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#one of my bigger recent passion Roberts is a story and even when I have some motivation and energy I just remember that literally not a sing

twh-news · 3 years

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To land ‘Loki,’ Kate Herron had to pull out all the stops. How she won over Marvel

As a teenager, Kate Herron was obsessed with the “Lord of the Rings” films.

In particular, she recalls heading to theaters repeatedly with friends who shared her passion to see “The Two Towers” (2002), the second installment in director Peter Jackson’s trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy novel. She even wrote “Lord of the Rings” fan fiction.

“It was very silly,” the British filmmaker insists, revealing that one of her stories saw the heroic Fellowship traveling through a magical fountain and getting trapped in New York. “Honestly, I was just writing the stories to make my friends laugh. I guess it was kind of that first foray for me: ‘How do I tell a story?’”

Years later, Herron is again involved in telling a story about a protagonist displaced from the world he knows. But this time, her audience is much bigger.

Herron, 33, is the director of “Loki,” the Marvel Studios series that follows the adventures of the titular god of mischief after he has been plucked out of time by an agency charged with maintaining the sanctity of the timeline. Thus, the six-episode series, which premiered earlier this month on Disney+, features a slightly different version of Loki than the fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have grown to love since his first appearance in “Thor” (2011) through “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).

“I love villains,” says Herron during a recent video call from Atlanta, where she is putting the final touches on “Loki.” “I think that if a villain’s done right, you don’t necessarily have to like their actions, but you have to understand them. And I think that Tom [Hiddleston], in the last decade, has brought such empathy and wit and pain to a very real character for so many people. I just wanted to be part of whatever [Loki’s] next chapter was going to be.”

The series, on which the self-described Loki fan also serves as an executive producer, is Herron’s highest-profile project to date. Her previous credits include directing on Netflix’s “Sex Education,” as well as “Five by Five,” a series of short films executive produced by Idris Elba.

While growing up in South East London, Herron never considered filmmaking as a career. Her love of movies manifested as the aspiration to become an actor, and she often goaded her peers into putting on plays or making movies using a friend’s father’s camcorder. It wasn’t until some astute and encouraging teachers at Herron’s secondary school pointed out that she seemed more interested in storytelling that she changed course.

By introducing Herron to new texts, these teachers — as well as a film studies class that covered films directed by Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa — helped expand her perspective.

“I just didn’t know that you could have a voice and an authorship over a film, which probably sounds a bit silly. But I just hadn’t really thought about films in that way,” says Herron. Soon enough, she was on the path to film school at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, England, where she graduated with a degree in film production.

Herron laughs as she remembers how she believed she would just go off and find work in film straight out of school. “Obviously that did not happen,” she says.

With no post-graduate roadmap (or job offer) to help her break into the industry, Herron eventually started writing and directing short films with “no money” while juggling a day job as a temp. Both experiences provided Herron with material for “Loki,” which introduces a new bureaucratic agency called the Time Variance Authority to the MCU.

“I’ve worked at a lot of random places, which weirdly has influenced ‘Loki’ in some ways because we have this office culture kind of running through it,” says Herron. “I’ve worked in a lot of offices.”

In order to give the retro-futuristic offices of the TVA “a real lived-[in], breathed-in office” feel, Herron incorporated details that viewers could recognize from the real world — from paper files to the posters on the walls — and gave them a fantastical twist befitting the superhero series.

“One of the most exciting things to me about Kate is she has this amazing attention to detail,” says “Loki” co-executive producer Kevin Wright. “That was something that we saw on her very first pitch [and] it works its way into every frame of the show. Every monitor, every piece of paper in the TVA … she has looked over and approved everything you see.”

In an email, “Loki” star Hiddleston described Herron as “a dream collaborator” who possesses “a unique combination of extraordinary diligence, stamina, energy, respect and kindness.”

“Her affection for and understanding of Loki was so deep, profound and wide-ranging,” Hiddleston wrote. “She built a new world for these characters to play in with incredible precision, but she was also acutely sensitive to their emotional journey.”

Herron’s affinity for outsiders is apparent throughout the course of our conversation. There is of course her love for Loki — the heir to the king of Frost Giants raised as the prince of Asgard who has become one of the MCU’s most beloved villain-turned-antiheroes. Herron’s first introduction to the world of Marvel as a kid was through “X-Men: The Animated Series,” about the superhero team with mutant powers that set them apart from average humans. Herron cites Lisa Simpson — the overachieving, opinionated middle child from the animated sitcom “The Simpsons” — as the reason she is a vegetarian who can play the saxophone.

And although Herron describes herself as shy, it’s no match for the passion she brings to discussing film and television.

She calls Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” co-written by “Loki” actor Owen Wilson, “a perfect movie.” In addition to being obsessed with “The Simpsons,” Herron gravitated toward genre shows such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the updated “Battlestar Galactica” and “The X-Files” when growing up.

As Herron enthusiastically dives into “Loki’s” influences — which include “Alien” (1979), “Blade Runner” (1982), “Brazil” (1985), “Metropolis” (1927) and, yes, even “Teletubbies” — it’s easy to see why Wright knew she was the right person to bring “Loki” to life from their very first meeting.

Upon learning that Marvel was developing a show about Loki, Herron tasked her agents with calling Marvel every day until they would meet with her. And it worked.

“I was just so excited that somebody was chasing the project,” says Wright. “Which sounds crazy, that Marvel would be excited somebody’s chasing us. But it was the early days of us trying to get this Disney+ streaming stuff off the ground, so people were very hesitant … they didn’t know what it was yet.”

Herron’s enthusiasm for the show landed her a video meeting with Wright and executive producer Stephen Broussard. Believing it might be her only shot at the project, Herron came armed with so many stills and clips to illustrate her discussion of the scripts she’d been sent that a simple meet-and-greet turned into a four-hour conversation.

“Over the course of the next week or so,” Wright explains, “it was really figuring out how to set Kate up to succeed when we got her in front of Kevin Feige to pitch this.”

Herron put together a 60-page bible of ideas for the characters, the story, the visual references and more. The rest is Marvel history.

She learned not to wait for permission, she says, after graduating from film school and becoming involved with improv and stand-up to both develop her comedy chops and to meet funny collaborators to be in her short films.

“I think I’d always find excuses, almost, [to not do it],” says Herron. “It was that thing of being like, ‘Oh, well, I’m not ready. So I’ll wait. I’ll wait until I’m perfect at it and then I’ll go do it.’”

Taking inspiration from Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel Without a Crew” and a SXSW keynote speech by Mark Duplass, Herron realized that she just needed to start making things. She told herself it was OK if the films were messy. If a short was bad, nobody had to see it. If a short was “halfway to good,” she would submit them to festivals.

It’s this tenacious creativity that connects the dots between her early fan fiction, her short films, her pitch presentations — and now “Loki” itself. It’s a trait that has helped her navigate the industry to her current success, even during the periods it’s been most frustrating. As a female director, “I got asked crazy stuff in interviews sometimes,” she says of life on the festival circuit. “I remember being asked, ‘Are you sure you’re ready? Are you sure you’re ready?’ And male colleagues of mine were never asked that in interviews. I think that’s probably why I was so driven to just go out and make stuff.”

#loki #loki series #kate herron #interview #los angeles times #article

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marvelhero-fics · 5 years

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Silent Britain

Series - Prologue

Pairing: Tom Holland x Reader

Summary: You and Tom are working as love interests in a new Scorsese film, essentially leading to be love interests in real life

A/N: Sorry, it’s been a hot minute since I've posted! Anyway, this is basically going to be a whole series. I have no idea how many parts it’ll be, and I’ll be updating at least every two weeks (but I’ll aim to update it weekly!) I thought it was kind of a fun idea so essentially in the film Tom plays a bad-boy mob members son, while the reader plays the opposing mob members daughter. Please enjoy! (This chapter is a bit of a slow-burn, but it’s essentially just setting up the plot and everything!)

Also, all the italics in this story are the readers thoughts!

Word Count: 1,500

Silent Britain Masterlist || Full Masterlist

Prologue

The uncomfortably loud alarm buzzed through your tired mind. A glance to your left told you it was 7:00 am. Time to get up. One arm reached out to turn your alarm off, while the other went to wipe your eyes as they opened sluggishly, adjusting to the illumination in your bedroom that crept through the blinds. Wasting no time, you moved your body from your large bed and stumbled your way to the kitchen. The house was quiet, no music playing, no TV’s on, signalling to you that your roommate/best friend, Evie, hadn’t woken up yet.

The thick script left on the dining table caught your attention. It was for an upcoming, untitled Nolan film. You’d been asked to read the script to audition, however you only made it about half-way through it last night. Looks like thats on today’s agenda.

Acting was your absolute passion. You’d been lucky enough to start your acting career about 4 years ago, acting in 2-3 bigger films, every-so-often working alongside a well known celebrity. Working alongside Robert Pattinson in dramatic indie film was pretty cool, considering you’d grown up around all the Twilight hype. Playing Brad Pitt’s daughter in another film was also a big moment in your career. Not to mention your recent role in the Emmy award winning show Big Little Lies really helping define who you were as an actress. Ever since then you’d been asked to audition for quite a few more roles. Shockingly, it actually took a bit of a turn on you. People recognised you more often, which meant it was harder to leave the house. It also meant you started comparing yourself to other actors your age, to which you never thought you’d live up too. Being rich and famous really wasn’t all it was cut out to be.

While mindlessly making breakfast, your phone began buzzing on the hard, marble bench top. It was your agent, Melissa.

“Hey, Mel.” You quickly answered,

“Morning, (Y/N), how’re you doing?” Her thick American accent sung through the phone. Melissa was from California. You weren’t, you were born and bred in England, and you’d continued living just outside of London throughout your career. It was just much easier having an agent closer to the action of Hollywood.

“Good, I’m a little tired, it’s like seven AM over here.” You responded,

“Well it’s 11 at night over here, but I’ve just received some fantastic news and I couldn’t wait to tell you.”

“You’ve got my attention.” You chuckled slightly, leaning down to rest on the kitchen bench, ready to intently listen to whatever Melissa had to say.

“You remember that Scorsese film you auditioned for a while back, Silent Britain?”

Oh my god. “Yea, of course I remember, what about it?” Your palms became clammy and your voice shook slightly.

“You’ve been offered the role! You’re playing Elizabeth Baker!”

Your head immediately fell to your hands. You were just unbelievably over-joyed, you didn’t even know what to say. This would undoubtedly be your biggest role to date. “Mel, oh my god, this is such huge news, I really didn’t think I’d get it. This is so, so, so incredible.” You stood and began pacing the kitchen.

“It gets even better, guess who else is already signed on?”

“Who?”

“Tom Hardy is playing your father, Anthony Hopkins is playing your grandfather,” Your jaw had already hit the floor at this point, “Chrisitan Bale is also signed on, and Jude Law’s set to play one of the detectives.”

“Melissa, holy fuck.” You paused, “holy fuck. This- that’s so many actors, incredible actors-”

“And there’s plenty more to be signed on. So I’m assuming you’d like the role?”

“Of course I’d like the role!”

“I’m sending through all the paper-work and details for you to flick through, I’ll also mail over a script ASAP so you can go through the whole thing. You’ll have to fly out here in about 2 weeks for the initial meet up with Martin and the cast, so I’ll book that in now, and we can work out the rest of the details when you’re here, how’s that sound?” Melissa explained quickly,

“Yea, yea that sounds perfect, when’s filming set to start?”

“It says mid-June, which is in two months, if all the actors have been accounted for by that time.”

“Okay, I’ll get all my shit sorted out and I’ll see you in two weeks! Thanks so much Mel.”

And with that, the two of you hung up. Leaving you alone with your thoughts. A fucking Gangster Scorsese film. It doesn’t get better than that. That’s peak-of-the-career shit right there. Everything you did the rest of that day was purely in order to be organised for your flight. You hadn’t been this excited since you landed the role of Reece Witherspoon’s daughter in Big Little Lies. After screaming in pure bliss with Evie about the news, you went to your nearest shopping centre to get any possible supplies you may need. Shampoo, conditioner, dry shampoo, toothpaste, a power board, a charging cable, new comfortable clothes, not that you really needed anymore, new nicer clothes, not that you fucking needed anymore, the list went on. Evie even came with you, as if your impulse control wasn’t already low, Evie made it plumet, suggesting you needed every second thing she laid her eyes on. You even bought a notepad with the Taxi Driver movie poster on the cover because Scorsese directed that too, and it’ll be funny incase I ever need to take notes.

You shut the boot of your car, hopping into the driver's seat next to where Evie sat comfortably in the passenger’s seat.

“So who else is in the film? Besides Venom, Hannibal Lecter, Batman, and John Watson.” Evie smirked at her own joke,

“Ha ha. Very funny.” You stated, pulling out of the car park. “That’s all I know about at the moment, here” you passed her your phone, “check my emails, I might’ve gotten an update.” Evie took the phone from your hands and held it to your face to unlock it.

“Melissa Bradd sent another email, with attached file, more details…” Evie muttered, mainly to herself as she opened the document. “Hmm, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hardy, you-” Evie gasped heavily.

“What, what is it?” You quickly interjected.

“I’m going to shit my pants, I’m gonna actually die right here, right now-”

“Evie, what the fuck!? What is it?!” You almost wanted to pull over the car.

“Timothee Chalamet is playing Joseph Baker, your brother!” She practically shrieked. Christ. Obviously you adored Timothee’s work, he was incredible and so devoted, but Evie absolutely adored him, for a long time now.

“Oh my god,” you uttered, just above a whisper. Reacting to not only Evies reaction, but also that another big name was going to be on screen beside you. “Anyone else?”

“It doesn’t even fucking matter who else is in it!” Evie sung, flailing her arms in the air.

“Evie, who else is in it!” You repeated, feeling a little on edge. Her gaze returned back to the phone screen, her excitement still clearly coursing through her veins.

“So far, Finn Wolfhard is set to play your younger brother, and Michael Fassbender and Christian bale are signed on as your uncles,” She read.

It was at this moment, your hands really started shaking. You tried gripping the wheel as tightly as you could, but it honestly felt like most of the blood in your body was vanishing, you didn’t seem to have control over much of anything, especially not your breathing. Evie looked over at you.

“Hey, (Y/N/N), you okay? You’re kind of looking a bit pale.” She spoke quietly,

“That’s a lot of big actors, Evie.” You responded, your mouth entirely dry.

“Yea, but you’re a big actor too, you know. You’ve been in some big films!” She lightly tried to reassure you.

“Eve, I’ve been a background character in like 3 big films.” You peered over to her, quickly returning your glare back to the road.

“You’re in Big Little Lies, that’s a big show.”

“I’m a daughter, I’m not a main character at all. This movie, I’m a fucking huge character in this movie. This movie practically fucking revolves around me, Tom Hardy, and Hopkins.” Your voice elevated as you spoke.

“Let’s just get home, and then we can talk it all through.” Evie said calmly, clearly not paying much mind to what you’d just said. You nodded in response. And, as if on cue, your phone chimed.

“What was it?” As you asked, Evie began scrolling through your phone.

“Another email from Melissa.”

“And?...”

“A couple more actors signed on.”

“And?...” Your head was far too close to exploding.

“Well, Rachel Weisz is playing your mum, and Daniel Craig is another uncle,” Evie was speaking softly, “Idris Elba is a detective, and- uhm- Tom Holland is your love interest…”

And there goes the explosion. “I need to pull over. I’m about to have a stroke.”

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brooklynmuseum · 4 years

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The Brooklyn Museum mourns the loss of Dr. David C. Driskell, whose scholarship, teaching, and curatorial work were instrumental in defining the field of African American art history. His landmark, traveling exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art, which made its final stop at the Brooklyn Museum in 1977, featured work by more than 200 artists and transformed the ways in which American museums framed and presented histories of African American art. An artist himself, his work was included in the Museum’s recent presentation of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.

Reflecting on Two Centuries of Black American Art in 2009, Dr. Driskell recounted how he wanted to bring “patterns of exclusion, segregation, and racism to the attention of the art public. [. . .] But it was also about engaging the establishment in the rules of the canon, so as to say, ‘No, you haven't seen everything; you don't know everything. And here is a part of it that you should be seeing.’”

We are grateful to Dr. Driskell for his immeasurable contributions to the field of art history, and will continue to carry his scholarship and his lessons with us.

***

“When Dr. Driskell spoke at the Brooklyn Museum last year as part of the programming for Soul of a Nation, he told me backstage how he had been on our stage in the 60s with civil rights heroes such as James Baldwin. He was so happy to have returned and could not have been more full of grace. Dr. Driskell has left a profound mark on the Museum’s history. While we mourn his passing, we also celebrate the ways that he shaped a history of African American art and advanced both the field and our institutions with clarity and conviction.”

– Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director

“An artist, educator, art historian, and curator across at least five decades, Dr. Driskell’s impact was not only field defining but field generating. When we talk about the ongoing project that is the writing and presentation of black art history against its erasure and/or dismissal, we must keep close what it meant for scholars like Driskell who began this work with few blueprints, summoning the great courage and clarity necessary to name and advocate for the importance of black art history – in the face of so many cynics and detractors. I live with gratitude for that fortitude. It was my absolute honor to include Dr. Driskell in the Brooklyn presentation of Soul of a Nation, and an even bigger honor to meet him and to welcome him to the museum for an unforgettable conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Alexander in the fall of 2018. I will hold that memory close.”

– Ashley James, Associate Curator, Guggenheim Museum, and former Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum

Two Centuries of Black American Art, June 25, 1977 through September 05, 1977 (Image: Brooklyn Museum photograph, 1977)

“Dr. Driskell's 1977 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art intended to, in his words, engage "the establishment in the rules of the canon, so as to say, 'No, you haven't seen everything; you don't know everything. And here is a part of it that you should be seeing.'" Museums are still catching up to this proposition today, and we can all benefit from acknowledging how much there is to learn from each other. And we learned so much from him!

In the New York Times review of that exhibition, critic Hilton Kramer dispraised the show, asking "Is it black art or is it social history?" Dr. Driskell responded: "All art is social history; it's all made by human beings. And, consequently, it has its role in history."

Rest in power Dr. Driskell.”

– Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

“When I was an undergrad art history student at the University of Maryland, I ran the student art gallery and while this was between the time when Dr. Driskell served as Chair of the Art Department and when he was named Distinguished Professor, he was always interested and supportive of the clique of young artists and future art historians who hung out at the West Gallery. His generosity made a real impression on me and every time he walked in the gallery I would become completely tongue-tied.”

– Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

“Although I never got to know Dr. David C. Driskell personally, I did have the opportunity to hear him speak several times. When I first began studying African American art in college, I understood that David Driskell was a pioneer in the field. But, when I tucked into seats in buzzing lectures hall to hear Dr. Driskell speak as a grad student or subsequently as a museum professional, I heard about conversations with Aaron Douglas or summer at Skowhegan--Dr. Driskell painted a picture of a life lived with the people that made up the history I was devoted to studying. With the passing of Dr. Driskell, a connection to the past has been irrevocably severed.”

– Dalila Scruggs, Fellowship Coordinator, Education

“David Driskell’s life took him from a one-room segregated schoolhouse in North Carolina to the White House. Under the Clinton administration, Driskell, acknowledged as a leading expert on African American Art, worked with Mrs. Clinton to acquire a great landscape by Henry Ossawa Tanner, who became the first Black artist to enter the White House collection. This is only one example of the many doors Driskell opened in his quest to tell a more truthful and complete story of American history and culture.”

– Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art

“I did not have the opportunity to meet Dr. David C. Driskell, but I fondly recall seeing him speak at a CASVA symposium, The African American Art World in 20th-Century Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery of Art in 2017. There, he participated in a panel discussion with other artists (moderated by Ruth Fine) regarding the city’s impact on his own artistic development. He spoke with such passion about James A. Porter and the legacy of his teaching at Howard University.

Driskell has also left an indelible imprint on the Brooklyn Museum and its own exhibition program, most recently with his inclusion in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. In 1976, he curated Two Centuries of Black American Art, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976 and subsequently traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 1977. In this groundbreaking exhibition and publication, he defined the “evolution of a black aesthetic” and called attention to such important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists as Joshua Johnson, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, among many others. Driskell has significantly shaped my own thinking on American art and, in my own research, I am reminded of his rediscovery of the landscape painter Edward Mitchell Bannister who, after his death in 1901, remained largely forgotten.

Edward Mitchell Bannister (American, 1828-1901). Untitled (Cow Herd in Pastoral Landscape), 1877. Oil on linen canvas. Brooklyn Museum Brooklyn Museum Fund for African American Art, 2016.10

A tireless advocate for Black artists, Driskell led the charge in redefining the mainstream art historical canon. He forever changed the discipline and paved the way for so many, and for that I am grateful.”

– Margarita Karasoulas, Assistant Curator of American Art

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Clips from Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Pyramid Films, 1976. Brooklyn Museum Archives.

“One of the greatest treasures in the Brooklyn Museum Archives are the five videos that document the Symposium Afro-American Art: Form, Content, and Direction that occurred on June 24th and 25th, 1977 that was organized by David Driskell, the Schomburg Center, and Brooklyn Museum Staff in conjunction with the Two Centuries of Black American Art exhibition. In the afternoon of the first day, Romare Bearden, Selma Burke, Jacob Lawrence, John Rhoden, Ernest Crichlow, Vincent Smith, Bob Blackburn, Roy De Cavara, Valerie Maynard, and William T. Williams talked on stage for three hours about their artistic practices within the context of twentieth-century art traditions. It’s staggering to think of all those brilliant artists in conversation together—watching the footage, hearing the artists in their own words is profoundly moving.

When researchers are looking into the exhibition or are curious about the Museum’s history of exhibiting Black Artists, I’m always excited to share the material produced for, by, and of the exhibition. The archival material includes visitor comment books, the press kit, 22 folders of correspondence, the film produced for the exhibition, and the aforementioned symposium videos. The programming built around the exhibition was legendary, and the breadth is rarely seen today: seven artist studio visits (Howardena Pindell!), six supplemental exhibitions at other venues (The Abstract Continuum at Just Above Midtown Gallery!), twenty-two gallery talks (Dr. Rosalind Jeffries on the Harlem Renaissance!), dance performances (Sounds in Motion Dance Company!), concerts, and the list goes on. Driskell’s vision had a deep seismic effect on the art world. The people brought together at these events and programs, the knowledge shared, learned, and passed on to subsequent generations, none of this can be quantifiably measured or completely comprehended, especially from a remove, but its incredible magnitude can be felt when conducting research into the exhibition. Dozens of researchers have come to look into this history, and I look forward to welcoming future visitors to the Archives to learn more about David Driskell, hopefully inspiring them to perpetuate his monumental legacy.”

– Molly Seegers, Museum Archivist

#david driskell #Dr. David C. Driskell #in memory #brooklyn museum #art #art history #scholarship #artist #black american art #black art #soul of a nation

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milliondollarbaby87 · 4 years

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Here are the Male performances that have made my top 25 for the 2019 films that I managed to see throughout the year. This will include some 2018 films by date but due to the UK release dates they were available for this list. I actually had 45 on the long list so to cut it down it was a very tough ask! Some amazing films and therefore performances in 2019!

Taron Egerton as Elton John in Rocketman from Paramount Pictures.

My Cinema 2019 list – here 2019 Films overall – here

25. Viveik Kalra – Blinded By the Light (Review)

I am a massive Bruce Springsteen fan which is certainly a good start when you see Blinded by the Light and Viveik Kalra gives a truly lovely performance in this film. Really capturing the magic of the Boss’ lyrics and highlighting just how life changing music can be, putting in the lyrics into very good scenes and moments.

24. Randall Park – Always Be My Maybe (Review)

I think I enjoyed this film more than I actually was supposed to and Randall Park was certainly a big reason behind that. He was brilliant in the leading role as the guy who had pretty much been friendzoned and works very hard to get out of that. His comedic timing worked so very well and you could not help but like his character.

23. Daniel Mays – Fisherman’s Friends (Review)

I don’t really feel like many people actually saw this film with it being quite a small British one. But I am pleased I managed to see it because it certainly brought to life the lovely true story of the group of Fishermen who ended up singing together on albums. Daniel Mays is the producer who comes across the group and feels they could make some money off them, but it ends up more than that and he shows some very good character development.

22. Anthony Hopkins – The Two Popes (Review)

The Two Popes certainly wasn’t my idea of an interesting topic for a film, but the performances are truly outstanding that was something that I was expecting especially from Hopkins who can do nothing wrong when it comes to films. He was engaging enough from start to finish and really was believable in the role.

21. Jonathan Pryce – The Two Popes (Review)

Following on from Hopkins it really was amazing to see Jonathan Pryce in this type of role as he is certainly one of my favourite actors. Working well as the pair he gets the slightly better and bigger role as it was the more difficult character to take on.

20. Bill Nighy – Sometimes Always Never (Review)

Another of my absolute favourite actors in a rather unseen film with Bill Nighy as the father searching for his missing son and in return neglecting everything else that is going on around him. Using scrabble as a way to connect and believing he has been reunited due to an online game. A very different type of role and very enjoyable to see him branching out to something different.

19. Kenneth Branagh – All Is True (Review)

I can totally appreciate how amazing Branagh was as William Shakespeare in this film as he also directed himself. I wasn’t a very big fan of the film overall but the performance really does deserve a lot of praise, I mean come on just look at how unrecognisable he is! You can tell how passionate he was about the story and bringing Shakespeare to life in a different way to performing in one of his plays.

18. Sam Rockwell – Jojo Rabbit (Review)

Is there any role Rockwell cannot do? I mean playing a Nazi is now added to his list, but not any Nazi, a Nazi that is willing to poke fun at the poor decisions and being what turns into an amazing role model for young Jojo. Everything around his performance is so good mixing emotions with comedy in key moments.

17. Tom Holland – Spider-Man: Far From Home (Review)

I really don’t think the world was emotionally ready for Far From Home, the first post-Endgame film from Marvel. Tom Holland’s Peter Parker was all of us in grief for the legend that is Tony Stark. In what is an impressive action film it packs so much emotion and we felt fully on the journey with Peter. Holland has really grown in the role and made it more than his own with a unique carefree style.

16. Nicholas Hoult – The Favourite (Review)

In a strange way it makes me sad that Hoult did not really receive enough credit for his pretty much perfect performance in The Favourite. The female performances are truly outstanding and it felt that he was just overlooked, so I am making sure he gets plenty of praise by having him rightly in this list!

15. Al Pacino – The Irishman (Review)

Sometimes I feel that due to my age and the years I really started getting into film that I still haven’t caught up and see the best of Pacino. His Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman is an amazing performance and really makes me want to try and watch his better films as in recent years it has been rather mixed. He was outstanding on screen with De Niro and Pesci that is for sure!

14. Steve Coogan/John C. Reilly – Stan & Ollie (Review)

I have done this one as a double feature as Coogan and Reilly are both amazing and one would not be amazing without the other. The level of performance to truly become Stan and Ollie is amazing. You just have to see the scenes compared to the original clips to appreciate how much work was put into this lovely little film.

13. Clint Eastwood – The Mule (Review)

You may or may not know that Clint Eastwood is another of my favourites and lets face it he was pretty much the only actor around who could pull off this role. The old man who became a drug mule!

12. Archie Yates – Jojo Rabbit (Review)

Archie may not have had the biggest of roles in Jojo Rabbit but he was certainly stealing those scenes he was in, with perfect delivery and the innocence to really pull it all off. Amazing that this was his first ever film role and you have to look forward to him being cast in the Home Alone reboot!

11. Robert Downey Jr. – Avengers: Endgame (Review)

Everything had built up to this film and the moments within it and the character development for Downey Jr has been going on for so many years now with Tony Stark growing with each film. We would see another side to him throughout Endgame and it was an amazing performance to watch.

10. Robert De Niro – The Irishman (Review)

I feel De Niro has not actually been given enough credit for his performance in The Irishman you know as the actual Irishman. He has not received any award love and I personally feel it is such a shame, especially when you think it is best acting he has done in the past 20 years. Working so well with Pacino and Pesci!

9. Christian Bale – Vice (Review)

Unrecognisable for his role in Vice which was an incredible performance even if the film is not the best in terms of enjoyment factors. But it has also confirmed that I really watch just about anything with Bale in it, he pushes the boundaries in all of the right ways and that is why he is at the top of his craft.

8. Daniel Craig – Knives Out (Review)

The soon to be former James Bond has a complete change in roles, although we could say Logan Lucky was that turning point. In Knives Out he is a character you would never have thought he would play especially when he gives the unreal donut metaphor scene! Linking together with the very talented cast and quite frankly holding the film together as the detective.

7. Antonio Banderas – Pain and Glory (Review)

Now I feel seeing Pain and Glory which was actually on as a Cineworld Unlimited Screening which I must add only had about ten people attend the cinema, which was a shame because Banderas is utterly outstanding in the leading role. A Spanish film which I throughly enjoyed from start to finish. Attempting to battle his demons as his life has come crumbling down around him.

6. Joe Pesci – The Irishman (Review)

I feel Pesci is truly outstanding in The Irishman and stole every single scene he was in, absolutely love that he came out of retirement to take this part. It’s actually different to the style of character he has played in the past which was an added bonus because his acting was then different, the silent assassin at times.

5. Richard E. Grant – Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Review)

A true gem of a film and Grant works so well with Melissa McCarthy to bring to life the true story of Lee Israel who committed literacy forgery, he became her only friend. Grant was outstanding to watch as the over the top Englishman and I loved everything about his performance.

4. Taron Egerton – Rocketman (Review)

Isn’t is a shame for Taron Egerton that Bohemian Rhapsody and Rami Malek came out before his Rocketman performance as I truly believe because of that film he has not fully received enough praise for his turn as Elton John. Not only the acting performance but he recorded all of the songs himself as well. He is quickly becoming one of my favourite young actors.

3. Joaquin Phoenix – Joker (Review)

I don’t care what anyone says Phoenix is outstanding in Joker and his character development is on another level. When the casting was first announced he was always going to be amazing and that is shown within the film, he does not take on easy roles at all and that is confirmed with this one!

2. Adam Driver – Marriage Story (Review)

I don’t think a performance broke my heart as much as watching Adam Driver in Marriage Story. The layers and level of performance was amazing and on a totally different level. He had an amazing 2019 taking on so many different characters and I loved everything about this especially with the Losing My Mind scene as well!

1. Roman Griffin Davis – Jojo Rabbit (Review)

Could only be on actor in the top spot for 2019 in my opinion and a very young actor with that 12 year old Roman Griffin Davis. Jojo Rabbit is his first ever film role and he completely nails every single thing throughout the film. The range and level of emotion he must show from start to finish really shows that he is a true star in the making. He can make you laugh and then cry in later scenes as he is attempting to come to terms with the war and wanting to be Hitler’s friend. I honestly think he deserves so much praise as what a way to make your film debut!

Which were you favourite male performances in 2019?

Top 25 – Male Performances in 2019 Here are the Male performances that have made my top 25 for the 2019 films that I managed to see throughout the year.

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icyaslack · 5 years

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Personal thoughts about Tony Stark and Jorah Mormont. So SPOILERS AHEAD for Avengers Endgame and Game of Thrones season 8. Long post, sorry in advance.

I’ve recently lost two of my most beloved characters ever and I can’t even begin to process it. It’s visceral I grieve like I would for a real person. When I watch anything, be it tv shows or movies or reading a book, I need to get attached to the characters or at least one of them, in order to immerse myself in the story I need an emotional connection. Unfortunately I tend to get attached to secondary characters, at best, meaning there’s a good chance either they die or we don’t see him for long periods of times. Therefore, most of the time I don’t even realize I love ‘this character’ the most because it’s never really ‘love at first sight’ with me, it happens but it’s rare. My friends and family aren’t like that they can watch or read something never really loving a person or relating to any one of them, it’s not the most important to them. They value the storyline over the characters but I’m the opposite, I can watch/read a horrible story or scenario if the characters are well-developed but I absolutely can’t do the other way around. A good story/a good movie will just bore me to death if the characters aren’t interesting. It means I empathize deeply with my favourites and tend to take their ups and downs personally. I don’t know surely I get to attached to them but I can’t help it, it the way I am.

Tony Stark was different in the way that I adored him from the first minutes of Iron Man 1. I remember I was a lot younger but was immediately drawn to this complicated multi-layered character. He was there for all my young-adult life; I went religiously to watch all the films he was in, falling more and more for him. And his journey was not an easy one, when he suffered I did too and alone because I wasn’t on any social media at the time and my family and friends didn’t understand why I was so passionate about a fictional character. They still do. So nearly in secret I adored him and was sad and happy and resentful and bitter with him for nearly 11 years. That last decade wasn’t easy for me, not at all, but I still had him, I still had Tony Stark and as silly as it may seem, it helped me quite a lot. When I went to see Endgame I knew there was a good chance he would die but I told myself not to believe that, that they would find a way to leave his character retire or anything, as long as he still lived I was ok with it. But they didn’t. And his death destroyed me. With Tony’s death a whole part of my life came crashing down and it’ll never be the same.

I’m still not pass denial and anger about Tony’s death and reblogging pics and gifs is hard enough at it. I can rationalize all of it but right now I’m still too numb to do anything but randomly weep and cry myself to bed. I wasn’t able yet neither to watch another Iron Man or Avengers film, nor to read fanfiction, it’s just too soon and it doesn’t feel right, I’m physically unable at this point .

Jorah Mormont was my favourite from season 1 (ex aequo with Eddard Stark) and I didn’t even believe we’d see him for this long because he’s a good guy and good guys die in got. But he lived and was the best advisor, protector and friend Daenerys ever had. He saved her life over and over again never asking for anything in return but to be able to protect her and be at her side. Even knowing his feelings weren’t reciprocated, at least not romantically, he stayed with his Khaleesi because she was his everything and he believed in her, he saw her potential as the best Queen for the Seven Kingdoms. And as the seasons passed my love and admiration for him grew and I got too attached to him almost unconsciously, as I said to myself that after Ned I’ll never loved a character on this show so much for his death was too painful. But still little by little loyal, brave Jorah and his unconditional love and faith in Daenerys made a special space in my heart as I watched the episodes hopping to see more of him. When he died it crushed me, I prepared myself beforehand telling me there was a big chance he’d die in the battle to come. But it did nothing to soothe the blow in the end and I was left with him dead, albeit heroically, and nothing to hope for. It was very hard because I was still emotionally raw from Tony’s death and it made it all worse. Now a week later and at the eve of episode 4 I’m not better at all.

Contrary to Tony’s death with Jorah I nearly drown myself in fanfiction and videos about him. I’m re-watching all his scenes in every seasons constantly, I’m on a loop.

I don’t know why I have such contradictory reactions to their demises but it is what it is. It’ll last for weeks or months before I can put myself together again but it’ll never be the same. Especially with Tony because he’s part of a bigger universe and every film of the MCU will highlight the whole he left in everyone’s heart when he died.

I’ve tried to put in writing how I feel but I’m not skilled enough and I lack vocabulary and I am really angry at myself for not being able to express all the love I have for them and how extraordinary men they are (never were, they’ll live forever). All I can say is thank you Tony Stark, thank you Ser Jorah Mormont for everything. And thank you Robert Downey Jr and Ian Glen for portraying these characters with such a passion and professionalism. If it weren’t for their amazing performances I don’t even want to think how wasted these characters would have been.

I doubt someone would willingly read this in order to do this you must be a masochist, but I strongly apologise for my grammar and everything related. Anyway it’s cathartic when you don’t have anyone to share these thoughts with. Please excuse this inane waste of time.

#personal #Avengers Endgame spoilers #Endgame spoilers #Game of Thrones #got spoilers #Tony Stark #Iron Man #Jorah Mormont #please read at your own risk #this is bad please don't do this to yourself #i mean it I am unable to string two words together #blame the depression and with it the lost for words

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hope-for-olicity · 5 years

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Fabulous Olicity Fanfic Friday - November 23rd, 2018

Happy Friday! So this is my attempt to both thank awesome fanfic writers for their amazing work and offer my recommendations to anyone who is interested. Here are the fantastic fanfic stories I read this week! They are posted in the order I read them.

seemingly impossible (but not untrue) multi-chapter WIP by @alexiablackbriar13 - Young genius historian Dr Felicity Smoak unknowingly and accidentally calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript within the Oxford Bodleian Libraries - a book that has been lost for centuries. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Felicity wants nothing to do with magic, despite her unruly and powerful abilities. But her discovery of Ashmole 782 sets the world of creatures stirring; with a mystery afoot and new, dangerous magical abilities manifesting for her to navigate, she is approached by the enigmatic vampire biochemist Professor Oliver Queen, who seems to have a deep interest in both the manuscript… and her. Based on A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16224353/chapters/37923743

Angel multi-chapter Complete by @it-was-a-red-heeler - Oliver encounters a stripper by the name of Angel and is blown away. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15961898/chapters/37227686#workskin

The Predator multi-chapter WIP by @supersillyanddorky06 - Oliver Queen is the one anomaly in the Chicago Outfit. He is the only non-blooded member to be a part of the high circle in the family. His reputation precedes him and he is their best hunter. Felicity Smoak, daughter of the Starling boss, infiltrates his house, intent on killing him. But a startling encounter tips the scales. He goes on the prowl and she escapes. Hate, heat, and friction. Sparks. But something bigger is happening in their world. And despite their disagreements, only they can fight it down. Mob AU. Not Bratva. Enemies-lovers. http://archiveofourown.org/works/5077885/chapters/21891689

Love and Little Cupcakes multi-chapter WIP by @christinabeggs - Felicity loved sweets so much that she paid no attention to her lovelife. Until Thea Queen came into her store wanting fabulous cupcakes for her sixteenth birthday. SO ADORABLE! http://archiveofourown.org/works/12400539/chapters/28216053

Dobblegangers by @lostolicityscenes - I don’t know what this is. Just thinking about doppelgangers and this popped into my head. I picked blue-grey hair because honestly I can’t think of a color that hasn’t been used by another female hero or villain and I wanted it to be different. There might be a part 2 to this at some point. https://lostolicityscenes.tumblr.com/post/180150292851/doppelgangers-an-when-you-should-be-writing-the

The Strong Do Not Always End Up On Top multi-chapter WIP by @godswritingfool - Having passed as a Beta all her life, Felicity Smoak had desired normalcy with a little taste of thrill every once in a while. IT girl by day, hacker by night. Or maybe weekends. Was that too much to ask? Turns out the Bratva Captain, overbearing CEO of Queen Consolidated Oliver Queen, is her Alpha Matched Mate! If that wasn't bad enough, Felicity's revenge against the Triad left a power vacuum in the criminal underworld of Starling City. When the turf war ends, the dust settles, and the new mob takes control, sick and bizarre events and even more disturbing and crazy crimes escalate in Starling City. Can the Bratva and remaining criminal organizations get a handle on the newcomers who are spreading chaos in the streets? Underneath it all, while dodging the Triad, Stalkers, Jealousy, the new Mob, Possessiveness, and Outside Forces, can Reluctant Omega Felicity Smoak and Territorial Alpha Oliver Queen get over their issues and stubborn pride and finally accept their soul deep connection? http://archiveofourown.org/works/7701490/chapters/17547565

In a Perfect World multi-chapter WIP by @smoaking-greenarrow - Based on a prompt: "What if Oliver (being cut off from Queens billions) follows his true passion - photography, meets Felicity and they become THE internet famous family of the world?" Oliver fell in love with photography after he received his first camera at sixteen years old. Now, he spends his time alone, traveling around the world and capturing breathtaking moments- like the beautiful woman he meets on a beach one night. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15758463/chapters/36651615

With the Speed of an Arrow multi-chapter WIP by @academyofshipping - Oliver Queen’s elite and silver-spoon life has taken some blows in the past few years, but he is still the carefree billionaire everyone knows of and loves. When his role in the family business is in jeopardy and he is introduced to a motley of new people, his status quo is threatened. With a changed perspective, Oliver realizes his feeling for his best friend and anchor-in-life, Felicity Smoak, may be more than just platonic. OR A modern adaption of Jane Austen’s Emma with a gender swap* and no island. *Knowing that gender is not binary https://archiveofourown.org/works/16559846/chapters/38799857

There's a Hole in My Soul multi-chapter WIP by @dianasmatthew - Felicity Smoak is the daughter of a powerful and dangerous mob boss. Oliver Queen, who had been an associate until recently being promoted to bodyguard, was given the job of protecting Felicity. Neither of them are very happy about the arrangement. https://archiveofourown.org/works/5827837/chapters/13431532

Vampire Oliver multi-chapter WIP by @tdgal1 - Vampire series, more fall out from Oliver's failed attempt to woo Felicity https://tdgal1.tumblr.com/post/180184554795/vampire-oliver

| ONE | (Oliver the Footballer) multi-chapter WIP @someonesaidcake - Felicity Smoak had a plan; to save enough money to kick her monotonous job and start up the company of her dreams. She made good plans, solid plans, attainable plans. He was never part of her plan. His name was Oliver Queen, the reclusive Brazilian football star with a broken smile and a story to tell. He'd never planned on her either. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15005402/chapters/34779542

The Wine Tasting by @quiveringbunny - Spending the afternoon doing something she thoroughly enjoys may change Felicity Smoak's life. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16637105

The Queen's Mage multi-chapter WIP by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl - Words have power, and mages, those with the aptitude to draw on that power, are few in number. Thus, their services are highly sought after by anyone who has exhausted all mundane means of solving whatever problem is plaguing them. Felicity is reminded of this fact the hard way when she is hired by Moira Queen, the Lady Starling, to find and return to her son Oliver, who fled his family home five years ago following the death of his father. With a threat hanging over her should she return without Robert Queen's heir, Felicity begins her search. When she finds Oliver, and ends up joining his vigilante crusade while she waits for him to decide whether to return home, the last thing she expects to do is fall in love with him. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14617068/chapters/33781269

Charmed I'm Sure! multi-chapter WIP by @christinabeggs - What happens when three witchy sisters take on the evil in the world? https://archiveofourown.org/works/15852249/chapters/36922482

Knight in Dented Armor multi-chapter WIP by Serendipity16 - 10. That's the message that was left on Felicity Smoak's car that started the downward spiral that has become her life. Sure, she has her amazingly gorgeous-I mean muscular- I mean supportive best friend and CEO, Oliver Queen to help her through this strange time. But will Felicity's past finally catch up to her? And what happens when the countdown runs out? https://archiveofourown.org/works/11156415/chapters/24895272

And So The Adventure Begins multi-chapter WIP by @mindramblingsfics - Felicity spent her first year of college focused solely on her studies. In year two, with the convincing of her best friends Iris and Sara, she lets her hair down a bit. Oliver spent his first year partying with his wingman Tommy and living up to the status that came with his last name. He realizes he should buckle down focus on the most important part: actual school. Oliver and Felicity meet, and even though they are on different ends of the spectrum, they don't realize that they can each bring out hidden parts of one another. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15800025/chapters/36771018

Caught in the Rapture multi-chapter WIP by @bindy417 - AU. Being the daughter of a ruthless and notorious crime lord, Felicity Smoak didn't think her life could get any worse. When her father unexpectedly sells her in marriage as a peace offering to his enemy, she quickly learns it'll take more than just her sharp intellect to survive. But what starts out as a sentence worse than death may actually be her only shot at freedom. http://archiveofourown.org/works/7931917/chapters/18128824

From Somewhere Within multi-chapter WIP by @smoaking-greenarrow - Their connection has always felt natural to them, safe and secure. But others tend to fear what they don’t understand, and as far as their enemies are concerned, the world isn’t ready to accept two people who can know each other the way that Oliver and Felicity do. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16009244/chapters/37356257

Life's All About Changes multi-chapter WIP by Crazyreader2468 - After agreeing to plead guilty to being the Green Arrow in order to get FBI assistance in capturing Diaz, Oliver finds himself in a supermax, a maximum security federal prison, serving a life sentence. As he struggles to become accustomed to life in prison, his family, friends, and teammates struggle to live without him, as well as continually attempting to find a way to get him pardoned. Will they succeed in obtaining a pardon and will Oliver survive until they do? Mostly AU from right before the ending of episode 6 x 22 and after most of 6 x 23. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14936172

Pieces of Always multi-chapter WIP by @so-caffeinated and @dust2dust34 - Life continues after Forever is Composed of Nows. Ongoing non-linear collection of family moments for the Queens. http://archiveofourown.org/works/8220479/chapters/18840356

Arrow Out of Context multi-chapter WIP by @smoaking-greenarrow - "Well if it's you asking, I'll do it" https://archiveofourown.org/works/14957309/chapters/39043306

// @emmaamelia95 // @mel-loves-all // @oliverfel4 // @green-arrows-of-karamel // @coal000 // @miriam1779 // @memcjo// @captainolicitysbedroom // @tdgal1 // @spaztronautwriter // @lalawo1// @quiveringbunny // @wrongshipper // @thebookjumper // @vaelisamaza // @myhauntedblacksoul // @lovelycssefan // @laurabelle2930 //

#FabulousOlicityFanficFriday #olicity fanfiction #fic recs

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booksbookandmorebooks · 5 years

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Homecoming - The Cinematography.

Hello my lovelies I’m back with my first post of the new year! i thought id start it off with something a little different. When looking at how much I upload and how sporadic my posts seem to be lately I started thinking about what else I do with my time (besides reading) and well, honestly my only other hobby is that I tend to binge watch a lot of shows. In the past month I have binged watched Alias Grace, The OA and shamefully quite a few more including the show I’m here to talk about today, homecoming. So, I thought why not incorporate my passion into my blog. So, from here on out this blog will not only be dedicated to books that I love it will also include my reviews on the recent shows I have been watching. I really hope you enjoy this little change up and enjoy my reviews.

So without further ado let’s get started!

This show is about a young woman known as Heidi (Julia Roberts) who we initially see harassed by a department of defence official. Who is extremely interested in the time she spent employed and head of the project formerly known as home coming. A facility described and branded as a a type of institute focused on helping former soldiers transition back to civilian life after their service and help them adjust. While jumping between the present day and a series of flashbacks we see our characters realise that not only have they been lying to the people around them they have also been lying to themselves and now is the time to face up to the truth and the repercussions of some very questionable choices.

Stats:

Title: Homecoming

Genre: Psychological thriller / Drama

Release date: 02.11.2018

No. of episodes / seasons: 1 Season – 10 Episodes

Episode duration: 25-30 minutes.

Main cast: Julia Roberts, Bobby Cannavale, Stephan James.

Rotten tomatoes rating: 98%

So to start off with this show is not exactly your normal stero-typical show. If anything, the first half of episode one I was unsure if this was something I would actually enjoy. It all seemed a little too out there but I pushed through and once I had finished episode one I was hooked. The main issue I can see people having with it would be the odd shots and the odd pacing. These are one of a few topics I will be discussing and analysing below. While these factors can be a little daunting and seem a little pretentious, when you really look at them, they become so interesting to watch unfold. You can really let your imagination run with this series, it feels more like an art form in some senses than just a show. Instead of it being a throw away show that is trying to appear edgy, it genuinely provides the audience with this feeling of uneasy and eeriness throughout. This series not only stuck with me for the storyline and the shocking twists but also because of the intensity of emotions you feel when watching. When talking about this with a friend I realised that this show is more addictive due to the anticipation of what experimental shot or method we would experience next, more than overall enjoyment of the show.

In this post I will mainly be talking about the methods ,themes and the many approaches the director and producers have used to create this show and how they in turn, translated to me personally.

One of the most common shots we see for the first half of the show are these downward angle shots, now im not massively into my media studies so there are most probably a fast amount of terminologies I am missing but bare with me. These shots tend to make you feel like you are watching an animal in a maze. You get to see the characters from a bird’s eye view and watch them wind their way around their surroundings. When watching this I couldn’t help but feel the characters, any characters involved in this method were puppets being watching and manipulated, Even the bigger characters who we initially believe to have power and control are being used. Almost like animals in a testing lab. This is confirmed for me when in the episode the camera pans out to reveal the design of the building our series mainly takes place in. It is a big building with huge celling to floor walls of glass. Almost like an observatory, furthering my theory of observation through testing, a theme we know towards the end of the series is very important to the story development.

Another very important feature in this series is the change in aspect ratio and how its used to differentiate the two time periods that the show is set in. (past and present) the use of this method while a little jarring at first (it had me checking the tv and the app when I watched it) is so clever because when jumping between two different time periods it is so easy to confuse the audience and risk the chance of the storylines becoming messy and convoluted but with this it was almost impossible not to follow. We see the present depicted with two black sections of either side of the screen and the past in full screen view. Now as I mentioned, this method while clever isn’t something that you would necessarily deem as clever. You may see it like I did at first, something there that has no real meaning, it is just to further the weird feeling this show creates, that is until episode eight. Contained in one scene that I won’t spoil for you; a particular character has a huge revelation and the director not only shows the severity and shocking nature of this through the use of facial expressions and music but the aspect ratio we have been used to seeing in the present is used to demonstrate the character being bought into the light. We see that in her moment the camera shot widens and the present is left in full screen mode. To symbolise that her character is no longer in the dark and she can finally see the bigger picture. Something that when it happened I had to take a minute to appreciate it. It blew my mind that how such a simple change can really impact the feeling that you have when watching a show like this.

While on the subject of time differences I want to also mention a more common method but one that proved just as effective. In the shots of the past the colours are all desaturated and have this sad melancholy feel to them which really do help show the vast dullness of our main characters present life. Especially when compared to the flashbacks. The bright lights, the white walls and open nature of the building our main character is working in, the fake over the top smiles everyone sports, the over helpfulness of Heidi when compared to the reclusive and reluctant (almost isolated) whisper of a person we now see. Simple yet, very very effective.

Now as I mentioned, after to talking to some friends that have watched this show the biggest problem most people seemed to share was the pacing. I often heard it referred to as an issue and while I can understand it from their point of view I have to very strongly disagree. This was not an issue for me, this show was not meant to be rushed. It was supposed to burn slowly and gradually to help you grow as a viewer alongside the characters. If this show was rushed the audience would most definitely feel robbed. A piece of art like this is not something to be watched flippantly in one sitting and be disregarded upon a pile of throw away trash tv. This is really something.

I feel the shows pacing is intentionally slow because it mirrors the story and the story telling method. The relationships are gradually built through therapy sessions, a method of help that is used to slowly help the victim. All those subtle sighs, glances and twitches that help define a character are lost if not handled with care and time. You’re not only watching these people, you’re growing with them. It’s a way to engage the audience without them knowing it. Hooking and drawing you in. it captivates you and on reflection once I finished this show, I was fascinated by how it managed to do such an amazing job at that.

Not only that, but at this pace you are provided with enough time to form your own opinions and feelings towards these people, their choices and their pasts, instead of being provided with a set narrative. This way your feelings are not dictated to you, you’re not presented with the black and white ideal of good and bad, in fact this show often tends to blur those lines. Making peoples seemingly bad decisions almost justifiable. We are provided with on numerous occasions scenarios that show not only the redeeming qualities of a person but their flaws and we are able to form our own views on them in our own time. Something that wouldn’t be possible without a slow burner.

I really could continue analysing this show because there are just so many amazing factors. From music to the close-up face shots or the intensity of the volume that changes so frequently but I will stop, I have to at some point. All my friends are bored of me talking this show up, so I suggest you go and watch it yourself. You can only learn so much from a review after all. But if you are looking for something that will leave you speechless and stay with you for weeks after, I can’t recommend this highly enough, if that’s not enough the amazing talent of Julia Roberts should at least tempt you a little. I really hope you enjoy the show and can start looking for your own explanations and feelings towards this alien methodology! Until next time have a great week!

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notourlasthunt · 6 years

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People Have the Power: Why Fan Engagement Is the Future of TV

Film Daily. Amy Roberts. June 11, 2018.

Following the announcement last week that Freeform has cancelled Shadowhunters – meaning the second half of S3 will air in 2019 and feature the last ever episodes of the beloved teen horror show – fans have been understandably campaigning to save the show online ever since. Freeform’s head of programming Karey Burke revealed the decision was made after the network’s co-production partner lost its output deal with Netflix, putting a bigger financial burden on them to make the original show. “We want back and forth with them but ultimately we just couldn’t make the economics work. We were very happy creatively with it.”

On the one hand, such a statement is frustrating for fans hearing the show wasn’t cancelled based on content or ratings but instead on economics. On the other, it provides hope that there could still be a possibility of another network or streaming platform stepping in and saving the show. It’s also worth noting that Shadowhunters fans are some of the most passionate you’ll find online. To many, it’s more than just a TV show – it’s a lifeline offering diverse and powerful LGBTQI representation, progressive depictions of gender, and thoughtful reflections on current social issues.

On Twitter, one user described Shadowhunters as being “the reason why so many of us learned to embrace who we really are. Shadowhunters is acceptance, tolerance, empowerment, and love, and those things deserve to be saved.”

Meanwhile, another took aim at what they perceive to be an industry-wide issue. “Further proof that networks don’t realize what they have when they’ve got it. These stories are more than just numbers & contracts, they mean things to people. Media is art & it changes LIVES. You can’t put a price on that.” However, perhaps the most astute was someone on Tumblr who sniped, “So Freeform cancelled Shadowhunters because they can’t afford production, as if season one wasn’t filmed in McG’s backyard with two flashlights and an iPhone.”

The fans currently campaigning to save the show have also combined their efforts to fundraise for The Trevor Project, a charity that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQI youth. At this stage, the Shadowhunters fandom are much more than just a collective of people who love the show; it’s become a movement rooted within popular culture. With such impassioned efforts by fans to save Shadowhunters and to support LGBTQI young people who may draw strength and acceptance from the show, it’s ludicrous to imagine that not one single network or SVOD would step up to save it. Luckily for those fans, fan engagement looks to be the future of television.

Let’s not forget how much of a ruckus One Day At a Time fans kicked up when it looked likely the show wouldn’t be getting a third season. A hashtag campaign reigned supreme across Twitter, official letters were sent out, and influential fans wrote heartfelt pieces about the importance of the show and why it should be renewed, which it finally was in March 2018.

More recently, NBC’s sci-fi drama Timeless was cancelled and renewed within just three days after a monumental outcry from fans. Actor Malcolm Barrett(Dear White People) explained to Vulture, “I saw there was a heavy fan base, which I had never really seen until this moment. When we got canceled, there were tons of folks on Twitter, and fan art, and hashtags, and all this is stuff that I’ve never experienced in my entire career.” And let’s not forget the ballad of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. A show ruthlessly – and stupidly – cancelled by Fox, only to be picked up by NBC a day later after fans near enough shut down the internet to protest the cancellation. On Twitter, Melissa Fumero credited the show’s fans for saving the Nine-Nine by stating, “You did this!! You got loud and you were heard and you saved our show!!”

The rise in fan engagement saving a show calls into question the validity of renewing or cancelling shows based solely on live metrics. Even the most hardcore fans of any show likely miss the occasional live episode or may have even discovered it during a critical bingewatching experience on an SVOD service. The way audiences engage with TV shows has radically changed since the days when a live scheduled episode was the only way for an audience to show their love for it.

Networks like Fox are staying firmly in the past and others like NBC sound like they’re slowly catching up to the value of fandoms over metrics. Why an SVOD service like Netflix would allow for the cancellation of a show with a colossal fan base like Shadowhunters is quite frankly bewildering in that respect. Streaming should be the saviour of television when it comes to fringe shows with huge fan followings and it’s a mistake to underestimate the power of such fandoms. We’ll have to wait and see whether Shadowhunters fans will be able to positively influence change and save their show from certain doom.

All we do know is that fans currently hold more value and power than actual shows, creators, or networks do and it’d be foolish for the industry to continue ignoring that.

#news #saveshadowhunters #film daily #saveshadowhunters news

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neptunecreek · 3 years

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Podcast Episode: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Episode 001 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

Julian Sanchez joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they delve into the problems with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISC or the FISA Court. Sanchez explains how the FISA Court signs off on surveillance of huge swaths of our digital lives, and how the format and structure of the FISA Court is inherently flawed.

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

How the FISA Court impacts your digital privacy.

The makeup of the FISA Court and how judges are chosen;

How almost all of the key decisions about the legality of America's mass Internet spying projects have been made by the FISC;

How the current system promotes ideological hegemony within the FISA court;

How the FISC’s endless-secrecy-by-default system insulates it from the ecosystem of jurisprudence that could act as a guardrail against poor decisions as well as accountability for them;

How the FISC’s remit has ballooned from approving individual surveillance orders to signing off on broad programmatic types of surveillance;

Why we need a stronger amicus role in the FISC, and especially a bigger role for technical experts to advise the court;

Specific reforms that could be enacted to address these systemic issues and ensure a more fair review of surveillance systems.

Julian is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and studies issues at the intersection of technology, privacy, and civil liberties, with a particular focus on national security and intelligence surveillance. Before joining Cato, Julian served as the Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, where he covered surveillance, intellectual property, and telecom policy. He has also worked as a writer for The Economist’s blog Democracy in America and as an editor for Reason magazine, where he remains a contributing editor. Sanchez has written on privacy and technology for a wide array of national publications, ranging from the National Review to The Nation, and is a founding editor of the policy blog Just Security. He studied philosophy and political science at New York University. Find him on Twitter at @Normative.

Below, you’ll find legal resources – including links to important cases, books, and briefs discussed in the podcast – as well a full transcript of the audio.

Please subscribe to How to Fix the Internet using Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast player of choice. You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive. If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]

Resources

NSA & FBI

Stellar wind

NSA Collected US Email Records in Bulk for More than Two Years Under Obama (The Guardian)

NSA's Stellar Wind Program Was Almost Completely Useless, Hidden From FISA Court by NSA and FBI (Techdirt)

FAQ on NSA surveillance, including FAQs about EFF’s litigation to stop the mass surveillance (EFF)

Pen trap and trace authority and wiretap authority and other electronic surveillance, including Title 3 (relevant to wiretaps)

Crossfire Hurricane

Crossfire Hurricane (Wikipedia)

Read the Inspector General's Report on the Russia Investigation (New York Times)

Carter Page: Justice Department Says Facts Did Not Justify Continued Wiretap of Trump Aide (New York Times)

Court Cases

Smith v Maryland (Wikipedia)

Smith v Maryland Turns 35, But Its Health is Declining (EFF)

US v. Miller (Wikipedia)

U.S. v. Maolin Ninth Circuit Opinion (ACLU)

United States v. Maolin case page and brief (Brennan Center)

United States v. Maolin case page (EPIC)

Jewel v. NSA case page (EFF)

About Federal Judges - Article III Judges (US Courts)

Section 215 & FISA

What You Need to Know about the FISA Court- and How it Needs to Change (EFF)

FISA Court Docket

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Reform or Expire (Section 215 of the Patriot Act) (EFF)

Enhancing Civil Liberties Protections in Surveillance Law (2015 USA Freedom Act and the introduction of amici) (Brennan Center)

Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) (Wikipedia)

The Classified Information Procedures Act: What It Means and How It's Applied (Lawfare)

Books

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

National Security Investigations and Prosecutions by Douglas Wilson and David Kris

Transcript of Episode 001: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Danny O'Brien: Welcome to How to Fix the Internet with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a podcast that explores some of the biggest problems with face online right now. Problems whose source and solution is often buried in the obscure twists of technological development, societal change, and subtle details of Internet law.

Cindy Cohn: Hi everyone, I'm Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I'm also a lawyer.

Danny O'Brien: And I'm Danny O'Brien, and they let me work at EFF too—even though I'm not a lawyer. Welcome to How to Fix the Internet, a podcast that explores some of the more pressing problems facing the net today and then solves them. You're welcome, Internet.

Cindy Cohn: It's easy to see everything that's wrong with the Internet and the policies that govern it. It's a lot harder to start naming the solutions to those problems, and even harder sometimes to imagine what the world would look like if we got it right. But frankly, that's the most important thing. We can only build a better Internet if we can envision it.

Danny O'Brien: So with an ambitious name like 'How to Fix the Internet', you might think we're going to tackle just about everything. But we're not, and we're doing that on purpose. Instead, we've chosen to go deep on just a few specific issues in this podcast.

Cindy Cohn: And sometimes we know the right answer—we're EFF after all. But other times, we don't. And like all complex things, the right answer might be a mix of different ideas or there may be many solutions that could work or many roads to get us there. There is also some bad ideas some times and we have to watch for the blow back from those. But what we hope to create here is a place where experts can both tell us what's wrong, but give us hope in their view of what it's going to look like if we get it right.

Danny O'Brien: I do feel that some parts of the digital world are a little bit more obviously broken than others. Mass surveillance seems like one of those really blatant flaws at EFF we've spent years fighting pervasive US government surveillance online and our biggest fights have been in what seem to us the most obvious place to fight it, which is in the public US courts. But there is one court where our lawyers will likely never get a chance to stand up and argue their case. Even though it's got surveillance in its name.

Cindy Cohn: Our topic today is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is also called the FISC or the FISA Court. The judges who sit on this court are hand picked by the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, that's currently Justice Roberts. The FISA Court meets in secret and has a limited public docket and until recently it had almost no public records of its decisions. In fact, the very first case on the FISC docket was an EFF transparency case that ended up getting referred to the FISC. But this where almost all of the key decisions about the legality about America's mass Internet spying projects have been made and what that means is pretty much everybody in the United States is affected by the secret court's decisions despite having no influence over it and no input into it and no way to hold the court accountable if it gets things wrong.

Danny O'Brien: Joining us now to discuss just what an anomaly an American and global injustice the secret FISA Court is, and how we could do better is Julian Sanchez, the Cato Institute's specialist in surveillance legal policy. Before joining Cato, Julian served as the Washington editor for Ars Technica where he covered surveillance, intellectual property and telecom policy. He has also worked as a writer for the Economist blog, Democracy in America and is an editor for Reason Magazine where he remains a contributing editor. He's also on Twitter as Normative and that's one of my favorite follow there.

Danny O'Brien: Julian, welcome to the podcast. We are so happy to have you hear today.

Julian Sanchez: Thanks for having me on.

Cindy Cohn: Julian, you have been incredibly passionate about reining in mass surveillance for as long as almost anyone, perhaps even me. Where does that passion come from for you?

Julian Sanchez: I don't know if I have an origin story. I was bitten by a radioactive J. Edgar Hoover or something, but as an adolescent I was in a way much more technical than I am now. I ran a dial-up BBS when that was still a thing before everyone was on the Internet and I remember watching people dial in and I think it was something people sensed was a private activity as they were writing messages to each other and tooling around looking for things to download. Sometimes I would just be sitting there watching them and thinking, gosh, the person who operates the platform really has visibility on a lot of things that we don't instinctively think of as observed. Probably just as a result of being online, for some values of online from a pretty young age, I was interested in a lot of the puzzles of how you apply rules that we expect to govern our conduct in the physical space to this novel regime.

Julian Sanchez: I remember in college jumping ahead and reading Lawrence Lessig code and discussing the puzzle of the idea of a perfect search. That is to say, if you had a piece of software, a virus let's say, that could go out and look only for contraband, it would only ever report back to the server if it found known child pornography or known stolen documents. Would that constitute a search? Is that the kind of conduct that essentially, because it would never reveal anything but contraband, could be done universally without a warrant or should we think differently about it than, for example, the Supreme Court thinks about dog sniffs. If it only ever reveals what is criminal, that is, the presence of narcotics or bombs, then it doesn't technically count as a search even though it is a way of peering into a protected space.

Julian Sanchez: more recently, whimsically, the Risen and Lichtblau story back in 2005 'Bush Lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,' which was the first public hint of what we later came to know was a mass program of warrantless surveillance called, Stellar Wind. I was just dissatisfied with the quality of the coverage and ended up buying the one book you could get about FISA, 'National Security Investigations and Prosecutions' by David Kris and Douglas Wilson, and burning through it like Harry Potter. I just found it inherently fascinating. This was at a time when, and I was still a journalist at the time, it was a time when most of the reporters writing about this did not understand FISA very well. They certainly had not read this rather thick, and to normal human beings, boring treatise and so I found myself, because I now have this rather strange knowledge base, writing quite a lot about it, partly just because the quality of a lot of the coverage of the issue was not very well informed.

Cindy Cohn: We had a similar experience here at EFF, which was, at that time it was my colleague, Lee Tien and I, and we had read Kris and so we ended up becoming the only people around who knew about the secret court before everybody suddenly became aware of it. But let's back up a second. Why do we have a FISA Court? Where is it? I've talked a little about who is on it, but where does this idea come from?

Julian Sanchez: This grows out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 that was passed in response to disclosures of a dizzying array of abuses of surveillance authority and their power more generally by the FBI especially, but the American intelligence community in general. For decades, oversimplifying a bit, effectively wire tapping had been initially just illegal period and then very tightly constrained and the FBI had essentially decided those rules can't possibly really apply to us and so FISA, for the first time, created an intelligence specific framework for doing electronic surveillance. The idea of having a separate court for this, I think, grew out of a number of factors.

Julian Sanchez: One is the sense that there was this need for extreme secrecy where you were dealing with potentially people with foreign state backing who were not necessarily going to be sticking around for criminal prosecution. And when you're talking about intelligence gathering, criminal prosecution isn't necessarily the point. And so this is an activity that is not really designed to yield criminal cases. You don't really want the methods ever disclosed. You're dealing with adversaries who have the capability to potentially plant people in ordinary courts, that's where you're discussing interests, sources, and methods in your intelligence so there was a sense that it would be better to have a separate, extra secure court. And also that you might not want to have to explain all this both highly sensitive and potentially quite complicated intelligence practices and information to whatever random magistrate judge happened to be on the roster in the jurisdiction where you were looking.

Julian Sanchez: And also that the nature of intelligence surveillance is quite different in so far as, again, you're not necessarily looking at someone who has committed a crime, you think someone is working on behalf of a foreign power and trying to gather intelligence for them or engage in clandestine intelligence activities. But you don't necessarily have a specific crime you think has been committed. Your purpose in gathering intelligence is not to prosecute crimes. These are the cluster of reasons around the formation of a separate court for that purpose and it originally consisted of seven federal circuit judges, now it's 11 after the USA Patriot Act increased the number and so they continue serving on their regular courts and then, in effect, take turns in rotation sitting for a week and hearing applications from the Justice Department and the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance.

Cindy Cohn: The court started out as one thing, this idea of individual secret warrants for spies basically, but it's really changed in the past decade. Can you walk us through how those shifts happened and why?

Julian Sanchez: And of course to the extent that older FISA Court opinions are not available. The first ever published opinion of FISA Court was in 2002 and it was quite a few years before we got a second. Now quite a number of more recent ones are public, but we still have to speculate about the earlier history of the court, but veterans of the court, that is retired FISC judges have effectively confirmed that, in its early years the FISA Court was primarily about assessing the adequacy of individual warrant applications. It was just a bread and butter magistrate judge usually almost scut work. Okay, have you made the showing that there is probable cause to believe that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power. You have, you haven't. In 99.9% of cases, it was, you have and they took a pass on that individual warrant and as we get to the, in particular, the post-9/11 era and you're dealing with questions of trying to, one, often figure out who an unknown target is. You might have someone whose using a particular email address or other account that you don't otherwise necessarily have an identity.

Julian Sanchez: You're potentially trying to sift through a lot of data to figure out who your target is or which data pertains to the people you're interested in. There is a shift toward more programmatic sorts of surveillance and so the court increasingly is not passing on the question of have you established a probable cause showing with respect to "bad guy X" but rather does the law, does a statute written to deal with pre-Internet communications technology permit you to do the surveillance you're contemplating and in particular, might it allow you to gather information in ways that go beyond just targeting a particular facility, a particular phone line, that is the home phone of a particular known target. And so it ended up building this kind of secret body of precedent around what kinds of programs for Internet type network surveillance were permissible under a statute that was not written with that in mind.

Cindy Cohn: They really did shift from individual warrants to approving whole programs and whole programs that really went beyond, is this person a spy to let's look at this whole network and see maybe if there is something that indicates that a spy might be there. It really flips the kind of basis way that we think about investigations. From my perspective, obviously, I've been litigating this in the courts for a long time so it kind of flipped the whole thing on its head.

Julian Sanchez: And so we know, for example, maybe I should give some maybe more concrete examples. We know there was a bulk telephony metadata program under one FISA authority that actually was sort of the second case of this kind the FISA Court had to consider. There was an earlier question presented by a program that used what was called the pen trap authority, pen register trap and trace authority, which is, in the traditional phone context, this is about essentially real-time metadata surveillance. Meaning let's say there's a particular phone number that we think is up to no good, maybe we don't have a full blown probable cause wiretap order for that number yet, but we want to know who this target is calling and whose calling that target.

Julian Sanchez: A pen register trap and trace order lets you get realtime data about what calls are happening to and from that number and who they are from and how long the call lasts and in the Internet era the question is, what kind of realtime metadata does that let you get and when the statute talks about a facility at which this information collection is directed, traditionally that meant a phone number is the facility, but in the Internet era, you had questions like, because the standard for this kind of trap is because you're not getting full blown, in theory, you're getting the full content, the full email, the full phone conversation. You can get one of these pen trap orders under Section 214 of the USA Patriot Act with a lot less than probable cause.

Julian Sanchez: The question is, we're talking about regular phones anymore, we're talking about Internet accounts and IP addresses and server. What can a facility be? Can we say, we want all the metadata and the realtime transactional information for a particular server and all the traffic coming to and from that? So we're not just talking about one individual phone line or maybe even a corporate phone line used by a number of people, but facilities that may be handling millions of peoples traffic, or at least tens of thousands of peoples traffic. The court, I don't think that is an opinion that is public in full at this point, but essentially said, at least with respect to international communications, we're going to be pretty permissive about what you can collect.

Danny O'Brien: This is the other shift that I see, which is that not only is FISA not dealing with regular phones anymore, but it's dealing with these big servers with millions of people, but also the sort of target has changed too, partly because we're not really talking about agents of a foreign power, we're not talking about spy versus spy. It became much more dissolved than that. It's like we're talking about random stochastic terrorists who you don't necessarily know who they are. But also, this switch between "we can do foreign surveillance because we're targeting foreign powers and their spies",to "we're just surveilling foreigners", like they don't have rights under this court. So the question is, how do we scoop out this data and separate the stuff that legally we are concerned about, which is US citizens communications, but everything else is kind of fair game. And then we have a secret court that doesn't even have any kind of representation of US citizens interests, but also making this kind of human rights and foreign policy decision too.

Julian Sanchez: The debate around the authorities that the FISA Court oversees has been very, US citizens-centric, so you can watch tapes from CSPAN where a lot of defenders are saying, "look, as long as they are targeting foreigners, who cares if they don't have constitutional rights". Some of us think, people are human and have human rights even if they had the poor taste to be born somewhere other than the United States and so this is perhaps not something we should entirely shrug off. But also that there's this interesting shift from the idea that you should be concerned if the communications of an American with Fourth Amendment rights are surveilled too. The idea that really what's significant in terms of encroaching on peoples' rights is who is targeted. And for practical reasons, of course, you understand why this would be the focus because you cannot in advance know whose communications you will intercept when you target somebody. You know who you're going to target, but you have no idea who they might talk to. That's the point in part of doing the surveillance.

Julian Sanchez: But if you look at the text of the Fourth Amendment, it doesn't say the "right of the people against being targeted shall not be violated". It says "the right of the people to be secure in their persons and houses" and papers or the digital equivalent thereof. And in a sense, the fundamental Fourth Amendment concern was, at the time, were the general warrants, with the idea of these sort of open-ended authorizations to search, that did not target anyone. From the perspective of the people who signed off on the Fourth Amendment, it was not a mitigating consideration to say, don't worry if your communications are collected, you weren't the target. The thing they found most egregious, the thing they thought was the most defensive abuse was surveillance that did not have a particular target that made it open to anyone to be swept into the dragnet.

Danny O'Brien: Right. And just to spell this out, general warrants and this is a British invention so I apologize, was this idea that you could just get a warrant for everybody in a town or everybody who might be associated with it so this early mass surveillance warrant.

Julian Sanchez: And it's intimately connected with political, essentially political dissent and suppression. Some of the most controversial early cases that the American framers looked to involved a publication called the 'North Britain 45', was the one that really annoyed the King and so there was an authorization given to the King's messengers to make diligent search for these unknown anonymous writers and publishers of this seditious publication. The whole problem was it was published in the United States so they didn't know in advance who was responsible so they thought we need the authority to be able to riffle through the possessions of all the folks we suspect of maybe not being as loyal as they ought to be and give them cart blanche to decide who the appropriate targets are so the British courts ultimately said was destructive of liberty in a pretty toxic way. Chief Justice Pratt, later Lord Camden wrote some pretty inspirational prose about why that kind of authority was fundamentally incompatible with a free society and that was a great influence on the defenders of the Fourth Amendment who had the same objection to general warrants or a general search authorizations that empowered customs officials to essentially look for contraband without particularized judicial authorization.

Danny O'Brien: And there's this subtle thing here where you only get to make that kind of discrimination, that kind of difference particularly when you're separating what is terrorism and what is political action, if there is someone in the court testifying on behalf of the person that might be being targeted and that's what a secret court like the FISA Court just didn't have for a very long time, barely has now.

Julian Sanchez: Regular courts don't have that either, of course. When you were going to apply for a wiretap, even if it's in a criminal case, you don't call up the lawyer of the person you're wiretapping and say, would you come in and do an adversarial proceeding in court about whether we can wiretap you. You tend not to get very much useful information that way. But there is the back end, which is to say, yeah, ex parte proceeding on the front end, you don't notify the target in advance that you're going to do a wiretap, but that process is conditioned by the knowledge that the point of a criminal wiretap, a so-called title three wiretap, is to gather evidence for a criminal prosecution that when that prosecution occurs, you're going to have discovery obligations to defense counsel. They are going to have an incentive to kick the tires pretty hard and poke everything with a stick and make sure everything was executed properly and the warrant was obtained properly and if it wasn't, get the case thrown out.

Julian Sanchez: That knowledge that you've got to expect that kind of wire brush when it comes time to go to court, means that really from the outset, you talk to people who work on getting criminal wiretap orders that they are in consultation with their lawyers and they are talking about how are we going to do this in a way that is going to stand up in court, because if this gets thrown out, you've just wasted your time and probably a fair amount of money in the process. The fact that that doesn't exist on the FISA side, that essentially 99% of FISA orders are not intended to ever result in a criminal prosecution are never going to result in disclosure to target, are effectively, permanently covert means you really don't have to worry about that. You are presenting to the FISA Court your version of "why I think there's evidence that this person is a foreign agent" and if you've cherry picked the facts as seems to have happened in the case of former Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page, if you decided to include the inculpatory information but leave out the information that might call into doubt your theory of the case or make it look like perhaps there's another explanation for some of these things that look incriminating on face.

Julian Sanchez: You're probably never going to be called into account for that because the FISA Court is relying on your representation and they are probably never going to hear from the target. They put together a very misleading argument for why I was a foreign agent.

Cindy Cohn: I feel like a part of the problem here is that judges, they really do only get one side of the story. This is one of the reasons that EFF helped get past some changes to the law as part of the USA Freedom Act to create another entity that could at least weigh in and help the court hear from the other side, make it a little more adversarial. But I do think the judges get captured and also one of the things we've learned now is that thanks to the US Supreme Court catching the Department of Justice not even telling criminal defendants when FISA information was used. They are supposed to be telling criminal defendants when FISA information was used and to date, nobody whose been prosecuted even in the public courts on the basis of secret FISA information has ever had access to be able to figure out whether what they were told was true.

Cindy Cohn: The Carter Page situation is really an anomaly compared to so many others-

Julian Sanchez: Literally unique. The only case of a FISA Court application being even partly public.

Cindy Cohn: And that didn't happen because there was a legal system to do it. That happened because of political decisions and so nobody else is going to get that, is the point I think. People should say, "Carter Page found out that there were lies underneath his". I think that it's good to get that input but I think it's unreasonable to expect that that's the only time that's ever happened. It's just the only time we've ever found out about it.

Danny O'Brien: As a non-lawyer and someone who tries to avoid looking at politics almost all the time these days, could you just explain what Carter Page was and why that was different?

Julian Sanchez: Carter Page was a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign who had all sorts of incredibly sketchy ties to Russia. He was actually someone who was on the FBI, the New York office of the FBI's radar before he had any association with the Trump campaign. They were essentially preparing to open an investigation of him before he was announced as a Trump advisor. When he tried to campaign, this was passed on to FBI headquarters and he, in a sense, they were generally trying to figure out to what extent the Trump campaign was aware of and potentially complicit in the electoral interference operation that Russia was running on Trump's behalf or at least against the interests of Secretary Clinton and because of the panoply of shady connections, Carter Page became the person they thought, this is the one we can most easily target or get a warrant for. We don't want to go after the candidate himself, but and at this point Page had actually left the campaign, but he was the one who seemed to be the most likely, to actually be directly connecting Russian intelligence with the campaign. The most plausible link.

Julian Sanchez: There was a really disturbing exchange between, I think it was, Marsha Blackburn and Inspector General Horowitz from DOJ, put out this IG report on Crossfire Hurricane that focused pretty centrally on the surveillance of Carter Page and I was very critical of the many errors and omissions and that process, in particular when it came to the renewals of the surveillance of Page. And Blackburn, I think she asked this with the aim that he would say this is incredibly unusual and therefore the only explanation for it is some sort of agenda to get Trump or political bias against Trump. But she asked, how common is it for there to be this many errors and this much sloppiness in the FISA process? Is this out of the ordinary? Horowitz had to, quite candidly, say, "I just don't know. I hope not, but we've just never done this kind of individualized deep dive on a FISA application before.

Julian Sanchez: We've done audits, but this kind of we're digging into the case file, not just looking at whether the facts in the application matched what was in the case file, but whether there are important facts that were left out and painted a misleading picture. We just haven't done that before so frankly, we don't know how unusual this is". And that ought to be disturbing.

Cindy Cohn: We do know though, even the programmatic looks at, the Inspector Generals have looked or when the FISA Court themselves has caught the Department of Justice in lies, which they have a lot, that this is really an ongoing problem. It's one of the big frustrations for us in terms of trying to bring some accountability to the mass spying is that the FISA Court ... the part where the FISA Court approves a lot of things that come before it doesn't really bother me as much as the fact that the FISA Court itself continually finds out that the Department of Justice has been lying to them and doing things very differently than they've represented and having a lot of problems and they always just kind of continue to say, "go and sin no more", rather than actually creating an accountability or changes and I think that that message gets received.

Danny O'Brien: And that's sort of the point where a court like this becomes a rubber stamp because the FBI or whoever is coming to them saying, "we just want to extend this investigation. It's just the same as it normally was." Do you think that the FISA judges get captured in this way, that they just end up spending so much time listening to the intelligence services and the FBI and not hearing the other side of the story, that they just end up being overly reliant on that point of view?

Julian Sanchez: Absolutely. That's just necessarily the case. I've heard from retired FISA judges that they would hear from government lawyers things like, "you will have blood on your hands if you don't approve this surveillance." And again, because most of the stuff is never going to be public, you have on one side, look, if you are too precious about protecting civil liberties, you have people saying there could be an attack that would kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of people and on the other side, you're never going to be accountable for authorizing too much surveillance because this is not designed to end in a trial. You're never going to be really grilled about why you approved this dubious electronic surveillance.

Julian Sanchez: I would add that there is a defense intelligence folks and former FISC judges themselves sometimes make of the very high approval rate, which is quite high or you certainly, for most of the court's history, it's been extremely high, 99% plus, though not that much higher, frankly, than ordinary title three applications. And one of the ways that they would defend this and say "we're not a rubber stamp despite this 99% approval rate" is, they would say look, you need to understand how this process really works in practice. Which is, it's not that they just come in blind with an application that we decide. There is this back and forth where they will have a read application, a first draft, and they will go to, not the judges directly, but FISA Court staff, who may be in contact with the judges and say, this is the application we were thinking of submitting and they'll hear back.

Julian Sanchez: Maybe you should narrow this a little bit, maybe we would approve it for a shorter period of time or for these people, but not those people or we would approve this if you had better support for this claim. And so there is this sort of exchange that then essentially results in applications only being submitted when the FBI and DOJ know it's in a state the FISC is going to approve it. Maybe they don't submit it at all if the court says, "no, this is not something we would sign off on." And just to finish this point of, which is, and you would think, okay, that would explain it, but the problem is, you've created a process that is guaranteed to result in a FISA docket history that consists only of approvals. So when you get a proposed application and the court says, well, this doesn't quite meet the standard, that application doesn't actually ultimately get submitted.

Julian Sanchez: It only gets submitted when they know the court is going to say yes, when they've refined it in such a way that the court is willing to sign off on it. The problem is then you've created a body of precedent that consists exclusively of approvals. A particular set of facts where the balance of considerations is such that the court is going to say yes and so then you thus have no record of where the boundaries are of these are the conditions and the fact patterns under which the court will say no so that years down the line, a judge who is looking at applications can say, "okay, here is our record of yeses and nos. Here's our record of what's within bounds and here's our record of what's out of bounds." You only have a history of yes and that is very problematic. You don't have a documentary record of what previous judges have said, no, under these facts that's a bridge too far.

Cindy Cohn: And so that's why some of the former judges have said, look, this isn't really a court anymore. It's more like some kind of administrative agency. This is what you do if you want the FCC to approve a license. You can have this back and forth and then you finally submit something that works. There's lots of other kinds of bodies that work that way, but courts don't. And courts don't for some good reasons.

Danny O'Brien: All right, you've said that this court doesn't really have much oversight, but I have heard spoke that there's another institution around the FISC called the FISCR. Is that just like the superlative of the FISC or how do those relate?

Julian Sanchez: What we really is need is a FISCR. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review is where appeals from the Foreign Intelligence Court go. They've sat, that we know of, maybe a half a dozen times, all in the 21st century. It's possible they sat previously and we don't know about it, but five or six times that the public is aware of and the interesting thing structurally about the FISCR is that effectively the only time they are going to hear a case is on the rare occasions when the government didn't get what they want.

Cindy Cohn: I have to agree. This isn't really a way that holds the FISC accountable when it makes errors and certainly not when it makes errors that hurt you, the people who are the subjects of surveillance. You know, we managed however, to get some reforms over the years. EFF played a pretty big role in getting some changes to the FISA Court as part of the USA Freedom Act. What's your view on those changes and the impact of them, Julian?

Julian Sanchez: I think they've been pretty significant. I think we already have cases that we know about where the amicus of the USA Freedom Act created a panel of amici or friends of the court who at least in cases involving novel questions of law or technology can be invited by the court to provide their expertise, provide perhaps a contrary view to the government's argument inevitably why they should have more power to surveil, more broadly. And we already have cases where amici have successfully opposed/proposed surveillance that we know about or identified problems with practices by the FBI. There is, I think, a release made about a year and change ago that was essentially initiated by one of the amici that involved discovery that the FBI agents were searching this bulk foreign surveillance database. It's called the 702 database in a variety of improper ways and essentially taking this supposedly foreign intelligence database and routinely looking for US person information without any real connection to any national security or foreign intelligence case.

Julian Sanchez: We were probably catching more problems than we were before. It doesn't fundamentally change the structural problems with the court, but it does, I think, make it a little bit better. It has already paid off in ways that are public and perhaps in others that we don't know about.

Cindy Cohn: I think so too. Honestly, we felt like the first thing we have to do is get more information out about it so that we can make our case that Congress ought to step in and change it because those kinds of changes take a pretty strong lift on our side if we want to try to change things especially because the other side gets to do secret briefings to the intelligence communities.

Cindy Cohn: The theme of this podcast is how do fix these things. Julian, what would it look like if we got this right. We need to do national security investigations. I don't think anybody would say that we're never going to do those. What would it look like if we got the role of the FISA Court right?

Julian Sanchez: I mentioned this, I'm not sure this is the right idea, but it's worth putting out the possibility which is just we don't necessarily need a FISA Court. There are other countries that just have all surveillance governed by a uniform set of rules that regular judges are handling. And you could say, applications will go to the whatever jurisdiction is appropriate with the extent that you know one. You'll use the same procedures you use any time a court that is not a special secret court has to handle classified information, which can happen in a variety of circumstances like for example, when you need to prosecute someone for a crime that involves using classified information. But assuming the FISA Court is going to stick around, I think the most important thing that can be done is just remove the presumption of permanent covert.

Julian Sanchez: The amici, I think, have been very useful, but they are fundamentally a kind of clutch. They are a way of trying to partially reintroduce the kind of back end accountability that is the norm for criminal searches and criminal electronic surveillance in criminal investigations, surveillance that is criminal. One way you could do that more directly is just by ending the presumption of permanent covertness. I think the idea that electronic surveillance is going ultimately to be disclosed to the target eventually. It's something the Supreme Court has effectively said is an essential constitutional requirement, that one of the things that makes a search reasonable in Fourth Amendment terms is, if not at the time it's conducted then at least after the fact the target of that surveillance or that search needs to become aware of it and have an opportunity to challenge it and have an opportunity to seek remedies if they believe that they've been targeted inappropriately.

Julian Sanchez: The idea that you can just systematically make a judgment that that's not appropriate, that that's not necessary for this entire category of surveillance targets, even in cases where they do the surveillance and they say "we were wrong, this person was not a foreign agent, we didn't find what we expected", just seems totally misguided. You can't that frivolously dispense with an essential constitutional requirement. There may be cases where you don't want to reveal the surveillance after the fact, especially if we're talking about a foreign person, someone who does not actually have Fourth Amendment rights, but there may be cases where there are some powerful considerations that you should maybe for quite a while not disclose that the surveillance happened, but this shouldn't be the presumption.

Julian Sanchez: This is something they should have to argue for in the individual case. That, okay, the surveillance is done, why should you not have to tell this US person, and maybe in very many cases, there will be good reasons not to, but it shouldn't be taken for granted. It should be something that eventually they should assume we will in fact have to disclose or certainly if it turns out we were wrong, it's very likely the court is going to make us disclose and therefore, one, introduce the actual check on the back end of people kicking the tires and having the opportunity to challenge surveillance they believe is improper. But also on the front end, creating the understanding on the part of the people who are submitting these applications that you cannot assume this will be secret. You cannot assume that you will be accountable if you've targeted, especially an American, either on weak evidence or a selective arrangement of the evidence. I think that would go a long way toward aligning incentives in a much healthier way.

Cindy Cohn: I totally agree. I certainly, from your mouth to the Ninth Circuit's ears, because we have that very question up in EFFs case concerning national security letters, which do empower the government to request information from service providers and then carry what is essentially turning out to be an eternal gag on those companies. I completely agree with you that having something, the public having a little sunshine, be the disinfectant for some of the problems that we've seen can be very helpful.

Cindy Cohn: I also think that I'm not quite sure why we need a secret court hand selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to do this. Our Article three judges do handle cases involving classified information. We have a very special law called the Classified Information Protection Act that governs that and people are not regularly leaking classified information out of the federal courts. So I feel like it might have been reasonable in 1978 to think that that could be a problem. I think now in 2020 we have a lot of experience with regular courts handling classified information and we don't see a problem there. We might be able to help a little bit by broadening the scope of the judges involved from the hand picked ones.

Danny O'Brien: Isn't this also part and parcel of fixing all the problems around the FISA Court, reforming the classification process because I think that something you've identified, Julian, is this dark black ops world of government where the default is to classify information and then just the rest of government which has this presumption that it should be exposed to public review and we've got this creeping movement particularly around surveillance where the presumption is classification. And there's no external way of challenging that. The same people who want to conduct these programs are also the people that determine whether they are secret or not.

Julian Sanchez: I think that's absolutely right and it's one of the reasons I think the FISA Court has the appearance of a regular court. You always hear when people criticize the FISA Court, they say, "these are regular Article three judges." But in a lot of ways, it is sort of potemkin court because it is a court with a lot of the trappings but divorced from the larger context that gives us some reason to have confidence in the output, I guess, of the legal process which is to say, these Article three judges, but normally Article three judges do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a context of higher courts who will be reviewing their decisions and hearing arguments from whoever lost the case that you ruled on and may issue a bench slap, may overturn your ruling in a perhaps gentle and perhaps somewhat scathing way.

Julian Sanchez: You have the knowledge that this is something that advocacy groups are going to look at write about, that the legal community is going to write law review articles about that you may find your peers and colleagues in the legal community not making fun of you, but the gentile law journal version of a kick me sign on your back if you write something that's not very well thought out. So you remove all of that context, you remove the review from above, the review, in a sense by a larger community and you remove a lot of the incentives for decisions to be effectively high quality.

Danny O'Brien: Can I just quickly ask, what's an Article three judge? What does that mean?

Julian Sanchez: Article three of the Constitution establishes the judicial branch so these are judges who are part of the judicial branch of the American government as laid out in Article three of the Constitution.

Danny O'Brien: Right. As opposed to FISA, which is really part of the executive almost?

Cindy Cohn: Article three judges, as Julian said, are judges who are appointed and approved by Congress in accordance with the way the Constitution creates the judiciary. There's lots of other people who are judges in our world who get called judge, but aren't Article three judges. So the magistrate judges who are judges who handle a lot of stuff for judges. Immigration judges. Lots of people.

Danny O'Brien: Judge Judy.

Cindy Cohn: Judge Judy. Well, she's a state court judge. But TV judges. Lots of people get called judges and so when people like Julian and I say Article three judges, we mean judges who were selected by the President and approved by the Congress in accordance with the processes that have developed out of Article three. Article three of the Constitution doesn't actually lay all of that out, but that's the process. It's to distinguish from other kinds of judges and the FISA Court is made up of judges who have been approved under Article three. It's just a subset of those that are handpicked by the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court to serve on it. And for a long, long time, the Chief Justice would generally only pick judges who lived in the eastern side of the country. There were very, very few judges from the 9th circuit, which is where we are out here in California. And the theory was, what if they have to get on their horse and drive to DC to look at secret things. And we made fun of them and so did a lot of other people point out that there are ways that you don't physically have to be in DC and that you can still review classified information because the FBI does it all the time. We finally have one judge from the Ninth Circuit who is on the FISA Court.

Julian Sanchez: Although by statute, I think there is a kind of minimum number of FISA Court who have to live within, I forget the distance, but it's 30 miles of DC or something like that. But it is a very unusual structure. That's to say, I think it's pretty basically unique. This is a court with 11 judges, all of whom were chosen by one person, John Roberts. And you can say, "they are all people who have been at least approved by the Senate and confirmed to their regular posts", but the composition of the panel is important. They don't usually sit as a panel. They usually, individually, take turns hearing cases. But there is a lot of social science research showing that essentially your peer group matters. If you have a bench that is composed of lets say, democratic appointees and republican appointees that if the majority of judges are conservative, liberal judges on that panel, on that bench, will tend to vote more like conservatives and vise versa.

Julian Sanchez: Conservatives, or at least someone who started as a conservative, with a bunch of democratic appointees as their peers will come to vote more and more like a liberal and in deed may vote more liberally than the initially conservative judge with a majority peer group of liberals. So the fact that you have people chosen essentially by one person probably not particularly ideologically diverse or diverse in perspective. I know there's a lot more former prosecutors and former defense attorneys who get picked for the FISC. That's probably true for the judiciary in general, it does mean you have not just all the structural reasons that the court is going to be disposed to be deferential to the government, but also a selection bias in the composition of the court to the extent that John Roberts is favorably disposed toward granting the government this kind of authority and chooses people whose perspectives he finds congenial]. You're going to have a body that probably does not have a lot of very staunch civil libertarians on it.

Cindy Cohn: One of the things that we did as part of helping push for this amicus rule is to include in the kind of people who can help the judges, technical people, because one of the things we saw after Mr. Snowden revealed a lot of the spying and the government unilaterally made some of these decisions public is that they were not nearly as well reasoned as we had hoped. And some of that may be because the judges don't have the kind of help that they need to do this because of the secrecy and the limitations on access to classified information.

Cindy Cohn: We were able to get the amicus to include not just lawyers, but also technical people. But I feel like at that point it's kind of too late. One of the things that I think would make, frankly, and this just isn't FISA Court, but I think all courts do a better job with technical issues is if they had more resources to explain how the tech works for them. I think that especially in the kinds of situations around mass spying, which is where we started and where we spend a lot of EFFs energy anyway. These are complex systems and if you're turning a legal analysis about whether how our people are targeted and how target information is collected, you have to understand how the technology works.

Julian Sanchez: There's some specific rulings related to the bulk metadata collection, both the telephone records collection under 215 and then that prior Internet metadata ruling where looking back on some of these that eventually have became public, the court is effectively saying well, there's a ruling from the late 70s, supposedly Maryland that says telephone records are not protected by the fourth amendment, you don't have a fourth amendment right against your telephone records being obtained by the government because you've essentially turned over this information voluntarily and this is information the company keeps as a matter of course in its own business records. The FISA Court effectively reads that as, communications metadata is not protected. Again, the opinions that have been released are fairly heavily redacted but it doesn't appear to be anywhere where in okaying this kind of very broad collection that doesn't require particularized warrants based on probable cause, anyone who spoke up and said, well, Internet communication does not work like the old phone system.

Julian Sanchez: All this traffic that is occurring over the network, when you send an email, Comcast does not keep a business record of what emails you sent. Maybe your employer or your email provider has a record like that, but Comcast, as a backbone provider, doesn't have that as a business record you can routinely obtain. You are collecting information that is, as far as the backbone provider is concerned, just content as much as the content of the email itself or the content of a phone conversation would be content. So there is this way in which this technological difference between how the phone network works and how packet switch networks like the Internet work, that is pretty clearly directly material to whether this important precedent applies and if this precedent doesn't apply, it makes a huge difference because it means what you're doing is essentially collection of content that is protected by the fourth amendment as opposed to collection of some kind of business record that, under this unfortunate precedent, is not protected by the fourth amendment.

Julian Sanchez: And it's not that you can't imagine some kind of potential argument they would make about this, but what's disturbing is that it didn't even look like the court had considered this. The court had not even factored in, there's actually this technological difference that calls into question whether this is the appropriate precedent. And it's one thing to say, they made a decision about that, that I don't approve of, but it's another thing to say, they have not even factored this in. They are not even questioning whether this technological difference makes an important legal difference because they don't seem to be even cognizant that these two networks operate in very different ways.

Cindy Cohn: I'm a huge fan of metaphors, but sometimes you read these decisions and you realize that the court actually didn't go beyond the metaphor level to figure out whether that's actually what's going on and just because there are similarities between phone networks and the way emails work doesn't mean that they are actually the same. I wanted to just summarize some of the ideas we've had because, again, we're trying to fix things here and I think that the fixes that we have talked through are perhaps get rid of the secret court all together and let the regular courts handle these cases is definitely worth thinking about.

Cindy Cohn: Certainly that all of the court's decisions and the material presented to the court would eventually be made public and that the burden is on the government to say why they shouldn't be made public. There is certainly stuff that can be redacted if you need to protect people's personal privacy but the government needs to demonstrate why these things should be private and I would argue they need to do that periodically, that it's just not one and done and then it stays secret forever.

Cindy Cohn: I think we've talked a little bit about making sure that the judges are chosen differently. That the choice by the chief justice causes real dangers and hazards in the ability of the court over time to really be ... to hold the government to its word and make the government do its work. I certainly think that the, personally, I don't put words in yours, but that the rule of the amici is small but mighty and needs to get bigger so that the court really does have something, especially in cases ... one of the things that we've lost is the adversarial process at the end that we have in the case of regular warrants. If we're not going to have that adversarial process at the end when we decide whether the evidence is admissible, we need to have more of an adversarial process in the beginning so that there is more of a shake out of what they get to do at the beginning since there isn't going to be one at the end.

Danny O'Brien: We have this to-do list of what to fix and taking notes. We also wanted to try and imagine what this better world would look like if we did manage to fix the Internet. But I want to narrow this down a bit. Julian, as somebody who's a journalist who writes about a secret court and has to do the research to try and map out what's going on there. If we did fix this process, how would your job change? What could you imagine writing about now and presenting to the public that maybe you can't or struggle to explain in the current situation?

Julian Sanchez: It's already changed significantly. Again, for decades there were basically no FISA Court opinions that were public. And then there were a very tiny handful and now there are dozens of public FISC opinions since the passage of USA Freedom. It's possible to talk concretely about what the FISA Court says on a range of complicated questions as opposed to just merely speculating about the different ways a court might interpret a statute that is, again, often not super clear because it was written before the technologies that now applies to existed. But certainly to have a more adversarial back end would open up, I think, the possibility of evaluating how often essentially they get it right. We just have no sense currently of how often electronic surveillance approved by the FISC is actually generating intelligence useful enough to justify the intrusion.

Julian Sanchez: We don't authorize wiretaps to catch jay walkers, as a rule. There is a list of fairly serious crimes that are eligible for wiretaps. But in the FISA case, you have a number of definitions of foreign intelligence. FISA orders have to be geared toward collecting foreign intelligence information and a lot of the definitions of that is rather complex multi-part definition are the kind of things you would think. Threats to the national security of the United States, but one of the rather broader ones is information that is relevant to the conduct of foreign affairs of the United States. And so when you're looking back and saying, did we get anything worthwhile out of this, there's a whole lot of communications between people who are not terrorists or spies or criminals that, if they are business people or government officials, or talking to business people or government officials might well in some sense be relevant to the conduct of foreign affairs of the United States, and because you don't have as you do on the, it's a different title three, the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1969, ordinary criminal wiretaps are sometimes called title three orders.

Julian Sanchez: In that case, at least, you can say, you did the wiretap, what percentage of these wiretap orders you got resulted in a prosecution, how many of those resulted in convictions and to the extent that you did a wiretap and then you convicted someone of a fairly serious crime you have at least a sense that it was not completely frivolous, that you didn't just invade people's privacy for no reason. We don't have anything like that on the FISA side really. Surveillance ends and then 99% of the time there is no prosecution. That's not the point of FISA or a foreign intelligence surveillance. But okay, they stopped at some point wiretapping someone. Did they get it right? Did they get it wrong? Was the information in the application a fair representation of the facts available? Were they diligent about trying to present a complete picture to the court or did they only present what supported their desired results? That's all a perspective that we'd be much more likely to have if effectively people who were surveilled but ultimately weren't doing anything wrong had the ability to drag that into the light.

Cindy Cohn: Julian's point is really well taken. One of the things we've seen when we've lifted up the cover a little bit on some of these FISA Court investigations is how little they get out of some of them. Certainly, in the context of Section 215, which is the mass telephone records collection that, at the end of the day, there was one prosecution against a Somali guy who was sending money home. That was the only one where the FISA evidence was used. And then the Ninth Circuit just ruled in this case, which is called Maolin, a couple of weeks ago that frankly, the government was overstating how much the FISA Court information was being used and essentially was misleading Congress and the American people about the usefulness of it even in the very one case left standing.

Julian Sanchez: There is absolutely a pattern we see when, whether it was foreign wiretapping, the one component of Stellar Wind was first disclosed. It turned out this had saved thousands of lives, absolutely essential in preventing terrorist attacks and then years later the inspectors general of the various intelligence agencies put out a report that says, actually we dug into this and we talked to the officials and they really could not come up with a concrete case of an intelligence success that depended on this warrantless surveillance that was part of Stellar Wind. With the metadata program after the Snowden disclosures, we heard "no, no, there are so many cases where terrorist plans have been disrupted as a result of this sort of surveillance." And then again a little bit later, not quite as long after the fact and that case happily, we get two different independent panels, the 'Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board' and a handpicked presidential committee looking at this and concluding fairly quickly, no, that wasn't true. In fact, we just couldn't identify any cases where unique intelligence of operational value was derived from this frankly enormous intrusion on the communications privacy of American citizens that, in the rare cases where there was some useful information that was passed on, it was effectively duplicative of information that the FBI already had under traditional lawful targeted orders for a particular person's records.

Cindy Cohn: That takes me to the last one on our list of things that would be great if we fixed the FISA Court, which is some real accountability for the people who are affected by what happens in the FISA Court. And I appreciate the inspectors general, they have done some good work uncovering the problems, but that's just not the same as really empowering the people affected to be able to have standing, whether it's in a secret court or a regular court and be able to say this information has come out that I was spied on and I want to have some recompense and there's a whole set of legal doctrines that are currently boulders on our way to getting that kind of relief in our NSA spying cases that I think that some more clarity in the FISA Court and some more reforms of the FISA Court would really help get out of the way.

Danny O'Brien: So this is: "see you in court,in a court that I can see."

Cindy Cohn: Exactly.

Julian Sanchez: Exactly.

Danny O'Brien: Julian, thank you so much for taking us through all of this. I look forward to your weekly column explaining exactly what happened every day in a new reformed FISA Court and look forward to seeing you on the Internet too.

Julian Sanchez: I am always there.

Cindy Cohn: Thank you so much, Julian. We really appreciate you joining us and your willingness to get as wonky as we do is greatly, greatly appreciated over here at EFF, not just on this podcast, but all the time.

Julian Sanchez: Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to catching up with you guys when we can get on planes again.

Cindy Cohn: Wow, that was really a fun interview. And boy, we went deep in that one.

Danny O'Brien: I like it. I like it when you folks get nerdy on the laws.

Cindy Cohn: The thing about the secret court is, even though you can get pretty wonky about it, everyone is impacted by what this court does. This court approved tapping into the Internet backbone. It approved the mass collection of phone records. And it approved the mass collection of Internet metadata. Two of those three programs have been stopped now, but they weren't stopped by the court, they were stopped Congress or by the government itself deciding that it didn't want to go forward with them.

Danny O'Brien: After those things were made public, even though this whole system was designed to keep them secret.

Cindy Cohn: Right. It took them going public before we were even able to get to the place where we saw that the court had approved a bunch of things that I think most Americans didn't want. And clearly Congress stopped two of the three of them and we're working on the third.

Danny O'Brien: I do feel like I'm honing a talking point here and I feel that it is this contradiction with foreign intelligence surveillance court. It's not really a court because there aren't two parties discussing. It's just one effectively. It's not really about foreign data because it's brief has expanded for these programs that are taking place on US soil and can scoop up US persons' information. And I'm not going to say it's not intelligent, but it doesn't have the technical insider advise and intelligence that allows it to make the really right decisions about changing technology. I think that really just leaves surveillance out of its title. That's the only thing that's true about this name.

Cindy Cohn: It is the surveillance court. I think that's certainly true, and I agree with you about the intelligence, that basically this court really isn't equipped to be doing the kinds of evaluations that it needs to be able to do in order to protect our rights.

Danny O'Brien: Not without help. I mean, I think getting an amicus role into this and getting assistance and getting what Julian described as this ecosystem, this infrastructure of justice around it, super structure is the important thing.

Cindy Cohn: And that's the thing that became so clear in the conversation with Julian, is just how fixable this is. The list is not very long and it's pretty straight forward about what we might need to be able to bring this into something that has accountability and it fixes some of the problems and that's really great since that's the whole thing we're trying to do with this podcast is we're trying to figure out how you fix things. And I think it's pretty clear that if we really do need to fix the Internet, we also need to fix, as a piece of that, we need to fix the FISA Court.

Danny O'Brien: We'll both, after we finish recording here, go off and do that. And if you'd like to know more about that particular work that we do when we're not in the studio, you can go to EFF.org/podcast where we have links to EFF blog posts and work, but we also have full transcripts, links to the relevant court cases and other background info on this podcast. Bios on our amazing guests and also ways to subscribe to fix the Internet so you won't miss our next exciting episode.

Danny O'Brien: Thanks for listening in and we'll see you next time.

Danny O'Brien: Thanks again for joining us. If you'd like to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, here are three things you can do today. One, you can hit subscribe in your podcast player of choice and if you have time, please leave a review, it helps more people find us. Two, please share on social media and with your friends and family. Three, please visit EFF.org/podcast where you will find more episodes, learn about these issues and donate to become a member and lots more.

Danny O'Brien: Members are the only reason we can do this work. Plus you can get cool stuff like an EFF hat or an EFF hoodie or even a camera cover for your laptop. Thanks once again for joining us and if you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. We do read every email. This podcast was produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation with help from Stuga Studios. Music by Nat Keefe of Beat Mower.

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skepticaloccultist · 7 years

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The Bookshop as a Meeting Place

Treadwell's Books has been a part of London occult life for more than a decade. A center for London's disparate and motley occultists, witches, and magicians of every ilk and path to celebrate and meet.

Between weekly events, book launches and tarot readings Treadwell's is a home away from home for occultists the world over. From regular lectures and presentations by Phil Hine, Michael Staley, Hannah Sanders, Chris Josiffe, Robert Wallis, Owen Davies and dozens more to walking tours of the British Museum and Bloomsbury's occult history it's a place to linger, searching for that rare bit of booklore, meeting others on their own path. Some incredible people have found their way through Treadwell's door, a couple of friend's even found each other and eventually married because of Treadwell's. Its a magical place in many ways.

Having moved seven years ago from its first location in Covent Garden it is now tucked away down Store Street in Bloomsbury. A bigger space upstairs and downstairs lends itself to more events, with a comfortable downstairs that is even available for lettings for various group functions, public and private.

Behind Treadwell's is proprietor and "presiding spirit" Christina Oakley Harrington. In between her sold out Magical Bloomsbury Walking Tour and otherwise busy schedule I managed to chat with her about London occulture, her passion for books and running a bookshop in 21st century London.

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Christina Oakley Harrington of Treadwell's

While Treadwell's has only been in London since 2003 it seems to be a fixture that is much more firmly rooted in the occulture of London than its teenaged years belie. How have you come to be so central to the occult community of London?

Gosh, are we really? I have to give the credit to the wonderful people who've come through the doors of Treadwells for that. I've been hugely inspired by London's history of occult communities and in particular, the exciting occult renaissance of the 1880s and 1890s, when the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society had hundreds of members and there were gatherings, rituals and conversations happening every night of the week. I saw that such a renaissance might be possible in our own day if there was a bookshop which was actually a meeting place -- and I saw from history that such a place needed to offer a combination of hospitality, friendship-building and events space.

We hosted our first event within a few months of opening our doors. Since then, it's never been fewer than three nights a week that we're here. That's why we can't open any earlier than 11 am during the week and at weekends we certainly couldn't start any earlier than noon. All our late nights here!

What misbegotten adventure led you to opening an occult bookshop?

I got involved in paganism and the esoteric community in 1987 in the US, where I lived for eleven years. In 1989 I moved to London. It was the Atlantis Bookshop under the ownership of Caroline Wise which was the hub of activity and occult community creativity -- she was a force of nature, hosting conferences, promoting groups, advertising pub moots, and generally making me (and other young people) welcome and feel so inspired. Through her we got to meet magical orders, attend rituals, learn about magic from practitioners. She kept the channels flowing. If you went into her shop, she'd bombard you with recommendations, hand-made fliers, posters and postcards. So I opened Treadwells just as she was retiring from owning Atlantis, and felt that in that regard, she passed on the baton to us. Caroline's been a huge supporter of Treadwells and she's my personal inspiration of what an occult bookshop owner should be.

Do you collect books yourself?

I do! My collection is pretty eclectic. I don't have the completist gene, so I don't need to own full sets of things, mercifully. Then I get bored. I collected all of Dion Fortune's first editions, then once I had the full set, I didn't care anymore, so I sold them. I now have her work in paperback, which I've marked up with my marginal notes and personal opinions in the front and rear covers. So I work most of my books pretty hard. It's from my days as an historian, that I have opinions on what I'm reading and want to debate with the authors, or agree with them. So the margins of my books show that.

In the corner of my study is a shelf of books mentioning Treadwells, signed by their authors. Authors sometimes mention the shop in their novels, or in their guidebooks. Occasionally students and scholars mention Treadwells in the acknowledgments if we've helped them with their research - and that's so lovely. We have a commitment to assisting scholarly research where we can.

My collection is a working library of books containing ideas I love, historical research that inspires me, and lots of poetry -- which I use in contemplative reading and adopt into rituals I write. Big subjects I read are witchcraft, sapphic writers from Sappho through the 1920s, Renaissance planetary magic, and biographies of magicians of previous centuries. I've got an entire room for my books at home, and most often there are lots of them piled up on the desk with bookmarks stuck in, and intermingled are my various notebooks with quotes scrawled from the books I'm reading.

You mentioned a background as a historian, were you an academic before becoming a bookseller?

I was! I was a medieval historian. I taught for eleven years at a college of the University of Surrey. My PhD was at University College London with supplementary study at Jesus College, Oxford. The links between the world of scholarship and magical practice have grown wonderfully over the past fifteen years, so I relish reading the recent academic articles and studies of medieval magical texts and practice.

Do you recall the first book of, or on, magic you remember owning? Not a library book, but something that was your own?

I am sure I had children's books with witches as a very young child, as I was crazy about witches, and always wanted to try to do spells, and I even pretended to be able to fly (I had a children's storybook called No Flying in the House). However, I was very taken with a book whose name I can't recall, which I took from my parents' bookshelves, on superstitions and charms. I would copy the best charms -- in my opinion -- into a notebook, which I called my spellbook. I must have been about six, seven years old....

What rare items have come through Treadwells shelves over the years?

I'm so fortunate to see treasures coming through here. We have had a good smattering of Aleister Crowley first editions, Gerald Gardner first editions and books signed by Kenneth Grant. These are the staples of occult rare bookselling. But I love the offbeat stuff - we've got awesome zines. Zines are overlooked but are truly collectible as they're snapshots of the occult community at a particular moment, at the working coal-face, as it were. A faintingly exciting moment was when we got a very early Rider-Waite tarot deck, from a lady who had it in her attic, and had inherited it from her grandmother. We had people coming in just to look at it before we sold it to its current owner - during those two weeks we were honoured to be able to let tarot-lovers view it and appreciate it.

Some rare items are new - we've launched very limited edition items here -- nocturnal parties for books which are individually consecrated and inscribed and of which only one or two hundred copies are made. Those events are very magical, as it's just a small group of guests, lots of incense billowing, and good red wine flowing.

How has occult bookselling and publishing changed from your perspective over the last 14 years?

Bookselling now is a harder living than even twenty years ago, with London rents being high and with people having the option of purchasing on Amazon. But it's still vibrant, and getting even moreso. Reading occult literature inspires people to want to practice and meet others -- that's where the bookshop is crucial, and always will be. A bookseller is a curator, an advisor, and a bit of a therapist even, at times. I love that it's a continuity, a continuity of over 200 years.

Has the environment changed since the store moved to its current location several years back? Do you feel the community has grown?

We've been here at Store Street for seven years, having moved here after seven years in Covent Garden. I find it hard to believe we've been in Store Street just as long as we were in the old address. So uncanny! The community is different here than there -- and well, times change. In 2003 there was a tight connected community of people, and newcomers entered that network of people, socially. Now, it's much more open, less a community than a wider base of many many individuals who have overlapping interests. They will meet likeminded people at more niche events. I think it's because the era of subcultures is largely over, or so it seems to me. But Treadwells itself is a kind of community of regulars -- we get to know people whose vibe is in tune with ours and they keep coming back so next thing you know, we know all their kids' names and are invited to their art openings. But we are keen not to behave like a clique. So many occult-oriented people were outsiders at school that honestly, we don't need to replicate that in adulthood. A friendly gesture and a welcoming hello for our customers and new acquaintances: that's essential.

So many occultists I know scattered around the world have stories to tell about Treadwell's, visits on trips, meeting future spouses there, finding some bit of rarity they had long sought. Any insights into the future of occult bookselling in London and in general? Where does the plot take us from here?

I'm very excited about a new bookshop/occult event space in Seattle, Mortlake & Co, run by a wonderful chap named William Kiesel (of Ouroboros Press fame). It's got not only a range of rare books, but it also hosts intimate, intellectually-engaged soirees. I think occult bookselling is at its most exciting when it overlaps, not with the New Age, but with history and anthropology. By which I mean to say, when we widen our interest from the practice itself to include the people and the cultures that produced it. As an example, if you you love Enochian magic, check out Elizabethan court life. If you are drawn to hoodoo, learn about how African Americans lived in the era of slavery. If you practice traditional witchcraft, read a book on old cunningmen.

Any upcoming events or releases you would like to mention?

I'm particularly proud of our commitment to traditional, classic tarot reading. The art of reading the cards takes over a decade to master, but one can learn enough to have a meaningful experience in a single day. We offer one-day workshops, eight-week courses and even intermediate brush-up days. Tarot cards came out of the Italian Renaissance, so the symbolism is rich and deep, and it's the same symbol code you find embedded in Renaissance art. If you study the tarot cards, your trips to art museums suddenly become much more exciting.

+++

Discover Treadwell's Bookshop for yourself:

Treadwell's Books 33 Store Street, Bloomsbury, London www.treadwells-london.com/

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furederiko · 6 years

Photo

Time for November's 1st Random-News-Digest! And specially released on November 17th, 2017... despite being several hours late. LOL.

(Images courtesy of Nintendo, Warner Bros, 20th Century FOX, Square Enix, and The Pokemon Company/GameFreak. Taken from Official Trailers and/or Official Sites)

Super Mario Bros

Hold on to your Yoshis, because Mario Mario is coming back (yes, after that dreadful live action attempt in 1993) to Hollywood. This time, in an animated movie created by Illumination. If the report is to be believed, then Nintendo will be partnering with Universal to produce and release this movie. In case you live under a rock and doesn't know Illumination, that's the studio in charge of the "Despicable Me" and "The Secret Life of Pets" series. I know what you're thinking, I can already see the Toads being treated as the new Minions. LOL.

This project is said to be just in early stages, so it might take a few more years before it is ready for release. The average process to develop a big screen animated movie takes roughly 3 to 5 years, so if the deal moves on this month then we can expect the movie to arrive in... 2020. Which is the year of the Japan Olympics!!! Aaaaah, I see what you did there Nintendo. Honestly, I'm not expecting much of this project. As long as it's as entertaining as SONY's "The Angry Birds Movie", and unlike those numerous dull live action attempts... then I'll be okay. I'm pretty much sold by the word ANIMATED anyway, because forcing a live action adaptation to Mario and Luigi would be... a HUGE NO.

Metal Gear Solid

Now for this one, I'm... NOT so sure. Not just because I'm not big on KONAMI's "Metal Gear Solid" franchise as a game, but because it's live action. And we all know there's an eerie curse looming over live action adaptations for video games title. Look no further than "Assassin's Creed"... among many others.

The good news is, Derek Connolly is writing the script, and Jordan Vogt-Roberts is directing. The former has worked on "Jurassic World" and "Star Wars", while the latter is determined to make a watchable video game movie. LOL. Vogt-Roberts is most definitely a unique and seemingly fun guy, I'll give you that. This pair has worked together creating "Kong: Skull Island", which was an entertaining movie. Hmmm... now that I think about it, the whole espionage Special Forces theme would be somewhat similar to what Vogt-Roberts did in that King Kong movie. I genuinely think he actually CAN pull this off! Let's just hope the project moves on to higher stages, and not fizzles out like... it has always been.

Disney Animation

This was actually a news from last month. Yeah, I got pretty caught up with many personal ordeals, that I've completely missed out on mentioning this movie on my previous R-N-D. "Gigantic", Disney's version of the classic "Jack and the Beanstalk" story had been cancelled.

Said news was quite startling, considering the title was still part of their D23 Event... even if it was in a very minor way. It also has been in development by co-directors Meg LeFauve and Nathan Greno for quite some time, with a fixed 2020 release window. 'Creative process' was mentioned as reason for its cancellation, with Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studio president Ed Catmull calling the movie as 'not working'. The studio has moved on to another original project, that is expected to open in Thanksgiving 2020. Will we be getting another Disney Princess movie, following last year's "Moana"? Here's hoping. For now, the studio still has "Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2" set to open on November 21st, 2018, and the sequel to their hit title "Frozen" on November 27th, 2019. We can still look forward to those ones...

Disney Live Action

The live action department also hit a bump. Director Sam Mendes has departed his live action re-telling/adaptation for "Pinocchio". This is the second time he has walked out from a Disney project, with "James and the Giant Peach" being the first one. There's a rumor that Mendes might be moving to the franchise he worked on before, but that's the topic for a different category.

It's unclear if Disney will continue to work on this title by finding another director, or take a completely different approach and shelves it like what they just did to "Gigantic". Right now, two titles that are in active production is Guy Ritchie's "Aladdin", and Jon Favreau's "The Lion King" that will open on July 19th, 2019. If I'm not mistaken, Niki Caro's "Mulan" is still in pre-production, along with other titles.

We can also add a new title "Prince Charming", that is set to be written and directed by Stephen Chbosky. Chbosky is famous for his recent work "Wonder" that is set to be released this weekend, as well as the critically acclaimed "The Perks of Being a Wallflower". As the title suggests, it will focus on a young Prince and all the struggle he faces to live up to the family name. Of course, since the name Prince Charming typically refers to the one from... "Snow White" and/or "Cinderella", I can't help but wonder if this will be connected as prequel or some sort to either. It doesn't sound like it, but who knows, right? Let's just wait for more information in the near future...

Star Wars

Remember the time when many people speculated Rian Johnson would take over Collin Trevorrow's directorial seat for the tentatively titled "Star Wars - Episode IX"? Lucasfilm had expressed positive response to the director, and he himself was genuinely excited, giddy, and extremmely passionate about his love to experience in the franchise. It felt like a sure if not most plausible thing. But then we all knew that didn't happen, because it's J.J. Abrams instead who returned for the job.

But why didn't Johnson take the movie? Surprise surprise, turns out, he has other BIGGER project planned... for the franchise. Yes, he's not leaving the franchise anytime soon. Lucasfilm indeed had a great mutual time with Johnson, that they not only want him to work on another "Star Wars" movie, but to set up an entirely NEW non-Skywalker trilogy for them! The word 'bigger' would be an understatement now, right? He will be writing and directing at least the first one of this trilogy, while long time collaborator Ram Bergman is producing.

We can safely assume that this means the Skywalker-focused storyline will be wrapped up in "Episode IX", and afterwards, we'll be seeing a new route for the franchise in the foreseeable future. This new trilogy might not be episodic in nature, and will introduce entirely new characters from the universe. A "blank canvas" as Kathleen Kennedy said. Many fans have expressed both praises, and approval, as well as concerns, and disapproval for this approach, but if you ask me, I'm welcoming this with open arms. I've never been an avid fan of this space opera before, so this could be my official entry point. Without the need to explore previous movies, that is! LOL. I wonder if this new trilogy will be connected to the newly announced live action TV series?

Of course, this means that his work on "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" has completely left Lucasfilm VERY satisfied. Johnson himself might be REALLY anxious about it (a humble response, by the way), but this is by all means an expression of HIGH confidence from the studio. As evidenced by the departure of Trevorrow, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and others, they wouldn't give Johnson such massive responsibility if they are not overly pleased collaborating with him. He might be such a good polite and down to earth guy, eh? If you're curious about his work, then you only need to wait a bit longer. "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" arrives in less than a month on December 15th, 2017!

James Bond

Yep, thanks to walking out of the Disney live action project, Sam Mendes has immediately been rumored to direct the untitled "Bond 25". This naturally makes sense. Mendes worked on "Skyfall" and also "Specter", and the next movie might very well be Daniel Craig's last foray. Would be nice to see Mendes returning to deliver Craig's swan song as well as to wrap it up as his final 007 trilogy. Christoph Waltz had stated that he's not coming back as Blofeld though, so I wonder if that might affect Mendes' decision. Sure, Waltz teased that the role could be re-cast, but who can really tell what the future, I mean James Bond holds. Also, MGM announced earlier this month that Annapurna will help bring the franchise to the theatre. Does this mean the studio has won the bidding war? It's unconfirmed for now, but that seems to be the case. Quite surprising too, because it felt like a lesser entity when compared to other bigger names on the mix. But I guess as long as the franchise can still hit theatres, it's a victory for Bond's devoted fans nonetheless.

Dark Universe

Sad to say, this could be the LAST time for this category to be featured in my R-N-D. According to recent report, Universal has pulled the plug on its ambitious Dark Universe. At the very least, it's in critical condition.

All signs have totally led to this. Tom Cruise's "The Mummy" was a big failure that didn't make enough good impression (could you imagine what would have happened had Tom Cruise agreed to play Tony Stark in the first "Iron Man"? Marvel Studios dodged an bullet right there). And then production for Bill Condon's "Bride of Frankenstein" was halted not long after it begun, and the movie had since been removed from the planned release date. None of the other projects like "Invisible Man", "Wolf Man", or some others showed real progress. Next thing that happened, both Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan who seem... (or to be precise USED) to be the overseer to this Monster-based universe, have each moved on to other projects. That pretty much sealed the deal, don't you think? For the record, this isn't the first time Kurtzman abandons a cinematic universe. Don't ever forget Paramount's Transformers and also SONY's Amazing Spider-Man series.

Of course, it doesn't mean that the idea is gone for good. Universal can still pull off a soft reboot or some sort, simply by planning more properly before jumping towards another dark waters. President of production Peter Cramer even stated, "We are not rushing to meet a release date and will move forward with these films when we feel they are the best versions of themselves.". This implied that at least, Condon's movie might still become a reality sometime in the future.

I'm personally feeling VERY disappointed to hear this, knowing the probability of seeing Russell Crowe reprising his Dr. Jekyll is now close to zero. I really want to see him 'Hulk Out' and becomes a massive monstrous Edward Hyde... which we didn't really fully get in "The Mummy". But who am I to say, right? All I can say is, I hope Universal will inspire other studios to think ahead and NOT just try to snobbishly copy Marvel Studios' success without analyzing what makes their universe works. Heck, they have even proved that it's never to late to course-correct things. So don't give up Universal, and just do it one step at a time, okay!

DC Films

Uhmm... so yeah, embargo for critics reviews (both social media on November 10th, and full essays on November 14th) for Warner Bros' "Justice League" has been uplifted earlier this week. And well, true to the nature of DC Films (at least its first three movies, with "Wonder Woman" being the not-that-surprising exception), the response is a mixed-bag. Immediately, it has divided critics both fans and non-fans of DC Comics alike with polarizing opinions. Some said that Joss Whedon's clear influence doesn't gel well with the 85% done by Zack Snyder, but others said it worked just fine to elevate the movie. If you visit one entertainment site, you'd likely stumble on a review that paints the movie in a moderate-to-good light by calling it 'Pretty Good', while elsewhere you'll be greeted by review that sees it as bad-to-awful by calling it 'Pretty Bad'. Suffice to say, despite leaning to positive, things do not look completely 'PRETTY' for WB and DC.

By the way, RottenTomatoes deliberately delayed their aggregated score for the movie. My initial assumption when I saw the headline? "Ain't this cheating, huh?". Those who think RT is being paid by Marvel Studios... looks like WB is the one paying them instead, am I right? After all, this studio is infamous for constantly blaming RT for their movies' own critical failures. Of course, despite the fact that WB DOES have a stake in this site (feel free to make your own conclusion with that), that is NOT the actual reason. It's more inline with the site's Facebook show, or something like that. Of course, said score have been officially (it was leaked before hand) released now, and no surprise... as of writing (October 17th, 08:50PM local time), it's currently sitting at 37%. That is already a tad lower than its initial number. YIKES!

General consensus is calling the movie as fun but flawed. A narrative mess, but at least it gets the characters correctly now. An entertaining spectacle, but visually it's ugly and tacky. So at the very least, it's not a trainwreck and is still BETTER than the dreadful "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" nor the abominable snowma-... er, "Suicide Squad".

Ironically, WB tried to be boastfully 'different' three times, and failed miserably. Eventhough, in a way they WERE mimicking or parroting Marvel Studios. Just admit it, "Batman v Superman" was consciously made to rival Captain America 3, and "Suicide Squad" was their version of Guardians of the Galaxy. This year, they blatantly and openly COPY that 'competitor' movies. "Wonder Woman" was an amalgam of the first Captain America with elements of Thor, while "Justice League" is clearly DC's version of the 2nd Avengers. And my oh my, look what they've gotten! Good to POSITIVE responses!!! The morale of the day, if you can't compete, just follow suit. Oh, and also... use talented people who have worked on the opposite side. I mean, duh... Patty Jenkins, Joss Whedon, and Brian Michael Bendis? "Justice League" opens today on November 17th, so let's hope it will perform better financially than critically.

David F. Sandberg's "Shazam!" is moving along nicely as the movie next to be seen after next year's "Aquaman" (to be released in... *drumrolls* December 2018). After casting Disney Prince Zachary Levi as the heroic version, the movie obviously needs the human version, the little kid named Billy Batson. Remember when acclaimed young actor Jacob Tremblay (who similar to his Oscar-winner BFF, deserves BETTER roles) was said to be in contention? Well, the role ended up on young Asher Angel's hand instead. Name doesn't sound familiar? Well... he is one of the leads of "Andi Mack" on... Disney Channel. See? If you can't beat them, snatch their actors too. Grace Fulton is said to be portraying the female lead, and actor Mark Strong was said to be in negotiation to play the antagonist Dr. Sivana... whoever that is. Should he decide to take the job, this would be Strong's second DC character for WB after his short turn as Sinestro.

Interestingly, WB desperately wants this franchise to be noticed. Why is that? Just think about it, the movie is set to open in Spring 2019, so it's going to be released not far behind a particular Marvel Studios movie called... "Captain Marvel". I'm sure you know where I'm leading to with this, right? Yes... because Shazam used to be called by the same name. Coincidence? Highly UNLIKELY. It's another game of chicken by good'ol always-competitive WB (no matter how many try to scoff it off, their rivalry to Marvel is apparently REAL), folks! And a rather ballsy albeit rude one too. I mean for crying out loud, in this kind of political situation that sees a president continuously provoking people to hate a previous female opponent like a sore loser, and numerous reports of mistreatments of women by Hollywood top names... WB wants to use a testosterone-manchild-themed movie to directly challenge a FEMALE-led movie just because the two shared the same name? I call that suicide.

How about Dwayne Johnson's Black Adam then? That character is the nemesis of Shazam, so it's natural if we get to see him too in the movie. But noooope, apparently WB is planning to put him in another movie instead. And surprise surprise, it's not his own solo movie as the studio repeatedly promised, but Gavin O'Connor's "Suicide Squad 2". I literally slapped myself in the face when I read this, because dang it... wasn't it enough to throw a sexist Enchantress, that they just HAD to pit the broken Squad against another supernatural character? This is not confirmed for now, but since the movie still has a long way before starting production in October 2018... let's just hope WB has a more sane way for combining the "Suicide Squad" and "Shazam!" franchise. Hold on... did they just confirm that "Shazam!" is part of the current continuity then? Then I'm honestly not sure how I feel about that... (read: there goes half of my interest in seeing the movie.). I really want this to be its own separate thing, and not boggled in the failed universe. I guess I expected too much too soon, huh?

About "The Batman", there's a hint that Ben Affleck might be stepping out the Matt Reeves movie after all. Though he was singing a different tune during this year's San Diego Comic-Con International, the actor has since been saying a complete opposite. In a press junket for "Justice League" in London, he even openly said that he does NOT know what the future holds. That sounds like a guy who's thinking of gracefully bowing out from the DC Films... as soon as possible. He even mentioned the exact same thing to USA Today not long after. Quite surprisingly, the internet also expressed their agreement to see him leave. Some already even fancasting and speculating a replacement (that one actor, I hope its NOT true). OUUCH! Looks like what once a bright star, is slowly fading away like a comet that visits a solar system every hundred of years. Hmmm... I wonder if Henry Cavill will follow suit after this...

Last but not least, Patty Jenkins' much anticipated "Wonder Woman 2" has vacated its December 13th release date to arrive 6 weeks earlier. CALLED IT! Yep, I knew WB would end up doing this because competing directly with "Star Wars" would be waaaay too risky. I'm just surprised that it took this long for the studio to announce the shift. I guess they were waiting for Marvel Studios to prove that early November is a good spot for comic book adaptation, huh? Don't worry, Gal Gadot is expected to reprise her role, because WB had said that the report of her 'refusal' (originated at PageSix) is NOT true. "Wonder Woman 2" will now open in November 1st, 2019.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Would you look at that?! I can't believe this, but WB has mischievously prepared a contingency plan for the negative response to "Justice League". I assume based on past experiences, WB is aware that critics would still be divisive (no different situation, a bit worse than "Man of Steel" even) about their DC movies, so they immediately releases official synopsis and cast photo for the "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" sequel. Come on, releasing this on the same day the DC ensemble movie is released? Can't be a coincidence. A pretty darn good distraction, if I should add! Not to mention, this comes on the heels of that recently announced Niantic AR game.

The new official title has immediately generated mixed response. After all, "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" OBVIOUSLY put the focus on Johnny Depp's villainous character Gellert Grindelwald. It could be a good thing, if his name was still as big as it used to be in the past, but we all know that the world has changed. Thankfully, one character stood out the most among the confirmed cast members. It's none other than Jude Law's young Albus Dumbledore. I must say, he doesn't look the way I expected to be, but I'm definitely not complaining. Hey, a charming dashing Dumbledore would be a great selling point for the new franchise that hasn't been able to be on par with its "Harry Potter"... sequel.

We got FIVE couples now. The four core characters from the first movie are here, hopefully in a bigger and more memorable inclusion. We have Claudia Kim's cursed 'Maledictus' character, who seems to be pairing up with Ezra Miller's Credence and could very well be serving as an antagonist. And then there's Zoe Kravitz's Leta Estrange who is engaged with Callum Turner's Theseus Scamander. Indeed, Theseus is Newt's big brother, so here's hoping Eddie Redmayne isn't sidelined completely and get to showcase actual dramatic involvement in this sequel.

Say what you will about the first movie, but it was surprisingly entertaining enough to make me see more. It might be not at the heights of the "Harry Potter" series, but I'd gladly take this over the DC Films anytime. Directed by David Yates based on a screenplay from J.K. Rowling, this movie is set to arrive precisely one year from now on November 16th, 2018. Aaaah, I get it now.

X-Men Universe

Let's address the elephant in the room first. When we talk about Marvel character owned by 20th Century FOX nowadays, then you should be aware of a recent report that has taken the world by storm. That's right, the House of Mouse Disney is in negotiation to purchase FOX's film and TV division, because the other company wants to focus on news and sport. That literally means, all the movie rights for X-Men and Fantastic Four will be reverted back to Marvel! Yes, every characters from those faction might be returning home in the foreseeable future, because despite the report that talk has ended, the possibility is still very much high. Assuming Comcast or Verizon doesn't suddenly come out of left field and snatches this opportunity instead, of course.

If you ask me how I feel if FOX and Marvel Studios arrange an agreement similar to what the latter did with SONY and Spider-Man? Then I would not hesitate to say "No Thanks". Combining Marvel Studios' movie universe with FOX's sloppy, botched, and well... generally uninspiring one would be a disaster. FOX tend to disregard good characters, and treat them badly more often than not. But if this deal DOES become a reality, then I'd be REALLY happy. That means we WILL be getting the much-needed reboot that the X-Men and Fantastic Four are desperate for, and not just a soft-reboot that producer Simon Kinberg had been boasting out and about... that ended up with his "X-Men: Dark Phoenix". I don't know about you, but Kinberg clearly doesn't know what he is doing, so I want to see him OUT of and AWAY from any Marvel stories for good. Of course, there's a downside to all things. Through FOX movie division, we were able to get more comic adaptations in a yearly basis. Not just that, we also got titles like "Logan" or the upcoming "The New Mutants" that run in R-rated route, one that Marvel Studios or Disney in general would be highly unlikely to explore. That might be an outcome that many fans might be hard to swallow...

Anyways, amidst that rumbling news, Deadpool kept on walking proudly, as if it doesn't care about what would happen to its own crumbling universe. After all, one comment on social media said that Wade Wilson is the only Marvel character who could easily address the change casually without the need to mind its own continuity. Don't forget, this is the guy who is consciously confused which Professor X he should report to. LOL. "The Untitled Deadpool Sequel" (that's the placeholder title, which I hope would be the official title because it just fits the character so much) movie released a holiday-themed first official poster, as well as a Bob Ross inspired second teaser that well... if you ask me, pretty much stole a bit of buzz from WB's movie premiere. LOL.

This teaser suggests that despite the change in director, the movie still retains the same idiosyncratic atmosphere. I'm glad that the returning characters aren't forgotten in this one, and if some people catch this one theory right, we might be getting a rather 'sinister' antagonist as the super villain. WOW. "The Untitled Deadpool Sequel" (I'm still laughing here!) arrives on June 1st, 2018, so if you're a fan of the first movie, make sure you mark your date.

One more thing, would you like to see a movie featuring... a mutant character called "Multiple Man"? Well, James Franco might be starring in one. So whether you want it or not, it's still probably coming in the future. Who's behind this bizarre and preposterous idea? Duuuh... Kinberg of course. Who else? LOL.

SONY Marvel Universe

Situation in the SONY side, is a 'little' different. Not content with "Venom" (showing us a first look of Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock after just 2 weeks of production) and "Silver & Black", the studio is already moving forward with another title. This time, "Morbius the Living Vampire". Earlier this week, it was revealed that the writers of this year's "Power Rangers" Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama had submitted their script to the studio. The two previously worked on several underwhelming movies like "Dracula Untold" and "Gods of Egypt".

To be honest, I'm actually surprised when I found out that Dr. Michael Morbius belongs to SONY. He's a long time antagonist of Blade, and as far as I know, that character has reverted back to Marvel. Of course, I just discovered that the Roy Thomas and Gil Kane's creation debuted in "Amazing Spider-Man" #101. It makes sense now, because it's almost the same situation to the character Kingpin. Problem is, similar to Venom and other Spider-Man related characters, the BIG question is will these character work without Spidey himself... Or in Morbius case, without Blade? I seriously doubt it. I believe just the fact that these characters will not interact with the ones from Marvel Studios, is already strongly pessimistic. Let's just wait and see if SONY can prove that it DOES have what it takes to jumpstart their own Spidey-less Marvel Universe.

Marvel Studios

Let's talk about "Thor: Ragnarok" first! Eventhough this weekend the movie's might would likely be overthrown by DC's first ensemble movie, Taika Waititi's comedy has managed to at least stay on number 1 for two consecutive weeks. It's making huge money, even more than Chris Hemsworth's first two solo movies. Seriously though, should we even be surprised? This buddy comedy is genuinely FUN and hilarious, and plenty of its memorable scenes will be etched into your brain... forcing you to laugh or giggle whenever the memory strikes. Like a lunatic? Well, if you say so. LOL. Really though, you couldn't see me now but I'm currently cackling upon remembering that... uhm, naked scene. LOL.

By the way, Waititi has openly expressed his desire to make another Thor movie with Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo. What do you think? Should he get his second Ragnarok movie? If it means we'll get another 'Get Help' moment, or more of Jeff Goldblum's Grandmaster? Waititi might not have a vast or deep knowledge of comic book, but since "Ragnarok" pretty much creates a clean slate for Thor Odinson and the Asgardians... he can pretty much do anything. And I honestly look forward to see that.

Disney has begun campaigning the movie and James Gunn's "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" for Oscar race too. Since many of the Award's regular players have been lambasted with various kinds of sexual misconduct allegations, can we expect members of the Academy to turn towards comic book adaptations now? I certainly hope so. We know that 'Best Visual Effects' and in some cases 'Best Make Up' will be the usual entry, but I sure hope these movies get a chance in other categories too. 'Best Score' or 'Sound Editing' perhaps? I do think Mark Mothersbaugh deserves an appreciation for his work in "Ragnarok".

"Black Panther" is now officially three months away from release! Well, for the US region at least... because several other countries (like yours truly) usually get it earlier. To celebrate this, Marvel Studios have released a batch of single character posters that includes Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa, his royal family members, up to Andy Serkis' Ulysees Klaue. As far as I recall, we haven't had one for Michael B. Jordan's Erik Killmonger... or did I miss anything? The movie also have tested positively in early screenings according to report, so we're in for another Marvelous time. "Black Panther" arrives on February 16th, 2018.

Fans have been actively demanding the D23/SDCC trailer for "Avengers: Infinity War", to the point that people started doing illegal stuff like posting leaked images and all. We got the first look for Proxima Midnight, Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow's new hairdo and costume that resembled another Marvel character, as well as Paul Bettany's Vision and Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch looking in despair. These pictures are great, but HOW we get them is the morale question here. I'm not particularly fond of this attitude, because it only shows the dark and negative side of fandom.

Obviously there are VALID reasons why Marvel Studios is withholding that trailer, thus is it so hard to just WAIT until it is released officially? The reason can be a simple one, like the need to add quality Visual Effects to it, or a bigger one like... the potential of spoilering other movies. In particular, "Ragnarok" and "Black Panther". I'll use "Ragnarok" for example. Thor's appearance in the trailer shown exclusively last Summer was INCONSISTENT compared to how he ended up in "Ragnarok". In the end of "Ragnarok", we know that he got a 'permanent scar', and he didn't look like that at all in the "Infinity War" trailer. And then there's that scene with Loki holding the Tesseract. Also, Thor ran into a gigantic vessel, that Marvel Studios President has confirmed to be the Sanctuary II. The owner? Josh Brolin's Thanos. See? It's a massive spoiler already. Who knows what kind of secret from "Black Panther" it would spoil in advance!

I personally feel what we all need to know, is that the movie will undoubtedly be HUGE. Like Ruffalo himself hyped stated, it has "all of the Marvel characters in it. All nine franchises. I mean, it’s mind-boggling. Everyone has their moment to shine. Everyone is still their characters.". Feige admitted that even the filming felt overwhelming and surprisingly emotional everyday. And also, that the movie is some kind of a... heist movie? HUH? Yeah, co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo specifically said so to CNET, which honestly made me wonder. They were pretty specific that the heist would be Thanos' play, as he collects all 6 Infinity Stones. Hmmm... let's just stop right here, because now I've become curious to see the trailer. LOL. But nope, I know for sure that I'm going to be watching this movie. At least, ONCE. That's why Marvel Studios can even delay the trailer forever or not release it at all, and I won't mind. Because I don't really need any more convincing to see it.

As far as I know, "Ant-Man and the Wasp" has completed production. I'm not really sure about this though, but I think I did see like some kind of celebration for it on Twitter. Regardless, both Walton Goggins and David Dastmalchian have completed their parts earlier this week. Dastmalchian even gave us a look for Randall Park's Agent Jimmy Woo. Here's hoping we'll be getting a teaser trailer soon.

Laurence Fishburne who would soon be seen as Bill 'Goliath' Foster in the movie, opened up to Collider that because he grew up with Marvel, he actually pitched himself to Marvel Studios! Intriguingly, he also came with several ideas, and has been developing one secretly with Marvel. He hoped that "It’s gonna change the world". Hmmm.... this is intriguing. Fishburne didn't specifically say movie, so it could very well be a comic series, or even a TV one. Something related to Blade perhaps? or some others? Hmmmm...

Recent report by Variety claimed that Ben Mendelsohn has been approached to play the antagonist in "Captain Marvel". If his interview with Collider was any indication, it seems he might have officially come onboard the movie... or at least in final talks. His response reminded me greatly to when Paul Rudd, Benedict Cumberbatch, and also Carol Danvers herself Brie Larson tried to play coy about their roles. These are obviously polite and sincere actors, so they couldn't really hide that big of a secret. Since this is feeling like a dejavu, let's just say we shouldn't be surprised if Mendelsohn ends up antagonist-ing Larson in the movie when it arrives on March 8th, 2019.

This is the last one for the category folks! More SPOILER-ish (as usual, you might want to skip to the next category if you avoid one) information surrounding "Avengers 4" has been flying over the internet. One particular bit teased the reenactment, a flashback, or perhaps a time travel twist involving "The Avengers". Not only because Robert Downey Jr. was spotted wearing the exact same shirt from the 2012 movie, Hemsworth himself posted a photo (with his daughter) wearing a costume precisely from the same movie. Actor Frank Grillo and Maximiliano Hernández were also suspiciously present in Atlanta. Does this mean Crossbones and Agent Jasper Sitwell are alive in the movie? Hmmm. Could we be seeing a reality alteration here? Especially if we consider the ability of the Reality Stone. According to report that can't really be considered credible, these will all be scenes generated by Tony Stark using his B.A.R.F. simulation that we saw in "Captain America: Civil War". To who? Ty Simpkins' Harley Keener, who has been confirmed to appear in the movie. Hmmmm... now I'm really curious about this movie too. But let's just focus on "Infinity War" first, shall we?! One day... I mean one movie at a time.

Marvel TV

Oh hey, Marvel's "Inhumans" has officially ended with its eight episode. I think it was last Friday, if I'm not mistaken. How would I know, if I couldn't even care less about it. Personal preference aside, that means the 5th season of Marvel's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." is about to air very soon. And if you're among devoted Marvel fans who are already counting days, then the show has released an official trailer to wet your appetite for this new season.

The trailer was... uhmm, okay I guess? I'm still on the fence to follow this season, so I can't really tell if this manages to persuade me or not. One thing for sure, it's action packed and filled with creepy aliens. It's really nice to see Henry Simmons' Mack and Natalia Cordova-Buckley's Yo-Yo get more presence and involved in more action. We also see bits of the new characters: Jeff Ward's ambiguous Deke, Eve Harlow's Tess, Pruitt Taylor Vince's commander Grill, and Coy Stewart's possible-Nuhuman Flint.

And then there's that confirmed report of Nick Blood returning in some capacity as Lance Hunter. What about Adrienne Palicki's Bobby Morse? Last we heard, she won't be making an appearance due to her tight schedule in the equally space-themed alien-filled "The Orville". That doesn't mean she's not open to reprise her role though, because she has had a great time and is still in touch with the cast. Here's hoping the stars will align somehow, and we get to see her official return in the series. "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." will begin the new season on Friday, December 1st, 2017, with a two-episode premiere entitled "Orientation Part 1 & 2".

Marvel's "Runaways" is set to premiere next week, on November 21st. Its first three episode will hit the streaming platform Hulu on the same day. To prepare for this, Entertainment Weekly has released official posters and banners for each of the six lead characters, while IGN dropped additional ones showcasing their super-powered abilities. They looked neat, and teased the teenager's signature skillset. Currently being praised as the teenage soap-opera side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, let's just hope that this series attracts enough viewers and good rating to warrant another season.

Meanwhile, Marvel's "New Warriors" has departed Freeform... even before it is even aired. Although Kevin Biegel's 10-episodes first season was initially meant to debut in the network, the pilot was so well-received to the point it attracted several high-level Disney execs. Freeform was unable to set a time slot for this show (I guess they prefer Marvel's "Cloak and Dagger" more?). Thus Marvel Entertainment pulled it out, and has been actively searching for a partner that can launch it next year as planned... as a direct two-seasons package! Surely it won't land on Netflix, given Disney's plan to launch their very own streaming service in 2019. This is just a wild guess, but I think Hulu would end up becoming its new home.

Speaking of Disney's upcoming new service, CEO Bob Iger confirmed that it will feature at least one new Marvel series among others. I wonder what that is? I just hope, and sincerely hope that it is not concerning Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel. It would be such a waste to utilize that massively popular character in a TV setting, when it would make the most in movie format. She's an Avenger, so she's better of to be with the other members, right? Not to mention, Marvel TV doesn't exactly have a good track record to pull their projects off properly (Inhumans, anyone?). I prefer that rumored "Power Pack" movie to switch places if that's indeed the case. Crossing my fingers!

Netflix

Eventhough Marvel's "The Punisher" is catching everyone's attention, and receiving mostly positive response from entertainment critics (general drawbacks are inevitably concerning the gun violence), Marvel fans need to be prepared with the possibility of it being the final Marvel title on Netflix. As has been widely reported, Disney is intent on creating their own streaming service. One that will include new live action show for "Star Wars", animated series based on "Monsters Inc.", and also Marvel series.

It's unlikely if the service will ONLY have one series. So it makes perfect sense for Disney to end their contract with Netflix, and pull out movies and shows like Marvel's "Daredevil", Marvel's "Jessica Jones", Marvel's "Luke Cage", Marvel's "Iron Fist", and Marvel's "The Defenders" from the platform to be exclusives alongside their 'future family'. After all, Disney had openly stated that Netflix would end up becoming their competitor when the time come. I doubt Netflix would be threatened, with a vast library of original series and movies in their pockets. But this might have a bitter result to fans of the series. Sure, this might not be as bad as many fans are worrying about, because these shows might simply move to a different place. Then again, we also need to remember that Netlfix co-financed these series, so the most likelihood is that these series will be put to a close. Can fans handle that? I don't think so.

For now, "Daredevil" begins filming Season 3 this week. I think the 2nd seasons of "Jessica Jones" and "Luke Cage" had wrapped, while the one for "Iron Fist" will start next month. At the very least, these shows are still set to air in 2018 since Disney won't be launching their service until the following year. Come 2019? Come what may. All episodes of "The Punisher" should already be available today, so you might want to enjoy it as much as possible... while you still can.

Final Fantasy

"Episode of Ignis", the third character DLC for "Final Fantasy XV" has received an official release date. Square Enix announced at the Paris Games Week 2017, that it will be available on December 13th, 2017. The storyline will take place after the "Trial of Leviathan", where Ignis is tasked to protect the unconscious Noctis as they make their way to safety. Ravus will also join forces with Ignis, likely to protect his sister Lunafreya. The story will have multiple endings, and feature new music from "Chrono Trigger" composer Yasunori Mitsuda. You can check out the official trailer for this DLC on Youtube.

Noctis himself, is set to have his own... uhmmm, 'adventure'. As in, he will be guest starring as a playable DLC character in... "Tekken 7". Yes, I know I should've put this in a separate "Tekken" category, but moreso than Geese Howard who came from "The King of Fighters" series, Noctis IS the LEAD of "Final Fantasy XV". It would be more appropriate to feature him here in his own turf, right? Ahahaha... good excuse, eh. Noctis will be available in Spring 2018. The announcement trailer sees him receiving an in-game invitation/request from Lars Alexandersson, and features his three travelling companions too (who unfortunately are only present as cameo). Go check it out, it's a fun video...

Dynasty Warriors

KOEI Tecmo has announced the release date of the English version of "Dynasty Warriors 9". While the original Japanese version will arrive for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on February 8th, 2018, countries in North America and Europe will have to wait a few days later for a release on February 13th, 2018. I doubt this will spark complaints though, because unlike previous titles, this one only sees a delay that is only less than a week away.

Pre-ordering the game will reward players with a set of extra costumes for the character Zhao Yun, Guan Yinping, Diaochan, Sun Shangxiang, Lu Lingqi, Wang Yi, and Wang Yuanji. I know what you're thinking, Zhao Yun's the only male on the list! I guess that's because he's the unofficial poster boy for the franchise, so he gets the privilege to be surrounded by the ladies. Fans of the series can already book their copy of the game right away, whether in physical or digital version.

Ace Attorney

Nintendo Switch has taken the world by storm, and rightfully so. While its launch lineup was pretty scarce, third party developers have begun noticing the potential and strong selling point of the hybrid console. One of them, is of course CAPCOM.

According to recent report, they are preparing THREE... yes, not one or two, but three titles from the "Ace Attorney" franchise to be released in 2018. The first two, are compilation titles set to be released between April and October 2018. The first one compiles the first three games (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney − Trials and Tribulations), and the second compiles the next three (Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice). All those titles have been exclusively available or re-released for Nintendo 3DS, so I doubt it will take long for them to be transferred into a Switch version.

The third title, is going to be an entirely new title that features Phoenix Wright as the lead protagonist once again. This is good because the latest title released was the 19th century setting "The Great Ace Attorney 2: Ryunosuke Naruhodo’s Resolution", and just like its prequel, it didn't get an English-language version. Having Phoenix at the spotlight means fans might get an international version, albeit via digital services. This news is still regarded 'rumor' for now, but as I said, Switch is getting all the buzz, so I won't be surprised if it ends up becoming actual fact and not just fan fiction.

ARIKA

The company's so-called 'Mysterious Fighting Game' has been given an official title. It's "Fighter EX Layer".... Whooaa--HUH? Hold on, Layer? Why Layer, what's the point? I wonder why they don't just call it "Fighter EX Arena" or something. Japan and their Engrish sometimes throws you for a loop, huh? LOL.

ARIKA will start beta testing on December 11th, with six playable characters: Kairi, Garuda, Skullomania, Darun Mister, Allen Snider, and Shirase. Those who attend PlayStation Experience 2017 on December 9th and 10th, will also be able to play a demo version. The game will utilize a system called 'Gougi', which sounds a little hard to describe or comprehend. Apparently, this will allow players to have different ways to play, so the flow of matches will be changed. To put it simple... it's difficult to make sense of until I can get my hands on it. LOL. "Fighting EX Layer" will arrive next year, so for the time being, check out the new trailer to get more... uhm, understanding about it.

Pocket Monsters

DC fans have gotten a "Justice League" movie, while Marvel fans received "The Punisher" series this very day. There's still one more, and this one is dedicated for Pokemon fans worldwide. Yes, the high-scored "Pokemon Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon" is now officially available in market! Yaaaay...

Since the start of the month, The Pokemon Company has been releasing new promotional materials to convince gamers to grab the new and final adventure on Alola Region. Did you know that every Legendary Pokemon and their alternate forms are set to appear via Ultra Wormhole? Make sense, because this would be the last title for Nintendo 3DS. Some of them are version exclusives (like Ho-Oh is Ultra Sun while Lugia is in Ultra Moon), and some even requires special conditions (Giratina can only appear if version exclusives Dialga and Palkia are present), but all the Legendaries from Generation I to VII is here.

What about Team Rainbow Rocket? It's a villainous organization created by... previous bosses from past games. Yes, Team Rocket's Giovanni is bringing Team Magma's Maxie, Team Aqua's Archie, Team Galactic's Cyrus, Team Plasma's Ghetsis, and Team Flare's Lysandre to challenge the protagonist. There's also The Battle Agency that allows players to use Rental Pokemon, and also Totem Stickers that enable them to obtain totem-sized Pokemon. You can check out the details on these features on Gematsu, or check out the official trailer.

The latest one focuses on Necrozma, because the so-called 'Strange Evil' contains another enlightening "Secret". This refers to a report that the poster Pokemon/Ultra Beast will have a new form in these games, and not just the Dusk Mane or Dawn Wings. Read the details of this news on Gematsu.

Those who don't have a 3DS, has no other choice but to rely on "Pokemon GO" your Smartphone. Hey, there's a free Alolan costume now... to make it seem like we're also playing "Ultra Sun & Moon". LOL. Problem is, what would happen now that Niantic is actively developing a new title? Should casual and devoted players alike be nervous? Well... if Niantic's statement could be hold accountable (they... generally do, by the way), then players should NOT be worried. The company openly promised that inspite of "Harry Potter: Wizards Unite", "Pokemon GO" will still be continuously improved and updated. They even say that the team is 'doubling down' on new improvements, particularly in the year 2018. Hmmm... that means we won't be getting the rest of Generation III until at least January, huh? Bummer.

With a new 'copycat' app already 'stealing' the buzz by implementing most-requested features that "Pokemon GO" has been sorely lacking, it looks like Niantic will be pushed to step up their game much faster. Producing updates in a slow pace simply won't cut it anymore, unless they are planning on losing more and more players by relying on the same gameplay that... well, ends up becoming tedious and boring after a while. So yeah, let's just keep a close tab on this 'promise' and whether the company will be able to be true to their words or the opposite. That's when the judgement will be strike down. Am I right? *wink*

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alexanderwrites · 7 years

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Thoughts Roundup - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 14

“We Are Like the Dreamer”

David Lynch famously said that he can’t stand people talking after they see a movie. That the movie is the talking. Despite the fact that talking about movies is pretty much my passion, I get what he means. Up until recently, i’d be scouring the internet for hours after each new episode, reading about every talking point, every theory and attempting to unpick every moment. I would do this immediately after watching each episode which, really, makes no sense. Yes, I still like to read reviews and give the forums a quick peruse, but I find that to get the most out of the show, I have to sit with the episode for a while, and see how I feel about it after a good night’s sleep, hence why I write these reviews a day after I see each episode. There is such a thing as too much and too soon, and reading pieces immediately after watching an episode is sort of like seeing the opening act after you see the main show. There is so much to take in and enjoy with each given episode that afterwards I just need to process it in my own way without getting external input.

Talking and writing about the show does have merit and is great fun, I just am starting to realise that I need to separate the show from the writing about the show. I mean, how can it not mess with your expectations, for better or for worse? “We WILL see X character next episode”, “The next episode will be the ONE where everything changes”, “This character from this episode will be the key to the whole mystery”, and so on. How would I feel about The Return if i’d never read a word on it? Part of me wishes I had, but then again good, thoughtful writing about The Return is so complimentary to my enjoyment of the show, and has made me appreciate so much more about it. I suppose my point is: writing, whether good or bad, has affected the way I watch and view the show, and so for the reviews henceforward, I will try and keep my points as individual and unaffected by other writing as possible. Ideally, i’d like what I say about the show to express how I feel, rather than attempt to sway the readers (all 2 of you) a certain way. So, after a good night’s sleep, little to no reading on the episode and a big, fuck-off coffee, let’s talk about...

. The FBI. The episode kicks off and wastes no time in getting straight into things. It’s with openings like these - abrupt and un-establishing - that remind you that this is from one long, 18-hour Script. The endings often remind me of this fact too. Absent are cliff-hangers and buttons, and absent are ‘previously on’s at the beginning of each episode. Instead, here’s Gordon, calling Lucy. It’s strange to think that they haven’t interacted in The Return yet, and even stranger to remember that Gordon hasn’t even been back in town. It’s strange, because they’re two of the funniest characters in the show, and Gordon is one of the most Twin Peaks-y characters, despite not even being from the town. They feel linked, even if it’s by one event 25 years ago, and they are still linked today - they just don’t quite know how, yet. Gordon’s call to Lucy is laugh out loud funny; I have a simple comedy brain, and will always laugh at things that are too loud. Hearing Gordon’s tinny yell pummel its way out the end of her receiver really tickled me, as did his unexplained, confused pause when Lucy told him of her trip to Bora Bora. Not a beach boy, Gordon? So, for a scene that wastes no time, it certainly wastes time, but beautifully so. Their interaction is a miniature reunion that finally links Gordon back to Twin Peaks, which has always felt like his spiritual home.

The Return has had a really interesting way of dispensing information, wherein waiting for a character to discover something that we already know is as gripping as us discovering information in the first place. And so, Gordon finally finds out about Laura Palmer’s missing pages, and how it indicates “Two Coopers”. You have to admire Robert Forster’s straight-face matter-of-factness in handling these topics. He knows it sounds strange, but to him, these are just strange truths that it is his duty to notify his colleagues and superiors of. I guess, as a Bookhouse Boy, Frank Truman has seen enough odd things in those woods to not be particularly fazed by them anymore.

. Tammy, God Bless you for saying “What’s the significance of the Blue Rose?” when asked by Albert which one question she should ask him about the first ever Blue Rose case. That is what we all want to know, and the last few episodes have given us more clarification of that than I ever expected. She could be seen as an audience surrogate, the newbie to whom everything is explained. But she is also smart, more proactive than the typical rookie, and she gives us the most perfect explanation of what a Blue Rose is: something which does not occur in nature. It’s exciting getting to hear glimpses into the history of the Blue Rose, but a bigger bombshell is dropped in this scene, one so inextricably connected to Dougie and Vegas that it’ll most likely have our FBI crew strolling down the strip by the next episode: Diane is Janey-E’s half sister. But, is she really? Whomever she is texting (which it seems is Doppelcoop), she tells them where the FBI are and that she’s getting them to Vegas. If this were her task, to get the FBI to Vegas, would it not be beneficial to her to speed up the process by claiming that she’s Janey-E’s sister? Who knows. Diane plays her cards very close to her chest, emotionally and informationally, and any time we get too close, we get a big fat Fuck You from her. For now, i’ll take her word for it, because I love the idea that Laura Dern and Naomi Watts are sisters.

. Monica Belluci has the secrets to the universe, or at least in Gordon’s head. “Who is the dreamer?”. It’s a damn good question, and I think what it means is “whose chess board are they all pawns on?”. Is it Doppelcoop, or is it forces larger than him? Is it “Mother”, or something we saw born in the atomic explosion? The show has always felt like a dream, and while I don’t believe it’ll all turn out to be a literal dream, the feeling is there, and it makes us wonder what version of reality we are seeing. It’s a thoughtful philosophical quandary, and one that clearly disturbs poor old Gordon, the sensitive soul. And next we have our Bowie cameo which is not really a cameo like the clickbait headlines tell us, but a scene from Fire Walk With Me, which, at this point, you almost have to have seen to fully appreciate The Return. It’s interesting that both Gordon and Albert hadn’t remembered exactly what Jeffries had said, and his “Who do you think that is there?” question regarding Cooper is certainly creepy in retrospect. Did Jeffries slip in and out of time, and see who Cooper would become? It feels like he is, if not a key to unlocking the mystery, at least a very important figure in the overall story. I don’t think there is a clear mystery that will ever be solved at this stage, and I think in a sense, it would be disappointing if there was one overall answer to everything. It would be too easy. Instead, lets just take each scene and surprise we get, try and contextualise them as best we can, and figure out what they say rather than what they literally mean. It’s too vague and too abstract for everything to be neatly explained, and really, wouldn’t that ruin some of the fun?

. The boy scouts Bookhouse Boys are heading to Jackrabbit’s palace, and there is something intrinsically melancholy about their journey, because it makes Bobby fondly recall his father. The woods they walk through aren’t the scary, foreboding woods we see in Twin Peaks at night, they’re glowing with sunlight and the home of happier times in Bobby’s childhood. That is, until they find a vortex to the Black and White World and the woman from the Purple World who helped Cooper escape back in Part 3, naked and unable to speak, and with skin still over her eyes. The scene of them exploring gave me serious Lost flashbacks, and like Lost, what comes next is confusing as all hell, yet fairly answerable.........I think. Andy, of all people, disappears to the Black and White Room, which looks absolutely stunning again. The set design throughout The Return has been terrific but perhaps a bit more modern and less stylised than some of Lynch’s other projects, but the Black and White room is a hit of that old school, Eraserhead style set design. The Giant names himself as the “Fireman”, which ties again to fire and electricity being a source of evil, and the Fireman as a pretty decent bloke, really. A window above Andy transforms into a cinema screen which gives him the weirdest “Previously on” the world has ever seen. From the Atomic Blast and the releasing of Bob into our world, to Laura Palmer being taken by the Angels, it is a stirring and haunting mirror into the darkness that summarises succinctly the nature of good and bad in the show’s universe. And now Andy - yes, Andy - has the secret to it all. It’s a hypnotic scene, and i’m increasingly blown away by how well The Return is blending the more abstract, with the linear narrative, to the point where the two cannot exist without each other. Like a blend of a wanderlust through the netherworld, and a real-world sense of purpose and duty, Andy takes the woman to the police station to protect her. He knows more now, and understands that she is in danger. From who? Mother, it seems, is still hot on her tail. His job has never been more important, and keeping her safe was as important as arresting the policeman earlier, a funny scene, the buildup to which seems to have played out almost entirely offscreen. I like it though - it reminds you there’s an entire world going on that you don’t necessarily get to see. The woman chirps and squeaks in her cell, desperately trying to articulate some sort of message. We cannot decipher her message, no matter how hard she tries to speak. So close, yet so far away.

. James has his first non-singing dialogue of the season, and though he doesn’t give too many glimpses into his life, we know that it’s his birthday, and that he’s a security guard at the Great Northern. And that above all, he seems happy. It’s hard to tell from what we see of him, but he smiles so much more easily than he used to, and his brooding seems absent. We’re not really thinking about ol’ forehead, because we’re thinking about his Security Guard buddy, a ‘cockney’ (that accent is maybe the scariest thing in the return yet) who has lots of lines to tell you that he is, in fact, English (Pubs? Check! Football? Check! Antiquated cockney rhyming slang? Check!). It’s weird and a bit goofy, but damn is it a story that hooks you. I love the idea that there are portals to the Other Places all over the world (the book hints that there are many), including in an alley in the East End of London. Does that mean Ian Beale is to discover one next? It’s such an incongruous image but kind of brilliant, and now we have someone sent specifically to Twin Peaks by The Fireman and given one very powerful hand. Arms and hands, man. The references to arms and hands being signs of power, possession, weakness and evil are so numerous, but they seem to be perhaps an entry point for non-human spirits? Then, James goes to check out a creepy noise (never a good idea you dumdum) in the basement of the Great Northern, where that odd ringing noise seems to emit from. It feels like he could die down there; it feels like he is dead down there. It feels like hell, and there’s more excellent set and sound design to thank for that. There is something very bad under every building in Twin Peaks...

. In an episode that has so many talking points to choose from, I think the one that most people will be talking about is Sarah Palmer’s. Her scene is so filled with dread, malice, then satisfyingly gruesome terror that I needed to pause the episode afterwards. It’s an horrific yet celebratory moment: the disgusting harasser gets exactly what we’ve been waiting for the whole series, and gives a sense of power and authority right back in the hands of a tortured woman. Yet, it is pretty clear cut evidence that Sarah is either not a person, or is a person who is, for want of a better word, darksided. Was she the girl who got a bug in the mouth after all? Is she home to spirits as Leland was? It’s hard to tell, but i’m all for the spirits if they cause her to bite a gross dude’s throats out. When Laura took her face...off at the beginning of the Return, there was nothing but light. When her mother did the same, a darkness peered out, as did a cheshire cat grin that takes a pretty high place on the Nightmare Imagery Shitlist of The Return.

. And we come to an end, with more ambiguous discussions at the Roadhouse. Billy gets a mention, and it is likely that he was the blood soaked creep from the jail cell scene earlier in the episode. “I can’t remember whether my uncle was there”, says one of the characters as she describes when she last saw Billy. She seems worried by this. It’s such a small and seemingly unimportant question, but it feels like the detail that makes her story not of this world. Having characters in more than one place at a time and having characters disappear and reappear has made us look out for any variation on this theme, and the Uncle’s both being there and not being there stands out. The talk of family members reminds me of the screaming car woman with the sick teenager from episodes back, who also listed members of her family, seemingly at random. What is going on in the families of this town? It feels so fucking nightmarish, and while I once didn’t enjoy these moments for their lack of direct connection to the narrative, I now appreciate them as miniature dramas, always unfolding under a shade of darkness, and expanding the universe of the show that you don’t really see. Tonight’s scene ties their drama to Audrey’s through the mention of Tina. How it’ll come together is to be seen, but the word I think most apt to describe it is Purgatory. It feels like these characters are stuck in a strange, haunted, endlessly unfolding narrative. Of abusive family members, of violence, lies and deceit, of nightmarish uncertainty and endless repetition. What would be really interesting would be to piece all these moments together to see what themes and motifs stand out, because like so much else, it feels like there is something pounding at us from beneath its surface.

That’s how I’d describe this episode. There is something underneath this episode, like the face beneath Sarah’s, or the language beneath the Blind Woman’s chirps, or the ringing sound underneath the Great Northern, that we get glimpses at but ultimately cannot decipher. They are brought out by fear, anger, necessity and desperation, and try as we all might, we may not discover what they all mean. Maybe it’s that we listen to the blind woman’s noises, that we venture into the basement, that we look into Sarah Palmer’s eyes, that is important. Perhaps the act of Andy listening to the fireman and watching those scenes unfold is what the purpose is. What matters most is not that the mystery is answered, but that we behold the mystery, and celebrate it. Isn’t that what all of life really is? One big, weird ass mystery that we’re endlessly trying to answer? We can watch the magician’s hands as closely as we like, but his hat will end up empty, and we’ll be left asking questions and wishing we’d just enjoyed the trick. Maybe we’re all in someone else’s dream, or maybe we are the dreamer - what matters most is that the question exists, and that we accept it. What more can you do than that? “What the fuck is going on in Twin Peaks”? We might never know, and that’s okay.

#twin peaks spoilers #twin peaks the return #david lynch #tv review

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bthenoise · 5 years

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Q&A: Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas Opens Up On Censorship, ‘Child’s Play’ and His Band’s Blossoming Career

All photos by Julius Aguilar

As you’ve probably heard by now, the world is a scary place. For vocalist Spencer Charnas, however, that’s exactly how he likes it. Growing up as a devout horror fanatic, the outspoken vocalist has committed his life to the world of blood, guts and gore via his cinematic and self-proclaimed “theatricore” band Ice Nine Kills.

Currently out on The Noise-presented Episode III tour with Falling In Reverse, From Ashes To New and New Years Day in support of their hard-hitting, horror-themed LP The Silver Scream, Charnas and company are destroying venues all across the US giving numerous showgoers nightmares in the best way possible.

Speaking with Charnas about the momentum his Fearless Records act has started to build with the release of their fifth full-length record -- which has sold over 50,000 copies by the way -- the passionate frontman says he owes it all to persistence.

“I think ever since I was a little kid, I was always extremely persistent in whatever I wanted,” he explained. “I remember my dad used to just call me relentless. If I wanted something I just wouldn't give up. ‘Dad, can we do this? Dad, can I get a guitar? Dad, can I go to this concert?’”

“And while I probably was an annoying little prick when I was a kid,” he added, “I think that mentality and that spirit has helped navigate a very difficult and competitive and frustrating path in life.”

To hear Charnas open up more about Ice Nine Kills’ blossoming career as well as his honest take on censorship in America and the new horror remakes of Pet Cemetary and Child’s Play, be sure to read our in-depth Q&A below. Afterward, make sure to grab tickets to see Ice Nine Kills out on tour here.

The Falling In Reverse tour starts today but you guys have already been on the road doing your own headliner leading up to this. How are you feeling coming into this and is it weird to switch gears from a headliner to a support tour?

Spencer Charnas: Is it weird to come into it from a headliner and just jump into another tour, it takes a little bit of time to get used to it. The venues on this tour are a bit bigger in size. So the stages are obviously larger, we're a little bit further away from the crowd. So it's going to take a few shows to kind of get the feeling of it and get the hang of it. Whereas before the venues were a little bit more intimate and not every show had a barricade.

You guys are doing something pretty fun for your VIP meet and greets where you’re playing horror trivia with fans. Where did that idea come from?

You know with VIP, we've done so many in the past over the last, probably five years. And over the last few ones, it just seemed like it got a little bit stock -- everyone kind of does the same thing. You show up, you get a signed poster and a picture with the band and it doesn't really seem like too much of an experience. So I was racking my brain for something that we could really have fun with and get kids excited about and [create a] sort of spontaneous anything-goes atmosphere, because you don't know who's going to win. You don't know what the questions are. And I thought what better way to do something like that and do trivia with horror films, which obviously ties into our entire band's aura.

Have you won pretty much all of them so far?

I’ve won 98%.

So the questions are easy for you?

Some of them are challenging. But for the most part, I know the answers. It's getting to a point where I'm winning all of them. So I think we might do everyone verses me.

Speaking of horror movies, have you been able to see the recent horror films that have come out? Us? The new Pet Semetary?

Yeah, I did. I saw both of them. Didn't care for Us. I was definitely a fan of Get Out. I think Jordan Peele is enormously talented and I think he'll continue to make great films, but for whatever reason, I was not crazy about Us and I kind of fell asleep. Pet Semetary I did enjoy. I thought it was entertaining and disturbing at the same time. I don't think it was incredible. But I did enjoy it and I thought the acting was phenomenal. John Lithgow was great. And I like the twists that they put on their version. It wasn't just a regurgitation of the former film.

Well talking about remakes, any thoughts on the new Child's Play that's going to come out?

You know, I really was but the first trailer to me was underwhelming. The second trailer looked better. For me, you know, Child's Play -- in the sense that I think you can't do Nightmare on Elm Street without Robert Englund -- I think the same thing [goes] with Child's Play and Brad Dourif doing the voice of Chucky. That's just, he's Chucky. So to not do it with him, I'm a bit wary of. But I gotta say Mark Hamill did sound good in the last trailer that I heard. But I wish that they would have maintained the iconic voice of Brad.

youtube

So obviously, you guys have a lot of imagery that ties in with horror movies. It's very intense. Some people think it's a little gory. It's gotten you guys banned from House of Blues in Orlando. Were you surprised by that or more surprised it’s taken this long with how graphic some of your imagery can be?

I'm kind of surprised in 2019, as far as in the rock or metal scene, that any band would really be banned -- unless they were like a terrible white power, sort of racist hate mongering band. But yeah, I was surprised that we were banned. And you know, at first, the only thing that's the bummer for me is I love playing in Orlando and it's always such a great show. But at the same time, it's kind of cool that it happened because we got a lot of press and publicity from it. And we got to release this line of shirts that are some of our coolest shirts ever. And I think it was kind of a blessing in disguise. So thank you, Disney.

Do you think it's interesting, though, that in 2019 metal isn't as scary or intimidating as it used to be in the 80s or early 70s?

I think just in general, the political and social climate that we live in now is overly politically correct. You know, I'm not a conservative Republican and I'm not a crazy left wing liberal, you know, I kind of fit somewhere in the middle. But I think that putting up walls against what people think is obscene or gory is a very dangerous, slippery slope. I don't think that there should be any censorship ever. And if you start putting up walls where you think something is obscene, you could very well wake up one day and there are walls up in all sorts of places that you never thought they would be and you can’t hear or say anything. And that's not freedom to me.

It's interesting that somebody can put a pentagram on stuff or upside-down crosses and a lot of people think that's cool. But if you do one thing that crosses the line, you're canceled on Twitter forever. It's a weird line to walk.

I agree. I think people need to be more accepting of other people's ideas and opinions. And I think that if you don't like a band or you don't like someone's record, then the great thing about this country is that you don't have to buy it. Or you could buy it and throw it in the trash. But I think that this society is moving in a dangerous way in that regard because I think art should never be censored. I don't think comedians should ever be censored. I think that colleges are starting to raise and teach kids that if they don't like something, it's not that they should turn their back and go find something else, it’s that it should be banned and this speaker shouldn't be allowed to speak on campus. And I think that doesn't prepare people for the real world.

It's one of those things where everyone's allowed to have their own opinion. If you don't agree, that's fine. But everyone can have one.

Exactly. Obviously, there are dangerous, terrible groups out there. You know, hate mongering groups or groups that have an undertone of racism or sexism. And that's awful. And that's horrible, but let them spew their bullshit and walk away.

So moving on to your new album, The Silver Scream. It's obviously been huge for you guys and opened a lot of doors. As this record has blown up, a lot of people are coming and hearing Ice Nine Kills for the first time even though you’ve been a band for close to 10 years. How have you personally persevered knowing this moment would someday come? And how does it feel to finally have that well-deserved breakout moment?

I mean, I think ever since I was a little kid, I was always extremely persistent in whatever I wanted. I remember my dad used to just call me relentless. If I wanted something I just wouldn't give up. “Dad, can we do this? Dad, can I get a guitar? Dad, can I go to this concert?” And while I probably was an annoying little prick when I was a kid, I think that mentality and that spirit has helped navigate a very difficult and competitive and frustrating path in life. You know, the music industry is not something that you can say, “Hey, I'm going to go be a popular band.” And I think mostly the bands that make it, I would say a majority of them get lucky. They're a good band, but they had that lucky break -- [maybe] they knew someone or the right A&R guy happened to be on their MySpace and [thought] “that guy looks cool. And this is a great song, let's sign them.”

But a majority of bands that get out there, even if they're great, even if they have a great song or great albums, they could just go on and just never be discovered or not have the right business sense. And I think a lot of bands that had taken our route would have probably given up 5-10 years ago. And for whatever reason, I just would refuse to believe that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I wanted to do in life. And I kind of always come back to the story of a band like Metallica. Metallica couldn't get a record deal to save their lives at the beginning because labels thought they were too punk for the metal kids and too metal from the punk kids. So if you think about that when you're getting frustrated and no one is interested in your band, you have to think back to no one wanted to sign Metallica at one point -- which, you know, obviously turned out to be one of the biggest bands of all time. So that kept me going. And I think honestly, the steady build that we've had I think has been very helpful for us building a cult following and not necessarily just kind of a flavor of the week. Like, “Oh, this band and song is cool, let's go see them.” And then you know, a year later, you lose touch with that band. I think we've managed to build a real strong core following over the last 10 or so years of touring. And I think the stars just sort of aligned on this last album. I've always been very interested in horror films and theater. And this album, we decided to put that really at the forefront of what we're doing. And with how popular horror is right now with the success of movies like Get Out and It and the new Halloween, I think it was just really good timing. And I'm excited to see where we can take it.

Did you feel any pressure to do a second Silver Scream?

There's definitely pressure. I mean with any record you do, you always want to one-up yourself. And you know, I guess in true horror fashion, everyone's looking for a sequel. So we'll see what happens. You know, I just want to make sure that we do something again that's special and reinvents what we did before but maintains the fun of what The Silver Screen was.

It's interesting that you grew up such a fan of horror movies probably wanting sequels to certain films. But now you're almost in the reverse position now where it's like, “Hey, slow it down. Maybe we can't do a sequel like you’re hoping.”

Yeah, it's a tough call and I'm still sort of wrestling with exactly what to do. But we'll see what happens.

#Ice Nine Kills #The Silver Scream #Fearless Records #Episode III Tour #Interview

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castaliareed · 7 years

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Why JonSa?

So a JonSa hater comment and a blog post on love inspired me to overanalyze the Jon x Sansa dynamic. Enjoy!

This is JonSa fic. The point is that they have feelings for each other. They are confused by these feelings. Finally, they decide they've been through so many horrible things, it's winter, it's cold, and YOLO...

Was the beginning of my response to a commenter on one of my JonSa chapters that felt Jon would not lust after Sansa, his sister.

Fans who ship JonSa often receive these types of comments. Commenters consistently state the impossibility of the ship. Citing that these characters especially Jon would not feel this way about a woman he was raised with whether or not he ever discovers she is really his cousin.

The default response of JonSa shippers is that they were not close as children. Followed by a list of book examples, show examples, and character analysis of why they have both been foreshadowed and could work together.

There are plenty of examples in the book when seen through a JonSa lens that can be used to support the ship. From, Jon saying Sansa is "radiant" at the feast for King Robert to Ned telling Sansa that Joffery is "no Aemon the Dragonknight" and that he will find someone "brave, and gentle, and strong" for her. Both of Ned's references fans believe foreshadow Jon. Later, Sansa's character development in the Vale as she poses as the bastard daughter of Littlefinger has clear references to her bastard brother. Jon's first love, Ygritte, is "kissed by fire" or red-haired similar to Sansa, who has auburn hair and sings like Sansa as well. There are more examples throughout the books.

Then Season 6 happened and even people who most likely have never heard the word "ship" in their lives were asking if Sansa and Jon would have a romantic future. Text and shows can be interpreted many different ways. Until the story is finished, it is all just speculation and up for debate amongst fans. No matter how many times you re-watch the clip of Jon telling Sansa he likes the "wolf bit" after giving her the full body once over it still is just speculation. Brothers check their hot sisters out all the time. (me giving side-eye..) At least in Game of Thrones, they do.

What is discussed less in the justifications for JonSa is the emotional journey they are on. In a few posts it has been mentioned that a relationship between Sansa who looks like her mother Catelyn and Jon who looks like their father* would go a long way to healing their childhood wounds.

In my response to the commenter, I also stated: "I hope I can show how that (JonSa) is possible for both of their characters based on the facts that they haven't seen each other for years, they have both grown significantly due to trauma, and that their core personalities have always been very similar in nature (inward, romantic, compassionate, etc..). I personally believe that they were both kept distant as children by the adults in their lives and because well they were actually quite alike underneath the surface gender differences placed on them by a patriarchal culture."

Their emotional journey becomes multifold, a need to heal old wounds, a need for the familiar, and a need to overcome gender constraints. Jon was treated horribly by the only mother-figure he ever knew, Catelyn, who saw him as a reminder of the honorable Ned Stark's one failing. He was also a threat to her sons and her political power via her sons. Conversely, Jon was close to his "father". Spoke with him often and wanted to be like him. It was the one thing he wanted to be and could not be due to his status as a bastard.

Sansa looks like her mother and wanted to be a proper lady. This meant seeking her mother's approval. It could be said that Sansa is less like her mother than she wanted to be liked by her mother. Being the second child and a daughter in a patriarchial culture this was a natural response. Sansa at heart is very much her father's daughter. Inward, observant, compassionate, overly concerned with appearances. Sansa wants to be seen as a lady as much as Ned wants to be seen as honorable. Another failing she shares with her father is a highly questionable relationship with the truth. Sansa lies more often but Ned lies bigger.

Part of Jon's journey as depicted on the show is Sansa telling him he is a Stark to her. She is the only person who could give this to him in a manner he would accept. Part of his healing is feeling he is fully accepted as a Stark. The ultimate irony is that he is also a Targaryen. His mother being a Stark not his father. Bringing us to the gender expectations of their world.

They are in the process of overcoming these expectations. Jon believes that Winterfell is his sister's by right. He, aside from her mother, is her only family member that does this. Her full-brother Rob was more than willing to disinherit her. Jon accepts a woman's right to rule even over his own. Given his acceptance of her as a Stark, despite her past marriages, and as rightful Lady of Winterfell. We are left to hope that Sansa will return the favor and still accept him as a Stark once his parentage is revealed. This will be the key to their relationship together. JonSa shippers hope that it draws them closer especially romantically. Others worry it could push them apart. They must overcome what their world tells them about the primacy of male succession. They must believe you can inherit from the female line or inherit as female. Making them both legitimate.

To fully understand why JonSa is an exciting possibility for their emotional journey, we must think bigger, outside the world of Westeros. We must think about the nature of love itself. A recent article on The Brainpickings blog discussing Alain de Botton's writings on love captures the idea.

"We are constrained in our love choices by what we learned of love as children. Adult love is in central ways a search for rediscovery of emotions first known in childhood. In order to prove exciting and attractive, the partner we pick must re-evoke many of the feelings we once had around parental figures, and these feelings, though they may include tenderness and satisfaction, are also likely to feature a more troubling range of emotions." - Alain de Botton

Jon and Sansa can find the familiar in each other. Sansa as a representation of both Catelyn in her looks and Ned in her character can be this type of love for Jon. For Sansa, Jon is said to look like her dead father. His nature is also very Stark-like. He follows the old gods which for her represent her northern roots. The familiar can go even farther beyond the positives and reveal their failings.

"It seems we are fated either to seek out the fault of a parent in a partner or to mimic the fault of the parent with a partner. Either way, the fault of the parent remains central to our love choices. Without it, we may simply not be able to feel passionate and tender with someone. We might imagine we would only be attracted to admirable traits — to perfection, to very positive things about another — yet just below the conscious radar, it is the failings that lure us in." - Alain de Botton

Jon for his part is more than willing to see Sansa as the proper lady, the Princess, she wants to be. In fact, he wants to see her that way. While Show!Sansa resists somewhat by attending the parley and claiming that no one can protect her. Jon has the ability to both respect her growing political nature and wholeheartedly believe in the lady-like facade she presents to the world. In the books his last thoughts of her are of her singing and brushing her direwolf, Lady.

However, one must ask could it be her failings that lure him in. Show!Jon tells her they need to trust each other after she apologizes for not telling him about the knights of the Vale. Instead of being furious with her, he seems to accept her apology kissing her on the forehead before gazing into her eyes and lips. Subconsciously, could he be reminded of Ned here? Ned the father he misses and admires. And who unbeknownst to Jon lied to him every day of his life supposedly to protect him. While, it's unclear why Sansa lied, fear the Vale would not arrive in time, fear Littlefinger would betray her, or as a battle strategy. The lie saved the day, saved Jon, much as her father believed he was doing.

In Jon, Sansa can find both a hero and at times a bit of a literal bastard. Someone who wants to protect her wants to fight for her. Who, at the same time, can be a bit of jerk when arguing with her. Is this a dynamic she saw in her parents that happened off-screen and off-book? Catelyn Tully certainy showed her less than kind sides to Jon.

As Show!Jon and Show!Sansa work together to restore their home. Here is hoping that Book!Jon and Book!Sansa will reunite at Winterfell, too. In the World of ASOIAF and GoT, their collaboration is and will be central to their character growth. They could further their emotional journies through an intense sibling relationship that never ventures into the romantic realm. While much to the consternation of JonSa shippers, myself included, the romantic relationship may or may not be necessary for these characters. Because in Westeros, the family relationships, the sibling relationships, are primary.** We are presented again and again with sibling relationships that push and pull characters even when those siblings are not directly interacting. In our modern world it hard for us to relate to this. Today, primacy is placed on romantic partnerships. However, in a medieval world where one often had very little choice in their marriage partner, giving the sibling bond priority makes perfect sense.

Further, it is the emotional journey, not the romantic one that is central to each character in ASOIAF or GoT. Seen in this light on the show at least, JonSa has already begun. Sexual intimacy while possible was not necessary to secure their bond because it is an emotional bond, not a romantic one. It is easy to imagine them being affectionate with each other while at Castle Black or while traveling the North beyond what was depicted on camera. In this world, even sibling cuddling could have been seen as not out of the ordinary. Affection, flirting, and arguing the hallmarks of modern romantic relationships, become very much a part of Jon and Sansa's medieval emotional relationship.

At the core of it, ASOIAF and Game of Thrones are telling us a story about family. They are telling us a story about ourselves via complicated and flawed characters. So, to answer again the commenter's complaint that Jon would not lust after his sister. Of course, he could. In fact, they already do lust after each other emotionally. This is Game of Thrones, in this world attraction emotional or physical is not reserved for appropriate romantic partners as it is in the modern world. Dynamic emotional relationships that push characters along on their journies is very much the purview of brothers and sisters.

*Yes, R+L = J and Ned is really Jon's uncle but neither character on the show or in the books is aware of this.

**This could be the subject of another meta entirely.

#jonsa meta #jonsa #whyjonsa #jon x sansa #jon snow #sansa stark #meta #asoiaf meta #alain de botton #game of thrones meta

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onlyhitlyrics · 4 years

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YouTube Virtual Graduation Ceremony 2020 called "Dear Class Of 2020" took place on July 7, 2020. The ceremony was headlined by former President Of The United States, Barack Obama, and First Lady Michelle Obama and with commencement speeches from Beyonce, BTS, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai among other celebs.

Each people of BTS delivered endearing speeches that were motivating and inspiring. While RM spoke in English, the six members - Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook - spoke in Korean reflecting on their lives as musicians, their growing years where they were unsure about their path, motivated the young generation to keep hope and chase their dreams.

[#오늘의방탄] #BTS on Dear Class Of 2020???? Congratulations on your graduation????#DearClassOf2020 #BTS#소우주 #봄날 #작은것들을위한시 pic.twitter.com/FUsdnmyj0n

— BTS_official (@bts_bighit) June 7, 2020

Here are their speeches:

RM (KIM NAMJOON)

"Dear Class of 2020, it’s been a strange year so far, but you made it. Today, we might not have flowers and we might not have graduation caps, but what we do have is possibly the most special graduation ceremony in history. Never before have so many gathered to celebrate a graduating class for their achievements and their dreams. You could be watching us from your bed or from your living room, alone or with somebody. Wherever you are, you will all soon be breaking out of one world to soar into another.

Ten years ago, it snowed really hard on the day of my middle school graduation. I remember that day clearly because I took a picture with my friends and kept it as my messenger profile for the rest of my school years. On that day, I was just a boy who had closed just one chapter, ready to pen another. And I remember that feeling, it’s really thrilling, breathtaking, it was the moment I felt most like me myself, a feeling I wanted to hold onto forever.

So, as a fellow individual in his 20s all the way from Seoul, Korea, I want to say congratulations. We’re very excited about what lies ahead of you. Regardless of where or how far you are, we hope our stories today can give you some sort of comfort, hope, and maybe even a bit of inspiration."

JUNGKOOK (JEON JUNGKOOK)

"Unlike RM, my graduation picture was recorded in a Bangtan Bomb (a video). In the beginning, and the end of high school, my members were always there for me, and I remember my hyungs (older brothers) saying to me, "When did you get this big, old enough to graduate now?" I remember them congratulating me, by my side, and going to eat black bean noodles together. I saw that video again recently, and this came to mind - 'Did that little kid really grow up to become me?' Though RM mentioned he thought the boy in the graduation picture seemed just like himself, I feel that I've walked along quite a far path. I feel that I never left that path, walking continuously until now, but I've noticed there are still quite a few things that I've come to learn along the way.

So, as the person I am now, I believe in myself, trust in my members, and have faith in the world, and stand here along with my fellow members here today. Now, I hope you all will, for your own sake, take one step at a time towards growth, running diligently towards your future."

JIN (KIM SEOKJIN)

"My memory of graduation is a little different. It was before my debut with BTS. I was around 20, just a high school graduate going into university. Back then, the notion of becoming an adult was something quite scary. Anxious about making my way into an unfamiliar world, I was cautious of everything I said or did. Sometimes, I'd feel restless, watching my friend go on far ahead of me. And attempting to keep up with their speed would only leave me breathless. I soon realized that their pace was not my own. What held me together during those times was a promise I made with myself - take it slow. I'd go at my own pace, steadily. From then on, it became a habit of mine to take extra time for myself. For instance, when learning choreography, I begin practice days earlier than the others do.

If any of you feel lost in the face of doubt and uncertainty, or the pressure of starting anew, don't rush. Take a deep breath. You may find any moment can be turned into an opportunity. Allow yourself to take it easy. Take it one step at a time. You might discover the important things you were missing, and they will reach out to you."

SUGA (MIN YOONGI)

"These days, I feel as though I've fallen to the ground during a race. I dust my knees and get up again, only to find that there is nobody around me. It's as though I'm on a deserted island. This might not be the grand finale that you had imagined. Please, don't be afraid, don't worry yourself. The end and beginning, beginning, and end are connected. There are some things you can only do in isolation such as focusing only on myself and breaking my own barriers. One small person can dream the biggest dream, paint the largest picture, and make endless possibilities come true. When we meet again, I look forward to seeing your dream, your picture, and your endless possibilities out in this world.

Take your hands off of what you can't control, and get your hands on what you can change. As you and I continue on in life, we will find ourselves in so many situations out of our grasp. The only thing we can control is ourselves. Get your hands on the changes you can make because your possibilities are limitless. After all, I also had no idea I would become BTS either. Thank you."

JIMIN (PARK JIMIN)

"First, congratulations on your graduation. But at the same time, I am worried for everyone. I think about your health, and whether you’re doing okay, whether you are holding on tight during a time when nothing seems to go as planned, whether your body and mind are all safe and sound. I hope you are all doing well, but if things are not okay even in the slightest, we send you our most sincere consolation with all our hearts.

SUGA-hyung (older brother) likened the state of today to being deserted on an island, but I hope you will never give up. Remember there is a person here in Korea, in the city of Seoul, who understands you. We are all in different parts of the world, in different environments and circumstances. But, in this moment, I hope we can all give each other a warm pat on the back and say - OT'S OKAY!"

V (KIM TAEHYUNG)

"I’d like to congratulate all of you who are graduating on this very special day. When you look back to today, years from now, how will you remember it? Many of us are at war with reality right now. But I hope we can take bits of this moment with us, in a photograph or a memo, to look back and to and remember June of 2020, and how it compares with the new today you will be embracing. In all honesty, I wasn’t born with the talents of singing and dancing and wasn’t much the persevering type either. I began later than my friends and was lacking in some aspects, but I soon developed a joy and passion for singing and dancing. This joy motivated my persistent efforts and has led me to where I stand today.

If there is anyone out there who cannot see where they should go from here forth, I urge you to listen to your heart. Things may feel a little difficult right now, but somewhere out there, luck and opportunity are waiting for you. I believe that. On that note, I will remember this day. Today may not be my own graduation, but I will try to look back upon this day years from now and remember it as a memory to treasure. And I look forward to the day you will stand and tell us your own story."

J-HOPE (JUNG HOSEOK)

"I’m not much different from all of you. At times, I feel as though I’ve reached a dead end as I perform and make music. Sometimes, my mind is bleached white and I can hardly take another step forward. It’s a regular occurrence as I work. At these times, I think, “just this once.” “Just this once,” and I pick myself back up. I decide to trust myself. The next attempt might not be perfect, but the second is better than the first, and the third is even better than the second. And that is the moment I decide, I’m glad I chose not to give up.

There will be times in your life when you question your own decisions, whether it be about your major or your profession, whether you have the right choice, whether you are doing well, or walking the path of failure. And when you do, remember: You are the leader of your own life. And chant it over and over again - 'I can do it. You got it. I can do it well. I can do it better than anybody.' Like this."

RM concluded the commencement speech by saying, "The recent unforeseen events completely changed our plans, and the sense of loss and anxiety we felt then are still with us today. The fear of an obscure future as our daily lives turned upside down, is a moment of realization of the self, the realization of what makes me a true me, myself. As musicians, we are pulling ourselves together by making music. We write songs, we produce, and we practice, as we think about the people we love. And it connects to the world during such difficult times, and with music, we hope we can bring you smiles and courage again. And V just mentioned memos and the photographs. For us, our way of remembering and communicating is to make music. For you, it could be anything. In our music, and in our hearts, and in the time that we break out of ourselves, we’re alone but also together. We may be seeing each other through just a camera on this small screen, but I know your future will bloom to something much bigger and magnificent."

BTS, in fact, closed the ceremony with the after-party. They performed 'Boy With Luv' and 'Mikrokosmos' from 'Map Of The Soul: Persona' album and 'Spring Day' at the National Museum Of Korea. Suited in pastels, it was the best way to close the virtual ceremony.

A day ago, it was reported that BTS and Big Hit Entertainment donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter fund in order to stand in solidarity with the Black community. Though the septet and the company didn't intend to release their donation amount in public, it was Variety that reached out to their rep to confirm the news. Their fandom took the donations further by starting the #MatchAMillion initiative on Twitter and is closer to reaching the mark in just over a day.

BTS has had a global impact with their music. The group, composed of members RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook, recipients of the Order of Cultural Merit in South Korea, and were keynote speakers at United Nations in 2018.

ALSO READ: BTS donates $1 million to Black Lives Matter, ARMY kickstarts #MatchAMillion initiative to help further

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