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meta-squash · 4 years ago

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Brick Club 1.5.3 “Money Deposited With Lafitte”

We establish Valjean’s solitary nature here. And okay, so I just rewatched the first two Mad Max movies with my best friend because she’s never seen them, and really Valjean and Max Rockatansky have a lot in common. Lonely, solitary guy with a backstory that’s a mystery to others but not to the viewer, who is also very skilled at many things, waltzes into a town, saves it from various crises while not talking much and being pretty socially awkward despite his charisma, and then leaves never to be seen again. Someone write an AU. Okay, moving on.

“He talked with very few. He shrank from compliments and with a touch of the hat would walk on rapidly; he smiled to avoid talking and gave to avoid smiling.” God my favorite thing about Valjean is just how awkward he is, despite also being unknowingly charismatic. He’s fantastic at fooling people simply because he’s so kind, and from that they choose what they want to see, but really he’s just so awkward. He doesn’t want to talk to people or do much socializing, which I think is another reason for his avoidance of upper class society affairs. Not only is he not interested because he’s not interested in advancing himself up the social ladder, he’s also not interested because it would mean he’d have to talk to people.

Valjean’s library is “well chosen,” and I’m wondering what books that would mean. Surely the bible, but what else? I assume he learned what the Right Books were by listening to conversation or looking at what was on other people’s shelves (perhaps during his Benevolent Break-Ins?) or something. His language starts to become more polished, too, as he educates himself through literature as well as (I presume) through his brief social interactions. The people seem to notice it but also don’t seem to think much of it? This doesn’t seem to factor into the rumors about him as much as his solitary nature does.

Valjean’s aim with a gun is frighteningly accurate (Where did he learn to shoot a gun? Would that have been another skill from his time as a pruner?) but he never kills inoffensive animals/small birds. I think this is the only other time we see Valjean with a gun aside from when he’s at the barricade. This description feels weirdly dark; I think it’s the word “frightening” (in Hapgood the word is “terror”). This skill with a gun seems like a hint not of his laborer past but of his past at Toulon, the potential he had prior to Myriel of becoming “the worst man.” Now he only uses it on threatening animals, but his aim itself is a threat. (Which is an interesting thing to establish only to have him definitely Not Use It on the barricade.)

“He would offer a hand to anyone needing it, help a fallen horse, push a mired wagon, or grab a rampaging bull by the horns.” What a parallel here. In Tome 3 we had Fantine as a horse that falls. In the coming chapters were have a broken wagon. I’m not sure if the “rampaging bull” would be Javert or perhaps Thenardier or something else? I would assume Javert, since his goodness essentially stops Javert mid-”rampage.” This is also an example of Valjean throwing himself in front of more dangerous things to help others, potentially heedless of his own wellbeing.

“If we took a little time, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. Men are so like the nettle!” This line reminds me of all the parallels I was getting to modern day back in Tome 2. It’s just something that’s still so prevalent today. Someone grows up in a way that’s considered “bad” and instead of figuring out how best to help and communicate and nurture that person into something that is not “bad,” we just toss them away and neglect and ignore them and then when they adapt to that treatment in a certain way that we again consider “bad,” we either lock them up or force them out onto the streets. (Sorry, I’m mad at how relevant a 150 year old book is. A local homeless man was murdered by a housed person at a camp last week for no reason and the treatment of people living at homeless camps around my city has been so awful recently.)

“My friends, remember this: There are no bad herbs, and no bad men; there are only bad cultivators.” This one is so interesting because it sort of sets Valjean up for future failure. A cultivator (whether it’s a person or a machine) is someone who prepares land for use. Montreuil-sur-Mer itself is this land, and yet Valjean neglects certain parts of it. He makes this comment about the nettle, about finding a use for it if you only take a little time, and yet he gives up on and/or just sort of ignores the sex workers (and any other adjacent community) that are pretty much guaranteed to exist due to it being a garrisoned town. Valjean I love you but I have Concerns about your weird moral hoops that people have to jump through. I’m sure there are women who work at the factory and also as sex workers, who are hiding their second job and hoping no one finds out. But what about the women who are already known sex workers, who (I assume) don’t even have a chance? Valjean gives hospital beds, universal healthcare, a place for old and infirm laborers to stay, an “infant school/place of refuge” (I still don’t quite know what that is), but he doesn’t put any sort of aid in place for women who are already “fallen” or “morally indigent” etc. There are no bad herbs or men, only bad cultivators, but what happens if you’re great at cultivating three quarters of your field, but you decide not to bother to work the land of that last quarter? Anything you plant there will die, and you’ll yield fewer crops. It seems like a weird oversight on Valjean’s part to do good for most of the city and townspeople except for these women. There’s clearly a divide between the “honest” working women and the sex workers; we see it clearly later on with Fantine. So it’s not as if it’s a hidden secret. But for Valjean to enforce these specific moral standards without giving those suffering the most a way to achieve them and the support to do so, it’s just bad practice. @everyonewasabird mentioned that maybe it’s because he never really knew any women, so he doesn’t really know how drastically different life is for women and how different it is to “be an honest woman” vs an “honest man,” or how difficult it is to get there if you’re already trapped in sex work, but if he’s fairly aware of the goings-on in most of the town, you’d think he’d realize there was a divide and that people on one side were suffering while people on the other were not.

Oh my god I thought this post was going to be short but apparently I have Opinions.

“With his eyes raised to heaven, he listened with a sort of longing toward all the mysteries of the infinite, to the sad voices that sing on the brink of death’s dark abyss.” Ah, Valjean and his many deaths. Valjean listens to the “sad voices," but he never (or almost never? I can’t remember) actually talks to or “listens to” god. He never assumes that god is specifically listening or speaking to him, it seems.

Valjean breaking into houses to place money on the table is the exact reverse of his stealing the silver from Myriel. But it also goes hand in hand with his “can’t take compliments” nature; it would probably be really hard for him to stand there and listen to people thanking him for his generosity. But I think it’s also something from when he was poor himself. It’s an understanding of the shame and humiliation that comes with having to ask for money or for charity. Valjean breaking into people’s houses to not-so-secretly place money on their table circumvents that entirely. He avoids having to take a compliment and the people of Montreuil-sur-Mer get to avoid feeling awkward or shameful at asking for money.

A brief refocusing on the candlesticks here. Just a reminder for the audience about where all of this goodness comes from, but also a little example of the way Valjean himself displays the candlesticks as a reminder. I’m not sure what would make them “unusual” to the townspeople though? Surely everyone had candlesticks?

We also get a taste of the nature of rumors in Montreuil-sur-Mer. A rumor occurs, and despite multiple people being able to dispel the rumor, it persists and grows. But Valjean has a reputation and a status to back him up despite the darkness of some of the rumors. Fantine never has that. The rumors about her only serve to push her further down. He’s a savior and she’s a scapegoat. Again they are parallels of each other, moving in opposite directions.

#les miserables #les miserables meta #brickclub #lm 1.5.3 #les mis #les mis meta #i finished writing this at 3 am instead of 5am!#also for anyone that's scene Mad Max Road Warrior:#is the scene where the Feral Child has to get the shotgun shell from the hood of the car not the most Gavroche moment ever?#*seen not scene #clearly finishing at 3am instead of 5 doesn't help my ability to spell at all

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sodalitefully · 4 years ago

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It’s hazardous to breathe... [GNR Mad Max AU, pt. 1]

This is the first half of a AU inspired by the movie Mad Max: Fury Road that @smokeandmirrorz and I came up with after he posted some awesome art for a Mad Max AU! This oneshot very loosely follows the plot of the movie, it may make less sense if you haven’t seen the film. I split it into two parts so it would be more readable on tumblr, the second part is here and the whole fic is also on AO3.

*Contains mpreg, character death, and plenty of unpleasant things from the Mad Max universe, including implied/referenced sexual violence, some regular violence/gore (more so in the second part), and Immortan Joe.*

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It wasn't often that the wives were brought outside their chamber. Less often still that Steven got to be present when they were – so he considered himself lucky to be in the same room when the Immortan's only surviving wife emerged from the biodome to watch Immortan Joe send off his top Imperator on a mission to recruit more valuable full-lives after the untimely deaths of his other two wives.

It was a little known truth that Steven and Slash had history. 'Little known,' because if the Immortan caught wind that the two had become close when Slash was first brought to the Citadel and Steven was just a War Pup, he would be toast. As little as they'd talked in the years since then, Steven still considered Slash... if not a friend, at least an acquaintance. And that's more than he could say about his fellow War Boys.

Being allowed in the same room as Slash was the first step to reigniting their friendship. Now, if only Slash would acknowledge him...

"Steven." Slash's voice was barely loud enough to hear.

"Yes?" Steven perked up, encouraged that Slash hadn't forgotten about him after all.

"I need you to do something for me." Steven nodded eagerly. "I need you to go to Imperator Stradlin, and tell him to come visit me as soon as possible. Can you do that?"

"Of course. Anything for the Immortan!"

It wasn't for the Immortan, but Steven didn't need to know that.

"One more thing – It's top secret. You can't say a word to anyone else, alright?"

Getting to the wive's chamber wasn't hard for Izzy: all he had to do was convince the guards he was on official business, and then once he was inside the vault, the soundproof walls would take care of the rest. All the same, he did not have a good feeling about this "meeting." Whatever was going on, it was going to be trouble...

The thick vault door swung open, revealing a scene straight out of a dream, so serene it seemed impossible that it could exist in the same world as things like gas wars, and tumors, and the Wasteland.

Sunlight streamed through huge semi-opaque windows and illuminated the smooth sandstone walls. Green plants and relics of the old world surrounded a pool of crystal-clear water. And in the center of it all, clothed in the purest white, was the Immortan's most prized treasure:

"Slash... the Desired."

"Imperator." The wife looked him dead in the eye; his hair was restrained in a ponytail and draped with the same white fabric as the rest of his body. It was the first time Izzy had ever seen Slash's face completely clear of dark curls, and the first time he'd seen him with enough clothing to cover the rest of his skin.

“Why did you ask me to come here? Does Joe want something from me?”

Slash’s mouth twitched into a frown at the name, but he responded in a carefully level tone:

“I have a proposition for you.”

Izzy raised an eyebrow. What could a wife possibly have to offer him? Besides the obvious, of course, and that... that was more trouble than it was worth.

“I can’t stay here any longer,” Slash explained.

“You’re crazy if you think he’ll just let you leave,” Izzy replied with a startled laugh. It was inconceivable, but Slash was looking at him with complete sincerity.

“He won’t. But you want to leave too.”

“Do I?” He did, but Slash definitely wasn’t supposed to know that.

“Please, you hate it here, it’s obvious. You want to leave, and I want you to take me with you."

“Fucking hell – don't you think I would have left by now if I could? And why would I help you anyway? How do I know you're not just testing my loyalty to the Immortan?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Me, doing favors for Joe?"

"Alright, fine. Then what if I betray you? I could be rewarded for... keeping the Immortan's property safe."

"What if I tell everyone you took advantage of the Immortan's absence to take his one and only wife for a test drive?"

"Fuck. You're not as pure as we've been led to believe, are you?"

Slash snorted. "Not by half."

"But that doesn't change anything. The Immortan would rip my throat out with his horse teeth for trying to steal one of his breeders –"

“Don’t call me that!” Slash snapped.

For a moment, Izzy was reminded of a younger Slash, fresh from the Wasteland and ready to bite at anything that got too close.

But Slash quickly composed himself, trying and not entirely succeeding to recapture an air of calm assertiveness. "Look, just... Just think about it, alright? We have a chance, I know we do, and really... How much more of this do you think you can take?"

Izzy sighed. "I'll think about it," he conceded.

"Thank you."

Slash did his best to hide his disappointment, and Izzy wasn't about to stick around and make things worse by trying to console him. He turned around to leave the wives' sanctum, but hesitated before he reached the doorway.

"Slash... What really happened to the other Wives?"

"One... One miscarried. The Immortan wasn’t happy about that. The other tried to..." his lips faltered at the worst profanity in the Citadel, "... abort her pregnancy, it didn't end well. The Organic Mechanic couldn't do anything but give her something for the pain. They give us a serum, sometimes, to help us sleep. I gave her my dose."

The scouting party brought back a feral! they said. Full-life and raving mad, driving an Interceptor, can you believe it?

No, Izzy couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe that Axl Rose, MFP legend turned Road Warrior, could get taken down by a pack of half-dead War Boys. But the proof was in front of him, shivering in a cage, starving and in dire need of a shave.

"...I-Izzy?"

His voice was exactly the same as it always was, the respirator that Izzy cobbled together a lifetime ago couldn't hide the low timber that sometimes still appeared in his dreams.

He'd made a mistake when he thought he could play it safe at the Citadel. He should have listened when Axl told him they were better off on their own. The Citadel was a shrine to depravity, and he wouldn't let Axl become another one of its victims – he needed to get them out of the tower walls and far away as soon as possible. It would be a challenge to escape unnoticed... but Izzy knew the perfect distraction.

"I'll make a deal with you, Slash."

Slash didn't have the decency to look shocked when Izzy barged into the biodome uninvited – or the decency to put on the thin white shirt that lay discarded on the floor.

Actually, Izzy was the one looking shocked when his eyes fell on Slash’s bare belly and his carefully planned proposition died in his throat.

“What’s the deal?” Slash asked, but Izzy was more concerned with his unfortunate new realization:

“You didn’t tell me you were pregnant! What were you thinking, asking me to help you? The Immortan is going to shred me to pieces!”

“He’d shred you anyway, this won’t change anything,” Slash gritted out. Pregnant or not, there was no way he was about to let Izzy back out, not now. “What’s the deal, Stradlin?”

Izzy hated to be caught off guard, but he could use this to their advantage. Joe would never risk hurting a potential heir, making Slash an even better shield than before. And once he and Axl split off, there was no way Joe would waste time and resources going after a twice-disgraced Imperator and a feral bloodbag before he got his pregnant wife back, giving them a valuable head start – if it came to that.

"I'll take you with me on my next supply run. Ten days from now. We'll go to the Buzzards' territory, trade guzzoline for another vehicle. Then we part ways, got it? I'll get you out of here but I'm not babysitting you or your sprog for the rest of my life."

"You don't want to get caught with me, you mean. Stopping to deal with the Buzzards will give the Immortan time to catch up to us. I'm fucked on my own."

Izzy didn't respond, and tried to look like it didn't matter to him whether Slash took his offer.

"Fine. If they catch up... At least I'll die historic on the Fury Road," Slash said with a sardonic smile. "But I have a request – I need you to find me a driver. Someone who doesn't serve the Citadel, someone no one will notice is missing."

"There is no one like that."

"Really? All those people down there, and none of them can operate a car?"

"If they could, they wouldn't be there."

"There must be someone," Slash insisted. Izzy sighed.

"I'll see what I can do in ten days. But what the hell do you need them for?"

"Well... I can't drive."

On his third visit, Izzy had spent enough time in the biodome to say that stepping inside the pristine vault always made him feel like a dirty rag, used to wipe away sweat and grime then left out to stiffen in the dusty waste.

But if he was a dirty rag, then Duff was roadkill. He was a half-life, one of the Wretched who clung to the sides of the Citadel like barnacles, bathing in dust while the Immortan bathed in Mother's Milk. He was lanky – no, skeletal, nothing but sunburned skin and bone. He carried the Wasteland with him wherever he went, tracking dust with each step. Izzy bit down on the irrational urge to warn him not to touch anything in the vault.

The black leather collar around his neck marked him as a former denizen of Gas Town, one who had likely outlived his usefulness if his rickety prosthetic leg and the cluster of nasty tumors half-hidden by his hair had anything to say about it. Clearly, he was in no shape to labor in the refinery. Rumor had it that The People Eater was a cannibal – as his name suggested – but evidently Duff had escaped that fate, perhaps because he had no meat on his bones to speak of, and instead sought out clean water, abundant food, and fresh air at the Citadel. Hah.

Slash stared at them over his shoulder, wide-eyed and seated in the shallow pool in the center of the room. Tiny bottles lined the edge of the pool, and the scent of flowers wafted in the air.

"A bath? Now, really?"

"It might be the last chance I get," Slash countered, but he rose from the water, the beads on his skin already drying in the inescapable desert heat. Izzy averted his eyes as Slash wrapped a length of gauzy white cloth around his waist, tugged a loose shirt over his head, and bent forward to twist another cloth around his damp hair. Then, finally, he turned to face his guests. "Is this...?"

"This is Duff, the Wretched. Not a War Boy. He came from Gas Town, so he can drive."

"Good." Duff was staring at Slash like a mirage, but Slash knew how to get on a person's good side: "Do you want some water, Duff?"

"How the fuck did you get in here?!" In a heartbeat, Izzy's handgun was aimed at the War Boy's head. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye. "Slash, get away from him."

"No! You can't kill Steven!"

"He knows too much, he's a liability. Kill him and let's go," Axl advised.

"No! Stradlin, who even is this guy?" Slash demanded, but once again, he received no explanation.

"Slash, what's going on, where are you going? Please don't leave me!"

"Steven, I –"

"Take me with you! I can help!"

"Slash, I'm serious. Step away." Izzy inched closer, his gun unwavering. War Boys were unpredictable, Kami-crazy. You never knew what they might do when backed into a corner.

But Slash was crazier – he pushed Steven back, placing himself between Izzy and his target. Izzy recognized the steely glint in his eyes before Slash even spoke: "He's coming with us."

They were curled up in the hold of the War Rig, surrounded by food and supplies that would never make it to Gas Town like they were supposed to. Duff was happily munching away at a carrot, and Slash was sitting with his legs curled up to his chest.

"Are you scared?" Duff asked.

"... Yes," Slash admitted, barely audible over the roaring engine. "Are you?"

"No."

"Why not? If we get caught, you'll be punished too, for helping me. And he doesn't care about taking you alive."

Duff shrugged. "It doesn't really matter, does it? I've got a few months left, at best."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I've had my whole life to come to terms with it. Well, half-life."

It was a terribly morbid joke, but Slash still laughed.

“So... You’re not afraid of anything, then?”

“Well, I don’t know – When Izzy brought me to you, I was scared. It was like he’d taken me out of the real world and dropped me in a fantasy. I thought if I touched anything, I’d destroy it; if I spoke, I’d break the spell and wake up in the Wasteland, half dead with a crow pecking at my tongue. I thought if I got too close to you, I'd pass on my illness, and if I looked at you too long, I'd go mad and start believing in things like beauty and health and the goodness of humanity."

Slash could have laughed at the momentous gap between Duff's perception of the biodome and his own. Instead, when Duff finished his recollection, Slash crawled across the middle of the hold and pressed himself against Duff's side.

Duff tried to scoot away, but Slash entangled him with the soft touch of fine cloth and uncalloused hands. He wrapped his arms around Duff’s thin torso and laid his head on his shoulder.

“No, don't go. You don't have to be scared, Duff... You're the cleanest person to touch me in a long time."

Hesitantly, Duff reached up and let his good hand rest on Slash’s back. Slash’s hair brushed against his collar, even softer than his clothes, and when Duff breathed deeply he could still make out the sweet scent that filled the room when they first met.

For a moment, Duff let himself get lost in the fantasy world that still surrounded Slash, even in the hold of the War Rig, miles from the Citadel. He could forget about the danger they were in, the cruelty they’d experienced, and even the ticking time bombs in his own flesh.

“Do you think your baby will survive?”

“I don’t know.” Slash didn’t sound optimistic, he toyed with his sleeve and avoided Duff’s gaze.

“I’ve never seen a completely healthy baby before, I didn’t think it was possible. But then I saw you, and you’re perfect, so maybe...”

Slash scoffed.

“The Immortan is toxic. He taints everything: the water, the people... and me. If I was ever perfect, I’m sure as hell not anymore, and neither is this baby.”

Duff hugged Slash closer, and slid a hand down to his belly.

“We’ll see.”

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[part 2]

#title from paradise city #this fic is so much longer than my usual omg #sodafics #gnr fanfic #gnr #guns n roses #guns and roses #slash #saul hudson #steven adler #izzy stradlin #duff mckagan #axl rose #mad max #mad max au #sorry to whoever follows the mad max tag and did not want to see this...

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letterboxd · 4 years ago

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Lonesome Cruiser.

Blockbuster composer Tom Holkenborg, aka Junkie XL, talks to Gemma Gracewood about composing for titans, his pride in Dutch cinema, friendship with George Miller and longing for Olivia Newton-John. Plus: his Letterboxd Life in Film and why he’s selling his prized collection of recording gear.

It has been a spectacular spring for Tom Holkenborg, the Dutch musician also known as Junkie XL, who has crafted the scores for multiplex fare such as Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate, Sonic the Hedgehog and the upcoming zombie banger Army of the Dead. Only weeks apart, two blockbusters landed on screens with his sonic stamp all over them: Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong and Zack Snyder’s re-realized Justice League.

Thankfully, the Godzilla vs. Kong score was complete by the time the Justice League telephone rang. Holkenborg—who had lost the Justice League gig along with Snyder the first time around—knew the Snyder cut was coming; he had closely watched the growing calls for it online. “Zack and I already started talking in 2019. He’s like, ‘What if we were to finish this? What would it take?’ Those conversations turned to ‘Well, how many recording days potentially do you need and how much of an orchestra do you potentially need?’ Finally, somewhere in April 2020, that’s when that phone call came: ‘Okay, light’s green, start tomorrow, and start running until it’s done because it’s four and a half hours’.”

Ray Fisher as Cyborg in ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’.

Holkenborg approaches the titanic task of blockbuster film scoring with an engineer’s mindset: “Building a fantastic, huge house with 20 bedrooms and the dance hall and the kitchen… You’re not going to start by building the third bathroom for the third guest room, right?” Once he has identified the scenes that are most important to his directors—for Snyder, they included the introduction of Cyborg, three fight set-pieces, and a scene of The Flash running that comes towards the end of the film—the composer identifies instrumental “colors” in order to build a theme around each character. Then he holds some of those colors back, theorizing that “if you want like an, ‘Oh!’ experience by looking at a painting that has a huge amount of bright yellow in it, it’s way more successful to see fifteen paintings in front of it, where yellow is absent.”

The Godzilla vs. Kong score satisfies Holkenborg’s life-long love of both characters. “I don’t have a preference for either one. I love them both for various different reasons.” Their respective histories fascinate him: Godzilla as a way to make sense of Japan’s nuclear fall-out, and Kong as a gigantic spectacle that ended up attracting the sympathies of the audiences he was supposed to scare. Even when the science makes no sense (“what the fuck are plasma boosters, anyway?!”), Holkenborg is still happy to wax lyrical about the emotional depth of Kong’s stories, the elaborate concepts of the Godzilla-verse, and his musical approach to the pair—dark, moving brass for Godzilla, with synthesized elements “because he is a half-synthesized animal”, and a more organic, complex orchestration for Kong, featuring “one of the world’s bigger bass drums”.

Adam Wingard’s ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’.

All of this seat-shaking bombast is composed on an “insanely massive sound system” in Holkenborg’s small home studio (though he reassures pandemic-stricken film lovers that he has recently seen both Godzilla vs. Kong and Justice League on his laptop—and “really enjoyed watching it like that”). The process, he says, was “pretty intense”, but only in terms of the sheer amount of score needed. Composing in quarantine was not much different from his usual workflow. “I’m a pretty lonesome cruiser anyway. Composing, by nature, is like a solo exercise—obviously with assistance.”

Like many creatives (Bong Joon-ho recently told a film studies class that he is up at 5:00am most days to watch a movie), Holkenborg is an early riser, waking by 4:00am. “I’m super sharp between like 4 or 5:00am and 9:00am, so I like to do a lot of creative work in that slot.” He takes care of business until mid-afternoon, when another creative spurt happens. “And then I have another batch of calls usually to make, and then around 8:30pm, I’m going to retire for the rest of the day and just chill out a little bit and watch stuff that I want to see, read things that I want to read. Right now I’m studying Portuguese.” By 10:30pm, he’s asleep. “And then at three o’clock I get up.” (Needless to say, Holkenborg’s children are no longer small.)

The pandemic simplified a lot of things for a lot of people: for Holkenborg, it has been a moment to tidy up the physical side of his work. In November last year, he opened an online shop to divest the bulk of his gear—synths, pedals, guitars, drum machines and much more—that he has been collecting since the late 1970s. When friends told him he’d regret it, he disagreed. “At some point I’m going to die. I can’t take them to the afterlife. I also found out I don’t need them. I love to have them around, but I don’t need them.”

Tom Holkenborg with the bass drum used in the ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ score.

It certainly solves the question of what he’d take if his house was on fire. “The hard drives with sounds and music over the last 40 years, 45 years, that’s hard to replace. So, that would be it. I’m just thinking about things that are absolutely irreplaceable and there are not that many, really.” Alas, it’s bad news for that bass drum. “I can’t take that with me when the house is on fire. Unfortunately, it’s going to make the house burn longer.”

Anyone who has interviewed or spent time with Holkenborg will agree: he may be a lonesome cruiser, but he is also personable, funny, loves to settle in for a chat. As he lights his second or third cigarette in readiness for his Life in Film questionnaire, I’m curious about his relationships with the esteemed filmmakers he has worked with—who include his mentor, Hans Zimmer, directors Sir Peter Jackson, Tim Miller, Robert Rodriguez and, especially, Fury Road’s George Miller.

The story of how Holkenborg scored Mad Max: Fury Road bears retelling: that George Miller did not want a soundtrack (“he was convinced that the orchestration of sounds of the cars would be enough to carry the whole movie”), that Holkenborg was only brought in to create a little something for the Coma-Doof Warrior’s flame-throwing guitar, that they hit it off, the job grew, and grew, into a score that covers almost the entire film.

The Coma-Doof Warrior in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015).

What is his best memory of Fury Road? “Well, obviously, when I saw the movie for the first time and I was like ‘what the hell am I looking at?’,” he laughs. “What I mostly look back on is the friendship that I developed with George and the film school one-on-one that I got admitted to, while being paid at the same time, to study with somebody like him. We would talk all night about all kinds of things and nothing, because that really defines our relationship so much—a joint interest in so many different things.”

Happily, Holkenborg and Miller are working together again, on Three Thousand Years of Longing. “It’s really great to be in that process with him again. It’s just like about pricking each other with a little needle. It’s like, ‘Oh, why are you saying that?’ We do that with each other to keep each other sharp. ‘Oh, but if you’re doing this, I’m going to be doing that.’ And then, ‘Oh, if you’re doing that, I’m going to be doing this.’ So it’s really interesting.”

What is your favorite Godzilla film?

Tom Holkenborg: 1989’s Godzilla vs. Biollante. It’s a very obscure one where he’s basically fighting a giant rose. Let’s not look for the logic there.

Why has that particular Godzilla captured your heart? It’s so corny. Yeah. Mothra vs. Godzilla is also great. Mothra looks like a very bad Arabian carpet that was imported through customs and it got delivered by FedEx completely ruined and then laid outside for like four weeks in the rain.

‘Godzilla vs. Biollante’ (ゴジラvsビオランテ, 1989).

What is the first film you remember seeing in a cinema? Bambi. I was six years old, yeah.

And is there a film you have fond memories of watching with your family—a movie that became a family favorite? Not, like, a family favorite because our opinions were too diverse for that, but the next movie that became very important to me when I was a little older was Saturday Night Fever. I thought the soundtrack was, like, groundbreaking, mind-blowingly insane. It’s not necessarily those three massive beats of the Bee Gees on there, but all these other really alternative, left-field tracks by bands like Kool & the Gang. And the way that that darker disco music played against that really dark movie about what it’s like to live in New York and become a competitive dancer, it’s incredible. And still, today, it’s one of the movies where film music and the film itself had so much impact on me, even though it’s not a traditional film score in that sense. It’s incredible.

What is the film that made you want to work in movies, given that you also have a whole musical career separate from movies? (Enjoy Junkie XL’s early 2000s remix of Elvis Presley’s ‘A Little Less Conversation’.) For me, the move from a traditional artist into film scoring was a very slow gradual process. There’s not one movie that pushed me over the cliff. It’s just, like, all the great movies that were made. And I still have a list of obscure movies, classic movies that I need to see.

Yesterday I saw the weirdest of all, but I do want to share this: the original, uncut R-rated version of Caligula, [from] 1979. He [director Tinto Brass] was notoriously brutal and he organized orgies and had terrible torturing techniques. But it’s really weird, there’s Shakespearean actors in there, and then it goes to full-on porn sections. It’s really weird. The music is incredible. You can find it online. You will not find it anywhere [else]. I can just imagine what this must have felt like in 1979 when the film came out. Suspiria, that’s another one. It’s just like, how weird was that thing?

What is your favorite blockbuster that you did not compose? Ben-Hur. I’ve seen that one at least 20 times.

What’s your all-time comfort re-watch? The movie I’ve seen the most is Blade Runner. It’s just, like, it’s a nice world you’re stepping into, that fantasy. It’s not necessarily because I have memories [of] that movie that brings me back to a certain time period, it’s not that. It’s just that I just love to dwell in it. It feels a little bit like coming home. You can use it as comfort food, you can use it as, “I’m not feeling anything today”, or the opposite. You feel very great and you feel very inspired and it’s like, “Oh, let’s go home and watch that movie again.”

Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’ (1998).

Hans Zimmer has been an important mentor to you. Do you have a favorite of his scores? Yes, The Thin Red Line. It’s also the filmmaking of Terrence Malick—he forces a composer to think a certain way. He would always say, “It’s too much, make it less, make it smaller, make it this, make it that.” So, A, it’s a very good movie and B, he got Hans into the right place and Hans just over-delivered by doing exactly the right things at the right time and then shining just because of that.

Who is a composer that you have your eye on and what is one of their films that we should watch next? It’s so sad to say, but I mean, let’s call it like a retrospective discovery if you will. I’m so sad that we lost Jóhann Jóhannsson. He was a composer I felt really close to. We started roughly in the same time period making our way in today’s world. Also, Jóhann came from an artist background, even though it was a modern classical background. He made really great records, great experimentation with electronic elements, with classical instruments, and the mix between the two of them—very original way of looking at music. With Denis Villeneuve as his partner in crime the movies that they did were just mind-boggling good, whether it was Sicario or Arrival or Prisoners, and his voice will truly be missed among film composers. So people that are not super familiar with his work, I would definitely check it out.

‘Turks Fruit’ (Turkish Delight, 1973).

What is a must-see Dutch film that we should add to our watchlists? Holland has small cinema, but it has a really rich cinema and a very serious cinema culture. Usually because there’s not enough work in film, people are serious stage performers but then they also act in movies so they understand both really well. And we’ve delivered. There’s a string of actors that make their way to Hollywood or star in well-known series, whether it’s like Game of Thrones, or what we just talked about, Blade Runner. Many directors like Paul Verhoeven, Jan de Bont, the cameraman.

And so a movie that I’d like to pick is an old movie, called Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight) from the 1970s. Rutger Hauer is a younger guy, like, this completely irresponsible guy that starts this relationship with a really beautiful young girl, and they do all these crazy things, they do a lot of drugs and they have a lot of sex. He’s just like a bad influence on her.

Then he finds out she [has] cancer and it’s terminal. And to see him deal with that, and to see him want a change, but also in that change he does a lot of bad stuff at the same time… It was a sensational movie when it came out. And it actually was directed by Paul Verhoeven, one of his earlier films. When you see it, you’re just like, ‘Why am I watching this?’ for the first 45 minutes and then it starts and it’s like, ‘whoa’. So it’s really good, even in retrospect.

Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in ‘Grease’ (1978).

What is the sexiest film you’ve ever seen? When I was super young, it was definitely Grease, with Olivia Newton-John, when she was in her catsuit at the very end of it. I had her picture on my bedroom, above my bed sideways because I was only like ten years old or something. I was so in love with Olivia Newton-John. It wasn’t the film per se, it was her. Yeah, I find, personally, movies from the ’70s to be more sexy, but it has something to do with the super-loose way that people were dressed and people were behaving.

And the other one was later in life: Basic Instinct. Sharon Stone. I’m not talking about like the famous shot, right, where she crosses her legs. I’m not talking about that, but the way that she acts throughout the whole movie. It’s insane. It’s really great.

Are there any films that have scared you? Like, truly terrified you? Yeah, I’m not a big fan because I get sucked up too much in it. The found [footage] horror movies like Paranormal Activity and things like the Japanese version of The Grudge, I cannot watch that stuff. That gets me too much. Because when I watch a film, I cannot watch it with one eye half open, the other one closed, like, ‘Okay, kind of cool, interesting’. I just get sucked into it.

Is there a film that has made you cry like no other? Oh yeah. Multiple. Once Upon a Time in America. The Godfather. Hable con Ella (Talk to Her). Betty Blue.

Thomas Holkenborg, AKA Junkie XL.

These are the films that make you weep? Not like on a regular basis, but I remember those were the ones that I really got hit. I’m talking particularly about the third Godfather. That whole end scene when they get out of the church and then… It’s really well-acted. So many Godfather fans that were dismissive of the film when it came out, in retrospect, ten, fifteen, 20 years later, are like, ‘it’s a really good film’. And I actually think so.

Final question. Is there a film from the past year that you would recommend, that you’ve loved? [Long pause.] The thing is that I watch pretty much a movie a day. So, that’s like three to four hundred movies. It [has] happened so often that I watch a film and then I’m just like an hour and 45 minutes in, it’s like, ‘wait, fuck, I’ve seen this thing before’.

So, we have an app for that… [Laughs.]

Related content

Junkie XL’s Letterboxd Life in Film list

Freddie Baker’s review of Justice League

Dutch Cinema: Danielle’s extensive list of more than 2,000 films

Letterboxd Showdown: The Perfect Score (best film scores)

The official Junkie XL Reverb Shop

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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Summer Movie Preview: From Black Widow to The Suicide Squad and Beyond

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The summer movie season has returned. Finally. Once something we all just took for granted, like handshakes and indoor dining, a summertime season stuffed with pricy Hollywood blockbusters and cinematic escapism suddenly feels like a long lost friend. But, rest assured, the summer movie season is genuinely and truly here. It’s maybe a little later than normal, yet it’s still in time for Memorial Day in the States.

This is of course happy news since many of the big screen events of this year have been 12 months or more in the offing. A Quiet Place Part II was supposed to open two Marches ago, and In the Heights is opening almost an exact year to the day from its original release. They’re here now, as is an impressive assortment of new films. There are genre fans’ long lost superhero spectacles, with Black Widow and The Suicide Squad leading the pack (and Shang-Chi closing out the season unusually late in time for Labor Day weekend), and there are also horror movies like The Conjuring 3 and M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, aforementioned musicals, family adventures in Jungle Cruise, psychedelic Arthurian legends via The Green Knight, and a few legitimately original projects like Stillwater and Reminiscence. Imagine that!

So sit back, put your feet in the pool, or up by the grill pit, and toast with us the summer movie’s resurrection.

A Quiet Place Part II

May 28 (June 3 in the UK)

Fourteen months after its original release date, the first movie delayed by the pandemic is finally coming to theaters for Memorial Day weekend. And despite what some critics say (even our own), most of us would argue it’s worth the wait. As a movie about a family enduring after a global crisis that has left their lives in tatters, and marred by personal tragedy, A Quiet Place Part II hits differently in 2021 than it would have a year ago. And it’s undeniably optimistic view of humanity feels like a warm balm now.

But beyond the meta context, writer-director John Krasinski (flying solo as screenwriter this time) has engineered a series of intelligent and highly suspenseful set pieces which puts Millicent Simmonds’ Regan front and center. Also buoyed by subtle and affecting work by Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy, here as a neighbor they knew a few years and a lifetime ago, this is one worth dipping your toe back into cinema for, especially if you liked the first movie.

Cruella

May 28

We’ll admit it, we had the same initial skepticism you’re probably feeling about a Cruella de Vil origin story set in punk rock’s 1970s London. But put your cynicism aside, Disney’s Cruella is a decadent blast and the rarest of things: a live-action Disney remake that both honors its source material and does something creative with it. Neither a soulless scene-by-scene remake of a better animated film, or a lazy Maleficent like re-imagining, Cruella more often than not rocks, thanks in large part to its lead performance by Emma Stone.

Also a producer on the picture, Stone takes on the role of Cruella de Vil like it’ll be on an awards reel and absolutely flaunts the character’s madness and devilish charm. She also finds an excellent sparring partner via Emma Thompson, young Cruella’s very own Miranda Priestly. Once these two start their verbal battle at the end of the first act, the movie is elevated into an electric period comedy (with plenty of heavy handed period music). It’s a pseudo-thriller for all ages, enjoying some very sharp elbows for a kids movie.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

June 4 (May 26 in the UK)

The latest big-screen adventure for real-life ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) sees the two drawn into the unusual case of the first ever U.S. murder trial where the defendant claimed he was innocent because he was possessed by a demon. This is the eighth movie in The Conjuring expanded universe—director Michael Chaves has already made a foray into this supernatural world with The Curse of La Llorona—and as with all the main Conjuring films, the hook is that it’s (very loosely) based on a true case that the Warrens were involved with.

Peter Safran and James Wan are back on board as producers, although with this being the first time Wan isn’t directing one of the main Ed and Lorraine investigations, we’re a little cautious about this return to the haunted museum.

In the Heights

June 11 (June 18 in the UK)

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Tony award winning musical is getting the proper big screen treatment in In the Heights. A full-fledged movie musical—as opposed to a taped series of performances, a la Disney+’s Hamilton—In the Heights is like a sweet summer drink (or Piragua) and love letter to the Latino community of New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood.

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Closer in spirit to the feel-good summertime joy of Grease than the narratively complex Hamilton, this is perfect multiplex escapism (which will also be on HBO Max if you’re so inclined). Directed by Crazy Rich Asians’ Jon M. Chu, In the Heights has a euphoric sense of movement and dance as it transfers Miranda’s hybrid blend of freestyle rap, salsa rhythm, and Caribbean musical cues to the actual city blocks the show was written about. On one of those corners lives Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), a bodega owner with big dreams. He’s about to have the summer of his life. You might too.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard

June 16 (June 21 in the UK)

You know Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a throwback when even its trailer brings back the “trailer voice.” But then the appeal of the 2017 B-action comedy, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, was its very throwback nature: a violent, raunchy R-rated buddy comedy that starred Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds, who exchanged quips as much as bullets between some genuinely entertaining stunts.

Hopefully the sequel can also be as much lowbrow fun as it doubles down on the premise, with Reynolds’ Michael Bryce now guarding Samla Hayek’s Sonia, the wife of Jackson’s Darius. All three are on a road trip through Italy as they’re chased by Antonio Banderas in what is sure to be a series of bloody, explosive set pieces. Probably a few “motherf***ers” will be dropped too.

Luca

June 18

Pixar Studios’ hit rate is frankly incredible. With each new film seemingly comes a catchy song, an Oscar nomination, and a flood of tears from anyone with a heart—and there’s no reason to believe that its next offering will be any different. Luca is a coming-of-age tale set on the Italian Riviera about a pair of young lads who become best friends and have a terrific summer getting into adventures in the sun. The slight catch is that they’re both sea monsters.

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This is the feature directorial debut of Enrico Casarosa, who says the movie is a celebration of friendship with nods to the work of Federico Fellini and Hayao Miyazaki. The writers are Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones—Andrews is new to Pixar but has experience with coming-of-agers, having penned Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, while Jones co-wrote Soul. Jacob Tremblay and Jack Dylan Grazer voice the young boys (sea monsters)—13-year-old Luca and his older teenager friend Alberto—with Maya Rudolph as Luca’s sea monster mom. After a year of lockdown, this could be the summer movie we all need.

June 25

You better start firing up the grill, because the Fast and Furious crew is finally ready to have another summer barbecue. And this time, it’s not only the folks whom Dom Toretto calls “mi familia” in attendance. The big new addition to F9 is

John Cena as Jakob Toretto. As the long-lost little brother we didn’t know Vin Diesel’s Dom had, Jakob is revealed to be a superspy, assassin, and performance driver working for Dom’s arch-nemesis, Cypher (Charlize Theron). Everything the Family does together, Jakob does alone, as a one-man wrecking crew, and he’s coming in hot.

Fans will probably be happier, though, to see Sung Kang back as Han Seoul-Oh, the wheelman who was murdered in Fast & Furious 6, and then pretty much forgotten in The Fate of the Furious when his killer got invited to the cookout. It’s an injustice that brought veteran series director Justin Lin back to the franchise to resurrect the dead. So it’s safe to assume he won’t be asking Cypher to bring the potato salad.

The Forever Purge

July 2 (July 16 in the UK)

We know what you’re thinking: Didn’t The Purge: Election Year end the Purge forever? That or “are they really still making these?” The answer to both questions is yes. Nevertheless, here we are with The Forever Purge, a movie which asks what happens if Purgers just, you know, committed extravagant holiday crime on the other 364 days of the year? You get what is hopefully the grand finale of this increasingly tired concept.

The Tomorrow War

July 2

Hear me out: What if it’s like The Terminator but in reverse? That had to be the pitch for this one, right? In The Tomorrow War, instead of evil cyborgs time traveling to the past to kill our future savior, soldiers from the future time travel to the past to enlist our current best warrior and take him to a world on the brink 30 years from now.

It’s a crazy premise, and the kind of high-concept popcorn that one imagines Chris Pratt excels at. Hence Pratt’s casting as Dan, one of the best soldiers of the early 21st century who’ll go into the future to stop an alien invasion. The supporting cast, which includes Oscar winner J.K. Simmons and Yvonne Strahovski, Betty Gilpin, and Sam Richardson, is also nothing to sneeze at.

Black Widow

July 9

The idea of making a Black Widow movie has been around since long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe first lifted into the sky on Tony Stark’s repulsors. The character has been onscreen for more than a decade now, and Marvel Studios has for too long danced around making a solo Widow, at least in part due to the machinations of Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter.

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How Black Widow Could Build The MCU’s Future

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But the standalone Black Widow adventure is here at last, and it now serves as a sort-of coda to the story of Natasha Romanoff, since we already know her tragic fate in Avengers: Endgame. Directed by Cate Shortland (Berlin Syndrome, Lore), the movie will spell out how Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) kept herself busy between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, primarily with a trip home to Russia to clear some of that red from her ledger.

There, she will reunite with figures from her dark past, including fellow Red Room alumnus Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Russian would-be superhero Alexei Shostakov, aka the Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz), another survivor of the Black Widow program and a maternal figure to Natasha and Yelena.

It’s a chance to say goodbye to Nat and see Johansson as the beloved Avengers one more time. But this being Marvel, we suspect that the studio has a few tricks up its sleeve and in this movie about the future of Phase 4.

Space Jam: A New Legacy

July 16

In the annals of synergistic branding, Space Jam: A New Legacy might be one for the record books. A sequel to an older millennials’ 1990s touchstones—the thoroughly mediocre Michael Jordan meets Bugs Bunny movie, Space Jam—this sequel sees LeBron James now trapped in Looney Tunes world… but wait, there’s more! Instead of only charmingly interacting with WB’s classic stable of cartoon characters, King James will also be in the larger “WB universe” where the studio will resurrect from the dead every property they own the copyright to, from MGM’s classic 1939 The Wizard of Oz to, uh, the murderous rapists in A Clockwork Orange.

… yay for easter eggs?

Old

July 23

Though he might be accused of being a little bit hit-and-miss in the past, the release of a new M. Night Shyamalan movie should always be cause for celebration. Especially one with such a deeply creepy premise. Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Old sees a family on vacation discover that the beach they are on causes them to age extremely rapidly and live out their entire lives in a day.

This is surely perfect fodder for Shyamalan, who does high-concept horror like no one else. The cast is absolute quality, featuring Gael García Bernal, Hereditary’s Alex Wolff, Jo Jo Rabbit’s Thomasin McKenzie, Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, Little Women’s Eliza Scanlen, and many more. The trailer is pleasingly disturbing too as children become teenagers, a young woman is suddenly full-term pregnant, and adults seem to be decaying in front of their own eyes. Harrowing in the best possible way.

Snake Eyes

July 23 (August 20 in the UK)

Snake Eyes will finally bring us the origin story of the G.I. Joe franchise’s most iconic and beloved member. Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) stars in the title role, with Warrior’s Andrew Koji as his nemesis—conflicted baddie (and similar fan fave) Storm Shadow. Expect a tale heavy on martial arts badassery, especially with The Raid’s Iko Uwais on board as the pair’s ninja master. Samara Weaving will play G.I. Joe staple Scarlett after her breakout a few years ago in Ready or Not, while Úrsula Corberó has been cast as Cobra’s Baroness. Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife, Red) directs.

Jungle Cruise

July 30

Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra is best known for making slightly dodgy actioners starring Liam Neeson (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night) and half-decent horror movies (Orphan, The Shallows), so exactly which direction this family adventure based on a theme park ride will take remains to be seen.

Borrowing a page and premise from Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen (1951), Jungle Cruise stars the ever-charismatic Dwayne Johnson as a riverboat captain taking Emily Blunt’s scientist and her brother (Jack Whitehall) to visit the fabled Tree of Life in the early 20th century. Like the ride, the gang will have to watch out for wild animals along the way.

Unlike the ride, they’re competing with a German expedition team who are heading for the same goal. A solid supporting cast (Jesse Plemons, Édgar Ramírez, Paul Giamatti, Andy Nyman) and a script with rewrites by Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049) might mean Disney has another hit on its hands. Either way, a lovely boat trip with The Rock should be diverting at worst.

The Green Knight

July 30 (August 6 in the UK)

There have been several major Hollywood reimaginings of Arthurian legends in the 21st century. And every one of them has been thoroughly rotten for one reason or another. Luckily, David Lowery’s The Green Knight looks poised to break the trend with a trippy, but twistedly faithful, interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Dev Patel stars as Sir Gawain, a chivalrous knight in King Arthur’s court who takes up the challenge of the mysterious Green Knight (The Witch’s Ralph Ineson under mountains of makeup): He’ll swing a blow and risk receiving a returning strike in a year’s time. Gawain attempts to cheat the devil by cutting his head clean off, yet when the Green Knight lifts his severed head from Camelot’s floors, things start to get weird. As clearly one of A24’s biggest visual fever dreams to date, this is one we’re highly anticipating.

Stillwater

July 30 (August 6 in the UK)

The Oscar winning-writer director behind Spotlight, Tom McCarthy, returns to the big screen with a fictional story that feels awfully similar to real world events. In this film, Matt Damon plays Bill, a proud father who saw his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) go abroad to study in France. After she’s accused of murdering her roommate by local authorities, the deeply Southern and deeply Oklahoman father must travel to a foreign land to try and prove his daughter’s innocence.

It obviously has some parallels with the Amanda Knox story but it also looks like a potentially hard hitting original drama with a talented cast. Fingers crossed.

The Suicide Squad

August 6 (July 30 in the UK)

You might have seen a Suicide Squad movie in the past, but you’ve never seen James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. With a liberating R-rating and an old school vision from the Guardians of the Galaxy director—who likens this to 1960s war capers, such as The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare—this Suicide Squad is absolutely stacked with talented actors wallowing in DC weirdness. One of the key players in this is Polka-Dot Man, another is a walking, talking Great White Shark, voiced by Sylvester Stallone. The villain is a Godzilla-sized starfish from space!

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So like it’s namesake, there’s probably a lot of characters who aren’t going to pull through this one. Even so, we can rest easy knowing that Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn will be as winsome than ever, and the likes of Idris Elba and John Cena will add some dynamic gravitas to the eccentric DC Extended Universe.

Free Guy

August 13

Perhaps pitched as The Truman Show for the video game age, Free Guy stars Ryan Reynolds as an easygoing, happy-go-lucky “Guy” who discovers… he’s a video game NPC living inside the equivalent of a Grand Theft Auto video game. This might explain why the bank he works at keeps getting robbed all the time. But as a virtual sprite who’s developed sentiency, he just might be able to win over enough gamers to not shoot him, and make love not war.

It’s an amusing premise, and hopefully director Shawn Levy can bring to it the same level of charm he achieved with the very first Night at the Museum movie.

Respect

August 13 (September 10 in the UK)

Before her passing in 2018, Aretha Franklin gave her blessing to Jennifer Hudson to play the Queen of Soul. Now that musical biopic is here with Hudson hitting the same high notes of the legend who sang such standards as “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “Think,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and of course “Respect.”

The film comes with a lot of expectation and a lot of pedigree, with Forest Whitaker and Audra McDonald in the cast. Most of all though, it comes with that rich musical library, which will surely take center stage. And if movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman have taught us anything, it’s that moviegoers love when you play the hits.

Reminiscence

August 20 (August 18 in the UK)

Lisa Joy is one of the most exciting voices on television today. One-half of the creative team behind Westworld, Joy steps into her own with her directorial debut (and as the solo writer) in Reminiscence, a science fiction film with a reliably knotty premise.

Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a man who lives in a dystopian future where the oceans have risen and the cities are crumbling. In a declining Miami, he sells a risky new technology that allows you to relive your past (and possibly change it, at least fancifully?). But when he discovers the lost love of his life (Rebecca Ferguson) is cropping up in other peoples’ memories, which seem to implicate her in a murder, well… things are bound to start getting weird. We don’t know a whole lot more, but we cannot wait to find out more.

Candyman

August 27

Announced back in 2018, this spiritual sequel to Bernard Rose’s 1992 original is one of the most exciting and anticipated movies on the calendar. Produced by Jordan Peele and directed by Nia DaCosta, the film takes place in the present day and about a decade after Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects have been torn down. Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays an up-and-coming visual artist who moves to the now-gentrified area with his partner and is inspired by the legend of Candyman, an apparition with a hook for a hand, to create new work about the subject. But in doing so, he risks unleashing a dark history and a new wave of violence.

Tony Todd, the star of the original movie, will also reprise his role in a reboot that aims to inspire fear for only the right reasons.

The Beatles: Get Back

August 27

Director Peter Jackson thinks folks have a poisoned idea about the Beatles in their final days. Often portrayed as divided and antagonistic toward one another during the recordings of their last albums, particularly Let It Be (which was their penultimate studio recording and final release), Jackson insists this misconception is influenced by Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary named after the album.

So, after going through the reams of footage Lindsay-Hogg shot but didn’t use, Jackson has crafted this new documentary about the album’s recording which is intended to paint a fuller (and more feel-good) portrait of the band which changed the world. Plus, the music’s going to be great…

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

September 3

The greatest fighter in Marvel history finally hits the big screen with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Simu Liu (Kim’s Convenience) takes on the title role of a character destined for a bright future in the MCU. Marvel fans might note that the “Ten Rings” of the title is the same organization that first appeared all the way back in Iron Man, and Tony Leung will finally bring their villainous leader, The Mandarin, to life. Awkwafina of The Farewell and Crazy Rich Asians fame also stars. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), this should deliver martial arts action unlike anything we’ve seen so far in the MCU.

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serendipitous-magic · 5 years ago

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tell us about the space lesbians you coward

Okay okay okay. (Deep breath in) you asked for it.

And you’re probably going to regret that. (I’m not sorry.) This is your own fault. You’ve brought this upon yourself.

So, it’s an idea I had for a feature-length movie script.

-Main characters: Tessa and Bee.

-It’s a sci-fi. Takes place in a Firefly-esque universe (that is to say, out in Space with a lot of different planets and spaceships and stuff, but I think it’s just going to be humans around - no aliens like Star Wars or Star Trek)

-Very basically, imagine a mashup of… a) select worldbuilding trends from Firefly and The Mandalorian, b) action sequences and pacing akin to Solo, c) the gayest parts of the new Star Wars movie trilogy, d) the desperate fuck-it-all One Last Final Effort battle concept like Rogue One, and e) the feminism from Mad Max: Fury Road - and then make it lesbian and add antiestablishmentarianism and anti-capitalism and you have the basic ~vibe~. (I realize that I sound like the *most* pretentious of self-absorbed film students right now, and honestly? I’m not even sorry.)

-Takes place at the kind of tattered, lawless, ragged outer reaches of the Galaxy - basically The Old West but In Space.

-The main villains are these Space Robber Barons (greedy 1% Rich Assholes who want to maintain the status quo so they can keep being rich and powerful and not let anyone else be rich, or even anything other than poor and exhausted (sound familiar?))

-Pretty much all the main characters are women (as a deliberate mirror image to all the “main characters are all men except for the one token woman” movies)

-There’s a gang of badass rebel warrior women a la the Many Mothers from Mad Max

-Space battles? Check.

-Jailbreak scene? Check.

-Spaceship racing, complete with showing off for your gay crush because you’re lesbians who share a single braincell? Check.

-Adventures on different worlds with different ~atmospheres~ and whatnot? Check.

-Intricate rituals? Check.

-Plenty of morally gray characters who don’t adhere to a strict Good vs. Bad trope? Check.

-Reversing tropes wherever possible? Check.

-Girls piloting spaceships? Girls being mechanics? Girls being feral space-outlaws living day-to-day, running on spite, stolen food and joie de vivre? Girls being morally gray and having character development arcs that change them as people? Girls having meaningful relationships onscreen (as friends, family, mothers and daughters, allies, partners, girlfriends)? Check, check, check, check, check.

Basically, it’s super self-indulgent and I’m having THE MOST fun with it. I have like… Most of the plot planned out?? Like for basically 9 hours today I’ve just been working through it. And this is pre-writing, of course, so who knows what will end up changing, buuuuut I really like the concept thus far!

Also - I know super-specific appearance descriptions aren’t something you get to include in scripts, but it helps me visualize and write my characters if I have something specific to reference, so here’s my current “faceclaim”:

Main character: Tessa - kind of a mix between Erin Kellyman and Amandla Stenberg (more on the side of Erin):

Love interest / Main Character 2: Bee

The closest faceclaim I’ve been able to find is something between Aja Bair and Naomi Scott, but like imagine The Lesbian Haircut. So, like, something between…

But with something like this haircut:

And there you have it! The basic summary at least lol. Like I said, you did this. You brought this upon yourself. You’re welcome.

#asks #anon #lesbian space western #tessa and bee #wlw #lesbian #my writing #Gwen attempts to write a movie #... and gwen talks too much lol

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shallanspren · 6 years ago

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I've never actually seen Mad Max and I was turned off by the fact that so many of the women are half naked in it, but I was wondering why you found it so good? And do I need to watch the other films to get Fury Road?

ok ok ok. my time has come.

i’m going to answer your last question first. no, you don’t need to see the other films to get the context of fury road. max’s voice over in the beginning explains pretty well where his head is at. “once i was a cop. a road warrior searching for a righteous cause.” so he was this police dude and something fucked up happened and now he’s living on his own in this shithole post-nuclear apocalypse.

what did happen? in the first film, max’s wife, jessie, and their child, sprog (which is aussie slang for child, yes, he literally named his child child. max is actually the worst at names) are run down (literally) by a motorcycle game. mad with grief, max hunts them all down and murders them and then, not wanting anything to do with anyone, runs off into the outback so he can be alone. other shit happens in the second and third films, but if you don’t want to watch them but want to know what happens you can wika it. at one point, max has a dog...named dog.

i had seen the previous three films before fury road and didn’t think much of them and almost didn’t see fury road because of it. but i hadn’t seen any of the films since i was maybe 14. maybe. i’m 26 now and just rewatched the first one again and...still don’t think much of it. road warrior (film 2) is considered the best of the og 3 btw.

also, the flashbacks max has in fury road are not tied to any of the previous films. they are of an event that happens almost right before fury road that went totally sideways and fucked up my murder son even more. you can read up on that in the mmfr prelude comics if you want.

anyway onto some of the other shit.

the half naked women? they aren’t wearing what they wear by choice. not only are they forced into white, purity implying, thin, impractical garments, but the non-pregnant wives are also forced to wear chastity belts with teeth. the girls make getting said belts off of them as soon as they have the chance, but there is little to do about clothing. though, most of them do gradually donn more items of clothing as the film progresses.

this film is a masterclass in storytelling. it’s the prime example of “show don’t tell” that a lot of filmmakers struggle with. george miller does it seemingly with ease. we know that all of the main women in the film (and this includes furiosa) have been sexually abused by the same tyrannical man (cheedo, the youngest has not been raped by him, but in the prelude comics, it is implied heavily that joe has molested her). george tells us this by not really telling us. angharad is “his favorite” and about 7-8 months pregnant with his baby, but she’s desperate to get away from him, coining the repeated phrase, “we are not things!”

when the war boys are gearing up to go chase after furiosa once her treason is discovered (before we’ve even got a glimpse of any of the wives) one says that furiosa, “took a lot of stuff from immortan joe”. nobody sees these women as people, which is why the abuse has been able to go on for so long. furiosa was taken as a wife when she was young and cast out when it was discovered she was infertile. she was taken about 20 year prior to the start of the film.

even in combat scenes, we rarely see women brutalized. frequently only getting a handful of frames. enough to know when they’ve been hit, but not enough to be gratuitous. counter that with every single time a man is getting hit in the film. they get significantly more frames. especially for max.

in fact, max is the only character we really see violated in any fashion. his hair is shorn off, he’s got information forcibly tattooed onto his back like he’s a product. he’s branded and forced to give blood. so many films and shows focus on showing us the abuse of women and often go way over the top with it. george miller counters that by saying,”if i show you a women getting hit, it’s gonna be so quick and then we’re moving on, and no, you don’t get any rape flashbacks either. i will let you know what happened to these women, i will make it obvious as fucking day, but i will not show it.” that’s so refreshing!

this film was also edited by a woman, margaret sixel, and she won an academy award for it. she’s george miller’s wife and he asked her to edit despite her never editing an action film before because he knew her work would set the film apart from every other action style film out there. and her work still stands out significantly.

jenny beavan, the costume designer, and also an academy award winner for her work on the film, poured her soul into the film. every costume is amazingly detailed. all of them tell a story.

the film itself? is colorful as fuck. miller originally wanted to do the film in black and white, but warner brothers worried that wouldn’t market as well, so miller instead when the way of making everything as colorful as possible, rather than the desaturated nonsense that’s way overused in post-apocalypse films. it’s stunning as fuck.

charlize theron and tom hardy? the two are magic in their roles. honestly mel’s max pales in comparison to tom’s, and charlize understood the story she was telling so fully. every bit of her was poured into that part idk if i’ve ever seen her inhabit a role so deeply.

the soundtrack is fucking amazing. enough said.

the stunt work? most of it is practical. that includes the bit where guys are swinging around on 50 feet poles attached to speeding cars. that includes the big crash at the end of act 3. that bigass truck really did flip like that, the only cgi there had to do with debris flying forward, but the crash was legit.

in fact, very little cgi was used at all. they used it to get rid of charlize’s arm and stunting wires. they used it for one VERY obvious stunt, the used it for the chase inside a sandstorm and other really tiny things, but other than that? that shit is real.

max and furiosa as the two leads are so layered and compelling too. i could go on about them, but really, they deserve their own posts.

it’s a film that’s epic on all scales, and incredibly feminist, incredibly meaningful. and it’s great eye candy on the action scale. really, do yourself a favor and watch it.

#mad max fury road #i fucking love this film #i cry about it daily it feels like #Anonymous

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior Home and Semi-Theater Edition 7/10/20 – GREYHOUND, PALM SPRINGS, THE OLD GUARD, RELIC and More!

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July weekend, even though movie theaters don’t seem any closer to opening, and I believe some in certain areas even closed! New York City just hit Phase 3 this week, and I’m not sure Phase 4 even includes movie theaters. Let’s not even talk about L.A. as it will just depress me. I literally have no idea what’s going on or if movies being back in theaters nationwide by the end of this month is even realistic. There are a lot of available movies this week, and I did my best to see as many as possible, but honestly, I’m getting a little burnt out watching movies on my computer and even on my TV set (the few times I can), so we’ll see how far I get this week. Hold on tight, because this week is gonna be a doozy! (I actually wanted to write a defense of Quibi and its content, but I’ll have to save that for a quieter week.)

Believe it or not, Tom Hanks has a new movie out this week, too, but it’s only on Apple TV+, since Sony decided to sell Hanks’ fictitious submarine drama GREYHOUND to the relatively new streaming service. Surely, that can’t be a good sign, right? Directed by Aaron Schneider (Get Low), it has Hanks playing Commander Ernest Krause, who is put in charge of his first fleet of ships to sail across the Atlantic Ocean’s notorious “Black Pit,” bringing supplies and troops to Europe during America’s early days in World War II. The area of the Atlantic got its name because the planes that normally escorted the fleet to keep an eye out for German UBoats would have to turn back. As Captain of the USS Keeling aka Greyhound, Krause is solely responsible for dozens of ships and men.

Greyhound is a classic case of “Well, it looked good on paper,” because when you have a piece of fiction by C.S. Forester and one of America’s most beloved actors wanting to make it into a movie, what could possibly go wrong? Well, I’ll tell you. As someone who generally loves submarine movies and movies with great sea battles, certainly this movie was made for me, but no, although there are a few decent CG battles, the majority of the movie involves Hanks calmly stating orders to his men from the control deck of the Greyhound, as they take evasive measures to protect the fleet from the UBoats. Really, it’s mostly about Hanks, because other than Stephen Graham in a small role, none of the other men on the Greyhound have much personality. The movie even has the audacity to waste a great actor like Rob Hunter on a nothing role as the ship’s cook who brings Krause food and coffee he never has time to eat or drink anyway, because fighting the Germans is very busy work indeed.

While some of the firefights do bring a much-needed level of excitement, there’s otherwise no real stakes or tension, because you always know that Hanks’ boat will never be sunk. Every once in a while, Hanks will ask for coffee or his slippers to change things up. That’s how boring this movie is. And then, despite all the “non-stop fighting,” they somehow have time to stage an elaborate burial at sea when the ship is hit by enemy fire. Maybe this would have been a better movie seen in theaters, but probably not. It’s absolutely astounding how boring this movie is, but if naval speak gets you hot then Greyhound might just be the movie for you!

Now that that’s taken care of, let’s try to get some of the other movies, hopefully some of them are better than Greyhound.

Andy Samberg stars in PALM SPRINGS (NEON/Hulu), the new romantic comedy and first feature from director Max Barbakow. Calling it a “romantic comedy” wouldn’t really be doing the movie justice, since it’s more of a quirky comedy that offers more than the simple Sundance rom-com formula of Samberg’s previous Sundance movie, Jesse and Celeste Forever. The movie begins with Samberg’s character, Nyles, waking up at a wedding with his horrid girlfriend Misty (a very funny Meredith Hagner). At the wedding, Nyles gives a rousing speech (despite no one knowing who he is) then connects with the bride’s sister, Sara (Cristin Milioti). But wait, maybe you think you know where this is going but when the two go off somewhere private to “hook up,” it’s rudely interrupted by someone trying to kill Nyles, and well, it just gets stranger from there.

I’m not sure how much of the plot and the early twist would be considered a spoiler, although maybe not if you’ve watched the trailer. Essentially, Sara follows Nyles into a cave where there’s some sort of dimensional thing that returns them back to the beginning of the same day over and over. They go to sleep or they die, and they’re right back at the start of the day, so yup, it’s basically a similar Groundhog’s Day premise that we’ve seen in movies like Happy Death Day, Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll, Before I Fall or others, but it’s all about what Barbakow, writer Andy Siara and the two leads do that make Palm Springs so much more entertaining and even deeper.

I have to be honest that I wasn’t familiar with Milioti at all before this film, so this ends up being an amazing spotlight for her talent, and similar to Rashinda Jones in Jesse/Celeste, she makes Samberg that much easier to palate. Not that I dislike Samberg, but I’ve never been the biggest fan when he’s given free reign like in movies such as Hot Rod. (But I did like Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, so maybe he’s grown on me.) I will admit that I’m a sucker for a good wedding-based romantic comedy—as seen by recent ones like Plus Oneand Destination Wedding -- and with its odd quantum physics twist, Palm Springs continually finds new ways of exploring the tenuous existence that is a new relationship. Oh, I should also mention that Roy, the guy trying to kill Nyles, is played by JK Simmons, and while it’s definitely a smaller part for one of my favorite actors, he also plays a significant role in the story.

You’ll probably know right away if Palm Springs is your kind of movie, but the mix of quirkiness and honest heart and emotion makes it one of Samberg’s better endeavor. It hope it allows us to see much more of Ms. Milioti, since I think she’s quite wonderful as well. Palm Springs can be watched on Hulu or in select drive-ins starting this Friday, and since it is this week’s “Featured Flick*,” I hope you’ll check it out! (*I changed the name of this just to see if anyone is paying any attention… or even reading.)

Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández’s comic, THE OLD GUARD, has been turned into a movie directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) that will hit Netflix this Friday. It stars Charlize Theron and is written by Rucka himself, and it’s a fairly high concept action movie involving a group of “immortals” – warriors who aren’t able to die, so they’ve lived for hundreds of years and are now hiring themselves out as hired mercenaries. When they learn there’s a new immortal awakening, they seek her out to recruit her.

I generally like Charlize Theron in action mode as seen in Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, and she’s pretty kick-ass as Andromache the Scythian aka Andy, the leader of the Old Guard. Kiki Layne from If Beale Street Could Talk offers a nice counterpoint as her trainee in the form of Nile, the newest immortal, who discovers that she can’t die while serving as a soldier in the Middle East. The rest of the cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthias Schoenaerts and others, who are all okay, but I just wish there was more to the story than just watching them have to deal with a lame corporate villain named Merrick (Harry Melling), who wants to harvest their blood to create life-saving pharmaceuticals for others.

While I liked the flashbacks to historic times showing Theron’s Andromache in another light, the stuff in present day is rarely as interesting. I’m not sure I ever would have thought of Bythewood doing action, even though she was supposed to do a Silver Sable/Black Cat movie at one point, but her fight scenes pretty fairly impressive, but she doesn’t lose sight of losing the focus on characterization, at least in terms of the two women.

The Old Guard isn’t bad, and it really would have benefited from being seen on the big screen, but I’m not sure it really offers enough with its concept other than a few decent fight scenes. Personally, I felt it paled in comparison to Netflix’s other recent action film, Extraction, at least in terms of the story and characters.

A horror movie that got a lot of lavishing praise out of Sundance is Natalie Erika James’ RELIC (IFC Midnight), which you may remember me mentioning last week, because apparently, it opened in a few drive-in theaters last Friday. I had been looking forward to this due to the amount of praise it got from Sundance, comparing it to the likes of The Babadook or Hereditary.

The story revolves around Emily Mortimer’s Kay and her daughter Sam (Bella Heatchote) travelling to their grandmother Edna’s country home in Australia after she’s reported missing. Edna (Robyn Nevin) soon returns and is behaving oddly, and with Gran clearly not herself, Kay has to figure out if she’s possessed by something or just suffering from advanced dementia.

I feel like I have a general idea what James was trying to accomplish with Relic, as it explores what it’s like being the caregiver for your elderly parent once they’ve become debilitated by something that makes them unrecognizable, put into the context of a horror film. I ended up watching the movie twice, mainly because I had no clue what was going on during my first viewing, but honestly, this movie just ended up annoying me, and it was only partially due to the fact that I had very little idea what was going on since most of the movie is so dark. More than that, I found a lot of the movie to be incredibly dull, and comparisons to The Babadook are inane, since the only thing is that it’s a horror movie (sort of) directed by an Australian woman.

The movie also involves some sort of “evil presence” and a creepy old house that was on the premises when Kay’s family moved in, but this information is revealed in such a dreary and confusing manner that makes it harder to figure out what you’re watching. In fact, if not for a number of eerie random images, it would be hard to even consider the first half of Relic “horror” since it’s more of a family drama about these three women from different generations contending with each other in this house. As someone who has had many conversations with my sister about what to do about my own elderly mother, I could see why this might connect with viewers, but planting this idea haphazardly into a typical horror movie just never worked for me. Relic has some good things going for it, such as the performances by the three actors (particularly Nevin), plus the creepy imagery and sound design do a lot to create a mood even if it doesn’t necessarily help with the storytelling.

The problem is that this story is told at such a snail’s pace and by the time the horror elements start kicking in within the last 20 minutes of the movie, almost everything is in pitch blackness, making it almost impossible to tell what you’re watching. Any earlier qualities worthy of praise are lost with some of the bad choices in lighting and editing, as well as an ending that’s dragged on for so long and at such a drowsy pace that any good will towards the movie will likely be lost. Ultimately, Relic is a disappointing high concept but single-note thriller that fails to deliver on the scares, instead delivering a dull and slightly unsettling family drama about aging and dementia.

In fact, I actually much preferred Jeffrey A. Brown’s horror film, The Beach House, which comes to the streaming network sShudder this Thursday. It stars Liana Liberato and Noah Le Gross as Emily and Randall, a young couple who travel to his father’s beach house to reconnect. Once there, their vacation is broken up by Jake Weber’s Mitch and his wife Jane (Maryann Nagel), but as the two couples get to know each other, a freak environmental event unleashes an infection that leads to all sorts of freaky occurrences. While there was just as much weirdness and not knowing what was going on as in Relic, at least this movie mostly takes place in the sunlight, so you can actually see things that are equally or even more disturbing than anything in Relic.

Brown’s film starts out so simply with this young couple wanting to spend some time alone together, but there’s this constant menace looming that’s foreshadowed in the opening credits, and as Mitch and Jane show up and start behaving oddly, you’ll wonder what exactly is happening to them. Things get even more disturbing when Emily is on the beach and experiences even odder and grosser circumstances that lead into the film’s “body horror” portion that will make even those with the strongest constitutions slightly queasy.

Part of why the film works so well is the small cast Brown has put together. I’ve been quite a fan of Liberato for many years, and she effectively becomes the film’s lead. Certainly, there are a few common horror tropes in place including ones that can be traced back to the likes of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, but there’s also enough new ideas that the film doesn’t seem like retread. While I’m not 100% sure exactly what was happening in The Beach House, Brown and his cast do a good job keeping the viewer uneasy and disturbed.

Atom Egoyan’s new thriller GUEST OF HONOUR (Kino Lorber) will premiere this week as part of the Kino Marquee (and there’s lots of great stuff on there that will help support your local arthouse while you’re checking that out!) It stars David Thewliss as Jim, a health inspector whose high school music teaching daughter Veronica (Lausla de Oliveira) has been jailed over an indiscretion with two teen students.

Egoyan has proven himself to be quite a master at the thriller genre, and Guest of Honour involves a complex family drama narrative that scuttles between timelines in order to keep you guessing where things might be going. I’ll freely admit that the non-linear storytelling was somewhat confusing at first, as the movie is framed by a conversation between Veronica and Luke Wilson after the death of her father. It also flashes back to an important moment from Veronica’s childhood before her mother died of cancer, which led to other things that would affect her years later.

I’m frequently amazed by Thewliss as one of England’s more underrated exports, but I was equally impressed by Ms. de Oliveira, whose work I was not familiar with before seeing her in Egoyan’s capable hands.

While we’ve heard plenty of true stories about the relationships between teachers with their students, Guest of Honour isn’t just about that, and it’s the way Egoyan reveals some of the story’s more interesting complexities, like Veronica’s relationship with an obsessed bus driver (Rossif Sutherland), that builds to some of the events that happen later. Honestly, I’m hesitant to reveal too much about the plot since there’s a way that Egoyan unveils various elements that makes Guest of Honour another compelling entry in the filmmaker’s constantly-evolving oeuvre.

A really interesting crime-thriller with a sci-fi twist hitting Apple TV, Prime Video and other digital platforms this Friday is South African filmmaker Tony Dean Smith’s own directorial debut, VOLITION (Giant Pictures), a film co-written and co-produced with his brother Ryan. It stars Adrian Glynn McMorran (Arrow) as James, a man constantly down on his luck who has clairvoyant powers that he uses to get himself involved in a scheme involving valuable diamonds. Just before this happens, he meets Angela (Magda Apanowicz), a young woman who gets pulled into the problems James gets into with others wanting the diamonds, and when he sees a murder, he has to do what he can to change the future.

I feel like this column’s running theme is that I’m being deliberately vague about the film’s plot, and in this case, it’s because halfway through the movie, there’s a pretty big twist that involves time travel. While that immediately makes the movie more interesting, it also makes things far more confusing. Up until that point, Volition felt like a rather weakly-written indie crime-thriller from filmmakers who may have seen Memento a few too many times. In fact, it opens with such a pretentious bit of narration I was worried the movie wasn’t going to be very good, and there was very little in the first half to keep me invested. When that new element/twist is added, McMorran’s character ends up on a far more interesting journey, and that turns Volition into a far more inventive and original story. Sure, it isn’t Primer, but if you’re a fan of the twists that come with time travel, Volition does a good job keeping you wondering what might happen next, and it does this with a mostly no-name cast, which is always quite impressive. In that way, it reminds me of The Wretchedwhich opened earlier in the year, as that was also by two filmmaking brothers taking a DIY attitude towards independent film. Volition isn’t perfect but it’s far better than I was expecting, and it’s a testament to the filmmakers’ perseverance to bring their very specific vision to the screen.

I was pretty excited to learn out about the quirky Japanese coming-of-age musical comedy WE ARE LITTLE ZOMBIES (Oscilloscope) from Makoto Nagahisa, because it’s the type of movie that I would usually see at the New York Asian Film Festival that would have been going on right now if not for… well, you know what. But it did play Fantasia in Montreal last year, so I’m sure it would have been fun seeing it with that audience. It’s certainly cute and quirky, involving a group of kids who come together to deal with their parents. Honestly, I don’t have a ton to say about it, but if you like oddball Asian films like the ones that play those festivals, you’ll know whether the film is for you. You can watch a trailer and find out where you’ll be able to catch We Are Little Zombies at its Official Site.

At least that was more watchable than Gavin Rothery’s sci-fi directorial debut, ARCHIVE (Vertical Entertainment), starring Theo James from the Divergent movies as George Almore, a man in the year 2038 who is working on an AI that is as close to human as possible, one that will hopefully reunite him with his dead wife in this new form. If you watch this, you’ll immediately think that Rothery must have watched Moon quite a lot. In fact, he was the conceptual artist and visual FX artist on Duncan Jones’ movie, and the influences of that film are so obvious it’s hard to get past it. Then again, Theo James has so little personality and charisma, he’s almost constantly being overshadowed by his robotic companions. So yeah, not recommended, and I’m a little shocked this was accepted into this year’s cancelled SXSW. Honestly, I couldn’t even get through it.

Also premiering in the Kino Marquee is Nicholas Leytner’s Austrian drama The Tobacconist (Menemsha Films), starring Bruno Ganz (Downfall) as Sigmund Freud and based on the bestselling novel by Robert Seethaler, which I haven’t read (if that isn’t obvious). It deals with the friendship between a teenager named Franz (Simon Morzé) and Freud during the Nazi occupation of Vienna, when the former travels there to work as an apprentice at a tobacco shop where Freud is a regular customer. When Franz falls in love with a music hall dancer, he turns to Freud for advice.

Apparently “showing only in theaters” this Friday is Michael W. Bachochin’s sci-fi/”psychodrama” Parallax (The Primal Group) starring Naomi Prentice as a young artist who is haunted by nightmares and who wakes up to a life she doesn’t recognize. At this point, I might as well just post the actual synopsis: “As she begins to uncover the truths of the life that she's found herself in, the gravity of her failing reality weighs heavily on her psychological identity and the reliability of her sanity is called into question.”

Let’s get to some docs, and you can probably safely assume that Harry Mavromichalis’ Olympia(Abramorama) is about Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis, because it is. Featuring interviews with Whoopi Goldberg, Laura Linney, Diane Ladd and more, that covers the Greece-born actress as she opens up about her struggles with depression, suicide and drug addiction, as well as stories from some of the actors she’s shared the stage and screen with over the years.

The next doc is about the Chinese artist who probably has had more docs made about him than…well, anyone else? Ai Wei Wei: Yours Truly (First Run Features), directed by Cheryl Haines and Gina Leibrecht, covers how the artist developed his 2014 exhibition, @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, inspired by his 2011 detention by Chinese authorities (which has generally inspired all his recent work?) Hey, if you’re a fan of his artwork, then you’ll probably want to see this doc, too.

One doc that I really wanted to see was Brett Harvey’s Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo (Universal), which had a virtual world premiere and is now on ITunes and other VOD, but my attempts to get a screener was met with absolute silence. The film documents the amazing life and career of the 71-year-old character actor and action hero who went from a life of drugs and doing hard time in prison to becoming an easily recognized and respected star, mainly thanks to Robert Rodriguez. I would like to see this movie, and maybe someday I will.

Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema will be adding Jacques Becker’s 1947 film, Antoine and Antoinette, this Friday, as well as the 1927 filming of the original Broadway play, Chicago, long before it was turned into a musical, although it does have Ginger Rogers playing Roxie Hart. Reinhold Schünzel’s original 1933 film Victor and Victoria (which was later remade by Blake Edwards for wife Julie Andrews) also joins the fairly hefty list of repertory films available, being shown as part of the “Pioneers of Queer Cinema” series.

Other movies I just wasn’t able to get to this week include Tito (Factory 25), I, Pastafari (Gravitas Ventures), The Medicine (1091), Never Too Late (Blue Fox Entertainment), Deany Bean is Dead (Global Digital Releasing) and Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Utopia).

Also beginning on Apple TV+ this Friday is the new JJ Abrams series, Little Voice, starring Brittany O’Grady as Bess King, a 20-something singer trying to find her voice in the rat race that is New York City. I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet but apparently, Abrams got Sara Bareilles from Broadway’s Waitress to write some of the tunes, so it should be decent.

Next week, more movies—some in theaters, some not in theaters! But most of them watchable from home in case you don’t drive or your city is exploding with the COVID after the rest of us have been in quarantine for months. Thanks bunches.

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #Streaming #VOD #Greyhound #Relic #TheOldGuard #Volition #TheBeachHouse #PalmSprings #GuestOfHonour

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differentkindapiratemovies-blog · 5 years ago

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Narrative Theory Essay

Discussing the perceived oversaturation of narrative archetypes in modern media with reference to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory.

“As the old saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun. For fans of movies and TV, that means that every story that can be told already has been. But sometimes, the movies that seem to be retelling a well-known story TOO closely are singled out, accused of being a ripoff, copycat, or unoriginal. There's no more famous (or successful) example than James Cameron’s Avatar: a story of a human being welcomed into a native tribe, who betrays their trust, but eventually saves the day by fighting on the good side in the end. As soon as the movie hit theaters, people dismissed the billion-dollar blockbuster as a ripoff of Fern Gully, or even Pocahontas before it. The truth is... it’s telling the same story told by dozens, even hundreds of famous films. But that’s not a reason to attack it, or any other re-skinned movie myth.”

It’s common to have the notion after coming out of a movie theatre that the experience was strikingly similar to the previous time you went. There is a common thread line throughout all of movie and storytelling history. Since the dawn of man, the human race has used narratives and stories to communicate ideas and emotions with each other - usually either trying to capture a part of history or with the purpose of fictional entertainment value. However, primarily I believe narratives are there for communication, being carefully crafted by storytellers of all different generations. Cave men used to draw on the walls of their caves and their fire would illuminate the images, causing them to flicker back and forth to create the earliest animation and stories recorded. Some of the most prominent fictional stories ever created, including religious texts such as the Bible, are stories we haven’t stopped recreating in two thousand years. I refuse to believe that it is the only formula that works despite being undoubtedly effective. Some might think of it as a stale structure.

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, first theorised in Hero Of A Thousand Faces, and Tzvetan Todorov’s structure of narrative are commonly combined to create a story that seems to resonate with the majority of an audience and seemingly never ceases to fail. Movies such as The Matrix and Star Wars use both these theories in order to make up a successful story. (Although debatably the whole original trilogy acts as the entire journey seeing as Luke Skywalker, the main character, is at his lowest in the finale of the second movie resulting in a pitfall ending). George Lucas, the creator and director of the first Star Wars film, considered Joseph Campbell to be his friend and mentor.

“My last mentor was Joe... who asked a lot of the interesting questions and exposed me to a lot of things that made me very interested, a lot more in the cosmic questions and the mystery… and I've been interested in those all my life but I hadn’t focused it the way I have until I had got to be good friends with Joe.”

George goes on to say he took the mythological and religious ideas behind narratives and simplified them for a modern audience. Perhaps it would be beneficial to drop religion altogether when writing stories for the modern and less religious generation.

The Dragon Quest video game series also follows these rules with the main character literally referred to as “The Hero”. The journey of a character rising up, facing hardships, being at their lowest then being born again for their worlds to be restored to equilibrium is something I think people either feel like they can relate to or, probably closer to the truth, is fantasised about and idealised. Everyone would like to be hero in the story, overcoming their problems and saving the world. Joseph Campbell says this in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces.

“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realisation. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realisation transcending all experiences of form - all symbolisations, all divinities: a realisation of the ineluctable void.”

There’s something gripping about watching this structure play out, and it is engaging for an audience - but they’ve seen it thousands and thousands of times before. As much as I appreciate movies that put a creative spin on the traditional structure of narrative, I really respect and love movies that go against the curve. Obviously this happens quite frequently but probably not at your local Odeon cinema - mainstream media is often streamlined for the purpose of easy consumption. For example, I enjoy films from the Marvel universe, but all too often they all play out in the same format. You could argue that companies have monopolised certain narrative structures and have a tendency to recycle them.

However, films like Richard Linklater’s 1991 day-in-the-life-of debut Slacker go against traditional “hero journeys” and plot point one/plot point two narratives, instead working like a series of loosely connected vignettes; in each scene we spend time with a different character and closely follow events occurring in their lives in real time. There’s no arcs, no beginning, middle or end. No rebirth, just a movie about strange characters hanging out in Austin, Texas, on a sunny day. It’s not an art film or particularly experimental. It’s just that, well, nothing happens. It’s an accurate depiction of reality. It's what real life actually is. I don’t wake up every day and go through a hero’s journey. We may develop as people and these situations can occur, but nine out of ten times life just isn’t like that. We wake up and things stay the same and in life, at moments when the credits are supposed to roll after we’ve achieved something, after we’ve overcome something, it just kind of keeps going. Life moves on and our “arcs” and problems to overcome reset, or new ones appear like a constantly stream of wildly uneventful sequels. New problems come up and sometimes they’re never solved and sometimes people don’t change. In my short film “Campussies!” I was really interested in trying to capture a kind of nothing day and interactions with strange people - not really making anything particularly interesting or high tension. The short was also influenced by Linklaters’ other seminal film Dazed and Confused, however that follows a slightly more traditional take on story telling, depicting a character develop throughout the movie. Jim Jarmusch is another director who often uses abrupt endings and whole scenes that literally stop moving forward. A lot of people say there’s almost an amateurish fine line however I believe this to be completely intentional.

In my narrative-based website I recreated the story of Homer’s Odyssey, a very classic tale that has been recreated and re-skinned many times over many years. Through the website, I make you, the person, interact with the story and go on the hero’s journey by yourself. There is only one correct path however the “reincarnation” implies you are constantly reborn until you get it right. Little is told about the situation in my narrative purposely, so that you can project what you would like onto it. It’s about a person, you, traveling from somewhere dangerous, perhaps enemy territory of some kind, and getting back home safely, set in a nonspecific period of time. However the roads are dangerous - filled with sword wielding enemies and no consistent place to be safe from the elements.

There’s other forms of narratives we’re told in between the lines in media such as what we’re told about certain people; these are pervasive narratives. On television we are exposed to poverty porn, depicting that all low income people are a certain way - intended to give the viewer a sense of superiority. In eighties movies we’re told that punks are ruffians and troublemakers. There’s an endless list of mainstream movies from that period showcasing punks as “bad guys”, such as The Terminator (a movie chock full of visual cues) and The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). Of course there were movies made with more of a punk rock sensibility, such as Return Of The Living Dead, and exploitation movies of the time in which punks were portrayed as the “good guys”. This was most likely due to the media’s take on punks during the movement in the late seventies. The papers themselves named these angry kids “punks” and they wore it as a badge of honour in response to the criticism - that they were a bunch of violent thugs who held switchblades, beat you up and stole your lunch money. Their anti-establishment ways often had them the basis for dystopian movies. In actuality, it wasn’t really like that at all and personally I would feel safer if I saw a gang of whatever the modern day equivalent of punks are. Although I would agree with the anti-establishment sensibilities, most aren’t true anarchists. They’re not gonna mug you.

Again, another example of pervasive narrative we are consistently exposed to is the connotation between women and make up. Media tells us that it is the norm and it’s heavily tied to what is considered the standard of beauty for women. However, anyone of any gender can choose whether or not to wear make up. In my photography piece “Three Studies of a Woman in the Sun” I photographed my subject both wearing make up and without, one subverting the expectations of a photographed woman in modern media and one showing how she often feels comfortable. I often wonder why women choose to wear make up and why it improves their confidence. Do they truly believe that it makes them feel more in touch with their identity, or perhaps we live in a misinformed society in which it is more acceptable for one gender to present themselves a certain way, when in reality it doesn’t really matter and there’s not much of a difference. John Berger had this to say about the representation of women and their identity in the media.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

My three portraits as part of my DCMP Photography brief are of my friend and artist Katie. Shot on a Canon, I wanted to capture her identity through three images. The middle image you see in the three panels on my blog is her in a natural environment and utterly neutral. That one is relatively light in tone due to the summers day behind her, however she's looking off and something implies it’s more melancholy than the photo lets on. Perhaps the uplifting summer isn’t enough to hold her inner more negative emotions, or that maybe the summer is no longer a good thing in light of the summer getting hotter and hotter each year. Maybe this isn’t a summer of celebration, but one of the end of the world. The bottom one is a real captured moment of her closing her eyes perhaps to imply her shyness in an industrial area, somewhere I often find comfort due to high containers and is generally aesthetically pleasing to me almost because of how not pleasing it is. The top one is how Katie would usually be and dress in her own environment, the lighting highlighting how she expresses herself through her own image. I like how the darkness is almost bleeding in around the edges of the photograph. I experimented with lighting a lot with this one and took several different photos that were the contender for the third portrait. Here, now she is herself, she seems to project more confidence looking directly into the camera like this time the camera is invading HER space as opposed to the other ones where she’s almost a part of the scenery. Now she’s out of the sun, she is the one who is shining. Notice how she also seems to fill up the frame the more comfortable she gets.

Unseen stories hide in advertising and movie posters. In these places you will find signs that speak to us sub-consciously. The movie posters for most horror movies will always use the colour red. Why? Our brain tells us when we see red that there’s danger and that the film will most likely contain plenty of blood. We understand what genre the movie is without even being told so due to semiotics. This can be seen on the movie poster for Shaun of the Dead where the doors our main character is standing behind are red, with white text to pop and in other iterations red text. You see he is surrounded by zombies, hoarded by them, most likely foreshadowing to what the movie is going entail. This is the same in food advertisements. If you watch a television ad about food the colours and aesthetics used often will tell you about the product. Most of the time, fruits and vegetables will be wet, to make them seem fresh and often whoever is starring in the ad or the dialect of the voiceover is who that product is for. If there is a voiceover speaking in a cockney accent then it’s marketed toward the working class, but it’s all just an illusion using stereotypes to manipulate the sub-conscious and the masses into relating to it. It does this all without ever actually telling us.

I wrote a short science fiction script called “The Great Hydration War” and shot a scene from it. In this scene, I did my best to make every shot tell us something. I played around a lot with power dynamic and it’s constantly changing using nothing but visual clues. When our main character thinks they are in control, the camera angle is low, making them seem large and powerful, but when the villain gets the upper hand you’ll see that they have the power. When they are both pointing guns at each other you’ll see that they’re both at the same level and share the power of the scene because it could go either way. Jazoor, the main character from the script who is from outer space, sees a figure after returning to Earth for the first time in years. Unsure of who it is, we see them in a wide shot, impersonal and unidentified. But when they stand up and Jazoor realises that it’s her twin from back when she grew up on the now ancient Earth. “It’s you!” Jazoor exclaims. With what she knows she gains the power to deal with the situation. She’s got this. However she’s flooded with doubt; “You sure?” Says the Dryborg, an evil futurist cyborg whose one weakness is water. The camera swoops up, leaving the character feeling vulnerable with no idea what kind of situation this is now. Then she brings up her gun, bringing the power back to her. I did this throughout the entire scene and tried my best to make sure I was expressing the characters feelings and positions in the scene through the camera angles even though obviously it’s quite a non-sensical script and a mildly ridiculous scene. I thought about the lighting, as the scene was based on an alternate reality Earth in the past where the sun is blue so I made sure all of the scenery were glowing in this blue light which I managed to do in post-production. The costumes were designed by myself and my friend who played the characters. I wanted something science fiction-esque, but obviously I had no budget and not a lot of time, so I decided to try to take the comedic route and rely on it having more charm than actually trying to make the audience believe what was going on. The scene is a pivotal part of the larger structure and story that I had written, however the storyboards for the scene were in fact drawn before I wrote it.

Even when I wrote the script I realised I sub-consciously loosely followed the hero’s journey, most likely because I take so much inspiration from movies. Even when writing, I instinctually had thoughts like “yes, now this kind of scene has to happen”. It was very condensed but it’s still there. We begin the story introducing our hero Jazoor, she continues to go on a journey across the universe before falling and being at her lowest in the third act before facing off her demon she’s been fearing the whole film. She overcomes the Dryborg but not in the way she probably thought. However, I did forget to film the character limping throughout the scene.

Everything is a journey, our lives are one. They’re not always structured how we want them to be but they’re a journey. Every day when we wake up we begin a new micro journey, a new chapter in a much bigger story that is how we view our lives. Stories are almost telling us how to live and that what we’re doing is okay. In my opinion modern mainstream cinema is stale, and I find it hard to believe that in just over a hundred years of film (and a few thousand for storytelling as a visual medium), storytelling has already dried up of all its originality and that we just keep repeating ourselves. Perhaps it's time we took a look at how we structure and create our characters and stories and try to make something more relevant and authentic. Stories reinforce our sub conscious beliefs behind our morals, between good and bad. People don’t want to be seen and thought of as the bad guy within society, hence why most stories are in fact about what we perceive as the “good guy”, the hero. I always find something to latch on to when enjoying a film, something to reassure me that I have my humanity or reassure me when I feel like I don’t have it - and that it’s okay if I don’t.

I don’t like to talk about the internet or politics in context of any work because I feel like those are things that have tainted some elements of different art forms. The only issue with making movies people can relate to is that also means you don’t want to offend anyone, which almost seems like an impossibility in recent years. Too much is focused on these subjects but perhaps that’s why people like movies. Social and political commentary have made many movies hits throughout all of time, but I believe a lot of the time story and characters are being sacrificed out of fear of offending or not being politically correct. It doesn’t seem to matter which stance you take within media, there will always be people that disagree. The internet has given everyone a loud voice and usually it's used for criticism. In terms of relating to a movie, I don’t think it should be a case of representation of sexual orientation or race, it should be about values and character - although I suppose it is human nature to want to relate to something or something who appears like us. Whatever the case, we need to relate to character as a person, and become engaged in the narrative. I think that is is why Campbells and Tzvetan’s theories and myths are continued to be used to this day, because they work.

I would personally love to see more change and experimentation in mainstream and modern cinema, and not to have to constantly and actively seek it out. Even recent movie posters are directly copying each other with the use of colour and framing, which directly relates to the signs we use to communicate information with an image. It would be refreshing to really open up the limitations and possibly of narratives - or in some cases close them off completely.

Bibliography

The Matrix. (1999). [video] Directed by L. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. United States: Warner Bros.

Star Wars. (1977). [video] Directed by G. Lucas. United States: 20th Century Fox.

Shaun of the Dead. (2004). [DVD] Directed by E. Wright. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures.

Slacker. (1991). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Orion Classics.

Dazed and Confused. (1993). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Gramercy Pictures.

The Terminator. (1984). [DVD] Directed by J. Cameron. United States: Orion Pictures.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. (2019). [DVD] Directed by G. Miller. Australia: Warner Bros.

The Return of the Living Dead. (1985). [DVD] Directed by D. O'Bannon. United States: Orion Pictures.

Campbell, J., 1949. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 1st ed. United States: Pantheon Books.

Square Enix. 1986. Dragon Quest. Video Game. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

Berger, J., 1972. Ways Of Seeing. 1st ed. United Kingdom. Penguin.

George Lucas. (1999). “George Lucas in Conversation With Bill Moyers”. Bill Moyers. George Lucas Tells Bill Moyers About the Mentors in His Career.

Dyce, A.D. 2016. How Every Blockbuster Movie Tells The Same Story. [Online]. [8 July 2019]. Available from: https://screenrant.com/how-all-movies-same-secret-truth/

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filmfrancais101-blog · 6 years ago

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Survival Movies - The Cream of the Crop and Those That Didn't Shine

Tactical Movies, Best to the Worst! The popularity of survival motion pictures has really grown over the past couple of years. I have rated these shows in three different categories. The categories are: realisticness, survival value and entertainment factor. Each of these is on the A - F Grading Scale with A being greatest and F being worst. These ratings are all depending on my opinion so you may not feel the same. Waterworld - Realisticness - D Survival Value - D Entertainment component - C+ The Earth is now filled with water, but some folks believe there is still dry land on the earth. This is one of the numerous survival movies about the fight over resources. As in numerous movies, this is a fight between the protagonist (Kevin Costner) as well as the antagonist (Dennis Hopper) and his cronies (called the smokers). This movie is fun to watch but I avoid feel it was realistic or offered much in the way of emergency value. The Postman - Realisticness - B Endurance Value - C Entertainment factor - B Personally i think the reviews of this movie by critics don't perform justice. In this film, the United States is a very different place along with little order. Many people have gone back to a dark age groups style of living with no electricity, very little law, and a tyrant thug (Will Patton) trying to gain power. The leading part (Kevin Costner), a drifter, finds a way to make a difference on the planet even though he is originally only worried about his own livelihood along with well - being. This was a very long movie, but I truly enjoyed it and liked its sense of wish. I thought this movie offered decently realistic insight about what could happen with a breakdown of society and numerous years of lawlessness. It had a few areas that I think gave it a few survival value, but overall, it was just one of the entertaining coping movies. The Road - Realisticness - A Survival Valuation - B Entertainment factor - C While I did not feel this was one of the survival movies that lived as much as my expectations, I feel it accurately portrayed the psychological rollercoaster that an end of the world situation would create. The actual characters in this movie were not able to trust anyone surrounding them, and they lacked the resources necessary to carry on a normal life, that could be an accurate outcome in a real societal breakdown. I believe this movie, while being boring in some spots, sensed very realistic and showed the dreary outlook from the main character (Viggo Mortenson) in a post apocalyptic globe with no hope. On the survival value front, I thought there have been some topics to take away from the story line that would be within real life. I felt that this film streaming allowed me to understand that striving for happiness and wishing to live life towards the fullest despite terrible circumstances is key to beating the finish. I am Legend - Realisticness - C Survival Cost - B - Entertainment factor - B This is certainly another of the survival movies that I think showed fantastic emotion. The main character (Will Smith) and his dog try to survive throughout this film despite the constant threat involving zombies. I will say this movie has one of the saddest scenes in any movie I have ever seen, which makes the entire movie worth watching. This survival movie really demonstrates how important a companion is when you are lonely. Other than the value of companionship, there were only a few survival lessons to be learned. Guide of Eli - Realisticness - C Survival Importance - C Entertainment factor - B I believed Book of Eli with Denzel Washington and Mila Kunis was worth the watch. This survival movie revealed how important being aware of your surroundings is. Also in a catastrophe ridden world it shows how there will be people that will require power any way they see fit. The use of religion to control men and women is what the antagonist (Gary Oldman) uses to gain energy. If you are a Christian or are religious this is definitely an important flick to watch because it shows how people can use religion plus the Bible for good as well as evil to push their own motives. However, in the end, this movie didn't show the Bible or Christianity in a bad light. I thought the lesson of being conscious was the best survival value it gave. Jeremiah Manley - Realisticness - A Survival Value - C Entertainment factor - B Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford) is one of the best survival movies. This movie is about a person who wants to live as a hermit living off the land, who also wishes to be left alone to do his own thing. This is actually the oldest movie on my list and also one of the best. I believe they have great survival value and is quite realistic. In one picture, Jeremiah Johnson finds a man who has been dead for some time with a note on him saying, "I, Hatchet Jack port, being of sound mind and broke legs, perform hereby leaveth my bear rifle to whatever sees it, Lord hope it be a white man. It is a great rifle, and killt the bear that killt me personally. Anyway, I am dead. Yours truly, Hatchet Jack. inch How can you not love this movie with a scene like this? This movie is great at depicting how to live off the actual land and be self - sufficient. Castaway - Realisticness - B Survival Value - C Entertainment issue - B Castaway, starring Tom Hanks, is a family members survival movie. There is some survival value to this video clip like starting a fire or taking an abscessed teeth out with an ice skate. The main character is associated with a commercial UPS type plane crash that leaves your pet stranded on an island with no other survivors. It shows how ingenious people can be when they do not have the conventional resources for survival. Into the Wild - Realisticness - The Survival Value - B Entertainment factor - Udemærket Into the wild is the true survival story of Captain christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) who gives up his ordinary living to roam the US and live in Alaska. This is an greatest adventure movie that shows how Christopher lived simply by himself in the Alaskan wilderness with only what can carry on his back. This film offered good medical value, and it taught me something very important: never consume wild plants unless you know exactly what they are and if they are secure to eat. Zombieland - Realisticness - D Survival Benefits - D Entertainment factor - A - It is really a comedic approach at the survival and zombie type. While there is really no realisticness or survival value in order to speak of it, is very funny. This survival movie stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, and Emma Stone. During the motion picture, they all come together to help each other survive a zombie infested world. In my opinion, one of the best cameos of all time occurs during this picture. Just watch and see! 28 Days Later - Realisticness - B Survival Value - C Entertainment point - B 28 Days Later is a survival movie starring Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins). After a virus baby wipes out almost everybody on the planet, a few survivors come together to try and look for a safe place to live. This was a good movie that described what could happen if an epidemic were to spread very quickly. This particular survival movie does not have tons of survival value, but it nevertheless provides insight on the possibility of a nation or globally epidemic. Mad Max/Road Warrior/Beyond Thunderdome - Realisticness instant D Survival Value - D Entertainment factor tutorial B Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Beyond Thunderdome are very entertaining and fun survival movies to watch, but are very unrealistic. Mel Gibson stars as Mad Maximum, a man who lives in a post apocalyptic world who have also tries to improve life for himself and others. Generally there really was not much survival value in these movies, but you will find cool vehicles with many types of weapons, which makes them enjoyable. Red Dawn - Realisticness - B - Emergency Value - B Entertainment factor - A+ Red-colored Dawn is not just one of my favorite survival movies, but also among my favorite movies It has quite a few stars before they were home names (Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson in addition to Jennifer Grey). The Russians and Cubans have taken portion of Colorado and are rounding people up, whom they believe to become threats, into camps. A group of high schoolers get together plus live in the woods. They badge themselves the "Wolverines" trying to take back the land that was previously theirs. This is a wonderful movie that provided survival value in the way of outdoor residing, hunting and fishing. The other thing I love about this film, that others have also expressed, is that when you finish viewing this movie, you feel extremely patriotic and proud of the fantastic people that live in the United States. Rescue Dawn - Realisticness - A Survival Value - B Entertainment factor -- C This survival movie is the true story connected with Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German American jet fighter pilot whose plane is shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and captured. I believe this video gives you a picture of how the living conditions in prisoner campements were. Additionally , it shows how important having a strong : will is when you need to get out of a seemingly lifeless end situation. There are many scenes in this film that have survival value, especially when they escape from the camp and should live outdoors and survive in the wild. Alone Throughout Australia - Realisticness - A Survival Value rapid B+ Entertainment factor - B+ This is survival documented is not well known, but still provides pretty great survival worth. The only reason I saw this was because I attended a little independent film festival in my town. This is the story with Jon Muir and his dog that set out on a trip throughout Australia with only him, his dog, and what he could carry on his homemade cart. This is a great look at success and has the highest survival value out of any of the survival dvds I have reviewed. Out of all the movies I've ever seen, this particular film probably has the saddest scene because what occurred in the movie was what happened in real life. In case you get a chance, definitely watch this documentary. The only concern is it is difficult to find and usually expensive because of its rarity.

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itsjaybullme · 7 years ago

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21 Actors John Wick Should Fight in ‘John Wick 3'

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Peter/Barcroft Images/Barcroft Media, Mike Pont/FilmMagic, VCG/VCG

Keanu Reeves is gearing up to start production on John Wick: Chapter 3, which will be released in 2019. That's right: John Wick is officially back for a third go-around.

But after battling against actors like Adrianne Palicki, Alfie Allen, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Ruby Rose, and countless unnamed bad guys in the first two films, Reeves needs some new blood (literally) for the cast of the sequel.

So: Who will he fight this time?

Reeves does most of his own stunts, dating back to his days on The Matrix, and the John Wick series is no different.

“There’s an incredible stuntman who doubles John Wick,” Reeves told Men's Fitness in March. “They hit him with a car. He’s standing there, and they hit him—that’s a stunt. Me? I’ll shoot some guns, flip some people—and that’s action. So, yeah, I do as much action as I possibly can, because I love it—and I love the opportunity to bring the audience along. I want to be able to do everything. Since The Matrix, I’ve used this term, ‘superperfect.’ As in, ‘Can we get it superperfect?’ That’s part of what makes [a great action film] a pressure cooker. It’s the intensity of just trying to do the best you can in the circumstances that you have.”

Here’s a look at who you think John Wick should battle against in Chapter 3, ranked according to their action-movie experience, skill at portraying villains, and cinematic track record.

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Tom Hardy

TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images

After transforming his body for films like The Dark Knight Rises, Warrior, Venom, and Mad Max: Fury Road, Hardy could easily get the look of an uber-assassin taking on John Wick. Between playing a villain in Bane and doing some intense MMA and kickboxing training for Venom, the British badass already has a head start on the “gun-fu” moves of John Wick. Plus, we already know he loves dogs. He’d fit right in.

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Jason Statham

VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images

The Fate of the Furious and Expendables star would have no trouble sliding into the world of John Wick. Statham has played badass villains in the past, fought against stars like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and he has the action movie fight skills to go with it. Adding his mix of roguish British charm to the franchise would make for pure entertainment. Need proof? Here’s Statham's most shredded Instagram posts.

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Dave Bautista

VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images

Letting the former WWE superstar and current Guardians of the Galaxy actor let loose in the world of John Wick could make for one of the most entertaining fight scenes in Hollywood history. Dave Bautista would be a challenging physical presence for John Wick, considering how massively jacked he is, and his comedic timing could make him just the right kind of over-the-top-villain for Chapter 3. Bautista has experience playing the bad guy, having starred as the James Bond villain Mr. Hinx in Spectre, as well as in The Man with the Iron Fists and the Kickboxer reboot.

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Idris Elba

VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images

Between kickboxing in real life and taking down Norse gods in the Thor series (and likely the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War), Idris Elba would have no problem handling himself against John Wick. For as many good guys he’s played over the years, Elba has played some fantastic villains during his career, including Stringer Bell on The Wire, Tango in American Gangster, and Krall in Star Trek Beyond, so being a bad guy would come naturally for this potential future James Bond.

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Liam Neeson

Mike Pont/FilmMagic

With his late-career turn into a badass action star, Liam Neeson could bring some major gravitas to the John Wick series, thanks to a “particular set of skills” he picked up from the Taken franchise. Neeson has kicked ass in movies like The Grey, Run All Night, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Non-Stop, The A-Team, and in the upcoming 2018 film The Commuter. He has some experience being a villain, including his iconic turn as Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins.

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Scott Adkins

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

The martial arts expert would be perfect for John Wick: Chapter 3. The British-born actor has multiple black belts in various disciplines, is as shredded as anyone in Hollywood, and he has experience playing a villain, starring as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s sidekick in The Expendables 2. Adkins has made his career starring in B-type action movies like Accident Man, Hard Target 2, Triple Threat, and Boyka: Undisputed, and that’s kind of the genre/DNA that runs through the John Wick movies.

We know Adkins would have no trouble training for the role, based on these 17 Instagram moments.

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Jon Bernthal

ason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Playing The Punisher wouldn’t be the worst way to prepare to enter the John Wick universe. Between the action and the gunplay, Jon Bernthal would feel right at home after working as Frank Castle for the Marvel series on Netflix. Bernthal has the experience (and jawline) to play a villain, too: The actor has played a bad guy in projects like Shot Caller, The Walking Dead, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

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Denzel Washington

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Okay, fine: Though the Academy Award winner might not be the first name that crops up when it comes to “action movie villains,” Denzel Washington actually would fit in pretty well. He won an Oscar as the heavy in Training Day, and over the years he’s starred in his fair share of morally cloudy movies, including Man on Fire, The Equalizer, The Taking of Pelham 123, 2 Guns, The Magnificent Seven, and Safe House. Bringing Washington’s gravitas to the John Wick series would make for a fun hero-villain dynamic. (Look, you guys suggested his name. We're just taking the idea seriously.)

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Jet Li

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Adding a martial arts legend to the world of John Wick would likely make Keanu Reeves very happy. Reeves is a self-professed martial arts nerd, he could have a fight for the ages against someone like Li. While Li doesn’t do much acting in the U.S. anymore, he starred in all three Expendables films. He's also made a few heel turns of his own, portraying ass-kicking villains in Lethal Weapon 4 and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

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Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving

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We'll say it: We love this idea. Reeves already reunited with Matrix co-star Laurence Fishburne in John Wick: Chapter 2—so why not go all-in and make Chapter 3 another Matrix reunion? Both Hugo Weaving and Carrie-Anne Moss have Matrix fight training under their belts. Weaving has played plenty of stony villains besides Agent Smith— remember Red Skull in the first Captain America movie? Moss is no slouch herself, and these days you can see her on the Netflix/Marvel series The Defenders as high-powered attorney Jeri Hogarth. This tag team could give Reeves the challenge he needs to take John Wick: Chapter 3 to the next level.

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Tom Cruise

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The superstar actor has as much action experience under his belt as anyone in Hollywood, and joining John Wick would give Tom Cruise a chance to go against type by playing a bad guy. On top of that, Cruise would absolutely be game for fight scenes—he’s proven with the Mission: Impossible series that he has no problem doing his own stunts. (Cruise climbed one of the biggest buildings in the world and was strapped to the outside of a plane while it was taking off while filming the Impossible series.) Yes: Some badass fight scenes with Keanu Reeves would probably be a joy for Cruise.

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Joe Manganiello

Doug Inglish

He’s got the size and he’s got the look: Joe Manganiello knows how to wear a suit, and with muscles like he has, Keanu Reeves would have his hands full with a Manganiello villain. The former Men’s Fitness cover star just took the mantle of one of the most badass villains in comic book history after appearing as Deathstroke in Justice League, and he has action film experience after appearing in movies like Sabotage and the upcoming Rampage, alongside superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

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Michael Jai White

Noel Daganta

The John Wick producers could save a bunch of money if they brought in Michael Jai White as one of the villains. The Spawn and Dark Knight actor has been training in martial arts since he was a teen, and he has no fewer than eight—count ‘em, eight!— black belts in a range of disciplines, including Taekwondo, Kobudo, and Goju Ryu. Jai White is buddies with Scott Adkins, having co-starred with the actor in Accident Man and Triple Threat, so he could try and bring over his friend for a villainous duo to go up against John Wick.

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The Best of the Rest

John Parra/WireImage, Isa Foltin/Getty Images for Sony Pictures, Gisela Schober/Getty Images

Here’s a look at the rest of the suggestions:

Jack Gleeson - Game of Thrones star Alfie Allen a.k.a. Theon Greyjoy already starred in the first John Wick, so why not bring in another GoT star—this time, the actor who plays King Joffrey. Still salty about the whole Ned Stark thing? We see where you're going with this, guys.

The Expendables crew - Jason Statham could join Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, and company as opponents of John Wick. That might be too much action even for this movie.

Iko Uwais - The martial arts star would be quite the opponent for John Wick.

Tilda Swinton - Keanu Reeves already mentioned Swinton as a potential option for the John Wick universe, saying he’d love to reunite with his former Constantine co-star. “You know, I had the chance to work with her – I was in two films with her [Constantine and Thumbsucker, both released in 2005] but had the chance to work with her once — I’m onboard with that,” Reeves said to People. “We run into each other once in awhile socially out there in the world. She’s a remarkable person and actress, so I’m all aboard with that!” Plus, she nailed the part of a martial arts master in Doctor Strange—why not do it again?

Floyd Mayweather - Maybe this should be his next fight after Conor McGregor.

Vin Diesel - Between his Furious work and time doing the voice of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, Diesel could try and squeeze in one more franchise under his belt. His heel turn in the latest Fast & Furious flick was entertaining, if not entirely convincing, so

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson - Speaking of actors with lots of franchises under his belt, “The Rock” is always a welcome addition to an action movie. While Johnson likely has no time at all to make an appearance in John Wick, we heard this suggestion a lot.

Danny Trejo - Between his roles in Con Air, Machete, Grindhouse, From Dusk till Dawn, and The Replacement Killers, Trejo knows his way around an action scene. A battle against John Wick would be extreme and fun. Extremely fun, basically.

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flickdirect · 7 years ago

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Over the years there have been numerous films that include the sport of boxing as a backdrop and even a few that include wrestling but until 2011's Warrior there has never been a movie that showcases the sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighting. Just like Rocky or Million Dollar Baby, the action itself isn't the focal point of the film but serves as a useful tool to create tension for the drama surrounding it. The plot has a basic premise that could include almost any sport or even none at all, but the violence that is encompassed in MMA fighting helps shape and mold the characters and the audience perception of them.

Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy; Mad Max: Fury Road) is a military soldier and the younger of two sons of a former boxer/ alcoholic/ abusive parent, Paddy (Nick Nolte; Cape Fear). He is angry at the world and ready to fight anyone who looks at him the wrong way. He is also a hurt little boy on the inside and emotionally closed off. He becomes an internet sensation when a viral video shows him taking down Mad Dog (Erik Apple), one of the top MMA fighters in the Country, which inspires him to ask Paddy to help him to train for the Sparta Contest, a "winner takes all" MMA competition.

Brendan Conlon (Joel Edgerton; The Gift) is Tommy's older brother who is a high school Physics teacher and former MMA fighter. In an effort to keep from losing his house, he starts fighting again and when his trainer's best guy gets injured, Brendan begs to be sent to the Sparta competition in his place. The obvious underdog, Brendan must use his intellect to outsmart his competition and win the $5 million prize money. Ultimately, Brendan surprises everyone and makes it to the finals only to be face to face with his estranged brother, Tommy.

Director Gavin O'Connor (Miracle) really knows how to cast his films in order to get maximum use out of his performers. All three leading men were perfect for their roles and Jennifer Morrison (Once Upon a Time) as Brendan's Wife, Tess, is well cast too. Nolte plays Paddy as a fractured man trying to make amends but who also understands he doesn't deserve the forgiveness he seeks. His obvious hurt though is no less compelling. Edgerton is the perfect combination of softness and hard as nails drive and determination and Hardy simply does what Hardy does best – the brooding, angry, Neanderthal-like male who doesn't need anything nor anyone.

The 4K UHD Blu-ray disc is beautifully presented in 2160p high definition video quality and accentuates the sharp differences between Tommy's and Brendan's worlds. It is evident even in their training facilities, where Tommy's is dirty and gritty and he is surrounded by tough, mean, guys who always eye him suspiciously and Brendan's is clean and tidy and where everyone is encouraging and pushes each other to be their very best. The Dolby Atmos audio is clear and crisp with the dialogue sitting nicely in the center channel and background noises (like the crowd cheering) filling the surrounding speakers.

The Warrior combo pack has a number of extras including: Digital Download, Audio commentary with Gavin O'Connor, Anthony Tambakis, John Gilroy and Joel Edgerton, Redemption: Bringing Warrior to Life, Philosophy in Combat: Mixed Martial Arts Strategy; Simply Believe: A Tribute to Charles "Mask" Lewis, Jr., "Cheap Shots" Gag Reel, Brother vs. Brother: Anatomy of the Fight, and The Diner Deleted Scene. While many of these extras offer terrific insight into the world of MMA fighting and give the viewer a sense of the friendship that developed between the cast and crew, others, like the Anatomy of the Fight were not as interesting or informative.

I started out hating this film finding the pacing slow and the characters somewhat uninteresting. However, partway through the film when they end up at the Sparta Competition in Atlantic City, I became more invested in these men, their relationship with each other and their father and their need to thrive in this arena. So if you can sit through the first half of the film and stomach the fight scenes at the end (which I had a hard time doing) the payoff is watching a beautifully acted, well put together film with heart and soul.

Grade: B

About Allison Hazlett-Rose Allison Hazlett-Rose has always had a passion for the arts and uses her organization skills to help keep FlickDirect prosperous. Mrs. Hazlett-Rose oversees and supervises the correspondents and critics that are part of the FlickDirect team. Mrs. Hazlett-Rose attended Hofstra University where she earned her bachelors degree in communications and is a member of the Florida Film Critics Circle.

Read more reviews and content by Allison Hazlett-Rose.

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