#but its a kind of long complicated thing that spans multiple movies

[child-of-dreamworks-animation]

@helterskeltermess

Oh, you get it.

While I can't blame the whole thing entirely on Joel Crawford, who happened to have directed both Croods 2 & pib2, and was certainly responsible for part of the issue, the main reason behind character inconsistencies, I think, is DreamWorks' decision to swap the animation team.

I mean, well, switching directors mid-production or mid-series isn't normal, but it's not that uncommon as well. The Shrek series has passed onto several directors along the way, yet no obvious character inconsistency is reported/spotted. Same with the Kung Fu Panda, the characters, by and large, stay in line with their personalities at their first appearances. HTTYD series is a bit complicated: the movie trilogy was directed by Dean DeBlois (so no inconsistency issues for sure), the TV series (RoB, DoB, RTTE) and multiple shorts were all handed over to different newbie directors(?). Although in some episodes, there might be some slight drift-aways from the original, but mostly it's doing fine. (I'm a die-hard fan for the httyd series, but yeah, I'm still very much unsatisfied with the way they deal with the movie finale :()

But in the case of pibtlw, well, FIRST, there is that incredibly long time span in-between the 2 movies. And SECOND, a switch of directors: originally Chris Miller who directed the prequel (approx. 2014-2016?), then Bob Persichetti (2019, also head of story of pib1), and finally Joel Crawford (2021?-2022). WHAT WITH the cancelation of the original piece Puss in Boots: Nine Lives and 40 Thieves and incessant changes of the scripts. AND the acquisition of DreamWorks by Comcast/Universal, during those turbulent days, a lot animators were laid off and left for other studios. In the end, with one thing and another, the former animation crew of pib1 was dissolved, and the story lost its track as a natural result. (Shame, they have made such beautiful concept arts back then.) I doubt if similar things have happened with Croods 2, but I never checked. I'm only aware that the majority of animators of pib2 come from Croods 2. So that's the cause, I suppose?

And speaking of Puss in pibtlw, true, he wasn't wildly out of character, but still he'd gone a bit too far. Vain, narcissistic, gloaty, (even going from party to party, and not taking his past deaths seriously) definitely sounds like him, but he's never appeared to me to be someone who would be actively looking for death, or put it in another way, he wouldn't laugh at death or life-or-death matters. Seriously, he knew the consequences, and he had seen deaths on multiple occasions already (see Shrek3 & pib1). Puss might well be tempted to conquer death (having so many lives under his belt) just as much as to live his life to the fullest. In other words, Puss still holds Life dear, however frivolously he is playing around Death. (Paradoxical? yeah, I'm well aware...)

The thing is, being arrogant/playful doesn't automatically discount Puss' love & passion for life. And by introducing that oppressive, larger-than-life Death Wolf into the sequel, DreamWorks has probably pushed Puss' personality a bit too far: initially, he was too big of himself, and then in the middle, he was so terrified petrified of death that he knew no better than simply running away. Multiple factors contribute to that, for sure, but still, Puss wasn't like that in pib1, was he? He was chivalrous, noble, and valued honor above all else, nowhere close to the somewhat selfish and all-abt-himself character in pibtlw, surely?

Additionally, I believe the change in style is also partly to blame? I'm not essentially against introducing that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse art style into the sequel, it's just... I find it a bit too dramatic and comical to fit in? Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is first-of-its-kind in the (possible) animation series, so whatever they did with the style would be just fine. But that's not the case with pib sequel. The 1st movie, dated from 11 year ago, embraced a realistic style. So did the Shrek series. For consistency's sake, the sequel should have followed the original style. It's a bit outrageous actually to switch style amid series. But the new style is trendy and sooo cool, oh yeah, I know, still not a big fan* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ , sorry to disappoint. And all those comical visual effects, while amplifying the emotions & drama, don't do much good closing the gap. In fact, I think the over-emphasis on drama and comedy seems to deprive the characters of their subtlety and delicacy (which btw supplemented by vast details in pib2, yet still... not quite).

Then again, I am not sure whether all these are the result of change of director/animators/head of story, or simply something lost in time--a lot had happened, you know. Just... Pity how the story could have turned out otherwise, had it been narrated by the original crew, retaining that original flavor. That's all.

*actually, what I'm saying up there is while the new style doesn't suit pib2 (the best), although somehow paradoxically I can't imagine a pibtlw in realistic style either, the visual effects in itself is still STUNNING. I've watched the latest trailer of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse twice, not without my brain buzzing after the 2ed watch lol, and I can't put in words how much effort animators have invested in this and how simply WONDERFUL it looks. It will win another Oscar, for sure.

This is a bit controversial, so I will put it under a read-more.

Anyway, haven't said this earlier but I think there is a tiny discontinuity in terms of Puss' personality between the first movie and the second. (I am not saying pibtlw isn't good, it's just... pibtlw is fantastic on its own, but to take the first movie into account, I suspect there is a slight shift in the character development of Puss.)

Puss has always been cocky and narcissistic and self-important throughout the series, but he isn't all that reckless. He isn't reckless to a point where he utterly disregards the value of life like he did in the sequel.

Puss has seen death after all. In the first movie, he witnessed Humpty giving up his life to save his hometown San Richardo. He knew what death meant.

Sure, committing suicidal acts by stuffing himself in a cannon only to prove Kitty wrong is definitely something Puss would be up to (typical of orange as well), but that's probably because he still has plenty lives to spare (he was on his fifth at that point).

Playing at adventure when the stakes are not so high is perfectly fine, but really... stamping on a boy's face (whether on purpose or not) with no apology whatsoever is surely a bit too much? Yeah, Puss is that awesome legend, that superstar that everybody looks up to, but at least some respect for life, for others?

He paid due respect in the first movie. He respected Kitty's privacy, and in return Kitty confided her tragic back story - that's basically how they ended up together in the first place. Trust and mutual respect.

And Puss wasn't too puffed-up to annoy Kitty. I mean, of course Puss is known for his irresistible feline charisma. Kitty knew it. There's a line in the first movie in which she said "I know you have a reputation with women". But after spending days, months, years together, Kitty is fed up and eventually she grows immune to it, much to Puss' dismay, which is all kinda cute. Anyway, this is beside the point.

All I am saying is Puss would never be as cautious as Kitty, (he had a, relatively speaking, secured childhood, lucky boy), but he certainly wouldn't overextend himself to a degree where he mocked death in the face???

Idk, it's been over a decade between the first movie and the second. Lots can happen. And there's Shrek (sorry, I'm not a big fan of the Shrek series but... he wasn't that full of himself in Shrek either??? *correct me if I get it wrong*)

It's just... it appears to me Puss is a bit out of character at the beginning of the sequel, but the rest is fine.

[greatghuleh]

okay i got one last rum & coke let me try to type out my issues with MCU and how they are handling Sorcerer Supreme, the title and how it effects the characters Wong and Strange. This might not be coherent.

Okay.  Like, try to look at this as more than just a joke these characters like to throw around.  Try to think of Sorcerer Supreme as a title that actually means something.  (because it does)

Let’s start here.... In the comics Doctor Strange went on for a LONG time before he was ever Sorcerer Supreme. It was “Doctor Strange Master of the Mystic Arts”. So, Stephen doesn’t NEED to be Sorcerer Supreme to have fun and interesting stories.  Get that out of the way. I, as a fan, don’t need Stephen to be the Sorcerer Supreme.  But there is WEIGHT to this title. and MCU is more and more disregarding it. 

So. look at how MCU has told this story.  

We have Stephen’s whole origin movie.  And the emphasis on him and the almost “chosen one” aspect of him coming in and becoming the Sorcerer Supreme.  because the Ancient One (Current SS) saw it.  and they KNEW he’d become the SS.  and this was SIGNIFICANT.   Tho the first movie absolutely 0-100 guns Stephen’s training from novice to kind of proficient to Sorcerer Supreme in no time flat.... this is what they did.  him Becoming Sorcerer Supreme and accepting this responsibility from the Ancient One in the first movie was significant.  and was not a thing that he or the audience were meant to take lightly.  There were SCENES that hit this very heavily.  THIS WAS A BIG DEAL. 

And alongside this, we have chosen to adapt Wong as a direct peer of Stephen’s, even a sorcerer more experienced and knowledgeable.  a *bit* like “Season One” dynamics but not quite.  Wong is a competent Sorcerer, skilled fighter, and displayed to have a very good head for knowledge.  Remember that we are also at the same time presented with a Stephen Strange that essentially has a photographic memory in his first movie. 

Stephen is Sorcerer Supreme. But hes inexperienced........ MCU missteps first here.  Now Wong’s role is to wrangle an inexperienced Sorcerer who is THE LEADER, instead of just being his protector.  We’ve essentially tried to empower Wong here but have still put him in the same position as his comic counterpart but with a SS who kind of deserves the title less.  

We see a competent and powerful SS!Strange appear in the Avengers movies with Wong playing the support in Infinity War.  Okay.  We see Strange growing into his responsibilities and taking them seriously and a Wong who doesn’t have to wrangle strange as much as work alongside him. (loved this)

then the switch happens.  End Game, Stephen gets blipped and Wong (”by default”) earns the Sorcerer Supreme Title because Stephen is essentially dead and somebody has to be SS. 

So.  here come the problems.  Wong didn’t necessarily EARN this title.  the movies keep telling us he’s only SS by “technicality” and we even see Stephen disrespect his position, as shown lightheartedly in MoM (its still disrespect), and now we see the absolute MESS MCU has made of this. 

We’ve BARELY established Doctor Strange in the MCU and as this Sorcerer Supreme before we snatch it away from him with the *snap*.  and now we have to come up with some “solution” to the problem we’ve created.  we killed the sorcerer supreme.  there has to be another.  Give it to Wong.  But now we brought Stephen back and we dont want to FOCUS on Wong, the Sorcerer Supreme, so we just start to turn the title into some little joke because we don’t know what else to do.  We have no real avenue to correct what Infinity War did.  We didn’t think this far ahead.  

You see.  Now that Wong is Sorcerer Supreme its this kind of flimsy title suddenly that is just earned on “technicality”.  He’s a character that comes and goes and somehow ends up with the busy work.  You can argue this is just kind of how Wong works, he’s more oriented this way.. He’s going to better maintain the Kamar Taj school and training and be more physically present in the “day to day”. and I hear that.  But the casualness that the title Sorcerer Supreme takes on suddenly in the MCU speaks. 

( and the first Doctor Strange movie did not joke about this title and its responsibilities and what the role needed.   its all the movies that came after that kept making it less significant as they realized Stephen Strange was farther and farther from re-obtaining it.)

and throwing out that while Stephen was Sorcerer Supreme (and portrayed as competent for a bit) doesn’t JUMP HEAD FIRST into every new thing the title unlocks as MoM revealed the SS is given access to knowledge of the Vishanti and Book of Vishanti and we learn in MoM that Strange didn’t know anything about this but Wong did??

its like, shitting on them both at the same time.  because we have a Strange who didn’t seem to bother learning all that was available to him *LOLOLOL* and a Wong who is highly disregarded by the MCU despite his knowledge and skill. 

We’ve now overselled Strange as a Sorcerer and potential SS and entirely undersold Wong.    and yes. this fucking shits on them BOTH. 

We’ve dumbed down Stephen to such a degree that he’s left for half of his OWN movie asking “What’s going on?” while we went to all that trouble to *not* make Wong an underling and even made him SS yet he’s still EXPLAINING all this shit to Stephen.  

We’ve missed the marks entirely.  

We probably would have been better off leaving their comic book dynamic almost in tact at this point and how they’ve disrespected both characters but especially their attempt at empowering Wong.  

and then, with all these changes and making Wong a SORCERER and SS, you have to sit down and ask, why aren’t the movies about Wong, Master of the Mystic Arts, Sorcerer Supreme??

they BUNGLED IT.

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 26: Brought Back (Transcript) - 25th January 2016

tw: racism, colonialism, live burial, slavery

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

No one wants to die. If the human design was scheduled for a revision, that’s one of the features that would get an overhaul. Our mortality has been an obsession since the dawn of humanity itself – humans long for ways to avoid death, or at least make it bearable. Some cultures have practically moved heaven and earth doing so. Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians built enormous stone structures in order to house their dead and ensure them a place in the afterlife. They perfected the art of embalming so that even after death, their bodies might be ready for a new existence in a new place. Death is a reality for all of us, whether we like it or not. Young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, life is one long journey down a road, and we walk until its over. Some think they see the light at the end of it all while others hope for darkness, and that’s where the mystery of it all comes in: no one knows what’s on the other side. We just know that the proverbial walk ends at some point, and maybe that’s why we spend so much time guessing at it, building story and myth and belief around this thing we can’t put our finger on. What would be easier, some say, is if we just didn’t die, if we somehow went on forever. It’s impossible, but we dream of it anyway. No one returns from the grave… do they? Most sane, well-adjusted people would say no, but stories exist that say otherwise, and these stories aren’t new. They’ve been around for thousands of years and span multiple cultures, and like their subject matter these stories simply refuse to die. One reason for that, as hard as it is to believe, is because some of those stories appear to be true. Depending on where you look, and who you ask, there are whispers of those who beat the odds. Sometimes the journey doesn’t end after all. Sometimes, the dead really do walk. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

The quintessential zombie movie, the one that all the commentators say was responsible for putting zombies on the map nearly 50 years ago, was George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The creatures that Romero brought to the big screen managed to influence generations of film makers, giving us the iconic zombie that we see today in television shows like The Walking Dead. The trouble is, Romero never used the word “zombie” to describe the creatures from his landmark film. Instead, they were “ghouls”, a creature borrowed from Arabian folklore. According to the mythology, ghouls are demons who eat the dead and, because of that, are traditionally found in graveyards. But Romero’s ghouls were not the first undead creatures to hunger for the flesh and blood of the living. Some think that honour falls to the Odyssey, the epic Greek poem written by Homer nearly 3000 years ago. In the story, there’s a scene where Odysseus needs to get some information from a long-dead prophet named Tiresias. To give the spirit strength to speak, Odysseus feeds him blood. In a lot of ways, the creatures we think of today as zombies are similar to the European tales of the revenant. They’ve gone by many names – the ancient Irish called them Neamh-Mhairbh, meaning “the undead”; in Germany they are the Wiedergänger, “the ones who walk again”; and in Nordic mythology, they’re called the draugr. The name “revenant” itself is Latin and means “the returned”. The basic idea is pretty easy to guess from that – revenants were those who were once dead, but returned to haunt and terrorize their neighbours and family. It might sound like fantasy to our modern sensibilities, but some people really did think that this could happen.

Historians in the Middle Ages wrote about revenant activity as if it were fact. One man, William of Newburgh, wrote in 1190 that, and I quote, “It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony. Were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure, laborious, and troublesome”. Newburgh goes on to wonder why the ancient writers never mentioned events like these, but doesn’t seem to take that as proof that revenants are pure fantasy. They mentioned all sorts of boring things, mundane and unimportant, so why not the unnatural and unusual? He was, of course, wrong – the ancient Greeks did have certain beliefs surrounding the dead and their ability to return to haunt the living, but to them it was much more complicated, and each revenant came back with its own unique purpose. You see, the Greco-Roman culture believed that there was a gap between the date of someone’s actual death and their intended date of death. Remember, this was a culture that believed in the Moirai – the Fates – who had a plan for everyone. So, for example, a farmer might be destined to die in his 80s from natural causes, but he might instead die in an accident at the market or in his field. People who died early, according to the legends, were doomed to wander the land of the living as spirits until the day of their intended death arrived. Still with me? Good. So, what the Greeks believed was that it was possible to control those wandering spirits – all you needed to do was make a curse tablet, something written on clay or tin or even parchment, and then bury it in the person’s grave. Like a key in the ignition of a car, this tablet would empower someone to control the wandering dead. Now, it might sound like the world’s creepiest Martha Stewart how-to project, but to the Greeks magic like this was a powerful part of their belief system. The dead weren’t really gone, and because of that they could serve a purpose. Unfortunately, that’s not an attitude that was unique to the Greeks, and in the right culture, at the right time, under the right pressure, that idea can be devastating.

In Haiti, the vast majority of the people there are genetically connected to West Africa to some degree, up to 95% according to some studies. It’s a remnant of a darker time, when slavery was legal, and millions of Africans were pulled from their homes and transported across the Atlantic to work the sugar plantations that filled the Spanish coffers. We tend to imagine African slaves being shipped to the new world with no possessions beside the clothing on their backs, but they came with their beliefs, with their customs and traditions, and with centuries of folklore and superstition. They might not have carried luggage filled with precious heirlooms, but they held the most important pieces of their identity in their minds and hearts. No one can take that away. There are a few ideas that need to be understood about this transplanted culture. First, they believed that the soul and the body were connected, but also that death could be a moment of separation between the two. Not always, but it could be – I’ll explain more about that in a moment. Second, they lived with a hatred and fear of slavery. Slavery, of course, took away their freedom, it took away their power. They no longer had control over their lives, their dreams, or even their own bodies. Whether they liked it or not, they were doomed to endure horribly difficult labour for the rest of their lives; only death would break the chains and set them free. Third, that freedom wasn’t guaranteed. While most Africans dreamed of returning to their homeland in the afterlife, there were some who wanted to get there quicker. Suicide was common in colonial Haiti, but it was also frowned upon. In fact, it was believed that those who ended their own life wouldn’t be taken back to Africa at all. Instead, they would be punished. The penalty, it was said, was eternal imprisonment inside their own body, without control or power over themselves. It was, in a sense, just like their own life. To the slaves of Haiti, hell was just more slavery, but a slavery that went on forever. These bodies and trapped souls had a name in their culture: the zombie. It was first recorded in 1872, when a linguistic scholar recorded a zombie as, and I quote, “a phantom or ghost, not infrequently heard in the southern states in nurseries and among the servants”. The name, it turns out, has African roots as well. In the Congo they use the word nzambi, which means the spirit of a dead person. It’s related to two other words that both mean “god” and “fetish” – fetish in the sense of manufacturing a thing, a creature that has been made. The walking dead, at least according to Haitian lore, are real.

What did these zombie look like? Well, thanks to Zora Neale Hurston, we have a first-hand account. Hurston was an African American author, known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and regarded as one of the pillars of the Harlem Renaissance. And it was while researching folklore during a trip to Haiti in 1936 that she encountered one. In her book Tell my Horse, Hurston recounts what happened. “I had the rare opportunity to see and touch an authentic case”, she wrote. “I listened to the broken noises in its throat.... If I had not experienced all of this in the strong sunlight of a hospital yard, I might have come away from Haiti interested but doubtful. But I saw this case of Felicia Felix-Mentor which was vouched for by the highest authority. So I know that there are Zombies in Haiti. People have been called back from the dead. The sight was dreadful. That blank face with the dead eyes. The eyelids were white all around the eyes as if it had been burned with acid. There was nothing you could say to her or get from her except by looking at her, and the sight of this wreckage was too much to endure for long”. Wreckage. I can’t think of another word with as much beauty and horror as that, in the context. Something was happening in Haiti, and the result was wreckage, lives broken and torn apart by something – but what? The assumption might be that these people had all attempted suicide, but suicide is common in many cultures, not just in Haiti. When you dig deeper, though, it’s possible to uncover the truth, and in this case, the truth is much darker than we like to believe. Zombies, it turns out, can be created.

On the night of April 30th, 1962, a man walked into Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti. He was sick and complained of body aches, a fever and, most recently, coughing fits that brought blood up from his lungs. Naturally, the medical staff were concerned, and they admitted him for tests and treatment. This man, Clairvius Narcisse, was seen by a number of medical doctors but his condition quickly deteriorated. One of his sisters, Angelina, was there at his bedside, and according to her his lips turned blue and he complained to her about a tingling sensation all over his body. But despite the hospital’s best efforts, Narcisse died the next day. Two doctors, one American and one American-trained, each confirmed his death. The man’s sister, Angelina, signed the death certificate after confirming the man’s identity. Because she couldn’t read or write, she did so by pressing her thumbprint onto the paper, and then his family began the painful process of burying their loved one and trying to move on. Death, as always, is a part of life; never a pleasant one, but a part nonetheless. Over 18 years later, in 1981, Angelina Narcisse was walking through the market in her village, something she did nearly every day. She knew the faces of each vendor, she knew the scents and the sounds that filled the space there, but when she looked down the dirt road toward the small crowd of people something frightened her, and she screamed. There, walking toward her, was her brother Clairvius. He was, of course, older now, but it was him. She would have recognised him anywhere, and when he finally approached her and named himself with a childhood nickname, any doubt she might have had melted away. What followed was a whirlwind of revelations as Clairvius told his sister what had happened to him, and it all started, he said, in the hospital room. According to him, his last moments in the bed there were dark, but fully aware. He could no longer see anyone, and he couldn’t move, but he remembered hearing the doctor pronounce him dead. He remembered the sound of his sister weeping. He even remembered the rough, cotton sheet being pulled up and over his face. But awareness continued on to his funeral, where he claimed to hear the procession. He even pointed to a scar on his face – he claimed that it was the result of one of the coffin nails cutting him. Later, the family brought in a psychiatrist, who performed a series of tests on Clairvius to see is he was a fraud, but the man passed with flying colours, answering questions that no one but Clairvius himself could have known. In an addition, over 200 friends and family members vouched for the man’s identity. This, all of them confirmed, was Clairvius Narcisse.

So, what happened to him? According to Clairvius himself, he was poisoned by his brother over a property dispute. How? He wasn’t sure, but shortly after his burial, a group of men dug up his coffin and pulled him free. That’s a thought worth locking away deep in the back of your brain, by the way: trapped inside a coffin beneath the earth, blind and paralysed, cold and scared. It’s a wonder the man didn’t go insane. The men who dug him up were led by a priest called a Bokor. The men chained Clairvius and then guided him away to a sugar plantation, where he was forced to work alongside others in a similar state of helplessness. Daily doses of a mysterious drug kept them all unable to resist or leave. According to his story, he managed to escape two years later, but fearing what his brother might do to him if he were to show up alive, he avoided returning home. It was only the news of his brother’s death many years later that coaxed him out of hiding. The story of Clairvius Narcisse has perplexed scientists and historians for decades. In the 1980s, Harvard sent an ethno-botanist named Wade Davis to investigate the mysterious drug, and the result of his trip was a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow, which would go on to be a New York Times bestseller as well as a Hollywood movie, but few agree on the conclusions. Samples of the drug that Wade collected have all been disproven, no illegal sugar plantations staffed by zombie slaves has ever been discovered, and the doctors have been accused of misreading the symptoms and prematurely declaring the man dead – there are so many doubts. To the people closest to him, though, the facts are solid. Clairvius Narcisse died, his family watched his burial in the cemetery, he was mourned and missed, and 18 years later he came back into their lives. The walking dead: medical mishap or the result of Haitian black magic? We may never know for sure.

Stories of the walking dead are everywhere these days. It’s as if we’ve traded in our obsession with extending our life and resigned to the fact that normal death, the kind where we die and stay dead, might be better. We fear death because it means the loss of control, the loss of purpose and freedom. Death, in the eyes of many people, robs us of our identity and replaces it with finality. It’s understandable, then, how slavery can be viewed through that same lens. It removes a person’s ability to make decisions for themselves – it turns them, in a sense, into nothing more than a machine for the benefit of another person. But what if there really are individuals out there, the Bokor and evil priests, who have discovered a way to manufacture their own walking dead, who have perfected the art of enslaving a man or women deeper than any slave owner might have managed before, to rob them of their very soul and bind them to an afterlife of tireless, ceaseless labour? In February of 1976, Francine Illeus was admitted to her local hospital in Haiti. She said she felt weak and light-headed. Her digestive system was failing, and her stomach ached. The doctors there treated her and then released her. Several days later, she passed away and was buried in the local graveyard. She had only been 30 years old. Three years later, Francine’s mother received a call from a friend a few miles away. She needed her to come to the local marketplace there, and said it was urgent. Francine’s mother didn’t know what the trouble was, but she made the journey as quickly as she could. Once there, she was told that a woman had been found in the market. She was emaciated, catatonic, and refused to move from where she was squatting in the corner, head down, hands laced over her face. The woman, it turned out, was Francine Illeus. Her mother brought her home and tried to help her, but Francine seemed to be gone. She was there in body, but there was very little spirit left. Subsequent doctors and psychiatrists have spent time with Francine, but with very little progress to show for it. On a whim, Francine’s mother had the coffin exhumed. She had to see for herself if this woman, little more than a walking corpse, truly was her daughter. Yes, the woman had the same scar on her forehead that her daughter had, yes, they looked alike, yes, others recognised her as Francine, but she needed to know for sure. When the men pulled the coffin out of the earth, it was heavy, too heavy, they murmured, to be empty. More doubtful by the minute, Francine’s mother asked them to open it, and when the last nail had been pulled free from the wood, the lid was lifted and cast aside. The coffin wasn’t empty after all – it was full of rocks.

[Closing statements]

[duhragonball]

The dumbest part of Terminator Genisys is also the most memorable, because it’s a title drop repeated several times in the movie.  Personally, I like this movie.   Watching T4, I couldn’t help but look forward to watching this one, because I knew it would be more fun.   But T5 was a commercial and critical failure, so I guess I’m in the minority.  I read an article yesterday that talked about how no one even understands why the movie wasn’t more successful, but I think the whole “Genisys is Skynet” thing sums it up pretty well.  I’ll unpack that under the cut.

So in the article I read, it talked about how there was a lot of “chaos” behind the scenes, but no one seems to know exactly what that “chaos” was.   I like to imagine a 67-year-old Schwarzenegger exchanging catty comments with Emilia Clarke, or maybe Matt Smith’s weird face frightened the child actors on set.  The article suggested that maybe T5′s convoluted plot might have been a source of contention, but that’s ridiculous.   Arnold was in Total Recall and Last Action Hero, and Emelia Clarke was in HBO’s Game of Thrones TV series.  They’re used to dealing with nonsense storylines.   Besides, they film these things out of order, and with a big budget sci-fi like this, half the shots would be in front of a green curtain, so they probably had no idea what the plot even was, good or bad.

I think the bigger issue is that they made a fifth movie 31 years after the first one.  How many movie franchises even make it to a fourth sequel?   James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man.   Some horror movie characrers.    There’s a decent list, sure, but they’re still pretty exceptional franchises.   Also, the thing I notice about a lot of these examples is that the rights to the characters were kept under firm control.   One of Terminator’s problems was that the rights kept shifting from one company to another, and all these legal hassles had to get ironed out before a new movie could be made.  I don’t think that hurt the quality of the films too much, but it spaced the movies out further apart.   T3 was supposed to cash in on the red-hot success of T2, except the movies came out 12 years apart.   That’s a long drought.   Long enough that a lot of potential fans would have moved on to other things. 

T4 was probably supposed to rebuild the franchise, alongside the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, but they were trying to do this without Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, or James Cameron.   But why?   T3 and T4 weren’t that big a draw, so why keep at this?   Someone thought that the rights to this series was still worth something, and if they just kept making Terminator content it would bring back the glory days of 1991.   And then the rightsholders would go bankrupt and someone else would purchase the hot potato and try all over again.

Somewhere around the late 2000′s, all these big shot movie people decided that everything needed to be a trilogy.   Maybe the success of Star Wars had something to do with that.  My biggest gripe with the 2011 Green Lantern movie was that they could have made Sinestro the main villain, but they waited until the very end of the movie to show him turning evil, all to set up a tease for the sequel.   Except there would be no sequel because the movie they made wasn’t successful enough.    So instead of putting everything they had into the one movie, they deliberately held back for the sake of two or three movies, only to sabotage the one movie they actually got to make.   T4 was supposed to be the first part of a trilogy, but it flopped, and then someone new started over with T5, which was also supposed to be the first part of a new trilogy.   Except it flopped too, which led us to T6.   I don’t know if Dark Fate is supposed to be the first part of a new trilogy, but it doesn’t matter, because now it can be part of the “Failed Trilogy” Trilogy with T4 and T5.

I think about this sort of thing a lot.   Entertainment marketing is always in your face, always trying to convince you that this new product matters, and you need to get invested in it, because it’ll be worth your time.   That’s why people were so pissed off about the final season of Game of Thrones.   They went into the series expecting everything to follow some sort of big plan with a huge payoff, and then the showrunners just improvised a bunch of stuff at the end.  So all the time they put into the early seasons just feels like a big waste.   The entertainment industry is aware of that phenomenon, but they don’t understand how to deal with it.   The solution is to make solid storytelling plans, well in advance.   The industry thinks the solution is to pretend they did that, and hope the customer believes it long enough to pay for admission.

I don’t know if the general public thinks about this stuff as much as I do.   Maybe they think about it even more, but either way, I think it’s possible to catch on to the game without being fully aware of it.   They made T5 hoping to remind people of how much they enjoyed T2, and people watched the trailer and saw Old Man Arnold and thought “This looks like that T3 movie my dad made me watch as a kid.    Pass.”    Or they were like me and thought “They made a fifth one?”   Or they thought “Where’s Christian Bale?” because they enjoyed T4 and wondered why the sequel had nothing to do with T4. 

A big problem with T5 was how they refused to call it “T5″.  They wanted to do a “reboot”, kind of like how T4 was a “reboot”, except that one didn’t do the trick, so now they were going to reboot it again.  That should have been their first clue that this wasn’t going to work, but instead they went in the opposite direction from T4.   “Okay, the new cast and new direction wasn’t what people wanted, so we’re bringing back the old characters from T1 and all the big special effects from T2, and we’re going to make nonstop callbacks to all the classic movies.   But it’s not a sequel!  No, this is a whole new story!  We’re starting fresh, which is why we cast the guy who starred in the original movie!”

Let’s be clear: Using Arnold Shwarzenegger in your Terminator reboot is like casting Adam West to star in Batman Begins.   I don’t care if he still looks good for his age, and I don’t care if he’s the only actor who can do the character justice, and I don’t care if they came up with a plot device to explain why the cyborg looks like an old man.    His age isn’t the issue.  The issue is that you keep putting the same guy in every movie and expecting people to think this is a clean break from the previous movies.   Well it isn’t.   Terminator Genisys is Terminator 5.   The screenwriters supposedly made a big whiteboard with all the timelines, and they didn’t count T3 and T4 in their “canon”, and the fans can make all the multiverse diagrams they want, but it doesn’t matter.   The only timeline in this franchise is a straight line that counts 1, 2, 3..., and this is 5. 

You can say, “Well it has to be hard reboot, because of all the things that contradict the previous movies!”   But to that I say “This whole series is about altering the past to change the future.   Literally any discontinuity can be handwaved as a change in history.   Kyle’s backstory in T5 is very different from his backstory in T4, but it doesn’t matter, because I can just say that these were alternate timelines, or it’s the same timeline that’s been mutated by all the time traveling.  Terminator Genisys embraces that concept, because Kyle’s childhood gets altered within this movie, so it’s impossible to suggest that T4 and T5 are incompatible with each other. 

And that’s what went wrong with this movie.  They were so determined to present it as multiple, contradictory solutions to the same problem.   They wanted this movie to be a reboot, but they also wanted it to be a back-to-basics approach, while at the same time they wanted to go in a bold new direction, while simultaneously making the whole thing nostalgic.   And in trying to check off all of those boxes, they wound up satisfying none of those objectives.  Audiences got confused.   If the plot didn’t confuse them, then the branding of the movie certainly did. 

The plot reads like a fan theory: The whole series has involved this cycle spanning 1984 to 2029.   Kyle leaves 2029 to travel back to 1984, and every movie happens in between those years.   Okay.   So what if someone from after 2029 sent a Terminator back in time to before 1984?  All bets are off, now, right?   John Connor won’t expect this because he only knows about things up to 2029.   And everyone has assumed that world history up to 1984 has been static.  

T5 introduces “Pops” a T-800 sent back to 1973 to protect Sarah Connor as a child.   He becomes her surrogate father, and they plot to prevent Judgment Day.    So when Kyle Reese goes back to 1984 to save her, he finds a completely different situation, because history’s already been changed. 

Back in 2029, just as Kyle leaves for his trip to the past, John Connor gets assimilated by The Borg  Doctor Who   a T-5000 Skynet.  I guess it was just waiting for him to think he won the war before making its move.   Skynet converts John into a T-3000, an experimental model that replaces and duplicates human tissue at a cellular level.    The result is a black sand monster that looks and acts like John, with all of John’s memories and personality, but now it’s loyal to Skynet.  Skynet sends T-John back in time to ensure that Judgment Day proceeds without a hitch.  

So after that, it’s basically just the standard formula from T2, 3, and 4.   The good guys have to infiltrate and destroy a building to kill Skynet, while a Terminator hunts them down.   Except this time the Terminator is John Connor, and he’s actively fighting to protect the infant Skynet.   They defeat him, blow up the building, and everything seems pretty cool, except Skynet’s still backed up in the basement, so if anyone digs it up we’ll be right back where we started.  

I don’t think this is too awfully complicated.  I mean, it’s a time travel story, like every other movie in this series.  The goofy part is that this movie tries to account for alternate timelines, and characters being aware of changes in history, and that’s a tricky thing to do.   For example, T5!Sarah is very different from the original version played by Linda Hamilton, but she knows what was supposed to happen to T1!Sarah, even though that version of Sarah no longer exists.  

And this is where that screenshot comes in.    See, Kyle has no idea what’s going on when he arrives in 1984, but he had a vision of his younger self during his time trip.   He somehow remembers things that didn’t happen to him, but his alternate timeline self.  This never gets adequately explained; Pops just says “Yeah, that’s a thing that could happen, I guess,” and everyone moves on.    The point is, Kyle sees his younger self reciting “Genisys is Skynet,” and “Judgement Day is in 2017″, and that’s how he knows when and where to go to defeat Skynet.  Sarah wants to time travel to 1997, because that’s when Judgment Day was originally supposed to happen, but Kyle convinces her that they need to go to 2017 instead, and it works.   Then at the end of the movie, they have to track down Kid Kyle and ask him to recite the same message over and over again.   That way, Kyle can hear it when he makes the trip from 2029 to 1984.  

And... that’s pretty dumb.   The whole movie insists that everything has changed and nothing in history is static.   We never find out who sent Pops to 1973, or who sent the T-1000 to kill Sarah and Kyle, but the point is that history got completely overhauled because of these things.   And yet, Kyle seems to think that he can arrange a predestination paradox to ensure his victory over Skynet.   Why would that work?  John was trying to arrange a predestination paradox to ensure his victory over Skynet, and then T-John was trying to arrange another predestination paradox to ensure Skynet’s victory over him.  But none of it worked because history is apparently too fluid for that to matter.   It worked in the earlier movies (or at least it seemed to work) because those films didn’t push too hard on the idea of changing history.    John and Skynet could nudge fate, but they could never push things too far.  T5 declares all bets are off, but it keeps laying odds anyway. 

I think that self-contradiction is what bothered movie-goers in 2015.   It’s a reboot starring the old guy who was in the first movie, and it tells a story of altered timelines while also insisting that certain events can be made permanent.   So people leave the theater wondering what the hell the point was supposed to be, and word-of-mouth convinces audiences to steer clear.   There’s also a lot of plot danglers in the movie, like the question of who sent Pops back to 1973, or how he knows so damn much, but the answers were left for a future movie, one that never got made.   I think audiences in 2015 knew that they’d never get their answers in T6.   They knew T5 had nothing to do with T4, and they didn’t trust the studio to follow through on any of this. 

Oh, and “Genisys” is just the name of a fictional operating system, one that promised to do a lot of the same things Skynet was designed to do in T3.   It just had a different name, probably to keep nosy time travelers from finding it until it was too late.  T-John didn’t count on Kyle having that weird vision during his trip.  Like so many other elements of T5, the title was just slapping a new coat of paint on an old idea.   It looked mysterious and intriguing on a movie poster, but you go to the theater and find out it’s just Skynet again, and we know how Skynet operates by this point.   

With all that said, I do like this movie in spite of the marketing arrogance that fueled it.   They wanted to fix up the franchise and failed, but the movie itself is fun to watch.   T4 takes a friggin’ hour to get started, but T5 opens with a big future battle with lots of robots, and then you see two T-800′s wrassle, and then you see a T-1000 kick ass until it gets corroded to death with hydrochloric acid.  John turning into a T-3000 is kind of bizarre to me, but he works as a villain, and his black sand body makes for some cool effects.   Magnets seem to be his main weakness, and the movie does a lot of cool stuff with that.   There’s also a part in the hospital fight where he whacks off the valve on a pressurized gas cylinder, and it flies all over the place like a rocket.   And there’s a helicopter chase.   I’m not hard to please.  

I think the big problem with T4 was that most of its action sequences were too grounded in reality.   There are parts of T4 that look like a present-day war movie, or some other sci-fi film, like Independence Day, or Starship Troopers.  The Terminator movies were all about cyborgs hitting each other with present-day stuff, like trucks and toilets and school buses.   T4 can’t deliver on that, but T5 can, which is why I like 5 better than 4.  It also does a better job at holding my attention.   Both movies use the same twist and reveal it at the same time.   Marcus Wright finds out he’s a cyborg about halfway into T4, and John Connor reveals himself to be a T-3000 about halfway into T5.    But when T5 makes its play, I feel like I’ve seen a lot more stuff happen up to that point.   It helps that they didn’t give away the Evil John twist in the trailer. 

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Assassin’s Creed: What the Netflix Series Can Learn From Castlevania and The Witcher

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Netflix recently announced its partnership with Ubisoft to develop multiple series based on the Assassin’s Creed franchise. The scope of this deal could eventually include both live-action and animated series, but the partnership will start with the production of a live-action adaptation of the best-selling games. 

While there aren’t many official details available at this time regarding what parts of the Assassin’s Creed franchise these shows will cover, expectations are unusually high for these projects. Why? Well, Netflix happens to have produced two of the more notable adaptations with video game ties in recent memory: Castlevania and The Witcher, which was actually based on the books but came on the heels of the games’ success and borrowed elements from the CD Projekt Red titles. 

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few of the most important lessons that the Assassin’s Creed Netflix adaptations can learn from the success that Castlevania and The Witcher have enjoyed thus far. 

Assassin’s Creed Shouldn’t Take Things So Seriously

There’s this weird thing that happens with some video game adaptations we’ll call the “respect reach.” Maybe it’s because there’s still this lingering perception that video games aren’t respected by wide audiences, but many video game adaptations just take things too seriously. 

One of the first things that jumped out to me about Netflix’s Castlevania is the way that the show quickly established its sense of humor. Even The Witcher’s moments of levity lead to some of its best scenes. By keeping things light when possible, those shows managed to entertain their audiences first while setting up the next dramatic reveal. 

There’s a sense of humor in the best Assassin’s Creed games that this upcoming adaptation could very well use to distinguish itself from the Assassin’s Creed movie (and other, lesser adaptations out there) so long as the showrunners aren’t too concerned with needing to be taken seriously. 

Assassin’s Creed Shouldn’t Be Afraid of More “Mature” Content

The Assassin’s Creed series typically earns a “Mature” rating from the ESRB, but the game aren’t necessarily known for their violence and sexually explicit content. The rating is more of a technicality necessitated by the nature of the game’s assassination mechanics and bloody combat. For what it’s worth, Castlevania and The Witcher both feature more “mature” content such as language, violence, and even nudity. Those elements don’t inherently make a show good (just as the lack of them doesn’t make a show bad), but it’s interesting that the two adaptations share this quality. 

Maybe the lesson is that Assassin’s Creed needs to be willing to incorporate that kind of content if it all helps the pacing, storytelling, characters, or other key production elements. This kind of goes hand in hand with keeping things light, as Assassin’s Creed needs to make sure it has the creative freedom needed to ensure its most dramatic moments land as intended. 

Assassins’ Creed Needs to Keep Things Simple (At First)

Part of the reason that the first season of Castlevania worked as well as it did was that it offered a relatively short (four episodes) setup of bigger things to come. Conversely, some of The Witcher’s stumbles can be attributed to its complicated multiple timeline structure that often struggled to cleanly introduce a large cast of characters and effectively establish its world’s mythology.

There’s a value to keeping things simple that feels especially relevant to the Assassin’s Creed series. The Assassin’s Creed games feature a complicated mythology that even some people who’ve played every game in the franchise struggle to keep up with, especially when you bring in the present-day sci-fi lore that serves as a gateway to the historical stuff.

Those complicated mythology story beats will come in time, but when Assassin’s Creed debuts, it should focus on its characters, world, and style before trying to dive deeper. 

Assassin’s Creed Shouldn’t be Too Worried About Sticking to the Games’ Stories

Speaking of the Assassin’s Creed stories, there’s a strong argument to be made that the upcoming Netflix series shouldn’t be too concerned with sticking close to them. 

Not only do the Assassin’s Creed games sometimes get bogged down in the series’ mythology, but they span hundreds of years and incorporate hundreds of characters. One of the great things about the newer games is that they get the chance to do their own thing (to a certain degree) beyond the present-day Desmond Miles story established in the first few games. 

As we saw in Castlevania, it’s sometimes valuable for writers to take what they need from a series while ultimately using those aspects as the basis for a tale of their own design. In fact, we wouldn’t even mind if every Assassin’s Creed season told an anthology story set during a different era, unrestricted from a convoluted frame story about the end of the world. 

Assassin’s Creed Needs to Feel Like a Big Production 

One of the things that immediately separated The Witcher from both other Netflix series and other video game adaptations is the investment that Netflix made in its production quality. Netflix has invested big money in its series before, but The Witcher showed every dollar spent in the quality of its production rather than on the actors and directors attached to it. 

It’s hard to imagine how Assassin’s Creed will succeed if it doesn’t walk a similar path. Most of the Assassin’s Creed games benefit from larger budgets that typically go towards crafting a visually stunning recreation of a certain time period. If Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed tries to save a few dollars in the wrong places, it’s immediately going to look like the half-hearted effort some fans fear it could ultimately be. 

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A big budget doesn’t guarantee that Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed will be a quality show. However, a big budget does afford the showrunners the space they need to figure out how this adaptation is going to fit into a rapidly evolving media landscape that’s certainly not lacking in competition.

The post Assassin’s Creed: What the Netflix Series Can Learn From Castlevania and The Witcher appeared first on Den of Geek.

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New from Every Movie Has a Lesson by Don Shanahan: CAPSULE REVIEWS: The 2020 Academy Award nominees for Best Animated Short

(Image: weliveentertainment.com)

They may not get much attention when they’re not made by Disney and not appearing in front of their animated tentpoles, but the artistry and creativity is alive and well in the field of animated short films.  This year’s five nominees for the 92nd Academy Award are some of the most stark and unique entries I’ve seen in the years I’ve been able to cover the annual best. Below are my capsule reviews of this year’s final five for Best Animated Short.  Naturally, my niche of life lessons are included. Like the documentaries and live-action shorts in other Oscar categories, the animated films are presently collected in a single program to watch on the big screen at Landmark Theatre locations nationwide, including the three venues here in Chicago. 

HAIR LOVE

The most modern one, per se, of the field is this computer-animated chestnut from director (and Chicago native) Matthew A. Cherry.  This gem has climbed from a 2017 Kickstarter campaign to receiving its big screen chance in front of The Angry Birds Movie 2 last year and now an Oscar nomination.  It playfully and poignantly shines love on the entanglement and empowerment that comes from hairstyling black hair.

A precocious young girl with voluminous hair is scrolling through YouTube and watching instructional videos of a stylist (voiced by recent Oscar nominations reader Issa Rae of the upcoming film The Photograph) specializing in taming the untamed.  With the nodding consultations of her trusted pet cat, she lands on a look she wants.  When she tries it herself, it’s a disaster, much to the chagrin of her outmatched father.  Hair may be a woman’s specialty, but this dad become determined to pull off the look himself for his daughter and win the battle.

BEST LESSON: “MAKE THE JOURNEY WITH A LITTLE BIT OF WORK AND A WHOLE LOT OF LOVE”— This lesson is the send-off mantra of the featured YouTuber and it channels perfectly the adversity and attachment in the hair-styling and bonding process of Hair Love.  Connect the work to patience and connect the love to shared quality time with family.  The woman is wise and means more than we know to this father and daughter. Be ready for a crescendo.  

Hair Love elevates from a shared father-daughter experience to even bigger family swells.  It also celebrates a unique black essence that not only brings people together, but lifts self-esteem.  It’s skill. It’s status. It’s self-efficacy. Matthew A. Cherry nails all that with a beautiful and vibrant presentation. 

DAUGHTER

So often with even the best clay work from the likes of Aardman and Laika, we feel as though we’re watching a really nice diorama being shot.  Settings stay more static and fixed at wide shots to allow us audiences to soak in all the artistry. With that in mind, it impressive when something perceived as rudimentary can marvel our senses with underlying sophistication.  That is the effect of Daughter which takes intentionally smeared and crude sculpted claymation and lets the camera and audio foley swoop with incredible dexterity and detail.

A rescued bird from a window becomes a visual metaphor for a complicated and strained father-daughter relationship in this short film.  The father lies ill in the hospital while heart monitors break the silence between him and his daughter shuffling around the periphery of the room.  Memories manifest within the girl of other times where she tried to show affection and distant dreams where she imagined a different life, mask and all.

BEST LESSON: SAY SOMETHING— Plenty of animated shorts employ the dialogue-free style to let the visuals do the talking.  While that is indeed the case with Daughter, it’s also a bigger intentional meaning between the family members and their difficulties.  The silence between them is unhealthy and cannot be sustained. There is a rightful longing to say something and speak your feelings before the chances end and the people that need to hear them are gone.

All of these elements are masterfully created in this medium by Daria Kashcheeva, who wears the hats of writer, director, art director, DP, piano player, and more for this film.  The camera depth of these scenes is remarkable. The characters are commonly shot in close-up showing the literal and figurative imperfections within a sensory soundscape that is encapsulating.  Of the nominees, Daughter is the heaviest hitter for story and most challenging in design.  Bravo here!

KITBULL

Kitbull is the requisite Pixar entry for the Academy Award.  This cutie pie comes from their new SparkShorts division.  Written and directed by Rosana Sullivan, Kitball boasts, and pleasantly so, traditional 2D animated brilliance, which counts as a nice stylistic change of pace from the CGI juggernaut.

In platonic “Bennifer” name-combination fashion, this short features a little stray black kitten befriending a muscular white pitbull in their shared urban landscape of San Francisco’s Mission District.  The kitten makes its home inside a cardboard box behind a barbed-wire-strewn trash heap next to a garage. The big pooch is chained to a doghouse right outside the door. Both have their fears. Both have their flaws.  Both have their scars when it comes to trusting outside sources, even generosity given to them.

BEST LESSON: HELP A NEIGHBOR— This lesson could be called help a stranger, but it’s bigger than that when the stranger lives in proximity to you.  The cat witnesses the hardships of the pitbull and vice versa for the gruff dog watching the alleycat. They have their differences and their fears, but they show kindness and care to help someone in need.  It’s basic, beautiful, and effective for an animated short, which is par for the Pixar course.

This is Sullivan’s first directorial effort after years as a Pixar character designer for the likes of Piper, Incredibles 2, and The Good Dinosaur.  Without dialogue, the characters speak volumes with their body language and acts from every purr and pant to twitch and trot.  Animal lovers will find great joy. Likewise, there is much to be impressed by when it comes to the nearly abstract designs that lessen the tendency to hyper-detail in favor of letting the themes paint the picture.  Short or not, that is true to the fabled Pixar Punch.

SISTER

It’s a natural wish for a young child to want a companion at home.  Desiring a brother or sister brings the equally natural result of future sibling rivalry.  Ask any big brother or big sister and they’ll tell you how the ups outnumber the downs of that relationship.  Throw in some cultural notes and you have the lovely Annie Award nominee Sister from Chinese animator Siqi Song.

Save for a few items of colorful adornment, Sister is shot in black and white with animated stop-motion fabric dolls.  In dated chapter markers spanning the early 1990s, the narrator is the big brother observing the growth of his little sister.  Spanning the first five years of this little one’s life, the brother simultaneously celebrates and laments the turbulent life of getting along with a petulant little one.

BEST LESSON: WHAT SIBLINGS ADD TO LIFE— Those savvy in their international history will see those timestamps and know of the dreaded One-Child Policy that operated in China during that time.  Siblings were rare, frowned upon, and often, through sad and unfortunate measures, prevented. There are millions within multiple generations in China who never got to experience the closeness, both jovial and contentious, of having a sibling and the lift they bring to growing up.  That societal factor looms large over the truth and setting of Sister.      

With that gravity in mind, the woulda-coulda-shoulda moments in Sister teeter gracefully between funny and touching.  Existence becomes the most powerful emotion of Song’s lovely and crushing short.  Dedicated to the siblings “we” never had, the animation is a strong testament of remembrance to a time of lost experiences.  

MEMORABLE

(Image: dia.org)

Texture is such a trait of all of these nominated animated shorts.  Most use it within their art to stand out or define purpose. Memorable incorporates its unique physical texture into its act as a thematic tool of questioning the clues and differences between dreams and memories.  This may start as a head-scratcher for many, but will soon hit with poignancy. 

Elaborate opening credits creep over the grooves, ruts, and cracks of what will be the painted clay that makes these French environments and characters. In surreal ways, common objects around Louis (voiced by Andre Wilms of Le Havre) and his wife Michelle (voiced by Dominique Reymond) begin to defy their shapes and normal states. Time too seems to hop in these moments. Is the forgetful man seeing things or is it the whole world that has started to bend? 

BEST LESSON: WHAT YOU RECOGNIZE AND WHAT YOU DON’T— If what Louis is experiencing in Memorable are the hazy flashes of a neuro-degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, then recognition is the challenge. The spirit and humor of a person may not change, but memorized matches and connections will fail, making that personality out of touch and out of place from where it used to be. 

The animation shifts are stunning in Memorable. With each passing action written and directed by Bruno Collet in his sixth short, the main character’s perception of both himself and his surroundings become subtly more dilapidated with the mounting cognitive loss. It’s a striking way of presenting the human and mental effects of such ailments.  Get your tissues ready.

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Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid http://www.nature-business.com/nature-we-need-answers-hurricane-michael-leaves-florida-residents-desperate-for-aid/

Nature

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People salvaged supplies from a destroyed business the day after Hurricane Michael made landfall.CreditCreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — It was two days after Hurricane Michael, and Eddie Foster was pushing his mother in a wheelchair down a thoroughly smashed street, his face creased with a concentrated dose of the frustration and fear that has afflicted much of the Florida Panhandle since the brutal storm turned its coast to rubble.

He was in a working-class neighborhood called Millville, where many residents said they were becoming desperate for even basic necessities. Mr. Foster, 60, and his 99-year-old mother had no car, no electricity. The food had spoiled in his refrigerator. The storm had ripped off large sections of his roof. He had no working plumbing to flush with. No water to drink. And as of Friday afternoon, he had seen no sign of government help.

“What can I do?” he said. “I’m not angry. I just want some help.”

[Follow live updates on Hurricane Michael’s aftermath]

This was the problem that government officials were racing to solve on Friday, as desperation grew in and around Panama City under a burning sun. Long lines formed for gas and food, and across the battered coastline, those who were poor, trapped and isolated sent out pleas for help.

It would take time to reach everyone. Yet the Panama City area, one of those hit hardest by Hurricane Michael, grew into a whirring hive of activity on Friday, as box trucks, military personnel, and rescue and aid workers flowed in from surrounding counties and states, struggling to fix communications and electrical systems that officials said were almost totally demolished.

The death toll from the Category 4 storm rose to 16, stretching as far north as Virginia, where five people died, and it was expected to climb higher as search-and-rescue crews fanned out through rubble that in some cases spanned entire blocks. The toll also included the potential of millions of dollars in damage to aircraft, which were left behind during the storm at Tyndall Air Force Base.

[Read here: Tyndall Air Force Base a “complete loss.”]

For those waiting for relief supplies or the ability to return to their homes, Brock Long, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, counseled patience. “Bottom line, it was one of the most powerful storms the country has seen since 1851,” he said. “It’s going to be a long time before they can get back.”

In Panama City, people pitched in when they could. Some even opened stores that lacked electricity: A Sonny’s barbecue restaurant fired up its smokers in the parking lot, feeding many who gathered in the late morning in a line that was at least 100 grateful residents long.

Image

Volunteers assisted members of the National Guard as they distributed water and food to residents in Quincy, Fla., on Friday.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times

But in a city of unusable toilets and iffy cellular service — where nearly every street seemed like a set from a disaster movie — tensions were occasionally high as people waited for their first hot meal since Tuesday night. Before noon, a shouting match broke out between two men waiting for their barbecue plates. “Stop it!” a server admonished them at the top of his lungs. “Now we’re all being kind — got it?”

But the line was also full of hugs and tearful reunions, and across the broken region, residents exhibited selflessness and sweat as they began the long slog of putting it all back together. Crews had been able to clear some of the power lines and fallen trees from the main roads of Panama City, but many other areas were still choked with a riot of debris and limbs. Search-and-rescue teams continued to check neighborhoods in coastal Bay County, and Mark Bowen, the county’s emergency services chief, said that officials had estimates of the dead, but would not release them until the work was done.

“We have missing people, O.K.?” he said. “Are they missing because their loved ones can’t contact them, or are they missing because they perished in the storm? We just don’t know that.”

Shellshocked residents continued to stream from their homes, mostly focused on the first steps of rebuilding — finding help, from government assistance to shelters. But for some, the search proved frustrating: Solid answers were scarce, particularly in remote parts of the Panhandle. Some turned to word of mouth, and that was equally unreliable.

“I just keep looking for steeples and long lines, but I haven’t found much so far,” said Lynette Cordeno, 54, a retired Army sergeant who hoped to find a meal service somewhere. “We are walking around with no internet, no cell service, no way to even ask for help.”

Ms. Cordeno had gathered with others outside the Mr. Mart convenience store in nearby Callaway, one of many stores big and small that were rumored to be opening Friday. Some came barefoot and some in storm-battered cars. They came for room-temperature water and beer, charcoal and candy — and critical information.

“This is the working-class part of town. We didn’t have much before and now we have even less,” said Kevin Deeth, who lives four blocks away in a trailer missing jagged chunks of roof. “Now we need answers so we can try to start over.”

At his home, heaps of clothing and toys, now a sodden mess, are everywhere. Parts of the walls disintegrated, coating the living room like a first snow. Mr. Deeth saved some family photos and his children’s framed school awards, but not much else.

For now, Mr. Deeth, his wife and four school-age children are staying with a friend. He said Friday was his son’s 13th birthday, and then he began to cry.

Video

Emily Basham’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Michael. Now the mother of three is wondering how to start over.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Overwhelmed. I guess that is what you would call it,” he said. “I have no idea what to do,” he said. “I am lost.”

The story and the sentiment were common, and they were not likely to abate soon. Mr. Bowen, the emergency services chief, warned on Friday that the area was in for a bout of “long-term uncomfortable, so people kind of need to get into that mind-set.”

Emergency planning experts said the government had not necessarily fallen short in its response so far.

“This is what disasters look like,” said W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA chief. “Sit tight, help’s coming, but it’s not going to be there 12 hours after the storm passes.”

Likewise, those knowledgeable about disaster planning dismissed the idea that the rapid intensification of the storm had caught emergency responders off guard. Storm preparations, they said, are mostly driven by the population of a threatened region, not the precise dimensions of a storm.

“Once you get to a certain point in this part of the coast, it’s just going to be bad,” Mr. Fugate said.

Appearing Friday afternoon in Marianna, an inland community, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said that state officials were “constantly reaching out to see what we can do to be helpful.”

“We have put out fuel, water, food in all of the impacted areas,” the governor said. “Where we can get there by truck, we’re getting there by truck.”

Officials in Panama City insisted throughout the day that crucial short-term help would soon arrive, even though the logistics, given the blocked roads and failed communications systems, were daunting. By afternoon, they had released a list of nine Bay County feeding sites.

Video

Hurricane Michael’s powerful winds and rains swept across six states, killing more than a dozen people, causing flash flooding and leaving at least one million without power.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times

Some local officials were worried about the possibility of social unrest in the areas where the poorest residents had not stocked up with multiple days’ worth of supplies. A short drive from Mr. Foster’s home, looting had been seen Thursday at a half-wrecked dollar store, and while some people came for things they wanted, most had come for things they needed — drinks and food.

On Friday, in a sign of the change that could soon roll out across the city, the store was being guarded by military personnel in a pair of Humvees.

Officials said that the Red Cross and religious volunteers were preparing ambitious feeding programs. The Florida National Guard was moving through neighborhoods with food and water. Soon, officials said, the region would be dotted with canteens and “pods” to allow people to drive up for food and water.

In the meantime, with cell service and internet hovering between spotty and nonexistent, residents navigated the ruined landscape with what scraps of information they could. Charlotte Jordan, 68, said that she heard about the free barbecue from her daughter, who called her from Tampa.

Elsewhere in line, Tracey Simmons, 42, was angrier. “They’re doing us like they did New Orleans,” she said. Ms. Simmons, an educator, said she was worried that poorer residents would eventually be moved out, much as they were after Hurricane Katrina. For the time being, she was frustrated by the complicated game of survival that was playing out.

“We know that people are coming,” she said of relief crews, “but where are they?”

Radio personalities played an important role in filling the gap — for those who had radios. One station broadcast a sort of improvised community bulletin board, reading out listeners’ news of store openings, offers of help, people in trouble, and people exasperated:

“Wayne’s Grocery has ice.”

“In the city of Fountain, Fla., can someone get water and formula to a baby?”

“My grandmother needs her meds and she needs her road cleared.”

“We should sue the cellphone companies.”

“You have to be patient, folks,” the host, Shane Collins, advised at one point. “We have been through a major disaster and it takes time.”

It came as a relief to many when a Sam’s Club opened Friday morning, under the watchful eye of National Guard troops. But like so much here, it was also a pain: On one side of the massive building, a two-hour line of sweaty shoppers pushing empty carts snaked through the parking lot. The shoppers were allowed in about 10 at a time, and had few fresh goods to choose from. Most walked out with cases of bottled water, snack food, and the occasional generator.

On the other side, the line for gas was even longer.

“I’m angry,” said Michael Chism, 30, on his third hour of waiting to fill up. “But there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the hurricane that ravaged towns in the Florida Panhandle this week. It was Hurricane Michael, not Matthew.

Richard Fausset reported from Springfield, Fla., Alan Blinder from Atlanta and Audra D. S. Burch from Panama City, Fla. Christina Caron and Matthew Haag contributed reporting from New York, and Patricia Mazzei from Marianna, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

In Storm-Stricken Florida, Desperate for Necessities

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/looting-stores-hurricane-michael.html |

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid, in 2018-10-13 11:41:48

[algarithmblognumber]

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid http://www.nature-business.com/nature-we-need-answers-hurricane-michael-leaves-florida-residents-desperate-for-aid/

Nature

Image

People salvaged supplies from a destroyed business the day after Hurricane Michael made landfall.CreditCreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — It was two days after Hurricane Michael, and Eddie Foster was pushing his mother in a wheelchair down a thoroughly smashed street, his face creased with a concentrated dose of the frustration and fear that has afflicted much of the Florida Panhandle since the brutal storm turned its coast to rubble.

He was in a working-class neighborhood called Millville, where many residents said they were becoming desperate for even basic necessities. Mr. Foster, 60, and his 99-year-old mother had no car, no electricity. The food had spoiled in his refrigerator. The storm had ripped off large sections of his roof. He had no working plumbing to flush with. No water to drink. And as of Friday afternoon, he had seen no sign of government help.

“What can I do?” he said. “I’m not angry. I just want some help.”

[Follow live updates on Hurricane Michael’s aftermath]

This was the problem that government officials were racing to solve on Friday, as desperation grew in and around Panama City under a burning sun. Long lines formed for gas and food, and across the battered coastline, those who were poor, trapped and isolated sent out pleas for help.

It would take time to reach everyone. Yet the Panama City area, one of those hit hardest by Hurricane Michael, grew into a whirring hive of activity on Friday, as box trucks, military personnel, and rescue and aid workers flowed in from surrounding counties and states, struggling to fix communications and electrical systems that officials said were almost totally demolished.

The death toll from the Category 4 storm rose to 16, stretching as far north as Virginia, where five people died, and it was expected to climb higher as search-and-rescue crews fanned out through rubble that in some cases spanned entire blocks. The toll also included the potential of millions of dollars in damage to aircraft, which were left behind during the storm at Tyndall Air Force Base.

[Read here: Tyndall Air Force Base a “complete loss.”]

For those waiting for relief supplies or the ability to return to their homes, Brock Long, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, counseled patience. “Bottom line, it was one of the most powerful storms the country has seen since 1851,” he said. “It’s going to be a long time before they can get back.”

In Panama City, people pitched in when they could. Some even opened stores that lacked electricity: A Sonny’s barbecue restaurant fired up its smokers in the parking lot, feeding many who gathered in the late morning in a line that was at least 100 grateful residents long.

Image

Volunteers assisted members of the National Guard as they distributed water and food to residents in Quincy, Fla., on Friday.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times

But in a city of unusable toilets and iffy cellular service — where nearly every street seemed like a set from a disaster movie — tensions were occasionally high as people waited for their first hot meal since Tuesday night. Before noon, a shouting match broke out between two men waiting for their barbecue plates. “Stop it!” a server admonished them at the top of his lungs. “Now we’re all being kind — got it?”

But the line was also full of hugs and tearful reunions, and across the broken region, residents exhibited selflessness and sweat as they began the long slog of putting it all back together. Crews had been able to clear some of the power lines and fallen trees from the main roads of Panama City, but many other areas were still choked with a riot of debris and limbs. Search-and-rescue teams continued to check neighborhoods in coastal Bay County, and Mark Bowen, the county’s emergency services chief, said that officials had estimates of the dead, but would not release them until the work was done.

“We have missing people, O.K.?” he said. “Are they missing because their loved ones can’t contact them, or are they missing because they perished in the storm? We just don’t know that.”

Shellshocked residents continued to stream from their homes, mostly focused on the first steps of rebuilding — finding help, from government assistance to shelters. But for some, the search proved frustrating: Solid answers were scarce, particularly in remote parts of the Panhandle. Some turned to word of mouth, and that was equally unreliable.

“I just keep looking for steeples and long lines, but I haven’t found much so far,” said Lynette Cordeno, 54, a retired Army sergeant who hoped to find a meal service somewhere. “We are walking around with no internet, no cell service, no way to even ask for help.”

Ms. Cordeno had gathered with others outside the Mr. Mart convenience store in nearby Callaway, one of many stores big and small that were rumored to be opening Friday. Some came barefoot and some in storm-battered cars. They came for room-temperature water and beer, charcoal and candy — and critical information.

“This is the working-class part of town. We didn’t have much before and now we have even less,” said Kevin Deeth, who lives four blocks away in a trailer missing jagged chunks of roof. “Now we need answers so we can try to start over.”

At his home, heaps of clothing and toys, now a sodden mess, are everywhere. Parts of the walls disintegrated, coating the living room like a first snow. Mr. Deeth saved some family photos and his children’s framed school awards, but not much else.

For now, Mr. Deeth, his wife and four school-age children are staying with a friend. He said Friday was his son’s 13th birthday, and then he began to cry.

Video

Emily Basham’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Michael. Now the mother of three is wondering how to start over.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Overwhelmed. I guess that is what you would call it,” he said. “I have no idea what to do,” he said. “I am lost.”

The story and the sentiment were common, and they were not likely to abate soon. Mr. Bowen, the emergency services chief, warned on Friday that the area was in for a bout of “long-term uncomfortable, so people kind of need to get into that mind-set.”

Emergency planning experts said the government had not necessarily fallen short in its response so far.

“This is what disasters look like,” said W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA chief. “Sit tight, help’s coming, but it’s not going to be there 12 hours after the storm passes.”

Likewise, those knowledgeable about disaster planning dismissed the idea that the rapid intensification of the storm had caught emergency responders off guard. Storm preparations, they said, are mostly driven by the population of a threatened region, not the precise dimensions of a storm.

“Once you get to a certain point in this part of the coast, it’s just going to be bad,” Mr. Fugate said.

Appearing Friday afternoon in Marianna, an inland community, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said that state officials were “constantly reaching out to see what we can do to be helpful.”

“We have put out fuel, water, food in all of the impacted areas,” the governor said. “Where we can get there by truck, we’re getting there by truck.”

Officials in Panama City insisted throughout the day that crucial short-term help would soon arrive, even though the logistics, given the blocked roads and failed communications systems, were daunting. By afternoon, they had released a list of nine Bay County feeding sites.

Video

Hurricane Michael’s powerful winds and rains swept across six states, killing more than a dozen people, causing flash flooding and leaving at least one million without power.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times

Some local officials were worried about the possibility of social unrest in the areas where the poorest residents had not stocked up with multiple days’ worth of supplies. A short drive from Mr. Foster’s home, looting had been seen Thursday at a half-wrecked dollar store, and while some people came for things they wanted, most had come for things they needed — drinks and food.

On Friday, in a sign of the change that could soon roll out across the city, the store was being guarded by military personnel in a pair of Humvees.

Officials said that the Red Cross and religious volunteers were preparing ambitious feeding programs. The Florida National Guard was moving through neighborhoods with food and water. Soon, officials said, the region would be dotted with canteens and “pods” to allow people to drive up for food and water.

In the meantime, with cell service and internet hovering between spotty and nonexistent, residents navigated the ruined landscape with what scraps of information they could. Charlotte Jordan, 68, said that she heard about the free barbecue from her daughter, who called her from Tampa.

Elsewhere in line, Tracey Simmons, 42, was angrier. “They’re doing us like they did New Orleans,” she said. Ms. Simmons, an educator, said she was worried that poorer residents would eventually be moved out, much as they were after Hurricane Katrina. For the time being, she was frustrated by the complicated game of survival that was playing out.

“We know that people are coming,” she said of relief crews, “but where are they?”

Radio personalities played an important role in filling the gap — for those who had radios. One station broadcast a sort of improvised community bulletin board, reading out listeners’ news of store openings, offers of help, people in trouble, and people exasperated:

“Wayne’s Grocery has ice.”

“In the city of Fountain, Fla., can someone get water and formula to a baby?”

“My grandmother needs her meds and she needs her road cleared.”

“We should sue the cellphone companies.”

“You have to be patient, folks,” the host, Shane Collins, advised at one point. “We have been through a major disaster and it takes time.”

It came as a relief to many when a Sam’s Club opened Friday morning, under the watchful eye of National Guard troops. But like so much here, it was also a pain: On one side of the massive building, a two-hour line of sweaty shoppers pushing empty carts snaked through the parking lot. The shoppers were allowed in about 10 at a time, and had few fresh goods to choose from. Most walked out with cases of bottled water, snack food, and the occasional generator.

On the other side, the line for gas was even longer.

“I’m angry,” said Michael Chism, 30, on his third hour of waiting to fill up. “But there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the hurricane that ravaged towns in the Florida Panhandle this week. It was Hurricane Michael, not Matthew.

Richard Fausset reported from Springfield, Fla., Alan Blinder from Atlanta and Audra D. S. Burch from Panama City, Fla. Christina Caron and Matthew Haag contributed reporting from New York, and Patricia Mazzei from Marianna, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

In Storm-Stricken Florida, Desperate for Necessities

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/looting-stores-hurricane-michael.html |

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid, in 2018-10-13 11:41:48

[magicwebsitesnet]

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid http://www.nature-business.com/nature-we-need-answers-hurricane-michael-leaves-florida-residents-desperate-for-aid/

Nature

Image

People salvaged supplies from a destroyed business the day after Hurricane Michael made landfall.CreditCreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — It was two days after Hurricane Michael, and Eddie Foster was pushing his mother in a wheelchair down a thoroughly smashed street, his face creased with a concentrated dose of the frustration and fear that has afflicted much of the Florida Panhandle since the brutal storm turned its coast to rubble.

He was in a working-class neighborhood called Millville, where many residents said they were becoming desperate for even basic necessities. Mr. Foster, 60, and his 99-year-old mother had no car, no electricity. The food had spoiled in his refrigerator. The storm had ripped off large sections of his roof. He had no working plumbing to flush with. No water to drink. And as of Friday afternoon, he had seen no sign of government help.

“What can I do?” he said. “I’m not angry. I just want some help.”

[Follow live updates on Hurricane Michael’s aftermath]

This was the problem that government officials were racing to solve on Friday, as desperation grew in and around Panama City under a burning sun. Long lines formed for gas and food, and across the battered coastline, those who were poor, trapped and isolated sent out pleas for help.

It would take time to reach everyone. Yet the Panama City area, one of those hit hardest by Hurricane Michael, grew into a whirring hive of activity on Friday, as box trucks, military personnel, and rescue and aid workers flowed in from surrounding counties and states, struggling to fix communications and electrical systems that officials said were almost totally demolished.

The death toll from the Category 4 storm rose to 16, stretching as far north as Virginia, where five people died, and it was expected to climb higher as search-and-rescue crews fanned out through rubble that in some cases spanned entire blocks. The toll also included the potential of millions of dollars in damage to aircraft, which were left behind during the storm at Tyndall Air Force Base.

[Read here: Tyndall Air Force Base a “complete loss.”]

For those waiting for relief supplies or the ability to return to their homes, Brock Long, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, counseled patience. “Bottom line, it was one of the most powerful storms the country has seen since 1851,” he said. “It’s going to be a long time before they can get back.”

In Panama City, people pitched in when they could. Some even opened stores that lacked electricity: A Sonny’s barbecue restaurant fired up its smokers in the parking lot, feeding many who gathered in the late morning in a line that was at least 100 grateful residents long.

Image

Volunteers assisted members of the National Guard as they distributed water and food to residents in Quincy, Fla., on Friday.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times

But in a city of unusable toilets and iffy cellular service — where nearly every street seemed like a set from a disaster movie — tensions were occasionally high as people waited for their first hot meal since Tuesday night. Before noon, a shouting match broke out between two men waiting for their barbecue plates. “Stop it!” a server admonished them at the top of his lungs. “Now we’re all being kind — got it?”

But the line was also full of hugs and tearful reunions, and across the broken region, residents exhibited selflessness and sweat as they began the long slog of putting it all back together. Crews had been able to clear some of the power lines and fallen trees from the main roads of Panama City, but many other areas were still choked with a riot of debris and limbs. Search-and-rescue teams continued to check neighborhoods in coastal Bay County, and Mark Bowen, the county’s emergency services chief, said that officials had estimates of the dead, but would not release them until the work was done.

“We have missing people, O.K.?” he said. “Are they missing because their loved ones can’t contact them, or are they missing because they perished in the storm? We just don’t know that.”

Shellshocked residents continued to stream from their homes, mostly focused on the first steps of rebuilding — finding help, from government assistance to shelters. But for some, the search proved frustrating: Solid answers were scarce, particularly in remote parts of the Panhandle. Some turned to word of mouth, and that was equally unreliable.

“I just keep looking for steeples and long lines, but I haven’t found much so far,” said Lynette Cordeno, 54, a retired Army sergeant who hoped to find a meal service somewhere. “We are walking around with no internet, no cell service, no way to even ask for help.”

Ms. Cordeno had gathered with others outside the Mr. Mart convenience store in nearby Callaway, one of many stores big and small that were rumored to be opening Friday. Some came barefoot and some in storm-battered cars. They came for room-temperature water and beer, charcoal and candy — and critical information.

“This is the working-class part of town. We didn’t have much before and now we have even less,” said Kevin Deeth, who lives four blocks away in a trailer missing jagged chunks of roof. “Now we need answers so we can try to start over.”

At his home, heaps of clothing and toys, now a sodden mess, are everywhere. Parts of the walls disintegrated, coating the living room like a first snow. Mr. Deeth saved some family photos and his children’s framed school awards, but not much else.

For now, Mr. Deeth, his wife and four school-age children are staying with a friend. He said Friday was his son’s 13th birthday, and then he began to cry.

Video

Emily Basham’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Michael. Now the mother of three is wondering how to start over.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Overwhelmed. I guess that is what you would call it,” he said. “I have no idea what to do,” he said. “I am lost.”

The story and the sentiment were common, and they were not likely to abate soon. Mr. Bowen, the emergency services chief, warned on Friday that the area was in for a bout of “long-term uncomfortable, so people kind of need to get into that mind-set.”

Emergency planning experts said the government had not necessarily fallen short in its response so far.

“This is what disasters look like,” said W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA chief. “Sit tight, help’s coming, but it’s not going to be there 12 hours after the storm passes.”

Likewise, those knowledgeable about disaster planning dismissed the idea that the rapid intensification of the storm had caught emergency responders off guard. Storm preparations, they said, are mostly driven by the population of a threatened region, not the precise dimensions of a storm.

“Once you get to a certain point in this part of the coast, it’s just going to be bad,” Mr. Fugate said.

Appearing Friday afternoon in Marianna, an inland community, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said that state officials were “constantly reaching out to see what we can do to be helpful.”

“We have put out fuel, water, food in all of the impacted areas,” the governor said. “Where we can get there by truck, we’re getting there by truck.”

Officials in Panama City insisted throughout the day that crucial short-term help would soon arrive, even though the logistics, given the blocked roads and failed communications systems, were daunting. By afternoon, they had released a list of nine Bay County feeding sites.

Video

Hurricane Michael’s powerful winds and rains swept across six states, killing more than a dozen people, causing flash flooding and leaving at least one million without power.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times

Some local officials were worried about the possibility of social unrest in the areas where the poorest residents had not stocked up with multiple days’ worth of supplies. A short drive from Mr. Foster’s home, looting had been seen Thursday at a half-wrecked dollar store, and while some people came for things they wanted, most had come for things they needed — drinks and food.

On Friday, in a sign of the change that could soon roll out across the city, the store was being guarded by military personnel in a pair of Humvees.

Officials said that the Red Cross and religious volunteers were preparing ambitious feeding programs. The Florida National Guard was moving through neighborhoods with food and water. Soon, officials said, the region would be dotted with canteens and “pods” to allow people to drive up for food and water.

In the meantime, with cell service and internet hovering between spotty and nonexistent, residents navigated the ruined landscape with what scraps of information they could. Charlotte Jordan, 68, said that she heard about the free barbecue from her daughter, who called her from Tampa.

Elsewhere in line, Tracey Simmons, 42, was angrier. “They’re doing us like they did New Orleans,” she said. Ms. Simmons, an educator, said she was worried that poorer residents would eventually be moved out, much as they were after Hurricane Katrina. For the time being, she was frustrated by the complicated game of survival that was playing out.

“We know that people are coming,” she said of relief crews, “but where are they?”

Radio personalities played an important role in filling the gap — for those who had radios. One station broadcast a sort of improvised community bulletin board, reading out listeners’ news of store openings, offers of help, people in trouble, and people exasperated:

“Wayne’s Grocery has ice.”

“In the city of Fountain, Fla., can someone get water and formula to a baby?”

“My grandmother needs her meds and she needs her road cleared.”

“We should sue the cellphone companies.”

“You have to be patient, folks,” the host, Shane Collins, advised at one point. “We have been through a major disaster and it takes time.”

It came as a relief to many when a Sam’s Club opened Friday morning, under the watchful eye of National Guard troops. But like so much here, it was also a pain: On one side of the massive building, a two-hour line of sweaty shoppers pushing empty carts snaked through the parking lot. The shoppers were allowed in about 10 at a time, and had few fresh goods to choose from. Most walked out with cases of bottled water, snack food, and the occasional generator.

On the other side, the line for gas was even longer.

“I’m angry,” said Michael Chism, 30, on his third hour of waiting to fill up. “But there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the hurricane that ravaged towns in the Florida Panhandle this week. It was Hurricane Michael, not Matthew.

Richard Fausset reported from Springfield, Fla., Alan Blinder from Atlanta and Audra D. S. Burch from Panama City, Fla. Christina Caron and Matthew Haag contributed reporting from New York, and Patricia Mazzei from Marianna, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

In Storm-Stricken Florida, Desperate for Necessities

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/looting-stores-hurricane-michael.html |

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid, in 2018-10-13 11:41:48

[blogwonderwebsites]

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid http://www.nature-business.com/nature-we-need-answers-hurricane-michael-leaves-florida-residents-desperate-for-aid/

Nature

Image

People salvaged supplies from a destroyed business the day after Hurricane Michael made landfall.CreditCreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — It was two days after Hurricane Michael, and Eddie Foster was pushing his mother in a wheelchair down a thoroughly smashed street, his face creased with a concentrated dose of the frustration and fear that has afflicted much of the Florida Panhandle since the brutal storm turned its coast to rubble.

He was in a working-class neighborhood called Millville, where many residents said they were becoming desperate for even basic necessities. Mr. Foster, 60, and his 99-year-old mother had no car, no electricity. The food had spoiled in his refrigerator. The storm had ripped off large sections of his roof. He had no working plumbing to flush with. No water to drink. And as of Friday afternoon, he had seen no sign of government help.

“What can I do?” he said. “I’m not angry. I just want some help.”

[Follow live updates on Hurricane Michael’s aftermath]

This was the problem that government officials were racing to solve on Friday, as desperation grew in and around Panama City under a burning sun. Long lines formed for gas and food, and across the battered coastline, those who were poor, trapped and isolated sent out pleas for help.

It would take time to reach everyone. Yet the Panama City area, one of those hit hardest by Hurricane Michael, grew into a whirring hive of activity on Friday, as box trucks, military personnel, and rescue and aid workers flowed in from surrounding counties and states, struggling to fix communications and electrical systems that officials said were almost totally demolished.

The death toll from the Category 4 storm rose to 16, stretching as far north as Virginia, where five people died, and it was expected to climb higher as search-and-rescue crews fanned out through rubble that in some cases spanned entire blocks. The toll also included the potential of millions of dollars in damage to aircraft, which were left behind during the storm at Tyndall Air Force Base.

[Read here: Tyndall Air Force Base a “complete loss.”]

For those waiting for relief supplies or the ability to return to their homes, Brock Long, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, counseled patience. “Bottom line, it was one of the most powerful storms the country has seen since 1851,” he said. “It’s going to be a long time before they can get back.”

In Panama City, people pitched in when they could. Some even opened stores that lacked electricity: A Sonny’s barbecue restaurant fired up its smokers in the parking lot, feeding many who gathered in the late morning in a line that was at least 100 grateful residents long.

Image

Volunteers assisted members of the National Guard as they distributed water and food to residents in Quincy, Fla., on Friday.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times

But in a city of unusable toilets and iffy cellular service — where nearly every street seemed like a set from a disaster movie — tensions were occasionally high as people waited for their first hot meal since Tuesday night. Before noon, a shouting match broke out between two men waiting for their barbecue plates. “Stop it!” a server admonished them at the top of his lungs. “Now we’re all being kind — got it?”

But the line was also full of hugs and tearful reunions, and across the broken region, residents exhibited selflessness and sweat as they began the long slog of putting it all back together. Crews had been able to clear some of the power lines and fallen trees from the main roads of Panama City, but many other areas were still choked with a riot of debris and limbs. Search-and-rescue teams continued to check neighborhoods in coastal Bay County, and Mark Bowen, the county’s emergency services chief, said that officials had estimates of the dead, but would not release them until the work was done.

“We have missing people, O.K.?” he said. “Are they missing because their loved ones can’t contact them, or are they missing because they perished in the storm? We just don’t know that.”

Shellshocked residents continued to stream from their homes, mostly focused on the first steps of rebuilding — finding help, from government assistance to shelters. But for some, the search proved frustrating: Solid answers were scarce, particularly in remote parts of the Panhandle. Some turned to word of mouth, and that was equally unreliable.

“I just keep looking for steeples and long lines, but I haven’t found much so far,” said Lynette Cordeno, 54, a retired Army sergeant who hoped to find a meal service somewhere. “We are walking around with no internet, no cell service, no way to even ask for help.”

Ms. Cordeno had gathered with others outside the Mr. Mart convenience store in nearby Callaway, one of many stores big and small that were rumored to be opening Friday. Some came barefoot and some in storm-battered cars. They came for room-temperature water and beer, charcoal and candy — and critical information.

“This is the working-class part of town. We didn’t have much before and now we have even less,” said Kevin Deeth, who lives four blocks away in a trailer missing jagged chunks of roof. “Now we need answers so we can try to start over.”

At his home, heaps of clothing and toys, now a sodden mess, are everywhere. Parts of the walls disintegrated, coating the living room like a first snow. Mr. Deeth saved some family photos and his children’s framed school awards, but not much else.

For now, Mr. Deeth, his wife and four school-age children are staying with a friend. He said Friday was his son’s 13th birthday, and then he began to cry.

Video

Emily Basham’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Michael. Now the mother of three is wondering how to start over.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Overwhelmed. I guess that is what you would call it,” he said. “I have no idea what to do,” he said. “I am lost.”

The story and the sentiment were common, and they were not likely to abate soon. Mr. Bowen, the emergency services chief, warned on Friday that the area was in for a bout of “long-term uncomfortable, so people kind of need to get into that mind-set.”

Emergency planning experts said the government had not necessarily fallen short in its response so far.

“This is what disasters look like,” said W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA chief. “Sit tight, help’s coming, but it’s not going to be there 12 hours after the storm passes.”

Likewise, those knowledgeable about disaster planning dismissed the idea that the rapid intensification of the storm had caught emergency responders off guard. Storm preparations, they said, are mostly driven by the population of a threatened region, not the precise dimensions of a storm.

“Once you get to a certain point in this part of the coast, it’s just going to be bad,” Mr. Fugate said.

Appearing Friday afternoon in Marianna, an inland community, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said that state officials were “constantly reaching out to see what we can do to be helpful.”

“We have put out fuel, water, food in all of the impacted areas,” the governor said. “Where we can get there by truck, we’re getting there by truck.”

Officials in Panama City insisted throughout the day that crucial short-term help would soon arrive, even though the logistics, given the blocked roads and failed communications systems, were daunting. By afternoon, they had released a list of nine Bay County feeding sites.

Video

Hurricane Michael’s powerful winds and rains swept across six states, killing more than a dozen people, causing flash flooding and leaving at least one million without power.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times

Some local officials were worried about the possibility of social unrest in the areas where the poorest residents had not stocked up with multiple days’ worth of supplies. A short drive from Mr. Foster’s home, looting had been seen Thursday at a half-wrecked dollar store, and while some people came for things they wanted, most had come for things they needed — drinks and food.

On Friday, in a sign of the change that could soon roll out across the city, the store was being guarded by military personnel in a pair of Humvees.

Officials said that the Red Cross and religious volunteers were preparing ambitious feeding programs. The Florida National Guard was moving through neighborhoods with food and water. Soon, officials said, the region would be dotted with canteens and “pods” to allow people to drive up for food and water.

In the meantime, with cell service and internet hovering between spotty and nonexistent, residents navigated the ruined landscape with what scraps of information they could. Charlotte Jordan, 68, said that she heard about the free barbecue from her daughter, who called her from Tampa.

Elsewhere in line, Tracey Simmons, 42, was angrier. “They’re doing us like they did New Orleans,” she said. Ms. Simmons, an educator, said she was worried that poorer residents would eventually be moved out, much as they were after Hurricane Katrina. For the time being, she was frustrated by the complicated game of survival that was playing out.

“We know that people are coming,” she said of relief crews, “but where are they?”

Radio personalities played an important role in filling the gap — for those who had radios. One station broadcast a sort of improvised community bulletin board, reading out listeners’ news of store openings, offers of help, people in trouble, and people exasperated:

“Wayne’s Grocery has ice.”

“In the city of Fountain, Fla., can someone get water and formula to a baby?”

“My grandmother needs her meds and she needs her road cleared.”

“We should sue the cellphone companies.”

“You have to be patient, folks,” the host, Shane Collins, advised at one point. “We have been through a major disaster and it takes time.”

It came as a relief to many when a Sam’s Club opened Friday morning, under the watchful eye of National Guard troops. But like so much here, it was also a pain: On one side of the massive building, a two-hour line of sweaty shoppers pushing empty carts snaked through the parking lot. The shoppers were allowed in about 10 at a time, and had few fresh goods to choose from. Most walked out with cases of bottled water, snack food, and the occasional generator.

On the other side, the line for gas was even longer.

“I’m angry,” said Michael Chism, 30, on his third hour of waiting to fill up. “But there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the hurricane that ravaged towns in the Florida Panhandle this week. It was Hurricane Michael, not Matthew.

Richard Fausset reported from Springfield, Fla., Alan Blinder from Atlanta and Audra D. S. Burch from Panama City, Fla. Christina Caron and Matthew Haag contributed reporting from New York, and Patricia Mazzei from Marianna, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

In Storm-Stricken Florida, Desperate for Necessities

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/looting-stores-hurricane-michael.html |

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid, in 2018-10-13 11:41:48

[internetbasic9]

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid https://ift.tt/2pPR83d

Nature

Image

People salvaged supplies from a destroyed business the day after Hurricane Michael made landfall.CreditCreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — It was two days after Hurricane Michael, and Eddie Foster was pushing his mother in a wheelchair down a thoroughly smashed street, his face creased with a concentrated dose of the frustration and fear that has afflicted much of the Florida Panhandle since the brutal storm turned its coast to rubble.

He was in a working-class neighborhood called Millville, where many residents said they were becoming desperate for even basic necessities. Mr. Foster, 60, and his 99-year-old mother had no car, no electricity. The food had spoiled in his refrigerator. The storm had ripped off large sections of his roof. He had no working plumbing to flush with. No water to drink. And as of Friday afternoon, he had seen no sign of government help.

“What can I do?” he said. “I’m not angry. I just want some help.”

[Follow live updates on Hurricane Michael’s aftermath]

This was the problem that government officials were racing to solve on Friday, as desperation grew in and around Panama City under a burning sun. Long lines formed for gas and food, and across the battered coastline, those who were poor, trapped and isolated sent out pleas for help.

It would take time to reach everyone. Yet the Panama City area, one of those hit hardest by Hurricane Michael, grew into a whirring hive of activity on Friday, as box trucks, military personnel, and rescue and aid workers flowed in from surrounding counties and states, struggling to fix communications and electrical systems that officials said were almost totally demolished.

The death toll from the Category 4 storm rose to 16, stretching as far north as Virginia, where five people died, and it was expected to climb higher as search-and-rescue crews fanned out through rubble that in some cases spanned entire blocks. The toll also included the potential of millions of dollars in damage to aircraft, which were left behind during the storm at Tyndall Air Force Base.

[Read here: Tyndall Air Force Base a “complete loss.”]

For those waiting for relief supplies or the ability to return to their homes, Brock Long, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, counseled patience. “Bottom line, it was one of the most powerful storms the country has seen since 1851,” he said. “It’s going to be a long time before they can get back.”

In Panama City, people pitched in when they could. Some even opened stores that lacked electricity: A Sonny’s barbecue restaurant fired up its smokers in the parking lot, feeding many who gathered in the late morning in a line that was at least 100 grateful residents long.

Image

Volunteers assisted members of the National Guard as they distributed water and food to residents in Quincy, Fla., on Friday.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times

But in a city of unusable toilets and iffy cellular service — where nearly every street seemed like a set from a disaster movie — tensions were occasionally high as people waited for their first hot meal since Tuesday night. Before noon, a shouting match broke out between two men waiting for their barbecue plates. “Stop it!” a server admonished them at the top of his lungs. “Now we’re all being kind — got it?”

But the line was also full of hugs and tearful reunions, and across the broken region, residents exhibited selflessness and sweat as they began the long slog of putting it all back together. Crews had been able to clear some of the power lines and fallen trees from the main roads of Panama City, but many other areas were still choked with a riot of debris and limbs. Search-and-rescue teams continued to check neighborhoods in coastal Bay County, and Mark Bowen, the county’s emergency services chief, said that officials had estimates of the dead, but would not release them until the work was done.

“We have missing people, O.K.?” he said. “Are they missing because their loved ones can’t contact them, or are they missing because they perished in the storm? We just don’t know that.”

Shellshocked residents continued to stream from their homes, mostly focused on the first steps of rebuilding — finding help, from government assistance to shelters. But for some, the search proved frustrating: Solid answers were scarce, particularly in remote parts of the Panhandle. Some turned to word of mouth, and that was equally unreliable.

“I just keep looking for steeples and long lines, but I haven’t found much so far,” said Lynette Cordeno, 54, a retired Army sergeant who hoped to find a meal service somewhere. “We are walking around with no internet, no cell service, no way to even ask for help.”

Ms. Cordeno had gathered with others outside the Mr. Mart convenience store in nearby Callaway, one of many stores big and small that were rumored to be opening Friday. Some came barefoot and some in storm-battered cars. They came for room-temperature water and beer, charcoal and candy — and critical information.

“This is the working-class part of town. We didn’t have much before and now we have even less,” said Kevin Deeth, who lives four blocks away in a trailer missing jagged chunks of roof. “Now we need answers so we can try to start over.”

At his home, heaps of clothing and toys, now a sodden mess, are everywhere. Parts of the walls disintegrated, coating the living room like a first snow. Mr. Deeth saved some family photos and his children’s framed school awards, but not much else.

For now, Mr. Deeth, his wife and four school-age children are staying with a friend. He said Friday was his son’s 13th birthday, and then he began to cry.

Video

Emily Basham’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Michael. Now the mother of three is wondering how to start over.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Overwhelmed. I guess that is what you would call it,” he said. “I have no idea what to do,” he said. “I am lost.”

The story and the sentiment were common, and they were not likely to abate soon. Mr. Bowen, the emergency services chief, warned on Friday that the area was in for a bout of “long-term uncomfortable, so people kind of need to get into that mind-set.”

Emergency planning experts said the government had not necessarily fallen short in its response so far.

“This is what disasters look like,” said W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA chief. “Sit tight, help’s coming, but it’s not going to be there 12 hours after the storm passes.”

Likewise, those knowledgeable about disaster planning dismissed the idea that the rapid intensification of the storm had caught emergency responders off guard. Storm preparations, they said, are mostly driven by the population of a threatened region, not the precise dimensions of a storm.

“Once you get to a certain point in this part of the coast, it’s just going to be bad,” Mr. Fugate said.

Appearing Friday afternoon in Marianna, an inland community, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said that state officials were “constantly reaching out to see what we can do to be helpful.”

“We have put out fuel, water, food in all of the impacted areas,” the governor said. “Where we can get there by truck, we’re getting there by truck.”

Officials in Panama City insisted throughout the day that crucial short-term help would soon arrive, even though the logistics, given the blocked roads and failed communications systems, were daunting. By afternoon, they had released a list of nine Bay County feeding sites.

Video

Hurricane Michael’s powerful winds and rains swept across six states, killing more than a dozen people, causing flash flooding and leaving at least one million without power.Published OnOct. 12, 2018CreditCreditImage by Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times

Some local officials were worried about the possibility of social unrest in the areas where the poorest residents had not stocked up with multiple days’ worth of supplies. A short drive from Mr. Foster’s home, looting had been seen Thursday at a half-wrecked dollar store, and while some people came for things they wanted, most had come for things they needed — drinks and food.

On Friday, in a sign of the change that could soon roll out across the city, the store was being guarded by military personnel in a pair of Humvees.

Officials said that the Red Cross and religious volunteers were preparing ambitious feeding programs. The Florida National Guard was moving through neighborhoods with food and water. Soon, officials said, the region would be dotted with canteens and “pods” to allow people to drive up for food and water.

In the meantime, with cell service and internet hovering between spotty and nonexistent, residents navigated the ruined landscape with what scraps of information they could. Charlotte Jordan, 68, said that she heard about the free barbecue from her daughter, who called her from Tampa.

Elsewhere in line, Tracey Simmons, 42, was angrier. “They’re doing us like they did New Orleans,” she said. Ms. Simmons, an educator, said she was worried that poorer residents would eventually be moved out, much as they were after Hurricane Katrina. For the time being, she was frustrated by the complicated game of survival that was playing out.

“We know that people are coming,” she said of relief crews, “but where are they?”

Radio personalities played an important role in filling the gap — for those who had radios. One station broadcast a sort of improvised community bulletin board, reading out listeners’ news of store openings, offers of help, people in trouble, and people exasperated:

“Wayne’s Grocery has ice.”

“In the city of Fountain, Fla., can someone get water and formula to a baby?”

“My grandmother needs her meds and she needs her road cleared.”

“We should sue the cellphone companies.”

“You have to be patient, folks,” the host, Shane Collins, advised at one point. “We have been through a major disaster and it takes time.”

It came as a relief to many when a Sam’s Club opened Friday morning, under the watchful eye of National Guard troops. But like so much here, it was also a pain: On one side of the massive building, a two-hour line of sweaty shoppers pushing empty carts snaked through the parking lot. The shoppers were allowed in about 10 at a time, and had few fresh goods to choose from. Most walked out with cases of bottled water, snack food, and the occasional generator.

On the other side, the line for gas was even longer.

“I’m angry,” said Michael Chism, 30, on his third hour of waiting to fill up. “But there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the hurricane that ravaged towns in the Florida Panhandle this week. It was Hurricane Michael, not Matthew.

Richard Fausset reported from Springfield, Fla., Alan Blinder from Atlanta and Audra D. S. Burch from Panama City, Fla. Christina Caron and Matthew Haag contributed reporting from New York, and Patricia Mazzei from Marianna, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

In Storm-Stricken Florida, Desperate for Necessities

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://ift.tt/2QKTfAR |

Nature ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid, in 2018-10-13 11:41:48

[theconservativebrief]

After more than eight years of shenanigans involving candy people, alternate universes, vampires, nearly 3,000 wiki pages’ worth of lore, some highly unusual exclamations (“Mathematical!”), and bacon pancakes, Cartoon Network’s beloved Adventure Time is coming to a close.

Since its debut in 2010, the series has evolved into one of the most popular and influential programs in the channel’s history. Despite being first and foremost a kids’ show, it built a sizable fan base among older audiences and gained mounting psychological and even philosophical weight over its 10-season run. The September 3 series finale marks the end of an era in imagining new storytelling possibilities, not just for cartoons but for TV in general.

Adventure Time spans nearly 300 11-minute episodes involving hundreds of distinct characters — so it’s no easy feat to describe. But in brief, it takes place 1,000 years after a nuclear apocalypse known as the “Mushroom War” warps the Earth into a fantasy landscape; its main setting, the Land of Ooo, is populated by offbeat creatures and people made of candy, fire, or “lumpy space,” among other things.

A young boy named Finn (Jeremy Shada) is apparently the last human being on the planet, and he and his foster brother/best friend — a shape-shifting dog named Jake (John DiMaggio) — have taken it upon themselves to be as helpful around Ooo as possible. They lend their treasure-hunting, monster-fighting, errand-running prowess to their many friends and neighbors, and along the way, the complex backstory of Adventure Time’s characters and their world is unspooled.

That supremely odd summary belies the fact that Adventure Time has sneakily persisted as one of the most critically acclaimed shows of the 2010s. When considering the recent “Golden Age” of TV, few would rank it alongside the likes of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or Game of Thrones. And yet it has received high praise from sources as wide-ranging as the A.V. Club, the New Yorker, NPR, and this very site.

In addition to being aimed at kids, Adventure Time lies at the intersection of multiple artistic categories that often struggle to attract serious critical consideration — namely, animation, fantasy, and short-form episodic TV (which for a long time was mainly the playground of experimental Adult Swim shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force). Still, it has won over many critics. And though its erratic airing schedule has led to a decline in viewership and prestige in its later years, it has maintained a consistent standard of quality nonetheless.

With its series finale now on the horizon, let’s take a look back at the brilliance of Adventure Time, both as a singular achievement and as a show that has left a lasting impact on the TV landscape.

Adventure Time began as a short film made for Nicktoons. After the short leaked online and subsequently went viral, creator Pendleton Ward was able to successfully pitch it to Cartoon Network as a series. Produced in 2006, it exemplifies the “random” style of internet humor of that time, pioneered by the likes of Homestar Runner, eBaum’s World, and Newgrounds.

[embedded content]

In just under seven minutes, a boy and his dog fight an ice-powered, princess-abducting king, with a brief dream excursion to Mars for a pep talk from Abraham Lincoln, before ultimately running off to confront some ninjas who have stolen an old man’s diamonds (ninjas were to internet comedy in the mid-2000s what bacon would be to it in the early 2010s). Millions of people loved it when it hit (the then-young) YouTube, and the short was eventually nominated for an Annie Award.

Once Adventure Time the show made its Cartoon Network debut, it found instant success and regularly drew millions of viewers per episode for many years. Examining the phenomenon, critics have often cited the show’s broad appeal for both kids and adults as a big reason for its popularity.

Cartoons have long embraced an anything-goes sensibility, but Adventure Time took the approach to a new level. Every single episode would pack its brief running time with strange new characters, places, and ideas: A vampire who drinks the color red. A pack of sentient balloons eager to die. An imaginative robot that “switches places” with its reflection. And to fit within the 11-minute runtime of each episode, it all came at the audience at a breathless pace.

Animated shorts are as old as television itself, but Adventure Time spurred a revival of the format, especially on Cartoon Network. The show also led the way in turning “random” humor and world-building from a niche interest into what is now practically an industry standard, not just for animated series aimed at kids but for adult-oriented ones as well. Shows like BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty demonstrate a common willingness to indulge the strange, an instinct that Adventure Time arguably introduced to the mainstream.

It didn’t stop there. Even as Adventure Time told bizarre tales of trickster gods from Mars and penguins that turned out to be world-threatening alien abominations, it worked hard to incorporate them into its complicated backstory and world, maintaining dense continuity through multiple long-running story arcs. In the grand tradition of prestige TV, it featured overarching plots about Finn’s search for his birth parents, or the recurring threat of the fearsome undead sorcerer the Lich. And yet it also made time for many standalone episodes, sometimes ultimately folding them into the larger picture, with major characters like Marceline the Vampire Queen being introduced in apparent one-off installments.

Adventure Time’s penchant for experimentation was both admirable and skillfully executed. The show didn’t hesitate to hand over multiple episodes to guest directors simply to riff on a different animation style. It occasionally adopted an idiosyncratic airing schedule, where several new episodes would drop over the course of a single week and then months would go by with nothing new. While the inconsistency sometimes hurt Adventure Time’s ratings, the show’s creative team used the “episode bomb” approach to produce several miniseries that featured some of its most ambitious ideas and set pieces.

Despite the show’s overall comedic tone, it handled its biggest ideas with gravitas and sincere emotion. And for all the manic energy it could indulge, Adventure Time never hesitated to slow down for a scene or two, or even a whole episode. American animation sometimes has trouble simply putting breathing space into shows and movies — superfluous gestures, brief pauses, and other moments that aren’t necessarily propelling the plot forward. Hayao Miyazaki once explained this to Roger Ebert as ma, the soundless beats between claps of the hand. Adventure Time had lots of ma.

Look at this scene from the “Stakes” miniseries, in the episode “Everything Stays.” In less than a minute, the episode creates an extraordinary evocation of intimacy between a parent and child. The animators inject dozens of little gestures to establish this feeling — note the brief shot in which young Marceline strokes her mother’s arm. And then the scene is over, and it’s on to the next beat.

[embedded content]

This kind of formal economy, doing a lot in precious little time, is rare in television. Today, many prestige shows are running longer with each installment yet still struggle to carve out time for characters to simply be. They could learn something from Adventure Time, a show that used its 11-minute episodes to explore myriad genre ideas and flights of fancy, and to demonstrate the endless potential of simply being artistically open and flexible.

Every single character on Adventure Time, from the regulars to the one-episode guests, had a distinct voice. And I don’t mean in terms of acting (though the show’s voice acting was excellent), but in how each person spoke. The writers gave everyone a unique slang, or attitude, or cadence to work with.

Finn and Jake had their own adolescence-inflected goofy rapport and strange swears (“Aw, dingle!” “Algebraic!”). Marceline was a laid-back slacker punk rocker. Princess Bubblegum was officious and scientifically minded. Finn and Jake’s parents, who only appeared in a few episodes, had ’30s-style trans-Atlantic accents (“Make like there’s egg in your shoe and beat it!”). One episode set in an alternate universe introduced an entirely different future lingo. No character was too minor to be considered as a distinct individual.

Adventure Time frequently devoted entire episodes to fleshing out secondary characters, sometimes shining a spotlight on someone who had only existed in the background for the entire show up to that point. It drew up complex inner lives for the likes of characters with names like “Root Beer Guy” — a sentient, walking mug of soda — and “Cinnamon Bun.”

And what it could do for its main characters was even more impressive. Some of them were hundreds of years old, with a few of them predating the Mushroom War, and as we got to know them better, we came to understand a long history of regrets, which stemmed first from the act of survival and then from trying to build a new society out of the ruins. Their arcs were contrasted with the subtle but definable trajectories of Finn and Jake, who slowly matured over the course of the show from goofballs to responsible figures.

Many episodes of Adventure Time took detours to toss out different philosophical challenges, aiming them at both the characters and the audience. In one, Finn got trapped in another world and lived an entire lifetime there before returning to his own as a child again. In another, Finn and Jake confronted a population of people willingly submitting to a Matrix-like virtual reality existence. In a sequence emblematic of the series’ simultaneous whimsical tone and intellectual seriousness, one character mused: “What’s real? Your eyes think the sky is blue, but that’s just sun rays farting apart in the barf of our atmosphere. The sky is black.”

Adventure Time dared to be anything and everything, often at the same time. It was a silly, plotless kids’ show. It was an epic fantasy adventure. It was a long-term coming-of-age story. It was an experimental exercise. It was a stoner’s dream. It was a relationship drama. It was a heartbreaker.

Episodic television offers a canvas unique among the arts: time. The best shows make use of this canvas to tell their stories as creatively and ambitiously as they can; Adventure Time used it to become one of the best television series of its day.

Adventure Time’s four-part finale, “Come Along With Me,” airs Monday, September 3, on Cartoon Network.

Original Source -> An ode to Adventure Time, one of TV’s most ambitious — and, yes, most adventurous — shows

via The Conservative Brief

[wyueprouqi]

/whois=Wyueprouqi

So I haven't exactly "blogged" anything on here yet. tumblr is supposed to be a blog so maybe I should do that? I'll introduce myself and give you some ideas of my goals that are in mind for this project, as well as some background. It's pretty extensive. [Q.]W.Yueprouqi is the name I go by on here. Does it stand for something? Maybe. I'm not going to say what because it might blow your mind if I did. It's not my given name. The sound that people usually make at me to get my attention is "Kris" or "K.M." - I feel odd about my given name, since I consider it my alter ego for a job. Literally. I don't want to change my hair for low paying jobs so I've invested in wigs to be "Kristina". And I've never really related to it, so.... Wow, I sound like a complete headcase. But you're only young once, and being a headcase seems to suit me. Let's talk about something else. How about the story? Ok, we're gonna have to step back a bit. To 2010. 2010 was an interesting time. I was partially living at school in a basement studio they had given me to make artsy things. I converted it into a bomb shelter and pretended the world was ending whenever the subway rumbled by. One night I had a dream in there. It was about a dark-haired man at a bar who captured the attention of a suicidal woman. (Odd thing about my dreams is that they're often in third person view. It's kind of nice. I don't usually have the attention span for movies, so this is a decent surrogate). Anyway the dark-haired man and the woman quickly become attached to one another and begin to live a life together. Thing is, the dark-haired man is not exactly human - he's what old legends refer to as "father time". Now Time (I don't remember the exact name my brain gave him. Names are dumb to me.) and this chick go on living this life together until one day, he disappears out of no where. So the girl goes looking for him. He's become the reason for her life, basically. How she goes looking for him is by trying to contact those he's related to - the other legends. Mother Nature, Fate, etc. The one my dream ended on was Death. She was hanging out of a subway car, trying to entice him closer and asking where Time was. Death said Time no longer wanted to see her, and she refused that as an answer. Then I woke up. Looking back, I realize my brain was basically telling me I need to find purpose in my life other than people, particularly those of the romantic nature, but I'm pretty dense and I said "Hey! I liked this story kind of - let me see what I can do with it!" Timeline went through multiple changes. It used to be more dependent on time-travel, but slowly I learned more legends and beliefs, some of which don't fall into the white bread world and are of other religions and cultures. The hum that gets heard around the world. Then the whole thing about the hadron-collider made me think about energy and the transfer of it. Things fell into place. One day I went for a hike in the woods. Following the path to try to find some artifacts, I got the weirdest feeling and decided to turn back. THe next few nights I woke up with this sensation that something was in my room. Three times it showed up. It was what people refer to as a "shadow person". Whether this was a case of sleep paralysis or not is up for debate, but its believed that shadow people are some other things, specifically djinn. Well shit! That was something I was reading about! Alright, what does this all mean? More evolution, more connections made, more stories to write. More, more, more. I got distracted. In my head I'd constructed this intricate world. The characters came to life. The moody bartender who was a time-traveler, the weird group of people that he'd recruited for some reason or another, the girl who could be his apprentice...all of this stuff just growing. It still does grow sometimes, but it's pretty much at its peak now - and there's three storylines to write! These past six - I think I've posted six so far anyway - chapters are just the beginning of a very long story that has a not-so feel good ending. (Just putting that out there - it gets weird) It moved away from time-travel and Gods and closer to alternate dimensions and struggles over power and energy. Alright, so onto where I go from here. I'd like to post once a week from now on. Reason being, I hate murky, muddy writing, and I'm in that spot right now. Things get complicated. The beginning is easy. The beginning's been around and mostly unchanged for at least five years. (Ok, the prologue was actually like three years ago or so, but whatever). I'd begin, get lost, and go through periods where I didn't write. The story would grow. I'd fall into relationships, and then fall out of them. I'd get stuck in shitty jobs. All the while growing, just as my story did. My characters got impatient. Anyway, off track again. Let's regroup: I'd like to post once a week - avoid that muddy writing, and after I have at least half of it done, I'll consider converting it into graphic novel form. I have the skills but need the drive behind it. That part is an ambitious project. Like seriously ambitious. There's the whole lack of audience, to begin with. I mean, you guys tuning in, thanks! I started re-writing this for myself, before free-thought becomes illegal (it could happen). Writing it isn't difficult. The story is already pretty well written as it stands. Fleshing it out is another animal. I'm also kind of in the middle of dealing with my own shit right now. I'd like to be consistent, so when things maybe start to fall into place, I don't have as much pressure. And it fucking blows because none of it is something I can change. I can't change my lack of a job, or my inability to maintain a stable relationship (guys need to step their shit up). I can, however focus on what I'm doing. All I can do is write. And maybe someone will listen. Are you listening? -KM aka Wyueprouqi