#I know at this point there were budget constraints and this was the last film so they weren’t gonna do all this extra work for bonus content

[white-weasel]

Missed opportunity for the people at Twisted Pictures to release Bobby Dagen’s promotional DVD as bonus content similar to Full Disclosure Report or the Scott Tibbs Documentary

[popculturebuffet]

Evil Deadtrospective: Army of Darkness: Hail to the King Baby! (Commissioned by WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy screwheads! And welcome back to my look at the films of the Evil Dead. We’ve come to the end of Sam Rami’s original trilogy as Ash goes back in time to fight mini me’s, bagpiping skeletons and his own ego, it’s Army of Darkness!

Army of Darkness was the only film of the original rami trilogy I hadn’t seen before this retrospective. I OWN the film, on DVD and Blu Ray, I just never got around to actually watching it due to my habit of hoarding films like a dragon and then forgetting to you know, actually watch them. You may boo now. So part of the reason I took up Kev on his idea of this retrospective was to finally get around to it. What’d I think? Well obviously that’s a bit more complicated than “It was good” (Though it was) , so let’s dive into it under the cut shall we? 

Content Warning: This review contains mentions of sexual assault. Discretion is advised. 

Production of Darkness:

This fiilm had a MUCH smoother time coming into existance than last time.  With Evil Dead 2 being the huge hit it was, Rami’s name was once again great in hollywood, and interest in the sequel was high, with DIno De Laurentis more than willing to back a sequel. So Rami worked on the script while they tried to get the money up. He wanted to bring back Evli Dead II’s cowriter Scott Spigel but he was busy with another script. Luckily Rami had another Co-Writer in the wings: his brother Ivan, because Neoptisim. I joke of course, Ivan had worked with his brother on another script, and Sam liked it so the two set out to make a new film, workshopping the script before and during the production of Rami’s next film Darkman, a film I probably should talk about at some point given my love of both superheroes and Sam Rami. 

With the inital budget Dino could scrape up not being enough you’d expect, given the last two films, for this to delay the film for a while. But for once Sam was going in with something he didn’t have before: a big time box office draw.  Darkman turned out to be a massive hit, meaning Rami had the clout to do whatever he wanted next. And since Dino had a multi-picture deal with Unviersal it was easy enough to get them to distribute. 

This mean production went smoother than even the last film, and there were almost no problems making it, the only things changed being cuts due to budget constraints, not to mention a guaranteed wide big budget release. 

The problems only crept in AFTER it was done. For starters test audiences HATED the original ending. And while sometimes this is stupid and dumb and leads to a film getting ruined, in this case the execs probably had the right idea, we’ll get to that. What WASN’T right was our heroes had to put up their salaries to do reshoots, redoing the opening and ending, complete with new sequence. Not only that but much like Crimewave our heroes were largely locked out of editing, with the film first getting an NC-17 for exactly one shot, yes REALLY, and then an R that no amount of edits could undo. I scratch my head at that last part as I watched the theatrical version for this review: the gore is almost entirely asbent this time around, and while theirs bodies flying around ocasionally, i’ts not nearly enough to really warrant an R rating. Then again i’m asking for Logic from the MPAA, so whose really insane. The studio also gave Bruce Cambell exactly a day to approve the promotional posters or they woudln’t promote the films. 

Naturally with Studio Support like this and coming from a cult director making a weird period film following up two films that were horror classics but cult to the rest of the world the film.. well heres an artist’s rendering of how the box office went. 

So yeah the film didn’t do well, and this effectively ended the franchise till the comics, which only came about because Universal likes money. That said the film was still a critical hit and like the last two became a cult smashed, helped by being both more easily available and being more tv friendly. As a result while the franchise was never a box office darling.. it’s still beloved to this day to the point we got the remake we’ll be talking about next time and the new film coming next year, as well as two diffrent franchises of comics, and all sorts of merch including the FUNKO Ash proudly sitting on my shelf right above me as I type this. This film may of not been the hit Rami likely hoped for but it gave the trilogy closure and fans a lot of lines to quote. So let’s talk about it shall we?

The Film of Darkness:

We open with Ash a slave in the year 1300. Ash breifly recaps the last film, while also bringing up his job at S-Mart, the first of many iconic things about ash this film brought about. S-Mart is basically K-Mart back when it actually existed.  Ash loved his job there, to the point Bruce Cambell has claimed that while ash has several advanced degrees, something shockingly backed up by this film, he prefers the store because he just feels at home there. Linda also worked there before the whole being dead thing. We get narration covering her possesion, him having to amuptate himself and him getting sent back in time. This recap’s a bit more truncated this time about as Rami had felt they’d spent MORE than enough time in the cabin already, and wanted to get into something diffrent. 

And something different the first ten minutes are.... their boring. You’d THINK Ash ending up in the past, getting enslaved by king arthur, being called the chosen one by an old man, and getting dragged to a death pit would be fun but it’s just really tedious and not all that engaging. It does set up important info: the other guys being drug in are arthur’s enemies, the two being at war despite having a common enemies: the deadites who are ravaging the land and gentry. We also have a woman who we’ll come to know as Shiela spit in ash’s face because he’s supposdely with these guys. But it’s just ehhhh. Nothing really good happens and it just feels like a slog to get to the good stuff.

Thankfully the good stuff arrives when Ash is thrown in the death pit for sport.. because that’s what makes us SURELY like and care about arthur later: him throwing our hero to his death without any real evidence he was actually WITH the other guys. Sure enough their’s a deadite in the pit and Arthur has the spikes turned on because god hates Ash. 

Ash however shows his final character shift here: Ash is no longer the nice kid we met at the start of this trilogy, but a terminally moronoic meathead who is far more clever than he appears because he’d have to be, but is awesome at one liners, shooting things and chainsawing things as demonstrated when the wise old man from earlier throws him his chainsaw, allowing him to turn the tide, and then escape with his belt buckle. He then proceeds to use his gun and chainsaw to threaten everyone, getting the prisoner king guy released, which he’s greatful for and surely will come in handy later and threatening everyone while being as awesome and bruce cambelly at possible. ANd given they you know, enslaved him and threw him in a death pit I have no sympathy for these people. If I gloss over great jokes or lines just know it’s not because their not great it’s because this review would get tedious if it was just a string of army of darkness quotes and trust me it EASILY could’ve this film is THE most quotable film i’ve ever seen, with almost every iconic line you’ve heard from the franchise coming from here with only “Swallow your soul” and “Groovy” coming from the last one. 

The townsfolk end up praising our hero though when he shoots a flying deadite down, leading to him being praised, and next we see him he has a fresh shirt, as his original was about as torn as you’d expect given the last two days and being fed grapes, as he deserves. Shelia TRIES to apologize, but he’s a dick about it, and the elder tries to get him to go on a quest for the necronomicon.. to which he tells him that he just wants to go home without any quest despite you know people being in immediate danger. 

YOu might be sensing a pattern here. Ash is WAY more of a selfish dick in this film and it just dosen’t feel remotely in character. Ash has had changes in characterization, but as i’ve pointed out in the last two reviews it’s felt like a natural progresss. He started as a somewhat meek but still charming and charasmatic college kid, got turned into a slapstick victim slowly going insane from the sheer stress of the situation, and once calm and reunited with the others became an experinced badass, now knowing his opponent and ready to face them head on with a chainsaw and boomstick. This carries to this film: He’s slightly dimmer sure but that can be chalked up to him trying to take the easy way out, just wanting this nightmare of the past three days to END ALREADY.  As such he’s not thinking clearly like he was at the end of the last film. His recknlessness makes sense. But him wanting to basically abandon these people go go screw, assholes or not really dosen’t. Both of the previous films, despite how bad things were, had him trying to end this shit: end the evil dead because he knew it wouldn’t stop if he didn’t and would just harm more people. Sure it benefitted him too, but he at least saw that they weren’t going to stop. Here he’s willing to abandon a bunch of people to death because he’s fed up and that just.. isn’t ash. It dose’nt ruin the film mind, the film calls him out on it and he makes the right decision eventually, but it still dosen’t remotely work for me. 

What does is Ash getting ready for said quest after another deadite encounter, deciding the quid pro quo works for him. We get an awesome forging scene where he makes himself a metal hand, and talks to shielia again who made him subsittute shirt. He responds by being a dick to her. 

She slaps him, he goes after her and they have sex. This is about as deep as their relationship gets. 

So the next morning Ash rides off into the night with a full party.. who promptly stop once he gets near the area where the Necrnomicon is. Ash is told by the Old Man he has to say the magic words, Klatu Berada Nicto (from the day the earth stood still of course) to properly settle the book. I’d chide the film for coming up with new rules but frankly changing the rules or pulling new ones out of your ass is a horror movie tradition. The rules for who Chucky can transfer into have gone from “First person he meets” to “whoever as long as he has the heart of dambala” to “Fuck it”,  Freddy Kruger went from “the kids of the parents who burned him” to “Whoevers tangentially related to this girl with psychic powers who was friends with the last of those kids “ to “Fuck it” and Friday the 13th started it’s entire franchise off by saying “Fuck it jason’s alive after all and always has been.” So Evil Dead adding three words is basically nothing in the grand tradition of horror pulling new rules out of it’s ass. 

The first stop on his quest.. is an abandoned cabin.

I mean it’s DIFFRENT in structure from the one but it feels weirdly out of place and only there to use what I STRONGLY belivie was a bit thought out for Evil Dead II but not used because of budget: Ash getting swarmed by tiny versions of himself Gulliver’s travels style. Okay now THAT’S the kind of asspull i’m used to from horror sequels. But yeah this.. this is happening now. Which really was what my brain muttered for most of the movie from this point because Rami goes even WEIRDER than last time. And keep in mind last time had a laughing house, a tree demon, ash having a tom and jerry chase with his hand, a phalic necked murder grandma and ended with Ash chainsawing a giant flesh monster in the eye while a tree tore the house apart. So the fact Rami can TOP that in terms of 

Is a true achievement. This sequence is hilarious by the way, insane and weird even for this franchise but funny because Bruce Cambell fighting an army of tinier bruce cambell’s is impossible to ruin. You just can’t. 

So Ash swallows one and grows a horrifying styigan eye on his shoulder in what feels like the only moment of the film as creepy as the last two. It’s the only part that really FEELS like a horror film, if only for a moment. Though i’d like to stress.. i don’t MIND that this film shifted genres. While it threw me off, as I was still expecting something remotely serious like last time versus the slapstick madness that this film unleashed, once the shock wore off I was laughing my ass off the entire time. This film is comic gold and creative as hell. Again most adventure films wouldn’t suddenly have the protagonist fight mini mes and then eat one which slowly splits off into a hammy evil clone of him. Few would have the courage to go this batshit insane on screen with this level of budget but few men are Sam Rami and god bless him for it. This is a film no one else coudl’ve made, no one else could’ve produced and is fully him, his brother and cambell’s baby. It’s just a joy to watch a film that was clearly someone’s idea, taking everything that inspired them as a kid throwing it into a good pile and serving it to the masses. It’s why I love creators like Grant Morrison or Al Ewing and why i’ve grown to truly love and respect Sam Rami. I always liked the guy but these flims both show his evolution as a creator and his sheer talent and ingnuity. God bless him. 

So I could end the review there but I was paid for a full movie so let’s get back to the hero versus their evil clone

Eh close enough. Evil Ash is a sight to behold, prancing around talking about his good self being “little goody too shoes”. He’s also a tesitament to Cambell’s range as he has a different, far more demented voice, different body posture.. he’s different in everything except looks. A slapstick moron fight ensues, ending with our hero shooting his doppleganger and giving out easily one of his most iconic lines if not THE most iconic line of the film “Good, Bad, I”m the guy with the Gun. “ 

He then buries his evil counterpart instead of you know dismembering him and heads for the book. He instead finds THREE books. Ash’s reaction is understandable. 

Seriously I don’t get why the old man didn’t warn him about this or know about this. He’s a wise old codger, their supposed to know these things and offer heroes swords and fruit by the foot. That’s what old men in fantasy settings do.  That and line after line of cocaine.

So ash grabs one book and gets sucked inside and goes all long in the face. 

Before finding the right book.. and forgetting the magic words, the best part of it being when he tries just mumbling his way past it. Just like one liners there are TOO many good jokes to point out every last one. 

So lightning starts and the dead rises.. and Ash speeds back on his horse. Somehow it’s taken me THIS long to mention Ash’s horse. The sight of Bruce Cambell on a horse will never not entertain me. God bless this man and his horse, who i’ve named Scotty II: The Better One, because the film didn’t bother to name him and that sounds like something ash would say in this movie. 

So Ash Rides in on Scotty II: The Better One, and.. wants to be sent back despite everyone being in mortal peril thanks to his fuck up as the armies of the dead are coming for the book.. and as we see in the cutaway they have a new leader as Evil Ash arises in a kick ass new demon empror look. Point is Ash dosen’t give a shit and is prepared to peace out. I think an old friend has some words for Ash> Go ahead tell em. 

Thanks bud, good luck convincing that teenager to do murders. Ash has a change of heart when a winged demon grabs shelia though. The knights of arthur sure are lucky ash’s brain is hot wired to his penis. So with that Ash rallies them, saying that even with the 60 men that haven’t evacuated, they can hold off the dead, protect the book and save the day. Arthur is skeptical because his only real personality traits are “king stuff” and “king sized douche”, but ash has an actual plan  and not just “kill evil me, free shiela, ?????, sex, go home” drawn on a napkin in the back of his delta 88 like you’d expect. 

No his plan is twofold: ask their enemies for help, and since Ash set them free earlier that’s actually fesable and use his advanced knowledge to make gunpowerder and other future stuff, as well as a secret weapon we’ll get to shortly. And yes Ash just happened to have a bunch of science books in his car, but given Anne Boonchuy happened to have abotu 5 full costume changes, several pairs of clothes, a bath bomb, and god knows what else tucked in her back pack, this again feels like small potatoes. 

Meanwhile.. we get... easily the worst creative decision in the movie. Turns out Evil Ash specifically had Shielia kidnapped. Now that’s not the terrible creative decision, this is a tounge in cheek adventure film and all.. no the terrible creative decision.. is it’s HEAVILY implied he rapes her, and next we see her she’s a deadite. Evil Ash... RAPED SHEILA INTO BECOMING A DEADITE. Now unfortuantley charles tells me if I call on him twice in one review again he’ll stab me a bunch and i’ve met my weekly stabbing quota so that’s no good.  Luckily, I found a sub. 

God bless you Eel. Hopefully you’ll get a movie that actually deserves you soon.  To the point: This was unecessary, you did not need to give the scene sexual assault conotatoins let alone imply rape, what in the actual hell sam. It clashes with the tone, it’s uncessary and i’ts done for no reason, not even the endlessly questionable one of furthering a male character’s story. it’s just gross.

So after.. that the battle for the future of Camelot or whatever begins. And we get the best fucking thing in this entire film: SKELTON BAG PIPERS

This.. this is apparently a meme and has every right to be. I laughed so fucking hard at the sight of the skeletons bagpiping and fluting I swear I lost a kidney. God bless everything about this.

So the fight ensues against an army of skeletons because they coudln’t do dismemberings this time I guess, or they were cheaper. 

It’s also the highlight of the film as our heroes use explosive arrows, the skeletons are hilarious, and naturally voiced by Ted Rami, and the whole fight is cheesy goodness. But it hits it’s peak when, just as things seem their bleakest, ash breaks out the BATTLE WAGON

Everything about this is amazing, from the fact Ash somehow pulled this off to just the number of skeletons it done grinds up. Everything about this is awesome and it’s a driving symbol of why this film is so awesome. 

So Evil Ash uses Shiela to get ash to stop the car which then goes up in a fireball. 

She then goes deadite and we get another iconic line I HAVE to quote

“You Found me beautiful once!”

“Lady, you got real ugly!”

The tide then turns though as ash beats Demon Sheila and the other king guy arrives , raising hell against the army of darkness. This leads to our final showdown as ash faces evil ash in a swordfight. Honestly this last half hour is hard to recap. Not because it’s bad, in fact just the opposite: it kicks SO MUCH ass in one fell swoop it’s hard to riff or analyze. There isn’t any deep character stuff or anything left nor anything funnier than what’s happening half the time. It’s just pure deep fried cool. 

Evil Ash eventually gets the upper hand and the book, but looses it to regular ash who gets it to the wiseman> he decapitates his evil self, wins the daay and the old man uses the magic to make the bad people go away and Shiela turn back to normal> The two kings man hug and with that a new kingdom is forged.  It’s here we get to the two endings, as both branch off from about here each having a diffrent lead in. While I watched the thetrical cut I do feel it necessary to cover both as the original IS Rami and Campbell’s prefered version and loved by some fans. 

In the original ash is advised to take only 6 drops which will put him in a deep sleep and take him back to his time. This being ash he goofs it up and... well even in this film’s alternate less seen ending, it’s still quotable as hell. 

Yeah so this ending is decent.. but I prefer the focus group one. While this is Rami’s vision and all and DOES fit ash’s character.. it also feels needlessly cruel. While ash WAS kind of a dick in the first two thirds of the movie, he fully redeemed himself by the end risking life, mutilating his beloved Delta 88 into that beautiful monstrosity above, and doing everything he could to protect a kingdom that previously had enslaved him. He didn’t deserve this. And look sometimes a horror hero dosen’t get what they deserved. Nancy nearly died, and they didn’t bore us with the miraculous details of her mistake then actually died, and Andy got sent into foster care, blamed for more murders, sent to miltiary school, balked for more murders and locked in an institution.. and probably blamed for more murders. What i’m saying is sometimes you live, sometimes you die and sometimes a doll frames you for murder most of your young life. Sometimes a horror film HAS to end with the bad guy winning to be truly effective. 

But sometimes it dosen’t work,  like when Get Out THANKFULLY changed the ending to something far less depressingly realistic, and it dosen’t work here.  In large part because unlike the last two films which also ended on a down note.. this isn’t a horror film. It’s a goofy adventure movie. As such Ash getting a very undeserved unhappy ending just dosen’t work at all. Sure Evil Dead 4000 would’ve been sweet, but it wasn’t worth saddling the rest of the film with an unfitting, throughly depressing ending that just isn’t funny enough to counter ballance it. It’s especially draining if you’ve watched the other two films: Ash has been through so damn much over three films, watched everyone he loves and scotty die, been mentally and physically tourtured by the evil dead, had to chop off his hand, been locked in a murder cellar, been turned into a deadite twice, nearly got a hatchet to the face, watched everyone around him die AGAIN and then got sent back in time for doing the right thing, enslaved, got attacked by mini me’s , got attacked by a clone, accidently raised the dead again, had his girlfriend kidnapped and turne dinto a deadite and had to say goodbye to said girlfriend and Scotty II: The Better One. At this point, Ash earned a fucking break and audiences wanted that. 

So we got the alternate ending instead and again it just fits the cheesy, fun tone of the film better, and wraps up the trilogy better too: Ash has returned to the present where he has a habit of talking about his adventures like any one would belivei him. He does get one woman’s intrest... when a deadite breaks in and tries to attack said woman. So grabbing a gun from housewares, he fucking SLIDES OVER ON A BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL CART, SHOOTS THE VCR SHE WAS USING AS A WEAPON THEN SHOOTS THE EVIL BITCH AS HE GOES BEFORE FINISHING HER. He ends the films not trapped in a future for another sequel but finally happy> He’s got a new girl, a job he loves, a crowd that now adores and belvieis his weird stories. As our hero puts it in his final words for the trilogy

“In my own way I am king... HAIL TO THE KING BABY”

Final Thoughts of Darkness:

This film is great. I’ve gone deep into why. it’s not perfectt:L the assault, the boring first stretch, ash being a real ashhole. But the film is just so unabaishidly zany, the jokes and one liners so clever , and the tone just so over the top it’s impossible not to love. And this is coming from someone whose not a  bit fan of “guy gets sent back to arthurian times’ stories, so I had a hurdle to overcome but I just enjoyed this film. It’s also Bruce Campbell at his best, spewing catchphrases, mugging like all. hell and clearly having the time of his life.  Army of Darkness may not be AS good as the previous film, but it’s more a matter of prefrence honestly and I could see someone just as easily making this thier faviorite and owuldn’t blame them. This film is still awesome. 

Sadly as I said before the awesome didn’t translate into sales and while the franchise kept going it woudln’t return to theaters till someone decided to reboot the dead. While we MIGHT return to ash at some point next year, depends on what Kev wants to do, we still have one last trip to the cabin to deal with, one last film before next year’s big second reboot attempt. It’s time for the Evil Dead to rise once again with the remake. See you next time and thanks for readin. 

[clonewarsarchives]

Inside 'Star Wars: The Clone Wars'

By: Gerri Miller  (original article link on howstuffworks)

Sources

George Lucas interviewed August 4, 2008

Dave Filoni interviewed September 11, 2008

The sci-fi phenomenon that began more than 30 years ago with a movie about a galaxy long ago and far, far away has expanded exponentially ever since with sequels, prequels, books, games and animated spinoffs. Although the animated "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" movie, released this summer, has to date grossed a less than stellar $34 million, it was an offshoot of creator George Lucas' mission to create a TV series, and it served its purpose as a promotional tool for the weekly "Clone Wars" episodes that premiere on Cartoon Network Oct. 3, 2008.

Focused on the conflict briefly referred to in the original "Star Wars," the galactic civil war takes place in the period between "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones" and "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith." The Clone Wars pit the Grand Army of the Republic led by the Jedi Knights against the Separatists and their Droid Army, led by Count Dooku, a Jedi turned Sith Lord aligned with the evil Darth Sidious. Many of the characters from the "Star Wars" universe are involved, including Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and young Anakin Skywalker, before he was tempted to the Dark Side and became Darth Vader.

"I was lamenting the fact that in 'Episode II,' I started the Clone Wars, and in 'Episode III,' I ended the Clone Wars, and I never actually got to do anything on the Clone Wars," says Lucas. "It's like skipping over World War II."

To remedy that omission, he tapped Dave Filoni, an animator (Nickelodeon's "Avatar: the Last Airbender" series) and passionate "Star Wars" fan, to bring "The Clone Wars" to TV.

Ensconced at Big Rock Ranch, near Lucas' Skywalker Ranch headquarters in Marin County, Cali., Filoni and his team of artists and computer animators are making 22 episodes in season one and have nearly two more seasons written.

"We're way ahead. We've been doing this ever since I finished 'Revenge of the Sith,'" says Lucas, who hopes to do at least 100 installments.

He and Filoni collaborate on everything from story to design to execution in translating the "Star Wars" universe for television. It's a daunting creative, technical and logistic task, as we'll explain in the following sections.

Building the Universe

How do you scale down an IMAX-size spectacle for television and still have it make an impact, especially on a small screen budget? That's just one of the problems Dave Filoni has to solve.

"'Star Wars' is very famous for the scale of it, and how convincing it looks. So when you're doing a weekly television series, you have to figure out how to do things on that level," he notes. "Sometimes it forces you to be creative and come up with solutions that are better than if you can shoot everything you want," he continues, preferring to consider budgetary constraints a creative incentive rather than a limitation. "The team here is challenged to come up with these giant battles. We haven't shied away from anything."

While he did some of the initial character design, subsequently, Filoni has spent most of his time supervising other artists and animators, who number around 70 in-house and another 80 or so at facilities in Singapore and Taipei.

"Everything is written here, and the story and design and editing are all done here. The animation and lighting are done overseas, and sometimes some modeling as well," he outlines.

­"I meet with George to talk about the episodes and he hands out a lot of the storylines and main ideas for the stories. I'll draw while he's talking and show him the sketch," Filoni continues. "That way we communicate right off the bat about what something might look like."

At any given time, the director notes, episodes are in various stages of completion, "from designing to working on a final cut, or adding sound and color-correction. I have four episodic directors to help me, who each have an episode they're managing."

Rather than use computer animation to duplicate the live-action films' characters or continue in the very stylized vein of the 2004-2005 "Clone Wars" micro-series, "We kind of shot for the middle," says Filoni, who endeavored to blend a 2-D esthetic with 3-D technology.

"The 3-D model makers and riggers who worked on the prequels dealt with the height of realism to create convincing digital characters. I knew that we weren't going to be able to do that for the series. And we wanted it to be different than a live-action feature, to get away from photo-realism. It was a choice to simplify something in the character models, the same way we would do things in a 2-D show."

So how did Filoni stay true to the "Star Wars" legacy in this newest installment? Read on to find out.

Clone Style

Taking some inspiration from the earlier cartoon series, Filoni

approached the characters as a 2-D animator would, "but stylized the face a little more. If you look at Anakin, he has certain edges and lines in his face. I would draw an edge or a line that might be unnaturally straight or curved, and that would play into the lighting of it. I tried to sculpt in 3-D the way I would draw or sculpt an image in 2-D, with shadow and light. I wanted it to look like a painting -- you see a textured, hand-painted style on every character. I have texture artists who literally paint every single character right down to their eyeball, because I wanted that human touch on everything."

Advances in computer animation have allowed Filoni to accomplish much more than he would have been able to in traditional 2-D. "For eight years I worked just with a pencil. I never touched a computer. But working with George, we try to look at computers as an incredibly advanced pencil. The technical side helps the creative, artistic side," he says.

Battles filled with huge numbers of soldiers can be rendered faster than ever before, but they still have to be created, along with every other prop and character in an enormous universe. "'Star Wars' is so complex in that you're building a whole galaxy. We go to many different planets," Filoni reminds. "So every rock, tree, blade of grass, native vehicle -- every asset -- needs design. We had to create a whole bunch of assets for each episode, and the budget goes up for each element you have. Once you build it, you have it, but we can't go to a different planet and have the same chair there," he laughs. "On a schedule where we need those things right away, it's difficult to get it all built."

Since "The Clone Wars" is chronologically sandwiched between "Clone Wars" and "Revenge of the Sith," it has been a mandate for the creators to stay consistent with the mythology. "That's probably one of the trickiest things," admits Filoni. "We always have to keep in mind what the characters are thinking and feeling at the beginning of this and at the end. You have a lot of room to play with when you're in the middle, but you have to remember what people say in the third movie. With characters like Obi-Wan or Anakin or Padme, I have to pay very careful attention that it will hook up. And then there's the expanded universe of "Star Wars" novels and video games. I try to be aware of it all and work it in, because fans really appreciate it."

Filoni hopes to attract existing fans and create new ones, especially among the younger generation, but admits doing the latter may be easier. "One thing we have that's different from any movie that came before is we're an animated series. But there's an instant reaction to the word animation that it's for kids. How you get around that is with the stories you tell. We'll have our snow battles and we'll also have our lighter 'Return of the Jedi' moments. Some episodes lean older, some younger. But in the end it has a broad appeal," he believes.

The recent "Clone Wars" movie (out on DVD Nov. 11 ) served as a stand-alone prequel to introduce the characters at this point in time. In contrast, "The series has its small arcs and shows you the war from across a broad spectrum of episodes. It's not just Anakin Skywalker's story," Filoni underlines. "We can go left or right of that plot and deal with characters we have never seen. There's a lot of material. It's a three-year period in the history of the 'Star Wars' Universe, and there are so many stories to tell. The longer it goes, the more chance we get to tell fascinating stories in that galaxy."

Character Study

"The Clone Wars" shows a different side of some of the film franchise's most iconic characters. "In a series, you can do a whole episode about a character and learn more about what they were like, which makes what happens to them a lot more poignant," explains Filoni. "We know Yoda is powerful, but how does that power develop? How does he use it? We get to go into more detail that you just couldn't do in the live action films, because they're mainly focused on Anakin."

While few of the actors from the live action movies agreed to reprise their roles in voice over for "The Clone Wars," Anthony Daniels, the original C-3PO, is the exception. "One of the special moments for me was hearing Anthony on the telephone, discussing C-3PO with me and his experiences. That really helps us round out the characters," says the director, who enjoyed similar input from Rob Coleman, the animation supervisor who worked on Yoda on the prequels.

Of the new characters not seen in the live action series, there's the alluring but venomous Asajj Ventress, a disciple of Count Dooku. "She is, of course, a villain, and fits into the structure of the Sith," Filoni elaborates. "Darth Sidious -- Senator Palpatine -- is the main bad guy, and his apprentice is Count Dooku. Dooku is training Ventress in the Dark Side. She's getting more powerful. I wanted to make her intelligent, deceptive and also kind of sexual. She's kind of a forbidden fruit -- Jedi are not supposed to get involved with the more lustful aspects of life. She adds another dynamic to the series."

On the other side of the good/evil coin is newcomer Ahsoka Tano, Anakin's teenage pad­awan, or apprentice. "She's Anakin's student and helps us see him as more of a hero," says Filoni. "Once he gets over his initial reaction, he takes pride in her. He's unpredictable and the Jedi know that, but he has compassion and that is used against him and it later brings him to the Dark Side."

Ahsoka was created, says Lucas, "Because I needed to mature Anakin. The best way to get somebody to become responsible and mature is to have them become a parent or a teacher. You have to think about what you're doing and set an example. You look at your behavior and the way you do things much differently. The idea was to use her to make Anakin become more mature. We've made her a more extreme version of what Anakin was- - a little out there, independent, vital and full of life, but even more so. He gets a little dose of his own medicine."

"She's been a really fun character to develop," adds Filoni, who likes Ahsoka but admits that his character tastes tend to run a bit more obscure -- his favorite is Plo Koon, "a bizarre Jedi Master. It's been fun to develop him and show his personality beyond the fact that he's bizarre looking and carries a lightsaber."

Fan Fare

Just three years ago, Filoni dressed up as Plo Koon to see an opening night showing of "Revenge of the Sith," so it's not surprising that the 34-year-old fan is still pinching himself that he has this job. "It's a very creative atmosphere," he says of Big Rock Ranch, where the lakeside setting is "meant to inspire us artistically and definitely does. A lot of the people I work with grew up with 'Star Wars,' so we have a great time. It's hard, intense work, but George is very engaged in what we're doing. What more could you ask for? I have the guy who created the 'Star Wars' universe excited and interested in what we're doing. We couldn't be happier about that."

Asked why he thinks "Star Wars" remains a fan favorite today, three decades later, Lucas says diversification is the key. "We were always able to deal with different aspects of the story in various forms and I think that keeps it alive. It is a lot of fun and it's a universe that has been created to inspire young people to exercise their imagination and inspire them to be creative, and I think that always works."

"The original 'Star Wars' had broad appeal to everybody, and it holds up so well," adds Filoni. "I think there's a timelessness to it, even though Luke looks like a kid from the '70s with that haircut. Luke is a farmer boy and Han is a cowboy. Jedi Knights are like the samurai of Japan or the knights of Europe. Those archetypes work the globe over. It's a world phenomenon that speaks to everyone. There will always be a character you can relate to."

[bae-science]

oh? uprising pentagon funding moments? tell us more

okay let’s get into it hello everyone and welcome to unraveled with newt bae-science. i’ve replaced the twink.

BACKGROUND:

when creating the first pacific rim movie with gdt at the helm directing, the cgi being done was pretty expensive. it’s giant robots, giant monsters, huge military complexes, and making raleigh’s pupils into circles and not big pink hearts. complicated stuff! so the expectation from the big boys at legendary was that they would take the marvel route: get funding from the us military. 

the way that works goes like so: there is a team at the pentagon that reviews every script sent to them by film producers that would like funding. if the script is deemed to portray the us military in an acceptable way, the production gets free use of military bases, tons of cash, use of equipment, and a ton of other stuff. this is how marvel does all their movies. it’s propaganda, babey!

so they polish off the script and send it off to the boys in brown in washington to ask for cgi money. the us military reads the script, says “no we’re not portrayed well and also the ppdc is too international (and lbr, with the kaidonovskys and the triplets they probably weren’t too happy about that teamup)”, and sends it back for changes. no changes? no money.

well del toro says fuck that.

he says considering all the lovely things the us military had done to latin american counties while he was growing up (because remember, the guy is mexican), he wasn’t gonna take a penny of their propaganda money just to kiss up. no changes are made, a crap ton of more money goes into the cgi, and the first film barely broke even. it had a budget of $180 million usd  (10 million more than godzilla king of the monsters) and grossed $411 million worldwide. in big budget movie world? that’s fucking nothing. the first avengers movie had a budget of $220 million and made $2.048 billion worldwide. in 2012. so the bar was set and pacific rim did not meet it monetarily.

cut to five years later with uprising. legendary is sitting around, going “okay we know there’s still a strong fanbase for this franchise, there’s still blockbuster material in here, can we make a profit?”. they don’t want a repeat of last time, because if you bring in del toro, he’s gonna give us a script that won’t get military funding, and we cannot afford to make this movie without it. it’s pacific fucking rim. so they bring in a guy whose never solo directed before and has a background of working on the transformers movies, which are also about giant robots and also chock full of us nationalism. you can pay him less than a big name like gdt, he’s guaranteed to make something that the army will like, and he knows what he’s doing with the rock ‘em sock ‘em robots, which is all we really care about. 

enter steven s. deknight.

THE HUNCH:

gonna put a great big ALLEGEDLY here because none of this is confirmed, i’m only speculating, but i’m also a double entertainment major who’s been working in the industry for almost half a decade, so. i have a solid proposal.

here’s my pitch: i think they whip up a script that is us military catnip. tons of glorification of soldiers, turning the ppdc into a police state, child soliders going uncriticized, more emphasis on the jaegers and fight sequences than actual characters, and of course, the villains. you have shao, a chinese businesswoman who has an extremely unethical company culture (stream) and turns out to have been blind to the evil aliens destroying it right under her nose, and then you have the precursors. because putting aside the whole twist thing and newt being possessed and tortured, all the poorly done allegories, blah blah blah, before the big twist that it’s faceless aliens we can blamelessly kill, it looks like the fruity dude who defected from the government to the private sector and sold out, is the main villain. you have several excellent things the audience is already primed to hate (girlbosses, china, people being successful at things who aren’t the government and refusing to work with them, schrodinger’s evil dandy) thanks to propaganda. formulaic, basic plot with little scary nuance or criticism + easily vilifiable concepts the us doesn’t like = tons of cash from uncle sam. free money, right?

well we all know how that girl bossed now don’t we.

the budget for pacific rim: uprising was $150 million. it grossed $290.5 million worldwide for a monumentally worse box office flop than the first movie, mixed reviews from critics, an outraged fan response, and everybody got on their ass for fridging mako and being yet another sci-fi franchise to screw over john boyega. it premiered in march, Q1, where movies go to die. i was there. i sat in that theater in my little newt cosplay and was set on the path to also become a psych student (i have a lot of fields of study. nomative determinism, okay?), and felt my extremely normal and average height body fill with rage. it was a shitshow at the fuck factory. 

THE TAKEAWAY:

we all know why uprising sucked. it was a textbook example of fridging, the characters were underdeveloped and one-note, there were no real themes or points made, newt starred in a one-man one-hivemind trauma porno; i’ve said all this before. 

but i try to do this thing where i take away a lesson from a shitty experience, whatever it may be. what can we learn from uprising (allegedly)? well for one, don’t cram your movie full of enough propaganda to please the army and expect it to actually be a good movie. don’t let a first timer direct such a big project with so many politics behind it. let financial constraints push you to think outside the box with your art: just look at new who! blink is one of the highest rated episodes of the whole damn SHOW and it came out of penny pinching. and most important: support art that means something. throw your money at projects that have something important to say, and encourage the people you know to do so too. because if we don’t? nothing is immune to propaganda. not even giant robots.

(and stream pacific rim: the black so i can have a big budget for when i direct pr3 ❤️)

[fillingthescrapbook]

Rewriting The CW's Kung Fu, Part 9: Reflections and Moving Forward

And we have reached the end of our Kung Fu journey. If you haven't seen where we began, here's a handy guide to the previous posts:

Part 1: The Characters

Part 2: The Pilot

Part 3: The Mythology

Part 4: The Story Map

Part 5: Act I

Part 6: Act II

Part 7: Act III

Part 8: The Finale

Before I start with the lessons I learned and my other reflections, I want to thank @flailingbloo for all of her help and support in this endeavor. Without her to talk to and commiserate with, I would probably have gotten stuck in Act II forever and everything I've written would've been riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. So my eternal gratitude to flailingbloo. And now, we begin:

Lessons.

Going into this writing exercise, I already knew it was going to be hard. Writing stories is time-consuming, it's nerve-wracking, and it takes a lot of research...and patience. Writing, especially for television, is also not a solitary task. I mean, sure, the writing itself needs to be done alone--but everything that comes before, during, and after the writing needs input from so many people.

Although I have a lot (and I mean A LOT) of complaints about how The CW's Kung Fu was handled and written, I do have a lot of respect for the work that the writers put into their scripts. And I do appreciate all that they have done to have a show like this produced.

Doing this rewrite, I learned that it's really important to make the main character likeable. Like, every episode I broke down, I had to ask myself: is Nicky likeable here? Is she someone who viewers would want to root for? Like, for me she is, but only people who read what I wrote can say for sure. My perspective is now a bit skewered because I have bias.

Second, story maps are very helpful. There were times, especially during Part 6 (where I wrote breakdowns for Episodes 6 to 9) where I kept getting road-blocked by where I want the story to go. So I went back to the story map over and over again, to remind myself--where does the story itself need to go? How do I help the characters get to the point where they're ready for what needs to happen? (This is also where flailingbloo helped the most for me. Like, she really reminded me why I was doing this rewrite in the first place. Because I care about Nicky and the show. I wouldn't have funneled so much of my time and effort into this if I didn't.)

Another thing I learned, or rather re-learned, is the art of letting go. I created the character of Stanley to recur throughout the series as a reminder of who Nicky was and who she is becoming. And then I finished writing the first act without even mentioning him. By the second act, I was ready to use him finally--but, after multiple false starts, I realized Stanley was one of the reasons why I was having a hard time pushing Nicky's story forward. Because I kept trying to go back to the past. So I decided in the writing of the second act to shelve Stanley completely, only to find him popping up in the second to last episode in a, at least I hope, more organic way.

The last thing I learned in this exercise was that, whenever a new character needs to come in, I have to look at my existing characters first to see if any one of them can fulfill the role I needed for the story. Like, creating new villains for Nicky was fun, sure--but, at the same time, I realized that there were already existing villains that could recur. Like the Triad, who played villains in two more episodes after the pilot; and Henry's martial arts class at the community center became the source of two existing storylines from the actual show.

Reflections.

Do I think what my rewrite is better than the show? To me, yes. But, again, I am very biased. That said, I am proud of how I utilized the characters that the show created and didn't really give much importance to. Dennis, when he was introduced, felt like a rich character that could provide a very different point-of-view from the Shen siblings--but he was mostly relegated to being eye-candy. And I thought I gave him more meat by making him more involved in Althea's sexual harassment storyline, while also involving him in Nicky's stories.

That said, I also realize that I wasn't able to play up Nicky and Evan's past relationship as I was writing the episodic breakdowns. I was able to give them a lot of opportunities to explore their chemistry together, as I did with Nicky and Henry, but I kind of dropped the ball as a writer on guiding those planted moments into something more significant. Granted, I only wrote breakdowns and not actual scripts. Maybe I could've explored the romance angle more with a little sprinkle of direction and dialogue.

As I went deeper into the rewrite, I do see how easy it is to fall in love with characters as you write them. It's very easy to trap yourself into wanting villains to be more well-rounded. I keep having to remind myself that I don't have to redeem everyone. Just Nicky. Which became harder and harder as I went further and further into the story.

Another thing that became difficult as I went on? Keeping the mythology from just bursting open. That's how Henry, as I wrote him, evolved into becoming the son of a guardian--just so there's a reason for him to be so invested in Nicky's quest, while also having someone who can explain things to our main character. I'm actually really proud of that evolution.

All that said, I also have to recognize that I rewrote the show with the benefit of hindsight and the lack of budget constraints. In the real show, there's a group of writers who each have their own ideas of what the show should be. (This is where a head writer--not a show runner--would come in handy, so they could reel in the story to what needs to be told.) With more writers comes more chances for inconsistencies to happen. (And this is where a script supervisor, or a writing assistant, could come in handy.) And then there's production notes and budget. Not to mention, you know, the whole pandemic that's still happening. I didn't have to think about those things while doing this rewrite.

So, again, I want to give the writers kudos to actually producing scripts. I hope they haven't lost their minds--or their will to write--just because there are people like me who nitpick at everything. That's what people who love things do. We nitpick because we care.

Moving forward.

I do plan to stick with the real show for Season 2. I hope it's planned better. I hope they get researchers (plural!) and a writing assistant to help in the writing room. I hope the writers would sit down with the cast to discuss and develop the characters more. And I really hope they hire a better fight choreographer and fight director for the second season. (Like, rehire the people who choreographed and filmed the flashback scene in... Episode 11? The one with Nicky's maternal grandmother and Pei-Ling's own mother?)

I hope that the Nicky-Henry relationship gets explored realistically, and if a potential new love interest is ordered, they get introduced in a way that isn't antagonistic. Make them more well-rounded characters too, please. Make us want to root for their success. And while I think Nicky doesn't have an iota of chemistry with Evan, I do like Evan himself as a character. So I hope they get him more involved in future storylines--as an outsider looking in, sure, but also as an honorary member of the Shen family.

With regards to the Shen family, I do hope that we get to explore their relationships and dreams more before the show drops the reveal about Mei-Xue's daughter. I want Althea to have a cohesive storyline that doesn't pause for no reason. I want Ryan to explore being Asian AND gay as a first-generation Asian-American. And give the Shen siblings some recurring friends. They don't have to be semi-regulars (unless there's a story that can be explored) but let's not keep the Shens in a bubble. It was weird in the first season. Especially for Althea whose friends only showed up for her bachelorette party and never again. Not even when she was panicking about wedding preparations, which, considering how rich Dennis's parents were? They wouldn't let Althea be in charge of anything. They would hire a Chinese wedding coordinator. And an expensive and hard-to-book one at that. They donated an entire hospital wing, for crying out loud.

I want Jin to have an actual character, and not just be the supportive dad who loves his kids very much (admittedly my own rewrite also made this same mistake). And I want Mei-Li to be consistent as a character. Like, no more surprise twists about being the descendant of a legendary warrior without proper foreshadowing and plot-planting please.

Dennis shouldn't just be eye-candy. The same applies to Kerwin. Sure, I get that shirtless men are a must in a CW series, but please give their characters some meat too. Dennis's nerd-side was never showcased in the show, and Kerwin had that poor little rich boy background that didn't get explored either. Because the show was too busy keeping him and Zhi-Lan tearing each others' clothes off--when they're not tearing other people down.

Also, don't drop the ball on the tease that Bian-Ge is now everywhere. If I understood correctly, Bian-Ge is Kung Fu's version of Qi. If yes, then I hope they treat it respectfully as a force of nature--and not just the source of magic. The flowers from Bian-Ge itself can be magical, sure, I have no problem with a fictional flower being a McGuffin.

Finally, I hope the show also explores other Asian communities and cultures. Like, Kung Fu is great--but imagine if Nicky had to face someone who is versed in Silat Melayu? Or someone who uses Arnis? Someone who practices Kalaripayattu or Lathi Khela? Or Kuntao? Imagine Nicky having to use Wing Chun against someone who uses Karate or Krav-Maga? Asia is a big continent and there are so many different types of martial arts found from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Kung-Fu is an umbrella term, so it'll be great to see the different styles found under it.

... This went long again. Sorry about that. Funny thing is, when I started this whole rewriting plan? I thought it would take three posts, tops. And look at us now. Nine posts deep, and it seems I still haven't run out of things to say. So I'm cutting myself off before I completely wear out my welcome.

But if you've read all my Kung Fu posts, please do reach out. Let's discuss the show and what it can do to produce a better second season.

[gravecinema]

Why New Nightmare is the Best Nightmare Movie - 7/27/2020

The Nightmare on Elm Street series, to me, is the finest in all of horror. It has quite possibly the most iconic villain in the horror genre in Freddy Krueger, as played by Robert Englund. Starting with the first film written and directed by Wes Craven in 1984, the series would spawn 7 sequels and one remake. Each film would become event viewing for any horror fan, and would offer something new for audiences with every installment. It goes without saying that such a franchise would ignite debate amongst fans about which film is the best. Well, I’m here to tell you that without a doubt Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is the absolute best in the series.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was released in 1994, ten years after the debut of the first film. By then, the Nightmare films had grown to become just a little bit stale at that point. They had supposedly killed Freddy off for good in the previous film, in an effort to end the story and the series in a definitive way. However, you can never keep a good villain dead for long, and the fans demanded that he come back. Since the prior film was not greatly received by fans and critics, the decision was made to bring Wes Craven back to write and direct a true definitive ending for the series. And boy, did he ever deliver.

Prior to New Nightmare, Wes Craven had only been involved with the first and third films of the franchise. Writing and directing the great first film, but only coming back for writing duties for the excellent third film, Dream Warriors. After the third film, Wes Craven would again go on to pursue other projects as new filmmakers such as Renny Harlin were given the opportunity to see what they could do with the franchise. During this time, the franchise would veer off into a more comedic tone than the more horrific one from what Wes Craven had initially started it off with. It wouldn’t be until Wes Craven came back with New Nightmare that Freddy would become scary again.  

With Wes Craven writing and directing again, he would craft a story that would see Freddy becoming a dark force trying to escape the film world and coming into our own. The idea was that the Freddy character had become a host for a demonic entity while the films were being made and released, and after the character was killed off and the films stopped, that entity, having gotten used to being Freddy and liking it, would now make an attempt to cross over into the real world as a purer and more evil version of Freddy.  

With the change in tone becoming more horror centric again, Wes would also change and update the look of Freddy to better represent the demonic entity that had taken the character over. This version of Freddy in Wes’ story would have the claws coming out of Freddy’s own hand, as opposed to just having him wear the iconic razored gloved. Freddy would also be wearing a trench coat as this image of Freddy was in Wes’ original nightmare that helped inspire the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Since this version of Freddy was meant to be more evil than before, he would also be given more demonic features on his face with the skin looking more ripped than burnt, as if the demon was trying to force its way out, and also having more prominent shoulders.

With Freddy coming into the real world, the film also features characters from the previous films coming back as the actors who played them. Heather Langenkamp gets to return getting to play both herself and Nancy. Robert Englund gets to play his fun self along with the new evil Freddy. John Saxton returns as both himself and Nancy’s father in a sizable role. We also get a few fun cameos of previous cast members at Heather’s husband’s funeral. Finally, along with producer Bob Shaye making an appearance, we get the man himself, Wes Craven, playing himself throughout the film.

Wes essentially plays the part of soothsayer and narrator, providing Heather with an explanation of what is happening, and with a warning about what is to come and what she must do. To defeat this new version of Freddy attacking her and her son in the real world, Heather is going to have to play Nancy one last time.

The story that Wes Craven crafted here is one of the most engaging and inspired of the series. The meta storytelling style of real people knowing that they are becoming a part of a horror film would further be explored by Wes Craven in the Scream series. He would even blend the story with fairytale elements such as Hanzel and Gretel shoving the mean old witch in the oven, and having Heather’s son Dylan leaving breadcrumbs for her to find him. This story would lead to one of the most satisfying climaxes in the whole series, and the best ending out of any of the movies.

With Freddy coming into the real world and attacking the people that Heather cares about, we even get to revisit one of the most iconic kills in the entire series, when Freddy kills babysitter Julie by dragging her up the Hospital walls and slashing her to death. We also get to revisit the moment of Nancy sinking into the steps from the first film. We even see the return of the original house on 1428 Elm Street when the movie world and the real world start to fully merge, and the actors become their movie characters once again. Heather even gets Nancy’s gray hair streak during the last act of the film, along with her pjs.

Speaking of, the last act of the film is the best in all of the films. With Heather fully becoming Nancy, she goes to Freddy’s realm to face off with him just like in the first film. It’s an intense and thrilling sequence that has you fully invested in Heather getting her child back and saving him from Freddy. Heather also gets to fully take charge here, and completely owns her role. Crafting this final climatic scene just like a fairytale has to be my favorite choice that this movie makes, and it gives this Nightmare the best final shot in the whole series.

If there’s one criticism that I have from the previous Nightmare films, it has to be how most of them ended and concluded. The first film had a great final confrontation, but that last shot is a little cringy and confusing with the story. The second film had different rules than the others and it wasn’t really made clear how Freddy was ultimately defeated. The third film was great for most of it, but it had some questionable character deaths in the last act that never sat right with me. The fourth film had a pretty decent ending and protagonist for Freddy to face, but this was the movie where Freddy started becoming more funny than scary. The fifth film has some odd tonal shifts throughout it, with Freddy’s final defeat being weirder than the rest. Most of the sixth film was pretty mediocre with Freddy’s supposed final demise not being nearly as flashy or satisfying as the others. This film though, it offered a great and satisfying conclusion: That of a mother saving her child while defeating the evil monster by burning him in an oven and blowing him up.

I can also understand while some people might not prefer this film over others. This film explores a new concept that the other films didn’t, and that can make it a letdown for people expecting more of the same that they got before. Dream Warriors gets a lot of praise from fans as being the best, and I can see why. It has some of the best kills of the series, great set pieces and designs, Nancy and her dad coming back, and Freddy is still the menacing slasher that we are familiar with. My only problem with it as I mentioned before was some of the story choices that they made with a few of the characters at the end that didn’t satisfy me as much as the story and the ending of New Nightmare. As any horror fan will tell you, killing off a character that you really want to live can leave you with a sour taste in your mouth.

There’s nothing sour about New Nightmare for me, though. Every decision and path the story takes is one that I can fully get behind. It doesn’t have any of the budget constraints that the first film had, it makes Freddy scary again, and the deaths more meaningful. While it’s true that it gets some criticism from straying from the familiar Nightmare formula like Freddy’s Revenge did, it does it in a way that makes sense, and it gives the series a satisfying conclusion. Freddy wouldn’t return again until the special one-off of Freddy vs. Jason was made in 2003, and it was strictly made for fans of both horror icons as a thank you.  

If I had to pick the best thing about New Nightmare, it’s that it provides a proper and satisfying ending to a horror series, which can be rare in the genre. Many series can fade into direct-to-video obscurity with one bad cheap sequel after the next. However, the Nightmare on Elm Street films always made for appointment viewing at the box office, and you couldn’t have asked for a better way to end the series. It ensures that Freddy Kreuger will always have a great legacy as one of the premier villains in horror, and it will always leave us begging for more. With Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Freddy got to go out on top, and he will have us always go on loving him.

[intersex-ionality]

I’m sorry for asking but I cannot seem to find any answers. I see a lot of stray anti posts complaining about hazbin hotel, and I can’t for the life of me understand them because I haven’t seen the show. I read a summary of the plot, but perhaps you could explain better. What is it and why do so many hate it (and why have I seen no fewer than 4 unique posts claiming it’s “what happens when you let billdip shippers make things”?)

Now, I was never a billdip shipper, but I suppose I can see the, like, similarity in vibes between Alastor (a demonic radio host with untold evil powers and who speaks in a 1930s radio jockey voice), and Bill.

And since antishippers hate Bill and they also hate Vivienne Medrano, the attempt to compare “billdip” to an entire original cartoon property is, I guess, a logical connection for them.

But let me be clear: there’s absolutely fuck or all that can be said to parallel the popular interpretation of billdip, in no small part because there no Dipper character, and in much larger part because of Alastor extremely rejects all romantic, sexual and even platonic advances.

Antishippers hate Hazbin Hotel because they hate the woman who came up with and spearheaded the project. They loathe Vivienne Medrano for being a successful independent artist capitalizing on the desperate need in the general viewing public for the bright colors, musical numbers, and zany antics that only animation can provide, but without the stifling restrictions of being targetted towards children. Most “adult” animation is focused on being drab or viscerally disgusting as a form of schadenfreude humour. And while children’s animation certainly fills that bright and zany niche, because it is obligated to adhere to the morality of various broadcasters, it’s often very suffocated in what it can or cannot do or say.

The aesthetic that HH/HB has created is clearly a callback to two major styles of animation: the adult-aimed slapstick of early Warner Brothers, and the long-and-lanky exaggerated flailing limbs that were popular as a design choice in low budgets (TV, off-brand film) and fandom animation in the late 2000s.

Since this style of animation is also associated heavily with fandom’s last big burst of creative and sexual freedom before the whole “no boundaries, no barriers, the search algorithms can and will put porn on every child’s dashboard” disasters of 2013-2015, some people are naturally off-put by it, because it reminds them of the time a bunch of corporate overlords decided that they should destroy their own platforms. For whatever reason (it’s the capitalism, probably), people blame individual artists for this trash fire rather than the platform holders that purposefully destroyed organization and boundaries between groups in a desperate bid for ad revenue.

Antishippers have a deep-seated reflex reaction towards hating that art style. You can see it in the hatred of HH/HB, but also in the hatred of things like, “cringey once-ler fans” and of “people who draw all the homestuck like twinks,” and "people who draw Pearl like a man” and all kinds of other places.

Additionally, Vivienne Medrano was at the centre of a few other antishipper fiascos, because her previous projects involved what they call a “pedophilic student-teacher relationship between a child and an adult.” Of course, in truth, the relationship in question is between an 18 year old student and her 19 year old student-tutor, but when have anti-shippers let facts get in their way.

Likewise, she made a living for a while taking commissions for (SFW) furry art work, and has always had a very positive relationship with the furry community (despite not being a furry herself). People upset by her success as an artist are also quick to say that she has sex with animals, “like all furries do,” because as we all know, calling queer artists sexual cirminals is Good Praxis that has Never Caused Harm /sarcasm.

In effect, Vivienne Medrano is a perfect storm of things anti-shippers hate: successful queer creators who refuse to assimilate to heteronormativity; successful creators of color who refuse to assimilate to white respectability; unrepentantly proud of her art; unafraid to engage with sexual themes in a fun rather than puritanical and hateful way; popular in the late 2000s/early 2010s; an ascended fan who was able to turn her fandom credentials into a successful professional project.

Their hatred for all of these facts about her are presented in a way that lets them feel good about lashing out at someone they dislike/are envious of. Namely, by saying that her work is an act of sexual, racial, or gendered violence, rather than, you know, fictional and fun.

HH/HB is not somehow a perfect piece of art. I have made my own discomfort with facets of it very clear. And there are flaws other than my wariness of rehabilitation themes.

Some of the sound design is overwhelming, with a few scenes bordering Johnny Test levels of excessive sound effects; in some cases the editing has clipped too much quiet-space between the presentation of a joke and its punchline; those traits combined with the lack of closed captioning can make the show very hard to process for someone like me who has difficulty with speech.

The immense budgetary constraints of the animation can sometimes be seen in framerate dips or in peculiar background details. Zoomed out shots of the cast as an ensemble are particularly identifiable as places where what would have been filler art in a higher budget production were ultimately left in because there wasn’t time or money to replace them.

The show is extremely upfront about sexuality and especially queer and professional sexuality, which can easily be off-putting to people. Conservative Fox News hosts’ extreme homophobia and violence are put on full display--for the purpose of mocking them for being enormous sacks of shit, but on display nonetheless--which can likewise be uncomfortable.

At one point you see the clearly exposed brain of a cartoon egg, which I won’t lie, makes me gag every time it happens, no matter how stylized and brief the shot. (Why! Does the egg! Have a brain inside it!!!)

But, unironically, HH/HB is the best series of adult animation I have seen in probably a decade or more. Maybe in my entire life. Prior to this, the only option for adult animation that isn’t rooted in sadism or grey-beige palettes was anime, and the design direction and acting of anime are ultimately very different than that of western slapstick.

Obviously, not every anti-shipper is so outraged because they envy the success of an artist other than themselves. But a great many are fuelled by envy, either that they aren’t the success story, or that someone they perceive as The Enemy is a success story.

This is far from the first time that anti-shippers have proudly taken the same side as anti-queer bigots and as open and avowed racists, who also hate the show (for being gay, for featuring an interracial relationship, etc). It won’t be the last. But, for all that their actions are often indistinguishable from the queerphobes and the white supremacists, their motivations are at least meaningfully distinct.

[bitletsanddrabbles]

Theater vs. Books

One thing that has routinely shocked me in the Downton Abbey fandom is how little people seem to know about how TV works, particularly when compared to written fiction.

Examined logically, this should probably not be surprising. I’ve been involved off and on in school plays, church plays, acting camps, etc. for as long as I can remember. I actually went into university on an acting ticket, only to switch when I realized I’d get ulcers if I tried to make a living at it. Between writing classes and Dad going “Honey! The Vacation Bible School skit scripts are terrible again this year! Can you fix them?” I have way more scripting know how than I realize, not to mention directing since I then directed all the skits. I took a few combined study classes in college that involved film and, of course, my BA is creative writing, which does not make me the be all and end all of writing knowledge (there are people who haven’t taken a writing class in their lives who can out write me), but does mean that I have more idea what the different parts of a story are and how they fit together than someone who just took high school English.

However, one of my personal neurosis is that I know the education system I went through is substandard and that I am bad at research, therefore I expect the entire world to know more than I do. From a logical stand point this is rubbish, but try telling my psyche that when someone talks about how bad an actor is and then holds up a badly directed piece with a lousy script. (Guy in high school who insisted Nicole Kidman couldn’t act because Batman Forever, I am so looking at you.)

I mean, really. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve done or how much I know. If I am the only person on the planet who did not, at age five, win an academy award for my first screen play, which I also produced, directed, and starred it, everyone else should know more than me.

Don’t think I can’t see that trophy you’re hiding behind your back.

So for the sake of spreading awareness of what education I do have and helping my neurotic little mind cope with the reality that I’m not the least education person on earth, I’d like to make a few points on theater - both stage and film - versus the written word.

- Theater is an incredibly limited art form. Unlike prose where your narrator can spend pages taking you deep into a character’s psyche, most theater is restricted to communicating entirely thorough what can be seen and said in dialogue or monologue. Some theatrical pieces do use a narrator, but a lot of disadvantages to this in an acted piece (it creates pacing issues, people find it off putting, etc.), so it’s not common.  Now, since people perceive emotions differently based on their personal experience, getting an entire audience on board with a nuanced performance is basically impossible. Take sarcastic characters, for example. In a book, you can say that a character made a sarcastic joke that wasn’t meant to be malicious, but that people got offended anyway. Different people will read it different ways - some people will insist it was malicious despite the explicit statement it wasn’t, etc. - but the story has told you the impression you’re intended to get. In theater, your actor has to be sarcastic, the other actors react poorly, and even if you write in, “I was only joking, geeze”, it’s up to the audience to decide whether that was true or not.

So no matter how good your actors, directors, and writers are, it will always be tricky to nail down the intended authorial intent of any one scene or character.

- Theater requires a large budget. Writing does not. Seriously, these days technology is all about multitasking. It’s pretty much gotten to the point that you can buy a toaster and write a story on it. The most expensive books to write I know of are the early Harry Potter novels because JKR wrote in notebooks with pens. Oh yeah, and she bought coffee to drink while she did it. Now, you can argue that computers still cost a fair amount of money, but they’re pretty much a one time expenditure (unless you insist on upgrading or you break it or something basically not-inherent to computer owning).

Every time an actor walks on a stage or screen, they earn money. Every time a character changes clothes, that costs money. Every time there’s a scene (mostly stage) or location (mostly film) change, that costs money. Every time something catches fire, that costs money. Every rehearsal costs money. Theater is one, big shopping list.

- Theater has time limits. Books do not. One of the things in the budget for a theatrical production is space for that production to be seen. It’s a stage or a park or a movie theater or TV air time. All of that costs money and how much you can buy depends not only on how much money you have, but how much time the owners of the theater, park, TV station, etc. are willing to give you.

This means unlike book editors and publishers who can look at a work so stinking long no one would pay for it or want to hold it up long enough to read and go “Sorry, Mr. Tolkien, but we’re going to have to break this into three parts,” the people writing scripts need to try and meet a strict time limit - not shorter, not longer  - and if they go over, the editors have to actually take stuff out.

The closest thing writing really has to this is things like drabble challenges where you have to tell a story in an exact number of words. When these first hit Live Journal they were popular because they were a challenge. When they started losing favor, it was because 90% of the time you wound up sacrificing good writing for word count.

Theater, thankfully, is generally a bit more forgiving, but still. Telling a segment of story in a one hour time slot - or a full story in two hours - is not a walk in the park.

- Theater is not a one pony show. There are so many times I have seen people criticize an actor or director or script writer for something that is blatantly not their fault (see above), that I can’t even begin to count them. Theater is a group effort. If someone blows their lines, it’s not the script writer’s fault. If a director insists that an actor ham it up, that is not a reflection of the actor’s skills. There are times when directors actively screw up the action and the script writer doesn’t get a chance to fix it. An example of this is Downton Abbey, season two, where Anna and Ethel were supposed to be fluffing the couch cushions - the part you sit on - by dropping them. This was filmed as them dropping the throw pillows, which made no sense, and by the time Julian Fellows got to see the rushes, there wasn’t time (or money) to redo the scene. So we’re stuck with two maids who apparently don’t know how to fluff pillows and, if you do know how to fluff pillows and have not read the scripts with authors commentary, an audience who assumes that the writer was the person who got it wrong.

- In theater, especially film, mistakes are forever. This is more or less true in traditionally published writing as well, but it’s amendable. If an author makes a typo or gets off in their timeline or forgets where Dr. Watson’s war wound was in the last story, it’s set in stone for the already printed edition, but can, if the author so chooses, be corrected in later printings. Similarly, in stage theater a gaffed line is gaffed and there’s no un-gaffing it, but you can get it right in the next show.

An error in film is set in stone until someone decides to do a remake.

- In no institutionalized story telling medium is the audience comprised of one person. Unless someone is telling you a bedtime story, the story is not meant to cater solely to you. In fanfiction, which is amateur by definition, you can appeal to as niche a group as you like. In professional story telling, you need to appeal to as broad an audience as possible if you want to be successful. In theater, with it’s time constraints, this means every time spent on one plot line is time that can’t be spent on another plot line. In order to please the fans of character A, you have to take story time away from the fans of character B and vice versa. It’s a balancing act where you try to please everyone, and pleasing everyone is impossible. And everyone I’ve seen say “We really didn’t see enough of (x) in this show! We were robbed!” has a plot (y) that “served no purpose” that could have been sacrificed for their satisfaction, but guess what? Someone loved plot (y), wanted to see more of it, and thinks (x) could have been cut out to make that happen. The reason the creator gave us a little bit of both instead of a lot of one and nothing of the other is not because the don’t care about the fans of (x) or (y), but because they care equally about both of them.

They have to.

It’s their job.

[mappinglasirena]

Mapping La Sirena

Welcome one and all to the Mapping La Sirena Project!

If you are a fan of Star Trek: Picard and you would like to know more about the show’s most prominent ship, to check out floor plans and screencaps, and to discuss theories about the layout of this magnificent vessel, this is will be the place for you!

(Long, slightly rambly introduction and masterpost after the cut ;] )

Hi! My name is Lili and I’ve been a fan of pretty much all things Star Trek ever since I started watching Voyager at the tender age of 6. Besides the sometimes goofy, often brilliant storytelling and the wonderful characters, I always loved the worldbuilding of these shows - and in particularly the starships.

When Star Trek: Picard started airing a  few months ago, I was immediately drawn to the main ship, La Sirena. The mixture of the monumental physical set, judiciously used CGI, and sheer attention to detail made me fall madly in love with this little mermaid, and I wanted to find out every little thing about her that I possibly could. And since I imagine, I’m not the only one who feels this way, I decided to take you all on this journey with me!

What am I doing here?

As a reader and writer of fanfic, I know how helpful it can be to have a clear sense of the location your story is set in. When I realized that a good month after the final episode of ST:PIC season one aired, there still was no floor plan of La Sirena easily found on the web (easily = using my very limited googling-skills), I figured somebody had to sit down and do it. And apparently, that somebody was me. (May the gods help us all =D)

So, I sat myself down, and over the course of a few long days screencapped every single last scrap of Sirena that appears on the show. I now have a library of reference images and will post my progress as I work through them, trying to determine questions about the general layout of this ship, the details of its architecture and furnishings and all the questions that still remain. By the end of it, I am pretty confident that I will have a mostly accurate floorplan of the set that was used on the show (at least the parts of it that were shown to us thus far). We might even end up with the basis for a plan of the ship as it would exist in-universe (more on the movie set vs. “real place” issue later).

The following soon-to-be-links might give you an idea of what I plan to post over the next few months and I’ll keep adding links to this post as I go. So, without (even more) ado: Have fun exploring La Sirena!

Schematics & Floor Plans

A very crude first sketch

Official Set plan

We finally have an official set plan from the Ready Room!

A First Deeper Look at the Ready Room set plans

Centred Floor Plans from Set Me Up + cross section & more designs

Layout of the Captain’s Quarters

Shape and size

How large is La Sirena as seen on the show and is she larger on the inside?

Upper Deck

The Bridge

Where is the Holodeck?

Picard’s Study

Transporter Pad and Engine

The Trouble with Locating the Quarters/Conference Room

Crew Quarters

Captain’s Quarters

A closer Look at the windows

Conference room

The Mysterious Back End of the Ship

Crates, Tanks, Boxes, and Miscellania

Lower Deck

The Mess

Sickbay: Pt. 1: Size and Construction; Pt. 2: Furniture

So Many Nets

The Wall Problem, aka. Mysterious Nonexistent Corridors

Cargo Bay and other Speculative Spaces

Is there a dedicated cargo bay at the back of the ship?

Where are the rest of the crew quarters hidden?

Overall Design and Technological Aspects

A quick rundown of the Engine placement and history

Some Considerations

Tv Set vs . Starship

The set of La Sirena is just that, a tv set. When building a set, there are many constraints of time, budget, and practicality that will force the creatives to make decisions that will not always make sense when mapped onto a “real” starship. Take, for example, the fact that the Captain’s Quarters and the Conference Room were likely filmed in the same physical set, just redressed for the occasion.

Of course, there can always be Watsonian explanations for these kinds of incongruities and I’d love to hear people’s takes or read fics about them (after all, the entirety of La Sirena is apparently equipped with holoemitters, so I suppose technically, anything is possible).

But I am sticking with the Doylian “it’s a movie set” approach and will generally ignore these kinds of problems when trying to draft an in-universe-accurate floorplan of what we can know of the ship so far. I will be very diligent about pointing out whenever I handwave anything, though, so if you want to stick as closely to what we actually see on the whoe, you’ll know which parts of my analysis/headcanon to disregard ;)

Questions about “silly little details”

I have spend a ridiculous amount of time on this little project so far and in the course of it have gotten pretty familiar with a lot of aspects of the interior and exterior of this amazing starship. If you have any questions regarding details about what we can see of La Sirena on the show, please ask me and I will do my best to help! I absolutely love digging into the really nitpicky, tiny little scraps of information, and at this point, I can probably tell you straight away which scene might provide the info you’re looking for or whether there likely is no answer and you’ll have to get creative. So if you don’t feel like scrubbing through the entire 10 episodes of Picard to find out, say, the colour of the plates produced by Sirena’s replicators, please shoot me an ask, I’m always utterly delighted to help! (They’re white, btw.)

And just to make clear what I mean by “tiny little details”: in the course of writing some of my stories, I have collected answers to such important questions as

On which side of the desk does Rios have his chair? (Both)

How many cups are on the shelf next to the replicators? (4, even when one of them is currently in use)

Could a football roll under the railing on the upper deck and fall down into the mess hall anywhere but where the stairs go down? (No, there is a raised edge all around the rim that would catch it. Bouncing would work, though, since the space between the railing bars is large enough.)

Could I just say “Fuck it, I’ll just write it however, because it really doesn’t matter at all?” Yes. Would it be better for my sanity? Probably. Will I still keep trying to figure out as much about this crazy little ship as I possibly can at every turn? You betcha! So, no question is too silly, please ask away!!

A Quick Thought on Fanfic and “Accuracy”

This whole project started because whenever I write fanfic or make up stories set on La Sirena, my brain keeps insisting that we need to know which side of the mess hall the replicators are on! We need to know where exactly the holodeck is located and whether a football could fall to the lower deck through the railing. I would never hold anyone to these standards of “accuracy” - in fact I frequently don’t hold myself to these standards. Fic is for creative expression, so if in your imagination, La Sirena is twice the size of what we see in the show and has a ton of additional rooms and features, I would love to read that story! I want to create a resource for anyone looking for Sirena references to get inspired, not to point out inconsistencies or canon-divergence in lovingly created fanworks. I hope it comes across that way =)

[smokeybrand]

Welcome Back

I am a card carrying geek. I was that nerd in grade school, reading comics, watching anime, and larping with his friends during recess. I’ve always loved things like books and film, mostly because my ma had a penchant for the sci-fi and we would share in her hobbies. I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who since i was a wee lil’ Smokey and had a particular fondness for Max Headroom’s shenanigans. My chosen proclivities lend themselves to alternate universes, divergent timeless, and the interdenominational doppelganger or two. What i am trying to convey, here, is that i am not stranger to the revisit of a franchise. For me, rebooting an established work or expanding a loved lore is not a transgression. I am a fan of narrative. If you can tell a unique story, it really doesn’t even have to be that good, but something creativity and compelling, i am totally on board. This isn't as difficult a feat as you'd think considering how well Hollywood can adapt international films. The Ring and The Departed are effectively remakes of their original Asian fare and those films are spectacular. Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is the best example of this i can give. His deconstruction of the Batman mythos was one of the best cinematic and storytelling experiences I ever had. If you can take an established narrative, an established universe, and inject your own flavor into it, i am down for that, too. The Kelvin Star Trek timeline immediately comes to mind. Again, comic book guy, specifically a Spider-Man shill.

While i have years worth of alternate Spider-Men in the books to pull from, i think the most concise example i can give for a layman is to think Into the Spider-Verse, only with thousands more Spider-Men and Spider-Women. That’s the world I'm broaching this subject from, where there are decades worth of stories and reboots and remakes and reimagings, basically revisits, of a character that i absolutely love. Some are great like the Ultimate Spider-Man or the world of Renew Your Vows, and some are not so great, like that version Abrams’ kid came up with. That whole story was the worst. We have actually seen a little bit of this narrative reincarnation in the Spider-Man film franchise, itself, both good and bad. If we take the very first Spider-Man films, those campy, Raimi classics, as a starting point, then we had a terrible reboot in the Amazing franchise and a rather brilliant reimagining in the MCU outings. I really like the MCU retool. Tom Holland is THE onscreen Peter Parker and you can fight me about it all day.

Jurassic World and The Force Awakens are an interesting situation in the whole Revisit discourse. Both of these films are effectively reboots of the entire franchise and a whole ass remake of their initial entries. Beat for beat, theme for theme, these two films are basically the same as Jurassic Park and Episode IV, just less than they are in every conceivable fashion. Now, on paper, i should hate this but i don’t. There is a reason both of the imitations made billions for their respective franchise and that is simply nostalgia. We. as a culture, were starved for a Jurassic sequel and new Star War. When we got these movies in earnest, no one cared they were rehashes of the films that made them so important to the cultural zeitgeist. It was like seeing A New Hope and that initial outing to Isla Nublar for the first time, for a second time, but with much better effects. It had been decades since either of these movies had a proper release so we all just accepted that these were refresher courses in the lore. It was with the sequels that these things sh*t the bed so hard.

Fallen Kingdom and The Last Jedi skewed so far from what these franchises were, from the rules that had been established in the preceding films, including the first in their new trilogies, that they were offensive. Legitimately offensive. Jurassic World and The Force Awakens, as flawed as they were, left their worlds in respectable places. The narratives that could be built from those starting point were incredible. That potential was palpable. Lucas, himself, said that the stories should rhyme and you see that in his six films. Familiar yet different. Nostalgic yet original. Respectful yet original. None of that was recognized in the follow-ups and that is why these two franchises are on life support. It’s sad because there was potential there. Characters introduced were compelling and narrative threads left unties, could have become something great. Instead, expectations were subverted and the world completely sh*t on in an effort to be edgy, to distance itself from the established lore. That sh*t is whack. It’s not about being a fan of the franchise or a zealous istaphobe or whatever else the Twatter mob wants to accuse people of being. It’s about bad story telling. it’s abut a complete betrayal of a decades old franchise. It’s a bout being disingenuous with the property for personal gain.

I said at the beginning of this essay that i love a revisit. That’s why i went to see these sh*tty films. I also made very clear that i love storytelling. Fallen Kingdom and The Last Jedi lack in that fundamental aspect, that’s why they suck. They’ve done irreparable damage to the entire franchise and canon of these worlds that were so meticulously crafted by proper visionaries. Michael Crichton is rolling in his grave at what became of his Dinosaur Westworld and Lucas effectively bogarded his way into running Lucasfilm again after they sh*t on his legacy and that’s the thing; Legacy. These two franchises are part of American culture. They’re as revered as Apple Pie and Institutional Racism here. They’re not cash grabs or vehicles to push your politics. They’re modern fairy tales, myths, and should be respected as such. The thing is, though, i don’t believe there are actual creatives out there that have the vision to create like Crichton or Lucas anymore. Or, at least, Creatives that are willing to work within the constraints of this ridiculous studio system.

Modern film studios are disgustingly risk averse. That is a problem with anything making entertainment media nowadays but it’s most egregious in Hollywood. Films like Star Wars and Alien were made in a time when budgets didn’t swell to hundreds of millions of dollars so directors had to do what he could, with what they had, and that level of imagination birthed classics. It’s rare that creators get a blank check to deliver their vision nowadays, and even rarer that what they get to make if they receive that loot, is actually good. Zack Snyder and the train wreck that is Sucker Punch demonstrates my point perfectly. the new Lucases and Camerons are rare but there are a handful of directors who carry that torch. Denis Villeneuve is an incredible visual storyteller. He has a distinct vision for the grand and manages to craft proper worlds. Blade Runner 2049 is one of the best films i have ever seen in my life but it didn’t make money because people have been conditioned to ignore great storytelling for great effects. That sh*t is why people can say to me, with a straight face, that they think Batman v. Superman is better than The Dark Knight rises. That sh*t is stupid, shut the f*ck up. Deni was given the reigns to the Dune reboot and i think this might be the film that breaks him through to the mainstream.

Dune is a reboot. It looks like a revisit to the old David Lynch flick but with Deni’s penchant for the epic. This movie feels like what Jurassic World and The Force Awakens wanted to do; A respectful acknowledgment of what came before but an original take going forward. Dune is one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written and Deni is one of the most profound visionaries in the game right now.  I have no doubt the new film is going to be fantastic. This combination is a match made in heaven, similar to Alex Garland with Annihilation or, more accurately i think, Luca Guadagnino and Suspiria. Those two films are f*cking incredible and they adapt the source material in a very, specific, manner. Annihilation is a reimagining of the book and carries its own themes and tones while the new Suspiria is a complete reinterpretation of what came before, that i believe eclipses the original. Dune looks excellent but i don’t know that it will be well received. Deni has his work cut out for him because the world of revisits is riddle with the corpses of films that couldn’t care the weight of what came before or what could have been. Still, i don’t want Hollywood to stop. As unoriginal as remaking things is, i adore a fresh set of eyes on familiar fare. There are infinite ways to tell the same story and that’s the fun of revisiting an old tale.

[scifigeneration]

Beyond 'Bandersnatch,' the future of interactive TV is bright

by David I. Schwartz

Make a choice to see the next phase of the story. Netflix

Make a choice: Do you want to engage with your media passively or actively?

The December 2018 premiere of Netflix’s “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” offered consumers a new way to influence the entertainment they’re watching. Netflix has a growing list of choose-your-own-adventure movies. What viewers might see as a simple choice, such as which breakfast cereal a character begins the day with, could affect the whole show’s storyline. There are other choices to make as well – some of which change the plot, and some of which may not.

Viewers aren’t watching these interactive films just once. Rather, they are watching them over and over again to find each ending and post maps of the diverging plot lines. I think I sat on my couch for nearly three hours straight trying to exhaust all of “Bandersnatch’s” choices as it followed a programmer and designer through the process of game development.

I’ve been teaching and researching game design and development since 2001. I see this type of experience not as just the future of entertainment, but as the expansion of a standard method of storytelling that game designers have been using for decades. Netflix is introducing new technology and new audiences to this type of entertainment, but fiction writers have been exploring similar themes for far longer, creating stories of time travel and alternative realities that let people fantasize about redoing decisions in life.

Controlling your own destiny

There is a kind of game made popular by “Dungeons & Dragons” that provides a way to understand and expand what “Bandersnatch” explores. Role-playing games let players pick characters with multiple traits, such as strength, health and special skills, and work together to achieve story-driven goals.

Fans of “The Lord of the Rings” books and movies will recognize the idea of a team of characters with different backgrounds, abilities and motivations, all trying to work together toward a goal. The adventure is not just in whether they achieve the task, but the encounters, mishaps and even battles that happen along the way. The ultimate outcome depends on the choices players make along the way.

Many role-playing games get people together around a computer to explore a collective adventure. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Role-playing games started with players gathered around a table, keeping notes on paper and rolling dice to incorporate the role of chance and probability into the adventure. A human game master coordinated everything, keeping track of what was happening and working with players to advance their stories and the overall plot of the adventure.

Early computer games, such as the 1980s-era Infocom text adventures, turned the role of game master over to a game designer, who controlled the choices and their consequences. In the decades since, more powerful computers have let modern digital games offer a great many choices. Teachers have begun to use elements of role-playing games to help students learn.

Illusion of choice

With “Bandersnatch,” Netflix used software to process viewers’ choices and deliver the appropriate video. When watching and “playing,” I wondered if there were too few choices. The show offered only two choices of breakfast cereal, and the viewer couldn’t choose to skip breakfast, make eggs or open the freezer to grab some ice cream. But, there’s a very good reason for these constraints.

Every story decision requires more writing and more development. Tony Hirst/Flickr, CC BY

I often tell my students that when they’re creating role-playing games, the problem isn’t giving players choices: It’s deciding what happens next. Giving players lots of options is great, and fun – but with every choice the job gets harder. If there are three kinds of ice cream in the freezer, that’s three different sets of video to show vanilla, chocolate and strawberry – and possibly three different scripts, if the choice actually has consequences.

In game design, we call this a “branching narrative,” where every choice spawns as many new branches as there are options, and the tree gets bigger and bigger all the time. A movie with an enormous number of options would require multiple sets, extra time for actors, huge amounts of special effects work, extended production times and increasing budgets.

Such a complex film would also take viewers huge amounts of time to experience. Digital game players can handle this sort of effort by saving their progress and taking a break, returning to resume play hours later, or even days.

With an interactive movie, would a viewer want several days’ worth of watching? I don’t know if anyone has an idea of how long a typical interactive movie experience should last. My three hours on the couch watching “Bandersnatch” seemed about right – and ran through most of the options.

The Netflix producers borrowed from game designers, and the classic “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series, to give viewers the illusion of choices when really the alternatives were limited. My own research recommended the same technique: Allow the players some choices, but bring them back to the main narrative thread at key points.

Future of interactive media

There will be more interactive movies. Netflix has built its own software for “Bandersnatch,” which it can use for other stories too. There are already several addictive interactive kids’ shows, including “Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale,” “Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile” and “Stretch Armstrong: The Breakout.”

Gamers are already familiar with this convergence of film, interactivity and branching narrative. Cinematic video games, like “Indigo Prophecy” and “Heavy Rain,” let players make choices in dialog and other cinematic aspects, all of which alter the endings. An academically published game, “Façade,” is considered important not just for showing that scholarly games can be fun to play, but also demonstrating that academic concepts of branching narrative and story can create meaningful play: The player visits a couple’s apartment, and depending on where the player moves and what the player says, the couple reacts in different ways.

Engaging with a couple on the rocks. 'Façade,' by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern., CC BY-ND

I anticipate different genres of shows will explore interactive formats. Imagine playing through historical fiction where you can choose to execute Marie Antoinette or not. I also expect viewers will be able to make their choices in different ways than just pressing buttons on their remotes – perhaps by using voice recognition on their phones.

If artificial intelligence and machine learning systems get better at telling stories, viewers might even be able to suggest new possible choices, with the resulting content generated on the fly while people watch. Of course, there’s a strong overlap with virtual reality, offering immersive escapism, which is, in my experience, a key goal of interactivity.

In the meantime, “Bandersnatch” fans who want to continue exploring choosing their own adventures to direct a story can look for local gaming groups and game stores. “Dungeons & Dragons” and “HackMaster” are regaining popularity lately. So is live-action role-playing, in which people physically act out their fictional encounters. In these environments, players can ask “what if” without running into the limitations of software development and movie production teams. Human players can engage in the full extent of their imagination without any illusion of choice.

About The Author:

David I. Schwartz is Associate Professor of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology

This article is republished from our content partners at  The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[nightcoremoon]

So I finally watched Deadpool 2. long post. very... very... very long.

back in 2009 my then 7 year old sister really got into avatar the last airbender and I hadn't really watched it but I had to share the tv with my four sisters and honestly between the kids television and disney sitcoms it was a breath of fresh air, and for a year and a half we would wait for reruns of episodes we hadn't seen yet. avatar was the show that got me into fandoms. alas, time passed and by the time korra was playing we'd moved to a different house and lost cable tv because the stepfather refused to pay child support and we were on a one parent income. we didn't really do anything together anymore either because I was in high school now. but then she got super into comic books. and I mean SUPER into them. especially harley quinn and deadpool. so when they announced the first movie and suicide squad we had both collectively lost our shit in excitement. alas, mom said she wasn't allowed to watch it since it was rated R and she was only 14. so one late february afternoon I was gonna take her out to see a movie. I told mom we were going to go see zoolander 2. in the car, I looked at her and said

we're not watching zoolander

and she screamed

and we watched deadpool

AND IT WAS FUCKING AWESOME

anyway more time passed and I heard that a second one was coming out and I wanted to do the same thing but that didn't happen and I lost my chance to see it in the theater. and then as I got enraptured in transitioning and working and a whole bunch of other stuff I just never got around to it. I did watch all of the supporting videos and trailers and stuff though. anyways, my sister (yes the same one) just rented it on dvd from a video store and watched it with her boyfriend today (actually yesterday but shut up), so I just sat down to watch it after work and

It

Was

...

a little disappointing at first, don't get me wrong. there were a lot of plot contrivances and I LOATHE fridge stuffing. I literally made a joke, "if she dies I'm gonna be mad" and then BOOM she fucking died and I was so pissed off I almost just turned it off. but I decided fuck it might as well watch the whole thing. it was a huge step forward from a technical perspective and all of the cinematography was on point and I could tell david pulled his a-game and did so much better than tim did (sorry tim, I love mass effect 2 and scott pilgrim if it's any consolation) and felt so much more fluid of an action movie considering the man did john fucking wick. of course ryan was fantastic too, as he always is. everyone was great: rena, tj, karan, leslie, BRI AND KUTSUNA-SAN, zazie, and stef's voice plus the cgi crew. also I always love terry crews, bill skarsgard, matt damon, alan tudyk, and the two seconds that brad pitt was on screen, even if their appearances were for comedic effect. I wasn't really sold on julian though but he's a newcomer on the scene and he did pretty well for all intents and purposes. I could tell which scenes were filmed first thought but this isn't a scathing attack on a child's acting abilities. I'm just angry that the actual plot for getting to the end was so weak, that they're aware and had ryan lampshade the fuck out of it, and the last half hour was such a trip.

okay so first of all how in the FUCK did sergei figure out who deadpool's secret identity was, track down wade wilson's apartment, get a hit crew together, and make his way downtown in the amount of time it took dopinder to drive wade home, wade and vanessa to bang, and them to start watching a movie? oh yeah sure there's nothing saying that their talk about his daddy issues was the same day let alone the same hour as the previous scene except for the simple fact that there was no fucking indication that any time had passed. either way, someone fucked up, and it was for the sole purpose of fridging ness to cause wade manpain. although frankly the only thing I hate worse than killing off the previous waifu for the next is breaking them up for zero reason whatsoever from out of nowhere (or doing both: if you do both then you're no better than paul blart mall cop 2 and that movie is a steaming blight on humanity that's only saved by perfectly syncing to pink floyd's dark side of the moon album). and to be fair THEY ACTUALLY USED THAT AS A PLOT ELEMENT AND MADE ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND HAUNTING SCENES I HAVE EVER SEEN IN A MOVIE. and also a hilarious one. so that sucked at first but then redeemed itself later. I'm still a little salty that he killed francis for nothing. MORE ON KILLING LATER.

(actually upon reflection maybe wade didn't hide his secret identity at all so it's perfectly reasonable that sergei just went after him but that would awaken a whole swathe of problems like why the fuck are wade and ness livin in the middle of the city full of crime and shit??? and more on that later)

dopinder killing his rival in love. come on now, that's just unrealistic. dopinder is too fucking incompetent to successfully murder anyone who isn't a pedophile. MORE ON THAT LATER.

the suicide. I can understand going out with a bang but are we supposed to believe that wade bought all those barrels, wheeled them in, and arranged them all and never once thought "well gee maybe I'm overreacting a little bit"? okay, he was depressed and not thinking clearly, but he was constantly getting drunk, doing coke, and god knows what else. he somehow didn't have the clarity to not kill himself but had just enough to arrange such an extravagant death? yeah yeah I get it, rule of funny and cool, and I can forgive it because it's deadpool, but god damn it that's really lazy (AND GODDAMN IT THEY EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE IT TOO. ITS LIKE THE ROYAL RAT AUTHORITY BONFIRE HERE). it's also indicative that weasel and colossus and dopinder are just bad or at least distant friends. and at least althea has an excuse being that she can't see. but as for the other two? bruh he is suicidal and unstable as hell. the last thing he needs is SPACE. but well maybe he hid it well, like kurt cobain, robin williams, chris cornell, chester bennington, okay writing this sentence maybe that actually does make sense. fuck.

negasonic thought that wade "flamboyant pansexual" wilson was lesbophobic? what? I understand it was for a joke but like come on now. surely she'd know that wade legitimately wanted to fuck colossus but wouldn't because he loved vanessa. lesbian gaydar works well, okay? then again the writers are not lesbians so I mean they can't be faulted for not grasping the raw power lesbians exude. (and if there's canonical evidence negasonic is actually bi, the same rule applies because wlw solidarity and stuff). and that's more than made up with the interactions between wade and yukio. whom I love and would die for. she's delightful and I hope she gets plenty of screentime in DP3. (also lmao 'pinkie pie from my little pony'. the real pink pony would be proud)

now, I get that this is purely because of license issues and budget constraints but THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF THE X MEN COEXISTING WITH THE PEDOPHILE HOME AND THE ICE BOX IN THE SAME UNIVERSE IS SO FUCKING ASININE. even if I made concessions for everyone being dead despite the timeline being fucked up the ass without lube, and admitting to never having watched literally any x men movie past X3 and yes that means I've not seen origins, japan arc [wait shit yukio's in that WTF SONY], first class, days of future past, apocalypse, or logan so I'm not an expert on the field but like. FUCK. I know there's jurisdiction, things change, erik is away and charles is dead (I think) and logan is dead (I know), and there's six whole movies I'm lost on, but jesus christ, none of that segment had any work done to make sure it was logical. so here we're supposed to believe that colossus and negasonic took wade as a trainee in the X Jet to Allegorical Racist/Homophobic And Literal Pedophile Central to... do what, exactly? What was the fucking plan? Because it sure as fuck looks like the plan was to distract him enough to force the Devil May Cry (sorry but I see DMC I either think of the rap duo or the game series) to haul him off to fucking prison to the fucking nth power. Colossus who seems to be the head honcho and sole decision maker of the X Men just stood by and watched until bullets started flying. Was he recruiting? Was he the damage control? Was he the cheap plot moving device whose sole reason for showing up at Essex was to punch Wade out before he killed headmaster touchykids allowing for the hamfisted climax? Clearly if we were to derive any conclusion from this circlejerk we have to assume that not only Colossus but the entirety of the XMansion just don't give a fuck anymore, or that it isn't important to make sense because hey this is a Deadpool movie so fuck you for using logic. Excuse the shit out of me for being confused as to what the fuck actually happened, because if Colossus is willing to let Wade get thrown into prison for killing a pedophile but he's not gonna TAKE ACTUAL LEGAL ACTION AGAINST ESSEX HOUSE FOR TORTURING MUTANT CHILDREN FOR DECADES (Domino admitted to it being the same when she was a kid), either it's just a Public Relations nightmare to not let the Run-DMC haul him off, Essex is a legal powerhouse on the same level as the Westboro Baptist Cult with lawyers up the ass, or they changed a lot of shit from the trailers and cobbled together what they could from what remained (which is the most likely suspect because Bedlam and Shatterstar had scenes in the trailer where they were not dead and were actually fighting with Wade and Domino). Regardless, the scene however dumb and nonsensical was necessary I guess, and established Russell/Firefist as a character. I'm still gonna be pissed about that in particular but HOLY SHIT is that stupid. But that's not all that's stupid. More on that later.

Cable's motivations are grief. His hypocrisy is understandable. Killing kids is wrong so I'm gonna kill a kid so he doesn't kill other kids. Why doesn't Russel deserve life? Because he's a mutant? Wow, Thanos is racist AND mutant-phobic! In all seriousness though, all Cable had to do was nothing to prevent his family's death. If he had stayed in the future, nobody would have broken Russel out so there would be no way in hell he'd have killed the headmaster let alone everyone else he did. Although according to the laws of time travel, the timeline Cable came from was the timeline that he went back in time and did everything exactly the way it happened up until Wade took that bullet for Russel. Because that's the moment the teddy bear lost its bloodstain. Because literally not a goddamn thing changed the course of history up until that exact moment, THAT IS THE EXACT FUCKING MOMENT IT BUTTERFLY EFFECTED ITS WAY TO HELL AND BACK. Cable's dead family is a direct result of him going back in time to kill Russel to save them and failing miserably. And god I love time travel paradoxes UGH I JUST LOVE THEM SO MUCH. We have to assume Cable failed and that's why he succeeded. THATS SO FUCKING STUPID.

And you know what else is stupid? Wade made it back to New York after breaking out of DMC. How is that stupid? Well, first of all, the facility wasn't looking for THEIR MOST DANGEROUS INMATE. Black Tom said it himself, Wade is the toughest cunt in there. Although Juggernaut is way more powerful but whatever. More on that later. Anyway, the facility got the riot back on lockdown despite Cable decimating most of the staff, and got everyone in line enough to get them to start convoying to the more secure location. Did they see that Wade was missing and decide "hey, fuck it, what can the literally most unkillable man in the world with the most enormous boner for revenge in the universe POSSIBLY do to us who forced him to slowly die of cancer all over again in a hell prison???" Fucking stupid. Even dumber is the actual X Men themselves not giving a shit that there was an attack on the ice box which is apparently Mike Pence's wet dream, not lifting a finger to so much as offer assistance TO ENSURE THE SAFETY AND REHABILITATION OF ALL OF THE MUTANT INMATES, or even so much as being like "hey guys is Wade doing okay dying from cancer in your Guantanamo Bay?". And dumber still than that is Colossus deciding that Wade deserves to slowly die of cancer since he killed a pedophile who abused a kid so bad he used his powers for destruction and murder and evil and eventually became one of the most deadly sociopathic murderers in the fucked up future world, rationalizing it because Wade broke the rules of being an X-man by killing, even though Wade didn't wanna be an X-man in the first place. Colossus dragged Wade from his suicide directly to the X manor to get his body healed, forced him along to a mission he didn't wanna be a part of, and then punished him for killing a pedophile by forcing him to die slowly from the cancer while getting the shit kicked out of him by convicts. AND THEN WADE APOLOGIZED TO COLOSSUS? ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL HERE? WADE WAS SUICIDAL AND COLOSSUS FORCED HIM INTO PRISON. Bad friend, 0/10.

Seriously, a queer military vet with ptsd and a fucked up past replete with daddy issues who developed cancer and was then tortured by a shadow organization went on a revenge spree followed by a murder spree as a mercenary, and expressed that he's a violent psychopath who won't hesitate to murder sex traffickers or pedophiles or people who threaten his girl, and watched said girl (the only good thing in his fucked up life) die right in his arms immediately after his life was about to go in a good direction and start a family and probably give up all of the murder business and just be the best dad in the world and give a good life to someone to make up for the one he never got himself, did a cocaine bender, and literally committed suicide. But his godforsaken mutation wouldn't let him die, so he couldn't even see his Vanessa again. He clearly has severe clinical depression and needed a FUCKING MENTAL HOSPITAL STAY, not being shoved into a planless feeble attempt to get him to join the Xmen (using him for an extra hand for missions), and he was allowed to BRING THE GUNS, and he was confronted with a physically and sexually abused CHILD with mutant powers he probably didn't ask for that ruined his life and got him sent to Essex, a BIG KNOWN HOTSPOT FOR PEDOPHILES, and he has a big problem with sex criminals (oh yeah and the girl he loved so much he killed himself when she died? sex worker with a life full of being sexually assaulted herself. let alone the fact that wade has been sexually assaulted as well). You take a queer, mentally ill, suffering man and push him past his breaking point, and let him bring guns to a pedophile nest, HE IS GOING TO KILL THE PEDOPHILES. Colossus is a fucking cunt in this situation in every single conceivable fashion. He dragged Wade out of the frying pan, and out of the fire, and into the fucking woodchipper, before stepping on him. The situation is so far behind fucked up that I don't even think the crew fully grasp the full gravity of the situation described. But I digress.

Things weren't all bad from this point on.

The recruitment was funny and full of people. Dopinder's reaction at Peter was amazing and I love him. Domino was fucking phenomenal and I loved her. I knew that everyone else was dead from the moment I saw them, though, but I still loved them anyway. Brad. fucking. Pitt. Great action scene all around. Josh Brolin is just the baddest of asses. Murphy's law is supreme.

Juggernaut's reveal was well done. Still dumb but not quite "AHM THE JUGGANAUT BITCH" dumb. Cool dumb. And then he Megatron'd Wade which was even cooler. I thought Russell joining him was a little dumb but it was quite a callback. Although it begs the question: Wade knew it was foreshadowing something and he knew that Juggernaut existed but he just isn't omniscient and the inconsistency is driving me fucking bonkers. This isnt the Deadpool of the comics. This is the movie Deadpool. And while I do like it I can't say it's without flaws. That's ok but still annoying as fuck. And then more flaws.

It's stupid that Colossus would react the way he did when he learned Wade was back. Well if Colossus was moping about because an entire convoy of mutants literally fucking died except for Juggernaut (PROFESSOR X'S BROTHER IN THIS CHRONOLOGY) and Russell, that's even dumber. If he learned Wade was back at that moment then he's not even paying attention to anything considering Deadpool was out and about. Negasonic and Yukio didn't look too surprised to see him. Lazy writing, lampshades, whatever, blah blah who even fucking cares.

The heroes show up just in time. Shocking. But of course if they didn't it'd be a boring movie.

The action scene was FANTASTIC. It balanced four different fight scenes all at once. Why Jug didn't rip Cable in half like he did Wade I won't ask, maybe because he's half robot I guess idk. Still, Wade/Cable, Domino, and Colossus kicked ass, and Russell's advance to the headmaster was beastly. Julian's acting wasn't the best and neither was Eddie's but I got what they went for and HOLY SHIT THE SCENE IS SO CHILLING, especially for queer youth. Bryan Singer could only dream of that level of subtle analogues.

I thought it was dumb that Cable was all like "if Russell kills then he'll be an evil monster since killing is wrong" even though literally every one of the people there have killed several people that fucking day. Cable killed many, Wade killed many, Domino killed many. Granted they killed mostly pedophiles but they also killed a lot of DMC people & innocent civilians (accidentally). But again he was grieving so whatever.

Negasonic and Yukio had their moment too, I just wish there was more. But that's what the threequel is for. WE WANT MORE LESBIANS!

Wade has balls, I'll give him that. Where he kept that power nullifier I'll never know. [also... fuck that noise. they just have a collar that turns off mutant powers? ORORO WILL HAVE A FUCKIN ANEURYSM. and marie will have an orgasm. for once in her life. hahaha references]. But it was still a great scene. Russell is actually a really good character, if he is a bit Woobie, Destroyer Of Worlds. But I like that trope. Simon from Cry of Fear is one of my favorite characters in that respect; sympathetic even to the very end if he kills Purnell and Sophie (god that monologue is so haunting... "have fun cleaning my brains off the wall. FUCK YOU."). He's basically just a mini Wade but a mutant first. And it allowed Wade to have a defining character moment.

And what a moment. There's a quote that was said about The Princess Bride that I feel works here. It was about the Inigo fight with Rugen. "A comedy is only as strong as the moment when it stops being funny." And the moment when Inigo stabs Rugen, and says "I want my father back, you son of a bitch." is just permanently etched in my mind because the entire movie you watch with a smile up until right at that moment. And when Wade finally bites it, you think "oh, he'll just wake up again and make another joke" but he doesn't. He doesn't move again. He shows up on death's door. And you hear the acoustic version of Take On Me. And he walks through the fog door, and he's got his skin back. He did it, he's finally reunited with Vanessa. And Cable looks away, and you start to piece together where they're going with it, and he goes back, and you wonder wtf is this, and it returns to the present day and Wade digs in the wound AND PULLS OUT THE SKEE BALL TOKEN HOLY FUCKING SHITBALLS OH MY GOD THATS THE COOLEST SHIT IVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE JESUS CHRIST ON A STICK.

THE ENTIRE ENDING SCENE IS SO ICONIC.

And the whipped cream on top of the sundae is the headmaster getting creamed in the middle of his tirade. And then Dopinder's reaction is the cherry.

After that it kinda does the sappy ending which is fine for what it is. And then it brings in all the fourth wall breaking time travel shenanigans, drenching it in sap and Ryan Reynolds' brains.

The music is just OH MY GOD amazing. Yeah there's the pina colada song and skrillex and celine dion and ac/dc and enya and pat benatar and peter gabriel and cher and steve miller and for some reason diplo/french montana/lil pump but THOSE ARE ALL ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD OKAY???

The movie is chock full of amazing lines.

The fights are all really fluid and visceral.

The cinematography is always on point.

The plot formula is shaken up a little bit.

Several pedophiles die incredibly violently.

ITS A REALLY GREAT MOVIE, FOR REAL.

I'd literally say it's better than the first one.

All of the plot contrivances in the first half are negligible and are barely even problems unless you overanalyze them too much. Like I do.

And I also watched all of the extras... Celine Dion is such a good sport, really, and honestly kind of a dork and super endearing and I love her honestly and think she caught too much flak for being a) a woman b) popular c) in the worst 'romance' movie ever made tifuckintanic god I hate that movie so much despite loving kate winslett, leonardo dicaprio, and james cameron as much as I really loathe to admit it. And Ashes is a really good song.

And I never thought I'd say this but... Lil Pump has really nice flow. I really kinda hope he isn't the dead one. I despise French Montana but I love Sia and by extension Diplo (because LSD), and the song they did for the movie was... bad. But I'll probably be checking out Lil Pump soon.

And anyway the winter solstice mtv unplugged acoustic version of take on me? Beautiful.

I enjoyed this movie a lot, despite the nitpicks.

Thank you Canada. 🇨🇦

[jurakan]

On Netflix’s Avatar

[I did an essay about the Netflix Avatar on Facebook. I’m sharing here.]

---

So this past week it was announced that Netflix was working on a live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not a spin-off, another story set in the same world--it’s a remake, just this time in live-action. Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko (or Bryke, as they’re often called), the creators of the original series, are coming back to run the show. Here’s their statement, copied from Deadline:

“We’re thrilled for the opportunity to helm this live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. We can’t wait to realize Aang’s world as cinematically as we always imagined it to be, and with a culturally appropriate, non-whitewashed cast. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build upon everyone’s great work on the original animated series and go even deeper into the characters, story, action, and world-building. Netflix is wholly dedicated to manifesting our vision for this retelling, and we’re incredibly grateful to be partnering with them.”

The line about “a culturally appropriate, non-whitewashed cast” is of course, a reference to the movie that was released about a decade ago, in which the majority of the cast was Caucasian (when the animated series was inspired by Asian mythology and folklore, and had characters that matched that), despite being directed by an Indian man. If you’re ever curious when the ever current (and almost always justified) outcry of whitewashing in Hollywood became a mainstream cause of the Internet, the release of The Last Airbender is a good place to start looking. So of course, the makers of the series want to assure fans that this won’t happen again.

Here’s the thing: I think this is a terrible idea. And the statement from Bryke makes me worry even more.

There’s this common unvoiced idea in popular consciousness that the ultimate form of a piece of fiction is the live-action film. We read a book and if we like it we think it should be a movie. We read a comic and if it’s great we think it should be a movie. We watch a television series we like, animated or live-action, and if we think it’s great we demand that it get a movie. To be fair this has changed in recent times with the release of acclaimed live-action television serieses like Game of Thrones in which it’s become obvious that for screen adaptations sometimes a television series makes a better translation, because it’s got more time to keep in material from the source, unlike a movie which has much tighter time constraints. Clearly that’s the attitude being taken here.

Because Bryke very clearly sees live-action as a better form of storytelling than animation. The above statement includes the bit about “realizing Aang’s world as cinematically as we always imagined it to be.” In other words, the original Avatar: The Last Airbender (and by extension The Legend of Korra) isn’t the series they ever wanted to make, they wanted to make a live-action story but they settled for animation because that’s what they had. That’s an insult to the hard work that went into both of those series. Apparently a beautiful, consistent art style that they’ve kept up in animation and comics since 2005 is not actually what they hoped to be doing, and wanted to do it all in live-action instead.

More to the point, the world of Avatar works in animation. It works really well in animation. It’s a fantasy world with strange hybrid creatures, elemental powers, and powerful godlike spirits. And they aren’t small parts of the story; elemental bending is in every story, and the Gaang travels around on Appa the six-legged sky bison. That means if they’re going to look realistic at all, each episode is going to need an astronomically high budget for special effects, especially one that has multiple creatures, large battles, or scenes involving spirits. It’s a series inspired by Asian mythology and folklore, but also by wuxia films, so that also means lots of stunts and wirework.

All of this is much simpler in animation, where this isn’t an issue. Yes, it still requires funds to make animation look good and polished, but it isn’t as if there would be extra for a CGI character, or that you have to get stunt actos to work out all of the action on screen. You may have some consultants and martial artists so that you can model human movement, and you might use CGI for some things, but it’s a lot less of a worry about making it realistic because, well, it’s animated. It doesn’t look realistic to start with. It’s not the point.

There are other issues with live-action that people aren’t really addressing in this discussion too. The main characters are all kids. The oldest character is maybe sixteen? In an animated series, years of production don’t make too much of a difference because animated characters don’t age. Maybe their voice actors do, but generally voice actors who can imitate kids’ voices will be used over actual children. In a live-action television or movie series, child actors aging has always been an issue. In a multi-season live-action adaptation of A:tLA, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cast is significantly older than at the start of the series.

There’s also been some talk along the lines of  “We don’t have to worry because Bryke’s involved, and as long as the series’ creators are involved they’ll know what they’re doing and it’ll turn out fine.” As if the creator of the source material being involved is a guarantee of writing quality. They were involved with both Legend of Korra and the spin-off comics to both serieses, and they had many of the problems that the original series didn’t. Some people point to the lack of involvement from Aaron Ehasz, the leader writer on Avatar: The Last Airbender (who is currently lead writer on the Netflix animated series The Dragon Prince and it’s great, so please go watch that). Ehasz is generally credited with many of the best writing decisions in A:tLA, including Iroh not being evil. I don’t know if this is entirely fair, mind you, as not having sat down with the entire writing staff I don’t think we can come to solid conclusions either way. And I think a huge problem with Legend of Korra is that it had much shorter seasons and for the first two of those the staff had no idea if it was going to continue past the current season. But it still had major storytelling problems like unnecessary romantic subplots, cool concepts that get dropped, inconsistent character motivations, and deus ex machinas.

Basically: no, Bryke being involved does not reassure me in the slightest.

This strikes me as another attempt to cash in on nostalgia on Bryke’s part. Legend of Korra, for its flaws, was still overall a good show, and had its own story to tell and points to make. Had Bryke announced they were working on a live-action spinoff I’d be a bit more open. But a live-action remake of A:tLA? That just seems like a blatant cash grab. Maybe it’ll be good, but I sincerely doubt that it’ll be as great as the original animated series. So what’s the point?

[doomonfilm]

Review : Extinction (2018)

Here we are, yet again... the last few weeks have been devoid of major releases that I feel deserve my attention, and I find myself combing through the streaming services for ‘original’ content.  This go round, I found myself in the world of Netflix yet again, with a big old slice of science fiction in the form of Extinction. 

Peter (Michael Pena) is an engineer attempting to keep his wife Alice (Lizzy Caplin), as well as his daughters Hanna (Amelia Crouch) and Lucy (Erica Tremblay), happy and peaceful.  Reoccurring nightmares, however, make it hard for Peter to keep a sense of stability, as the nightmares seem to be clear warnings of an otherworldly threat racing towards everyone Peter knows and loves, with the intent to wipe them all out of existence.  The nightmares cause a rift between Peter and his family, as they are unable to understand why the man they love sometimes acts as if his family is an afterthought.  At the urging of Alice, Peter finally decides to see a professional for help, but his experience in the waiting room only furthers his fears.  Peter’s worries, unfortunately, become reality as scores of unknown ships emerge from the sky, bringing chaos and destruction with them.  As Peter attempts to protect those close to him, he slowly begins to learn more about the threat, himself, and the reality everyone is facing.

This film is full of pointed choices meant to make us question things that should be ‘normal’, only to validate these odd choices in the final 20 minutes of run-time through a surprising (to me) twist.  Like most any twist, many will say that they saw it coming from a mile away, but in my experience, I felt like I was seeing what I thought were quirks, only to have my expectations subverted.  It’s not the most mind-blowing setup and payoff in the world, but it definitely makes me want to watch the film again, as I imagine it will play much differently knowing the key bits of information I know now.

That being said, the film is definitely a good premise with a good payoff (in my opinion).  Invasion movies usually have a rigid structure, and are almost certainly about understanding that we’re ultimately all the same in this crazy universe, but this one is fresh due to the way it switches expected roles.  Even the role switch is not necessarily all that fresh, per se, but this film does it as more of a bait and switch scenario and less of an opportunity to teach a universal lesson (though the lesson punctuation is definitely hit as the film closes out).  

After doing a bit of research, I learned that this film is a rare escapee of the famous pit of despair that is development hell.  Many stars and directors have been attached to the property, but ultimately it could not get enough faith from a studio to merit production, promotion or a decent budget.  With the advent of Netflix and their focus on originals, however, we’ve come to see many of these so called ‘unmakeable’ properties become a reality, and while not all are the blockbusters that the creators dreamed that they would be, many of them do meet the expectations set for streaming service-level film.  Seeing actors in roles that you would not normally see them in due to these budget constraints is a nice change of pace as well, as Hollywood continues to prove how familiarity can breed contempt by placing a handful of the same action stars in all of their big budget action fodder.

Michael Pena shows an amazing amount of restraint and control in his performance, to a positive degree... as much as his silliness has become a hallmark, it would not have played well in regards to his role, but he did prove he can stick strictly to drama if need be.  Lizzy Caplan also gives a surprisingly reserved performance, allowing her pronounced moments to play extremely effectively.  Amelia Crouch is strong in her role as the angst-filled child, while Erica Temblay stands up to the task of the ‘young child making bad decisions’ trope.  Mike Colter essentially makes an appearance, but his role does not call for much in terms of depth or range.  Emma Booth, Lex Shrapnel and Lilly Aspell make brief appearances as the family next door, and Israel Broussard plays a member of the invasion force, but each of these roles are ultimately present to push the story forward.

I’m still waiting for Netflix to drop the film that lets us all know that they’ve truly arrived as a force to be reckoned with in terms of film release, but unfortunately, Extinction does not mark that day.  It does, however, continue to show a trend in the right direction, and an effort to make films that viewers will return to.

[gp-synergism-blog]

Gothic Film in the ‘40s: Doomed Romance and Murderous Melodrama

Posted by: Samm Deighan for Diabolique Magazine

Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

In many respects, the ‘40s were a strange time for horror films. With a few notable exceptions, like Le main du diable (1943) or Dead of Night (1945), the British and European nations avoided the genre thanks to the preoccupation of war. But that wasn’t the case with American cinema, which continued to churn out cheap, escapist fare in droves, ranging from comedies and musicals to horror films. In general though, genre efforts were comic or overtly campy; Universal, the country’s biggest producer of horror films, resorted primarily to sequels, remakes, and monster mash ups during the decade, or ludicrous low budget films centered on half-cocked mad scientists (roles often hoisted on a fading Bela Lugosi).

There are some exceptions: the emergence of grim-toned serial killer thrillers helmed by European emigres like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Ulmer’s Bluebeard(1944), Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1945), or John Brahm’s Hangover Square(1945); the series of expressionistic moody horror film produced by auteur Val Lewton, such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943); and a handful of strange outliers like the eerie She-Wolf of London (1946) or the totally off-the-rails Peter Lorre vehicle, The Beast with Five Fingers (1946).

Thanks to the emergence of film noir and a new emphasis on psychological themes within suspense films, horror’s sibling — arguably even its precursor — the Gothic, was also a prominent cinematic force during the decade. One of the biggest producers of Gothic cinema came from the literary genre’s parent country, England. Initially this was a way to present some horror tropes and darker subject matter at a time when genre films were embargoed by a country at war, but Hollywood was undoubtedly attempting to compete with Britain’s strong trend of Gothic cinema: classic films like Thorold Dickinson’s original Gaslight (1940); a series of brooding Gothic romances starring a homicidal-looking James Mason, like The Night Has Eyes (1942), The Man in Grey(1943), The Seventh Veil (1945), and Fanny by Gaslight (1944); David Lean’s two best films and possibly the greatest Dickens adaptations ever made, Great Expectations(1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); and other excellent, yet forgotten literary adaptations like Uncle Silas (1947) and Queen of Spades (1949).

The American films, which not only responded to their British counterparts but helped shape the Gothic genre in their own right, tended towards three themes in particular (often combining them): doomed romance, dark family inheritances often connected to greed and madness, and the supernatural melodrama. Certainly, these film borrowed horror tropes, like the fear of the dark, nightmares, haunted houses, thick cobwebs, and fog-drenched cemeteries. The home was often set as the central location, a site of both domesticity and terror — speaking to the genre’s overall themes of social order, repressed sexuality, and death — and this location was of course of equal importance to horror films and the “woman’s film” of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like the latter, these Gothic films often featured female protagonists and plots that revolved around a troubled romantic relationship or domestic turmoil.

Wuthering Heights (1939)

Two of the earliest examples, and certainly two films that kicked off the wave of Gothic romance films in America, are also two of the genre’s most enduring classics: William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939) and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). Based on Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name (one of my favorites), Wyler and celebrated screenwriter Ben Hecht (with script input from director and writer John Huston) transformed Wuthering Heights from a tale of multigenerational doom and bitterness set on the unforgiving moors into a more streamlined romantic tragedy about the love affair between Cathy (Merle Oberon) and Heathcliffe (Laurence Olivier) that completely removes the conclusion that focuses on their children. In the film, the couple are effectively separated by social constraints, poverty, a harsh upbringing, and the fact that Cathy is forced to choose between her wild, adopted brother Heathcliffe and her debonair neighbor, Edgar Linton (David Niven).

Wuthering Heights is actually less Gothic than the films it inspired, primarily because of the fact that Hollywood neutered many of Brontë’s themes. In The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015, Greg Semenza and Bob Hasenfratz wrote, “Hecht and Wyler together manage to transfer the narrative from its original literary genre (Gothic romance) and embed it in a film genre (the Hollywood romance, which would evolve into the so-called ‘women’s films’ of the 1940s)… [To accomplish this,] Hecht and Wyler needed to remove or tone down elements of the macabre, the novel’s suggestions of necrophilia in chapter 29, and its portrayal of Heathcliffe as a kind of Miltonic Satan” (185).

This results in sort of watered down versions of Cathy — who is selfish and cruel as a general rule in the novel — and, in particular, Heathcliffe, whose brutish behavior includes physical violence, spousal abuse, and a drawn out, well-plotted revenge that becomes his sole reason for living. It is thus in a somewhat different — and arguably both more terrifying and more romantic — context that the novel’s Heathcliffe declares to a dying Cathy, “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (145).

Despite Hollywood’s intervention, the novel’s Gothic flavor was not scrubbed entirely and Wuthering Heights still includes themes of ghosts, haunting, and just the faintest touch of damnation, though it ends with a spectral reunion for Cathy and Heathcliffe, whose spirits set off together across the snow-covered moors. These elements of a studio meddling with a film’s source novel, doomed romance, and supernatural tones also appeared in the following year’s Rebecca, possibly the single most influential Gothic film from the period. This was actually Hitchcock’s first film on American shores after his emigration due to WWII, and his first major battle with a producer in the form of David O. Selznick.

Rebecca (1940)

Based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name, Rebecca marks the return of Laurence Olivier as brooding romantic hero Maxim de Winter, the love interest of an innocent young woman (Joan Fontaine) traveling through Europe as a paid companion. She and de Winter meet, fall in love, and are quickly married, though things take a dark turn when they move to his ancestral home in England, Manderlay, which is everywhere marked with the overwhelming presence of his former wife, Rebecca. The hostile housekeeper (Judith Anderson) is still obviously obsessed with her former mistress, Maxim begins to act strangely and has a few violent outbursts, and the new Mrs. de Winter begins to suspect that Rebecca’s death was the result of a homicidal act…

The wanton or mad wife was a feature not only of Rebecca, but of earlier Gothic fiction from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In the same way that Cathy of Wuthering Heights is an example of the feminine resistance to a claustrophobic social structure, Rebecca is a similar figure, made monstrous by her refusal to conform. The dark secret that Maxim’s new wife learns is that Rebecca was privately promiscuous, agreeing only to appear to be the perfect wife in public after de Winter already married her. She pretends she is pregnant with another man’s child and tries to goad her husband into murdering her, seemingly out of sheer spite, but it is revealed that she was dying of cancer.

A surprisingly faithful adaptation of the novel, Rebecca presents the titular character’s death as a suicide, rather than a murder, thanks to the Production Code’s insistence that murderers had to be punished, contrary to the film’s apparent happy ending, and restricted the (now somewhat obvious) housekeeper’s lesbian infatuation for Rebecca. Despite these restrictions, Hitchcock managed to introduce some of the bold, controversial themes that would carry him through films like Marnie (1964). For Criterion, Robin Wood wrote, “it is in Rebecca that his unifying theme receives its first definitive statement: the masculinist drive to dominate, control, and (if necessary) punish women; the corresponding dread of powerful women, and especially of women who assert their sexual freedom, for what, above all, the male (in his position of dominant vulnerability, or vulnerable dominance) cannot tolerate is the sense that another male might be “better” than he was. Rebecca is killed because she defies the patriarchal order, the prohibition of infidelity.”

Wood also got to the crux of many of these early Gothic films (and the Romantic/romantic novels that inspired them) when he wrote, “The antagonism toward Maxim we feel today (in the aftermath of the Women’s Movement) is due at least in part to the casting of Olivier; without that antagonism something of the film’s continuing force and fascination would be weakened.” Heathcliffe and de Winter are similarly contradictory figures: romantic, but also repulsive, objects of love and fear in equal measures, they mirror the character type popularized in England by a young, brooding James Mason — an antagonistic, almost villainous (and sometimes actually so) male romantic lead — that would appear in a number of other titles throughout the decade.

Rebecca (1940)

In “‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s” for Cinema Journal, Diane Waldman wrote, “The plots of films like Rebecca, Suspicion, Gaslight, and their lesser-known counterparts like Undercurrent and Sleep My Love fall under the rubric of the Gothic designation: a young inexperienced woman meets a handsome older man to whom she is alternately attracted and repelled. After a whirlwind courtship (72 hours in Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door, two weeks is more typical), she marries him. After returning to the ancestral mansion of one of the pair, the heroine experiences a series of bizarre and uncanny incidents, open to ambiguous interpretation, revolving around the question of whether or not the Gothic male really loves her. She begins to suspect that he may be a murderer” (29-30).

As Waldman suggests, there are many films from the decade that fit into this type: notable examples include Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), where Joan Fontaine again stars as an innocent, wealthy young woman who marries an unscrupulous gambler (Cary Grant) who may be trying to kill her for her fortune; Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943) yet again starred Fontaine as the innocent titular governess, who falls in love with her gloomy, yet charismatic employer, Mr. Rochester (Orson Welles); George Cukor’s remake of Gaslight (1944) starred Ingrid Bergman as a young singer driven slowly insane by her seemingly charming husband (Charles Boyer), who is only out to conceal a past crime; and so on.

Another interesting, somewhat unusual interpretations of this subgenre is Experiment Perilous (1944), helmed by a director also responsible for key film noir and horror titles such as Out of the Past, Cat People, and Curse of the Demon: Jacques Tourneur. Based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter and set in turn of the century New York, Experiment Perilous is a cross between Gothic melodrama and film noir and expands upon the loose plot of Gaslight, where a controlling husband (here played by Paul Lukas) is trying to drive his younger wife (the gorgeous Hedy Lamarr) insane. The film bucks the Gothic tradition of the ‘40s in the sense that the wife, Allida, is not the protagonist, but rather it is a psychiatrist, Dr. Bailey (George Brent). He encounters the couple because he befriended the husband’s sister (Olive Blakeney) on a train and when she passes away, he goes to pay his respects. While there, he he falls in love with Allida and refuses to believe her husband’s assertions that she is insane and must be kept prisoner in their home.

In some ways evocative of Hitchcock (a fateful train ride, a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient and refuses to believe he or she is insane), Experiment Perilous is a neglected, curious film, and it’s interesting to imagine what it would have been if Cary Grant starred, as intended. It does mimic the elements of female paranoia found in films like Rebecca and Gaslight, in the sense that Allida believes she has a mysterious admirer and, as with the later Secret Beyond the Door, she’s tormented by the presence of a disturbed child; though Lamarr never plays to the level of hysteria usually found in this type of role and her performance is both understated and underrated.

Experiment Perilous (1944)

Tourneur was an expert at playing with moral ambiguities, a quality certainly expressed in Experiment Perilous, and the decision to follow the psychiatrist, rather than the wife, makes this a compelling mystery. Like Laura, The Woman in the Window, Vertigo, and other films, the mesmerizing portrait of a beautiful woman is responsible for the protagonist becoming morally compromised, and for most of the running time it’s not quite clear if Bailey is acting from a rational, medical premise, or a wholly irrational one motivated by sexual desire. Rife with strange diary entries, disturbing letters, stories of madness, death, and psychological decay, and a torrid family history are at the heart of the delightfully titled Experiment Perilous. Like many films in the genre, it concludes with a spectacular sequence where the house itself is in a state of chaos, the most striking symbol of which is a series of exploding fish tanks.

But arguably the most Gothic of all these films — and certainly my favorite — is Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door (1947). On an adventure in Mexico, Celia (Joan Bennett), a young heiress, meets Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), a dashing architect. They have a whirlwind romance before marrying, but on their honeymoon, Mark is frustrated by Celia’s locked bedroom door and takes off in the middle of the night, allegedly for business. Things worsen when they move to his mansion in New England, where she is horrified to learn that she is his second wife, his first died mysteriously, and he has a very strange family, including an odd secretary who covers her face with a scarf after it was disfigured in a fire; he also has serious financial problems. During a welcoming party, Mark shows their friends his hobby, personally designed rooms in the house that mimic the settings of famous murders. Repulsed, Celia also learns that there is one locked room that Mark keeps secret. As his behavior becomes increasingly cold and disturbed she comes to fear that he killed the first Mrs. Lamphere and is planning to kill her, too.

A blend of “Bluebeard,” Rebecca, and Jane Eyre, Secret Beyond the Door is quite an odd film. Though it relies on some frustrating Freudian plot devices and has a number of script issues, there is something truly magical and eerie about it and it deserves as far more elevated reputation. Though this falls in with the “woman’s films” popular at the time, Bennett’s Celia is far removed from the sort of innocent, earnest, and vulnerable characters played by Fontaine. Lang, and his one-time protege, screenwriter Silvia Richards, acknowledge that she has flaws of her own, as well as the strength, perseverance, and sheer sexual desire to pursue Mark, despite his potential psychosis.

This was Joan Bennett’s fourth film with Fritz Lang – after titles like Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945) — and it was to be her last with the director. While her earlier characters were prostitutes, gold diggers, or arch-manipulators, Celia is more complex; she is essentially a spoiled heiress and socialite bored with her life of pleasure and looking to settle down, but used to getting her own way and not conforming to the needs of any particular man. (Gloria Grahame would go on to play slightly similar characters for Lang in films like The Big Heat and Human Desire.) In one of Celia’s introductory scenes, she’s witness to a deadly knife fight in a Mexican market. Instead of running in terror, she is clearly invigorated, if not openly aroused by the scene, despite the fact that a stray knife lands mere inches from her.

Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Like some of Lang’s other films with Bennett, much of this film is spent in or near beds and the bedroom. The hidden bedroom also provides a rich symbolic subtext, one tied in to Mark’s murder-themed rooms, the titular secret room (where his first wife died), and the burning of the house at the film’s conclusion. Due to the involvement of the Production Code, sex is only implied, but modern audiences may miss this. It is at least relatively clear that Mark and Celia’s powerful attraction is a blend of sex and violence, affection and neurosis. As with Rebecca and Jane Eyre, it is implied that the fire — the act of burning down the house and the memory of the former love (or in Jane Eyre’scase, the actual woman) — has cleansing properties that restore Mark to sanity. It is revealed that though he did not commit an actual murder, the guilt of his first wife’s death, brought on by a broken heart, has driven him to madness and obsession.

This really is a marvelous film, thanks Lang’s return to German expressionism blended with Gothic literary themes. There is some absolutely lovely cinematography from Stanley Cortez that prefigured his similar work on Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. In particular, a woodland set – where Celia runs when she thinks Mark is going to murder her – is breathtaking, eerie, and nightmarish, and puts a marked emphasis on the fairy-tale influence. But the house is where the film really shines with lighting sources often reduced to candlelight, reflections in ornate mirrors, or the beam of a single flashlight. The camera absolutely worships Bennett, who is framed by long, dark hallways, foreboding corridors, and that staple of film noir, the winding staircase.

[man-creates-dinosaurs]

November is a big month for kaijū fans and aficionados. One reason is that November 3rd marks the anniversary of the original GODZILLA’s Japanese theatrical release in 1954. This year the Big G turns 63. Seeing how I technically missed the opportunity to do an anniversary post I thought I’d still like to put up something reflecting on the original film and its legacy. And then this topic came to mind…

A STOP-MOTION GODZILLA

Back in 2015 stop-motion animator and friend of this blog, Mark Wolf – best known for the educational paleo-short THE AGE OF MAMMALS (81) – offered up his speculations on how the original GODZILLA (54) may have been different if stop-motion animation, a la the work of Ray Harryhausen, had been used instead of suitimation. Wolf penned this piece as part of a series of posts for The Fantastic World of Ray Harryhausen Facebook page called “What If Ray Harryahusen Had Made… Theatre.” I found Wolf’s conjectures and insights fascinating and this led to a discussion between us about how and why stop-motion was and wasn’t used on GODZILLA.  

To be clear Wolf was never attempting to disparage the original GODZILLA as a film, writing that he “respect[s] the original Japanese GOJIRA’s black & white cinematography, impressive score and anti-nuke sentiments” but nevertheless finds “the visualization of Godzilla… laughable, especially when compared to KING KONG (33) or THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (53).” In particular, Wolf highlights the scenes of Godzilla’s maritime activity noting that while Godzilla sinks multiple boats in his premiere film he never appears in the same shot as any of them, which is in stark contrast “to [a similar] shot in BEAST when the Rhedosaurus sinks a ship.” Because Wolf believes that stop-motion provides a better “performance” then suitimation he says he’ll gladly take “Ray’s approach every time.” Note that Wolf’s emphasis here is on “performance,” not realism. Many western critics reject tokusatsu films for looking “fake,” but Wolf openly acknowledges that stop-motion is no more “realistic” looking then suitimation.

As for other ways GODZILLA may have been different had stop-motion been employed, Wolf starts off by pointing to Godzilla’s American precursor; THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (53). Based on the short-story “The Foghorn” by Ray Bradbury and published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951, Wolf observes that the dinosaur featured in the original painting by James Bingham which accompanied the story’s debut “looks more like Godzilla” then the model creature that Harryhausen would later produce. Wolf speculates that had stop-motion been involved in the production of GODZILLA that the titular monster, freed from the constraints of needing to fit a human inside its anatomy, may have also been much closer to that of Bingham’s painting or even the Rhedosaurus from BEAST and points to Tony McVey’s re-imagined model of Godzilla as a quadruped as one possibility.

However for everything gained something must be lost and Wolf writes that the downside to a stop-motion Godzilla is that it would have almost certainly annulled SFX director Eiji Tsuburaya’s impressive miniature cityscapes. Wolf notes that Harryhausen “tended to avoid” such elaborate miniatures “because they were repetitious and limited in their performances” preferring instead to composite his creatures into live-action sets.

All this speculation of course gives rise to the question of why Tsuburaya – a great admirer of Willis O’Brien’s work on KING KONG – didn’t employ stop-motion on GODZILLA? On this point Wolf addresses the two most frequently circulated claims about why Tsuburaya didn’t employ stop-motion: A) because “Toho couldn’t afford stop-motion” and B) because “no one in Japan at the time [was] capable of pulling off the effect.” With regards to both of these claims Wolf argues that neither makes any sense. Regarding cost Wolf points out that many of Harryhausen’s films, like “EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS (56) had a $120k negative cost,” which is well below GODZILLA’s entire production budget of $175k. As for the claim that Japan lacked talented stop-motion animators, this is entirely erroneous and flies in the face of the fact that “there is stop-motion in GODZILLA, including the most singularly bizarre use of model animation for VFX, ever - a shot of a fire truck overturning and spilling two firemen who have been riding on the sides (note how the headlights come on as the scene progresses)” as well as “a different shot, of Godzilla’s tail, [which] is ideal for animation and I am not at all surprised they tried it at least once.”    

Wolf goes on to speculate that the real reason that Tsuburaya didn’t employ stop-motion is because director Ishiro Honda was “impatient” – basically envisioning a scenario similar to what happened to O'Brien while working on Irwin Allen’s THE LOST WORLD (1960) which I’ve previously blogged about here. However on this point I had to correct Wolf, since the decision not to use stop-motion on GODZILLA wasn’t Honda’s but rather actually came down from Toho Studios Production Manager Iwao Mori, and only after Tsuburaya told him that it would take seven years to complete the film if stop-motion was used. Wolf found this claim, that Tsuburaya estimated it would take seven years to film GODZILLA with stop-motion, “hilarious” and wondered where he got such a ridiculously inflated number from since he would have “certainly [known] KONG didn’t take years to film” and noting that on average “the VFX for [a Harryhausen film like] JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (63) [only] took nine months.” BEAST only took a year.

In light of this I have to wonder if Tsuburaya was truly being sincere or deliberately hyperbolic when he told Mori it would take seven years to shoot GODZILLA with stop-motion. Was Tsuburaya really that ignorant about how long such a process would take? Or was it Mori who wanted stop-motion and Tsuburaya who didn’t and knew he could scare the producer out of the idea with such an over-the-top estimate of the time needed to film the movie?

However even if it wouldn’t have actually taken Tsuburaya seven years to do GODZILLA in stop-motion it nevertheless would have still been unfeasible since, as I pointed out to Wolf, the one thing Tsuburaya didn’t have was time. It’s important to remember that the original GODZILLA was not a well-planned out film. GODZILLA was released on Nov. 3rd, 1954 and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka came up with the idea on a plane ride back to Tokyo in mid-April of that same year as a last minute replacement for a war movie which had fallen through. Though Tanaka would go on to relate a number of tall-tales over the years about what his inspiration for Godzilla was, the reality clearly appears to be that the trade papers at the time were reporting that Toho’s main studio rival, Daiei, was going to be releasing THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS in Japan in December of ‘54 and that Tanaka had decided that Toho could beat them to the punch by whipping out their own domestic monster movie a month before. Here Wolf also points out that WB, the US distributors for BEAST, had netted a nice $5-Million in box office returns on the film after only paying $250k to acquire it, numbers which certain caught the eyes of execs at both Toho and Daiei. Once Tanaka had convinced his fellow Toho brass to invest in this admittedly risky venture, spending three times what they had spent on any previous film on GODZILLA, pre-production got underway in early May and production in early July. Tsuburaya’s team didn’t begin work however until August at which point they had about two months to shoot the 263 SFX shots (out of 868 shots) needed for the film. Steve Ryfle writes in his book Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star (98) that all-total Tsuburaya spent 71-days shooting the special-effect scenes for GODZILLA. As Wolf acknowledged, with such a small window of time to work in “not much could [have been] delivered” if stop-motion had been employed, “so hand-puppets, animatronics, [and] suits would [have made more] sense.”

But Wolf also finds himself still puzzled over GODZILLA’a random use of stop-motion, including that perplexing and admittedly unconvincing fire truck scene which he feels strongly that “no sane VFX Director would [have] elected to do” in stop-motion given that one of the things stop-motion is historically poor at portraying is objects moving at high speeds. The end result of such a shot is what for all the world looks like a toy fire truck with dolls being knocked over. I told Wolf that while I didn’t know about the fire truck scene itself I thought an apt parallel to it could be found in August Ragone’s 2007 biography of Tsuburaya in which he recounts a popular antidote concerning the 1965 Toho film FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD. Here Tsuburaya needed to shoot a scene in which the dinosaur-like kaijū Baragon attacks a stable full of horses. To accomplish this some decidedly fake looking miniature horses were placed in the scene for the monster to menace. When asked by a young intern why he had opted for the model horses over a composite shot using real horses Tsuburaya simply replied: “Because using a model horse was more fun!” Personally I think this antidote tell you everything you need to know about Tsuburaya and his aesthetic philosophy when it came to special-effects.

Tsuburaya would employ stop-motion in one other Godzilla film, 1962’s KING KONG VS GODZILLA, which is actually based on a story idea originally conceived by Willis O’Brien for a Kong sequel is which the supersized simian would have fought a giant-sized version of Frankenstein’s Monster. The first example of stop-motion in KING KONG VS GODZILLA is during the attack of the giant octopus on Faro Island where several of the octopus’ tentacles are stop-motion. Later there are several long-distance and aerial shots of both Kong and Godzilla which are done with stop-motion models. However the most obvert and dramatic example is a brief sequence in which Kong charges Godzilla, prompting Godzilla to rear up on his tail and deliver a kangaroo-kick to Kong’s chest; knocking the giant ape backwards. Another reason why Tsuburaya likely abandoned using stop-motion in his films is because it did not convincingly match the look of the suitimation monsters. This was the reason given by special-effects director Koichi Kawakita – who had mentored under Tsuburaya – for his own rejection of stop-motion when he assumed the role of head SFX-director at Toho beginning with GODZILLA VS BIOLLANTE (89). Kawakita had considered using stop-motion in this film and had a roughly 20-second sequence made in which Godzilla fights off the plant monster’s tendrils. However it was never used, ultimately being relegated to the deleted scenes section of the DVD and eventually YouTube. IMAGES

1) Tony McVey’s re-imagined Godzilla model kit

2 - 3) The only two stop-motion shots to appear in the original GODZILLA (54)

4 - 5) Kong and Godzilla throw down stop-motion style briefly in KING KONG VS GODZILLA (62)

6) Eiji Tsuburaya with his underutilized stop-motion Godzilla puppet