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woolishlygrim · 4 years

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Winter Weebwatch #3

I feel a little bad for giving out so many two and three star scores, so I should probably clarify that three stars is meant to be ‘generally pretty good’ and two stars is meant to be ‘watchable but very flawed.’ We’re not working on IGN metrics here.

Also, this week is the week I finally drop a show! What could it be, what could it -- it’s Plunderer. Of course it’s Plunderer. I couldn’t get all the way through this week’s episode and life’s too short to bother watching any more of it.

Also also, while In/Spectre hasn’t been dropped, it gets subbed so late that I’m skipping it this week and rolling this week’s episode over to next week’s post.

ID: Invaded.

★★★★☆

God, why was this show relegated to the Death Season, Where Anime Goes To Die? For three weeks running now, ID: Invaded has stood head and shoulders over all of its competitors, and while there’s always the possibility it could collapse in under its own weight, it so far seems to be going pretty strong.

So episode four (again, see remarks about how one and two aired in the same week) sees Sakaido and the team in a race against the clock to catch the Gravedigger, a serial killer who traps people into enclosed spaces with just a few oxygen canisters and livestreams their struggles, showing the world their final moments and even continuing the livestreams to show their bodies decaying. The Gravedigger has kidnapped a new victim, and for the first time left enough cognition particles behind for Sakaido to dive into his mental world.

Whereas previous episodes have focused heavily on the mystery angle, this episode largely focuses on the stress the case puts on Sakaido and the team. The Gravedigger’s world is a uniquely dangerous mess of fire, explosions, and shifting architecture, and Sakaido dies again and again as he struggles to find any evidence of the Gravedigger’s identity.

Much like the last episode, this would sit at a solid three stars, being a fairly engaging and somewhat harrowing story of Sakaido and the team putting themselves under immense stress to save a victim. What boosts it up to four stars is the moment where the writers pull the rug out from under the characters and the audience: The Gravedigger they’re hunting is only a copycat of the real Gravedigger, and his victim has been dead for days, the ‘livestream’ actually a recording.

The episode also hints at a bigger role for the Perforator in future, as the team attempts to use him as a back-up detective, Akaido, only to find out he’s ill-suited for the role.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

Pet was so close to a four star rating this week. So close.

So, this week’s episode continues an unclear amount of time after the last week’s episode, with Hiroki and Tsubasa having bought a fish store (as in a pet store that sells live fish and naught else, not a fishmonger’s), which Hiroki believes means they can stop doing work for the shady Committee -- only for Tsubasa to inform him that the Committee paid for the store in the first place, but not to worry, he’ll do all their jobs, and Hiroki doesn’t have to do any of them.

So this episode is … moderately upsetting, actually. Intentionally so.

The bulk of the storyline, in which Tsubasa alters a bodyguard’s memory so that he’s compelled to murder one of his boss’ friends, isn’t what’s upsetting about it, although it does deal with some sensitive subjects, namely domestic abuse and the objectification of vulnerable people. No, what’s upsetting is that, like with last week’s story about Hiroki and Tsubasa altering the memories of a couple, this one also harks back to Hiroki and Tsubasa’s relationship -- specifically, that Tsubasa is emotionally abusing Hiroki.

We get hints of this early on, when Tsubasa is deliberately vague about whether he’ll psychically synchronise with Satoru, another character who, at least in Hiroki’s mind (although evidently not in Satoru’s), is something of a romantic rival. As the episode wears on, Tsubasa goes about his work, while Hiroki, left alone at the fish store, begins showing his immaturity by acting out with his powers before eventually becoming sullen and unresponsive. All of that wouldn’t be enough to indict Tsubasa as being abusive, except in the final scene, as Katsuragi snidely remarks that their new store will never be successful and Hiroki will have to return to a life of crime, Tsubasa mildly returns that he knows it won’t be successful, and he knows it will hurt Hiroki, but that’s just part of ‘taking care of a pet.’

Aaaand we get our title, with all of the unpleasant implications of how Tsubasa views the much more immature and emotionally vulnerable Hiroki.

This episode would have scraped a four star score, but the early parts of the story are a bit too fast paced and a bit incoherent. That really was the only thing holding this absolute gutpunch of an episode back.

Bonus points to the episode that the thing that prompts Hiroki to act out with his powers is seeing a woman’s domineering and callous boyfriend, implying that he is at least somewhat aware of what Tsubasa is like.

Honestly, when this show started I was not expecting a meditation on the subject of abusive relationships, but here we are, and I’m down for it.

Darwin’s Game.

★☆☆☆☆

Oh my god, I just watched it. I just watched it, guys, and I don’t remember even the tiniest bit of it. Am I crazy? Is this what crazy feels like? It’s like I’m blotting the show out of my memory.

I remember something to do with plants and that’s … that’s actually the only thing I remember about this episode.

I don’t even think Darwin’s Game is bad (although let’s be honest, how would I know), it’s just not really anything. It has somehow hit that sweet spot between good and bad where it just fails to make any kind of impact at all, and my brain just interprets it as background noise and proceeds to flush all data pertaining to it.

I might drop it just because this has got to be getting boring for anyone reading these reviews by now. Watching this show is like a sneak peek of suffering from dementia.

And yet, I still know for a fact it’s better than Plunderer, so it gets one star.

Plunderer.

☆☆☆☆☆ (DROPPED)

Aaand I’m out.

Look, after the shitshow that was the first episode, I should have dropped it straight away. I gave it a chance, and the second episode convinced me that, hey, maybe this wouldn’t be so terrible, maybe the first episode was just an outlier.

The first episode was not an outlier. Episode three isn’t entirely sexual assault and sexual harassment, but about twelve minutes in it does segue into an extended sequence of exactly those things, getting worse with each passing minute. I got up to fourteen minutes, the point at which a supporting character was cheering on the protagonist to sexually assault someone, before I just couldn’t stomach watching anymore.

This show could be the most interesting, engaging, thought-provoking thing on television, and the constant sexual assault would still make me drop it. Luckily, even if you take out all the sex crimes, all you’d get is a show that was basically okay at best.

So zero stars for Plunderer, and I’m dropping the show. To be perfectly honest, I should have dropped it after episode one.

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen.

★★★☆☆

Onto more pleasant news, man, I just don’t know what’s up with Sorcerous Stabber Orphen’s pacing. Having proceeded at a truly glacial pace for the first two episodes, this episode caps off the entire current story arc, bringing it to an abrupt close.

Now in the company of his old mentor Childman and a task force of sorcerers, Orphen tracks down the dragon-ified Azalie, attempting to reason with her, only for Childman to stab him and eviscerate Azalie. In the aftermath, however, Orphen realises that he’s been played: The dragon he thought was Azalie was actually Childman, and the person he’s been thinking of as Childman is actually Azalie.

So, that was a weird twist. It’s not, in fact, completely out of the left field. The episode sets up early on that Azalie was skilled not only in elemental Black Sorcery, but also in telepathic White Sorcery, and that she should have access to those spells even as a dragon, something which is cause for concern because nobody in the task force has White Sorcery, including Childman. Later on, the confrontation with Dragon-Azalie (Drazalie, if you will), has a character call attention to how she hasn’t used any White Sorcery since the battle started. So when it’s eventually revealed that Azalie did, in fact, use White Sorcery, secretly swapping her mind with Childman’s and letting him die in her place, it actually fits together in quite a neat fashion.

The episode ends without any real hint as to where the story is going to go next: Azalie escapes in Childman’s body, and Orphen is still an exile from the Tower of Fangs, and there aren’t any other pressing story threads, so I guess we’ll see.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★☆☆☆

This is the second week in a row that I’m giving Infinite Dendrogram two stars, and it actually physically pains me to do so, because I really like this series. I think apart from ID: Invaded, it’s my favourite anime this season, by quite a significant margin.

But nothing at all happens in this episode.

Okay, that’s only half true. The episode opens with the Player-Killers roaming around Altar having all been killed, which journalist (that’s literally her character class, which I kind of love as a concept) Marie Adler says was the work of just the four ranked players. One by one, she shows the main cast a video of each one taking out a clan of Player-Killers in their own unique way: Arena gladiator Figaro takes his targets out one by one, sadistically toying with them before striking the killing blow; cult priestess Tsukuyo uses magic to immobilise her targets, before letting her cult skewer them one by one; martial artist Lei Lei takes them out in a surprisingly friendly and sporting fashion; and the King of Destruction, whose identity is unknown and definitely not Ray’s big brother, definitely, absolutely, just levels the entire forest his targets are hiding in.

I … do see the necessity of introducing them. The Superiors are basically this show’s Gotei 13, or Gold Saints, or Hashira, or <Insert Group Of Loosely Allied Big Tough People That Are In Every Post-Saint Seiya Shounen Anime> here. There are, however, more interesting ways this could have been done than having the characters watching four videos of fights they already know the outcome to.

For example, what if, instead, you had an episode setting up the characters all getting trapped in different areas, pursued by higher level Player Killers, only for them each to be saved by a Superior. That would actually have some tension and dramatic stakes, and it’d be a much more dynamic way of introducing them.

#plunderer #id invaded #infinite dendrogram #sorcerous stabber orphen #darwins game #winter weebwatch

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bestmovies0 · 6 years

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Annette Bening Opens Up About Hollywoods Sexist Past and Brighter Future

” I truly had to pis .”

That, as the terribly alluring Annette Bening tells it, is how she landed the role of Gloria Grahame in director Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool .

It actually took Bening twenty-three years to play the scandal-ridden screen siren. That was when producer Barbara Broccoli, current gatekeeper of the Bond films, first floated the idea to the actress. Broccoli is longtime friends with Peter Turner, and, having witnessed his affair with the much-older Grahame firsthand, wished to adapt his 1987 memoir chronicling their Liverpool-set romance during the Oscar-winning actress’s final years. It was a labor of love. But Bening was far too young, and the script far away from ready.

Cut to the UK’s BAFTA accolades seven years ago. Bening is there , nominated for Best Leading Actress for her dazzling turning as one-half of a lesbian couple in The Children Are All Right .

” It was this ceremony with no bathroom transgresses ,” she chortlingly remembers, so Bening absconded to the loo, where she ran smack-dab into Broccoli, whose bladder likewise overfloweth. The two got to talking and agreed that the time was finally right to adapt Turner’s tome into a cinema.

After several stops and starts, it’s finally here: a sensuous production featuring yet another stunning performance by Bening as Grahame, who reached the height of her fame in the 1950 s with the cinemas In a Lonely Place , The Bad and the Beautiful , The Big Heat , and Oklahoma ! em >, before her career was tarnished by tabloid scandal after romancing and later marrying Tony Ray, the actor-son of her second spouse, Nicholas Ray.

Following their split in the’ 70 s, and having failed to find work stateside, a 58 -year-old Grahame moved to England, acting in stage productions and falling for the decades-younger Turner, a mild-mannered Liverpudlian played in the film by Jamie Bell.

Over coffee, The Daily Beast chatted with Bening–a four-time Oscar nominee–about capturing the essence of Grahame, the present Hollywood # MeToo reckoning, and much more.

It’s a fascinating tale, Gloria Grahame’s. So many crazy highs and lows.

An amazing story. Crazy highs and lows–and lots of scandal. I recommend the book. It’s this tasteful, impressionistic memoir, because Peter Turner had this relationship with her, they’re thirty years apart in age, he’s from Liverpool, she’s this ex-Hollywood superstar. It’s this weird confluence, but they had this very real connect.

In the movie, we greet your Gloria Grahame after she’s experienced so many adversities. After she allegedly experienced electroshock therapy following a mental breakdown.

It’s interesting: I don’t know if that actually happened. I met Tim–her oldest son, the one who’s in the film–in England when we did our premiere. I didn’t want to invade his privacy since we were at the premiere, but I wanted to ask him a million questions, and that would have been one of them. Because there are a lot of stories about her that simply aren’t true. There’s a really trashy volume about her that you can’t trust. I’m not saying none of it happened, but we’re not sure.

” Does it go all the way up to the presidency? Well, we’ll see if people have to answer for their behaviour .” div>

— Annette Bening

One of the things alluded to in the film is her crippling nervousnes over her looks–particularly her lips.

That’s true.

There was so much sexism within the old studio system, as far as the lane these studio chiefs treated girls like props and erected them whole cloth–like how Harry Cohn Anglicized Rita Hayworth via a name change and plastic surgery. These studio heads used to bully actresses into surgery or fill them with such anxiety over their lookings.

And that’s not that age-old. I know on a studio film I did, I recollect the administrator tell people about the studio making notes, and he said,” They ever talk about the men’s performances and the women’s appearing .” And they were putting pressure on me to get on the case of the people who were doing my makeup, and the lighting, and everything. It’s like, I didn’t want to worry about that stuff. It’s still there.

Was it Mars Attacks ! em >? Or what movie was it?

Nah! They wouldn’t do that to Tim Burton. Tim Burton they left alone! But[ Grahame] had surgeries done on her upper lip.

There were tales that Grahame would kiss her costars with cotton balls lodged in her mouth.

Now, that’s something I don’t know is true. It would be great to know but I don’t know it’s true. I do know that she had surgeries on her lips. She was very self-conscious about it. She wanted to make them seem fuller. And now people are preoccupied with that, putting things in their lips.

In my inexpert sentiment, it doesn’t seem to have a the highest success rate.

[ Laughs ] I know! It objective up looking kind of goofy!

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How do you discover Grahame? On the one hand she’s a sort of tragic character but on the other there’s something quite lovely about the style she was able to live out her final years.

I don’t see her as tragic. I mean, the story is very sad, but for all of her defects and frailties–and she had them–she was a survivor. And she didn’t take her life or herself as an actress that seriously, and it’s a beautiful thing about her. She was a live wire. She was someone you met and would be like,” Hey, I’m going to this thing tonight. Are you around ?” and she’d be all,” Yeah, let’s go! Let’s do it! Let’s have fun !” She was all about enjoying life and letting get-up-and-go of the pain and the difficulties, because she had them for sure . And her relationships were very tempestuous. That’s why I guess gratifying Peter, a decent guy from Liverpool from this huge household, was such a positive experience for her.

In the cinema, she swingings back and forth between crippling anxiety about her age/ career and beaming confidence. There’s that sequence where she’s just finished performing in the play-act, is slipping through backstage, and Peter becomes to her and says something of the implications of,” That guy wants to sleep with you ,” and she turns to him and is like,” Honey, everyone wants to fuck me .”

” Everyone wants to fuck me !” That’s a great line. It’s a kind of contradiction, isn’t it? Because on the one hand she seemed like, fuck it, I don’t care! I’m living my life, doing theater in England, living with this young guy I like; and then on the other hand, there was the part of her that was conscious about aging, self-conscious about not being the sun that she had been.

One of the things she did that I found out about that I know is true is, when she went back to New York she took acting class with Stella Adler , who’s this legendary, brilliant woman that my husband examined with. Robert De Niro analyse with her too, and he’d told my husband that[ Grahame was there ]. I called De Niro and asked about it and he said,” Yeah. I was in class, like 18 or 19, and I didn’t even know who she was. I was a kid, and was ignorant about it. But person said,’ Gee, you know who that is ?'” He said that she didn’t get up and do scenes, but I thought that said a lot about Gloria and her aircraft. She’d won an Academy Award but was trying to get run, couldn’t get run, so went to England.

Your first cinema ever was The Great Outdoors , writes to the late, great John Hughes .

Written by John Hughes! I was so excited to just get a movie, and The Great Outdoors was like my nightmare come true.

I love that scene where[ John] Candy takes down” The Old 96 er .” That massive steak.

[ Laughs ] I was just remembering that we were on a reservoir various kinds of near Yosemite, and we were living in these little cabins–which I thought was the neatest thing in the world–and we’d “re going to have to” get up and drive around the lake. So it took about an hour to get to set, so we’d be leaving at around four in the morning, and I remember thinking,” This is so great! Oh my god !”

I mean, you started off your job with The Great Outdoors , Valmont , Postcards from the Edge , and The Grifters . That’s a fairly good run.

Milos Forman never mentioned The Great Outdoors ! The entire time I was filming [ Valmont ] I was guessing,” Did he know I induced that movie ?!” Because I don’t think he would’ve ever hired me for Valmont if he knew! [ Laughs ]

Grifters was a Harvey Weinstein movie, of course. What was your experience with Harvey like ? I’ve had my own experiences with Harvey, although it’s pretty clear that he acted very differently toward men–particularly men who are reporters–as opposed to up-and-coming actresses, which you were at the time.

I didn’t have any serious issues with Harvey. I had a couple of not-serious minutes with him. I entail, I was 31 and I was marriage. I don’t know. I believe I was lucky. Harvey sort of set the feelers out for most people–well, that’s not fair. But I didn’t have any issues with him.

How do you feel about this long-overdue guessing in Hollywood? It’s an industry that’s always been pretty outspoken when it comes to progressive makes but its therapy of the status of women has long been its glaring blind spot. The ” casting couch” goes back to its inception , and was almost treated as a punchline when it’s anything but.

It seems like a tipping degree. That’s how I think of it, is there’s been this incredible buildup over so long, and it’s a tipping degree. People can focus on it because it’s happening in show business with a lot of famous people, but now it’s rippling out into your business, journalism, and into the tech world. It’s in all the businesses, and that’s why it’s so significant: it’s become a tipping point for the whole culture. The hope is that it not only changes things in my business and your business and the more high-profile firms, but what’s really important is that it changes for the average working women who have no clout and no leveraging. A single momma working for low wages who cannot miss a period of study or a paycheck, is it going to change for those women? Or those men, too? I think it’s as difficult–or sometimes more difficult–when it happens for men, as there can be an added level of shame involved. But that’s really the measure for all of us: Does it actually go down to average working people? And does it go up to members of Congress? And does it go all the way up to the presidency? Well, we’ll see if people have to answer for their behavior.

Right. We’ve lately considered Donald Trump’s sexual-assault accusers attain the news rounds , and senators like Kirsten Gillibrand call on Trump to resign from the presidency over the allegations.

And his own diplomat to the United Nations[ Nikki Haley] has said that these women have a right to listen to. So, this is serious stuff.

It does seem to be a reaction to his election, doesn’t it? It seems like more than a coincidence that the Harvey Weinstein story violated on the one-year anniversary of the Access Hollywood videotape. When you elevate person like Trump at the very highest office of the land–and really, stimulate his the face of the nation–it forces-out the country to do a lot of soul-searching.

Yes. This can’t be the emblem of the free world–of the leader of the free world. No, I agree with you. I envision all of us are doing a lot of soul-searching only generally, in your work and in my job. What are “weve been” doing? Because, with these forces of nationalism, populism, xenophobia, racism and ugliness becoming more culturally acceptable, what happens to the culture? Culture tends to shut down and people tend to get discouraged. So I belief those of us that are trying to entertain people, we have a responsibility not to lose hope and not to become cynical. The whole thing you’re talking about is part of that–including the reckon on sexual harassment, and being able to have a nuanced dialogue about the inappropriate sex come-on or groping, and harassment and assault, right? They’re not all the same thing. There needs to be nuance.

My take on it is that there was just never any sort of accountability here, and since bad boys were able to act with impunity for so long, when the guessing comes–which appears to be now–there’s going to be an overcorrection. So I generally think it’s good that there’s increased accountability on behavior that moved unchecked for ages.

Clearly. I entail, it’s a little scary–the sheer number of people in our world that ought to have taken down, and whose behaviour we had not known about.

The Kevin[ Spacey] material was pretty shocking .

Yes. Utterly.

In the wake of the allegations, reports surfaced that several of his productions had been beset by his sexual misconduct issues. There were numerous stories from the fixed of House of Cards , and Gabriel Byrne likewise came forward and “re just saying that” production on The Usual Suspects was halted over Kevin’s” inappropriate sex behavior .” Were there any such problems during the filming of American Beauty ?

No. We didn’t have any of those problems. He was altogether professional. I considered him health professionals colleague, and we got on very well. I had no issues–and didn’t see any problems, either.

Coming back to the cinema, one of the points that I really enjoyed about it is that it does provide a frank depiction of an older woman’s sexuality. There aren’t nearly enough of these tales being told by Hollywood, an industry that’s not very kind to ladies past a certain age. You’re really an exception to the rule, having managed to carve out a great space for yourself.

Yeah, I feel really lucky. It’s an extension of love–sexuality is–and it doesn’t stop at a certain age, and Gloria was someone who that was very true for. I do think it’s something that a lot of people would leave out of narratives, the fact that girls far older than Gloria maintain and have active sex lives. People don’t really want to dramatize that. But now, that’s changing. Helen Mirren is an example of someone who’s playing very complex females. Judi Dench. That notion that women’s sex lives stop when they start having children is just a myth. Women have sexual relationships into their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. Hello ? This is what happens! This is the case for a lot of people. We, as ladies, want to play real-life people. We necessity these kinds of characters who have nuance, and faults, and strengths, and weaknesses, and sometimes they seem sexy, and sometimes they don’t, just like all of us. It’s a relief to see that happening.

One scene that I really loved–and that I feel communicates Gloria’s emotional quandary–is that early one where she and Peter have just returned from the bar, they’re a bit liquored up, and she sits on the couch and takes her top off. She’s feeling very empowered and sexy but then she senses some misgiving on his part, and even though it’s just nerves, she’s overcome by insecurity, and then embraces herself up.

In trying to find the moments for a character the hell is truthful, you get to explore some of your own true sentiments in a way that’s safe. I appreciate you saying that. I think she used. In one moment she’s feeling really confident and hey, I can do this! I can flirt with this guy! And then in the next moment she’s like, wait a minute…what am I doing? I’ve uncovered myself. I need to cover myself up, literally. When you gratify someone you really like that maybe you’re attracted to, part of you is like, yeah! And then maybe you think, well, I have this rolling here and…am I appealing? I think that’s something we all go through.

Read more: https :// www.thedailybeast.com/ annette-bening-opens-up-about-hollywoods-sexist-past-and-brighter-future

from https://bestmovies.fun/2018/01/06/annette-bening-opens-up-about-hollywoods-sexist-past-and-brighter-future/

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