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dankusner · 3 months ago

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The 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde has been studied exhaustively, even obsessively.

The prevailing judgment is that the crowd of law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting — more than 380 from 24 different agencies — failed abysmally to protect the children and teachers trapped in rooms 111 and 112.

They waited more than an hour to storm the classrooms and take down the shooter. By then, 19 fourth graders and two teachers lay dead or dying.

But the first officers on the scene lacked a vital piece of equipment that might have enabled them to neutralize the shooter early on.

The missing item?

A ballistic shield strong enough to withstand rounds from the attacker’s high-powered semi-automatic rifle.

This gap in protective gear and its repercussions are the subject of a new San Antonio Express-News investigation.

Investigations like this one are at the heart of our public service mission as San Antonio’s daily newspaper. We’re honored to serve you with independently reported accountability journalism.

Lack of crucial item hobbled police response to Uvalde shooting

The first police officers on the scene of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde lacked a crucial piece of equipment that might have allowed them to act quickly to neutralize the attacker.

The missing item: a ballistic body shield strong enough to stop rounds from the shooter’s high-powered, semi-automatic rifle.

The widely accepted narrative of the May 24, 2022, massacre is that a throng of poorly led, poorly trained police officers stood around aimlessly for more than an hour, afraid to confront a teenager who had shot up a room full of fourth-graders, some of whom were still alive and begging to be rescued.

But an Express-News review of body camera footage, police radio traffic, officers’ after-action statements and other information gathered by official inquiries into the shooting suggests that what the initial responders lacked was not the courage to storm the classroom but the necessary equipment.

If those officers had been equipped with even a single rifle-rated shield, the incident might have unfolded much differently.

A team of Uvalde Police Department officers was inside the school less than three minutes after the shooter began his rampage.

They followed the sound of gunfire and went directly to the classroom he was in, just as they had been trained.

As two of them prepared to enter the room, the shooter fired a barrage through the door and the wall.

Both officers were wounded by shrapnel — one still has a piece in his head.

They quickly concluded they would never make it into the room alive without a rifle-rated shield, and officers began asking for one immediately.

One called a contact at the U.S. Marshals Service and asked him to send “rifle shields” right away.

Another asked a Texas Ranger he knew to bring shields.

A third broadcast an appeal for shields on police radio.

Despite those urgent requests, a rifle-rated shield was not delivered to the school until 48 minutes after the shooting began and 42 minutes after officers began asking for one.

It was supplied by the Marshals Service.

Eventually, Border Patrol agents — taking cover behind that shield — breached the room and killed the shooter 77 minutes after he walked into Robb Elementary.

By then, 19 students and two teachers were dead or dying.

Some of them might have been saved if law enforcement had managed to get into the room sooner.

Why a rifle-rated shield proved so maddeningly elusive remains a mystery more than two years later.

The Uvalde Police Department, then poorly funded and woefully short of basic equipment, had two ballistics shields, but neither was rated for rifle fire.

The shooter’s rounds would have cut right through them.

Two dozen other law enforcement agencies responded to the shooting, flooding the scene with at least 380 officers.

Two-thirds of them were from the Border Patrol and the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Why their personnel showed up at a mass shooting without the one piece of equipment that would prove indispensable is a question still unanswered.

Neither agency will talk about it.

Asked for comment, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent, said it was reviewing agents’ actions that day and would “share its findings with the public when appropriate, in line with our commitment to transparency.”

DPS press secretary Sheridan Nolen said the agency would not grant interviews about the incident, and it did not respond to written questions.

The San Antonio Police Department sent its SWAT team to Robb Elementary, and those officers had rifle-rated shields.

But they did not get to Uvalde, located 80 miles west of San Antonio, until it was all over.

Police radio traffic includes a transmission at 12:33 p.m. that day — an hour after the shooter entered the school — saying SAPD SWAT was “en route and 30 minutes away.” Border Patrol agents killed the shooter at 12:50 p.m.

Police never set up a command post.

Different agencies failed to coordinate or even communicate.

The incident commander decided to negotiate with the shooter, an effort that proved fruitless, rather than send officers into the classroom immediately to take him down.

But none of those inquiries explained the delay in bringing a rifle-rated shield to the scene.

Even members of the elite Border Patrol tactical unit that finally ended the standoff were unwilling to enter the classroom without one.

When agents charged into the room, the shooter emerged from a book closet and opened fire on them.

The Marshals Service shield absorbed the rounds, and the agents killed the attacker with a barrage of return fire.

Three of them were later awarded medals for valor.

On May 24, 2022, people with children or other family members at Robb Elementary School went to the Uvalde Civic Center to learn their loved ones' fate.

A teenage gunman killed 19 fourth graders and two teachers at the school that day.

On May 24, 2022, people with children or other family members at Robb Elementary School went to the Uvalde Civic Center to learn their loved ones' fate.

A teenage gunman killed 19 fourth graders and two teachers at the school that day.

‘Mind-boggling’

The Uvalde shooter committed mayhem with a Daniel Defense DDM4 V7 semi-automatic rifle.

He purchased the weapon on the internet on his 18th birthday, a week before the shooting, and picked it up from a local gun store after clearing a background check.

The Daniel Defense is an AR-15, a type of rifle designed for combat — it’s the basis of the M16 rifle that U.S. Army infantrymen have carried since the Vietnam War.

AR-15s are light, accurate and deadly.

Their rounds travel at three times the speed of sound and tumble as they move through bone and tissue, creating cavernous wounds.

Civilian purchases of AR-15s have soared since the federal assault weapon ban expired in 2004.

Long before the slaughter at Robb Elementary, they had become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, including those responsible for the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut; the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla.; the 2017 First Baptist Church shooting in Sutherland Springs; and the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

The week before the Robb Elementary massacre, the shooter purchased two semiautomatic rifles: a Smith and Wesson M&P15, top, and a Daniel Defense DDM4 V7.

He used the Daniel Defense rifle to kill 19 fourth graders and two teachers.

The 20-year-old man who shot and wounded former President Donald Trump and killed a spectator at a political rally in Pennsylvania on July 13 used an AR-15, authorities say.

Forty-three percent of mass shootings from 2000 to 2019 were carried out with a long gun or rifle, according to the FBI.

Rifle-rated ballistic shields offer police their best protection against such weapons.

They’re typically made of layers of polyethylene or other plastic fibers that form a barrier tougher than steel.

Some shields have ceramic plates for enhanced protection.

An officer holds the shield with one hand using a center-mounted grip while holding a gun in the other hand.

Notches on the top or side of the shield provide firing positions for the officer’s own weapon.

The National Institute of Justice, the research and testing arm of the Justice Department, sets standards for ballistic shields. Those that can block rifle rounds are rated NIJ Level III or Level IV.

The cost ranges from about $3,000 for a basic Level III shield to $12,000 or more for models with extra features such as an optical site or a harness worn around the hips to bear the weight of the shield.

Shields weigh 16 pounds to 40 or more, depending on the model, and officers need special training to use them effectively.

Chad Rhoads, vice president of manufacturing at Baker Ballistics in Pennsylvania, holds a rifle-rated shield as CEO Rick Armellino poses as a shooter.

The company supplies the shields to federal law enforcement agencies, municipal police departments and a handful of Texas school districts.

Manufacturers turn out thousands every year.

Baker Ballistics of Lancaster, Pa., supplies rifle-rated shields to federal law enforcement agencies, a handful of Texas school districts, and police departments in Tucson, Ariz.; Kansas City, Kan.; North Las Vegas and other cities, including Allen, a Dallas suburb.

The company’s co-founder, Al Baker, spent 25 years with the New York City Police Department and three with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

At the NYPD, he was a lieutenant in the emergency services unit, which responds to hostage takings and other high-risk situations.

Baker said it was “mind-boggling” that officers responding to the Uvalde shooting had to wait so long for a rifle-rated shield.

“Not only surprising, but as a law enforcement officer, I find that very alarming,” Baker said. “Especially where children are being killed. … It’s kind of mind-boggling that they still had to wait all that time for a shield.

“I hate to be an armchair critic because I wasn’t there. I know Texas is big. And I’m pretty sure that (Uvalde) was a rural area. So I have sympathy for that. But I am surprised.”

San Antonio police officers respond to a 2016 shooting scare at the Nordstrom store in the Shops at La Cantera. Many large police departments equip officers with rifle-rated ballistic shields. Smaller departments in rural areas are much less likely to have them.

The Uvalde Police Department had none on May 24, 2022, the day of the Robb Elementary School shooting.

‘More care’

SWAT teams and other specially trained units long have been equipped with rifle-rated shields.

Patrol officers, however, were much less likely to enjoy such protection.

The 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, where a pair of shooters killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves, changed that to some extent.

In a foreshadowing of the Uvalde shooting, officers at Columbine waited 47 minutes to enter the school while the attackers picked off their victims.

The teacher who died bled to death while waiting to be rescued.

The disaster triggered an overhaul of police tactics and training.

Before Columbine, first responders at a mass shooting would establish a perimeter and wait for SWAT to get there.

Post-Columbine, the first officers to arrive are expected to eliminate the shooter right away, even if it means putting their own lives on the line.

The 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado sparked a rethinking of police doctrine and training.

Before then, the first officers at an active shooting scene established a perimeter and called in SWAT. After Columbine, first responders were expected to confront the shooter immediately, even at risk to their own lives.

A gubernatorial commission that investigated Columbine said it wasn’t enough to train police to intervene quickly at a mass shooting.

Officers needed the right kind of gear.

First responders “should have immediately available all weapons and protective equipment that might be required in pursuit of active armed perpetrators,” the commission said.

When departments go to the expense of equipping patrol units with rifle-rated shields, it’s to provide “more care” for officers “that are out there on the road by themselves … because they may have to go in by themselves” and confront a shooter, said Jesse Noriega, a career police officer who runs RDI Training & Consulting Group, a Pleasanton company that teaches law enforcement personnel how to use ballistic shields.

Yet the official inquiries into the Robb Elementary shooting accorded little importance to rifle-rated shields.

The Justice Department report said that although a shield can provide “an added layer of safety in high-risk situations,” local police responding to a mass shooting are unlikely to have access to one.

“An officer should never wait for the arrival of a shield before moving toward the threat to stop the shooter,” the report said.

The department said its review did not find that the absence of a rifle-rated shield delayed officers’ entry into the classroom at Robb Elementary.

Rather, the main reason for the “long pause” in confronting the shooter was that police had been ordered to evacuate the entire fourth-grade building first, the report said.

The Texas House and Texas State reports both said officers should have breached the classroom immediately using whatever equipment was at hand, regardless of the risk.

Both reviews made only glancing mention of the difficulty officers faced securing a rifle-rated shield.

The Texas State report, prepared by the university’s Alert Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training center, said anyone entering police work should be “acutely aware” they could be “shot, injured or even killed” responding to an active shooter, and that they’re expected to bear that risk.

Only one of the investigations explored in any depth the role a rifle-rated shield might have played if available earlier.

That review was conducted by Jesse Prado, a retired Austin police detective.

Uvalde officials hired him to assess the performance of the city’s police officers on May 24, 2022, and to determine whether any of them violated department policy.

Prado put their actions under a microscope.

Of the officers who responded to the shooting, 25 were still with the department.

He interviewed each of them at length, drawing them out about their perceptions and thought processes.

He studied bodycam, dashcam and security video, officers’ statements to investigators and other materials.

Prado concluded that all of them acted within policy and did the best they could under the circumstances.

His 182-page report does not address why a rifle-rated shield was so hard to obtain that day.

But it makes clear that officers on the ground saw it as their only hope of facing the shooter and coming out alive.

Abel Lopez, left, and Felicha Martinez, parents of 10-year-old Xavier Lopez, one of the victims of the Robb Elementary massacre, comment at a March 2024 Uvalde City Council hearing on the police response to the shooting.

‘Getting the assets’

Lt. Javier Martinez started his shift at 8 that morning.

As the Uvalde PD’s lieutenant of operations, he was responsible for training, internal affairs and animal control.

He’d been in law enforcement for 29 years, including 2½ as the department’s SWAT commander.

He wore plainclothes and worked out of police headquarters.

People standing outside a funeral home across the street from Robb Elementary were pointing at the school and yelling that that a gunman had gone inside.

Martinez, then 53, got his ballistic vest out of the trunk of his vehicle, put it on and headed for the school.

He was armed with a .40-caliber Glock pistol.

He had no radio.

Working radios had been scarce that morning, a common situation, so he’d given his to a patrol officer.

Uvalde police were poorly equipped for what they were about to face.

The SWAT team had a few stun grenades, but they were past their expiration date, and no one on the force was certified in their use.

The team had to hold a raffle to raise $3,000 for tactical uniforms.

The ballistic vest Martinez was wearing lacked armor plating.

Rifle fire would tear it to pieces.

Outside the school, Martinez met up with Staff Sgt. Eduardo Canales, a 16-year police veteran.

Among other duties, Canales, then 37, was the department’s SWAT commander, having succeeded Martinez.

Canales' 10-year-old son was a student at Robb Elementary, and the sergeant had gone there that morning for an end-of-year ceremony in the cafeteria.

It was Awards Day, and he watched his son collect a certificate.

He returned to police headquarters, only to rush back to the school when he heard the report of shots fired.

As he pulled up to Robb the second time, Canales heard gunfire and took his police-issue AR-15 out of a lockbox in his car.

The shooter had entered the school’s West Building at 11:33 a.m. through an unlocked door.

He walked to classroom 111, blasted away at the door with his rifle, then went inside.

The room was connected to an adjoining classroom, 112, forming a single large room. It was filled with children.

Once inside, the shooter fired more than 100 rounds in 2½ minutes, investigators later determined.

Canales and Martinez went into the building at 11:35 a.m. through a door on the northwest side, the same one the shooter used.

Hugging the wall, they crept toward room 111.

The hallway was filled with haze from gunpowder and pulverized wallboard.

By 11:36 a.m., the rifle fire had subsided, and it was eerily quiet, so quiet Canales thought that perhaps the children and teachers were still in the cafeteria.

The officers were near the door to 111.

It had a window in it.

Canales watched as Martinez edged close enough to be visible to someone inside.

He told Martinez to be careful.

Just then, a burst of rifle fire from inside the room ripped through the door and the wall.

A piece of shrapnel hit Martinez in the head.

Another penetrated his arm.

Canales took shrapnel in the ear.

Stunned, the two officers retreated.

Martinez was bleeding from the head.

Canales was struck by how easily the rounds had gone through the wall, as if it were made of paper.

Neither officer had been able to see the shooter or look inside the room.

Sgt. Donald Page watched this scene unfold from the opposite end of the hallway.

He and a separate team of officers had entered the building through the south entrance moments after Martinez and Canales went in via the northwest door.

Page had heard on police radio that the shooter had a handgun.

When he saw the .223-caliber shell casings on the floor, he knew otherwise.

Those were ammunition for an AR-15. Page was wearing a ballistic vest, but it was not rifle-rated, so he pulled back and took cover in a vestibule down the hall.

At 11:38 a.m. — five minutes after the shooter had entered the building and begun firing — Sgt. Daniel Coronado put out an appeal on police radio:

“Any available units, go ahead and bring shields from the PD, please.”

Canales belonged to an interagency task force with the U.S. Marshals Service. At 11:39 a.m., he called a deputy marshal he knew and asked him to bring “rifle shields” to the school as fast as possible.

A minute later, Coronado can be heard on bodycam video asking for help from DPS:

“If they have any ballistic shields, make location.”

Page got a call on his mobile phone from a Texas Ranger he was friendly with, and he “requested help with shields, equipment and rifles,” according to Prado’s report.

The Ranger replied that “he was getting the assets.”

Shields would have made a difference

Official inquiries into the Robb Elementary shooting documented a cascade of law enforcement failures but largely overlooked one key factor: the difficulty officers faced in securing a rifle-rated ballistic shield.

‘Fatal funnel’

Although injured and shaken, Martinez and Canales were in no doubt as to what was required of them, Prado wrote.

They had to get into that classroom and neutralize the threat.

After being shot at on his first approach, Martinez made a second try at 11:40 a.m., then a third, trying to catch a glimpse inside room 111.

Each time, he retreated before getting near the door.

He concluded that without protective equipment, the odds were hopeless.

Martinez and Canales “did not know how they were going to get into the room to stop the shooter without shields,” Prado wrote.

“The officers would have to travel a distance of at least 8 feet under a barrage of fire, then negotiate the opening of the door to gain entry.

This would have to be done without being able to see the person shooting at them,” Prado’s report said.

Nor, if they came under fire again, could the officers “shoot back, blindly, into the room.”

There were children inside.

And there was no place to take cover.

The wall offered no protection: The shooter had already fired right through it.

But Martinez wasn’t about to give up, Prado wrote.

“His only thought was how they were going to get into the room. … Lt. Martinez was just waiting for the shield to arrive to move forward.”

Canales was of the same mind.

His son, a fourth-grader, was in a classroom somewhere in the West Building.

He didn’t know where.

As he hurried out of the building after being hit by shrapnel, Canales’ body-worn camera captured him telling other officers, three times, “We’ve got to get in there.” The question was how.

“SSgt. Canales believed that the shooter had his weapon aimed at the door and they could not make entry to eliminate the threat without the shields,” Prado wrote.

“SSgt. Canales felt without the shields they would not be able to live attempting to enter and would not be able to help.”

The only sworn officer left at Uvalde police headquarters was Det. Hoshi Cantu, who was 8½ months pregnant and limited to desk duty.

When she heard officers on the radio calling for shields, she retrieved two from a storage locker.

A custodian helped her load them into her car, and Cantu drove them to the school, fighting through streets jammed with police and emergency vehicles.

But they were pistol-rated shields.

As the Texas House committee said in its report, a “rifle-rated shield was the only one that would have provided meaningful protection to officers against the attacker’s AR-15 rifle.”

Law enforcement personnel at the scene already knew this.

Outside the school, a Uvalde County sheriff’s deputy stood in full tactical gear, awaiting instructions.

He was holding a shield, but it was rated for handgun fire. When an officer told him the shooter had an AR-15, the deputy “set the shield down, saying it was useless,” Prado wrote.

‘Gotta get in there’

Inside the West Building, Martinez was still bleeding from the head.

Lt. Mariano Pargas Jr., the acting Uvalde police chief, urged him to go outside and have the wound examined by emergency personnel.

Martinez resisted, so Pargas finally ordered him to do it. Martinez left briefly, then returned.

At 11:49 a.m., an officer’s body camera picked up Martinez saying that officers “gotta get in there.”

An unidentified officer replied, “Wait, Javier, wait.”

A Uvalde County constable told Martinez the attacker was not actively shooting and that officers should “stand by.”

The police response now entered a new phase, marked by delay, indecision and confusion.

Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, chief of the small Uvalde school district police force, was the presumed incident commander, and he was not ready to breach room 111.

He wanted to evacuate the rest of the West Building first.

At 11:55 a.m., he announced a plan to clear students from classrooms near 111 and 112 and try to negotiate with the shooter.

Arredondo said later that his aim was to avoid further injuries or loss of life from an exchange of gunfire with the attacker.

His decision shifted the response from an active-shooter scenario requiring immediate intervention to a barricaded-subject scenario, in which police could bide their time. The official inquiries describe this as a critical error in judgment, because the shooter still posed a threat to innocent life and was preventing police from reaching the wounded.

Arredondo’s order to evacuate and negotiate was the first directive anyone had given the assembled officers that morning, and it “overrode” Martinez’s plan to go into room 111 once he had a rifle-rated shield, according to Prado’s report.

More miscalculations followed.

Assuming that the classroom door was locked (it most likely wasn’t, the various reports say), Arredondo embarked on a time-consuming search for keys and breaching tools.

Several times, he ordered officers who were preparing to enter room 111 to stand down and wait until all the other rooms had been cleared.

By now, what the Justice Department described as “overwhelming numbers” of law enforcement officers were at the school.

A scene of disarray greeted them.

It wasn’t clear who was in charge or what they were supposed to do.

Many took the general lack of urgency to mean the shooter had been killed or that Arredondo was actively negotiating with him.

Neither was true.

In fact, local police were waiting for someone with superior firepower and equipment to arrive.

The word was that BORTAC, the Border Patrol tactical unit, was on the way from its base in Del Rio, 68 miles away.

A crowd of parents had gathered outside the school, desperate for information and infuriated by the seeming inaction of law enforcement.

A deputy U.S. marshal handcuffed one frantic mother.

In this surreal atmosphere, Canales thought of his son.

He knew the 10-year-old was in a classroom near room 111, but he didn’t know which one.

He called his wife.

She told him the boy had escaped through a window and was safe.

Later, the child told his father that rifle rounds had pierced the wall and flown through his classroom.

Children flee Robb Elementary school during the shooting on May 24, 2022.

Then-Uvalde school police officer Adrian Gonzales, right foreground, has been charged with child endangerment, a felony, for failing to “engage, distract or delay” the shooter at the beginning of the incident.

Children flee Robb Elementary school during the shooting on May 24, 2022.

‘A death sentence’

Between 11:52 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., five different ballistic shields were delivered to Robb Elementary, according to the Justice Department report.

Only two were rifle-rated.

Both were sent by the Marshals Service in response to Canales’ urgent appeal earlier that morning, but the first did not arrive until 12:21 p.m., 48 minutes after the shooter entered the West Building.

It is unclear where the shields were sent from.

Bodycam footage shows a deputy marshal carrying the first one into the school.

Its arrival did not jolt the assembled officers into action.

Communication was still muddled, leadership lacking.

The BORTAC commander, Paul Guerrero, had gotten to the school around 12:13 p.m.

Some members of his team were already there; others were still making their way to Uvalde.

None brought rifle-rated shields.

As the crowd of law enforcement personnel waited for direction, children trapped in the classroom with the shooter repeatedly called 911, pleading for someone to rescue them and a teacher who they said was bleeding to death.

“I don’t want to die,” one of the fourth-graders said.

Someone brought a master key, and Guerrero tested it on the door of a janitor’s closet.

It didn’t work.

Guerrero then went to his car to get a crowbar-type tool.

He tried it out on a door in the hallway but decided that using it on room 111 would be too dangerous.

He had seen bullet holes in the door from the gunman’s earlier fusillades.

An officer’s body-worn camera picked up a voice saying what many in the hallway must have been thinking: To go near the classroom door was “a death sentence.”

At 12:36 p.m., a second master key was found, and this one worked on the janitor’s closet.

Guerrero still wasn’t ready to go into room 111.

He asked a Border Patrol sniper who had just arrived to assess whether he could get a bead on the shooter from outside the building.

A DPS drone was deployed to try to pinpoint the shooter’s location.

Neither effort bore fruit.

Finally, BORTAC agents and other officers lined up single file outside the classroom.

An agent positioned one of the rifle-rated shields to give Guerrero cover as he inserted the key in the door.

At 12:48 p.m., the six-man entry team — three from BORTAC, one from a Border Patrol search and rescue unit, and two sheriff’s deputies, one each from Uvalde and Zavala counties — moved in.

At the head of the stack was a Border Patrol agent holding one of the rifle-rated shields from the Marshals Service.

He saw muzzle flashes and felt rifle rounds pounding into the shield, he later told investigators.

Bullet fragments grazed one of the agents in the head, leg and foot.

They answered with a barrage of fire at 12:50 p.m., and the shooter’s body convulsed before collapsing to the floor.

“Subject down,” said a voice on police radio.

Police officers and medics rushed in to help the wounded.

The SAPD SWAT team had arrived too late to help take down the shooter.

Now, one of its members stood in front of the classrooms to keep nonessential personnel out and “preserve the crime scene,” the Justice Department report said.

Outside the school, streets were choked with law enforcement vehicles, making it difficult for emergency personnel to evacuate the injured.

Dazed officials made plans to identify the dead, notify next-of-kin and reunite the survivors with their families.

At 2:12 p.m., police received reports of a possible shooting at Uvalde High School, where Martinez’s daughter was a student.

Martinez started to drive there, only to learn it was a false alarm.

Fellow officers insisted Martinez get medical attention for his head wound, so he went to his family doctor, who sent him to Uvalde Memorial Hospital.

Doctors there told him shrapnel had lodged in his head and the only safe course of action was to leave it there.

Family members of victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting at a candlelight vigil on the one-year anniversary of the May 24, 2022, massacre.

Aftermath

In the day and weeks that followed, police officers would be blamed for the heavy loss of life and vilified as cowards for not forcing their way into the room sooner.

The school board fired Arredondo that summer, and in June of this year, a Uvalde County grand jury indicted him and then-school police officer Adrian Gonzales on charges of abandoning or endangering children.

The indictment accuses the two of acting with criminal negligence when they delayed confronting the shooter.

Both have pleaded not guilty.

It is unclear whether other officers will be charged.

Since the massacre, the Uvalde Police Department has invested heavily in tools, equipment and training “to enhance our department’s capability to protect our officers and community during high-risk situations,” said the city’s new police chief, Homer Delgado, who took office in April.

“The implementation of these new resources underscores our commitment to the safety and protection of the Uvalde community and our officers,” Delgado said in a statement.

Among the new resources: 20 rifle-rated ballistic shields.

The 2022 Uvalde school shooting prompted a string of official investigations.

This story is based primarily on information from three of those inquiries, one conducted by a special committee of the Texas House, another by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services and the third by Jesse Prado of JPPI Investigations, a private security agency.

The story also includes information from an early review of the shooting by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training center at Texas State University.

The investigations by the Texas House, the Justice Department and the Texas State center examined the overall police response. Prado, a retired Austin police detective, assessed only the performance of Uvalde Police Department personnel.

The description of the thoughts, actions and statements of the first Uvalde officers on the scene — notably, Lt. Javier Martinez and Staff Sgt. Eduardo Canales — is drawn mainly from Prado’s report.

Through their attorney, Martinez, Canales and other Uvalde officers mentioned in the story declined to be interviewed.

The attorney, Randy E. Lopez, said a city-imposed gag order bars the officers from discussing the shooting.

The story incorporates previous reporting by Express-News staff writer Guillermo Contreras on the Border Patrol's role in the police response.

July 28, 2024

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dean-winchesters-clit · 1 year ago

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So, all but one of these movies is going to be silent. Most of the videos I found have some sort of music, but that’s pretty much it.

First and foremost, we have the first movie ever made: Louis Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene from 1888! While this film is less than 3 seconds long, it still fills me with immeasurable joy to witness the birth of cinema as an artform.

Roundhay Garden Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knD2EhjGwWI

Next we have some films from the Lumiere Brothers and Thomas Edison(BOOOOOO). These filmmakers treated film as an extension of photography, which is how they expected film cameras to be used. They captured everyday life and staged performances, not knowing the full potential of their creations. Despite these limitations, the shorts themselves are still wonderful to watch. I recommend Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory and Annabelle Serpentine Dance, both from 1895. I also recommend the footage Edison(BOOOOOOO) took of Annie Oakley shooting in 1894.

Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQeIRLxaM4

Annabelle Serpentine Dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p94yQ8cvTHg

Annie Oakley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQSTSNq5dOM

How could we possibly go on without mentioning George Melies, the father of special effects? His movies make me so happy that I have to recommend two of them. Firstly, to showcase some excellent special effects, his film The Man with the Rubber Head from 1901. And of course, his magnum opus, A Trip to the Moon (1902) but this version is in full color!

The Man with the Rubber Head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgpWtyT1nxM

A Trip to the Moon, in color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOKz4A7sLkM

I refuse to continue without bringing up a single female filmmaker. Alice Guy-Blache is considered the first ever woman to direct movies and her films are absolutely delightful. Here’s a fun little short from 1903, How Monsieur Takes His Bath.

How Monsieur Takes His Bath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOKesEg4Sd0

Next we have a big one boys, one of the first narrative films that took America by storm. The Great Train Robbery (1903) is just a delight. It was made by Edison’s(BOOOOOOO) in house director Edwin S. Porter(YAAAAY!). It was incredibly unconventional at the time due to it having a plot! These bitches just loved watching the pictures move, so there’s a lot of scenes that go on for way too long, but that’s part of the joy of it. This film also contains what is considered the first ever fourth wall break in movie history.

The Great Train Robbery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jrB5ANUUY&t=360s

From this point on, narrative films skyrocketed in popularity and production. It was incredibly easy to go out and shoot your own movie because there were no fucking rules at all. This is exactly what the Warner Brothers did when they sold their horse to buy a movie camera. Because of this, there were just so many movies that came out between 1903 and 1920, so I won’t be able to mention a ton of noteable ones until we get to the roaring decade.

What I will mention is the first ever animated movie ever made: Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay from 1914. This movie is just absolutely delightful.

Gertie the Dinosaur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_c15oS5i5I&t=86s

Okay, this next one is gonna sound problematic, but I promise it’s good. Why Change Your Wife (1920) is a Cecil B. Demille movie that is surprisingly wholesome and gets really suspenseful in its third act. This is also our first feature length movie.

Why Change Your Wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zIO9YG052w

How can I go one without mentioning Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton? These guys were legendary comics and stunt performers. People still use their movies as examples for how to craft perfect physical comedy. For Charlie Chaplin, I’m recommending what is considered his crowning achievement with The Gold Rush (1925), and for Keaton, please watch The General (1927).

The Gold Rush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srnlg2b7y7M

The General: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzspLWK9FEc

We’ve technically already gotten international with the Lumiere Brothers and Melies, but now let’s talk Russia and Germany.

First, Russia. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) is a must watch in my opinion. It’s one of the first examples of montage and jump cutting and is invaluable to anyone aspiring to be an editor. It also recreates a horrific moment in history, lending credence to film’s ability to be a perfect conduit for propaganda, both good and bad. Do yourself a favor and watch this movie all the way through. The Odessa Steps sequence is a sight to behold.

Battleship Potemkin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_bkBbrdyyw

Now, for our final few films, Germany. German expressionism is a film movement unlike any other, and I beg you to watch the movies I recommend here above any other movie on this list.

We’ll go by director. First, F. W. Murnau. Murnau is known for his dark and moody filmmaking, most noteable of which is his 1922 film Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror. This classic horror film is a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which mainly covers the vampire’s torture of one Jonathan Harker, or Thomas Hutter as he’s known in this version of the story.

However, in my opinion, Murnau’s crowning achievement is The Last Laugh (1924). The Last Laugh is a heartwrenching story about pride and social standings and the tragedy of growing older. It is noteable as having only one card of text explaining the plot as opposed to the dozens that the average silent film of a similar length would have. The movie is an incredible example of how camera movement, editing, and staging can tell an audience everything they need to know without a single line of dialogue. PLEASE watch this film, it is hands down one of my favorite silent movies ever.

Nosferatu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6jFoYm3xs

The Last Laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIOTElYpurU

Next, Robert Wiene. Now, film cameras back in the day required a tremendous amount of light in order to capture an image due to the nature of the materials filmmakers worked with. This led to a lot of very bright movies. When Robert Wiene made The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), he overcame this problem by painting the shadows onto the abstract walls, floors, and even the actors on set. The result is just a stunning film with set design unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0KB2XC29o

And last, but certainly not least, Fritz Lang, my personal favorite of these German directors. Lang is most well known for the stunning epic Metropolis, a film about a futuristic city and the way it exploits its citizens. While I absolutely do recommend Metropolis, that movie is like three or four hours long, so I won’t pressure you. What I DO pressure you to watch is the one and only sound film on this list, M (1930). M is a masterpiece, truly a stunning film. The story of a city being haunted by a child murderer told from the omniscient point of view of said city is just brilliant. It’s surprisingly contemporary, dealing with issues of police overstepping boundaries and citizens taking the law into their own hands. It culminates in a truly once in a lifetime performance by Peter Lorre that I pray you do not miss the opportunity to experience. If you watch no other film on this list, please watch this one. It may change your life the way it did mine.

M: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdSL9FvCv0U

The results from this poll that asked "how old is the oldest movie you've ever seen AND enjoyed?" really piqued my interest. The winner was the 1930s, which does have a ton of amazing movies, but I think this result is mainly due to iconic and widespread films like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind.

As an aspiring film editor and lover of old ass movies, it makes me really want to make a recommended list of movies from before 1930. Would any of you be interested in that?

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stylesnews · 4 years ago

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Like most good stories, Harry Styles’ video for “Treat People With Kindness” starts with Fleabag, specifically with a meeting at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit London theatre run, which became the launchpad for the joyous black and white video, released on New Year’s Day.

Working with a team now synonymous with Styles' videos (choreographer Paul Roberts and stylist Harry Lambert, to name a few), it was directed by brothers Gabe and Ben Turner (part of the production company Fulwell 73), whose work has spanned One Direction videos ("Steal My Girl", “History”) and Styles' solo track “Golden” and who produced the documentaries I Am Bolt (2016) and Hitsville: The Making Of Motown (2019).

Here, Gabe and Ben tell us the story of when Harry met Phoebe and how “Treat People With Kindness” came together.

Gabe, you tweeted that the video was shot at the beginning of last year. How did it come together?

Gabe Turner: Harry and I went to watch Phoebe do her live Fleabag show in London. We met Phoebe and she was the kindest, most delightful person ever. The next day I was watching dance videos randomly and one of them was this Nicholas Brothers video from the 1920s. It was two brothers dancing. I said to Harry, “You and Phoebe, question mark.” And he messaged back saying, “Treat People With Kindness”. Then he called Phoebe and was like, “I've got this song. I want to do a video. What about me and you doing this dance routine?” And she was like, “Great." And then the two of them called Paul Roberts, the choreographer.

Ben Turner: This isn't always how our life is. This isn't the regular process. But once the touchpaper got lit, it just went off. Every now and then something comes along where all the dominoes fall perfectly.

GT: Harry and Phoebe worked with [choreographers] Paul Roberts and Jared Hageman. The four of them rehearsed all the time, remotely, wherever they were. Whatever projects they were doing, the choreographers would go with them and work on their steps. We would get sent video updates for them as they were rehearsing and learning. We were like, “This is amazing.” We had been to the Troxy for the Bugsy Malone Secret Cinema, so we were like, “That would be a great place to do this.”

You make it sound easy.

BT: That momentum that Gabe's describing, that's what made it easy. It was plenty of hard work, but once it started, it just came together.

What was the turnaround like for the video? BT: We just did it fast, in the space of a few months.

GT: There is a process for how music videos get made. Directors pitch for them, they come up with their creative, present it and there’s a process to go through. This one was already happening before any of that process. It was pure art from Harry and Phoebe, going, “We're going to connect and make this amazing thing and it will come out when it comes out.” As a creative to work in that way is totally joyous. You're just facilitating greatness.

What was it like to shoot?

BT: This is also easy, in a way, because the choreography means that [Harry's] going to be here at this point and there at that [point]. You knew exactly where they were going to be in the room. We went back and forward a bit on how to weave the story into the choreography so it wasn't just a dance routine. By the time we got onto set, that was quite well planned. The nice thing is being more prepared, you can try to feed in a bit of latitude to things. I know because we've worked with Harry for a long time that the camera doesn't just love him. The camera wants to marry him and run off with him and probably never come back. So we know to give a little bit of space for that to happen. Obviously to have Phoebe there with him as well is totally bonkers. And, again, the camera loves her. It was exciting for us to talk about how to execute things with someone who we admire so much.

GT: When you go to the Troxy there's a hidden stage at the top. Ben had an idea of coming down from the hidden stage to reveal Harry, then setting a scene up of [Phoebe] at the top. She was brilliantly collaborative in discussing what kind of role she was going to play.

What notes did you talk through with Phoebe about her character? BT: This song's called "Treat People With Kindness”, so it feels like there's a distance to cover in the narrative. You start on the Marsellus Wallace shot, out of Pulp Fiction. We wanted to get a sense that this was a kind of tough guy and there was the opposite of people being treated with kindness around the place. But the conversation went from [Phoebe] being a character that stood up to him to, actually, if you look at it, [she] wipes a tear off of his eye, which is so beautiful.

GT: Ben was just obsessed with casting the back of people's heads for the first shot.

What makes a good back of the head?

BT: I'm talking about how many folds of skin at the top, the optimum shape. Someone [said] that Bruce Willis had a fantastic shaped dome of a head and it really turned me on to the shape of a bald head, because it can be really beautiful.

GT: I find a lot of the music videos that we do, there'll always be a shot from a film that inspires something.

Aside from breaking the fourth wall at the end, the Pulp Fiction shot and the Nicholas Brothers, what other reference points or Easter eggs did you include?

BT: We love the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye and those physical comedians. I love Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. We’re also obsessed by Bugsy Malone. Busby Berkeley... I don't think there was much Busby Berkeley in this. GT: At the end there's a tiny bit, but Busby Berkeley has actually been used as a reference in quite a few music videos. We love that stuff. But we didn't want to go too into that symmetry and the choreography, because it didn't feel as fresh. What have you learned from Harry, after working together for so long?

BT: He's on a really interesting journey and we are lucky to be a bit of that journey with him. It's really rewarding to dip into that and try to facilitate some of that as we go along. There's a lot that he's in touch with that I'm not. I'm quite a lot older than him. I'm not as cool as him.

#harry styles #jan21 #gabe turner #ben turner #tpwkmv #GQ #article

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queerfables · 4 years ago

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Would y'all like some Supernatural Lore dropped on you that I assume was common knowledge at some point but which, as a new fan, I haven't really seen talked about? If so, settle in to learn about the origin of the phrase "The French Mistake", and some cinematic history on fourth-wall breaking that hits real differently in light of season 15.

We all know "The French Mistake" as the title of That One Episode where Supernatural goes so meta the real world becomes part of the show (also Misha Collins gets murdered?? I might as well confess now I haven't actually seen this episode, I'm still working my way through to it. Hopefully that doesn't become a problem...) Anyway, what you might not know is the title comes from the movie Blazing Saddles.

With some caveats, Blazing Saddles is an absolutely incredible movie: it's a comedy western made in 1974 about a Black man who becomes the sheriff of a racist town, defeats capitalism and gets a cute sharp-shooting boyfriend. The "boyfriend" part is subtext, but it's pretty damn loud.

So where does "The French Mistake" come in? It's the name of what might be the movie's most iconic scene. In the middle of the climax, a big western shoot-out turned brawl, the camera pans up out of the town and onto an adjacent movie set. The brawling cowboys burst through the wall of that set, out of their own film and onto the new set where they continue to fight. This is why the episode of Supernatural is named for this scene. Just like in Blazing Saddles, Sam and Dean stumble out of their fictional world and onto a film set.

Here's the part that takes this from good to GREAT: in Blazing Saddles, the set they burst onto is a musical, being filmed in the style of a Busby Berkeley number, and before our cowboys break through that fourth wall, we see a staircase lined with chorus boys. They are dancing suggestively, thrusting their hips and singing a song called The French Mistake.

Throw out your hands. Stick out your tush. Hands on your hips. Give them a push. You'll be surprised, you're doing the French mistake.

Look. Guys. It's a song about anal sex. It's being sung by a group of gay men. When the cowboys break the wall and stumble onto the set of the musical, one of them starts out fighting with one of the chorus boys and ends up walking off arm in arm with him. Two other chorus boys go for a romantic swim in a fountain.

"The French mistake" is a reference to the breaking of the fourth wall but it's also literally a euphemism for queer sex. Blazing Saddles makes breaking the fourth wall intrinsically tied to queerness breaking into the heterosexual narrative (I could write an entire essay on how that plays out in the relationship between the leads, Bart and Jim. Suffice to say they trade their horses for a limousine and drive off into the sunset together). Worth considering: are the metanarratives and fourth wall breaking on Supernatural also intrinsically tied to queerness manifesting in the narrative?

For a whole host of reasons, Mel Brooks thought Warner Bros would bury Blazing Saddles rather than release it. He told everyone working on it to just go wild and do all the things they wanted to do but never expected to get away with, because the chances were good it wouldn't matter. He had the right to the final cut - meaning that the execs couldn't force him to make any edits - but he didn't know if the film would ever see the light of day. It did, though, and ended up being a major hit. Brooks talked about this, and in particular the French Mistake scene, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

That was dangerous because I was asked by Warners — they said I can do everything you said, but they kept saying, “Don’t do the gay scene. Don’t break through the walls and do the gay scene. You’re crossing a line there.” I said, “Don’t be silly.” There’s always these musicals being shot at Warner Bros. with top hats and tails and dopiness, you know. I said, “It’s a good mixture of cowboys and gay chorus boys.” So I kept it all in. I had final cut.

There's something kind of familiar about that, right? Don’t break through the walls and do the gay scene. Queerness and metanarratives bound together, threatening the status quo. This scene in Blazing Saddles was so threatening to Warner Bros that above everything else in a very boundary-pushing movie, this was the one they wanted to cut.

One more thing that hits different after season 15, from another really meta episode... Yeah, I'm referring to the famous "why lamp?" scene. Other people have already talked about how the way Dean's dancing sequence in The Hero's Journey recalls the Hays Code and deliberate queer-coding in classic Hollywood. But I want to go further and say that it also specifically recalls the scene I've been talking about, Blazing Saddles' 'The French Mistake' scene.

Maybe this is just because it's drawing on the same frame of reference, or maybe it's more deliberate, but either way, the parallels are there, down to the suggestive song playing (We're all alone, no chaperone... let's misbehave). It's really telling to me that this dance sequence so closely parallels a scene that was almost censored for being too gay.

#Supernatural #destiel #dean winchester #blazing saddles #fable speaks

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hldailyupdate · 4 years ago

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How the joyous ‘Treat People With Kindness’ video came together

Directors Gabe and Ben Turner on how Fleabag became the launchpad for Harry Styles' ‘Treat People With Kindness’ music video

Here, Gabe and Ben tell us the story of when Harry met Phoebe and how “Treat People With Kindness” came together.

Gabe, you tweeted that the video was shot at the beginning of last year. How did it come together?

You make it sound easy.

BT: That momentum that Gabe's describing, that's what made it easy. It was plenty of hard work, but once it started, it just came together.

What was the turnaround like for the video?

BT: We just did it fast, in the space of a few months.

What was it like to shoot?

What notes did you talk through with Phoebe about her character?

BT: This song's called "Treat People With Kindness”, so it feels like there's a distance to cover in the narrative. You start on the Marsellus Wallace shot, out of Pulp Fiction. We wanted to get a sense that this was a kind of tough guy and there was the opposite of people being treated with kindness around the place. But the conversation went from [Phoebe] being a character that stood up to him to, actually, if you look at it, [she] wipes a tear off of his eye, which is so beautiful.

GT: Ben was just obsessed with casting the back of people's heads for the first shot.

What makes a good back of the head?

GT: I find a lot of the music videos that we do, there'll always be a shot from a film that inspires something.

Aside from breaking the fourth wall at the end, the Pulp Fiction shot and the Nicholas Brothers, what other reference points or Easter eggs did you include?

GT: At the end there's a tiny bit, but Busby Berkeley has actually been used as a reference in quite a few music videos. We love that stuff. But we didn't want to go too into that symmetry and the choreography, because it didn't feel as fresh

What have you learned from Harry, after working together for so long?

(12 January 2021)

#harry styles #harry update #article #gq #treat people with kindness #hldaily #january 2021

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welanabananaworld · 4 years ago

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Ouija, Origin of Evil and the profane voice - Part I

Though extremely shocking and disturbing, children happen to be at the core of major horror films. Samara in The Ring (2002), Dalton in Insidious (2010), Dany and the Grady twins in The Shining (1980), the children in Sinister (2012), Thomas in The Orphanage (2007) are among many other examples that prove the existence of an entire branch of horror cinema built on the mythology of the malevolent child. Why is the figure of the child so prevalent? Why should the most innocent and purest human beings be the main characters of films that are gruesome, violent and whose public age is strictly restricted? Precisely because their vulnerability and purity of soul make them easily influenced and manipulated by external forces. Besides, children are known to have an overwhelming imagination and a propensity to trust which are necessary to open the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead in accordance with the codes of the genre.

In addition to this, the more the prey is opposite to our expectations and subverts our beliefs of what is proper and what is not, the more the fright and fascination are potent. To consider a child as a monster, a killer or a possessed body is beyond our general understanding, hence the uncanny appeal of creepy children.

As pointed out by Alison Nastasi in her article published online on Hopes&Fears, this devious appeal for corrupted and murderous children portrayed in horror films might echo to « real-world fears about parenting, gender and social responsibility. »; a theory supported by Joe Dante’s comments about the subject : « Could it be connected to the fact that more and more parents have difficulty balancing work responsibilities [and] child-rearing (not to speak of nurturing their own relationships, personal and career aspirations) and are squeezed financially by the costs of raising children […]? Therefore, is it any wonder that children in genre movies are portrayed as powerful, disruptive, and uncontrollable? Perhaps these menacing moppet movies reflect the fears inherent in helicopter parenting—that the minute you take your eyes off your child, something dreadful will happen. » In any case, the films in question use the creepy kid trope in order to suggest that something is wrong, that the natural order of things is being shattered.

The corruption of innocence can take many forms but the most interesting one to study in relation to the narrative role of the voice in cinema is the threat of an invasion from the Beyond. In Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), supernatural forces hold a young girl hostage by inhabiting her body and making it go through such transformations (vocal and physical) as to change it beyond recognition.

Taking place in 1967 in Los Angeles, Ouija: Origin of Evil tells the story of the Danzer family. Alice, a spiritual medium, is striving to make ends meet after the loss of her husband and father of her two children by hosting readings in her own house with the help of her daughters, Lina (15) and Doris (9). Running a declining scam business, in which Alice pretends to talk to the dead to bring closure to people and the girls help her out with tricks intended to make it all real, Lina suggests her mother to add a ouija board as a new prop to modernise her readings. The factitious dimension of the ritual which unfolds through the display of ingenious devices (stretchable table, a cupboard big enough to hide Doris, extinguishable candles…) is both an ironical comment on how fake spiritism is going to beat the family at their own game by revealing its true power and also a cleverly designed introduction to set the tone and build the tension.

All the ingredients are here to turn the ouija experience into a nightmare. The bereaved family is craving for a contact whatsoever with their loved one, little Doris first. She wishes she could talk to her father at a seance like other people do when they come and see her mother for help, that is why she does not talk to god directly but instead send prayers to her dad every night before going to bed. Contrary to Lina who is a teenager in complete denial and pushes down her feelings, Alice and Doris seek communication and are open to it, hence the evil befalling on them.

Portrayed as an angelic but lonely and bullied girl who is deeply grieving her father and believes in the blurry frontiers between the worlds of the living and the dead, Doris becomes the perfect human and tangible vessel through which supernatural forces can express themselves. All starts with the introduction of the ouija board as a prop into the house and with Alice breaking the three rules which are to never play alone, in a graveyard and never forget to say goodbye. At this very moment, Doris becomes inhabited by Marcus’s spirit whose identity is yet to be defined. How does this possession first transpire? Through speaking. Marcus uses Doris’s voice to start materializing and, as soon as she touches the board, the voices appear all around her, thus enabling the world of the Beyond to let in.

Doris is progressively attracted by the ouija board which makes her believe she is talking to her father, Roger. They are deceitful spirits who do everything to earn her trust to better trap her, hence the hint at the money buried in the cellar. Contrary to Lina who is far from being fooled, Alice thinks her youngest child is gifted and asks her for help. As the readings follow one another, the trap is closing in around Doris who starts feeling pain in her neck at the same time she excels in the occult. She can now reproduce the voice of the deceased summoned during the seance.

Once she is fully possessed, Doris first goes through a radical physical and behavior transformation by becoming lethargic, stolid, her eyes often turned white when no one is watching her. Besides, her vocal abilities also go through creepy changes. In addition to mimic the deceased’s voice during the readings, adults’ voices, Doris keeps whispering in people’s ears in a demonic way when the evil entity starts spreading its malevolent influence on the whole family.

When the film reaches its climax and Doris fully assumes the devil’s voice, which is guttural, otherworldly and distorted by hatred, she no longer is a young innocent child. Marcus’s spirit corrupts and perverts Doris to achieve revenge by desecrating her body and soul and making her utter bloodcurdling things. The scene which most epitomizes the figure of the violated child is when Doris explains step by step to Lina’s boyfriend how it feels like to be strangled to death. The most uncomfortable thing about it is to witness the contrast between what she says and the sweet voice in which she says it with an angelic smile on her face. The mise-en-scène that keeps stressing Doris’s vocal changes, by shooting her facing the camera (or the fourth wall) as if she was already part of the Beyond, is meant to emphasize the element through which she is channelling these powers and forces : the mouth.

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The mouth as an organic element stands as a kind of leitmotiv throughout the film inasmuch as the possession of Doris’s body and soul by the demonic entity is made complete through that means. One night, Doris is awakened by her pain in the neck and gets assaulted by a dark creature who thrusts his devilish arm into her throat. This shadowy creature, one can notice, has no mouth or rather a distorted sewed one, similar to Lina’s mouth when she looks at herself in the mirror one night. At the light of these elements, what was supposed to be a nightmare was in fact real and prophetic.

But what can be the meaning of the recurring imagery of the sealed mouth (see also Lina’s doll)? Who is Marcus? Why is he portrayed as an evil spirit? What does he want from Doris and her family? He clearly states his purpose when trying to possess Lina’s soul : to snatch her voice.

Father Tom Hogan, a friend of the family, is the one who uncovers the ugly truth behind Doris’s pretended benevolent gift of clairvoyance. She is not channelling good forces but Marcus’s spirit, a man who happened to have been mutilated and murdered in this house a few decades ago. After the second world war, a twisted nazi doctor, called the devil’s doctor in the camps, escaped to America where he succeeded to get hired in a mental institution. He went on practicing his sadistic experiments on patients in the basement of his house. In order to do it, he cut out their tongues, severed their vocal cords and sewed their mouths so that no one could hear them from above. However, Marcus’s story does not end with his death. Violently murdered, he never rested in peace but instead was doomed to wander in the cold darkness of the underworld among other desperate, voiceless souls and malevolent creatures who must have been summoned by the doctor who was into the occult.

In the end, Marcus, who has been silenced by force, deprived of his own voice and overtaken by the surrounding evil influence in the Beyond, seeks revenge against god and people who have the ability to express themselves, eaten away as he is by hatred, frustration and pain. The only way for him to exorcise the horrible things he has been through is to communicate and hurt others, but for that a voice and a body are needed, hence his attempts to snatch the family’s voices. That is the only way to be heard and to have an influence outside his doomed world. Helped by her father’s good spirit, Lina grabs needle and thread and silences her sister for ever, thus fighting hard against the entity who strives to engulf her.

Ouija, Origin of Evil, like many other horror films, uses the voice and its communicative powers as narrative tools to address issues and challenge notions such as grief, loss, family unity, parenting, revenge, alternative beliefs, suffering, innocence, corruption, violation and religion. Religion…such a crucial theme whose set of practices and beliefs makes it the most cherished subject of the genre. Any idea which emblematic film is yet to be analyzed in the perspective of the profane voice and corruption of innocence?

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wwwps4 · 5 years ago

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Detroit

Can robots feel? To empathize? To do? Despite years of research, scientists do not give clear answers. And where science is powerless, fiction comes to the fore. Last year, with the help of NieR: Automata, Taro Yoko tried to get to the truth. Now David cage, the author of the interactive thrillers Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, has decided to present his view on the problems of artificial intelligence. Well, guys, myltso? On the blade Near future. Technology has made another leap, and the achievements of Boston Dynamics are in the past: androids are already among us, their appearance and behavior are barely distinguishable from ordinary people. Indispensable helpers and cheap slaves in one person, the" children " of CyberLife have been performing the most thankless work for years, bearing the humiliation of the Almighty masters. But nothing lasts forever: suddenly, in Detroit, one after another, deviants begin to appear-machines that have gained self-awareness.

Detroit: Become Human

In a matter of months, humanity is on the verge of war with its greatest creation. Now, in the darkest hour, the fate of the world depends on the actions of ordinary robots, not people. Marcus, the old artist's Butler, is stranded on the street in an accident. Connor, a police officer, hunts for "broken" brothers and tries to find out the reason for their madness. Kara, the housekeeper, runs off with her owner's daughter when he raises his hand to his own child. Heroes are waiting for incredible adventures, and their paths will cross more than once. And who knows how their amazing story will end?

Light, camera, shame Video games have long been made with an eye on Hollywood. Game designers spy on the Directors ' techniques, more and more screensavers from year to year, and the traditional gameplay is regularly replaced with spectacular QTE. It seems as if developers want to" shoot " movies, rather than sculpt conveyor blockbusters. Only a few people have the courage to say this openly. Few people except David cage and his Studio Quantic Dream.

Detroit: Become Human

Unlike other famous teams, the French company has long ceased to disguise itself: since 2005, it has been exclusively engaged in interactive cinema, where there is no place for shootings with terrorists, boss fights, or other distracting nonsense from the narrative. Cage's logic is impeccable: the industry is already littered with shooters like Call of Duty, why not do something original? But to create such masterpieces, you need skill. Talent. And here's the problem: the Frenchman has nothing else but naked enthusiasm.

Omikron: the Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls... Each of his opus is a story about how a good idea was ruined by a bad performance. Whatever the game, it's a beautiful dummy-fascinating at first, and then, closer to the final, falling apart. So it was hard to expect anything good from Detroit: Become Human (with its banal beginning). And all the same old cage I found something to surprise.

Detroit: Become Human

Double Detroit is an emphatically cinematic adventure that tells the fates of several characters at once. As before, the player is required to do relatively little: walk around locations, collect or view garbage, talk a lot, pass sophisticated QTE and survive. Yes, unlike many of the genre's peers, in Become Human (as in the ever-memorable Heavy Rain), the characters can die, and the plot will move on quietly — though, already in the direction of a bad ending. This is not a peaceful LucasArts quest.

Already from the introductory chapters, the new product is perceived as one big work on mistakes — as if all these years the authors studied reviews of their creations, threw out unsuccessful elements and kept working. The output turned out to be a kind of collection of "the best of". Check the boxes: a futuristic world a La Omikron (alas, without David Bowie), an intriguing Fahrenheit introduction with dozens of scenarios, investigative episodes, the death of the protagonists and elements of the heavy Rain interface, Hollywood actors just like in Beyond. Even the main menu resembles the beginning of the Nomad Soul — only instead of a low-poly model, a beautiful girl breaks the fourth wall. Try not to blush.

Detroit: Become Human

And it seems that everything is familiar, familiar, but there is nothing to swear at: from the point of view of game design, the game is made wisely. Even the usual genre flaws here, in the new context, do not look so scary and critical. Do robots speak in an unnatural, UN-human way? Logically, the same pieces of iron! Invisible walls prevent you from exploring locations? Of course, the program does not allow you to deviate from the set course! Bullets don't kill or even slow down characters during action scenes, and wounds heal too quickly? Cars, what to take from them.

However, these are rather pleasant things — the really impressive thing about Detroit: Become Human is something else. Here (unlike the series of some Telltale), the decisions made by the gamer during the "movie" really affect what is happening — very noticeably change the story. At first, the linear narrative branches out over time: unique mini-episodes are opened, even fleeting dialogues and individual chapters vary. And endings are determined not by the choice of a specific scene in the final, but by a number of not always obvious moments. How thoroughly did Connor study the crime scenes? Had Kara managed to escape from her master? And how?

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Conceptually, the mechanics are similar to the "butterfly effect" Until Dawn (or the earlier Blade Runner from Westwood): do something or say-prepare for the consequences, the authors will not allow the descent. Unless in the Supermassive Games horror movie there were much less variations of the development of events: in this regard, chamber horror is difficult to compete with the cyberpunk epic. Quantic Dream employees have done a lot of work, and they do not hesitate to demonstrate this by drawing giant diagrams at the end of each Chapter, similar to the intricate chronology of some Metal Gear Solid. A good way to mask loading screens!

In other words, in terms of gameplay, the new product really succeeded. Taking the best of their previous creations and borrowing a couple of other people's inventions, the authors finally fulfilled their promise: they released a real interactive movie. Hooray? Hooray. But unfortunately, Detroit is still David cage's "Need more emotion" game. With all the consequences.

Be a man Alas, in the five years since the premiere of Beyond, the head of Quantic Dream has not learned to write good scripts. Even with the help of new assistants and editors, all he managed to compose was at best a mediocre melodrama about racism, where the roles of oppressed Negroes were assigned to soulless androids. Vulgar metaphors and clumsy references to real historical events (up to the Nazi concentration camps!) attach.

Detroit: Become Human

Admittedly, it's very funny to watch such obvious and artless nonsense in 2018. There are no bright new ideas, unprecedented sci-Fi concepts, or unique views on AI problems. Instead — it is a continuous repetition of what has been studied with a lot of loud words, high-sounding platitudes and obligatory tears in artificial eyes. The characters are all drawn up according to the textbook of archetypes and communicate such Terry platitudes that at times the game borders on self-parody. Sometimes it even seems that Lieutenant Frank Drebin from the Naked gun is about to turn the corner and everything will fall into place. But that would be too subtle. Well, at least there was no nonsense in the spirit of Heavy Rain, that is, attempts to hit and turn what is happening upside down, somehow. Here everything fits into the fragile logic of a fabulous cyberpunk universe, where a robot service can be bought for a measly 899 dollars, and Canada is a futuristic Wonderland.

However, not everything is so sad. There are also good scenes in Detroit — and such that it's not even a shame to watch! They are concentrated mainly in the storyline of Connor (who has to play a buddy movie in the spirit of the series "Almost human"). There is humor, and "chemistry" between two dissimilar partners, and quite a sensible dialogue almost without stupid "snot", from which it is time to roll your eyes. Looking at the amazing adventures of an Android and a grumpy detective Anderson, you keep asking yourself: "why the hell are there two other protagonists in this game?»

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jokepoindexter-blog · 6 years ago

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https://youtu.be/Z4qc34kYHdM The Gunfighter - Directed by Eric Kissack, 2014.

In this post, I will be analyzing a short film, The Gunfighter (2014) directed by Eric Kissack. I will address how the film utilizes cinematic elements to support its premise. I will discuss the premise of the film, basic dramatic structure, and production design. I will also explore the production style, which includes the cinematography, sound, and editing. Finally, I will discuss the production elements I will employ in my short film Inshallah, and it’s dramatic purpose.

After infidelity secrets of a small town were revealed by an unseen voice, a bloody gunfight ensued between a group of saloon goers and a strange gunfighter.

The basic dramatic structure though not unique, the director incorporated a voice with a decisive language mixing suspense and thriller with comedy. The setup - The Gunfighter (Kissack, 2014) is a narrative comedy western short about a gunfighter who enters a saloon to have a drink, and his actions are narrated by a voice. The unseen voice knows what all the characters are thinking, and begins to reveal their secrets. A gunfight eventually ensues as they all realized they have wronged each other and kill each other except one named Sally. The voice finally revealed that a rabid wolf would maul her the next day.

Production design in Gunfighter (2014) is a creative period western, set in a saloon as commonly used in westerns. The production utilized efficient camera composition and movements and sound to direct viewer attention, set decoration, wardrobe and props were used to enhance the plot of the film. The salon set features brown painted walls, bar set up with unlabeled and faded labeled bottles of alcohol, stairs that lead up to rented rooms, windows, batwing door, tables, and chairs. Complimentary set dressings like curtains, posters, pictures, whiskey bottles, old dirty lamps, towels, and napkins accessorized the set.

The casts were clad in a period western wardrobe that includes spurs cowboy boots, gun belt with holster, jacket, buckle-belt, scarves and cowboy hats. Props used were playing cards, shots of whiskey, handguns, and shotguns, napkins while the makeup made use of beauty makeup for the characters, the actors were made to look sweaty, dirty and greasy haired. Fake blood was also used.

The director utilized artificial lighting to direct viewers to the protagonist by setting a spotlight above him, other lights used were represented with daylight as the sole source of light because the film was set at a time that there was no electricity. Camera movements and compositions included dolly tracks, pans and tilts on sticks, slow zoom and rack focus, wide shots and long shots, over the shoulder shots, medium, close and extreme close-ups were all used to initiate viewer attention to details.

Diegetic and non-diegetic sounds were used. Background sounds, footsteps, dialogues, and inaudible conversations in, and outside the set is used to complement the things the audience cannot see from their point of view. This includes the use of Foley sounds to represent footsteps, bar conversation noise. A narrative voice that breaks the fourth wall, talking to the characters and viewers of the film. The use of ominous sound shows that things are about to turn ugly in the film. The sound effect was minimal and it was used to complement a fast pan movement from one character to the other. The Editing is creative and simple. Focusing on cutting back and forth between characters and complimenting the shots so as not to distract the audience.

The film is dialogue and narrative based. and the story is more visualized. In editing, the first scene was introduced with a fade in, and jump cuts were used in the rest of the movie to show the progression, and pace of the relationship between the two characters in a montage of events.

I will be working on a short titled Inshallah, written by Elijah Edmunds. The film is about a young Muslim American who is absorbed into a group home after losing his parents to a road accident. The future is bleak for Syed as he faces discrimination He is bullied by roommates and was rescued by a housemate who had been through what he is going through. Learning from the cinematic storytelling of the Gunfighter (Kissack, 2014) with a $25000 budget, and comparing the production elements to that of my zero-low resource film requirement, I will utilize the use of a group-home location with all the set requirements in place. I do not have enough funds to build a spacious bedroom, mess hall set, as required for fluid cinematographic movements in my film.

Cinematography style will consist of static slow zoom to emphasize the dialogue of some of the characters. Shaky hand-held camera close-ups will compliment the fight that took place in one of the bedrooms. I will use extreme close-ups to emphasize the unspoken emotions of the protagonist and also to highlight the physical appearance of his pain in the film. The tone of the film will be saturated and later warm, to show the growth of the protagonist towards the end because of its drama theme. It is a dialogue-based film, but music and sound effects will be used to complement the plot of the story.

The are several props needed for this film which includes Syed’s Quran, prayer beads, praying mat, case files, pork chops, cups, and plates, but the most important prop needed is the praying mat and Quran as this helps portray Syed’s religion and he observes Salat in his dorm room. The challenges I face in working on this movie is how to choreograph the fight scene between the characters. With zero to low budget, it is hard to high a choreographer so I hope to have the cast rehearse this scene many times before the shoot. I will shoot a well-rehearsed fight scene with the use of sound effects to compliment it.

Pre-Production has improved my knowledge a great deal about film production. And the preparation required towards it. Getting familiar with the scripts and working on a script breakdown exposes all hidden components of the film.

In conclusion, I analyzed a short film, The Gunfighter (2014) directed by Eric Kissack. I address the film cinematic elements and production style. I also discussed the production elements I will employ for the short Inshallah, which I will be working on next month, and it’s dramatic purpose. Finally, I had a self-reflection of the past month and my growth process in this class.

#bestshortever #disclaimer

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westphotolukedas · 4 years ago

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Production Journal - The Farewell

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As a creative of British Asian origin, I am attentive of the perceptions of the Eastern community within Western mainstream culture. Crazy Rich Asians (2018) was an uplifting rom com that limited Caucasian actors to background fodder and reserved leading roles for those of Asian descent. Although glossy in its approach, it was a landmark victory for ethnic minorities in the film industry who have long been typecast to portray dated stereotypes. It suggested that we could be charismatic, comedic and above all desirable. Awkwafina is a rapper, comedian and writer who has successfully transitioned to acting. Her character Goh Peik Lin is a bleached blonde version of her gregarious stage personae. In The Farewell (2019) she plays another feasible derivative of herself as aspiring writer Billi Wang.

There was no shortage of story beats in the film that resonated with my own narrative. As well as a protagonist played by an actor with a similar background, the writer and director Lulu Wang is a Chinese American eager to accurately depict her upbringing. In the opening scene Wang walks the streets of New York while speaking to her grandmother on the phone. She confidently exclaims that she is wearing a hat for the cold weather, even though she is not. In response, her grandmother says she is at home when she is actually at the hospital for an appointment. ‘The back-and-forth makes for an elegant volley of disinformation; if love is kinetic, it’s best to keep things moving,’ wrote Chris Gayomali in his review of the film. It sets up the dynamics of the plot that eb and flow between familial ties with cultural expectations. In Chinese traditional it is regarded as moral to withhold the severity of a medical diagnosis from an elderly relative, even if the outcome is certain death. This clashes with the sentimentality of American born Wang as she struggles with the situation. In an emotive exchange, her mother asks her to conceal her feelings when she blurts, ‘Chinese people have a saying - when people get cancer, they die. But it’s not the cancer that kills them, it’s the fear.’ (Gayomali, 2019) (Ide, 2019)

Anna Franquesa Solano (Born 1984) is the cinematographer responsible for The Farewell’s (2019) sensitive visuals. After graduating with a degree in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona, she later studied film in New York. Her other noteworthy projects include I Don’t Like Cinnamon (2009), Silent Notes (2020) and The Normal People (2020). To breech the fourth wall, the characters walk directly into shot in slow motion during select scenes. While centred in the frame they stare at the audience as if in a dreamlike trance. This picturesque device references the Asian understanding of the passage of time. Buddhist thought encourages its practitioners to bring attention to the present moment and cast aside a preoccupation with the past and future. Furthermore, Solano pays close attention to filling her frame with long, timely shots. In a heartwarming scene, Wang and her grandmother practise Tai Chi together. The differences between the characters are shown to be generational as well as cultural. Nineteen takes were attempted and it was nearly left on the cutting room floor. My interest in the footage is its semi-autobiographical nature with two actors playing versions of themselves. Although there is a degree of scripting, the director captures genuine emotion by allowing any candid spontaneity to play out. As a result, it is equal parts documentary and constructed. (Weber, 2020)

Summary

There are certainly media codes that I will recreate from The Farewell (2019) and I am hopeful to represent its semi-autobiographical aspects - setting up a situation and then letting it resolve on film appeals to me. My interview is not purely documentary because I need to extract enough footage for the project and make it appear real. My email conversation with Teemu Hupli also covered some of the spiritual themes in this blog post.

‘In another tutorial I mentioned that there have been arguments that the Western conception of time has tended to be that time is linear - that it moves in one direction from past to present to future - and this is essentially what Hollywood conventions of continuity are designed to represent illusionistically. You can find this kind of conception particularly strongly in the philosophy of Hegel, who saw history as a progressive movement towards an ultimate goal of what he calls ‘spirit’ gaining freedom (you can try to read more about this by researching Hegel’s Philosophy of History, but it is heavy going reading, and I would perhaps suggest not spending too much time on it right now). More importantly, however, it was therefore interesting that your work seemed to derive inspiration from Japanese filmmaking. It has been suggested that the Japanese, or more broadly, Oriental conceptions of time are less linear than the Western notion, and therefore it stands to reason that some films originating from those areas construct different ‘pictures' of time too. This would be quite a fitting connection if your project ends up playing with questions of what is ‘genuine' thinking and talking in the here and now of ‘natural time’ so to speak; what is rehearsed, memorised and edited acting of such thinking and talking; what is continuous shooting and what is not, etc.’

Production Notes

The cyclical nature of Eastern philosophy was not investigated in the final cut of my piece. The voice over covers events that are not necessarily linear; however, there is a progressive property to the clips that expresses a beginning, middle and end. This is sealed with Natalie giving advice to her audience before switching a television off at the end. In post-production, I made attempts to shuffle the order of events but my experience as a filmmaker made this edit confused and unconvincing. The dream sequences from The Farewell (2019) were appealing too but I was not proficient enough with my knowledge of camera techniques to present my version of this storytelling device.

In several of the scenes of my film, Natalie and I are playing versions of ourselves in a similar fashion to Awkwafina’s portrayal of Wang. To film the section where we meet at the front door, I placed the camera in the kitchen and shot through the doorway. I was satisfied with this frame within a frame and then I left the flat to re-enter on cue. The events that occur on screen were not planned or scripted, and on some level, are representative of our real life interactions as friends. Following this, I found another shot in the living room that enabled us to speak to each other and remain seated on sofas. During an early screening of the project, I was given feedback that the burnt out window was distracting. I was not able to reshoot the scene and I feel that the way that it compartmentalises the composition is appropriate - I am respectful of her space as a performer that she may need to express herself. The chatting and laughing between us are spontaneous acts. She is actually showing me the Shakespeare script that we discussed beforehand and the enthusiasm is sincere. In the final cut, the voice over of her talking about improvisation seemed appropriately matched to this moment.

My initial proposal foresaw outside scenes shot on location - Natalie walking, on public transport and crowds. These were never produced due to time restrictions. As a result, the film comes across as more stagnant by being restricted to the confines of her flat. The scenes above contribute some spark to the footage and it would have been interesting to see how she engaged with strangers, other friends and family.

Bibliography

Ide, W. (2019). The Farewell Review - Beautifully Bittersweet Chinese-American Family Drama. The Guardian. Available from www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/21/the-farewell-review-lulu-wang-awkwafina [Accessed 10/04/2020]

Gayomali, C. (2019). How The Farewell Director Lulu Wang Stayed True to Herself. GQ. Available from www.gq.com/story/lulu-wang-the-farewell-interview [Accessed 10/04/2020]

Weber, J. (2020). The Farewell - 10 Things We Learned from The Director's Commentary. Screen Rant. Available from www.screenrant.com/the-farewell-things-facts-trivia-learned-directors-commentary [Accessed 10/04/2020]

Final Cut, Manual Mode, 25 fps, WB Natural Light

#wallpagescreen #westphoto #annafranquesasolano

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ccliftonmajorone2019 · 5 years ago

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FOURTH SHOOT: THE FIRST GREENHOUSE SCENE

So, now that we had completed the first scene with August, that being the Cafe scene I had posted about in my last blog entry, it was time to either film the first scene, or the first scene involving the Glasshouse since August is limited by her schedule in terms of filming for the time being. Due to my house being somewhat busy during this past week I decided upon the first Glasshouse scene as being a perfect fit for the next shoot.

The first Glasshouse scene in the films narrative occurs right after the first scene and the discovery of Mark’s main inspiration for his own art, setting up the important question of the film that is being asked by both Ken the cameraman as well as the audience, which is, is what we are being shown real or fake? throughout the Glasshouse scene we are given a glimpse into Marks character, someone who is fond of the idea of isolation and the rural side of life, with his choice of location being not only a brilliant place to shoot a abandoned body that has seemingly been murdered in Marks photographic narrative, but also as a place in which he himself expresses the idea of hiding, whether that be himself or other ‘things’. As well as this the scene hangs on the idea of Ken as the cameraman trying to understand Mark more as a person and his project, with his own questioning of Marks photography being that of fiction or reality. As Mark reluctantly opens up to Ken about his work and his intentions for the project, he becomes frustrated with Kens constant questions and momentarily snaps at Ken for pestering him to much. This gives us as the audience the first glimpse of Marks unhinged nature and who he truly is underneath this pretentious and charismatic vail. A man who is obsessed with creating the perfect artistic piece, who will do whatever it takes to achieve that, and at this point, in his own twisted mind, that is the execution of murder, however in order to achieve such a feet he will even lie to his own cameraman in order to achieve it, however in a moment of rage we almost see his true intentions come out as he snaps at Ken, for trying to find out the truth behind what he is up to. However, Mark seemingly manipulates the situation by proposing to Ken that if he was to help him complete this project, his involvement would grant him a vast amount of opportunities for the future, but for that to happen he needs to trust Mark and what he is planning, this seemingly sends Ken off the trail, who is now blinded by the idea of the success he could achieve. although this does not stop Ken for asking questions in the future, it restrains him from delving in to deep or trying to intervene in Marks intentions until halfway through the film. this scene is probably one of the most important ones throughout the narrative as not only does it give us a sneak preview of who Mark truly is, but it also sets in stone the main location of the films story as well as explaining why Ken is eager to do what Mark says and keep filming, until Mark finally reveals his true colours.

In order for the scene to feel important then, Me and Tom had to nail down the acting between these two characters throughout the filming. once we both met up at Stanmer Park we started right away planning out how this scene would go, going through the script and adding notes on how to say some of the sections of the lines as well as what emotions we had to portray in order to put forth the strength and weight of each of the dialogues. Although i didn't have as much lines as Tom it was important for me to play Ken in this scene as someone who is simply investigating into what his employer had in store for him as well as what his importance was in this project, although Ken is rather concerned in the beginning as he still doesn't understand if the photos of the dead models he was shown were real or fake, this subsides into simple and innocent questioning once Mark reassures him that the photos are only staged. On Tom’s side of acting he had to portray Mark as someone who starts off in the scene as a artist excited for his project finally starting now that he has a cameraman filming for behind the scenes. however his tone seemingly changes throughout as he becomes uncomfortable with all of Kens questioning, lashing out like previously mentioned, then luring Ken back in with his charm and lucrative promises. And in all honesty I think Tom really nailed it, after a couple of takes he was able to understand what i wanted to showcase in his motivation as Mark, he was really able to put forth the idea of Mark showing off to his new employee throughout the first half of the scene leading up to the glasshouse, then being able to quickly switch into a man on the brink of snapping once he had enough of all my questioning, and then proceed to slip back under the charismatic vail in order to lure my character back into the idea of future glory if i was to trust him and his vision, plus Tom’s use of the Wall outside the Glasshouse ruins as a depiction of the famous gallery wall that Kens name could be on in the future was all Tom’s idea, not my direction which was amazing! Looking back on the shoot however there are a couple of lines in which i seemingly stumble my words in multiple takes that we had to redo, although I am somewhat naffed off with myself in terms of that, i am still only in the early stages of acting with a camera, so i can excuse myself for that for the time being, plus also it adds to the nerves that Ken would be feeling in this scene.

Overall, I think me and Tom have nailed this scene completely, the Tone is set right in terms of the different shifts that occur throughout the characters interactions with each other, there is a certain comedic element that i do enjoy between the two that adds to the black comedy vibe i’m looking to nail alongside the main thriller aspect of the film, as well as the camerawork looking excellent for the direct cinema approach i’m going for and the fact we had it all wrapped up in 4 hours instead of the original 6 that we thought it might take. Perfect! Now all theres left to do is either the first scene or all the Greenhouse scenes involving August before we make our way to the final two scenes of the piece.

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ethanalter · 7 years ago

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Emmys: The Women of ‘Mr. Robot’

Portia Doubleday as Angela Moss, Carly Chaikin as Darlene, and Grace Gummer as Dominique “Dom” DiPierro in USA’s ‘Mr. Robot’ (Credit: USA Network)

As we enter Emmy season — nomination voting runs June 12 to June 26 — Yahoo TV will be spotlighting performances and other contributions that we feel deserve recognition.

The first season of USA’s cult drama Mr. Robot was mostly about the men in our anti-hero Elliot Alderson’s (Rami Malek) life. One man in particular: the titular leader (Christian Slater) of the anarchy-minded hacker enclave fsociety, who was revealed to be a Tyler Durden-esque figment of Elliot’s addled imagination in the Season 1 finale. For the show’s sophomore year, creator Sam Esmail (who also directed each of the 12 episodes), broadened the scope beyond Mr. Robot to focus on the women in Elliot’s life. Both his sister, Darlene (Carly Chaikin), and his childhood friend, Angela (Portia Doubleday), became driving forces in the narrative, as did a new face, FBI field agent Dom DiPierro (Grace Gummer), who is getting close — too close — to piecing together what happened on 5/9, the day that fsociety’s hack changed the world forever (and not necessarily for the better).

At the same time, Mr. Robot fans would likely agree that the increased focus on the show’s female cast has been a positive development for the show. “Season 2 was jam-packed with the ladies,” Doubleday tells Yahoo TV. “We were all really excited when we saw those scripts. It’s not as rare these days to see strong female characters that have arcs that aren’t dependent on the direction of a male counterpart, which I’m very happy about.” Gummer concurs: “Sam is so great at storytelling, and interested in the complexity of each character on the show individually. He’s not worried about anyone being likable or not likable or good or bad.”

We spoke with Mr. Robot‘s three female leads in separate interviews to break down their characters’ standout sequences from Season 2 — and learn how they might hint at what lies ahead for Season 3.

Dom ducks and covers in the one-shot shootout from ‘Mr. Robot’ (Credit: USA Network )

Dom’s Big Moment: The China Shootout (Episode 5, “eps2.3_logic-b0mb.hc”) With an FBI agent now in the mix, it stands to reason that things are going to get a lot more physical than they were in Season 1. And Dom was certainly at the center of Mr. Robot‘s two major forays into action-movie territory. In the fifth episode, she survives a firefight while working abroad in China that claims the lives of her fellow agents. Making the sequence all the more impressive is the fact that it unfolds in a single, unbroken shot — an approach Esmail repeated for another shootout in Episode 10, when Dom and Darlene are attacked by the Dark Army in a restaurant. Both sequences are strong examples of the “show, don’t tell” school of characterization: we see Dom’s personality expressed through action, rather than dialogue.

Grace Gummer: The shootout was a single shot, and I watched playback every time to make sure I was doing all of the actions right, especially grabbing the gun on the ground and shooting it. I had no bullets or ammo or sound to shoot it with; all I had was somebody off-camera going, “Boom!” I had to react to the backfire of a gun based on someone going “Boom!” You know, it was just those little things that you have to imagine in an incredibly chaotic and insane situation.

It was a very technically choreographed thing. I had to go behind the monitor between every take, and Sam would say, “I want you right here to grab the gun sooner,” because the camera was right behind me, kneeling where I was kneeling. It was all through my perspective as soon as I went down, so it had to be very specific. Physically it was really hard on my body; I turned my back out that day because of all the bending, crawling around, and twisting and everything. I ended up on the floor for a couple days with a bad back.

(Credit: USA Network)

There weren’t that many takes of that one; I think it was maybe the fourth take that we did where we got it. You only get a certain number of takes — you can’t really do that 20 times! I remember that I wanted to do more to make it look more realistic on my end, but you just have to trust Sam. When he says he’s got it, you know that he definitely has it. I forget the movie he referenced, but he wanted it to be very raw. I had never been able to do that [kind of scene] before, but if anybody is going to do it on the show, it had to be Dom.

What I think is so cool about her is that she’s aggressive and impulsive, tough and feminine. Deep down she’s incredibly lonely and isolated, and I think she uses her job as a cover-up for all of that. I think that’s how she’s related to every character on the show, because they all have that element to them. I thought of her as Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs or Frances McDormand in Fargo — that weirdo that somehow ends up being the one that gets the case and actually solves it. The one that cares the most, and the least likely person you would think would be able to do the job.

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You can see that in the shootout [in Episode 10]. She takes it upon herself; she doesn’t have any backup. No one is going to stop her, and her whole mentality is based on that. That scene was an adrenaline rush for me every time, because I knew that if I didn’t get it right, we would have to set it up and do it all again. It was a really hard, long night, one of the hardest shots I’ve ever shot in my career. I’d do 20 jumping jacks between each take to get me into the mindset of having been running. I’d have to think about all the props that I’m going to use, at what point do I open the door, how loud should I say “FBI,” how hard should I kick the guy on the ground to make sure he’s dead. It was insane, but really fun.

I can’t really say what’s going to happen to Dom in Season 3, but she’s definitely going to be at the center of the action. The action finds her, and she finds the action.

Darlene fulfills an act of childhood vengeance by killing Susan Jacobs (Credit: USA Network )

Darlene’s Big Moment: Killing Susan Jacobs (Episode 8, “eps2.6_succ3ss0r.p12”) Season 2’s eighth episode was a major departure for Mr. Robot in that Elliot didn’t appear on camera at all. Instead, Darlene was the central character in this particular hour, as the plan she had orchestrated with her brother started to unravel in spectacular fashion. The trouble started when Susan Jacobs (Sandrine Holt) — E Corp’s General Counsel, who helped absolve the corporation from any guilt in the deaths of Elliot and Darlene’s father — returned home to discover that fsociety had transformed her house into their command center. Darlene proceeds to take her hostage and, driven by the memory of Susan’s triumphant laugh when E Corp’s “innocent” verdict was handed down, kills her with a taser. That half-accidental, half-intentional act of vengeance splinters her fsociety cell, and eventually leads her to discover that her ex-boyfriend, Cisco, is a Dark Army operative.

Carly Chaikin: When we were talking about Season 2, Sam told me that I killed someone, and I was like, “What are you talking about? I’m a murderer now?” Reading it, it was one of those situations that most of us have [experienced]. We’ve had that personal moment where we think, “If I ever see that person again, I’ll kill them.” The hope is that 99.9% of us wouldn’t actually kill them. Darlene is put in that position thinking there would be something to stop her. But there wasn’t! And I don’t think it was a premeditated thing either. She obviously went down there with a taser, but it was more of an in-the-moment decision to actually do it.

Because she’s not a killer, I didn’t want it to be some kind of crazy lunge. That’s not real. The crazy thing is how easy it was; just one quick move. I came to set and talked to Sam about it, but he was like, “I don’t want to know anything. I just want to see what you do.” And so the performance that you saw was kind of just what I went in and did. We honed it in a little at the end, but he really liked what I came in with. Afterwards he came over and gave me a big hug and all the guys on set were like, “That was really good.”

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I’m not sure who chose the swimming pool, but I assume that once they saw the location, that was the area where it made the most sense to lock Susan up and keep her isolated. It was such a great environment, because it was so echo-y. Every sound you made was bouncing off the walls. It was an enclosed area, so you couldn’t just scream and have someone hear you.

One of the things that I really held on to while doing that scene was thinking about Darlene saying, “Nobody else saw but me.” That lonely isolated feeling of seeing this woman [laugh], and everyone else being like, “What are you talking about?” Having that be embedded in her, and with all of the s**t that has happened to her family as a result of E Corp. She has a face to put to that, which is Susan’s face. Susan encompasses all the evil that happened, and being able to put a face to that incident helps her. It provides a feeling that getting revenge on this one person would somehow make everything better.

All the characters on the show do things where we think we know how they’re going to turn out, and then things obviously go very differently than what we expected. Like the way fsociety thought that we’re going to start a revolution and change the world, and now we’re seeing what actually came of that. We’re going to see what comes of killing Susan. Coming into Season 3, I had to think about taking in everything Darlene went through from her brother being in jail, to destroying the world, to killing Susan. Where is she going to go from here?

Angela almost sheds tears while singing Tears For Fears (Credit: USA Network)

Angela’s Big Moment: The Karaoke Meltdown (Episode 8, “eps2.6_succ3ss0r.p12”) Welcome to your life, there’s no turning back. Those prophetic words were first sung by Tears For Fears in their immortal 1985 ballad “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and they become the anthem of Angela’s long-overdue emotional breakdown. Since accepting a gig at E Corp, she’s been compromising, and compartmentalizing, her feelings about working for the enemy, even as she also attempts to use her status as an “inside woman” to help Darlene. Pulled in so many directions, she’s teetering on the edge of sanity and, on that karaoke stage, she appears to plunge over. The person that winds up pulling her back is Whiterose (B.D. Wong), leader of the Dark Army, who gives Angela a unique test that she winds up passing.

Portia Doubleday: There’s a certain honesty that comes out when you sing that you can’t hide as an actor, even if you’re in character. I sing for fun, but I didn’t think that Angela was the singing type. It was a moment for her to finally break this veneer that she’s been holding together the entire show — this necessity for control. That moment was atypical of something that you would see her do, so I was really excited to see what would happen.

Originally, Sam and I were thinking about a couple of songs, including “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore. But there were a couple of covers that had come out, and we thought, “Let’s pick something that might not be out there currently.” And that song is also just very on the nose about Angela’s journey, and how she feels about working in that environment of E Corp. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” speaks to all of the characters on the show, although they go about it in very different ways. It was so much to do with what Darlene wants in her rebellion, and what Elliot struggles with constantly. That’s a perfect song to demonstrate the struggles of all the characters, and Angela has a taste of it herself. If she’s in an executive position in that company, how do people become like Terry Colby? It’s not like he started out that way. Perhaps he was very similar to Angela, but inevitably, he made that decision that completely compromised her life, and Elliot and Darlene’s.

(Credit: USA Network)

That scene was actually more difficult than I expected it to be, because you’re acting. I sing karaoke, and it’s fun, but it’s a lot different when you’re interpreting the language. We also didn’t want it to become a performance, if that makes sense. There was one take where I was like, “I need to sing it worse than this!” It was awkward for me to sing off-key at certain points, but also interesting because I was able to say these things with conviction, with where they’re actually coming from as opposed to singing a perfect song.

I don’t remember how many times I performed the song. Maybe seven times or something? Around there. I’m not sure if he cut different ones together. It sounds like they used one take, because I remember messing up at one point and I can hear it [in the episode]. I’ve never quite done a scene like that. The song is your master, in a way. You kind of have to just keep going and tell the truth to do the song justice. And the song is great! I was so obsessed with it.

I will say that’s a turning point for Angela. She thinks that her life is over, and what a perfect moment for Whiterose to kind of swoop in and say something to her. She has no idea what’s going to happen to her; everything is broken at that point, and she has everything to lose. I don’t think the audience will predict what inevitably happens with her in Season 3 in any way. It’s going to open up into a completely different version of Angela. Angela 3.0!

Season 3 of Mr. Robot premieres in October on USA.

yahoo

Read more from Yahoo TV:

Emmys: ‘This Is Us’ Star Mandy Moore on Prosthetics, Those Infamous Texts From Her Parents

Emmys: ‘Westworld’ Star Thandie Newton on Embodying the ‘Daring and Vicious’ Maeve

Emmys: ‘This Is Us’ Star Milo Ventimiglia Gets Misty Revisiting ‘The Pool’

Emmys: ‘Gilmore Girls’ Star Lauren Graham Revisits Her ‘Scariest’ Scene

Emmys: ‘Stranger Things’ Star David Harbour Revisits Sheriff Hopper’s Tough-Guy Moment

Emmys: ‘Feud’ Star Susan Sarandon on ‘The First Time I Really Felt Like Bette’

Emmys: ‘Westworld’ Star Jeffrey Wright Revisits That Reveal

Emmys: ‘Legion’ Star Aubrey Plaza on ‘Trying to Act Like Beyoncé’ in Dance Scene

Emmys: Alexander Skarsgård Revisits His ‘Big Little Lies’ Therapy Session

Emmys: ‘OITNB’ Star Laverne Cox Revisits Sophia’s Brave Pushback Against Solitary Confinement

#Emmys #_revsp:wp.yahoo.tv.us #USA #Grace Gummer #_uuid:ded2c328-498b-3bc0-93e6-e9e5cd315778 #Emmy Talk #Portia Doubleday #_author:Ethan Alter #Carly Chaikin #Emmys 2017 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000AE7lXEAT #Mr. Robot

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oscopelabs · 8 years ago

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“Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai?”: Bollywood's Scandalous Question, and The Hardest-Working Scene in Movies by Genevieve Valentine

In a nightclub with the mood lighting of a surgical theater, a village belle is crying out for a husband. Her friend Champa encourages and chastises her by turns; her male audience is invited to be the bells on her anklets. (She promises, with a flare of derision, that serving her will make him a king.) Her costume, the color of a three-alarm fire, sparkles as she holds center screen. The song and camerawork builds to a frenzy as if unable to contain her energy; the dance floor’s nearly chaos by the time she ducks out—she alone has been holding the last eight minutes together. And the hardened criminal in the audience follows, determined not to let her get away.

Subhash Ghai’s 1993 blockbuster Khalnayak is a “masala film,” mingling genre elements with Shakespearean glee and a healthy sense of the surreal. By turns it’s a crime story, a separated-in-youth drama, a Gothic romance with a troubled antihero, a family tragedy, a Western with a good sheriff fighting for the rule of law, and a melodrama in which every revelation’s accompanied by thunder and several close-ups in quick succession. (There’s also a bumbling police officer, in case you felt something was lacking.) It was a box-office smash. But the reason it’s a legend is “Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai?”—“What's Behind That Blouse?”— an iconic number that’s one of the hardest-working scenes in cinema.

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See, Ganga (Madhuri Dixit) isn’t really a dancer for hire. She’s a cop gone undercover to snag criminal mastermind Ballu (Sanjay Dutt), who’s recently escaped from prison and humiliated her boyfriend, policeman Ram (Jackie Shroff). Ballu, undercover to avoid detection, is trying to avoid trouble on the way to Singapore...but of course, everything changes after Ganga.

Though the scene shows its age—the self-conscious black-bar blocking, the less-than-precise background dancers—it’s an impressive achievement. Firstly, it’s a starmaker: the screen presence of Madhuri Dixit seems hard to overstate. By 1993 she was already a marquee name, and she would dominate Bollywood box office for a decade after, both as a vivid actress and as a dancer whose quality of movement was without peer. But if you’d never seen a frame of Bollywood you’d still recognize her mountain-climb in this number—playing the cop who disdains Ballu playing the dancer trying to court him, performing by turns for the room and to the camera, conveying flirty sexuality without tipping into self-parody, and all on the move for kinetic camera shots ten to fifteen seconds at a time. Dixit’s effortless magnetism holds it fast; the camera loves what it loves.

But this is more than just a career-making dance break; “Choli Ke Peeche” is the film’s cinematic and thematic centerpiece. Khalnayak is about performativeness. Ballu performs villainy (sometimes literally) in the hopes it will fulfill him; Ram vocally asserts the role of virtuous cop to define himself against those he prosecutes. As Ballu performs good deeds—saving a village from thugs, ditching his bad-guy cape for sublimely 1993 blazers—his conscience grows back by degrees. As Ganga performs a moral compass for Ballu, her heart begins to soften. And at intervals, crowds deliver praise or censure, reminding us that all the world’s a stage. (It’s in the smallest details: While on the run, Ballu’s ready to kill a constable until it turns out he’s an extra in the movie shooting down the street.)

And nowhere in cinema is the fourth wall more permeable than a musical number. Bollywood’s turned them into an art. Playback singers are well-known (they even have their own awards categories), a layer of meta in every performance. Diegetic dance numbers are common. Movies often halt the action entirely for an item number, as a guest actress drops by. For the length of a song, the suspension of disbelief the rest of a movie requires is on pause.

Musical numbers are a place where a movie can comment on itself, and Khalnayak takes full advantage of the remove. (In an earlier number with more traditional Hollywood framing, Dixit winks at us while singing to her beloved.) Likewise, Saroj Khan’s choreography in “Choli Ke Peeche” invites us to enjoy Ganga’s sexuality without concern about racy lyrics—or even about the villain, who dances in his chair along with the rest of us. With the camera as chaperone, it’s safe for “Ganga” to asks what else she’s meant to do but lift her skirts a bit as she walks (that skirt's expensive!), and to let her prince know she sleeps with the door open. The men around her are either part of the act, or an audience safely contained by the narrative and the frame for our benefit. (At times, her back is to her audience so she can dance for the camera; Khalnayak knows we’re watching.) “Choli Ke Peeche” is a thesis statement on the relationship between performance and audience.

It’s a moment powerful enough to cast a shadow across the rest of the film. This number, not the crimes or the cops, is what the movie returns to repeatedly; it’s too good to ignore and too subversive to solve. Not least, among the other layers of performance, is queer subtext. In Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath points out that “female homoerotic desire between Dixit and [Neena] Gupta is routed and made intelligible through a triangulated relation to the male hero.” Champa’s masculinized within the performance; she asks the loaded title question, addresses our heroine’s male savior, and discusses him with Ganga. It’s a significant connection between women in a song supposedly directed at a man—which might be why Champa is the one who defends Ganga’s reputation by explaining the dance-hall sting, and reminding the audience it was all for show.

But that’s not going to stop “Choli Ke Peeche.” At the end of the second act, Ballu blows Ganga’s cover. (He’s known she’s a cop since their backstage meeting—another layer of performance). To prove they mean no real harm, the men don lenghas and veils and parody a chunk of the number, right down to interjectional close-ups and a wandering camera that brings kinetic energy to the static space.

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In one way this reprise tries to undercut the song’s power by making it faintly ridiculous, suggesting it isn’t really sexual—it’s camp. But if “Choli Ke Peeche” functioned as a ‘safe’ way for Ganga to express sexuality when we first saw it, it serves a parallel purpose here. Despite the mocking undertones, with this number the men are reassuring her; they understand her sexuality was itself just a performance—her purity is therefore safe with them. (We know that’s a concern here because her shawl is pulled close about her; the free-spirit act is over, and her virtue is at stake.)

But there’s also something undeniably subversive in hyper-masculine, violent figures reenacting coy expressions of feminine desire. To prevent things from getting too subversive, Ballu invades Ganga’s personal space, a reminder of his power amid the making fun. And the performance ends in the threat of violence against Ganga when she breaks the spell—the expected order of captor and captive reestablishing itself as the film falls into a formulaic last act, an attempt to wrest social order out of the exuberant chaos one musical number has wrought.

It caused some chaos offscreen, too. When the soundtrack was released ahead of the film, “Choli Ke Peeche” was deemed obscene; the song was banned on Doordarshan and All India Radio, and faced legal challenge at the Central Board of Film Certification. In “What is Behind Film Censorship? The Kahlnayak debates,” Monika Mehta writes that “the visual and verbal representation combined to produce female sexual desire. It was the articulation of this desire that was the problem—it posited that women were not only sexual objects, but also sexual subjects.” And within the number, there’s no doubt Ganga’s in control; she sends alluring glances Ballu’s way, mocks (then takes) his money, and signals he’s free to follow her if he dares. The undercover-cop framework gives these gestures the veneer of respectability, but since Ballu doesn’t know that yet, the frisson of the forbidden remains.

Letters of condemnation and support rolled in. Many claimed the song was too suggestive; an exhibitor from Paras Cinema in Rajasthan wrote in favor because “Choli Ke Peeche” was based on a folk song from the area, and “If it was vulgar then the ladies would have never liked it.” The examining committee eventually ruled in favor of letting the number remain, with some edits: one that removed the chorus entirely (which Ghai successfully appealed), and two cuts to beats considered provocative, including one of Ganga ‘pointing at her breast’ as she sings, “I can’t bear being an ascetic, so what should I do?”, unequivocally claiming sexuality without even a man as her object. No wonder it had to go.

It wasn’t the only controversy dogging the film; star Sanjay Dutt was arrested under The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act for possible connections to the 1993 Bombay bombings, which added an uncomfortable self-awareness to Ballu’s onscreen misdeeds. Yet those controversies did Khalnayak no harm at the box office, where it broke records, and the movie’s had such nostalgic power that as of 2016, Ghai was considering a sequel.

But “Choli Ke Peeche” remains the movie’s most measurable influence. In Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, Rosie Thomas notes that after Ganga, “distinctions between heroine and vamp began to crumble, as the item number became de rigueur for female stars,” suggesting Khalnayak was a harbinger of less rigid strictures for Bollywood’s leading ladies. Another legacy of Khalnayak: more numbers feature women—with a man as the absent locus of their affections—dancing with each other instead, forming their own narrative connections and opening the opportunity for queer readings. (One of the most famous, “Dola Re Dola” from 2002’s Devdas, features Dixit again, alongside costar Aishwarya Rai.)

The pressure of so much cultural influence and metatextual weight might have turned a lesser scene into a relic, a stuttery car chase from a silent movie that starts a montage of the ways the camera has developed. It’s a testament to “Choli Ke Peeche” that it absorbs the weight of the years as gracefully as it does. If you want a watershed moment for sexual agency in Bollywood, you have it. If you want a starmaker with dancing that’s influenced choreography and direction for twenty years since, it’s happy to help. If you want a scene that dissects the idea of performance as subversive act, the offscreen vulgarity scandal only adds to your case. And if you want a musical number that reminds you what cinema can do, “Choli Ke Peeche” is as vibrant, campy, and complex as ever.

#bollywood #choli ke peeche #khalnayak #sanjay dutt #subhash ghai #masala film #all india radio #oscilloscope laboratories #musings #indian cinema #cinema of india #ganga #devdas #aishwarya rai #madhuri dixit #doordashan

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dweemeister · 4 years ago

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NOTE: Despite the fact The Magic Flute was originally released on Swedish television on January 1, 1975, it debuted as a theatrical film in the United States later that year in November. As per the rules I set out for this blog, Bergman’s The Magic Flute will be treated as a theatrical film.

The Magic Flute (1975, Sweden)

I imagine that when some people read that this film review concerns an adaptation of an opera, they will stop reading at the word, “opera”. As someone who was taught classical music from an early age, I get it. Opera seems inaccessible, and a several-minute aria just to get a plot point across can seem daunting (not just for the audience, but the performer too). But as with any artistic medium, there will always be points of entry for newcomers. Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 adaptation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is one of them. The Magic Flute is one of the more accessible and most performed operas in Western classical music, and it just so happened to be Ingmar Bergman’s favorite. Bergman saw the opera when he was twelve years old, leaving an immediate impression. Unable to afford the record, he attempted to recreate The Magic Flute with marionettes at home. By the mid-1970s and having cinematic and stage production experience in his oeuvre, Bergman dared to imagine filming his favorite opera.

There are numerous cinematic opera adaptations. But they are underseen and largely unavailable to North American viewers – I am not including filmed opera performances in this distinction (e.g. the Metropolitan Opera’s popular live feeds that are presented in movie theaters and public television). Invariably, Bergman’s The Magic Flute is mentioned on the rare occasions when opera films are discussed. Sometimes, due to contempt for opera or a lack of understanding about classical music, it is the only such opera film discussed, and usually never from a musical lens.

In this adaptation, Bergman attempts to meld the distinct artifices of cinema and opera together. The viewer is never transported to a fantastical world, as the film possesses no “fourth wall” to begin with. We see an audience – look closely and you will see Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist in the audience – waiting in anticipation during the overture, and the action takes place on what appears to be a homely community opera house. On occasion, we will see the performers backstage preparing for their musical entrances. When their performance begins, they inhabit the world of the opera.

This peculiar dynamic Bergman creates is less believable on a more gargantuan stage. The stage’s production design and deliberately low-budget (but charming) costume design suggests we are experiencing a performance given by a small community opera company. La Scala this is not, nor is it the Met or Paris Opera. Bergman wished to shoot the film at the Drottningholm Palace Theatre in Stockholm, a small eighteenth-century theater that still uses mechanisms dating back to its inception. Unfortunately, that theater was deemed too fragile for film equipment. Nevertheless, Bergman and production designer Henny Noremark (who also served as co-costume designer along with Karin Erskine) concocted a workaround. On a soundstage at the Swedish Film Institute, the production design team painstakingly crafted a facsimile of the Drottningholm Palace Theatre’s interior. The Magic Flute appears to be an inexpensive production, but it is anything but. The stage is intimate, inviting, personable.

In brief, Mozart’s opera is set in Egypt and concerns a mother-daughter dispute rife with misunderstanding. The protagonist, Prince Tamino (Josef Köstlinger), is contacted by the Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin). She asks him to free her daughter Pamina (Irma Urrila) from the clutches of a high priest named Sarastro (Ulrik Cold; doesn’t that sound like a villainous name?). After being shown a portrait of Pamina, Tamino falls instantly in love with her – that’s opera logic, you know. Tamino is joined in his adventures by Papageno (Håkan Hagegård), an overly talkative bird-catcher dressed like a bird. But Tamino will learn more about Sarastro’s priestly order and becomes interested in joining. The Magic Flute has been interpreted as heavily influenced by Masonic themes, and modern analyses clash as to whether its portrayal of the Queen of the Night is misogynistic (see: Sarastro’s belief that Pamina should not be subject to the Queen’s feminine manipulations) or proto-feminist.

Also featured are the conniving Monostatos (Ragnar Ulfung) and, in the second act, Papagena (Elisabeth Erikson). The Magic Flute benefits from an excellent recording by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Eric Ericson.

Opera films tend to adhere closely to the work composer and librettist. Bergman exercises some liberties with Mozart’s music and Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto*. Instead of the original German, this film uses a Swedish-language libretto by the poet Alf Henrikson (this Swedish-language version debuted at the Royal Swedish Opera in 1968). No offense against the Swedish language, but this Swedish-language version of The Magic Flute makes the musical phrasing awkward. Mozart’s opera was composed with German in mind. German may not be a listenable as Italian in an operatic setting (it could be worse, it could be English – as in the otherwise excellent 1951′s The Tales of Hoffman, adapted from Jacques Offenbach’s opera of the same name), but this should have been Bergman’s first choice.

The decision to cast singers with sweeter voices rather than full, unamplified ones assumes that an audience cannot tolerate a soprano’s high notes. "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" – commonly known as the Queen of the Night aria – demands full-bodied womanly rage to sing. The soprano should sing this forcefully, but not harshly. It feels like Bergman is asking Birgit Nordin to hold back her vocals during the aria (which also sounds rushed in the second half). Whether in an opera or an operatic adaptation for film, this is not an aria that should be sung with anything less than full power. Bergman should let Nordin sing this aria as it should be sung. To do so invites a starker contrast between those few minutes and the rest of the film – a show-stopper as Mozart intended it to be. Nevertheless, Bergman’s decision to prioritize acting over musicality – however it grates upon my senses – works for all the other roles. Nykvist’s cinematography pulls close to the actors’ faces, demanding more facial acting from the cast (who are all lip-syncing) than they might be used to. The cast succeeds in this challenge, approaching a type of acting they are unaccustomed to.

The setting of Bergman’s Magic Flute strips away much of the opera’s original Egyptian setting and settles for a vaguely European design. The Queen of the Night-Sarastro conflict becomes a parental dispute, as Bergman makes Sarastro Pamina’s father. A few trios in Act II have been eliminated. Also in Act II and to the film’s detriment, Bergman changes the order of appearance of two Papageno-centric scenes to the point where they no longer make any narrative sense.

Where Bergman’s The Magic Flute triumphs is its representation of the nature of live opera (and, by extension, live theater). When one experiences an opera or theater, everything onstage is an interpretation, a living fiction. The events onstage and the music transport one from reality, without ever truly leaving that reality. Moments in which Swedish text of the libretto appears in front of the actors (sometimes held by the actors themselves) precede the creation and widespread use of surtitles in opera houses today. By making somewhat indistinguishable the actors’ transition between the “real” and operatic worlds (during the intermission’s last moments, we see actors smoke a cigarette and two others playing chess), Bergman shows that the viewer is as much a part of the performance. We assign as much meaning to the unreality of an opera as the actors. The whimsical comedy of The Magic Flute – one filled with imperfect protagonists and subplots that never quite cohere – makes Bergman’s metatextual commentary more apparent and approachable.

The Magic Flute followed two heavy Bergman dramas in Cries and Whispers (1972) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973). Having watched twelve of his forty-five feature films, The Magic Flute is, by some distance, the liveliest Bergman film I have seen. I do not expect any others to be as light, as comedic as this – the key difference might be that Bergman is adapting material, rather than using an original screenplay of his. It is refreshing to see an Ingmar Bergman without a gripping existential crisis, mentally disturbed characters soliloquizing their plights.

In The Magic Flute, the relationship between our lived reality and theatrical artifice holds for every person that engages with the performing arts. Debuting in Vienna in 1791, The Magic Flute, Mozart’s final opera, was not composed for aristocratic patrons, but commoners. Almost two centuries later, the in-film audience of Bergman’s adaptation is comprised of various genders and races. That universality of the theatrical experience is reflected in their faces, interspersed on occasion alongside scene changes and still moments. The universality of Western classical music, in this case Mozart’s, is etched in their gazes. Nykvist’s camera keeps returning to one young girl in particular. She is always smiling, obviously enchanted by The Magic Flute. Perhaps she is feeling things akin to Bergman the first time he experienced The Magic Flute – unburdened by cynicism, more accepting of unreality.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

*A librettist is the opera term for a lyricist. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel opera, which means it contains snippets of dialogue. Schikaneder wrote both the lyrics and dialogue.

#The Magic Flute #Trollflöjten #Mozart #Ingmar Bergman #Josef Köstlinger #Håkan Hagegård #Birgit Nordin #Irma Urrila #Ragnar Ulfung #Ulrik Cold #Britt Marie Aruhn #Kirsten Vaupel #Birgitta Smiding #Elisabeth Erikson #Emanuel Schikaneder #Alf Henrikson #Sven Nykvist #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years ago

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Rock and Roll Me: On Andrea Riseborough's Spellbinding 2018 Performances

In a time of cultural noise, in which the loudest and most outspoken receive the most attention, Andrea Riseborough succeeds through nuance and restraint. Her spellbinding 2018 performances are the sublimest spectacles.

Because Riseborough speaks little in 2018 films like "The Death of Stalin," "Mandy" and "Nancy," character detail and directorial form become essential to the viewing experience, and how one interprets the performances. What would Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy be without Martin Scorsese’s Caravaggian lighting and framing in 1973's "Mean Streets"? And how would Sissy Spacek’s "Carrie" performance hold up without Brian De Palma’s blood red production aesthetic? Riseborough, a 37-year-old English actress, elevates films by harmonizing with the director’s mise-en-scène, and by keeping the audience engaged.

For Armando Iannucci’s political satire "The Death of Stalin," Riseborough represents the grounding force; the mediator of ridiculous men. As Svetlana Stalina, she delivers a Charlie Chaplin-esque performance, speaking with her hands and reacting to contrived male machismo with calculated non-verbals. Alongside loud male performers like Steve Buscemi, Jason Isaacs, and Michael Palin, Riseborough punctuates dialogue with her slanted grins, numerous face palms and rhythmic movements within each comedic scenario.

Riseborough essentially functions as a frustrated middle child in "The Death of Stalin," a literal sister to the stooge Vasily (Rupert Friend) and a sister-in-spirit to the titular dictator’s proud comrades. In that sense, Iannucci often stages Riseborough in the background (understanding that she’ll deliver something), or to the side as comedic scenes play out for reactionary moments, many of which may not be noticeable until a second viewing. To complement the rapid-fire dialogue, Riseborough uses consistent body motion, primarily with her hands. She exerts nervous energy by repetitively pointing at people, and she then transfers that energy inward via repetitive face palms. Riseborough consistently inhales and exhales, delivering a definitely loud performance, albeit in a different manner than the male leads.

During each moment of situational comedy, Riseborough repeats the same physical routine; a set-up for the inevitable one-liner. And while she’s afforded some clever dialogue, it’s the rhythmic, non-verbal crescendos that underline Svetlana’s internal conflict. On one level, Riseborough’s nervous mannerisms—pointing, inhaling, exhaling, smiling—boost the situational comedy, but these collective moments ultimately set up one giant exhale for her character in the end, as she drops the lyrical routine entirely, in order to communicate Svetlana’s humanity and the danger that could possibly fall upon her. (Svetlana Stalina moved to the United States and passed away in Wisconsin at the age of 85.)

In Panos Cosmatos’ "Mandy," Riseborough relies on performative restraint in favor of the narrative structure and her character’s arc. On the surface, Mandy Bloom looks like one of the doomed female characters from the "Friday the 13th" franchise. And it’s no accident that she identifies her home as Crystal Lake. In terms of character, Mandy wears a Mötley Crüe t-shirt and discusses the cosmos with her lumberjack boyfriend Red, portrayed by Nicolas Cage —perhaps THE quintessential loud performer. But what’s special about this dynamic, for both the characters and performers, is that Cage matches Riseborough’s method during Mandy’s first half. Red clearly adores Mandy, and vice versa. Incidentally, character detail, chemistry and performative nuance mesh together to create a magical sense of camaraderie, along with looming danger.

To execute her performance as the ill-fated Mandy, Riseborough mutes the physical noise, a la Svetlana Stalina’s swirling hands and finger-pointing, to accentuate her natural features. Riseborough’s presence is fundamental to Mandy’s charm, most notably her large eyes and peering gaze. In an early sequence, Cosmatos presents a close-up of Mandy emerging from a lake, a shot that simultaneously establishes the character’s psychological effect on Red while informing the audience about a dark wave of energy. In a subsequent sequence, Riseborough breaks the fourth wall — a wink of the eye to the viewer — while telling Red a cryptic story about dead starlings, much like how she briefly breaks the fourth wall during one of "The Death of Stalin"’s liveliest sequences. In that film, her eye contact with the camera feels like an easter egg. In "Mandy," however, her direct gaze creates a more potent connection; a blurring of the line between character and performer. When fate catches up with Mandy, all of Riseborough’s small character tweaks come into play, as it’s not hard to see her face in the fire. It all adds up, it all comes together.

Riseborough often gets left out of "Mandy" discussions because her performance is so quiet and subdued. (I listened to a couple Blumhouse podcasts and the hosts barely acknowledge her role.) She speaks like a chilled-out Siri and glides like an angel on earth. Essentially, Riseborough pulls back the singular string on her bow during the majority of Mandy, and then shoots a sharpened arrow for one perfect shot, one defining moment. And that moment comes midway through when Mandy accepts her fate and unleashes a primal scream, thus destroying the flimsy ego of Linus Roache’s cult figure Jeremiah Sand. For Cosmatos, Riseborough must depart from the Mandy narrative in order for Cage to flip the switch, and her final seconds ensure that audiences won’t soon forget that laugh, those eyes, and the internalized pain that suddenly explodes into the cinematic universe—a giant FU to all the painfully un-self-aware men (and women) that Sand represents.

Riseborough provides one of cinema’s most rockstar 2018 moments in "Mandy," and she utilizes her full skill set to carry one of the year’s most underrated independent films, Christina Choe’s "Nancy"—a challenging and poignant character study about a female outcast who believes she might’ve been kidnapped as a child.

Like Mandy Bloom, Nancy Freeman speaks softly but radiates with energy. In this performance, Riseborough carries herself more like Wayne World’s Garth Algar than a care-free flower child. She balances nervous energy with overt smugness, suggesting that Nancy could either be a pathological liar or maybe just a woman struggling with depression. This time, Riseborough focuses on her character’s eyes and lips; when Nancy clearly deceives people early on, her eyes dart back and forth while her lips curl from side to side — not a quiver, per se, but rather a nervous character tick to suggest unease. Riseborough also slows down the narrative pace in "Nancy," as her character’s interpersonal experiences lead to highly awkward moments, much like the person who makes a perfectly normal statement in conversation but waits for a reaction. Based on Riseborough’s character interpretation, however, Nancy seems to be a self-aware individual.

Because Nancy comes across as a quiet outcast, Riseborough’s subtle character quirks have a jolting effect as the drama escalates. She adopts a regional, Fargo-like accent, all the while speaking from her throat and raising her shoulders during moments of tension. In some of Nancy’s early scenes, Riseborough’s body language suggests her character is confident in selling deception, even if her facial expressions betray her posture as a whole. In this role, Riseborough’s performance allows for various interpretations, as Nancy doesn’t have the public profile of Svetlana Stalina, nor does she have a a strong romantic connection like Mandy Bloom. Nancy must survive on her own, even if her potential birth mother and father are willing to lend a helping hand by offering love and a new life. In "The Death of Stalin," Svetlana Stalina wears her heart on her sleeve no matter what, and Mandy Bloom speaks the truth in all situations. Nancy, however, could be a distant cousin of Ryan Gosling’s "Drive" charactertough to read, ready to travel ... ready to run if need be. With Riseborough, one can never be sure which road she’ll take. As a result, the performative nuance and restraint makes her biggest moments so impactful.

In the future, Andrea Riseborough may evolve into one of cinema’s most iconic performers, one associated with high-profile mainstream roles and big Academy Award moments; she has that type of potential. For now, though, Riseborough remains one of the film industry’s most under-the-radar actresses, as she’s been in the game for over a decade but continues to rapidly evolve and challenge herself. If you’ve seen "Mandy," "Nancy," or "The Death of Stalin," you’re likely a Riseborough fan already. Or at least you should be.

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