#2020 oscars reviews

[animaletras]

Leve, divertido e emocionante, o filme "Shaun, o Carneiro: a Fazenda Contra-ataca", de 2019, traz mais uma aventura das ovelhas da fazenda. Pra quem não sabe, Shaun, o Carneiro �� uma série de televisão que estreou em 2007 na Nick Jr, chegando no Brasil só em 2011 pela TV Cultura; hoje, tem exibição também pela Netflix. Surgiu como um spin-off da franquia Wallace e Gromit, dos mesmos produtores de A Fuga das Galinhas, de 2000. O longa metragem, lançado pela Netflix, é o segundo da série, sendo o primeiro de 2015, também indicado à categoria de Melhor Filme de Animação do Oscar. A narrativa linear e bem estruturada conta a história de Lu-La, um extraterrestre que vem parar na terra e está buscando um meio de voltar para casa. Nessa busca, acaba indo para a fazenda de Shaun, tendo que contar com a esperteza do carneiro para conseguir sair dessa sem ser pego por uma instituição de pesquisa que o persegue. Enquanto isso, o ambicioso dono da fazenda prepara uma espécie de parque para faturar em cima dos fanáticos por ETs. Inspirado em grandes filmes de ficção científica, principalmente no filme "ET, o extraterrestre", de 1982, a animação prende o espectador na tela com personagens consistentes, um visual bonito e atraente de stop motion, além de uma história que diverte mas também emociona. Há quem ache ser apenas mais uma animação voltada para o público infantil, sem nada muito interessante, mas um olhar mais atento consegue observar a importância de cada pequeno detalhe nas cenas, percebendo a singularidade do filme. Sem furos de enredo, a sucessão dos acontecimentos é bem construída, formando uma progressão narrativa que envolve. O filme reúne praticamente todos os clichês do cinema, brincando com características dos filmes de ficção científica e com certos alivios cômicos típicos de filme de comédia, de uma forma que não cai na mesmice. Vale a pena assistir a qualquer momento, seja sozinho, com a família, com o crush, com os gatos, enfim! Embora não tenha ganhado o Oscar por estar competindo com narrativas ainda mais elaboradas, não é um filme para se deixar esquecido.

[atruththatyoudeny]

Happy 28th! Here are all the amazing fics I read this month:

Have Love, Will Travel | kingsofeverything | [97k] Rather than spend the summer working at their desks, Louis and Harry are given the opportunity to crisscross the country together in a tiny camper, filming their adventures for a YouTube series. It soon becomes obvious to their viewers that there’s something more than friendship between them. Eventually, they figure it out.

everything of mine is yours | blueskiesrry | [33k] "Did you two have a good time?” Harry in his bathroom, brushing his teeth with frizzy hair and tired eyes. Harry on the couch cuddled up with Posy, cradling her in the crook of his elbow, humming a soft song. Harry laughing with his friends in a pub on a Friday night, a flower field in his eyes. Harry in his bed tucked under the covers, naked against fresh sheets like a shock of moonlight cutting through a storm. “Yeah,” he says. “We did.” or: With Harry in New York finishing up his PhD and Louis in London working as a solicitor, they try to navigate their eight year situationship including almost-daily phone calls, the occasional indulgence of casual phone sex, and endless gossip sessions as the feelings they have for each other get harder to ignore.

Sweeter Than I Ever Knew | mandylynn4 | [32k] Harry has spent his heats alone since he's presented, but his roommate, Niall, is convinced that he needs to try out The Agency - an app that lets alphas and omegas partner for heats. Unsure, he signs up and goes through 5 heats with different alphas. Some are good experiences, others are awful. But, in the end, he finds that his heats with the right alpha can be sweeter than he ever knew. TRIGGER WARNING FOR CHAPTER 2 - READ TAGS!!!

Cuddlebug | sun_flowr | [19k] When the call from the adoption agency finally calls, Harry and Louis are surprised to discover that they have been tentatively paired with a young pup named Rami, who suffers from a multitude of issues stemming from the abandonment he’s suffered. But no matter the challenges, they know they will do everything they can to care for and love this pup as if he was their own.

My Lungs Don't Breathe (don't want any kind of life without you, dear) | red_panda28 | [5.6k] Suddenly a cough bubbled up in his lungs and he froze. Laying in his palm was a single flower petal, pastel pink, and velvet soft. The first thought that struck him was well, guess I am in love with Louis. Then another realisation hit. It also meant that Louis didn’t love him back. OR Harry falls victim to the Hanahaki Disease after meeting Louis, Louis has his own secret, and Zayn is a good friend

Yesterday’s gone (it’ll be better than before) | red_panda28 | [3.5k] Leo’s frown. His attempt to call after Louis. Ed saying he was surprised to see Louis here. All those little moments fell into place the moment he spotted Harry Styles. Harry Styles, his former bandmate. Harry Styles, who he hadn’t seen face to face in over three years. Harry Styles, who was technically still Harry Tomlinson-Styles. OR Louis and Harry run into each other at the Euros, there's a mix up at the hotel and they have a past

It's written all over your... (or: the Red Carpet fic) | BlueNeptuune | [11k] The star-studded cast of Steal My Girl graced the red carpet on Saturday night ahead of the premiere screening, sparking an internet sensation like no other. The film itself received an average of 4-and-a-half stars from early reviews, launching it into the spotlight as a contender for the up-and-coming awards season, but the real news came from the carpet itself. Oscar-winner Louis Tomlinson (Kill My Mind, Back For You) made his first public appearance following the badly-hidden split from his management in early 2020, and he wasn’t exactly keen to talk about it. It was also the first time since his earliest work (Still The One is featured on our summer-vibes throwback list) that he’s attended the carpet by himself – rumours swirled that he’d split with his long-time girlfriend, but are the two things related? Tomlinson himself wasn’t spilling any tea, but it looks like one journalist in particular might have coaxed a little more out of him than anyone else...

Sweet Mondays | sweetkalachuchi | [3.5k] Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson have ended their marriage; neither of them knew the other would be at the Euros. Niall was there too. And there was only one bed.

Get Him Back | softfonds | [17k] After finding out his husband was unfaithful, Harry does one thing that makes him feel good again. But it's up in the air if that one thing will stay.

Wild at Heart | She_bear | [50k] Louis is a lost soul, sailing around a remote archipelago in the Philippines when he makes a surprising discovery. A castaway fic ___________ "Like the island itself, he was a quite bewildering and ever changing landscape of beauty. Nothing was the same now Louis was here. The placid solitude to which Harry had grown accustomed had been replaced by fun and exquisite physical pleasure. By conversation, affection and connection. And with that all his peace was lost."

Sugar, Sugar | parmahamlarrie | [25k] Meeting your soulmate was the most joyous event of one’s life… or at least, it’s supposed to be. Harry, in all of his 25 year old wisdom, was suspicious of the role fate plays in everyone's lives. He'd rather focus his time dating older men he meets off of a sugar baby website. Louis isn’t waiting with bated breath for his soulmate either. He has more important things to worry about than love. Mainly, his career as a writer, publishing under a pseudonym. He spends most of the year buried under research and manuscripts, taking as much time as he would like, much to his publishers' chagrin. After receiving many millions after the death of his Aunt Ethel when he was young, he technically never has to work again. As far as soulmates go, he figures if it happens, he will be so old that he’ll be stuck in his ways. Or he’ll have grey eyes forever, he doesn’t fucking care. He can get his needs met through a sugar baby website. Or… The Sugar baby soulmate AU

The Cottage | HoldingOnToChaos | [70k] Louis hates alphas and he has good reason to, but when his beloved omega grandmother dies, and he inherits her cottage, he meets Harry, an alpha hazelnut farmer who sneaks his way into Louis’ life. While Louis struggles with his severe touch deprivation, he forms a friendship with Harry that turns out to be exactly what he needed. -- Or Louis has severe touch deprivation and Harry has a hazelnut farm.

The Capillaries In My Eyes Are Bursting | 5secsoflarry | [14k] Two armoured palace guards stand there, speaking with the old, widowed beta. Harry watches curiously from the space in the back, ducking down a little in an attempt to hide. There have been whispers through the town of omegas being gathered and forced to the castle all week long - something about the King being ill - but Harry had thought they were only rumours….. OR Medieval times where King Louis is in a near death accident and enters a coma. The royal doctor says they have two weeks to find Louis’ true soulmate (omega) or he dies.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Algorithmic feeds are a twiddler’s playground

Next TUESDAY (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on WEDNESDAY (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD with HARRY SHEARER for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.

Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:

https://archive.org/details/decentralizedwebsummit2016-corydoctorow

Famously, Ulysses did this before he sailed into the Sea of Sirens. Rather than stopping his ears with wax to prevent his hearing the sirens' song, which would lure him to his drowning, Ulysses has his sailors tie him to the mast, leaving his ears unplugged. Ulysses became the first person to hear the sirens' song and live to tell the tale.

Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness. Our modern lives are filled with less epic versions of the Ulysses pact: the day you go on a diet, it's a good idea to throw away all your Oreos. That way, when your blood sugar sings its siren song at 2AM, it will be drowned out by the rest of your body's unwillingness to get dressed, find your keys and drive half an hour to the all-night grocery store.

Note that this Ulysses pact isn't perfect. You might drive to the grocery store. It's rare that a Ulysses pact is unbreakable – we bind ourselves to the mast, but we don't chain ourselves to it and slap on a pair of handcuffs for good measure.

People who run institutions can – and should – create Ulysses pacts, too. A company that holds the kind of sensitive data that might be subjected to "sneak-and-peek" warrants by cops or spies can set up a "warrant canary":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

This isn't perfect. A company that stops publishing regular transparency reports might have been compromised by the NSA, but it's also possible that they've had a change in management and the new boss just doesn't give a shit about his users' privacy:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90853794/twitters-transparency-reporting-has-tanked-under-elon-musk

Likewise, a company making software it wants users to trust can release that code under an irrevocable free/open software license, thus guaranteeing that each release under that license will be free and open forever. This is good, but not perfect: the new boss can take that free/open code down a proprietary fork and try to orphan the free version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562

A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders' interests over its shareholders' – but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Ulysses pacts aren't perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better. Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.

Which brings me to enshittification. Enshittification is the process by which platforms betray their users and their customers by siphoning value away from each until the platform is a pile of shit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittification is a spectrum that can be applied to many companies' decay, but in its purest form, enshittification requires:

a) A platform: a two-sided market with business customers and end users who can be played off against each other; b) A digital back-end: a market that can be easily, rapidly and undetectably manipulated by its owners, who can alter search-rankings, prices and costs on a per-user, per-query basis; and c) A lack of constraint: the platform's owners must not fear a consequence for this cheating, be it from competitors, regulators, workforce resignations or rival technologists who use mods, alternative clients, blockers or other "adversarial interoperability" tools to disenshittify your product and sever your relationship with your users.

he founders of tech platforms don't generally set out to enshittify them. Rather, they are constantly seeking some equilibrium between delivering value to their shareholders and turning value over to end users, business customers, and their own workers. Founders are consummate rationalizers; like parenting, founding a company requires continuous, low-grade self-deception about the amount of work involved and the chances of success. A founder, confronted with the likelihood of failure, is absolutely capable of talking themselves into believing that nearly any compromise is superior to shuttering the business: "I'm one of the good guys, so the most important thing is for me to live to fight another day. Thus I can do any number of immoral things to my users, business customers or workers, because I can make it up to them when we survive this crisis. It's for their own good, even if they don't know it. Indeed, I'm doubly moral here, because I'm volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better":

https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/

(En)shit(tification) flows downhill, so tech workers grapple with their own version of this dilemma. Faced with constant pressure to increase the value flowing from their division to the company, they have to balance different, conflicting tactics, like "increasing the number of users or business customers, possibly by shifting value from the company to these stakeholders in the hopes of making it up in volume"; or "locking in my existing stakeholders and squeezing them harder, safe in the knowledge that they can't easily leave the service provided the abuse is subtle enough." The bigger a company gets, the harder it is for it to grow, so the biggest companies realize their gains by locking in and squeezing their users, not by improving their service::

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

That's where "twiddling" comes in. Digital platforms are extremely flexible, which comes with the territory: computers are the most flexible tools we have. This means that companies can automate high-speed, deceptive changes to the "business logic" of their platforms – what end users pay, how much of that goes to business customers, and how offers are presented to both:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

This kind of fraud isn't particularly sophisticated, but it doesn't have to be – it just has to be fast. In any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Under normal circumstances, this twiddling would be constrained by counterforces in society. Changing the business rules like this is fraud, so you'd hope that a regulator would step in and extinguish the conduct, fining the company that engaged in it so hard that they saw a net loss from the conduct. But when a sector gets very concentrated, its mega-firms capture their regulators, becoming "too big to jail":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Thus the tendency among the giant tech companies to practice the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: dismissing your stakeholders' outrage by saying, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Where regulators fail, technology can step in. The flexibility of digital platforms cuts both ways: when the company enshittifies its products, you can disenshittify it with your own countertwiddling: third-party ink-cartridges, alternative app stores and clients, scrapers, browser automation and other forms of high-tech guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But tech giants' regulatory capture have allowed them to expand "IP rights" to prevent this self-help. By carefully layering overlapping IP rights around their products, they can criminalize the technology that lets you wrestle back the value they've claimed for themselves, creating a new offense of "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A world where users must defer to platforms' moment-to-moment decisions about how the service operates, without the protection of rival technology or regulatory oversight is a world where companies face a powerful temptation to enshittify.

That's why we've seen so much enshittification in platforms that algorithmically rank their feeds, from Google and Amazon search to Facebook and Twitter feeds. A search engine is always going to be making a judgment call about what the best result for your search should be. If a search engine is generally good at predicting which results will please you best, you'll return to it, automatically clicking the first result ("I'm feeling lucky").

This means that if a search engine slips in the odd paid result at the top of the results, they can exploit your trusting habits to shift value from you to their investors. The congifurability of a digital service means that they can sprinkle these frauds into their services on a random schedule, making them hard to detect and easy to dismiss as lapses. Gradually, this acquires its own momentum, and the platform becomes addicted to lowering its own quality to raise its profits, and you get modern Google, which cynically lowered search quality to increase search volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

And you get Amazon, which makes $38 billion every year, accepting bribes to replace its best search results with paid results for products that cost more and are of lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order.

This presented few opportunities for enshittification, but it wasn't perfect. For users who were well-established on a platform, a reverse-chrono feed was an ungovernable torrent, where high-frequency trivialities drowned out the important posts from people whose missives were buried ten screens down in the updates since your last login.

For new users who didn't yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.

The answer was the algorithmic feed: a feed of recommendations drawn from both the accounts you followed and strangers alike. Theoretically, this could solve both problems, by surfacing the most important materials from your friends while keeping you abreast of the most important and interesting activity beyond your filter bubble. For many of us, this promise was realized, and algorithmic feeds became a source of novelty and relevance.

But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target. The critique of these algorithms has largely focused on "addictiveness" and the idea that platforms would twiddle the knobs to increase the relevance of material in your feed to "hack your engagement":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

Less noticed – and more important – was how platforms did the opposite: twiddling the knobs to remove things from your feed that you'd asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you'd enjoy, to make room for "boosted" content and advertisements:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/z9j7uy/what_happened_to_instagram_only_ads_and_accounts/

Users were helpless before this kind of twiddling. On the one hand, they were locked into the platform – not because their dopamine had been hacked by evil tech-bro wizards – but because they loved the friends they had there more than they hated the way the service was run:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

On the other hand, the platforms had such an iron grip on their technology, and had deployed IP so cleverly, that any countertwiddling technology was instantaneously incinerated by legal death-rays:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/10/google-removes-the-og-app-from-the-play-store-as-founders-think-about-next-steps/

Newer social media platforms, notably Tiktok, dispensed entirely with deterministic feeds, defaulting every user into a feed that consisted entirely of algorithmic picks; the people you follow on these platforms are treated as mere suggestions by their algorithms. This is a perfect breeding-ground for enshittification: different parts of the business can twiddle the knobs to override the algorithm for their own parochial purposes, shifting the quality:shit ratio by unnoticeable increments, temporarily toggling the quality knob when your engagement drops off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

All social platforms want to be Tiktok: nominally, that's because Tiktok's algorithmic feed is so good at hooking new users and keeping established users hooked. But tech bosses also understand that a purely algorithmic feed is the kind of black box that can be plausibly and subtly enshittified without sparking user revolts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"

Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/

This was a remarkable (and uncharacteristic) self-aware moment from the then-nineteen-year-old Zuck. Of course Zuck couldn't be trusted with that data. Whatever Jiminy Cricket voice told him to safeguard that trust was drowned out by his need to boast to pals, or participate in the creepy nonconsensual rating of the fuckability of their female classmates. Over and over again, Zuckerberg would promise to use his power wisely, then break that promise as soon as he could do so without consequence:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Zuckerberg is a cautionary tale. Aware from the earliest moments that he was amassing power that he couldn't be trusted with, he nevertheless operated with only the weakest of Ulysses pacts, like a nonbinding promise never to spy on his users:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050107221705/http://www.thefacebook.com/policy.php

But the platforms have learned the wrong lesson from Zuckerberg. Rather than treating Facebook's enshittification as a cautionary tale, they've turned it into a roadmap. The Darth Vader MBA rules high-tech boardrooms.

Algorithmic feeds and other forms of "paternalistic" content presentation are necessary and even desirable in an information-rich environment. In many instances, decisions about what you see must be largely controlled by a third party whom you trust. The audience in a comedy club doesn't get to insist on knowing the punchline before the joke is told, just as RPG players don't get to order the Dungeon Master to present their preferred challenges during a campaign.

But this power is balanced against the ease of the players replacing the Dungeon Master or the audience walking out on the comic. When you've got more than a hundred dollars sunk into a video game and an online-only friend-group you raid with, the games company can do a lot of enshittification without losing your business, and they know it:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/10/24153809/ea-in-game-ads-redux

Even if they sometimes overreach and have to retreat:

https://www.eurogamer.net/sony-overturns-helldivers-2-psn-requirement-following-backlash

A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed needs Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:

Not showing you an algorithmic feed at all;

https://joinmastodon.org/

"Composable moderation" that lets multiple parties provide feeds:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

Offering an algorithmic "For You" feed alongside of a reverse-chrono "Friends" feed, defaulting to friends;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

As above, but defaulting to "For You"

Maturity lies in being strong enough to know your weaknesses. Never trust someone who tells you that they will never yield to temptation! Instead, seek out people – and service providers – with the maturity and honesty to know how tempting temptation is, and who act before temptation strikes to make it easier to resist.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[thelifeofchuckmovie]

“The Life of Chuck” is closing a distribution deal with Neon after winning Toronto Film Festival’s prestigious people’s choice award.

TIFF’s audience prize has historically been a reliable predictors of eventual Oscar success. It’s unclear if that’ll be the case this year, though “The Life of Chuck” has received largely positive reviews. The film will likely be released in summer of 2025 and will receive an awards push in the fall. Terms of the deal, which has not been finalized, weren’t immediately available. A spokesperson for Neon declined to comment.

Adapted from Stephen King’s 2020 novella, “The Life of Chuck” stars Tom Hiddleston and was directed by Mike Flanagan. Billed as a “life-affirming” story about an ordinary man named Charles Krantz, the film is split into three distinct chapters that unfurl in reverse chronological order and set against the backdrop of a world that appears to be slowly crumbling. Mark Hamill, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Jacob Tremblay co-star in “The Life of Chuck,” which has been compared to King adaptations like “Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me” rather than “It” or “Pet Sematary.”

In the film, the titular Chuck has an extended dance sequence. So Hiddleston, who plays the inhibited accountant whose life is shrouded in mystery, endured a six-week crash course to learn everything from jazz, swing, polka, samba and cha-cha to quickstep and moonwalk.

“I had to do all of these technical dances, none of which I have any training in,” Hiddleston told Variety at TIFF. “There are some that came more easily than others. I found I love dancing jazz and swing. Bossa nova is a technical thing that took my hips a minute to get my head around. Polka is like a 100-meter sprint. It feels like a gallop.”

WME Independent repped “The Life of Chuck.”

Elsewhere on the festival circuit, Neon landed rights to Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, as well as Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” The studio’s recent titles include the breakout horror hit “Longlegs,” which has grossed $100 million globally to date; “Cuckoo,” a mysterious thriller starring Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens; and “Immaculate,” a twisted religious tale led by Sydney Sweeney.

[firenati0n]

year in review: favorite lines! :) <3

hello hello! I was tagged by the lovely @anincompletelist in this adorable tag game where we share our top favorite segments from our published fics and/or wips! :)

I only have one published fic LOL so here are some of my favorite pieces from that and three out of four wips right now (four is buck wild to me considering i had zero like ten days ajflakjfds).

i saved some of my real faves for y'all to read in worm fic (i didn't want to spoil my favorite paragraph at the end LOL). I have linked the fic as well as the tags with wip snips :)

from our world, mine and his alone (the midnight train to go)

Deep breath in. “By the way. Digging the cardigan, Henry. Very…” He rifled through his extensive vocab for literally any appropriate adjective. Refined? Boring. Professional? Practical, but also boring.   “Very…?” Henry raised an eyebrow, long fingers wrapped around a cup of tea. Earl Grey, Henry had said a while ago, but Alex couldn't be sure. He had been terribly distracted by said fingers, wondering where else those fingers could— What Alex’s distracted, useless worms in his left temporal lobe decided to supply him with as a response was: “Slutty-English-Literature-professor core.” Alex was going to jump off the train. He was going to change his name. He was going to get a lobotomy, as a treat.  “Excuse me?!” Henry sputtered into his tea, turning red alarmingly quickly. His sexy-librarian cardigan was collateral damage, tea splattered down the front. 

from the full spectrum of human emotion (WIP, The Proposal (2009 movie) AU, eta 2024):

And selfishly, he’s pretty fucking scared for his career trajectory if it doesn’t work out. He can’t start over, he can’t. His resume can’t take it, and neither can his ego.  He can already hear Oscar clicking his tongue and shaking his head, practically taste the disappointment in Ellen’s pitied gaze and outstretched hand. He absolutely cannot give them the silver bullet that goes clean through his erratic heart and wrenches him back home. He loves Austin, breathes it, and yet…and yet. He just can’t return, not when he’s so close. He still has so much to prove, so much to hold up to the sky and say I’m here, I can take it, I did it, I’m good enough. It almost swallows him whole—his overwhelming love for his family, his nostalgia for the Texas sun. But it’s just not enough to—

from queerano de bergerac (WIP, Cyrano / The Half of It (2020 movie) AU, eta 2024):

“Amber, everyone thinks you’re pretty, it is an objective fact. Irrefutable, even.” “Aw, Henry! That’s so nice of you to say, thank you.” She flashes him a genuine smile. She’s sweet, Henry is loath to admit.  “You’re welcome. But. This letter…we need to workshop it a bit. Make it more personal? More about who Alex is as a person, and not who we see him as. What’s below the surface? What are his hidden depths that you are willing to explore? How do you show you’re in love, not just tell?” Amber raises an eyebrow. “Okay. How do I do that?” She sniffs. “I thought I was being so obvious when I asked if he had lunch plans.” “...You asked him if he had lunch plans during our…one lunch period at school?” “Okay, fine! I’m not the best with fancy words like you, Mr. Future English Literature Major.”

from untitled continuation of worm fic (WIP, eta 2024):

If Alex could land Henry's phone number (a bit forcefully, if he remembered Henry's tone correctly) using sheer fucking charisma, he could nail a date with the guy. Easy peasy.  Except. Except for the fact that Alex's brain seemed to rapidly degrade in every conceivable way when faced with Henry's fairytale hair and anime-worthy blue eyes. Henry's presence was lethal for every ounce of Alex's grey matter. With every blink of his doe eyes, Henry obliterated another one of Alex's (already fucking limited!) brain worms. They would writhe in agony, unable to shake the vicelike grip of Henry's charisma, doomed to a slow and sensual death. Alex was so fucked, and not in the fun, safe, and lubed way. 

+

no pressure tagging @ninzied @inexplicablymine @anincompletelist @myheartalivewrites @suseagull04 @priincebutt @sparklepocalypse @kiwiana-writes @onward--upward @nocoastposts @user-anakin @wordsofhoneydew @littlemisskittentoes @happiness-of-the-pursuit @matherines @lizzie-bennetdarcy @celeritas2997 @sherryvalli @gayrootvegetable @ssmtskw @affectionatelyrs @tinyarmedtrex @hgejfmw-hgejhsf @14carrotghoul @orchidscript @rmd-writes @dustratcentral @eusuntgratie @magicandarchery @leaves-of-laurelin @songliili @cricketnationrise @msmarvelouswinchester @leojfitz @dragonflylady77 @cha-melodius and open tag for anyone else wishing to share! have fun :)

xoxo roops

[justinssportscorner]

Anthony Castrovince at MLB.com:

Major League Baseball’s embrace of the Negro Leagues is now recognized in the record book, resulting in new-look leaderboards fronted in several prominent places by Hall of Famer Josh Gibson and an overdue appreciation of many other Black stars.

Following the 2020 announcement that seven different Negro Leagues from 1920-1948 would be recognized as Major Leagues, MLB announced Wednesday that it has followed the recommendations of the independent Negro League Statistical Review Committee in absorbing the available Negro Leagues numbers into the official historical record. "We are proud that the official historical record now includes the players of the Negro Leagues," Commissioner Rob Manfred said. "This initiative is focused on ensuring that future generations of fans have access to the statistics and milestones of all those who made the Negro Leagues possible. Their accomplishments on the field will be a gateway to broader learning about this triumph in American history and the path that led to Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Dodger debut."

Gibson, the legendary catcher and power hitter who played for the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords, is now MLB’s all-time leader in batting average, slugging percentage and OPS and holds the all-time single-season records in each of those categories. Gibson is one of more than 2,300 Negro Leagues players -- including three living players who played in the 1920-1948 era in Bill Greason, Ron Teasley and Hall of Famer Willie Mays -- included in a newly integrated database at MLB.com that combines the Negro Leagues numbers with the existing data from the American League, National League and other Major Leagues from history. “The Negro Leagues were a product of segregated America, created to give opportunity where opportunity did not exist,” said Negro Leagues expert and historian Larry Lester. “As Bart Giamatti, former Commissioner of Baseball, once said, ‘We must never lose sight of our history, insofar as it is ugly, never to repeat it, and insofar as it is glorious, to cherish it.’”

[...]

Why are the Negro Leagues being added to the historical record?

Essentially, to right a wrong. It certainly was not the fault of Black baseball stars such as Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Oscar Charleston that they were forbidden from participating in the AL or NL, and recognizing the Negro Leagues as Major Leagues is in keeping with long-held beliefs that the quality of the segregation-era Negro Leagues circuits was comparable to the MLB product in that same time period.

[...]

Which Negro Leagues will be included in the official record?

There are seven, and they operated between 1920 and 1948. The reason for the starting point is that attempts to develop Negro Leagues prior to 1920 were ultimately unsuccessful and lacked a league structure. And 1948 was deemed to be a reasonable end point because it was the last year of the Negro National League and the segregated World Series. After that point, the Negro League teams and leagues that had endured were stripped of much of their talent.

The seven leagues are as follows:

• Negro National League (I) (1920–1931) • Eastern Colored League (1923–1928) • American Negro League (1929) • East-West League (1932) • Negro Southern League (1932) • Negro National League (II) (1933–1948) • Negro American League (1937–1948)

Major League Baseball is recognizing the stats of 7 different Negro Leagues between 1920 and 1948 into the record book. This comes almost four years after the league announced that the leagues would be classified as Major Leagues.

See Also:

Yahoo! Sports: Negro Leagues statistics to be officially integrated into MLB historical record

[salvadorbonaparte]

2024 in Films - Part I

I watched too many films again this year so here's some reviews from the first quarter of 2024

January

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) - Pretty much the opposite college experience as depicted in 3 Idiots and also there's a scene where a child spontaneously converts to Islam to keep a wedding from happening and that works

Rocky (1976) - I got a little too into that series this year

The Karate Kid (1984) - Turns out the original is actually pretty good and I just watched the bad reboot as a kid! Oops!

Face/Off (1997) - This feels like it should be a fake film within a different film. Why is the face transplant plan A? There are some great scenes though, like the wife not recognising her husband, that made me question if this is actually a really deep exploration of identity. And then it got silly again.

Theater Camp (2023) - Almost makes me wish summer camps were real

Gone are the Days! (1963) - I watched this for Alan Alda's terrible high pitched southern accent but stayed for Ossie Davis infectious energy

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - Manic Pixie Dream Girl Amnesia. Joke aside, why is it that I can't stand Jim Carrey in comedies but love him in dramas

Moonstruck (1987) - This won an Oscar????

February

That Touch of Mink (1962) - homophobia stops insider trading apparently

Carol (2015) - This probably would have given me a sexuality crisis in 2015

Ay Carmela (1990) - no scene in any film will portray the horror of the civil war and fascism as well as the half eaten dinner table in the abandoned house

Rope (1948) - people only focus on the gay subtext (which is real) but can we pleeaaase talk about the politics of the film

Catch-22 (1970) - did a pretty good job in adapting a book that is really difficult to adapt

Platoon (1986) - This was another entry in my grad school watch list

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) - I wanted to watch this since forever but wanted to wait until I could understand it in Spanish. Well worth the hype.

Rocky II (1979) - a sequel that initially made me go "was this really necessary" but then brought me a lot of joy

Rocky III (1982) - Intricate Rituals

Rocky IV (1985) - A metaphor for the Cold War but also. Bad.

Rocky V (1990) - Bad

Rocky Balboa (2006) - Better but like what the fuck was that editing during the fight

March

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018) - I love when stand up comedy is recommended to me with "this will make you cry and change your life" and then it's true

The Holdovers (2023) - Liked it so much I watched it twice but the guy playing Kountze looked too modern like he definitely knows what an iPhone is

The Zone of Interest (2023) - the banality of evil is kind of a cliché phrase by now but it's real

American Fiction (2023) - clever satire, if I say more it probably turns into an essay

Capote (2005) - Rip Truman Capote you would have loved true crime podcasts. Also this was a continuation of my Philip Seymour Hoffman haunting

An American Werewolf in London (1981) - I love when a werewolf film doubles as survivors guilt

Poor Things (2023) - Horrible

Creed (2015) - Pretty much just Rocky but with a 2015 soundtrack and I'm not mad about it

A Fantastic Woman (2017) - a wrote a long ass review on letterboxd about this film is about loss

Creed II (2018) - As haunted as a sports movie is allowed to get before having to add real ghosts (please tell me there's sports films with ghosts). It's about "like father like son". It's about legacy. It's about being defined by your family names. It's about fatherhood. It's about breaking the cycle.

Creed III (2023) - Finally a film that asks the brave question "what if Rocky V was good?"

Dune (1984) - I liked the worms

The Joel Files (2001) - the story of two families in the third reich and one of them happened to be Billy Joel's

Oppenheimer (2023) - Would have made me insufferable during my teenage physics phase

Shiva Baby (2020) - a film that's also an anxiety attack

Searching for Sugar Man (2012) - insane!!!

Menashe (2017) - first Yiddish film I ever watched

Fruitvale Station (2013) - haunted

I, Tonya (2017) - a film keenly aware of the unreliability and subjectivity of both interviews and biopics, this is a sports biopic but also a moving story about the human need for love and the cycle of abuse and it's also damn funny.

Nosferatu (1922) - both scarier and more boring than the novel and also uniquely blood libel flavoured

Mädchen in Uniform (1931) - people were right this is gay

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) - Lovecraftian horror for cottagecore lesbians

I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians (2018) - history repeats itself, first as a tragedy then as a farce

La Haine (1995) - I watched this because of my professor :)

A Most Wanted Man (2014) - Philip Seymour Hoffman Haunting Continuation

Ödipussi (1988) - "Mommy calls me Pussi" is an actual quote

13 Little Donkeys and the Sun Court (1958) - Yeehaw???

[thenerdparty]

Twisters film review

Written by Shawn Eastridge

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first: between starring in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some with Tyler Hoechlin and now with David Corenswet in Twisters, Glen Powell has worked with TWO Supermen in the past decade. A true honor and privilege, and one I hope he doesn’t take for granted.

Am I the only one who’s paying attention to these things? Does this mean I have a Superman problem? Yes and yes? Great. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the review!

Twisters is the latest in a batch of sequels that arrives at least two decades later than it should have. (I’m looking at you, Top Gun: Maverick–and don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.) Maybe I’m just out of the loop and the world has been clamoring for a sequel to the 1996 box office smash, but I have a sneaking suspicion that by the time we officially reached the 21st century, it wasn’t near the top of anyone’s cinematic wish list.

That said, when the Twisters trailer dropped during Super Bowl Sunday, I was more delighted than I’d ever expected to be. (I’m almost positive it had something to do with the added “s” at the end of its title.) That initial delight grew into genuine excitement when I learned the film was being helmed by Lee Isaac Chung, the writer and director of one of my favorite films from the past decade, Minari. (That 2020 release, nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, was lost in the midst of the pandemic, and is well-worth seeking out if you missed it.) But how would Chung fair helming a multi-million dollar blockbuster sequel? Would his tendency towards low-key human drama be drowned out by the genre’s demands for rip-roaring special effects to appease the popcorn-munching masses? Would he truly put the “s” in “Twisters”??

If Top Gun: Maverick proved anything back in good ol’ 2022, it’s that you can have the best of both worlds: a sequel that not only goes above and beyond expectations but delivers an effort superior to its predecessor. Look, I get a kick from watching Twister as much as the next person. Its special effects still hold up, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt are a charming duo, and it’s lovely to see a pre-Boogie Nights Philip Seymour Hoffman doing his best Bill and Ted impersonation. But it’s no masterpiece (disasterpiece?). There was always plenty of room for improvement and Twisters rises to the occasion with more thoughtful storytelling and better drawn characters and emotional conflicts. It’s not particularly nuanced, but its heart’s in the right place, and how often can you say that about your average modern day blockbuster? And while Twisters is no Top Gun: Maverick (for one, it doesn’t have the benefit of Tom Cruise insisting that they take on real tornadoes. Wait, how has no one pitched that movie?), when it comes to crowd-pleasing, heartfelt, pulse-pounder blockbusting, Chung and his amazing cast and crew manage to get the job done and then some. 

Sure, Twisters’ characters and their relationships with one another are relatively simple and straightforward. Its screenplay, written by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), based on a story by Joseph Kosinski (director of the aforementioned Top Gun: Maverick), hits just about every plot beat you’d expect. In fact, I’d go so far as to say there might not be a single genuinely surprising moment in this entire story. It’s likely your average moviegoer (a.k.a. Mom and Dad) could call the film’s plot beat for beat from the get-go. But that’s okay! Mom and Dad are allowed to get one right every so often! Chung and Smith aren’t out to revolutionize the genre. Twisters is more of a refinement of the disaster movie formula, and it improves upon its predecessor in nearly every respect. 

Besides, whatever shortcomings are evident in the script are cushioned not only by Chung’s confident direction but a top-notch cast led by Daisy Edgar Jones (Normal People, Where the Crawdads Sing) and 2024’s go-to leading man Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man). These two are genuine superstars and manage to effortlessly carry this massive, multi-million dollar effort on their shoulders. Rounding them out is an excellent supporting cast, featuring Anthony Ramos (Hamilton, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts), Sasha Lane (American Honey), and Brandon Perea (Nope, The OA). There’s even what threatens to be a stock “along-for-the-ride” journalist character, whose portrayal by Harry Hadden-Paton (Downton Abbey, The Crown) is so sincere and genuine you end up loving him as much as the rest of the raucous crew. These performances are strong enough to elevate the material, grounding it in an emotional reality that might have collapsed in on itself in lesser hands. Kudos to Chung for never missing an opportunity to home in on these characters’ small emotions and character beats, humanizing the whole enterprise. 

But what would Twisters be without its tornadoes? And you’ll be pleased to know Twisters’ action delivers, providing solid thrills that end up being more involving than your standard blockbuster. Working with seasoned cinematographer Dan Mindel (Star Trek ‘09, The Force Awakens) and top notch sound and VFX departments, Chung does an expert job of dropping the audience right smack-dab in the middle of nature’s gargantuan terrors. The thrills are more visceral and hard-hitting than the original. And yes, while this might have something to do with the massive improvements in special effects in the nearly 30 years since Twister was released, it also has a lot to do with Chung’s documentary-esque approach to capturing these sequences. It’s a MOVIE THEATER movie in the “go for broke” way you want it to be.

FINAL VERDICT:

Despite its plot contrivances and simplistic characterizations, Twisters has thrills and heart to boot. It’s simultaneously a throwback to the days of simpler, straightforward cinematic thrill rides and an exciting, forward-looking venture that suggests more on the cloudy-skied horizon. As for me, I’d follow Daisy Edgar Jones and Glen Powell into any tornado and I can’t wait to see David Corenswet switch gears and save people from tornadoes in James Gunn’s Superman next year. (And you thought I was going to conclude this review without referencing Superman. Oh, how little you know me.) 

I award Twisters 3.5 flying cows out of 5.

[animaletras]

Lançado em março de 2020, bem no início da pandemia, “Dois irmãos: Uma jornada fantástica”, filme da Pixar dirigido por Dan Scanlon, passou por um momento delicado, e não foi muito exibido nas salas de cinema ao redor do mundo, mas definitivamente é um filme que merece atenção.  Em uma realidade na qual a magia existe mas foi substituída pela praticidade da tecnologia, acompanhamos a história de Ian e Barley, dois irmãos muito diferentes com um objetivo em comum: executar um feitiço para trazer o pai de volta à vida durante vinte e quatro horas. 

Inspirado em jogos de tabuleiro e em card games de fantasia, como Magic the Gathering e Dungeons and Dragons, a obra constrói um universo mágico consistente, com regras muito bem delimitadas. Como o esperado da Pixar, os elementos mágicos foram utilizados com muita sensibilidade, acrescentando várias nuances ao desenvolvimento dos personagens e à própria aventura.

Ao mesmo tempo em que a magia em Dois irmãos contribui para o desenvolvimento emocional dos personagens, se tornando um elemento essencial para a narrativa, nós também embarcamos nas falhas e dificuldades destes personagens, que precisam superar suas questões pessoais a cada desafio proposto pela aventura. 

Com personagens envolventes, o longa nos deixa imerso nessa jornada, de maneira que conseguimos sentir a evolução dos protagonistas e também nos emocionamos com as mensagens da história, que envolvem família, luto e amadurecimento.

[pleistocene-pride]

Happy Ice Age Week! Ornimegalonyx better known as the giant Cuban owl or giant cursorial owl is a giant now extinct relative of the modern burrowing owl, which lived throughout the caribbean during the Pleistocene period some 126,000 to 11,000 years ago. The first known remains of Ornimegalonyx consisting of subfossil post cranial remains collected from Cueva de Pío Domingo, Pinar del Río province, western Cuba, on 2 January 1954 by members of the Sociedad Espeleológica de Cuba. These were then named and described by the father of Cuban vertebrate paleontology, the late Oscar Arredondo that same year, who because of the size of the bones believed them to belong to a Phorusrhacid terror bird, giving the animal the name Ornimegalonyx meaning “bird with gigantic claws”. With the specific name arredondoi referring to himself. In 1961, Pierce Brodkorb reviewed the findings and identified them to have belonged to an owl which he formally named Ornimegalonyx oteroi, which was was eventually adopted by Oscar Arredondo. Remains have been abundant throughout the island, in pleistocene era cave deposits, and today at least 3 near complete skeletons have been recovered. In the past, three additional species of Ornimegalonyx besides O. oteroi were regarded as valid those being Ornimegalonyx minor, Ornimegalonyx gigas, & Ornimegalonyx acevedoi. However a 2020 study concluded that those species are all synonyms of O. oteroi, and describe a new valid species, Ornimegalonyx ewingi, from material formerly assigned to the prehistoric horned owl Bubo osvaldoi. Reaching up to 3.7ft (1.1m) tall, and 20 to 30lbs (9 to 13.5kgs) in weight, Ornimegalonyx sported very long powerfully built legs for its size. With a short tail, bulky body, and reduced wings, ornimegalonyx would have only been capable of short flights similar to modern turkeys or peafowl. It is then theorized that these owls would have been strong runners which spent most of there time on the ground, hence the alternate name, cursorial. In life the Cuban giant owl is believed to have preyed principally on large terrestrial vertebrates such as lizards, hutias, and smaller ground sloths.

Art used can be found at the following links

[bisluthq]

I’m going to rant for a bit so bear with me.

I never really play attention to Oscar predictions (specifically this early) but I keep seeing people talk about Saoirse’s chances for The Outrun and the way they talk about it sounds like they just don’t want her to be nominated. I don’t know that she will because honestly this feels like a weird year where none of the movies seem like sure Oscar contenders (the way films like Oppenheimer, Barbie and KOTFM were) but people are acting like there’s no chance she can get a lone nomination with this while also believing Angelina Jolie is 100% winning (even though people like Kristen lost in a similar situation) and thinking Amy Adams is 100% getting a nomination for Nightbitch which doesn’t look good. I think the chances of Saoirse getting a nomination are low, but the way people are talking about her vs other actresses feels like they just don’t want her there because they point out everything that’s against her and everything that’s for the other actresses without ever pointing out the opposite.

Then there’s the fact that she will most likely be campaigning The Outrun for lead. They’ve gone to so many festivals, she got the silver medallion at Telluride and they’re doing a million Q&As with screenings. You can tell she’s really pushing for it. We also know this movie means a lot to her and she produced it so she probably wants to get a nomination out of it. Most places are predicting she’ll go supporting for Blitz, which makes sense, but when I see people talking about Blitz they’re obsessed with her going lead for that? And saying that she will drop The Outrun and campaign Blitz for lead when I can’t see her doing that? I will also say that a year ago I would’ve believed she had more chances with Blitz, but right now? I’m not so sure.

They keep saying The Outrun has bad reviews but they aren’t any worse than the reviews for most, if not all, the other movies with lead actress contenders. People also bring up the rotten tomatoes score as if movies with lower rotten tomatoes scores don’t get Oscar nominated? It’s wild because I never participate in Oscar predictions but merely from observing who has been nominated I feel like I know more than most of these people making predictions? Like, I do think it will be hard for Saoirse to get nominated given that it is a very small movie, but people are acting like a lone nomination is a crazy thing when it happens like every year? And honestly, she probably deserves a nomination for this more than Paul did for Aftersun. Another small Scottish movie that’s probably a better film, but I don’t believe his performance was better (and I haven’t even seen Saoirse’s performance yet). And all of the other actresses have things going against them too.

It also annoys me that they act like Saoirse is like Florence or Anya or any other actress that age. But Saoirse is a 4 time Oscar nominee that got her first nomination like 15 years ago. They keep treating her like she’s new to all of this instead of putting her with older actresses who have had a career as long as hers.

Last but not least, I HATE that people complain when she chooses roles like Bad Apples or Foe because it means she won’t be getting an Oscar nomination every couple of years like back in 2016-2020, and they say her career is going downhill and things like that. But then they complain about her doing The Outrun and Blitz because apparently she only chooses “Oscar baity” roles?? Which is it?? I will agree that Ammonite was Oscar bait but I don’t think either of these are. I think she wanted to work with Steve McQueen and we know why she did The Outrun.

I kind of want her to go back to making bad movies so these people forget she exists and shut up. Maybe I’m being a cupcake, but what annoys me isn’t people saying she isn’t going to get a nomination (because like I said I do think her chances are low), it’s the way people talk about her vs other actresses. I just also feel like people don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk about her? It’s like when people talk about her doing bad movies now when they’re all better than what she was doing in most of the early 2010s. She had some mid to bad movies between Brooklyn and Lady Bird and then again between Lady Bird and Little Women but people act like she only made Oscar nominated movies and now she’s doing trash. They keep comparing her to actresses her age when she’s been around for so much longer. People should be forced to read her Wikipedia or imdb before they speak about her.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, I apologize for any typos because I did not proof read this and I need a gun 🙃

fair enough lol. This is very long but you’re right. I might have more ideas on this later but you’ve said it all quite well and - again because we’ve been talking food and anon inspired me - I’m making soup lol.

[mariacallous]

Emmy-nominated Succession star Sarah Snook will hit the West End stage in January 2024 in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. According to Deadline, the production may also have Broadway in its sights. 

Snook will portray all 26 characters in the classic tale which will open at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in January 2024 for a limited 10-week engagement.

According to Baz Bamigboye, Snook will perform the production from Australian theatre and opera director, Kip Williams, for two hours with no intermission. 

Snook is best known for her Emmy-nominated performance as Siobhan Roy in the HBO drama Succession, which recently completed an acclaimed four season run. 

Described as "one of the greatest performances ever seen on an Australian stage" (Time Out), Dorian Gray employs multiple live cameras and pre-recorded video which will allow Snook to create an audacious cascade of theatrical transformations. The production premiered in 2020 to five-star reviews and has garnered stellar receptions and returned for an encore run at Sydney Theatre Company in 2022. 

Building on a career-long fascination with theatrical innovation and spectacular reinventions of classic stories (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Suddenly Last Summer, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), STC Artistic Director Kip Williams has written an adaption of Wilde's century-old fable that is a magnificent mirror to our times.

[historyhermann]

RWBY Volume 9 Spoiler-Filled Review [part 1]

RWBY is an anime-inspired science fantasy action-adventure series, using computer animation, which has run for eight seasons, known as "volumes". Originally created by animator and writer Monty Oum, in 2013, and continued after his death in 2015, RWBY is the flagship series of Rooster Teeth, a digital media company and subdivision of Warner Bros. Discovery. As a warning, this review will discuss death, suicide, blood, torture, animal death, physical (and emotional) abuse, and other related themes.

Reprinted from Pop Culture Maniacs and Wayback Machine. This was the thirty-first article I wrote for Pop Culture Maniacs. This post was originally published on April 26, 2023.

This young adult animated series primarily centers on the four primary protagonists: Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, and Yang Xiao Long, with the series name deriving from their forenames. Set in a fictional world named Remnant, these characters, and others, train to become warriors (huntresses or huntsmen), so they can save the world from monsters known as Grimm, which are driven by fear and dedicated to destroying humanity.

Apart from the aforementioned protagonists, others, such as Ozma/Ozpin/Oscar Pine, Lie Ren, Nora Valkyrie, Qrow Branwen, Robyn Hill, and Jaune Arc, help them fight against evil forces. Uniquely, the series has theme songs, primarily by Casey Lee Williams, at the beginning of each volume, which foreshadows what will happen, making the show unique in its own way.

The show's ninth volume is unlike the previous volumes, which had a classic conflict between good vs. evil, intricate story telling, horror elements, and character development. That is because the protagonists are stranded in a magical land known as the Ever After. Even so, they retain a semblance which allows them to have superpowers-of-sorts, so they can either manipulate objects, disorient people, use super strength, or have other abilities.

Morally grey characters are inherent to RWBY, including the Ace Ops or General James Ironwood. In contrast, Cinder Fall breaks from the strict dictates of her leader, Salem. The latter, and her enforcers, are determined to do anything to achieve their goals, even engaging in human experimentation. This interlinks with the blood, gore, and death of some characters.

The series' large focus on sci-fi and magic elements goes beyond characters like Penny Polendina (voiced by Taylor "Pelto" McNee), a cyborg girl, and scrolls which record and receive messages. Arguably, in this volume, the series has received a "directional reset" and ended on a strong note, even setting up a possible volume 10.

One of the most controversial parts of RWBY, up to the current volume, has been its LGBTQ representation. There have been lesbian couples, like Saphron and Terra-Arc, and lesbian characters who have crushes on the protagonists, as is the case for Ilia Amitola (voiced by Cherami Leigh). This was strengthened by the role of May Marigold, the first trans character in the series, in Volume 8. She was voiced by trans female voice actress, Kdin Jenzen. She did not appear in Volume 9 and Jenzen has been critical of the company's practices. This volume is the last one that Jenzen will be working on, as she was reportedly laid off from the company.

Some fans have held out hope that the Bumbleby ship (Blake and Yang) would become canon, especially after Arryn Zech, Blake's voice actress, confirmed her character as bisexual in May 2020. This came to pass in this volume and there have been hints of other possible romantic ships, which I'll discuss later in this review.

One of the strengths of this series is its visuals, which have improved dramatically from the first volume, and its voice actors. Furthermore, although the fandom of this series can be toxic, the show's fans have come up with colorful ship names. This includes femslash ones, such as Baked Alaska (Yang and Neopolitan), Blood Mint (Ruby and Emerald Sustrai), Freezerburn (Yang and Weiss), Ladybug (Ruby and Blake), and White Rose (Ruby and Weiss), even though some of these are problematic.

The surreal nature of RWBY's ninth volume makes it fundamentally different from the canon-adjacent anime series, RWBY: Ice Queendom. The latter focused on Weiss Schnee, especially on how she needs to "unlearn her white supremacist thinking" and become a better person. There was a non-binary character named Shion Zaiden (voiced by Hiroki Nanami, and Jenzen in English). It was confirmed in an interview with the show's staff and producers. Unfortunately, similar characters have yet to appear in RWBY, even though both series share fight scenes, strong visuals, and soundtrack.

RWBY is somewhat complicated by issues that Rooster Teeth has dealt with over the years. For one, actor Vic Mignogna, who voiced Qrow Branwen until Volume 6, was removed after accusations of sexual harassment. Ryan Haywood and Adam Kovic were either involved in scandals which related to their leaked nude photographs or grooming underage fans, in the case of Haywood. Furthermore, anonymous reviews focused on a negative crunch culture at Rooster Teeth, especially at their animation division, leading to the resignation of Gray Haddock (creator of gen:LOCK), head of this division, as a result.

Former hosts of Rooster Teeth programs stated that they received racist and sexist abuse from the audience. Jenzen argued that an upper manager engaged in transphobic and homophobic abuse. This was followed by other employees posting similar stories. In response, the company released statements arguing they were taking steps to improve the work culture, review pay parity, and even replace the entire Human Resources department, while reducing the number of shows being produced. These issues were compounded by the arrest of then-vice president of Rooster Teeth, Michael Quinn, for assaulting his wife, in November 2019.

In terms of RWBY itself, fans previously claimed that the show queerbaited after the death of a character in the show's seventh season, believing that Qrow Brawnen and Clover Ebi were canon. In reality, the series never directly showed them together. The argument that Clover's death is queerbaiting, is like saying Wednesday did the same by not making the friendship between Wednesday Addams and Enid Sinclair a romantic one, despite the false insistence of fans that it was canon. As such, it is no surprise that some see RWBY as a lost cause and not worth supporting.

From my perspective, I think that regardless of these issues, and the fact that Rooster Teeth seems to be a toxic work environment, RWBY still has value. This is because of the hard work of the animators and writers, known as CRWBY. In fact, I would argue that the latest volume is the strongest in the series up to this point and it has some of the best animation. Although some may balk at the show's style, or even claim that the protagonist's clothing constitutes fan service for the audience, the reality is that the show's style makes it stand out, apart from any other action-adventure science fantasy.

Unlike previous volumes, the ninth volume premiered on Crunchyroll on February 18, as part of "a one-year exclusive release with Crunchyroll", and it will then release on the Rooster Teeth website in 2024. This is a big deal because the series is primary show for Rooster Teeth and its streaming platform of the same name. So, it may portend the end or reduction of the platform.

Whether the worst for Rooster Teeth comes to a head, I'm not sure. It seems very likely that the show will receive a tenth volume, which may be the final season. I would be very surprised if RWBY is not renewed, as it has generated a lot of buzz, has generally strong ratings on Crunchyroll, and, undoubtedly, has thousands of people watching each episode.

The ninth volume of RWBY is captivating. Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang try and find themselves, and anything they have lost. There are new characters like a talking mouse named Little (voiced by Luci Christian), the Curious Cat (voiced by Robbie Daymond), which fulfills a specific role in a land which has many characteristics of Alice in Wonderland, and enemies such as the jabberwalkers (voiced by Richard Norman). Little later becomes Ruby's emotional support animal of sorts.

I was further drawn into this volume by the story of Alyx, her brother Lewis, the Rusted Knight, and the Curious Cat. This was weaved together artfully, with the audience knowing as much as the characters about the real story as the series went forward. This included the revelation that Juane became the Rusted Knight and was reportedly betrayed by Alyx (voiced by Shara Kirby). He became trapped in the Ever After for over 40 years, causing him to become a "mature" older man, who has a steed named Juniper.

The volume interrogates Juane's hero complex. It breaks down when the town of the Paper Pleasers is flooded (possibly mirroring what happened to Mantle in Volume 8) and he can save none of them. He admits as much in the seventh episode, saying he "not ok" or "right". In some ways I see a parallel between Juane (voiced by Miles Luna) and General Ironwood (voiced by Jason Rose). Juane seems to be just as tired and angry at people, thinking he is "saving" people by making "hard choices". Ironwood is different as be became an unhinged military dictator who turned against the protagonists.

Even more than any previous volume, this 10-episode volume of RWBY has a specific focus on Ruby. She begins a downward spiral, although her sister, Yang, repeatedly tries to ask her what is wrong, often to no avail. Understandably, she is further shaken when her friends are shrunk to miniature size. She begins to have so much self-doubt that she isn't sure is a huntress/hero anymore.

This volume shows the extreme pressure Ruby is under as team leader, as she puts the needs of others ahead of her own. This is shown directly when she can't even use her weapon, Crescent Rose, in the show's seventh episode, after having flashbacks to traumatic events from the previous volumes. This is almost akin to the Steven Universe Future episode where Steven Universe tells his friend's mother about all the childhood trauma he has experienced over his life time.

Getting back to RWBY, at the end of episode seven, Ruby has a breakdown, asking why she has to be the leader. She criticizes everyone else for not devoting time to solve her problems, for helping Juane's "make-believe" friends, and seeming to disregard what she is going through. I thought it was interesting that none her teammates push her over the edge, but Juane, who has experienced as much trauma as her, ends up blaming her for everything that went wrong.

Although Juane has a valid point, it is wrong of him to put the blame on her entirely. In addition, Ruby's plan in Volume 8, to use the staff of creation to create paths to evacuate citizens from Mantle to Vacuo, clearly opened them up to a lot of danger. But, its failure wasn't entirely her fault. If Cinder hadn't asked about Ruby's plan, thanks to magic lamp, it might have been successful. Even so, they seemed to ignore the advice from the genie, in the staff of creation, who told them to "not fall".

This reality mattered little to Ruby, who felt overwhelmed by everything, and fled, shocking the rest of her team. Having Ruby snap at her team in the ways she did was inevitable based on what has happened through the previous seasons. In fact, she was already under a lot of stress by the end of Volume 8 and almost lost her life multiple times over.

In watching this volume, I am reminded of the mental health struggles of Steven in Steven Universe Future and Steven Universe, and Julian Chase in the ever-problematic gen:LOCK. However, it is different for Ruby. In the eighth episode, she pushes away Little and faces Neopolitan, a mute villain-of-sorts in a mansion, with Neo bringing back ghosts of Ruby's past to torture her. Through Roman Torchwick, Neo "says" that she will enjoy seeing Ruby break down.

At the end of the same episode, drinks a cup of tea, poured by Neo, with a leaf from the ever-powerful tree. She appears to end her own life, staring into the eyes of her sister, Yang, and feels that the world would be better without her. As this happens, her teammates remain in shock over what she did.

This serious tone of RWBY is only part of the show's mature, and distressing themes. It is coupled with death, loss, destruction, and horrific creatures such as the Grimm, which are attracted to those who are afraid or scared. Although such beings don't appear in this volume, the above scene is followed by the Curious Cat possessing Neo for his own ends. The devious cat sees Neo as an "empty host", and the cat-as-Neo is a being which Weiss, Blake, Yang, and Jaune fight in the last two episodes of this volume.

How RWBY depicts suicide is fundamentally different from how it is depicted in the continually controversial gen:LOCK. The latter featured all of the characters killing themselves, then each becoming the equivalent of a swarm of locusts to defeat the enemy. In the case of Ruby, there are questions as to whether she ended her own life, or she only engaged a suicide attempt.

The final nail of Ruby's descent into a dark place, Neo, is more than a villain. She is not completely heartless, even though she terrorized Ruby into the drinking the tea and killed Little with a twist of her heeled shoe. By the end of the volume, it is clear that she  may have some form of redemption or will become an ally-of-sorts to the show's heroes. Ruby even says that Neo will find herself, one way or another, as she falls back into the Ever After.

In terms of the tonal shifts in this volume of RWBY, they were not as well-executed as they could have been. At the same time, it should be remembered that a lot has happened in a short period of time, leaving Weiss, Blake, and Yang, especially after Ruby "ascends", without much time to process to process everything. Furthermore, it would be inaccurate to say that Ruby's teammates don't care about her, as they clearly do, in more ways than one.

The volume was effective in connecting the previous volumes to this one, with an emphasis on the themes of self-acceptance and self-love. Ruby exemplifies this directly. She isn't sure what choice she wants to make, even as those outside the tree, like Yang, Weiss, and Blake, accept whatever path Ruby wants to go down. At one point, Ruby thinks she might be doing more harm than good, looks at all of the possibilities in front of her, and grabs her mom's weapon. In the end, she embraces herself. This isn't as much change as some had been expecting, but it is a powerful message that you are enough, without a need to remake yourself.

The ever-present tree in this volume is shown to be a place of rebirth and rejuvenation, which does not simply resurrect and kill someone. Instead, ascension isn't death, but it is change, and that is the role of the tree. This is connected with the theme of this volume that you should not condemn yourself for mistakes you make, but accept them and learn from them. In fact, when the Curious Cat, which is vulnerable after the tree's leaves released him from Neo's body, argues that humans are weak, confused, incomplete, and break everything they touch, Weiss, Yang, and Blake disagree, saying Ruby is none of those things.

The volume nine finale of RWBY was one of the best episodes, giving background, but tying up loose ends, even talking about how the Ever After was created. It brought together the aforementioned themes and it ends with the characters walking through the portal to a place they are needed most: Vacuo. It was a fitting end to the series, if this is the last episode ever produced.

There is more about of RWBY's ninth volume, especially when it comes to LGBTQ representation, which put it on the map when it comes to all the representation in series this year. Episode 6, entitled "Confessions Within Cumulonimbus Clouds", was written by Eddy Rivas, and directed by Kerry Shawcross and Yssa Badiola. The latter was known for her short-lived series, Recorded by Arizal.

This episode built upon previous interactions between Yang and Blake, with flirting or blushing at one another in this volume, and in previous volumes. Everyone is trapped in a Punderstorm, a literal and metaphorical crossroads, with individuals only able to get out if they either solve the problems or wait until the storm passes.

In one of the best-constructed and well-done queer romantic scenes I've seen in an animated series, Blake and Yang admit their feelings for each other, as the music swells, then kiss. Significantly, the characters almost express the feelings of the fandom, with Weiss and Ruby surprised to see them linking lips, while Juane says that it "feels like I've been waiting forever for that". It is something which many fans of the Bumbleby ship had been waiting for.

While the scene was hinted in the volume 9 poster, it was no substitute for the scene, which excited fans over the canonization of Bumbleby, including on the show's subreddit. Even the Bumbleby's subreddit was exploding with new content. It could be said that the episode set a high standard for women-love-women romance.

It is only rivaled by the developing yuri story within the recently ended yuri isekai The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady, or the queer romance encapsulated within She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Dead End: Paranormal Park, Arcane, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Helluva Boss, Craig of the Creek, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, and Steven Universe to name a few recent series with prominent representation.

The episode itself generated discussion from the show's roundtable and even on All Good and No Worries, a Rooster Teeth show hosted by Barbara Dunkleman (voice of Yang), in an episode in which she talked with Arryn Zech (voice of Blake). In previous years, Zech and Dunkleman often hinted at this ship, stating their support for the ship, as did actor Kara Eberle (who voices Weiss).

The life of Zech somewhat mirrored her character, as she accused her ex-boyfriend, prominent actor Bob Morley, of verbal and emotional abuse, and said that Morley was furious when he learned that she was bisexual. Blake had been with an abusive ex-boyfriend of her own named Adam Taurus, who wields a chokutō and a gun, and attempts to take over the White Fang, peaceful organization originally aimed at improving conditions for the animalistic Faunus, a group of cat-like people.

In the penultimate season six episode, "Seeing Red", Blake and Yang kill Adam together, and touch their foreheads, which some see as a sign of romantic affection. Blake is also a bisexual character, like Zech is real life. In addition, during the discussion with Zech, Dunkleman admitted she is "not fully straight", but is "for the most part...fairly straight", while Zech talked about the struggles of dating as a bisexual woman.

It is clear that the romantic relationship between Blake and Yang was always planned, despite brutal shipping wars claiming otherwise. The canon nature of Bumbleby flies against those claiming the show's crew was queerbaiting. In fact, some made similar claims about the slow build-up of the romance between Marceline the Vampire Queen and Princess Bubblegum in Adventure Time, whose relationship, known as Bubbline by fans, was canonized in the series finale "Come Along with Me". It is not known if the CRWBY would ever an hour-long episode about Bumbleby, akin to the Adventure Time: Distant Lands episode "Obsidian", which almost exclusively focused on Bubbline, but would be great if that occurred.

The episode six scene was reinforced in other episodes: Blake and Yang fight together in tag team style, Yang protects Blake at one point, or Ruby sarcastically says she is "happy" for Blake and Yang getting their "feelings sorted out" when she has her breakdown at the end of episode seven. More powerfully, in the final episode, Blake and Yang walk through the portal door back to Vacuo holding hands just like Korra and Asami Sato in the Legend of Korra series finale.

© 2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Continued in part 2

[mfaunlv]

Here They Come!

Meet the Incoming Class

PhD/ Black Mountain Institute Fellows

Krista Diamond (Nonfiction)

Krista Diamond's essays and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Slate, Hazlitt, Longreads, Catapult, Joyland, TriQuarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Nevada Arts Council. In 2022, she was writer-in-residence for Desert Companion Magazine for whom she wrote a series of essays about Las Vegas lore. Her essay 'That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed' was recorded by Oscar-nominated actress Naomie Harris for Curio. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, she worked in the national parks. She has an MFA in fiction from UNLV and is looking forward to continuing her journey at UNLV where she will be happy to offer personalized recommendations about desert hiking and Las Vegas tiki bars.

Arpita Roy (Poetry)

Arpita received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she was the Thesis Poetry Fellow for 2023-24. She has been awarded Cheuse Center Travel Fellowship and Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Her work can be found in Thrush, Psaltery & Lyre, Couplet Poetry and X-Ray. Arpita is from Kolkata, India.

Fiction MFA

Gustavo Alvarenga

Gustavo Alvarenga is a Salvadoran born writer whose cultural background and strong family bonds play heavily into his fiction. He was raised in the suburbs of Northern Virginia but moved to Las Vegas during his sophomore year of high school when his parents relocated for work. He worked as a technician in the telecom industry for over a decade before deciding to switch careers and commit fully to the art of writing. He enjoys board games, hikes with his dog, rainy days, snowboarding, rock climbing, and meeting new people.

Jade Bailey

Jade Bailey grew up in Kansas. After completing a BSc in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and an MSc in Applied Social Research at Trinity College Dublin, she worked as a social researcher in Dublin, Ireland. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at UNLV.

Shayla Felix

Shayla Felix (She/her) is a disabled writer born and raised in Seattle Washington. She originally attended Eastern Washington University but later transferred, completing her BA in English with a Creative writing Emphasis at Western Washington University. Most of her writing focuses on hybridity with topics orbiting around Magical realism, feminism, nature, and self-identity. Some of her favorite pieces that she’s written appear in Voidspace_, Quarter After Eight, and Cold Mountain Review. She also hopes to travel to all 50 states one day.

Julia Lu

Julia is a fiction writer currently living in Houston, Texas, where she was born and raised. She studied film production in college. Julia enjoys cooking and baking, taking walks, and picture books. Her favorite season is summer.

Izuchukwu Udokwu

Izuchukwu Onyedibiemma Udokwu is a Nigerian storyteller. His work has appeared on LOLWE, Kalahari Review, AFREADA and others. He was shortlisted for the 2020 K & L Prize. His shortlisted story was published in an anthology of speculative fiction on Africanfuturism, Black Skin No Mask. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where he is a fashion designer and an interior designer, and still makes time to read and write stories.

Poetry MFA

Hüseyin Arıkan

Hüseyin Serhat Arıkan is an immigrant and poet from Ankara, Turkey. He earned his BS in Political Science from METU. He's excited to have his second collection, "Firar Folkloru" (The Folklore of Escape) published in Turkey this year. He is a progressive rock enthusiast and he can't manage to maintain a streak in Duolingo.

JM Huck

JM Huck is coming to creative writing with a background in visual art. She studied photography, printmaking and textiles at many schools in New York City, where she lived for eight years. JM spent three years teaching English in Japan, and she grew up a "third culture kid," graduating from an American High School in Italy. She has been placemaking her whole life and is happy to call Nevada her current home. Huck's undergraduate degree is in Economics from Agnes Scott College.

Seth Kleinschmidt

Seth Kleinschmidt is a poet from rural Wisconsin. Hailing from Lorine Niedecker's hometown, he proudly champions the Midwest in his poetry and is currently at work on a collection of sonnets about the Black Hawk War. He graduated with a degree in literary arts from Brown and has worked in the radio industry, both on and off the air, for fifteen years. Seth arrives in Las Vegas from Washington, DC, and in free moments plays soccer, bakes pies, and browses adoptable cats.

Lindsay Loughin

Lindsay Loughin is a nonbinary bipolar poet and essayist born in California and raised everywhere else. At one point a US Marine, and at another a high school marching band instructor, their current boss once said their resume looks like a fake person. They live with their two cats, collect cassette tapes and N64 games, and have a complicated relationship with the Oxford comma.

Non-Fiction MFA

Anesce Dremen

(photograph is courtesy of a collaboration with Balvinder Singh)

Anesce Dremen is a U.S. writer and educator often found with a tea cup in hand, traveling between the U.S., China, and India. A first generation college student and domestic violence survivor, Anesce studied in four cities in China with the support of the Critical Language Scholarship and Gilman Scholarship. She was a 2022-23 Fulbright-Nehru ETA in India. Anesce’s work has been published in Stillhouse Press, Gordon Square Review, SPAN Magazine, Tea Journey, Persephone’s Daughters, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Tiny Spoon, and Shanghai Poetry Lab, among others. Her work can be found at AnesceDremen.com.

Taylor Wright

Taylor Bradley Wright graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in Playwriting before moving back to Los Angeles and founding a non-profit production company: 48 Hours Theatre. She's written and staged multiple original works, including A Dead Rabbit, One by One, and When the Lights Go Out, and was a 2023 finalist for the Dramatists Guild Foundations National Fellows program for her play, 1976: A Motel. For the past decade, she's been working event logistics, publicity, and talent relations for large-scale events across the country, including the Oscars, The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, and over 100 film premieres, luncheons, screenings, and galas. She published her first novel, There's No Place Like House, in 2021 and has travelled from The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO to Prairie Lights in Iowa City for live readings and book signings. Her next book, Los Angeles: A Eulogy, is forthcoming. She is over the moon to be moving to Las Vegas with her banjo-playing husband and rescue pup, Olive, this summer to start this new chapter as a grad student at UNLV.

[forkaround]

Classic BL Watch: MasterPost

Namaste besties. @waitmyturtles started a challenge watching Older Thai BLs and it got me thinking as well. I've seen a few, I've DNF-ed a few, but I wanted to see the progression with my own eyes. Thus we be here.

The basic premise is to watch and review Thai BLs from Love Sick 2014 (which I believe is the first Thai BL) to present time.

I'm going to make a few changes to the format and include BLs from other countries as well, including China (if I can find it).

This is a long post so I divided it into chapters: - Some History - The Method to Potential Madness - List - Rating System I've made individual posts about each under #org: subcategory

I've been fascinated with BLs for over two years. To find that there was an entire world of queer content out there which A) existed and B) didn't queerbait or bury the gay, was a revelation. How could this be? I'd watched Yuri!!! on Ice in 2017 and I guess assumed that BLs would be the same (E7 blocked kiss). So while BLs were on my radar for a while before I started I didn't get into them until relatively recently. I got so into them that I started a YouTube Channel about it.

See I'm a writer and watching art transform in front of your eyes is a relatively recent phenomena and it makes my brain go brrr...

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Some History:

I'm Indian. I'm queer. We didn't have any rights until 2018 when the ban on homosexuality was lifted. We've had queer movies but they were your traditional Oscar-bait type things until very, very recently. By that I mean until last year where we had Maja Ma, a Madhuri Dixit starrer movie about a mom coming out as a lesbian which shocks the family and makes trouble for the son's marriage. It's a brilliant movie with one of India's best actresses as the lead. But it was a Netflix Original. Before that there was Subh Mangal Zyada Savdhan and Badhaai Do, which are both good queer movies which aired in cinemas from 2020 and 2022 respectively. All to say, queer media is very very very new in India. As such, what was a young queer to do but follow the Indian Dream and go to America. Which I did, in a literary sense. In fact watching Nyssa Al Ghul kiss Sara Lance was my queer awakening. (I love Ava but this ship was really something.) Between the good writing and queer chars being present, I wasn't coming back to India like any typical NRI.

I've mentioned before about how for the story I started writing at 15 there was no other love interest for the female lead except for another girl. It just won't make sense. This was before 2018, mind you, so not a chance in hell this would be published in India. I consoled myself with 'We'll publish in America. It takes place in space anyway, so it's fine.' But then came a story that just won't work in America. Think: what if Succession's terrible people protags were queer and Indian but it's written from a 'truly believes in romance' pov. Confused already right? I'd already given up hope. I love this, but it won't be anything more than a webnovel.

Par kahte hai -

(It is said, if you love something with all your heart then the entire universe will conspire to get it to you.)

And somehow I found BLs. A world of queer stories the likes of which I'd never seen before, brimming with love and support and honest and real and queer. The Bollywood fan in me lived again after a decade 6 feet under.

I love BLs. There's no two ways about it. I love them for the love they give, the hope they have, the cringe, the drama, the stupidity, the honesty, the realness. It's everything I ever wanted queer media to be. To start it from 0 and learn what made them what they are would be an amazing learning experience and to share that with other people... well how can I not?

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The Method to potential Madness:

My tastes are a little peculiar. I have seen media from all over the world, the good and the bad, what it has taught me is nothing is every going to be perfect and I will miss things that are important to other people but what else I've learned is that I don't really care about something being good. If it's broken, a little difficult, a little cheap but made with love. I am all in.

See when I was young during Janmasthami every year these guys from an organization called Yogeshwar would come in white kurtas and perform nataks(plays) in our society. They didn't have sets, 2-3 props, just that white kurta and pants as outfits and yet it was entertaining. It was fun. I loved it. So money and pure intentions have never been barriers for me.

(an example of Janmasthami natak)

What I do care about is competence. That the writer understands what they are writing about. The best actor can't pull off a bad script but a bad actor can be tolerated in a good script.

To get you an idea of my tastes some of my favorite medias are Legends of Tomorrow, Guardian (Cdrama), Supernatural, Agents of Shield, Agent Carter, Chains of Heart, Kinnporsche, LITA, The Eclipse, The Devil Judge, Crash Course in Romance, SRK movies from '00 like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Main Hoon Na, Kabhi Khushsi Kabhi Gham, etc. As you can see, very widely ranging. I love competence and I love heart. Everything else I can live without. To that end some shows I didn't like/DNF-ed: Bed Friend, Step by Step, Big Mouth, Eve, Game of Thrones, most Netflix things, Mr. Robot, Supergirl, The Flash, Elite, Witcher, Coffee Melody, War of Y. If you get too PC without the narrative backup I'll leave; If it's too nihilistic, I'll leave; If it's too monotonous, I'll leave. I have Psychotic Depression, I don't have the time to deal with this shit.

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List:

To borrow from @waitmyturtles, a list of shows I'll cover:

ThaiBL: 1) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 2) Make It Right + Make It Right 2 3) SOTUS + SOTUS S 4) Together With Me 5) Love By Chance 6) He’s Coming To Me 7) Dark Blue Kiss 8) TharnType 9) Puppy Honey 10) Theory of Love 11) Until We Meet Again 12) 2gether + Still 2gether 13) I Told Sunset About You + I Promised You the Moon 14) Manner of Death 15) A Tale of Thousand Stars 16) Lovely Writer I will group these into either productions i.e. all GMMTV or by writer i.e. all MAME, all Jittiran, all Sammon, etc

Korean BL: 1) Where Your Eyes Linger 2) Color Rush 3) To My Star 4) You Make Me Dance 5) Nobleman's Ryu's Wedding 6) Light On Me 7) Peach of Time 8) Kissable Lips 9) Long Time No See 10) Cherry Blossoms After Winter 11) Blueming 12) Our Dating Sim 13) The Eighth Sense Others like The Tasty Florida, Where Your Eyes Linger, Semantic Error, etc. I've already seen and don't include on this list.

Japanese BL: (from @absolutebl's recs) 1) Seven Days 2) My Love Mix-up 3) Restart after Come back Home 4) Mr. Unlucky Has No Choice but to Kiss! 5) Life: Love on the line 6) Man who defies the world of BL 7) Takumi kun 8) Boys Love 9) Cornered Mouse Dream of Cheese 10) Eternal Yesterday 11) Ossan's Love 12) Given Others like Cherry Magic, Old Fashion Cupcake, Minato Coin Laundry, etc. I've already seen and don't include on this list.

Taiwanese BL: 1 - 5) HIStory Series 6) Be Loved in this House: I Do 7) See you after Quarantine? 8) DNA says I love you 9) We are Gamily 10) Your Name Engraved Herein 11) Papa & Daddy 12) Plus Minus 13) Love is Science Others like We Best Love, About Youth I've already seen and don't include on this list.

Chinese BL: (If I can find them) 1) Addicted Heroin 2) The Untamed 3) Advance Bravely 4) My Esport Genius Brother 5) Like Love: I love you as a man 6) Mr. CEO is falling in Love with him 7) S.C.I 8) Irresistible Love 9) Mr. X and I Others like Guardian and Word of Honor I've already seen and don't include on this list

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Rating System:

Range: 3 Wonderland to 3 Wasteland. Wonderland = Good. Wasteland = Bad. 3 Wonderland = Best Ever. 3 Wasteland = Worst Ever. Categories: Writing/Script (character work, world building, pacing, etc.); Production (technical stuff, camera work, visuals, etc.); Acting; Joy Levels (how much I enjoyed it); Feeling (satisfied, confused, angry, etc.)(totally subjective, grain of salt metric) and a Final Rank.

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Tags: classic BL watch; [show]; fork watches; fork report;

[16/06/2023]

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Anyone here ever listen to the Fine Tooning podcast hosted by entertainment writers Drew Taylor and Jim Hill?

I tend to tune in every Tuesday. Sometimes I learn things about Disney history I never knew, in addition to hearing their takes on current animation news.

This week's episode was about Gary Rydstrom, long-time sound designer - especially for many Pixar films - and filmmaker who eventually directed the Pixar short LIFTED (attached to RATATOUILLE in theaters) and Lucasfilm's STRANGE MAGIC.

As many people know, he was set to direct an ill-fated Pixar film called NEWT, which would've - at one point - released in the summer of 2011 following TOY STORY 3. Before its cancellation, it swapped spots with CARS 2 and went to summer 2012.

What I never knew about this movie was that it was meant to begin a line of lower-budget, quirkier Pixar films. Similar to that of the films Disney Feature Animation's Orlando unit made before they were shut down in 2004.

And if you remember, back when NEWT was announced, it was supposed to share that year with THE BEAR AND THE BOW. That movie, of course, would later be titled BRAVE, and it opened in the summer of 2012. BRAVE would've been a holiday 2011 release if plans had held, and obviously would've been the mainline bigger budget movie opposite NEWT.

Pixar would try doing two-a-year again for 2013 - but w/ both movies being mainline big budget endeavors. So for 2013, the plan was: MONSTERS UNIVERSITY was set for the summer, and THE GOOD DINOSAUR - the thrown-out version that was being directed by Bob Peterson - following during the Thanksgiving frame. Of course, as we all know, that didn't happen either.

Finally, in 2015, they made it happen... INSIDE OUT was the summer movie of the pair, a huge hit all-around: Boffo box office, enthusiastic critical reception, an Oscar... THE GOOD DINOSAUR, the Thanksgiving movie, didn't enjoy any of that. Overshadowed completely by its sister picture, and it also lost money on top of being a very troubled production. Would it have fared well in a different year, on its own? Who the heck knows. It lived a nice second life through solid home media sales, and I'm sure someone somewhere is clicking on it on Disney+.

Then they tried again in 2017. The summer release, CARS 3, did so-so at best at the box office and got okay-ish reviews. CARS isn't everyone's cup of tea, so it was expected. Barely doubled its as-usual-for-Pixar gargantuan budget. Thanksgiving release COCO, by contrast, was the big hit. All of it: Great reviews, fantastic box office, and an Oscar.

2020 was another attempt, this time with a movie at the tail end of winter (the first weekend of March) and a summer movie... Well, COVID-19 happened. ONWARD was cut right off within a week of release, and SOUL went straight to Disney+. The recent theatrical release of SOUL sadly flopped. SOUL did, however, get an Oscar for Best Animated Feature 2020. ONWARD was also nominated for the award that year. So, the two Pixars finished the year with better than average reviews and Oscar noms.

2022 was the second attempt at this new strategy. TURNING RED in March, LIGHTYEAR in June... But Disney, concerned about COVID-19's Omicron variant, sent TURNING RED straight to Disney+. TURNING RED was well-loved and was up for the animated Oscar. LIGHTYEAR bombed in theaters, got okay reviews, and no Oscar nom.

This year was going to see that strategy again, until... Disney and Pixar delayed ELIO, which was set to be the March movie - with a trailer and everything, all the way back to summer 2025. The sole Pixar movie for that year... Leaving INSIDE OUT 2 as this year's Pixar film, and the summer release at that. I expect it to be huge, given that it's a sequel to a movie that clearly did so poorly years ago.

So... 2026, the current plan is for there to be two Pixars. A March and a June. We know TOY STORY 5 is in active development, and I suspect it'll nab the summer 2026 slot. Whatever is brewing in the hallway of the original movies for the March slot, I have no idea. It could be anyone's picture. Kristen Lester? Brian Fee? Rosana Sullivan? List goes on... We'll probably get an inkling of what it is sometime this year. Maybe for D23?

But here's the thing... We know Pixar keeps it all under one roof. After all, their Vancouver unit didn't make it, neither did attempts to collaborate with other filmmakers (see Henry Selick/CinderBiter's THE SHADOW KING). Every movie they make is some $175m+ costing behemoth...

And I think, why can't they do the big movie/small movie thing? It would allow them to double up production, while keeping costs lower on the quirkier movies, and allowing the filmmakers to experiment more. I mean, that's kind of the gist behind the SparkShorts, right? Or those few Co-op program shorts, like BORROWED TIME. Look at Illumination and their proposed adult animation label, Moonlight... That Pixar was attempting to do smaller and weirder films alongside their usual blockbuster spectacles tells me that... Maybe they should try again?

Though weirdly, TURNING RED was their usual $175m+ picture, and that had a different art style, was much more filmmaker-driven than usual, and was indeed a little quirkier. But even then, making a picture like that for such a massive budget puts it at risk. Remember, we watched ELEMENTAL open with a blah number and subsequently claw its way to a "just made it!" final gross. If that movie had cost around $85m instead and still looked as lovely, the near-$500m gross wouldn't even be an issue.

So why not have the next original after ELIO - should that be another triple-digit million movie - be this sub-$100m costing movie? Can it be done? Are they thinking about it?

I dunno, that podcast just got me thinking. I also found out a lot more about NEWT's production and rather mysterious cancellation from this very episode, stuff I was kinda dying to know for years... Yeah, Fine Tooning is worth listening to, check 'em out.