#ALSO i was thinking of that one chase scene where he basically glides over water hes such a show off ilove himmm

[starrypawu]

holyy jesus christ himself? oh no its just a stickman my bad

[percedurza]

I HAVE ALREADY SPOKE ON LENGTH ABOUT THE PRINCE OF EGYPT BUT NOT THE WHOLE THING ONLY THE PLAGUES AND MOSTLY PASSOVER. I JUST WATCHED THE FULL MOVIE FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE I WAS A KID IM GONNA TALK ABOUT IT AGAIN BECAUSE IT WAS SO GOOD. OKAY.

okay let me first say that i was in tears within the first ten minutes of the movie. deliver us was so powerful and heartbreaking i cried BEFORE THE TEN MINUTE MARK. yeah.

when moses' mother sang her final lullaby to her son and pushed him downstream in that (blessed and very fortunate) basket my heart hurt. i cried with her. that was the last time she would ever see her baby.

when his sister sang her prayer for her baby brother, wishing for him to come back to deliver them as well, that just drove the nail in harder.

in a later scene before the banquet you can hear moses humming that last lullaby and since deliver us was just maybe ten minutes prior you remember it and realize he really did keep that final song.

and the banquet oh yeah ramesses gets appointed this big title? and he names moses as the grand architect

and theres this captured hebrew lady brought in for ramesses but shes fierce (i would be too, she was captured and brought to the people she hates the most) and so ramesses orders her to be brought to moses' chambers instead

moses goes to his chambers and suprise! she escaped! moses chases after and sees her sneaking out with her camel and distracts some guards so she wont get caught and once the guards are gone he goes after her again aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand

miriam (moses' sister) meeting him in the city streets and recognizing him, telling him he's her family and him shutting her down and calling her a slave.... it hurt. when she hums that lullaby and he RECOGNIZES and then rushes back home to have a dream about that day he was sent away (in beautiful animation designed to look like the hieroglyphs on his wall) its all so painful to watch him be forced out of nowhere to realize his life is a LIE because hes not a true prince of egypt, he's born of the slaves, and then his father the pharaoh justifies the order to slaughter innocent babies by saying "they were just slaves" and OUGH

moses kills a man. unintentional but he killed a man while trying to stop him from beating a slave. oops.

he cant live with this so he runs away into the desert. theres this scene where he collapses to the ground and sheds all of the jewelry and adornments from his life as royalty but as he takes off the ring ramesses gives him, he looks at it. and slowly puts it back on. because no matter what, he still loves his brother, and he always will.

moses falls into a well. yeah. chases off some ruffians and then basically faints and falls in. these girls the ruffians were harassing started pulling him out and SURPRISE SURPRISE the captured lady from the banquet is there and she drops him back in when she recognizes him and walks away all smug and her name is tzipporah! just an fyi (very pretty name love it)

moses basically gets adopted into the group of hebrews and moses says something about not ever having done anything of worth and so tzipporah's father jethro sings a little tune to him!

through heavens eyes is a masterpiece. i really dont know what else to say also i want jethro to be my dad hes so nice

aaanyway moses and tzipporah get married during the through heavens eyes montage! i just think thats nice

OKAY now juicy stuff the BURNING BUSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the scene in which moses encounter the burning bush and god.

god claims that he has seen his people (the hebrew slaves) suffering and cannot stand for it any longer, so he wishes to send moses as a sort of ambassador of god

and moses doesnt think hes worthy of being god's messenger, which god quickly shuts up by pointing out how he's kind of, like, GOD

and he teaches moses those big old words, "LET MY PEOPLE GO" wahoo!!!!!!

he rushes home to tell tzipporah, and shes like "but ur just one dude" and hes like "well i kinda have to also the hebrews are suffering in slavery so :////"

tzipporah and moses head on over to meet ramesses and theyre all excited to see each other and then moses is like "behold the power of god!!!!!!" and his staff becomes a snake. pretty gnarly if i do say so myself

and then the high priests are like "ok" and start basically performing and rapping the names of the egyptian gods at moses in response i really dont know how to describe it but its basically a whole lotta smoke and mirrors. not actual miracles

moses talks to ramesses and asks him to let his people go, and instead doubles the slave's workload. the slaves basically hate moses now because yeah he technically is the reason theyre getting pushed harder and even his own brother aaron seems to loathe him. miriam talks to moses and he sees ramesses' ship gliding down the nile nearby

he calls out to ramesses and he just sends his guards after him. and so moses brings the staff down and turns the river to blood.

THEN THE REST OF THE PLAGUES ENSUE!!!

theres this specific part of the plagues scene in which ramesses stands between two statues of egyptian gods and glances at them as if to ask why the fuck arent they doing anything about the LITERAL hellfire and general havoc being brought down on the city. just thought that was a really cool detail.

AND OOOOOOOOOOOOOOH passover. i really shouldnt get excited about talking about an event that killed a whole heck ton of kids but its like fnaf at this point who cares ANYWAY THE DEAD KIDS

i already talked about the passover scene but what i didnt include (i think) is how when god's spirit or whatever idk enters the palace, it passes over a statue of ramesses and you just think, oh fuck wait RAMESSES HAD A SON.

and sure enough, that son is dead. moses walks in as ramesses pulls a sheet over his sons dead body and ramesses finally, after all of the plagues, tells moses he can take the hebrews and leave.

as moses walks away you can see ramesses glare at moses because he may have said he was done but. hes not. of course.

moses and the hebrews are leaving with yet another beautiful musical sequence (when you believe) and you can see the hordes of former slaves walking to the sea.

AAND just like i said RAMESSES WASNT FINISHED! he brings a whole bunch of soldiers on horseback and chases the hebrews, and god literally rains fire on them again this time in the form of a flaming tornado that sweeps across the sand, making a big old wall of fire that the egyptian soldiers cant get through

which gives moses the time to do the famous parting of the sea. he brings that staff down in the water and DOES GODS WONDERS!!! yay!!!

watching them walk on the seabed was beautiful. with some lightning strikes you could see the silhouette of some kind of shark swimming in the water (looked it up there are sometimes whale sharks in the red sea this is accurate)

and the fire tornado recedes into the earth, the fire fades, the soldiers chase on at ramesses' orders. the water sweeps them away just as the hebrews make it to the other side and it later cuts back to ramesses, alone on the rocky shore, screaming out at moses. hes completely alone, soldiers presumably dead, and no family to speak of. his side of the sea is cloudy and gloomy, still stormy, but when it jumps back to the hebrews in celebration, the sun shines bright and happy. the hebrews are free.

the movie ends with moses walking down the mountain sinai, ten commandments in hand, while the last snippet of deliver us plays once again.

only one other movie has evoked this much of this kind of emotion in me.(the one movie is klaus LMAO klaus made me ugly cry) there was not a single second of watching this that i didnt have goosebumps.

the movie itself just looks pretty. all of the characters have unique and neat designs. (its also nice to see a movie with only poc in it like im just saying)

the musical scores and numbers are so expertly made. my favorite has to be deliver us but through heavens eyes is a very close second. through heavens eyes made me feel better about myself, in a way. the entire movie was like some healing experience.

all in all, this is an S tier movie, and i BEG BEG BEG anyone who hasn't seen it to watch it. just pirate it or something (i did lol watched it on an illegal streaming site)

if you're not religious and havent seen it, think of it as a chance to learn more about abrahamic faiths. if you are religious and havent seen it, well hey! here you go!!

[everymovie2020]

Escape from LA (1996)

Date watched:  8 September 2018

Hoo boy.

I mean, the first one is dark, but it holds up well enough (my numerous questions about how the New York prison works aside).

This one is bananas.

I'm going to give a quick rundown of the plot (it's the same as the first one) and then list off the things I felt were truly insane.

So there's a massive earthquake in LA in 2002 (I think?) and that results in the city of Los Angeles being surrounded by water, becoming effectively its own island. America has elected a demagogue to office (starting to feel nervous at this point; some of this is sounding familiar), and he decrees that Los Angeles Island shall be the place where America sends its undesirables – i.e. anyone who is caught swearing, having sex, committing minor crimes, committing "moral crimes" or simply existing as a free human being.  So you can choose to be electrocuted or you can take your chances living in LA.

I mean… the plot of this movie echoes some of the things that we have currently been going through as a world, and I was like… has this movie predicted the dystopian future of our nightmares?

Anyway, this time the president's daughter has stolen a device that controls satellites which will send out an EMP to fuck over America's enemies (it's literally the plot of the underrated but brilliant TV show Revolution), because she's been brainwashed by the leader of the LA… gangs?  I don't know. Anyway, he basically groomed her online (though this is pre-internet) and she committed the crime for him, and his plan is that he wants everyone trapped in LA released.

They send in ol' Snake Plissken, and this time he wears an entirely black leather ensemble which honestly, I was digging far more than Version 1 Snake from the 80s.

So he gets into some strife, meets a hot chick who dies, then he's betrayed by Steve Buscemi a bunch of times, then he SURFS HIS WAY INTO LA WITH PETER FONDA WHICH IS TRULY BANANAS, while chasing Steve Buscemi who is driving a pristine Cadillac (HOW?), then other stuff happens, then there's torture by never-ending basketball, he hang glides at one point, Pam Grier is there playing a transgendered woman (they even put a voice changer on her and ugh, let's not talk about that), then he helicopters out of there and gives the EMP device back to the president.

Or does he?

He doesn't. He has the real control and he presses the button, causing the EMP to occur worldwide, effectively shutting down Earth's electronics and sending us back to the stone age.

IT IS LITERALLY THE PLOT OF THE UNDERRATED TELEVISION SHOW REVOLUTION OF WHICH I WATCHED EVERY EPISODE.  I feel like whoever wrote that show had watched this movie.

Here's my thing – this movie freaked me out.

It's like it sort of predicted the future, or not quite the current future, but where we could be heading under the Trump presidency?

The president in this movie gives himself a lifetime appointment – he effectively gets rid of the America as we currently know it and becomes a dictator/demagogue/whatever the one is where there's religion involved, is that demagogue? He's full on Old Testament Christian, so I'm guessing the women in his America are currently living in Gilead.

Then he turns LA, devastated by a natural disaster, into the place to send the undesirables, and he builds a wall around it.

DID DONALD TRUMP WATCH THIS MOVIE BEFORE HE RAN FOR PRESIDENT?

I was legitimately freaked out by this.

Actually, it feels more like the result of a Mike Pence presidency than a Trump one, because I can't imagine Trump outlawing sex.  He simply has too much of it.

Okay I just pictured him having sex and I shuddered IRL so I need to change the topic real quick.

Other things of note:

The special effects are truly awful.  This movie came out in 1996 and there's really no excuse for it.  Twister came out the same year, as did Independence Day; Jurassic Park was four years earlier – the special effects look like a bad video game from the 90s.  They are terrible.

There is a scene where Snake Plissken surfs to chase a car through the ruin of downtown LA and I know I mentioned it before, but it needs mentioning again.

He also hang glides, and defeats a basketball game that is played to torture people.  It bears mentioning again.

He's just such a badass.

The Queen Mary has ended up in downtown LA and I was like, "how did that get there?" It's moored in Long Beach so I'm guessing it broke free during the earthquake and just landed in the middle of the city?

What kind of fucked up universe are these people living in?  Is everyone else in the rest of America just totally okay with people being shipped off to an island to die?

But then I compare it to, say, people in Australia being totally fine with the fact that refugees are detained on Manus Island and Nauru, so I guess I can see how the rest of the people in America would literally not give a fuck. Or, for an American example, a percentage of Americans being totally chill with the fact that children are separated from their parents at the border with no plan as to how reunite them. Because who cares about brown people, right?

Fuck the world sucks.

It seems to me that in the "Escape" universe, there's been a series of decisions, one after the other, that if something gets slightly out of hand you just wall it off from the rest of the country and pretend it doesn't exist.  I just don't see how that's an effective policy.

There also seems to be serious worldwide drama and threats from Russia and China (and I'm pretty sure Cuba?), hence the EMP weapon.

Again, I’m questioning the food/sanitation/electricity/corpse logistics of cutting off LA from the rest of the world.

But here's the thing I don't get – fair enough Snake Plissken is one of the good guys, and fair enough he's had enough of playing the pawn in their political games. At the end of the movie, he presses the button to cause the worldwide EMP pulse, thereby shutting down planet Earth. And I guess he's tired of the status quo, but like… he's pressed a button that then directly leads to the deaths of millions of people worldwide.  If there's one thing the underrated but brilliant TV show Revolution, starring Elizabeth Mitchell and Billy Burke, has taught me, it's that people can't live without power.  So Snake kills millions of people with the press of a button.

Yeah, you'll topple the government, fine.  Sure.  But people are still trapped on the island of Los Angeles.  You've just fucked over a bunch of countries that never hurt anyone (I can't imagine Canada is caught up in any of the bullshit in this movie). You’ve just denied people heat in winter and cool in summer; you've just destroyed food sources and shut down dams and waterways – you're sentencing innocent people to death.

So is Snake Plissken a hero?  Not really!

[jgreenuniverse-blog]

Making Oversized spanners for Cortina

Friday the 12th March: Started measuring/cutting out the oversized spanners for ‘Cortina’.

Tuesday 14th/Wednesday 15th of March: continued adding detail to one of the spanners  to give more depth and make it seem less cheap.

Made in Dagenham: Blog 3: (in progress)

work completed:

Finished blocking everything -particularly good work on Cortina -blocked in the speeches, and choreographed a chase between Hopkins and Rita through the dance, Running storm clouds a lot, fantastic polishing on the Union meeting, very basically blocked into this is America, organised and put on a cake sale and leg waxing event to promote the show, as well as several hours in tesco beg packing and handing out flyers. We've also done loads of tech work with scripts, blocking scene changes and allocating tasks. I've also developed Hopkins character dramatically since blocking 'Stand up'. We've also done our first full run with Jonathan and no backing tracks, so we could really hear what we sound like alone.So, from the beginning. Made in Dagenham has had several polishes now, we spent part of a couple of sessions working on the character connections and polishing them up, and now the reactions look really good. we also make a good amount of noise from offstage now as the music starts to kickstart the atmosphere of the song. I've also really gotten the hang of the percussion section, and can perform well without having to concentrate to hard. i brought in a large bag of spanner and other tools for the engineers to be carrying round too, and just to make thing more interesting i not only use them instead spray painting, but also bang 2 together to the beat instead of clapping like everyone else, which adds an extra dynamic to the sound.I was mistaken before when i said i was placed in the 'steel capped boots' tap section, turns out i was actually just standing in. however, I took this opportunity to bring back the trolley sliding. after playing around i found the perfect moment to glide of the stage on it, just in time to return for the end chorus section. watching it back i feel it really adds to the playful side of the number.In would still say I need to make sure i'm 100% confident with some of the timing though, something I will be going over as slipping up just slightly sounds bad.We've greatly improved the 'Jammy dodgers' scene too adding small character interactions, such as Bill scratching my back on the lone 'and I scratch yours' and Sid offering me a jammy dodger. I just need to watch my blocking as it changes here and there. Also, the girls on the sewing machines will now still be stage left where i enter, just in black out so we need to figure out how/where i enter- this will easily be fixed in the next run.The breakfast scene has been much improved, me and Lydia have been doing independent rehearsals to bring it up to scratch- she's been doing a lot of work on the confidence and posture of her character. As Hopkins i've been working on my objectives, so when i say i have to go and start packing my briefcase, its because i don't want to finish my duck eggs as they taste awful. I've also been making more of the moment where i reminisce over boarding school, and as a comedy extra starting packing my teacup into my briefcase to link with his tea obsession.The union meeting has been difficult to rehears as we rarely have all the characters present, but recently we've mad some real progress. After being given feedback that I really want to make myself as slapable as possible, i though back to some of the exercises we did earlier in the process, where I interviewed/hotseated the machinists.I started bringing elements of this back in this scene, smugly gazing at Rita and sometimes Connie over my teacup. This is another added feature. adding to Hopkins tea obsession, I given him the mannerism of running his finger round the rim of his teacup when he's thinking, or plotting, especially when he's smug. I'm also so sarcastic to Rita that it is plain rude, and Amy makes a wonderful job being unsure quite how to react to this.the change is really quite apparent now too, you can really see management losing control of the situation as Rita becomes incensed, and we try desperately to regain control but she completely shuts us down. I'm using facial expression to really show the change from pleasure, enjoying watching her struggle with our complex roundabout approach to being quite shocked and bumbling when she starts making valid points.In everybody out theres quite a change at the factory, and when Hopkins gets a phone call telling him the girls have walked out, I really try to carry on the sense of bumbling panic that stems from the union meeting. I've been dreading this, so when i run onto stage and demand the phone from Lisa I make my voice shake slightly, and when i'm given the news close my eyes as if warding of a blow.however, the time gets confused with when Sam Is supposed to say his line, and theres seems to be an awkward pause which need to ironing out.I've had fun with developing Hopkins character between this phone call and the next. no doubt he's been making several calls and receiving a few, so when theres a strike in Liverpool too and we see him phoning his executive Tooley, he's quite panicky. another mannerism I've given him is effect of stress/panic -his expressions start to flit around wildly with the anxiety, which is exactly what i put into practice when phoning Tooley.It's at this point i should mention the amount of changes to Hopkins character I've been making. Before, I was playing him as simple, plain 'arse hole', as i've described before. however, when we blocked 'stand up', I end up changing my mind about giving the women equal pay, and actually end up  encouraging the vote for equal pay. this ad to come form somewhere, It doesn't just happen, so i've done a character sheet on his development.it basically shows how when i find out Tooley's coming over, i think he'll be in charge and will sort everything out. So at the beginning of act 2 in this is America I've regained my composure. however, Tooley boisterously blasts this out the water, and lays of the men on the production line. Not only does his entrance hurt my ego, but for the first time i wonder if that's too far.However, I try to ignore it and go along with, at first a little broodily, as seen in my discussion with Tooley and Monty in storm clouds. however, as act 2 progresses, I get fed up with the stress of it all and actually lose it a bit in Cortina. Finally, after basically saying 'what the hell' in Viva eastbourne and forgetting it all, i finally arrive at the TUC and hear Rita speech. It's passionate enough to actually stir the compassion deeply buried in Hopkins and inspires him to join the revaluation.