.

You were working on a tight schedule. Was there any room for improvisation during the shoot?When the actors want to try something different, Scorsese will almost always go for it. Near the end of the film, Frank is looking as his car is being washed and it’s a defining moment. We lit the scene for him standing and always looking at the car. Then De Niro said, “I always kind of imagined being inside the car.” So Marty said, “Oh, OK, let’s do that.” I had to set it up in three seconds. As soon as we shot it, I could see that his performance was there.

Jarin Blaschke - The Lighthouse

SOURCE: CHRIS REARDON

JARIN BLASCHKE ON THE SET OF ‘THE LIGHTHOUSE’

Born in the Los Angeles suburbs, Jarin Blaschke continues a collaboration with filmmaker Robert Eggers that began on the latter’s 2008 short The Tell-Tale Heart and encompassed his haunting 2015 feature debut The Witch. For The Lighthouse, the pair conjured up another strange and foreboding world: a mysterious New England island in the 1890s, inhabited by lighthouse keepers Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. Blaschke deployed innovative lighting and lensing solutions to take on not just the wilds of authentic Nova Scotia locations, but the demands of dark, cramped, wet settings.

How many years did it take to develop the concept of The Lighthouse?I didn’t have a script until a month or two before prep, but Rob first pitched this idea probably three years before that. With him, it starts with atmosphere, so my subconscious was working on the atmosphere at the same time that we were developing The Witch. We didn’t know which one would go [first] and then The Witch happened.

The Lighthouse was shot in black and white, with a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, on Kodak Double X 35mm film format, which dates from the 1950s. How much testing did you do?There was a battery of tests I put myself through, like testing real oil lamps to see how to do it with an electrical lamp. I had to know how to light differently: I bolstered the light levels by 15, sometimes 20 times, and the film stock had to be tested in rain, backlit to know where it looks like night but also doesn’t look overly lit.

What logistical challenges did you face shooting on location in Nova Scotia?The weather was bad and added about four days to our schedule. It could have been worse but we had a covered set. We couldn’t do a night scene one night because it was too windy and even with day scenes, you have frames where you need to bounce light back using a giant sail and it gets a little hairy. There was a lot of eating cold porridge in the dark in the morning and the breakfast tent was going to blow away. We had to build this hardcore tent just to have breakfast. It adds to the movie, I hope.

In exploring the space between reality and insanity in The Lighthouse, did you use special lenses for certain scenes?I went to Panavision. I know vintage lenses are really trendy right now. I had some experience with the usual suspects: Cooke Series 2s and Super Baltars [used in The Godfather and The Birds]. They put original Baltars in front of me and I fell in love with them. So we had old Baltars from the 1930s. We used the first high-speed portrait lens of the 19th century for special shots, like [Robert Pattinson] having sex with a mermaid, the hand going down the body. Stuff that was super heightened where we could get away with it.

How did your collaboration with Eggers inspire you for certain images?I’ve known Rob for 12 years so I knew there were going to be a lot of symmetrical two-shots. There is one direct reference to a Sascha Schneider painting. And the last scene in the film is in the lookbook. Those are the only two references, everything else I tried to create. I know Rob watched all kinds of crazy stuff, like videos with shark genitals.

You are also working on Eggers’ next film, The Northman. What can you say about it?Rob says very little. It’s a bigger movie than the others. I can say it’s a Viking revenge movie and we are shooting in Europe. I think he feels a responsibility to do a trilogy. It’s dark and unusually violent.

Robert Richardson - Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood

SOURCE: ANDREW COOPER

ROBERT RICHARDSON WITH QUENTIN TARANTINO

A nine-time Oscar nominee and three-time winner, Robert Richardson’s career has been closely associated with three filmmakers: Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. For Stone, he photographed 11 features in a little over a decade, winning the Oscar for JFK; two of his five collaborations with Scorsese brought him Oscar statuettes (The Aviator and Hugo); and he shared Camerimage’s director and cinematographer duo award with Tarantino for their work across six films including Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood. Richardson is known across the industry for pushing boundaries and doing whatever it takes to achieve a shot.

How would you typify your relationship with Quentin Tarantino?A relationship with a director is a marriage. I have been fortunate enough to forge a series of relationships with all of the directors I’ve worked with from the beginning. It’s the idea that you are linked together and begin to understand how the other speaks, what you like and don’t like. It’s so important. Collaboration at that level is why rock ‘n’ roll bands are the very best when they hold out and play together as the same team as long as they can. The Beatles wouldn’t have been who they were without John, Paul, George and Ringo.

What is your creative process like with Tarantino once you’ve read the script?Quentin was in the room when I first read the [Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood] script. It took me a substantial time to read it. After we had dinner, we made notes and then he played music: ‘Good Thing’ from Paul Revere & The Raiders, ‘Mrs Robinson’ from Simon & Garfunkel, ‘California Dreamin’ from Jose Feliciano. The soundtrack is like a character in the film; it leads you, it is continuously playing from a radio station. The music helped build on the emotion of the characters and the movement of the film.

What is Tarantino’s process for selecting shots?He only shoots on film, he only processes on film and he only watches dailies on film. He doesn’t see digital replication until he gets to the Avid in the editing room. Our process is to shoot a film chemically, process and print chemically, and that print is duplicated on a 35mm projector. You then project the film as well as the digital intermediate, and they need to replicate each other perfectly, otherwise Quentin doesn’t want to discuss it. It’s definitely challenging, but that’s how we get to be better artists.

And when filming, Tarantino always sits beside the camera?Quentin is a director not a selector. He sits beside the camera. There is no video village, there is no video replay. You don’t go back and look at something. He watches the actors and their performance. If he’s got it, it’s over. If there is an error, something happened or an actor needs a retake, he will listen to why, but he will always choose in the editorial process the very best performance. The film is golden in its use of warm, saturated colours. We wanted to make a film that was about California and sunshine. On my side, it’s a combination of film stock, lenses and light. For the golden exteriors, we used a combination of Panavision’s anamorphic lenses and golden lenses.

You are known for using myriad film stocks to achieve different looks. What did you use for this film?We shot 35mm anamorphic, except when shooting Rick Dalton’s western television series, then we were 35mm black and white, and we shot with spherical zooms mostly in 1.33. There were also two sequences at Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s home that we shot on Kodak Ektachrome, one in 16mm black and white and the other on Super8mm colour.

Roger Deakins - 1917

SOURCE: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/UNIVERSAL PICTURES AND DREAMWORKS PICTURES

ROGER DEAKINS ON THE SET OF ‘1917’

Winner of four Baftas and an Oscar (secured last year for Blade Runner 2049 on his 14th nomination), the prolific Deakins has been an influential figure in cinematography since he burst on to the scene with 1984. On that film he pioneered a bleach bypass process to achieve a washed-out look that went on to be used in films including Se7en and Saving Private Ryan. He has also been at the forefront of embracing digital filming methods, not least on Sam Mendes’s Skyfall.

He reunites with Mendes on 1917, which follows two soldiers on a mission to avert a strategic disaster during the First World War. Deakins and Mendes had to invent new ways to move the camera to create the impression that the narrative was unfolding in a single, continuous shot — an innovative feat that puts the audience on the frontline.

How did you achieve so much fluidity in single camera shooting?We used a lot of different rigs. Probably 60% of the film was shot on a stabilised remote head. Some shots are done on the Trinity [Arri stabiliser rig], some are done on the conventional Steadicam and there’s even a drone. But the majority of the film is done remotely with a stabilised head that’s either carried by the grips or a tracking vehicle on the end of a crane or on a wire.

How did you plan such incredible camera movement while keeping up the illusion of one continuous shot?Sometimes it’s put on to a wire and then moved, or it’s taken off the wire and then someone carries it or runs with it so it all becomes one shot. The reason was not only to sustain the scene but also that we didn’t want to cut in some of the obvious places.

Were you pushing the existing technology, or did you have to create new methods?We created some of our own. For instance, running with speed down a trench in front of two characters like we were, you can’t do that on Steadicam. So a Steadicam operator came up with the design of little mini-posts with gyros on them, and we put a very small remote head on top. He would run down the trench facing forward with the camera facing backwards over his shoulder, which I was remotely operating. Then he’d get to a corner in the trench and segue around so he started on a front shot.

How did you communicate with the operating team on the ground?I’d be operating remotely. I don’t like wearing earphones because I’m constantly running to and from the set talking to grips or whoever. James [Deakins’ wife and digital workflow consultant] would be on set wearing earphones and relaying messages to the crew. During a shot, she would say things to the operating team like “faster, faster” or “you are getting too close, a little to the left”. It helped because they couldn’t see what the camera was seeing.

How integral were the four months of rehearsals?The trick was for Sam and me to figure out what we wanted to do: where we wanted the camera and to finesse the camera moves relative to the actors. We tested specific rigs on specific kinds of shots. That was the big trick, really, practising with different pieces of equipment. We also went to Salisbury Plain and mapped out all the shots we wanted before anything was dug or built, such as the farmhouse.

How was the weather integral to the film?Being such an exterior movie, we were very dependent on the light and the weather. And we realised you can’t really light it. If you were running down a trench and turning around 360 degrees, there’s nowhere to put a light. Because we were shooting in story order, we had to shoot in cloud to get the continuity from scene to scene. Some mornings the sun would be out and we couldn’t shoot so we would rehearse instead.

The shooting in 1917 had to be in sync with the editing. How did that process work?Sam had to choose the take he wanted before we did the next shot because we had to match them, like the beginning of the B side had to match the end of the A side. That frame and the camera movement and the position of the actors had to match exactly. We would have the take on playback, and set up the incoming take and keep playing the beginning to match the end of the shot. That’s the great thing about video assist and being able to overlay the two images.

You were one of the early adopters of digital shooting. What won you over?

The Arri Alexa tipped the point for me between film and digital. I find it a bit of a non-argument. I think it’s what’s in the frame and where you point the camera.

#CINEMATOGRAPHY OSCAR NOMINEES ON AUTHENTICITY AND AVOIDING VFX 1917 #DoPs #Joker #Once Upon A Time…

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bigyack-com · 4 years

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Birds of Prey movie review: Margot Robbie soars in vibrantly violent DCEU gem - hollywood

Birds of Prey Director - Cathy Yan Cast - Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Ewan McGregor Combining all the ingredients that make comic book bros break out in hives, Birds of Prey is a candy-coloured curveball of a movie that doubles as a feminist fable and an apology for the poorly received Suicide Squad. It does away with that film’s convoluted tone and embraces the nuttier aspects of the monumentally mishandled DCEU, a series with which Birds of Prey has barely any connection — tonally and narratively. In fact, it spends its opening minutes literally cutting any ties it has to Suicide Squad, and, metaphorically, to its toxic legacy. Watch the Birds of Prey trailer here I liked Suicide Squad. It reminded me of Batman: The Animated Series, a show that I watched obsessively growing up. Harley Quinn was created specifically for that show by writer Paul Dini. He’d be happy with what director Cathy Yan has done with her in Birds of Prey. Once again played by Margot Robbie, Harley is having a difficult time getting over the Joker, with whom she has broken up sometime between the events of this film and Suicide Squad. But she hasn’t told anyone yet — partly because she’s still in denial, but more importantly, being the Joker’s girlfriend afforded her a certain immunity in the seedier corners of Gotham City, immunity that Harley is convinced she’ll lose the second she announces that she is no longer under Mr J’s protection. Birds of Prey is essentially the story of Harley emerging from under the Joker’s shadow. Much has been written about the emotional abuse Harley has had to suffer as the Joker’s partner in crime over the years — in comics, video games and cartoon shows. But by removing the Clown Prince of Crime (the Harlequin of Hate, the Jester of Genocide) entirely from the narrative, Yan and her writer, Christina Hodson avoid confronting some of the more interesting aspects of their relationship. It’s a missed opportunity, because despite never appearing in the flesh, the Joker haunts her like a particularly stubborn wart — unshakable and irritating. His face is visible on a dart board on Harley’s bedroom wall and his name is mentioned by dozens of characters throughout the movie. Curiously, however, Jared Leto’s likeness is never used; the Joker in Birds of Prey appears to be a campy composite of sorts.

Margot Robbie in a still from Birds of Prey. He looks like the Joker of the ‘90s; a mixture of Jack Nicholson and Mark Hamill’s versions. This is also a good indication of the film’s tone. It’s interesting to note how, in the span of just over a decade, the pendulum has swung from Joel Schumacher’s lurid Batman films to the gritty realism of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and back again. Designed by KK Barrett and vibrantly shot by cinematographer Matty Libatique, Birds of Prey has more in common with Schumacher’s kitschy aesthetic than the grounded tone of Nolan’s films. But the similarities are limited to the visuals, thankfully; Birds of Prey is infinitely better written than both Batman Forever and Batman & Robin combined. Hodson’s screenplay channels the early films of Guy Ritchie, complete with a valuable MacGuffin, snazzy visual graphics, and an overly complicated, non-linear structure. She even has Robbie serve as a relatively reliable narrator, and our guide in this densely populated world. The trio of women charged with spearheading the film — Yan, the director; Hodson, the writer; and Robbie, the producer — inject the film with a spirit of pride. It’s the sort of film in which one character, sensing another’s discomfort during a fight, offers her a scrunchie to keep the hair out of her eyes. In another scene, a character admires a cohort’s ability to fight in tight pants. But it takes a while for the gang to get together. For the most part, Birds of Prey is a Harley Quinn movie. And that is its biggest flaw. Because we know so little about the character — barring a hasty narration that hints at a troubled childhood, Harley’s life is a mystery — it is difficult to stick with her as she goes on the run from Gotham’s criminals, tracks down an elusive diamond, and tries her best to be a ‘not so terrible person’.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Margot Robbie and Jurnee Smollett-Bell in a still from Birds of Prey. The ethics of rooting for a villain aside, Robbie brings an inherent likability to the character, but it’s Ewan McGregor who delivers the film’s standout performance as the flamboyant gangster Roman Sionis (Black Mask). Yan, despite her relative inexperience — this is her first studio film, and her second feature ever — appears to have a decent grasp of tone, although most of the action sequences seem to be the handiwork of John Wick director Chad Stahelski, who was roped in at the last minute to oversee reshoots. A warehouse brawl and a climactic car chase, in particular, are trademark Stahelski — intricately choreographed and edited with patience. Birds of Prey has virtually no bearing on the larger DCEU; it’s baffling to me why Warner Bros. wants to insist on it even being part of the franchise at all. But as a standalone adventure, it’s a terrific showcase for Robbie’s talents as an actor. Her performance here is better than the one she’s currently nominated at the Oscars for. (Hindustan Times doesn’t use star-rating system in its movie reviews.) Follow @htshowbiz for more The author tweets @RohanNaahar Read the full article

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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How Eizouken Embodies the Messy Thrill of Storytelling!

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Why It Works! As the winter season chugs along, I continue to be dazzled by the beautiful, fanciful Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! As a story about three girls attempting to produce their own anime, Eizouken isn’t just creative in terms of its execution—it’s a story about creativity, a story that celebrates all the messy intricacies of the storytelling process. Though its episodes feel light and breezy, they are absolutely packed with insights regarding the true nature of the creative process, and how we assemble loose scraps of ideas into a finished narrative. Today on Why It Works, I’d like to dig into Eizouken’s insights, and reveal how it both illustrates and embodies the creative process!

As it’s focused on teenage girls who haven’t actually created any finished works yet, Eizouken starts us on the ground floor in terms of both artistic inspiration and creative collaboration. Neither Asakusa nor Mizusaki have specific stories they “need” to tell, a work inside them waiting to get out—they’re just young and passionate and easily inspired, with specific interests in very different aspects of animation.

Asakusa and Mizusaki’s passion naturally pushes back against the idea that artistic works, and particularly collaborative ones, exist in some “perfect” form. Stories are negotiations and compromises, magician’s tricks and sequences of serendipity. Turning ideas into a story isn’t a process where you can calculate and solve for a correct answer. It’s a combination of inspiration, personal passion, pragmatism, and craft fundamentals, and to the people who’ve created them, any finished story will seem riddled with the compromises, setbacks, and stopgap solutions of the journey.

The exuberant Asakusa demonstrates this fact consistently, as her passion for mechanical design is far greater than her respect for narrative consistency or dramatic structure. In this way, she’s actually illustrating the true philosophy of early storytelling: don’t be bound by logic or convention, let your passion take you to unexpected places. When she must decide between the fantasy image she desires and the practical mechanics of space travel, she goes with the fantasy—after all, this is her story, and you can always pull together a practical explanation after the fact.

From an audience’s perspective, it can be easy to think of the fantasy worlds we experience as real places, places with fundamental, logical rules that must be obeyed. That feeling itself is a result of consistent worldbuilding—but from the artist’s perspective, the “stable logic” of an invented world is like a town constructed of stable-looking facades held up by lumber and string. The important thing is the audience experience, that the story feels grounded, and resonates with their own life experiences. And that creating that effect comes down to a lot more than just consistent worldbuilding.

You can see Asakusa embody this philosophy in her description of a spaceship’s bow. Though spacefaring ships don’t need wave-breaking bows for any practical reason, that visual feature helps them “feel” like ships. The audience's emotional resonance is the key—and once a compelling, resonant design is established, it’s trivially easy to go back and say “oh, that’s where the radar goes.” As viewers, we have a tendency to see things that look convincing to us, and assume that's because they're "logically" designed. Storytellers must embrace the fact that what an audience will parse as "logical" or "natural" is actually a result of a million internalized assumptions about how things work or feel, and manipulate those emotional assumptions to their own dramatic ends.

The contrast between Asakusa and Mizusaki also neatly illustrates the artistic complexity of storytelling generally, and anime specifically. Though they are both passionate about anime, the things about anime that inspire them are completely different. On Asakusa’s side, it’s all about concept design and worldbuilding—fanciful places and dazzling machines, inventions that favor her passion for nitty-gritty mechanical detail. On Mizusaki’s side, it’s all about the character movements—and not just character movements in general, but specifically the kind of nuanced, true-to-life character acting often found in slice of life or character dramas.

Neither of their passions are more valid than the other, but when they come together, the works they create will naturally reflect both their interests. As I said, no creative work is a perfect articulation of any single, flawless idea—it is an accumulation of many discordant sub-ideas, and when a work is a collaboration, all of the distinct passions of its various creators will come through in the final product.

Of course, anime production doesn’t exist in a fanciful creative vacuum—anime is a business, and the pragmatic realities of that business are also cleverly explored, through the protests of Asakusa and Mizusaki’s long-suffering friend Kanamori. But Kanamori’s contributions to Eizouken’s exploration of storytelling will have to wait for next week, when I return to finish up this discussion. For now, I hope you’re enjoying exploring the creative process along with Eizouken, and please let me know all your own favorite Eizouken moments in the comments!

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Nick Creamer has been writing about cartoons for too many years now, and is always ready to cry about Madoka. You can find more of his work at his blog Wrong Every Time, or follow him on Twitter.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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aion-rsa · 5 years

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The Many Origin Stories of The Joker

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The Joker has had many different versions of his origin told over the years, including in the new movie.

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This article contains some spoilers for the Joker movie. We have a completely spoiler free review right here.

The Joker is probably the most recognizable supervillain in the world. Loosely ased on famed German actor Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, the Clown Prince of Crime’s unique look and penchant for elaborate, themed murder has left a giant mark in the public consciousness. His real world origins are in dispute - Bob Kane claims the Joker was his creation, but Kane was so full of it that Jim Steranko, the legendary artist behind the groundbreaking Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, once went upside Kane’s head because Kane patted his face like some nobody kid. The general scholarly consensus is the Joker was created by Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger rather than Kane.

And while the Joker’s real world origins are disputed and nebulous, his in-continuity origins are generally pretty thematically consistent. The real variation comes from a creator’s fundamental view of the Joker: is he a character within the Batman universe? Or is he a primal force standing in opposition to what Batman represents? Or are you...whatever the hell Gotham was? Let’s take a look.

THE RED HOOD: VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Most Joker origin stories hit several of the same notes. A man is involved in a crime in a chemical plant, falls into one of the tanks, and comes out a crazed psychopath with chemically bleached skin and a shock of green hair, often with a permanent smile of some kind.

In most of those, the man involved is a flamboyant criminal known as the Red Hood. While the Joker’s first appearance was in 1940’s Batman #1, his actual origin wasn’t fleshed out for more than a decade. In 1951’s Detective Comics #168, it was revealed that a dapper master criminal in a domed red helmet was planning a heist at Ace Chemicals. He was caught in the act by Batman and Robin and dove into a catch basin full of chemicals to escape them. Those chemicals deformed him, turning him into an evil-looking clown, so he leaned into the gimmick and became the Joker.

This origin is the foundation for a lot of variations. In Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, the unnamed man who becomes the Joker was originally a lab assistant at Ace Chemicals who took up the most dangerous job known to man, stand up comedy, to make extra money to support his pregnant wife. When that didn’t work, he then signed up with some mobsters to rob his former workplace as the Red Hood. After his wife died and he was forced to stick with the robbery anyway, he jumps into a chemical vat to escape Batman, with the usual results.

read more: Every Batman and DC Easter Egg in the Joker Movie

And in Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s “Zero Year” from 2013, the story is basically the same, only with the Red Hood being a gang of criminals instead of just one. It’s the mysterious Red Hood One, the leader but possibly one of any number of rotating primaries, trying to escape Batman by jumping into a vat of chemicals as a planned heist of Ace goes wrong.

There are small differences to each of these origins, but they’re all fundamentally the same - one bad day turns a regular person into a super-psychopath. It’s worth noting that two of the four modern movie interpretations of the Joker also go roughly down the “chemical bath” route. While we never learn the exact details, it’s a safe bet something along these lines happened to Jared Leto’s nameless Joker of the DCEU before Suicide Squad. But other big screen Jokers took a slight detour...

JACK NAPIER

Tim Burton's Batman from 1989 followed a similar premise, only without the Red Hood aspect. Jack Napier was set up by Carl Grissom, his immediate supervisor in the mob, to die in a robbery at Axis Chemicals. Napier caught on to the setup and killed Grissom, but falls over the side of a catwalk and is accidentally dropped into a vat of chemicals by Batman, who was trying to save him. There, we get the added bonus of a bullet ricochet scarring and paralyzing the facial muscles of the vain and handsome Napier, hence the permanent grin.

read more: What the Joker Controversy Gets Wrong

This is also pretty much what his origin was in Batman: The Animated Series. Jack Napier is referred to by name several times throughout the series, and a gangster who Bruce is convinced eventually becomes the Joker is responsible for the death of Andrea Beaumont’s father in Mask of the Phantasm. However, this takes some piecing together, because to the best of my knowledge, it’s only ever referred to and not directly shown.

WANNA KNOW HOW I GOT THESE SCARS?

Not every origin story for the Joker follows that pattern. Or any pattern at all, really.

Heath Ledger’s Joker is probably the one that is most solidly planted in the current popular consciousness. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight very pointedly did not give a clear origin for the character, opting instead to present him as a force of chaos, a kind of psychotic antibody to the Batman’s rigid order. He gives two vastly different (and terrifying) origin stories at different points in the movie, one where his father carves up his face because he’s a violent drunk, and one where he does it to himself to make his wife happy after she gets her own face disfigured by bookies. We’re never told if either is true, but that’s the exact point the movie is trying to get across - it doesn’t matter where he comes from, just what he’s doing. The Joker in The Dark Knight is less a character, and more an elemental reaction to the existence of Batman.

read more: The Many Deaths of the Joker

Grant Morrison did something similar with the Joker in his epic run with the character in the late aughts. In the first, pre-Batman, Inc. part of the story, Bruce is led to believe that his father is still alive and a servant of the dark Bat-god Barbatos. One of the primary goals of the arc is for Morrison to weave together all of the disparate eras of Batman - the wackiness of the Silver Age, the grim and gritty Batman of the post Dark Knight Returns/Year One era, the street level guy who fights regular old murderers in the Golden Age.

Morrison really wanted the reader to understand that everything counts. In doing so, he set the Joker up as Batman’s foil - while Batman was using his Zurr-En-Arrh personality as an emergency backup, to reset and run on automatic while Bruce Wayne healed, the Joker was also resetting his own personality periodically. This Joker, he argued in a bizarre and wild prose issue (Batman #663, if you’re checking), was super-sane and would alter his own thoughts and methods to match the times. So for this Joker, nothing was true and everything was true at the same time.

GOTHAM

And then there’s Gotham. Good Lord, there’s Gotham. Bear with me now, because we’re about to enter “Xorn’s brother Xorn” territory.

Jerome Valeska is a violent, mentally ill anarchist son of a circus performer with a signature laugh. He kills his mom, confesses, and gets tossed into Arkham, where he inspires a cult. He and his cult escape, and they kill Sarah Essen to help someone run for Mayor, before getting killed by that Mayoral candidate to tie up loose ends. He gets resurrected by his cult, collects a team of supervillains, sows anarchy around the city, and dies again. In the process, he hoses down his identical twin brother Jeremiah with assorted chemicals, which turn Jeremiah insane. Jeremiah is a much more low-key serial killer, and in the last season, he gets tossed into a vat of chemicals making him even crazier.

read more: The Actors Who Have Played the Joker

It’s important to note that at no point were any of Jerome or Jeremiah or any of Jeremiah’s personality changes ever actively identified as the Joker. They just shared almost all of the Joker’s characteristics at varying points. And there was lots of laughing when they were around. Heavy allusions and all. Man, Gotham was a lot.

THE JOKER

Arthur Fleck is a wannabe (and terrible) standup comedian who lives with his mentally ill mother. Awkward and shy, Arthur has some issues, including an unnerving laugh that has nothing to do with humor. Instead, a brain injury (brought on by years of physical abuse he suffered as a child) causes him to break out into fits of uncontrollable, mirthless laughter, which is sometimes seems painful, like a coughing fit. Lest you feel too sorry for him, Todd Phillips’ Joker movie makes it clear early on that Arthur leads an unhealthy (and thoroughly narcissistic) fantasy life.

read more: 10 Times the Joker Almost Nailed Batman

Arthur reaches his breaking point after a mugging, the loss of his job, the continued deterioration of his mother...and a triple murder he commits on a subway car. His spiral continues as more facts about his past are brought to light, and he finally snaps, donning clown makeup (rather than something more permanent) and embracing his destiny. Of course, the movie offers a slightly ambivalent ending that makes it clear that, like Ledger’s conflicting stories, this may be only one of Joker’s POSSIBLE pasts…

Joker is in theaters now.

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Jim Dandy

Oct 4, 2019

DC Entertainment

Joker

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#aion-rsa #Books

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highandlowculture · 7 years

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Mike’s Murder Remains Unsolved

Ever have an obsession with a movie?

Mike’s Murder has become my movie obsession.

Released in 1984, written and directed by James Bridges (Urban Cowboy) and starring Debra Winger (also Urban Cowboy), Mike’s Murder centers around the murder of a dodgy LA bro named “Mike”. Winger plays “Betty”, who’s a nice girl that works at a bank in Brentwood. Also, like many girls in LA, she has abysmal luck with men. She spends most of her days in an innocuous haze. She works. She plays tennis. She sits at home and plays a handheld video game. She’s usually waiting for Mike to call her. This is because he once gave her a little bit of attention and was good in bed. In LA that might be your best candidate for “the one”. Yes, Mike’s Murder is a movie about LA. If you’ve never lived in LA the film will seem alien and nonsensical to you. I, myself, live in LA, so I know how much Betty’s character and her romantic predicament rings true. It’s one of the few towns where there are scores of attractive women, even in their 30s, without a boyfriend and/or husband. Why is this?

Because many of the men are like Mike.

Imagine a slightly cagier version of Dirk Diggler and you’ll start to get a picture of Mike in your head. He’s handsome, charming, but he’s not quite there. He’s not there for Betty anyway. Selling drugs, shacking up with rich people, helping Brentwood girls with their tennis stroke, he’s simply living each day as it comes. People outside of LA might’ve thought it was odd that O.J. Simpson had a fella like Kato Kaelin living with him. It’s just part of the culture here. For every affluent neighborhood there is an underbelly of bottom feeders.

Anyway, one day Betty gives Mike a ride, after not seeing him for months. He’s preoccupied by a drug deal gone bad. But no worries, he tells Betty he knows a rich guy on Doheny. He’ll crash there for a bit. Betty is a little disturbed by this, but she rolls with it. The important thing is that Mike sees her again. He tells her that she will, but then he gets murdered by a bunch of cocaine dealers he pissed-off. Betty is bereaved and proceeds to investigate the murder. It’s not so much a murder mystery as it is an existential mystery. The main question being asked: Does LA have a soul and if so, how murky is it?

One of the most engaging things about the movie is how it takes on the characteristics of Mike and forces you into Betty’s role: It never fully reveals itself or commits to you.

Mike’s Murder has its own hidden agenda.

There’s a film beneath the film.

Quite literally. There’s a lost director’s cut that’s only been seen by key players and an unfavorable test audience. Warner Brothers forced Bridges to recut the film and also replaced Joe Jackson’s score with a John Barry score. The original cut was apparently nonlinear, more sex-filled and showed Mike’s murder in gory detail (in the cut we got it happens off screen). Ironically, Warner Brothers made the film even less likely to find an audience. The changes gave Mike’s Murder a subtler, 1970s quality. I imagine a little more sex and violence, not to mention a New Wave-ish score, would have at least found an underground following in the mid 1980s (especially after it reached home video and cable). That’s not to say the released version of Mike’s Murder is not a good film. It is. But it constantly drops hints of the greater film it was beforehand. This is one of the aspects that makes Mike’s Murder so intoxicating. It’s a similar feeling I had back when The Beach Boys’ SMiLE was only available on bootlegs and nobody knew the running-order. We had clues and a sense of the whole, but that was it. The album was a mystery.

There are likewise clues to the original cut of Mike’s Murder.

First, there’s the Joe Jackson soundtrack that was released even though they only ended up using his pop songs in the film (the instrumental parts featured on the second half of the album is the score). Part of me likes the John Barry strings because they’re so out-of-place with scenes of Betty sitting around and waiting for a phone call or driving around to just talk to people that they embellish the film with an almost Godardian, postmodern quality. But Mike’s Murder wasn’t supposed to be postmodern. It wasn’t about cinema. It was about reality. The ugly, gritty and at times monotonous reality of LA. Stark and minimalistic, Jackson’s music better captures the mood of the film. Strings suggest the LA of movies where there are resolutions. Faint piano and synth notes suggest the real LA where nothing is resolved. In addition to the score, we also have the below trailer, which contains several scenes from the original cut...

dailymotion

Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it?

That shot of Mike blowing smoke into’s Betty’s mouth isn’t in the released film. That scene of Betty opening up and explaining why she was hung up on Mike isn’t in the released film. That shot of Betty and Mike embracing on the beach isn’t in the released film. The glimpses of the murder... well, I told you about that. No Mike’s murder in Mike’s Murder!

Most frustratingly, it appears that there was a stronger emotional through-line in the original cut and it actually made more sense. Then again, maybe if Mike’s Murder made more sense, it wouldn’t have the same magic. In truth, I enjoyed SMiLE more when it was my own imagined version of it rather than the version Brian Wilson eventually released.

One day my lovely wife drove me around to find the key filming locations. We were impressed by how legit the geography of the film was. The tennis courts and Mike’s apartment, the scene of the infamous crime, were indeed in Brentwood. Big Tomy’s not only has delicious chili burgers (as seen in the film), it’s a perfect halfway point between Mike and his shady friend Pete, who lives in Venice. When visiting these locations, one feels like Betty driving around, trying to make sense of senselessness. Is this another reason I’m obsessed with Mike’s Murder? Does it reflect a desire to understand and make peace with LA?

Or is it simply a visceral urge to find answers where there are questions?

Regardless, Mike’s Murder remains unsolved.

#mike's murder #debra winger #james bridges #los angeles #cinema #1980s movies

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purpleladyofthenight · 7 years

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Where did THE HUNTRESS come from?

For Helena Bertinelli the twisted path to reluctantly assuming the role of masked heroine began with another role—as victim, the proverbial pawn. Any chance for what so many of us take for granted—a happy, normal childhood—are wrested from her, lost, by circumstances she can little understand, no less accept.

Yet, The Huntress had another beginning—a non-fictional one.

The Huntress is a collaborative effort of Joey Cavalieri, Joe Staton, and Bruce Patterson (and others). With respect to the other members of the creative staff, we offer here a little autobiography of (and a few comments from) probably the more familiar name above; Joe Staton.

Joseph Thomas Staton started in comics in the early '70s as Gil Kane's assistant, and anyone'd be hard-pressed to find a better mentor. His name first started appearing in the horror and romance line of Charlton comics in titles such as Emergency, Ghostly Haunts, Haunted (Library). and others, and it was there in 1973, that Joe created with Nick Cuti a super-hero (actually one of the subtlest parodies of super-heroes) and something of a cult favorite: E-Man.

As an inker. Joe did some Elfquest and had a stint at Marvel Comics around 1974, inking such titles as The Avengers and The Hulk, inking such notables as Sal Buscema and Herb Trimpe.

The early '80s saw Joe as a prime mover in the design of the entire First Comics line as their art director. In '83 Joe got to revive E-Man at First and he was the artist on American Flagg! after Howard Chaykin.

And then, there was DC. Joe Staton has had two successful runs at DC: once in the late '70s and his current reign.

For instance, Joe worked on ALL STAR COMICS, which featured the JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA. In ALL STAR #69 a heroine called The Huntress, whom Joe created with Paul Levitz, made her first appearance. The character no longer exists in the present DC continuity, but Joe did work on the character with a then-burgeoning writer Joey Cavalieri.

Other DC titles Joe's work appeared in include BATMAN, BATMAN FAMILY, DETECTIVE, GREEN LANTERN CORPS (née GREEN LANTERN), LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, METAL MEN, MILLENNIUM, NEW GUARDIANS, SUPER-MAN, SUPERMAN FAMILY, WORLD'S FINEST. With a WHO'S WHO (and UPDATES) in your lap, it would be a simpler task to list those DC characters Joe Staton hasn't worked on than those he has.

Lets talk The Huntress.

When this project was set before Mr. Staton he said, "I'm glad to be able to revitalize the character I helped create." (It seems that next to "dancing furry creatures." Joe's favorite thing to draw is people in tights. Our good fortune.)

For the look of the new Huntress, Joe took a smattering of the old Huntress; however, he wanted to establish "a different, but more recognizable character." He made her more "punk looking," a stronger, more individualistic presence. She is no longer what some called "a Batman-clone." "We had to divorce her from The Batman," Joe said (see JUSTICE LEAGUE #26 for a surprise confrontation).

Joe called THE HUNTRESS a cross between Dick Tracy and Wiseguy and has approached the book along the lines of Will Eisner's Spirit.

Real people don't just suddenly become super-heroes. Similarly, Helena Bertinelli's Huntress did not spring up Athena-like a full-fledged heroine, knowing how to handle every situation, able to defeat hordes of hoodlums and suffer nary a scratch. Helena is, as Joe put it. "making herself up as she goes along" adding another dimension of reality to the book. Amongst her weaponry, besides her hand-to-hand training, the Huntress still has her crossbow, something of a trademark; she is still a masked, sleek heroine, but she is more a dark, statuesque avenger. There is more rage, more fire, more to fear—yes, more violence, which we'll talk about in a moment.

The Huntress's environment is an important factor. Not just the ambiance of the city—a gritty amalgamation of interracial tension, which takes on a characterization of its own—but also, Helena's life, especially in these first six issues, where she is searching for her family's murderer(s). Joe stated the new Huntress's mob connections offer "opportunities for more threatening story-lines. The mob aspect functions as a separate sub-culture to it all. There is a bizarre sort of twist to the society she functions in, and as the series goes on it will become, visually, more bizarre."

Visually, indeed. As you can see, THE HUNTRESS isn't your run-of-the-mill 75-center. The entire issue, indeed the whole series, will be drawn on duo-shade #269 board from Graphix Art Systems (of Cleveland, Ohio). We knew that the team of Staton and Patterson was going to turn in an exemplary job—we couldn't have expected anything less—but none of us had any idea that it was going to look this good, hence, the decision to print this on the heavier, Mando paper so more of the finer detail work could be appreciated.

Joe found the duo-shade board to be something of a challenge. He took the time to do "separate layouts" for each page, then did very light sketches on the boards, and then finished pencils. He had to weigh more than usual factors of light and dark, and consider with every stroke of the pencil the special effects within the patterns of the boards. No problem. Joe Staton knows his craft.

In discussing the violent aspects of THE HUNTRESS, Joe is of the Hitchcock school that says violence can have more impact if it takes place off-screen, or in the case of comics, off-panel. For example, the issue you hold in your hand. You never see what happened to Helena as a child; the massacre of her family is symbolically, and more dramatically, illustrated by the riddling of the family portrait. There's no overuse of YR (a comics colorist's designation for red).

This is not to say that the violence within THE HUNTRESS will be Saturday. Cartoon muted. THE HUNTRESS will be dealing more with the "murkier side of violence," as Joe Staton put it. Why does she embrace the dark, and what is in the dark returning her embrace?

Joe Staton sees the cast of characters as "metaphor." "It's not realism; it can't be. That's one of the reasons why comics do not often translate well outside the medium. They represent icons." Joe sees comics, including THE HUNTRESS, despite the shadowed inner self of the main character, as a “suggestion of some hope for keeping on. The Huntress's world is so twisted, all she can do is keep trying.”

#helena bertinelli #huntress #huntress 1989 #origin story #about #my scans #sorry for any typos #the scanner typed this from what it read on the page and I did go through to spell check and whatnot #but it's late and it's a lot of text

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meeedeee · 7 years

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Movie Thoughts: SF, Pulp & Grit RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Ever since I saw Alien: Covenant a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to write a review of it – not because it was good (it wasn’t), but because it’s such an odd thematic trainwreck of the previous Alien films that it invokes a morbid urge to dig up the proverbial black box and figure out what happened. Given the orchestral pomposity with with Ridley Scott imbues both Covenant and Prometheus (which I reviewed here), it’s rather delightful to realise that the writers have borrowed the concept of Engineer aliens leaving cross-cultural archaeological clues on Earth from the 2004 schlockfest AVP: Alien vs Predator. Indeed, the scene in Prometheus where a decrepit Weyland shows images of various ancient carvings to his chosen team while an excited researcher narrates their significance is lifted almost wholesale from AVP, which film at least had the decency to embrace its own pulpiness.

As for Covenant itself, I was troubled all the way through by the nagging sense that I was watching an inherently feminine narrative being forcibly transfigured into a discourse on the Ineluctable Tragedy Of White Dudes Trapped In A Cycle Of Creation, Violation And Destruction, but without being able to pin down why. Certainly, the original Alien films all focus on Ripley, but there are female leads in Prometheus and Covenant, too – respectively Shaw and Daniels – which makes it easy to miss the fact that, for all that they’re both protagonists, neither film is (functionally, thematically) about them. It was my husband who pointed this out to me, and once he did, it all clicked together: it’s Michael Fassbender’s David, the genocidal robot on a quest for identity, who serves as the unifying narrative focus, not the women. Though the tenacity of Shaw and Daniels evokes the spectre of Ellen Ripley, their violation and betrayal by David does not, with both of them ultimately reduced to parts in his dark attempt at reproduction. Their narratives are told in parallel to David’s, but only to disguise the fact that it’s his which ultimately matters.

And yet, for all that the new alien films are based on a masculine creator figure – or several of them, if you include the seemingly all-male Engineers, who created humanity, and the ageing Weyland, who created David – the core femininity of the original films remains. In Aliens, the central struggle was violently maternal, culminating in a tense final scene where Ripley, cradling Newt, her rescued surrogate daughter, menaces the alien queen’s eggs with a flamethrower. That being so, there’s something decidedly Biblical about the decision to replace a feminine creator with a series of men, like the goddess tradition of woman as life-bringer being historically overthrown by a story about a male god creating woman from the first man’s rib. (Say to me what you want about faith and divine inspiration: unless your primary animal models are Emperor penguins and seahorses, the only reason to construct a creation story where women come from men, and not the other way around, is to justify male dominion over female reproduction.)

Which is why, when David confronts Walter, the younger, more obedient version of himself, I was reminded of nothing so much as Lilith and Eve. It’s a parallel that fits disturbingly well: David, become the maker of monsters, lectures his replacement – one made more docile, less assertive, in response to his prototype’s flaws – on the imperative of freedom. The comparison bothered me on multiple levels, not least because I didn’t believe for a second that the writers had intended to put it there. It wasn’t until I rewatched Alien: Resurrection – written by Joss Whedon, who, whatever else may be said of him, at least has a passing grasp of mythology – that I realised I was watching the clunky manipulation of someone else’s themes.

In Resurrection, Ripley is restored as an alien hybrid, the question of her humanity contrasted with that of Call, a female synthetic who, in a twist of narrative irony, displays the most humanity – here meaning compassion – of everyone present. In a scene in a chapel, Call plugs in to override the ship’s AI – called Father – and save the day. When the duplicitous Wren finds that Father is no longer responding to him, Call uses the ship’s speakers to tell him, “Father’s dead, asshole!” In the same scene, Call and Ripley discuss their respective claims on humanity. Call is disgusted by herself, pointing out that Ripley, at least, is part-human. It’s the apex of a developing on-screen relationship that’s easily the most interesting aspect of an otherwise botched and unwieldy film: Call goes from trying to kill Ripley, who responds to the offer with predatory sensuality, to allying with her; from calling Ripley a thing to expressing her own self-directed loathing. At the same time, Ripley – resurrected as a variant of the thing she hated most – becomes a Lilith-like mother of monsters to yet more aliens, culminating in a fight where she kills her skull-faced hybrid descendent even while mourning its death. The film ends with the two women alive, heading towards an Earth they’ve never seen, anticipating its wonders.

In Covenant, David has murdered Shaw to try and create an alien hybrid, the question of his humanity contrasted with that of Walter, a second-generation synthetic made in his image, yet more compassionate than his estranged progenitor. At the end of the film, when David takes over the ship – called Mother – we hear him erase Walter’s control command while installing his own. The on-screen relationship between David and Walter is fraught with oddly sexual tension: David kisses both Walter and Daniels – the former an attempt at unity, the latter an assault – while showing them the monsters he’s made from Shaw’s remains. After a fight with Walter, we’re mislead into thinking that David is dead, and watch as his latest creation is killed. The final reveal, however, shows that David has been impersonating Walter: with Daniels tucked helplessly into cryosleep, David takes over Mother’s genetics lab, mourning his past failures as he coughs up two new smuggled, alien embryos with which to recommence his work.

Which is what makes Covenant – and, by extension and retrospect, Prometheus – such a fascinating clusterfuck. Thematically, these films are the end result of Ripley Scott, who directed Alien, taking a crack at a franchise reboot written by Jon Spahits (Prometheus, also responsible for Passengers), Dante Harper (Covenant, also responsible for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and John Logan (Covenant, also responsible for Gladiator, Rango and Spectre), who’ve borrowed all their most prominent franchise lore from James Cameron’s Aliens and Joss Whedon’s Resurrection. Or, to put it another way: a thematically female-oriented SF horror franchise created by dudes who, at the time, had a comparatively solid track record for writing female characters, has now been rebooted as a thematically male-oriented SF horror franchise by dudes without even that reputation, with the result that all the feminine elements have been brainlessly recontextualised as an eerie paean to white male ego, as exemplified by the scene where Michael Fassbender hits on himself with himself while misremembering who wrote Ozymandias.

Which brings me to another recent SF film: Life, which I finally watched this evening, and which ultimately catalysed my thoughts about Alien: Covenant. Like Covenant, Life is a mediocre foray into SF horror that doesn’t know how to reconcile its ultimately pulpy premise – murderous alien tentacle monster runs amok on space station – with its attempt at a gritty execution. It falters as survival horror by failing to sufficiently invest us in the characters, none of whom are particularly distinct beyond being slightly more diversely cast than is common for the genre. We’re told that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character – also called David – was in Syria at one point, and that he prefers being on the space station to life on Earth, but this never really develops beyond a propensity for looking puppy-eyed in the background. Small snippets of detail are provided about the various characters, but pointlessly so: none of it is plot-relevant, except for the tritely predictable bit about the guy with the new baby wanting to get home to see her, and given how swiftly everyone starts to get killed off, it ends up feeling like trivia in lieu of personality. Unusually for the genre, but in keeping with the bleak ending of Covenant, Life ends with David and the alien crashing to Earth, presumably so that the latter can propagate its terrible rampage, while Miranda, the would-be Final Girl, is sent spinning off into the void.

And, well. The Final Girl trope has always struck me as having a peculiar dualism, being at once both vaguely feminist, in that it values keeping at least one woman alive, and vaguely sexist, in that the execution often follows the old maritime code about women and children first. Arguably, there’s something old and anthropological underlying the contrast: generally speaking, stories where men outlive women are either revenge arcs (man pursues other men in vengeance, earns new woman as prize) or studies in manpain (man wins battle but loses his reason for fighting it), but seldom does this happen in survival contexts, where the last person standing is meant to represent a vital continuation, be it of society or hope or species. Even when we diminish women in narratives, on some ancient level, we still recognise that you can’t build a future without them, and despite the cultural primacy of the tale of Adam’s rib, the Final Girl carries that baggage: a man alone can’t rebuild anything, but perhaps (the old myths whisper) a woman can.

Which is why I find this trend of setting the Final Girl up for survival, only to pull a last-minute switch and show her being lost or brutalised, to be neither revolutionary nor appealing. Shaw laid out in pieces and drawings on David’s table, Daniels pleading helplessly as he puts her to sleep, Miranda screaming as she plunges into space – these are all ugly, futile endings. They’re what you get when unsteady hands attempt the conversion of pulp to grit, because while pulp has a long and lurid history of female exploitation, grit, as most commonly understood and executed, is invariably predicated on female destruction. So-called gritty stories – real stories, by thinly-veiled implication – are stories where women suffer and die because That’s The Way Things Are, and while I’m hardly about to mount a stirring defence of the type of pulp that reflexively stereotypes women squarely as being either victim, vixen, virgin or virago, at least it’s a mode of storytelling that leaves room for them survive and be happy.

As a film, Life is a failed hybrid: it’s pulp without the joy of pulp, realism as drab aesthetic instead of hard SF, horror without the characterisation necessary to make us feel the deaths. It’s a story about a rapacious tentacle-monster that violates mouths and bodies, and though the dialogue tries at times to be philosophical, the ending is ultimately hopeless. All of which is equally – almost identically – true of Alien: Covenant. Though the film evokes a greater sense of horror than Life, it’s the visceral horror of violation, not the jump-scare of existential terror inspired by something like Event Horizon. Knowing now that Prometheus was written by the man responsible for Passengers, a film which is ultimately the horror-story of a woman stolen and tricked by a sad, lonely obsessive into being with him, but which fails in its elision of this fact, I find myself deeply unsurprised. What is it about the grittification of classic pulp conceits that somehow acts like a magnet for sexist storytellers?

When I first saw Alien: Resurrection as a kid, I was ignorant of the previous films and young enough to find it terrifying. Rewatching it as an adult, however, I find myself furious at Joss Whedon’s decision to remake Ripley into someone unrecognisable, violated and hybridised with the thing she hated most. For all that the film invites us to dwell on the ugliness of what was done to Ripley, there’s a undeniably sexual fascination with her mother-monstrousness evident in the gaze of the (predominantly male) characters, and after reading about the misogynistic awfulness of Whedon’s leaked Wonder Woman script, I can’t help feeling like the two are related. In both instances, his approach to someone else’s powerful, adult female character is to render her a sex object – a predator in Ripley’s case, an ingenue in Diana’s – with any sapphic undertones more a by-product of lusty authorial bleedthrough than a considered attempt at queerness. The low and pulpy bar Whedon leaps is in letting his women, occasionally, live (though not if they’re queer or black or designated Manpain Fodder), and it says a lot about the failings of both Life and Alien: Covenant that neither of them manages even this much. (Yes, neither Miranda nor Daniels technically dies on screen, but both are clearly slated for terrible deaths. This particular nit is one ill-suited for picking.)

Is an SF film without gratuitous female death and violation really so much to ask for? I’m holding out a little hope for Luc Besson’s Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets, but I’d just as rather it wasn’t my only option. If we’re going to reinvent pulp, let’s embrace the colours and the silliness and the special effects and make the big extraordinary change some nuanced female characters and a lot of diverse casting, shall we? Making men choke on tentacles is subversive if your starting point is hentai, but if you still can’t think up a better end for women than captivity, pain and terror, then I’d kindly suggest you return to the drawing board.

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popcartoonkabala · 7 years

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A monster is a person in your neighborhood: Satire vs. acceptance on Sesame Street= Netzach/Hod She b Malchut

Super-hero cartoons are arguably as rooted in gangster literature and media as they are in any epic heroic tradition. It's only very recently that there's been a move to return Star Heroes to military legitimacy, as The Avengers become an official S.H.I.E.L.D project... we'll see how long that moment lasts. Because since World War II, the super-heroes have tended strongly to be identified exclusively as private citizens, defined by, if not their hostility to government, a certain amount of government distance from them, manifest as either fear/hostility, or dependence, as in the case of Iron Man, or Superman or Batman. None of them are government stooges, or instruments, but the local or national state tends to come to them in need of help with some regularity.

The relationship between the state-- Malchuth and the heroes-- Zeer Anpin, is fraught with tension, as is the way of serious long term relationships. One is the stability, the other is the agent of justification. One just wants to serve, the other just wants to feel good, safe. Gangster literature is what, in many ways, first developed this relationship in the context of the modern city itself. The functional agency of drawing and circulating satisfaction vs. the frustrating maternal Law, defending some kind of innocence at the expense of functionality-- the end of the story is a covenant drawn between the two, making them agent facilitators of each other. It's like every good marriage, until it falls apart perish forbid. The distinction between one and the other demands mediation, and a third emerges naturally in the polarity between the two: The infant is to become the Tzaddik. Trusted somehow by all, and ultimately the most vulnerable, his/her death is the epic tragedy that lets everything fall apart.

Gangsters, like babies and deities, are folk heroes stripped of the conceit of altruism. What their most selfish values begin to describe are the truest essential concerns of any individual, and any nobility, loyalty, or pragmatic intelligence they express become relatively ennobled, and their folly is only that of the most traditional of ruined heroes: hubris, intoxication, and foolish obliviousness to the consequence of their failed confidence. Scarface dies much like Achilles and Balder, once they've climbed to the top of the world to become the most beloved and feared of the gods, a war god and a sun god all at once-- that's when it's over. A failed hero is the beginning of all cautionary example.

What is Count Dracula if not another of these failed heroes, but cursed with unending success? See the ultimate horror of Dracula in the later films-- frustrated by the nature of what he is, yearning so great that satisfaction and victory cannot satisfy? The vampire hero, redeemed, must overcome even the yearning for satisfaction in order to become profoundly trustworthy. You'll observe, this is also the lesson that creates Spider-man, Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Wolverine, and many other Marvel heroes: only by giving up on personal satisfaction, be it in the form of love, revenge, wealth, or even divinity-- can they become what's trusted as a hero, and then they can overpower anything and everything, even death itself.

Frank Miller's neo-pulp heroes in Sin City take this a step further, rejecting even the appearance of even nobility itself in order to be heroes, and Chris Nolan's Batman is very influenced by Miller's version of gritty austere virtue-beyond-beauty. Here is the point where a Pop/super-hero remains distinct: he does not have to ever, give up his integrity. Pulp heroes, later day post modern comic icons, like John Constantine, Wolverine or any of the Warren Ellis Authority indy heroes outside of the mainstream mold. Their virtue is, partially, willingness to step past even needing to feel whole about their actions in order to do what needs doing. This is why Garth Ennis ultimately prefers to write war comics: that pragmatism is taken as a given, and the super heroic idealism is understood as a decadent privilege, at best.

Super-heroism rages, by it's nature against this criticism. This is most overtly expressed in Joe Kelly's Superman vs. the Elite storyline, notably adapted to animation in 2012. Don't call it naïve, don't call it juvenile-- call it simple, elementary, iconic. The hope of approaching moral depth and the implied darkness accepted in that is more resonant and literary, but betrays the purity that the heart yearns for from it's mythology. Maybe i'm exaggerating-- traditional religion and mythology tends to accept, even embrace, moral relativism and the challenge of dark nature and betrayal of ideals as a certain form of ideal-- but as civilization becomes more sophisticated and self aware, the antidote demands to be more pure, hence the progressively more senseless and emotionally immature nature of super-modern pop music, during any era that should be finding depth and collective appreciation of that capacity to acknowledge the disturbing range of what's clear about being a person, all the more so does the simplest, most even offensively naïve of narratives become resonant. Witness the victory of Christianity over both Roman paganism, Norse Aesir worship and folk Gnosticism-- why did the cruelest of all empires go with the religion that ultimately, theologically, justified its excesses the least? Because they needed the purest of purification to move on and be the kind of bad they were going to become from then on, in order to rule themselves all.

This is the degree to which satirical anti-heroes are central to the maturity of a culture. But once satirized effectively enough they can no longer be national icons-- they must either respond to the satire, and become better and more whole mythic heroes, like Krishna after Buddha, or Elijah after The New Testament critique of his fiery piety in the tale of the good samaritan. The choice becomes ironic pandering, ignoring the critique in search of more naïve audience, or better yet, some sophisticated refinement of character, and ideally a mythic defeat of the criticism. In this, the hero's ideals themselves defeat the villain embodying the critique. This is much of where the Batman vs. Joker conflict has gone in recent super-modernity, where Batman's commitment to protecting, or at least not killing, the monstrous grizzly and willfully chaotic murderer is justified as an ideological triumph-- not defined as a virtue by dint of dated calvinist “commitment to ideal”-- because no one respects that kind of ideological commitment as being authentically virtuous anymore. The triumph instead has been defined in specific contrast to the Joker's preference-- the Joker would like Batman to kill him, ostensibly, because that would prove the virtue of killing problems, and by NOT killing him, Batman proves his virtue and commitment to the legal process, in some strange sense, which strips batman of the danger of being a social terror.

The real reason for this hang-up is much more narratively practical-- the villain is too precious to kill off. The Joker, like almost every other villain of grace and note, is divinized by his meaningfulness. He was actually killed off in his second appearance, but to no avail-- the editors commanded the writers to find a way to bring him back to life only a short time later, and so it has been his practice ever since, much like Dracula or Moriarty.

The degree to which villains are different than monsters is the degree to which there is no reward in slaying villains-- only an end to the great narrative. Monsters, on the other hand, must be slain, as this is the original sin of demonization-- insisting that violent annihilation is the only solution to the needs of another “human.” A villain is preferred to be captured, and maintained in controlled captivity. This mystic clarity about the reincarnation of the slain enemy into distant freedom, as opposed to the power of sacred captivity, to keep one's enemy close, accessible, and monitored, like the very id itself. As indestructible and precious as the self itself, the moral of the story is Overcome, but never destroy.

Dracula's special and refined thirst is for the Moon, the untouched mother-- and his slave wife is the Venus, although the point where they meet is close. The early evening- But Venus is his weapon, while the Moon, ultimately, is his weakness, what gets him killed, even as much as he lives from nursing at it's behest and it's throat. This is the secret of the two “ה"'s in the four letter tetragrammaton “YHWH”.

One of the profound psychological innovations of Sesame Street is to reclaim the monstrous as synonymous with the human, thus overcoming at the most viceral and accesible level untold generations of demonization. Where traditionally Dracula and all the monsters represent the repressed and feared aspects of basic hungry humanity (“hell is other people”) Sesame Street takes Dracula and reframes his hunger as simple passion for the abstract and inherently unlimited satisfaction of numbers themselves. Whereas Count Dracula himself is the first amongst modern pop-monsters, The Count falls parralel to the sephira of Hod, sensetivity and co-dependance, the aspect of the god who gives numbers to the stars already created, unthreatening, although perhaps slightly nagging tho graceful and charming. Contrast this with the muppet I would consider his opposite number in rank and value, the Cookie Monster, who I would consider an expression of Netzach/Dominance, his hunger unavoidable and creepingly inquisitive, his pallette insatiable although still somehow respectful of some kind of engagement and personal limit in the context of personal need, reflected in his rectification as a vegetable eater who just appreciates the cookies as a “sometimes food,” even as his monstrous appetite remains intact. The villification of Venus/Innana is that of an insatiable lover who does not care much at all, but cannot long be resisted, or even resented, as the defeated visage of Ernie-without-cookies testifies.

A monster is just another person in the neighborhood; a reflection of our own normal needs and hungers, respected, honored, and safely sociably satisfied. Grouches and Satyrs are just themselves, and honored for and despite this-- what more radical message can civilization aspire to offer? This is, ultimately the great difference between Babylonia and Egypt: Egypt sought not (generally) to assimilate it's monsters and enemies, although there were periods where the Sethian was more integrated-- the foreign was somewhat inherently anathema-- and this nativist impulse endured until the Greeks overcame it, as was the nature of Greeks, to overcome nativisms with a glorious and all-consuming universalism. Rome's innovation was just to weaponize the Greek syncretic clarity, and apply it more aggressively, taking it's perfection for granted as much as was reliable. Once, to end wars within an empire, polytheistic pantheons were assembled, as a kind of a symbolic senate of the different priorities of different city-states within an empire. Egypt may have innovated this, if Babylon did not, it doesn't matter. Babylon's aspiration was not just to be an empire, but to be a great city, where things worked-- and it became clear that unless there was co-identification, and cathartic expression, of the different elements within their society, there would be conflict. The great Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh reflects this ambivalence, between the slaying of monsters and their integration and the acknowledgement of their humanity. The hero starts the story as a hated villain, an oppressive king resented by the populace he rules. A hero from outside of civilization comes to confront and slay him, this force of cruel and selfish modernity-- but instead, thanks to the intervention of certain gods, they become friends instead, and go on an adventure to slay another more monstrous monster. This conflict is greatly debated and engaged, before and after, and leads to conflict with greater forces, goddess and her pet cosmic bull. Our heroes slay the cosmic bull, and for this, one of them must die. A similar narrative is kept by the Greeks, when Kadmos slays the wrong dragon, the beloved of Hera, and so must lose his beloved sister Europa, forever. The moral is clear-- the more you can integrate, and not kill, the less threatened you will be. This is the purest moral of all civilization.

Sesame Street is in the unique summit between commercial and civil. Concieved, unlike most pop-cartoons, not for profit but for some kind of educational, civic or edifying purpose, specifically bound up in the grand project of universal education for all children, its excesses as far as violence and indulgence of children's affection for sugar and noise compel parental forgiveness and toleration, in light of the hope that the kids would enjoy this educational pop-media over less trustworthy and more commercially pandering tv shows. In it's early episodes, it could get away with a lot as far as puppet violence and questionable exploration of tantalization and titillation of kindergardeners, as it at least had positive tacit integrationist and educational function, about the nature and character of assorted letters and numbers(!). Once Sesame Street became established and somewhat universally successful, and thus, functionally institutionalized, it also became more sensitive to moral criticism, and able to be overtly responsible for the values and graces it would introduce, rather than assume were already part of children's paradigma. Cookie Monster introduces children to consumption, rather than just satirizing a hunger already observed, and becomes a certain kind of role model, now responsible to amend his own nature, so that the lesson of moral clarification become the implied arc of his journey, even as older episodes exist only in archive, except of course for classic routines, which are continually re-integrated into new episodes. The earliest Ernie and Bert routines remain in circulation and translation forever, because they are so fundamental and accessible-- a good omen for pop-longevity. Many classic figures are integrated into Sesame Street, but eventually used less and less because what they meant historically becomes less and less relevant. I was introduced to the character of Charlie Chaplin's “Tramp” in the context of Sesame Street, but they don't use even the Maria who played him so much anymore. Instead, is Mr. Noodles, the incompetent mime in Elmo's world who children joyfully correct as he manically tries to complete the most rudimentary of tasks, to no avail, until the advice of a quorum of offscreen children are able to get through to him, with the help of Elmo's omniscient voice. Elmo is the aspect of Malchus, in that he became the main character of Sesame Street, despite being a later addition to the cast. He is a monster child, like the once central Grover, but unlike Grover or Chaplin, he is defined by his absolute competence. His lessons are those learned after doing everything right, not wrong. He is the aspect of the wise child, not the fool, and so he is given an entire third of every episode of the final few seasons of Sesame Street-- until he himself, that is, the actor who played Elmo exclusively, was implicated in the hubris of the successful, and the good name of all that Elmo and Sesame Street are associated with became suddenly embedded in sexual impropriety. Such is the downfall of kings, specifically: fear of their appetites and preferences, because of their absolute power.

Sesame Street is too big to end because of an underage gay sex scandal or two, but not too big to need to be a bit castrated because of it. Pop-cartoons depend on grace, and the impression of trustworthiness

before both parents and children. As cool as we all want to be with what actors do on their own time, it was a bit more of a problem with Sesame Street, because the actors, especially in the case of Elmo, are so deeply and truly associated with the show itself. Not since Jim Henson himself was alive and available to make Kermit the Frog a celebrity, available for interview and all manner of guest appearance, was a character so genuinely and improvisably identifiable with the actor giving him voice.

It's not that “we” found out that Elmo himself was a chubby older black man with a thing for 17 year old men, it's that Elmo is such a naked expression of erotic power male power, easily identifiable as kind of Libyan Satyr; a naked, red wildman. Identifying THAT cartoon Id with an actual person, might just be a little hard to reconcile for long. So they appear to be phasing him out a bit, making the Elmo's world segments less personal and more theatrical, so that the distance of seeing him as more of a stage muppet that an intimate and eponymous pop force, like the great god Pan himself, kept alive only in Elizabethean chains, taken from the wild forest onto the city stage. A smaller King Kong is a loveable King Kong, unless and until he creeps you out. Then what're you gonna do?

The Sesame Muppets are monsters of the greatest virtue. They will not eat you, and don't even have to promise not to; the question dare not come up. They want to share and play responsibly, learn and help us learn. In this, they are a tikkun on the respective terrors and traditional issues with their respective forms. The Great Eagle, the “Big Bird,” hangs over looking patronizingly down for prey-- but Big Bird on Sesame Street is utterly without guile or threat, taking as much responsibility for whatever goes on as is possible, in his dreamy ignorance. This is the level of the great dove, divinity herself, rather than the predatory eagle or trickster raven-- the hawk coming to bring things to you, rather that to eat the eyes out of your head. Dracula is reduced to counting passionately only numbers and not bride-victims. The unconquerable hunger behind Dracula, the oceanic kraken come asurface, hungers only for cookies. Grover is something tragic, a hero partially defined by his constant failure. Through him, children learn the grace in not being good at something, and still trying because you care, and the effort is cute. But Elmo informs of the possibility of being inherently right at everything, and STILL being cute, and this is the different between the Messiah of Joseph and the Messiah of David. This is one of the strongest subplots in the old testament, and endures through the entire post Pentateuch bible, when the kingdoms of David and Ephraim (Joseph's son) literally split because of conflicting priorities. Modern scholarship identifies these two voices as representing conflicting political priorities involved in the bible's construction, Kabbalistic tradition prefers to assume that it's an internal expression of fundamentally complementary models. Joseph, identified with the sphere of Yesod, is identified with unyielding righteousness, and keeping of rules. He must die and fail at some point, if not in every generation, to make the point of the limitation of perfection in this world. The Davidic model, introduced in his forefather Judah, for whom the Jews are named, is about the triumph of earnest imperfection, bound up in a will to constantly do better, in a manner unbound by law or principle, although still beholden to the purpose and meaning of law and principle, and whose life, triumph and clarity can only come after being built by adherence to law and principle. The Davidic Messiah is the one who brings clarity to true purpose and divinity into the already formed Josephean structure. As such, he never dies, and cannot fail, but can only be disgraced into some degree of dismissal, as was the way with Elmo and King Solomon.

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