#but they’re often taken out of the original context because in the 21st century their intensely specific symbolism just isn’t as relevant

[incidentalblr]

listen valvert is a better exploration of les mis’s themes than enjoltaire could ever be

[pointlesstrashyexistence]

Any idea why my reblog wouldn't go through? Since I obliterated every single point you made, you ought to read it. The reply I posted tagged you instead.

No idea. As far as I know I haven’t blocked you and I don’t know what post you are talking about since I haven’t been tagged in anything.

Never mind. I realized that you were in fact were a racist and I blocked you’re other account so you got bitter and tried to argue using information that is innacurate. And if anybody would like to know the other account of this person, it is thoughtsandreplies.

So I’m going to go over each statement the person made with the exception of what originally began this, Immersion (Piss Jesus). Art is a very personal experience, but how you interpret art does not give you the right to use it as an excuse for racism.

So 1) No one is actually saying that Lincoln was a racist. They’re arguing whether or not the depiction of the Black man in the Emancipation Memorial, a real former slave named Archer Alexander is racist and if it should be taken down because of that. This specific instance is not about the white man involved, but the black man being represented and if his representation as someone physically and what could be taken as symbolically lower than a white man is degrading. This is a complex issues that even two of his descendants are have opposing opinions on. Muhammad Ali was a direct descendant of this man and his third cousin, Keith Winstaed, and his oldest daughter, actress Maryum Ali, have opposing opinions. Winstaed is in favor of keeping it because he is more focused on the historical context, that the sculpture of Alexander was meant to be seen as empowering because has broken his chains and beginning to rise. However, Ali is viewing with the eyes of someone living in the 21st century who expects better representation for minority communities that have historically been vilified in art, literature, television, and politics. She believes the statue is degrading and offensive because even if Alexander’s chains are broken, he is still below Lincoln, a white man, and is in a position that can be interpreted as him bowing to him. As I said before, art is personal and both people have valid interpretations of this piece. This is not the same as tearing down statues of actual racists. We put up statues of people to honor them, but we must be able to recognize that we can no longer honor people who were legitimately horrible. I don’t see any statues of Hitler in Germany so what’s your excuse for why you want to keep up sculptures of racists?

2) off the bat I could tell you were a racist who hasn’t bothered to examine their words and actions by referring to the Black Lives Matter Movement as a “historically illiterate mob”. Most of the people in the movement are black so I can assume you are perpetuating the stereotype that black people can’t read which is enforced by the fact that it was illegal for slaves to be literate and black and brown communities have historically and continue to receive less funding for their schools, which leads to lower quality books and teachers, which leads to students who have difficulty in their studies, which leads to students who have lower grades, which leads to black and brown communities being forced to accept work at lower paying jobs, which leads to black and brown parents that are not able to spend time with their children in order to make enough money for food, water, electricity, and housing, which leads to kids who don’t receive the attention they need, which leads to students who are being taught by these same lower standard teacher with old outdated books, which leads to students being frustrated over not being at the level of their studies that they should be but are unable to seek outside help because of a lack of tutors and familial help, which leads to students who “act out” because they were not able to develop the emotional tools necessary to monitor behavior and are then forced into prisons by teachers who have called the police on them, which leads to another lack of education because the U.S. prison system does not want to rehabilitate prisoners and help them become better people, it just wants to find a way to legally continue slavery.

3) It does not matter if someone had doubts about whether or not someone had doubts over their racial superiority. What matters is that they still willingly continued to be a part of that system that benefitted them because it was more convenient to not do anything. Also, nice job on conveniently leaving out the fact that Jefferson was known to have raped his slaves and produced multiple children with slaves, but still did not bothering freeing any of his slaves.

4) Don’t bother bringing up almost any of the other founding fathers also since they were also slave owners perpetuating the system because it helped them make money. And don’t try to excuse it by claiming that it was just accepted at the time. Abolitionism was a thing during that time. Even when Columbus began raping and pilaging, there were people who knew what he was doing was bad. There is writing about how people already knew Columbus was fucking insane and even Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, you know, the ones who started the Spanish Inquisition, was so disgusted by rumors about Columbus that they had him investigated and took away his titles when they found out about what was happening. They’re not off the hook though because they were still, you know, the reason for why many Saphardic Jews were imprisoned, killed, and forced to run away.

5) No, I don’t use the word “racist” too lightly, you’re standards for what count as racist just don’t include enough things that are racist.

6) Black people live in fear because they have historically and systemically have had legitimate reasons to, not because I’m calling out things that have been blatantly racist.

7) Yes there has been property damage. Yes there are people who are going to use these events as an excuse to do whatever they want. That will always be a part of protesting. But don’t act like cops aren’t doing this same thing, intentionally planting themselves in protests and then creating violence or causing property damage in order to give other cops a reason to attack protestors. If you know enough, you can spot them based on whose wearing shoes that can be run in or heavy combat boots, whose wearing nondescript clothes that you can see protective gear under, and who is wearing the “color of the day”, a tactic cops have used in order to disguise themselves among protestors but signal that they are cops to other cops by wearing matching accessories like armbands, headbands, or wristbands.

8) Funny how you don’t want to bring up the fact that these are populations with large black and brown communities that are usually overpoliced. Also, just because someone is a Democrat does not make them a liberal. The only reason I’m in preference of Democrats is because of the multiple marginalized communities that will hold them accountable for anything they do.

9) Not every single time a black person is killed is it because of racism. That “black-on-Black crime” people like to bring up? That’s not racism, that’s just the fact that people in close proximity to each other are more likely to kill each other and there are still heavily legally segregated parts of America due to wealth disparity. That example you brought up about a black cop killing a black man? That’s not racism. That a person knowing that they are untouchable because of the power that they have because the only good cops are cops that have quit. If you haven’t quit or been fired, you are likely a member of the blue wall of silence that refuses to condemn offices who intentionally act violently knowing that they will not be punished. Also, let’s not forget that people can also be prejudiced against people in their race or ethnicity because of the shade of their skin and the socio-economic class.

10) When have you seen any white man being bashed for having a black wife or being a “big brother” to black children? Often the only people who have problems with black women getting married to white men are black men who feel like they own black women and then claim they are “betraying their race” when they seek love from men in other races and ethnicities, but expect black women to stay silent as they chase after snow bunnies who fetishize mixed children. The only other case I could think of would be racists not wanting races to mix. And the “big brother” thing? The only reason I could think of would be complaints about wanting more black men to be “big brothers” because white men just cannot relate to the experiences of being a black child.

11) You conveniently left out that despite being one of the smallest racial communities in the U.S., black people are also the most policed, and will get arrested for things cops would let a white man go with like weed charges. Look no further than lovely white wonderbread comedien John Mulaney saying in his second comedy special “the comeback kid” “it’s (weed) always been legal silly goose”. This means that they have a disproportionate amount of black people in their records because if black people only make up 13% of people in the entire nation, they should only make up about 13% of all crime to, but they make up more because policemen have quotas to fill for how many people they arrest in order to receive more funding, and its easier with a racist system backing you up to arrest Black than white people.

12) Again, people in close proximity to each other are more likely to kill each other than people who do not know each other and people who live far from each other. Also, it’s the ultra extremists who really want to abolish the police. I still think we need a protective system, but we need it to work for the common people, not corporations and politicians. I think that every district should use the same system as wealthy white neighborhoods, where anyone who wants to be a policeman must be assigned a position in the neighborhood they are from because anything they do wrong will make them accountable to their neighbors, family, and friends. Also I believe that all cops should undergo mandatory psychological evaluations every 3-6 months, especially cops who have worked on extremely traumatic cases. I also believe that the U.S. should require at least 3 years of school for anyone wanting to become a cop because no one is actually able to learn the law, learn to enforce it through peaceful means unless in dire circumstances, and care for the wounded, mentally ill, physically disabled, or anyone mentally impaired by drugs and alcohol in 6 months.

13) Another example of how this person is racist because they are actually suggesting that we enforce racial discrimination and black poverty. Also, if you want to bring up gangs, the biggest gang in the U.S is police force using propaganda that promotes the idea of “belonging” and economic stability in order to entice people who do not feel like they belong wherever they are, and then giving them a gun and badge that basically means “kill whoever you want because we will cover it up for you”.

14) Unless a woman feels like she is able to provide a stable enough home environment for her and her child, NO ONE WILLINGLY CHOOSES TO BE A SINGLE MOTHER! Single motherhood is caused by multiple events. A woman was impregnated by someone who left her, a couple with a child divorced because of legitimate reasons because divorce is a long and financially exhausting process, a woman was raped and decided to keep the child, and woman was raped and forced to give birth because she lives in a state that limits women’s healthcare, which includes abortion.

15) Fatherless homes do not equate to a rise in criminal culture. If that were the case, all wlw couples and single mothers would raise criminals. Do you know what does equate to criminal culture though? Teaching people that they are superior to someone else because of their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality and then promoting violent behaviors in that child.

16) Black families were never more intact during slavery than after slavery. Slaveowners and slavetraders intentionally worked together to make money and create a lack of unity among slaves by selling individual families members to different regions. One of the first things that former slaves did after they were freed was go out and find their stolen family members.

17) I can’t say anything about economics since I don’t have much knowledge about the economic system before the New Deal. However I will say that this is the only valid point you have made. Politicians have historically tried to get as many black votes as possible when they realized what a reliable voting community they were and then never actually done much to help the black community. However this is a very general statement.

18) How is group called Black Lives Matter that is focused on gaining racial equality attempting to sow discord in a nation by basically say “can you stop targeting us just because you’re racist and don’t like the color of my skin”.

19) How is a group asking for racial equality a lie? Are you really going to deny racism when we have seen shootings, lynchings, and people getting run over by cars all within the last month and a half?

20) WTF IS A LIE ABOUT A CHANT THAT MEANS “I HAVE NO WEAPONS, DO NOT KILL ME”

[shellacninja-blog]

Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase [Albums I Like]

I walk. It's raining. As I move through my home town, the derelict ornateness is overtaken gradually by an infestation of trees and grass. Cars still drive past with an aggressive howl, and planes still rocket overhead, but nature has claimed this land. I find a solitary bench under a tree, the only one not covered with scattered raindrops. I sit down, and Sherbet Head plays. It took me three years of listening to The Campfire Headphase to realise that no, that's not a forest on the cover, it's a beach. I chalk my mistake up to [a] youth and the lack of attention to detail one has in it, [b] the green tint and smudges, and [c] because this album sounds like a representation of nature in the Western world. Most Western woodland in the 21st century has been claimed and built upon by man - I am surrounded by statues in my green sanctuary, many dedicated to monarchs, while some are war memorials - but has been, and is, treated with respect by most. Even if technology is present, and sculpting much of the present world, there is still beauty we did not sculpt, beauty we could never create or replicate via synthesis. Boards of Canada are an electronic band that have made electronic music with electronic instruments and techniques. The Campfire Headphase is the only album where they provide a spotlight for quote-on-quote traditional instruments (mainly guitar). It's soft, tender and almost devoid of any human presence, unlike their previous work which featured several spoken word samples and clips of children laughing. That's probably why the comparison is so easy for me to make. The first four songs, excluding Into The Rainbow Vein (a pretty, lo-fi synth that is an example of BOC's short tracks, one of the few of their trademarks they brought over from 2001's Geogaddi), all have lead melodies performed on guitar. Chromakey Dreamcoat's rickety, old-timey intro forms the basis for the entire song, which eventually evolves into a lush synth soundscape as the BOC brothers slowly add layers onto the track until it collapses under its own wait, quickly slowing to a stop. A red squirrel just jumped past me. Peacock Tail, one of the album's standouts, hides faint African percussion and handclaps behind soothing, sweeping ambient textures. If the rhythm section wasn't the glue that held BOC together before, it certainly is now. Without the percussion the majority of the tracks feature, they would turn into Eno-esque ambient pieces. While that's no means a bad thing, nor something the duo doesn't do (the last two songs forgo drums), it adds an edge to songs that otherwise would be smooth and restrained. IDM's influence from hip hop was never more apparent than with these guys, and the rhythm section is the last reminder of that on this record. Hey Saturday Sun's melancholy guitars and synth flow over an undercurrent of a sinister bassline that seems to slow down the funkiness of similar riffs on older songs like Aquarius. Slow This Bird Down's glitched drum machine makes it, somehow, sound influenced by trap before it was even a thing. The record may sound similar when taken as a whole, but BOC's attention to detail - you know, the one I was lacking the three years before I reaaaaally looked at this album's cover - is ever present. They have a reputation for putting stuff in their songs you barely even notice unless you really pay attention; their complexity is subtle in their composition yet very noticeable in their production. '84 Pontiac Dream carries the same chords throughout but introduces a new idea almost every thirty seconds to express that progression. Oscar See Through Red Eye, the most electronic track on the album, again uses the same chord progression throughout but has several different melodies, often being performed at the same time. Try and count how many. I would, but I'm writing a review right now. I love how this album is such a cohesive and consistent sounding record but when you really analyse the songs they're all very different. The unrecognized complexity of these two's music is insane. I wouldn't even be surprised if each album's correspondence to the additive primary colours is intentional. In the context of Boards' discography this is a strange spot. When juxtaposed with their previous release, Geogaddi (more on that one later), The Campfire Headphase is much less dark and instead looks to optimism. Satellite Anthem Icarus is wistful and yet chooses not to adopt the melancholic nature of the nostalgia it aims to be the soundtrack to. While the album may take the peace and love attitude too far in places - single Dayvan Cowboy is an overrated excursion in stoner soft-rock - it's nice to see that this album is fuelled by light rather than terror, as Geogaddi was. The Campfire Headphase is a great album. It's easily the most gentle and steady release in the IDM genre, right when its original wave of popularity was fizzling out. Much like Farewell Fire fades into quiet dormancy, BOC put out a companion EP to this album and then...disappeared. For years. Of course, we know now this album was not BOC's final statement, but if it was, it would've been an ending to be proud of, and that's why I like this album.

FAVOURITE TRACKS: SATELLITE ANTHEM ICARUS, PEACOCK TAIL, ‘84 PONTIAC DREAM, OSCAR SEE THROUGH RED EYE

FURTHER LISTENING:

Trans Canada Highway is the obvious choice, seeing as it featured Dayvan Cowboy and is effectively the companion EP to this release. Some really good stuff in this package - everything that isn’t called Dayvan Cowboy is essential BOC listening.

BOC albums had a tradition, until their hiatus, of including exclusive bonus tracks in Japan, and this record is no exception. Macquarie Ridge is little-known outside of diehard fans, and that’s a massive shame. It’s great.

The only track released between this album and their next, the radically different Tomorrow’s Harvest, is Seven Forty Seven. Another fan favourite; it sounds like Campfire being remixed by Kevin Shields.

Next post: the SINGERS review I keep putting off.

Back to the masterpost?

[maral12944-blog]

The beginner’s guide to neural networks

New Post has been published on https://gohomeworkers.com/the-beginners-guide-to-neural-networks/

The beginner’s guide to neural networks

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30-second abstract:

In this current second, neural networks are liable for the event of self-driving vehicles, the voice-activated assistant that lives in your telephone or in your countertop, in addition to the entire reinvention of industries resembling monetary companies and digital promoting.

Despite preliminary advances, neural networks by no means actually gained wide-spread recognition in machine studying or trade – partially as a result of they required far more computing energy than was obtainable on the time, but additionally as a result of the strategies that had been getting used to construct them had been nonetheless restricted.

The true good thing about neural networks (and deep studying on the whole) is their skill to generate outcomes to a level of accuracy that no human might hope to obtain – particularly, their capability to parse gigantic knowledge units in a comparatively quick period of time and detect the patterns hidden inside.

Whether it’s by providing a chatbot that clients can work together with or using analytical instruments to establish beforehand unexpected alternatives, neural networks are quick turning into an integral a part of immediately’s panorama.

Back in 2016, Google made headlines when the corporate introduced that it had efficiently used machine studying (ML) to enhance its in style Google Translate service. Thanks to deep studying, mentioned Barak Turovsky, Google Translate’s product lead on the time, the system “has improved more in one single leap than in 10 years combined.”

Up till that time, the time period “neural network” was simply as doubtless to be heard in a medical context as in a technological one. But these within the know acknowledged the potential that neural networks had to fully remodel the world as we all know it.

In this current second, neural networks are liable for the event of self-driving vehicles, the voice-activated assistant that lives in your telephone or in your countertop, in addition to the entire reinvention of industries resembling monetary companies and digital promoting.

Neural networks: An introduction

What precisely is a neural community?

In the fields of laptop science and machine studying, a neural community is often an algorithm designed to analyze knowledge and discover the patterns hidden inside.

Essentially, they will act as a sorting and labeling system for knowledge, though their accuracy depends on the standard and amount of the info they’re skilled on.

What makes neural networks thrilling is that they will uncover patterns in knowledge that no different approach or human can.

This is why computer systems are abruptly recognizing faces, translating textual content, and processing speech significantly better than they ever have earlier than.

The origin of neural networks

The origin story for the invention of neural networks as a machine studying approach is fascinating. The human mind incorporates billions of tiny cells referred to as neurons, and these neurons join collectively into networks.

They had been first proposed by neuroscientists within the early 1940s as a framework for understanding how the mind works. In the 1950s, as soon as computer systems had been extra superior, a number of researchers started making an attempt to simulate neural networks in computer systems with numerous levels of success.

In 1959, two scientists from Stanford developed the primary neural community appropriate for business use, making a community referred to as MADALINE that might assist get rid of echoes on phone traces.

Despite these preliminary advances, neural networks by no means actually gained wide-spread recognition in machine studying or trade – partially as a result of they required far more computing energy than was obtainable on the time, but additionally as a result of the strategies that had been getting used to construct them had been nonetheless restricted.

Bringing 1940s frameworks to the 21st century

Present day networks are (unsurprisingly) an excellent deal extra superior than their early predecessors. This is thanks to each the invention of higher neural community designs and strategies to prepare them, and to the exponential will increase in computational energy pushed by the semiconductor trade.

Modern deep studying makes use of networks with a number of layers (the extra layers, the ‘deeper’ the community), which offer extra correct outcomes, but additionally require huge quantities of  computational energy and reminiscence.

Companies resembling Intel and NVIDIA now provide processors, GPUs, and an entire host of hardware designed particularly to facilitate neural community coaching and implementation. Without this bodily infrastructure on which to perform deep studying, the fast advances in neural networks which have taken place over the previous decade would have been inconceivable to attain.

Why manufacturers ought to use neural networks?

All this begs the query, why ought to firms put money into neural networks within the first place? What advantages do they convey, and what makes them more practical than current processes? Moreover, what are one of the best purposes?

To reply these questions, it should first be acknowledged that the true good thing about neural networks (and deep studying on the whole) is their skill to generate outcomes to a level of accuracy that no human might hope to obtain – particularly, their capability to parse gigantic knowledge units in a comparatively quick period of time and detect the patterns hidden inside.

The most well-known purposes for neural networks contain facial detection, picture recognition, and speech-to-text or text-to-speech detection and transcription, however there are quite a few different alternatives ripe for exploration.

Customized networks may also help resolve manufacturers’ most urgent enterprise issues

Because of neural networks’ analytical skills, it’s doable to develop an algorithm designed to reply a particular query, whether or not scientific or business-related.

To give an actual world instance, some hospitals are utilizing large-scale knowledge evaluation to enhance analysis, establish high-risk sufferers, and decide areas of enchancment.

Other companies have used neural networks to enhance their promoting efficacy by higher figuring out potential prospects and figuring out the perfect conditions to strategy them.

Every firm, irrespective of how large or small, has the flexibility to incorporate neural networks into their group in a roundabout way. Whether it’s by providing a chatbot that clients can work together with or using analytical instruments to establish beforehand unexpected alternatives, neural networks are quick turning into an integral a part of immediately’s panorama.

Jeremy Fain is the CEO and co-founder of Cognitiv, the primary advertising AI firm to provide plug-and-play deep studying merchandise that allow entrepreneurs to enhance outcomes by customized algorithms. Cognitiv’s award-winning expertise creates and executes self-learning, totally automated deep neural networks for multi-touch, full-funnel advertising campaigns.

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[theinquisitivej]

Late to the Party - ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)

You don’t need to have seen George A. Romero’s films to know that his death meant that a giant of cinematic and pop culture influence had left us. The zombie is not only a permanent fixture of the list of all-time classic monsters, standing in equal footing alongside vampires, werewolves, aliens and so on, but zombies are also one of the most prevalent creatures of 21st century fiction, whether depicted straight-faced or as a deviation from the norm. Although the term ‘zombie’ wasn’t invented by Romero (before him it was usually found in films and stories about witch doctors using mind control to enslave people as lifeless ‘zombies’), and it wasn’t even him that termed the monsters in ‘Night of the Living Dead’ as ‘zombies’, I still think we can comfortably say that he invented what we know to be the zombie horror genre. But far from being content with just inventing a new horror subgenre, he stuck around to revisit and improve on his creation again and again with numerous titles that are synonymous with zombie fiction. Romero’s name is renowned by filmmakers and lovers of film, so I have no doubt his career took him to areas beyond zombie flicks and this particular series. I am not the person to tell you about this man and his accomplishments. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is the first Romero film I’ve ever seen and I will not disrespect his legacy by claiming that my limited experience even scratches the surface of his life’s work. But my hope with this review is to be one example of keeping a filmmaker’s memory alive by celebrating and discussing their art after they are gone.

          Romero directed ‘Night of the Living Dead’ in 1968 and wrote the screenplay together with John Russo. The two had previously worked on commercials, along with their friend Russell W. Streiner who would eventually act as producer for ‘Night’ and play Johnny in the film. The three friends were growing tired of working on commercials and wanted to create a horror movie, which they felt encouraged bizarre creativity. After a few redrafts, Russo and Romero put together a screenplay for a story about flesh-eating reanimated corpses, with Romero openly taking heavy influence from Richard Matheson’s novel ‘I am Legend’. For context, 1968 was the same year the original ‘Planet of the Apes’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ were released. In addition to ‘Night of the Living Dead’s black and white colourisation distinguishing it from these two examples of well-known Hollywood films of the time, ‘Night’ had a significantly smaller budget of $114,000 versus $5.8 million and $10.5 million for ‘Apes’ and ‘2001’ respectively. For as much as this story redefined horror, it nevertheless has the feel of a well-crafted cult classic, rather than a massive blockbuster.

          The narrative shows a simple series of events; a woman visits her father’s grave with her brother, they’re attacked by a strange man and the two are separated, the sister winds up at a seemingly abandoned house, and slowly more survivors begin congregating at this house and must try their best to survive until the authorities can save them. The experience is deepened by the TV and radio reports which add lore and context to the characteristics of these ghouls, where they might have come from, and how they can be defeated. The resulting movie draws the viewer in by slowly revealing a more detailed picture of the living dead while simultaneously raising the tension as characters become more unstable as ever more ghouls surround this claustrophobic setting.

          Despite the exact timescale of this narrative being unclear, ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is appropriately titled, as it neatly sums up the nightmarish atmosphere the film so successfully manages. The lighting is exceptional, illuminating the frightened faces of terrified survivors as they are surrounded by oppressive darkness, while shadows cast vague, uncertain shapes across their faces. On the zombies, the lighting frames the vacant expressions and the little gory touches effectively, but the shadows obscure things just enough to ensure that you aren’t ever able to take in the full picture of them, making what you can’t tell about them haunting while simultaneously accentuating the off-putting nature of the details you are able to take in. The camera is often tilted slightly, even when nothing is happening. This makes even the typically comforting setting of a home into a twisted and unsettling version of itself. The editing can be a little rough at times as it frantically cuts between shots during the ghouls’ attacks, but this works in the film’s favour, making you even more unsure of your surroundings as the whole world goes to hell. Finally, the music can be cheesey when listened out of context, but when paired with the film the bombastic tracks make the shocking moments hit harder, while its absence during the uneasy quiet moments adds to the viewer’s paranoia that something terrible could happen at any moment, putting you in the same headspace as the characters. Despite almost 50 years having passed, and countless other films, books, tv series, games, and more having taken their stab at selling the horror of this exact scenario, ‘Night of the Living Dead’ still works remarkably well as an atmospheric narrative that evokes a frightening nightmare you desperately want to wake up from.

          All of these elements combine to emphasise the uncanniness of the ghouls and the character’s surroundings. At first, the ghouls aren’t noticeably gory or disfigured; they just look like regular people who have gone mad. It is only as reports come in that the ghouls start to reflect our increased understanding of them by being more noticeably divorced from typical humans. Some wear little to no clothing, others show facial scars of more significant wounds, and we even get to see them ripping and eating viscera as we approach the final act. But this happens by degrees, slowly being introduced to us rather than being thrown at us all at once. Mankind is gradually disintegrating into depraved animals, but their human appearance makes the decline of something so familiar abhorrent and believable, despite, or maybe even because of what the limited budget can manage. If the uncanny is about taking the grounded world we know and shifting it ever so slightly into something unbearable, then ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is a successful example of how to use the tools of cinema to achieve this effect, and horror movies owe a lot to that, from the early slasher films of the 70s all the way to recent zombie films.

          While a streamlined narrative giving rise to a genre of imitators would have you believe that the original would pale in comparison to the examples that expanded upon the experience with deeper characters and complex moral situations, ‘Night of the Living Dead’s story is still compelling to watch. It does meander and feel a bit creaky once or twice, particularly when Barbara takes some time going over every detail of the attack on her and her brother; seeing her recount this might be more effective if we hadn’t already seen everything she’s describing barely 20 minutes before this. Also the limited makeup and practical effects worked for me because it was paired with some clever techniques that push them further, but tastes may vary and some viewers might find the visuals too cheap to take seriously and invest in. But neither of these drawbacks ruin the experience of seeing a group of characters act and react in a reasonably believable manner to extraordinary circumstances. Hearing the unfolding reports as more information is drip-fed to our characters keeps you hooked even as you spend much of the runtime in a quiet house with people just trying to wait this disaster out. The direction of how certain tensions and character conflicts will progress is pretty apparent from the get-go, but I appreciate that they aren’t a one-way journey where things only get worse. People make concessions, little gestures to help out, and work together long enough so that it doesn’t come off as an inevitability when things go from bad to worse, which makes the tragedy of this social microcosm’s descent all the more potent. Without going into spoilers, the ultimate fate of one character is particularly chilling, while another character’s end is so sudden and unexpected that it leaves you reeling in a way that stays with you. This is a fine example of the zombie horror genre, even as it lays the foundation for the stories that would follow suit.

          I have no doubt George A. Romero went from strength to strength in his series of zombie movies, just as other filmmakers took the genre in countless directions that took the zombies as metaphors for any number of things, or placed them in ever more imaginative scenarios. But for a starting point for not only an entire genre, but for one director’s career, this is especially impressive. It deftly captures the feeling of a nightmare, and I would argue its visuals are just as potent all these years later.

8/10.

Even at this early stage, George A. Romero shows his admirable grasp of brutal horror, and shared his creative nightmare with a world that has kept it going even after all this time.

[ivegotsomethingtosay]

A Series of Unfortunate Events (opinion piece)

From Page to Screen to Screen... Again...

Normally, this would be the point in the week where I���d post a movie review, but seeing as nothing very interesting came out this weekend, I decided to try something new. Today, I’ll be looking at both the 2004 movie and recent Netflix TV adaptations of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and seeing how they each hold up against the books on which they’re based. Sure, there’s about a dozen other articles/video essays that I can think of off the top of my head that deal with the same question of “which is better,” but being that I’m such a big fan of the books, I figured I’d throw my hat into the ring, an expression which here means: “write a big long think piece for my blog that nobody reads because I’m bored at work.”

So anyway, there seemed to be a general sigh of relief when Netflix dropped their long-awaited adaptation of the classic 21st century children’s series, which was seen by many as a sort of apology for the crimes committed by the 2004 Jim Carey version. “UGH,” said the collective millennial public, “FINALLY we get a proper adaptation of these books I haven’t picked up in over a decade!” The whole thing felt eerily similar to the reaction against the Star Wars prequels when The Force Awakens came out almost two years ago (holy shit, it’s been almost two years hasn’t it?) The fact is, no matter which side of either debate you stand on, it’s impossible to deny that we’ve backed ourselves into something of a corner when it comes to judging movies/television on its own merits. Save for the occasional original gem, the vast majority of modern entertainment is comprised of re-workings and re-hashes of material that’s previously existed in some form or another, meaning it’s impossible to analyze said material without at least discussing its fidelity to the original source, and close to impossible to not let that influence how you think about it on its own. No, you CAN’T like Episode I because Jar-Jar isn’t nearly as funny a Chewbacca. No, you CAN’T say Game of Thrones is better than the books because Daario’s hair isn’t blue in the TV series (seriously, this is the shit people argue about now-a-days).

And now, it appears not even A Series of Unfortunate Events is safe, which is really *ahem* unfortunate, considering Dan Handler’s 13-part YA saga might be one of the best things to happen to children’s literature since… ever. No, seriously, go back an pick up one of those books. Dust it off and shower yourself with some of with wittiest, most (literally) devastatingly brilliant writing this side of Oscar Wilde. For those who grew up with the Baudelaire orphans, these books were a watershed. Not only did they accomplish the insurmountable task of actually getting us to read on our own when we were 9-years old, but they taught us all the hard lessons about life, death, and morality that the adults were too scared to mention even amongst themselves.

So yeah, of course we were going to get a movie with a $150 million budget once they were selling in the same leagues as Harry Potter. And yeah, of course we were going to get a Netflix series once streaming gave us the opportunity to do long-form storytelling on a large canvas without spending $150 million. Which one of them is better? Neither, if you ask me, but I’d argue that bashing them in relation to each-other and/or in relation to the books isn’t going to get us anywhere. A “Cinema Sins” video is going to take us nowhere on the journey to analyzing great art, or even appreciating it. And if there’s anything to come out of the zeitgeist in the last couple of decades that could clarify as great art, it’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

To start, I want to talk about what each of these adaptations do right. I’ll come right off the bat and say that I love both the show and the movie for many different reasons, and that even though the books will always hold the top spot in my mind, they hold that spot for reasons that go beyond some bullshit like whether Klaus wears glasses or not.

The show, for one, covers a lot of ground. I really despise judging an adaptation on how much they cut out of the source material (more on that later), but there’s something to admire about how closely Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events sticks to the books. Four novels in and it seems like everything on the page has ended up on screen and then some. Adapting for long form television has given the showrunners (one of whom is Handler himself) to actually expand on the story, something rarely seen even in our Game of Thrones age. The argument of whether or not the show “gets the books right” is rendered almost completely irrelevant because it IS the books, just with Neil Patrick Harris. We get to witness all the stuff we’ve been picturing in our mind for years, we get to see the Lucky Smells Lumber Mill come to life, we get to experience going to the movies with Uncle Monty. I think a lot of the reason fans responded so well to the show was because it reflected the books so slavishly, giving us exactly what we asked for by giving us everything we asked for, all at once. It reminded me a lot of the PBS Pride and Prejudice in that it was difficult not to be a fan of the book and not be a fan of the show for no other reason than the show treated the book as a Bible.

The film, on the other hand, is two hours long. Not only that, but it spends those two hours going through the first three novels in the series, something that takes close to six hours in Netflix land. Our automatic instinct is to see this as a fault, but when was the last time you actually watched the movie? Rather, when was the last time you read the first three books? They’re fantastic, sure, but they’re also fantastic books. What enjoys and pleases us sitting with a bulk of paper by a crackling fireplace might not bring us the same joy when sitting in a dark, stuffy room with dozens of other people. One of the big faux pas in all these “which one is better” conversations is a misunderstanding of what different mediums can do and what can be achieved in each. The 2004 film might compress the books, but it illustrates them beautifully. The detail isn’t in how well we get to know each member of Olaf’s troupe, it’s in the little, subtle ways in which they express themselves onscreen. Sure we don’t get to spend hours and hours with Uncle Monty like we would watching the show or reading the books, but with Billy Connolly’s exceptional performance, we feel like we’ve spent hours with him.

The fact is, taken on its own merits, the 2004 Series of Unfortunate Events is a great movie. The aesthetic, the visual storytelling, the writing, and the performances are all so universally fantastic that comparing it to the books feels oddly irrelevant. The word “adaptation” implies some level of interpretation. It implies a level of taking what’s on the page and filtering it through our own personal beliefs and opinions. For all the talk about which one of these versions is “better,” little has been said about the different contexts in which they were made. The general attitude towards the concept of “evil,” which is a big theme in the Series books, was vastly different in 2004 than it is (was?) in 2016. In 2004, the United States had just invaded Iraq. We were still reeling from the single most devastating terrorist attack in human history, and our enemies seemed, at least at the time, very concrete. In the film, there’s a lot more of an emphasis on the idea of “fire” as a weapon. The wreckage of the Baudelaire mansion is shot and treated with the sobriety of a lot of post-911 photography. Jim Carey’s Olaf is significantly more insidious than Neil Patrick Harris’. He gets what we wants through fear mongering and cunning, often fooling nice, reasonably intelligent adults through a series of carefully planned and lethal actions. Much like… you know… a terrorist.  

In the Netflix series, however, the enemy isn’t so much “evil” as it is stupidity. Olaf in the show is treated like a complete idiot who just so happens to get his way because literally everyone else is too stupid to know what’s going on. One could argue that while Olaf is the source of the conflict, the real antagonist of the show is Mr. Poe, who, despite “seeming” to care about the kids, constantly places them in harmful, potentially life threatening situations because he thinks he knows better. There isn’t a set enemy here. The enemy, if you can call it that, is ourselves, our own blindness to the reality of our present situation. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s one of the many excuses we gave for electing a fucking James Bond villain into one of the most powerful positions in the world. Donald Trump is an idiot, sure, but he’s an idiot with access to nukes, and *apparently* that’s somehow our fault.

You see what I’m getting at here? Whether intentionally or not, art is always in some way reflecting the world in which its produced, and that’s especially true of Series. One could argue that, simply by consequence of the time it was born into, the Netflix show is closer in tone and aim to what Handler originally intended, but I’m not sure I’d agree with that. Sure, the show is significantly more ironic than the movie, much like the books. It contains much more references to pop culture, classic literature, and the world in which it was written, much like the books. But unlike the books, everything I just said comes off as funny, surreal, and at times even distancing. Watching the Netflix show is like watching an eight-hour long Wes Anderson film. It’s fun, colorful, and WAY more educated than you are, but for those very reasons, its harder to identify with what’s going on up on screen. The books, on the other hand, are deeply involving, deeply dark, and deeply funny. It’s a swirl of contradictions that can really only work properly when you’re reading it off a page. Postmodernism works differently on film than it does in literature. Translating directly from one to the other causes a kind of whiplash that the show suffered from on multiple occasions.

See, this is why I’ll always treasure the books. Specifically the Snicket books, because while I’ve gotten emotionally attached to characters in other stories and novels, Series was able to ignite the imagination in such a specific way, that literally taking it and putting it up on screen automatically lessens the effect. When I was ten, I had no idea what the Squalors’ endlessly large penthouse in Eratz Elevator actually looked like. I had no clue what it would be like to see Hector’s hot-air home in Vile Village. I have only the vivid, mysterious pictures that were painted in my mind, and nothing Netflix or Nickelodeon can conjure up will ever compare to that.

I envy all the kids who are going to grow up watching the Netflix series. I envy all of them who are going to go back and experience the movie as a result. What I do not envy is missing out on one of the better reading experiences of a lifetime in favor of either of those things, or vice versa. There’s an important lesson to be learned from all this: when we pit up art against itself, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to appreciate it on a deeper level. When we breathe a sigh of relief when we get the adaptation we always wanted, we miss out on the chance to challenge, and possibly refine our own points of view. Sometimes, we loose sight of what makes these things so lovable in the first place, and that’s unfortunate.

[aion-rsa]

Why Pirates of the Caribbean Didn’t Need Any Sequels

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Pirates of the Caribbean was never meant to be a franchise. Not really. Of course one could also argue the concept was never meant to be a movie either. Originally a theme park ride which opened at Disneyland in 1967, Pirates of the Caribbean becoming a movie is the kind of high-concept thrown around by Disney execs huddled at a conference table. Indeed, it was creative executives Brigham Taylor, Michael Haynes, and Josh Harmon who brainstormed the basic plot for a Pirates movie during the same period the studio greenlit The Country Bears and The Haunted Mansion movies. However, what made the eventual Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl a classic came from the type of creative inspiration Disney couldn’t anticipate or control… yet.

Released in 2003 with modest expectations from the Mouse, and even more cynical predictions by the rest of the industry, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie ended up standing tall among the last of a dying breed: a surprise box office hit not based on a property with a built-in audience. Coming out at the crossroads of summer blockbusters being driven by practical and digital effects, and analogue filmmaking versus digital cinematography, the movie was released as an old-fashioned adventure yarn in the spirit of Errol Flynn with a modern twist.

Curse of the Black Pearl was not seriously set-up for sequels, prequels, or a shared universe, yet it would spawn all of them in one way or another. Still, in its most undiluted form, Pirates’ success was predicated on a creative spark from the filmmakers involved, chief among them director Gore Verbinski and actor Johnny Depp, which Disney could not stifle or curb. Instead the pair made a throwback quite unlike anything else in the marketplace, and its singular quality is also why its eventual sequels would, to varying degrees, fail to recapture that 2003 lightning in a bottle.

After being thought up by Disney executives, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie incubated during a very different era for the studio. Disney’s live-action movies then released under the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle banner had long been struggling. Worse still, their animated movies were also beginning to falter with duds like Dinosaur (2000) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) signaling the Disney Renaissance was over. Within this anxiety, Disney first hired Jay Wolpert and then Stuart Beattie to write screenplays between 2001 and 2002 for Pirates, even as the studio vacillated on what they wanted. For his part, Wolpert imagined his heroic Jack Sparrow to be played by Hugh Jackman (hence the name Jack), but the studio didn’t think he could carry a blockbuster solo. In fact, Disney wasn’t even sure Pirates was going to be a blockbuster.

On the one hand, the studio was approaching Matthew McConaughey to play Sparrow after the actor proved a solid team player on their Touchstone Pictures’ Reign of Fire—it also helped that executives believed McConaughey resembled Burt Lancaster, who just happened to star in the last successful Hollywood pirate movie… 1952’s The Crimson Pirate. But Disney was also considering shuttling the concept over to the direct-to-video market, with either Cary Elwes or Christopher Walken as Captain Jack. Aye, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner had such cold feet on the project, and eventually about Depp, that he tried to stop production at the eleventh hour before cameras rolled in 2002, nervous because The Country Bears (starring Walken) flopped that summer.

But given the original setup for the picture in those early drafts, it is easy to see why there was a lack of confidence in the material. In its initial conception, Pirates of the Caribbean was intended to be a PG buddy comedy about a pirate named Jack Sparrow and his jailor Will Turner setting off to rescue the governor’s daughter; she’d been kidnapped for ransom by the dastardly Captain Blackheart, a generic baddie for a more generic plot. There were no twists or turns, Aztec treasure and curses, marooned islands, or the subversive streak cherished by the eventual filmmakers who discovered the heart of the movie was “sitting on a beach drinking rum.”

That inspiration luckily came in the quick turnaround of Dick Cook, the newly minted Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group chairman, convincing first Jerry Bruckheimer to produce the flailing Pirates of the Caribbean project and then, at Bruckheimer’s insistence, talking oddball actor Johnny Depp into starring in a Disney movie. Depp actually took the meeting with Cook to land an animated voice acting gig that would appeal to his children, but upon hearing the word “pirates” and the prospect of sword fighting, his ambitions for working at Disney quickly grew.

With a screenplay being hastily rewritten by new scribes Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who’d just come off Shrek and another all-time classic swashbuckler in The Mask of Zorro, Pirates of the Caribbean became a movie produced too quickly by a struggling movie studio to fully control, especially as its moving parts were transported to the actual Caribbean, including Elliot and Rossio, who continued rewriting the movie on-set to director Gore Verbinski’s specifications. For context, Verbinski’s biggest hit at that time was the decidedly not-family friendly The Ring.

“To make this film in under a year from an outline, it was really essential to bring them in,” Verbinski said about Elliot and Ross during his Curse of the Black Pearl audio commentary. The director had the writers’ shrewd intuition, which added a supernatural curse that upped the movie’s CG-spectacle for modern blockbusters and made it more in line with the Disneyland ride, as well as the ability to add narrative and verbal complexity on the fly.

Said Verbinski, “In looking at the genre and saying, ‘Why hasn’t it worked?’ I found a lot of the sort of dialect [in recent pirates movies] didn’t feel like it was really from Robert Louis Stevenson. You know, the ‘Black Spot,’ any kind of that pirate flavor out of Treasure Island. It sort of went away.”

With Pirates of the Caribbean, it came back with a vengeance. Released eight years after Renny Harlin’s lackluster Cutthroat Island failed at modernizing pirate movies by way of ‘90s aesthetics, Verbinski and Depp brought the old-fashioned wonder of Stevenson and Golden Age Hollywood pirate movies of yore roaring back. While the film’s marketing revolved around the then-cutting edge CGI effects of cursed men who in the light of the full moon turn into skeletons like they’re right out of some Disney park attraction, the reason the movie is still extraordinarily satisfying nearly 20 years later is because of what occurs outside these relatively limited digital set-pieces.

Narratively and visually, Verbinski and his merry crew of filmmakers pulled from Michael Curtiz’s classic Captain Blood (1935), which is likewise set around the escape of an imprisoned pirate with a brand on his flesh at the British Port Royal colony in Jamaica. Several scenes, like the decidedly PG-13 levels of roustabout action on the island of Tortuga, are even lifted directly from that movie. Others, like when Jack Sparrow and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) sneak aboard an enemy ship while breathing underwater in a capsized rowboat, are taken shot-by-shot from the much goofier Crimson Pirate.

But more than just paying homage to classic pirate movie iconography, the original Pirates of the Caribbean recaptured those earlier movies’ mirthful sense of adventure. The “dialect” Verbinski refers to is not resurrected by Depp’s idiosyncratic Jack, but it oozes out of stage thespian Geoffrey Rush. A classically trained character actor, Rush leans hard into the hard-Rs of his speech, all but literally muttering “argh.” He leans into every pirate stereotype and makes a feast of the scenery while doing so. Verbinski even joked he only wanted Rush because Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers were dead: that old school charisma is what turned this potential “paycheck” role into one every bit as essential in recapturing swashbuckling fun as Depp’s.

The same could be said for so many of the other elements, from the use of actual on location shooting (and in the Caribbean for parts of the movies unlike the Californian coasts used by Captain Blood) to at least one actual replica of an 18th century merchant vessel—The Lady Washington, redressed to look like the Interceptor in the film. The other two major vessels in the movie, the Black Pearl and Dauntless, were at least built two-thirds to scale on sea barges while CG filled in the rest.

And despite it being her breakout role, Keira Knightley’s performance as Elizabeth Swann is often overlooked. At only the age of 17, Knightley holds her own against co-stars Depp and Rush, and creates a compelling protagonist who is visibly working the angles of her situation in every scene. In lesser hands, Elizabeth could’ve been blandly innocuous, the “love interest,” but in the finished film she drives the plot, convincingly outsmarting Barbossa and Sparrow at every turn. And while performing the functions of an old-fashioned Hollywood love story, Knightley’s screen presence turned her into a star just as readily as a teenage Olivia de Havilland became one after Captain Blood.

But then that first major Hollywood pirate movie was on Verbinski’s mind during the production of Pirates of the Caribbean, both in how that 1935 movie’s swashbuckling scope made its director and two leads A-listers, and also in how he could subvert its tropes now in the 21st century.

“I knew the film could support [Depp’s performance] because Orlando’s doing Errol Flynn,” Verbinski said. “I mean if you look at Jack Davenport [as Commodore Norrington] and even Orlando’s performances, on their own they’re really solid, but in context they’re fuel for [Depp] to consume.” And consume them he did.

Captain Jack was always meant to be the amorous hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, a mischievous Han Solo to Will Turner’s Luke Skywalker that gets to kill Darth Vader at the end. But as screenwriter Elliot surmised in 2003, “The characterization, the personality of Jack is what we wrote. The expression of that is purely Johnny Depp.” He’d swing from pulleys like Flynn, but do so while screaming in bloody terror. He was a familiar narrative archetype, but as singular an anti-hero as Hollywood has ever seen.

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A performer best known for eschewing his handsome good looks at this time in favor of prosthetics and off-center performances like in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, Depp was not an obvious choice for the role. But at Bruckheimer’s insistence the character actor was in, and when he first met with his director Verbinski, the only thing the filmmaker was certain of is that Depp would play against his good looks.

Thinking back on their first meeting with affection, Verbinski recalled, “[He] said, ‘I don’t think Jack has a nose because he lost his nose in a sword fight, but it got sewed back on and it’s blue because the circulation is bad.’” It was a radical choice, one certain to die once Disney executives heard it, but it indicated the kind of subversive streak Verbinski thirsted for—one that could bounce off an old Hollywood aesthetic.

Said Verbinski, “This was in the infantile stages of the Bruckheimer and Dick Cook experience, and Synergy back home is talking about McDonald’s cups and happy meals. And on the third bottle of wine at a restaurant in London, we’re talking about a nose being sliced off.” It was the counterbalance the movie needed, and the type of creative-leaning these two eccentric talents gravitated toward. In Verbinski’s mind, Bloom must be D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers so Depp can play the rock star (Keith Richards to be exact). It also freed Depp up to improvise lines where he pondered if Will Turner, or the entire male population of France, were eunuchs. “You have to pervert the genre at almost every opportunity,” said Verbinski.

Yet perversion is not exactly a word that comes to mind with Disney. Not before 2003, and not soon afterward. But in the fast turnaround on a pirate movie in 2002, Verbinski and Depp could be quite perverse with the material, although not without pushback. For example, while the studio accepted Bruckheimer’s insistence that a pirate movie needed to be PG-13—a first for a Disney movie released under the studio’s official banner—there was immediate repulsion when Depp showed his personally selected wardrobe for Jack Sparrow, complete with five teeth capped to look like a golden grill in front. Depp was instantly summoned to a meeting with Bruckheimer and Cook.

“Three went away and then I secretly added one,” Depp said in 2003. “But the two that went away were the ones I used as bartering material.” In a 2010 interview, Depp later clarified how much concern there was over his performance as the dailies rolled in.

“They couldn’t stand [Jack],” Depp said. “I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie.’” Depp even referred to several executives as “Disney-ites” who feared he’d turned their heroic pirate into an openly gay character. “[They were] going, ‘What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?’ And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite; ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ which really made her nervous.”

According to Verbinski, Eisner even panicked when he saw a daily of the final shot of the movie, with Jack caressing the phallic-shaped handles of the Black Pearl’s steering wheel.

These were bold and bizarre choices made by both Depp and Verbinski at the peak of their creative talents. Today, it’s easy to forget how transgressive Depp’s Captain Jack appeared at the time, particularly after he turned Sparrow into a paycheck-generating caricature during the fourth and fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But in 2003, the character was brazenly unlike anything any studio would put at the forefront of a summer tentpole, least of all Disney. For that matter, it’s impossible to imagine such creative mojo being left unchecked on a Disney tentpole today, not when the studio has turned superhero movies into a finely tuned assembly line, and still seeks to do the same with Star Wars.

Of course the changing tides were imminent in ’03 too. Ahead of release, Verbinski, Elliot and Rossio, and the armada of filmmakers attempted to make the ultimate pirate movie. The director even mused there were only five types of pirate stories to be told: buried treasure, building a crew, marooned anti-heroes, kidnapped damsels, and the good-man-turned-scoundrel. Pirates of the Caribbean did them all in a single movie, complete with Aztec curses.

But shortly after principal photography wrapped, and even as Disney executives privately stewed over what Depp was doing to the movie, the studio quietly added the subtitle “The Curse of the Black Pearl,” signaling they wanted sequels. Yet considering the kitchen sink approach to every classical trope being honored and subverted in the original movie… did there really need to be a sequel?

In retrospect, no. Admittedly there’s quite a bit in the second Pirates movie to enjoy: Verbinski and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s sun-drenched photography of Caribbean locations was back, as was Penny Rose’s historically authentic costuming, and of course Depp. But the script was looser; and though the CGI was impressive with the motion-capture performance of Bill Nighy as new heavy Davy Jones and the giant tentacles of a Kraken, which harkened back to another Disney favorite, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the more enmeshed the franchise became with CG-spectacle, the more it got away from what made the first a brilliant throwback.

The initial Pirates sequels also fell prey to the franchise fad of the early 2000s. Before gritty reboots or “shared cinematic universes,” the buzzword in studios offices was “trilogy.” While the original Pirates was a blast of creative energy put into one film with no setups or dangling plot threads, it was released in an era when Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and the Star Wars prequels dominated the box office; even superhero movies were haphazardly trying to jump on the fad via X-Men and Spider-Man rushing awkward threequel finales.

But no matter how grandiose composer Hans Zimmer’s score became, Pirates of the Caribbean was not Lord of the Rings, and trying to force that square peg into a round hole triggered diminishing returns. While the second movie had fun developments like Davenport’s Norrington becoming a major character who washed out of the British Navy and was now a disgraced pirate crossing swords with Depp and Bloom during a spectacular three-way sword fight, the third film had no clear vision of what to do with him after a cliffhanger ending. So he was unceremoniously killed off. I’d even argue the third movie didn’t know what to do with any character to match the franchise’s sudden pretensions. So Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner, designed to be classic happily-ever-after types in the vein of Captain Blood, are unconvincingly morphed into tragic star-crossed lovers with an ending that reaches for the majesty of J.R.R. Tolkien. By trilogy’s end, they’re doomed to see each other only one day per decade. It wants to be mythic, but it’s really bloated melodrama.

Still, it was better than what came afterward. Realizing there was yet more money in the Pirates brand after the trilogy concluded, Disney churned out two more movies where everyone but Depp and Rush were gone. Gorgeous 35mm cinematography was replaced by bland digital photography, on-location shooting in the Caribbean was kept to a minimum, and the performance that once got Depp an Oscar nomination became a phoned-in parody of itself. Even the characterization of Jack is off, with the resourceful pirate tactician everyone mistakes for a fool turning into a fool everyone inexplicably mistakes for being clever.

In this way, all the elements that made the original so refreshingly lovable were run aground, much the same way Disney’s modern attempts to repeat the narrative beats of George Lucas’ once revolutionary Star Wars movies from earlier decades had led to a recycled emptiness by the time we reached last year’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The creative transgressions of Verbinski and Depp in their prime were sandblasted and smoothed by a studio system that’s only become better at dulling the edges of any and every intellectual property. Just ask Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the original directors of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

The fifth and final Depp-led Pirates of the Caribbean movie attempted to use prequel elements wherein audiences met a de-aged Jack Sparrow winning battles in his youth. But by then audiences had tired of the shtick. So Disney now seeks to reboot the brand with Margot Robbie in the lead. Undoubtedly her maiden voyage in the franchise will be loaded with easter eggs and dangling setups for sequels and spinoffs, and perhaps even a shared universe of Pirates movies. It’ll surely make for a smoother transition than the original movie had to indefinite expansion. And yet, I suspect the standalone quality of the first is what will always make it the most valuable treasure buried in this franchise’s sea.

The post Why Pirates of the Caribbean Didn’t Need Any Sequels appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[to-learn-of-living]

This Bible Passage Proves God is Cool With Same-Sex Marriage

“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.”

‭‭1 Timothy‬ ‭4:1-5‬ ‭(NIV) - emphases mine‬‬

Source: Google Images

Clearly this passage speaks directly to our modern age. Paul was obviously saying that the opponents of same-sex marriage are hypocritical liars who forbid LGBT people to marry. They have abandoned their faith and follow deceiving things taught by demons.

If you are reading this and hold a ‘biblical’ view of marriage, you're probably jumping out of your chair screaming ‘blasphemy’ right now. You're probably preparing a three point rebuttal in your head to prove me wrong. You may be dying to hit the comments section and explain why this passage can't possibly be applied the way I've used it...

...and you're probably right.

Sorry-not-sorry about the click bait.

But here's my point: Christians on both sides of this debate take scripture out of context. It is impossible to prove biblically if God is for or against same-sex marriage because it is a 21st century question that was never posited to the bible’s authors!

This particular passage is in the genre of ‘prophetic writing’, which by its nature makes it extremely hard to pin down the exact meaning (though many claim to ‘know’). This could have been written prophesying today's events, but it also could have been written about inter-racial marriage 50 years ago, inter-class marriages of previous eras, something yet to come, all of the above, or none of the above. We don't know! We need to study this text through meditation and prayer to decipher it, and even then we can never be 100% certain we’ve come to the right conclusions! That’s the point of faith!

But many people who would cry ‘heresy’ at my former reading of this passage are advocating for a similar ‘straightforward reading’ on all passages relating to LGBT sexual acts. They claim we need to stick to ‘biblical marriage’, and denounce same-sex-marriage activists for taking the bible out of context.

So let’s look at the bible passages on same sex relations in context.

There are only 6 or 7 passages in the bible that reference gay sex. 

This is hardly the be all and end all that many of today’s Christians make it out to be. If anything it’s an afterthought.

Importantly, there are no passages that mention same sex marriage.

That’s right. Zero. 

Therefore any biblical text used to prove anything in this debate has to be taken out of context and applied to modern life!

So what did these LGBT passages mean in their original contexts?

The story of Sodom is probably the most well known of the lot - after all we get the term ‘Sodomy’ from this story. But read it again in Genesis 18:16-19:29. God tells Abraham he will destroy Sodom. Abraham begs for mercy. The townsfolk try to gang rape some angels. Then Sodom is destroyed. 

There are 2 main takeaways from this story. First, the passage never says what Sodom’s sin was. Yes, there was an attempted gang rape. But this happened after God said he would destroy the city! However, God does clarify his reasons later in the bible:

“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” ‭‭Ezekiel‬ ‭16:49-50‬ ‭(NIV‬‬)

An argument could be made that sodomy was the ‘'haughty and detestable things’ God describes here, but once again we resort to speculation to figure that out. The obvious teaching of this passage is that God cares far more that the Sodomites didn’t help the poor and needy, than any possible sexual sin they may have committed.

Secondly, like a similar passage in Judges 19, this incident is specifically about gang rape. That is a very different social issue to two men wanting a monogamous marriage. To apply these passages to same sex marriage is to take the texts as far, or perhaps further, out of context than I did with my opening statements!

Pieter Schoubroeck, De verwoesting van Sodom en Gomorra

Leviticus 20:13 says “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” (NIV). This sounds like an open and shut case. But once again we need to look at it in context. 

This passage is found in a list of sexual sins (which are pro-polygamy by the way, I'll get to that later). Many people argue that because the death penalty is advocated here, gay sex is far worse than other sexual sin. But adultery is also given the death penalty in the same passage, and Jesus specifically said that anyone who divorces and remarries commits adultery. Yet so many of our churches give divorcees leadership positions they deny to gay Christians.

The chapter opens with an explanation of why these rules have been set. Pagan people all around the Israelites worshipped their gods by performing these sexual acts. So the Jewish people were commanded not to practice them. It is possible that this rule should still apply, but making that assumption requires taking the rule out of its context (a law for the Jewish people to not practice pagan worship) and applying it to today's world sans the religious meaning. By the same logic, we could take Paul’s 1 Corinthians 8 acknowledgement that there is nothing wrong with eating food sacrificed to idols out of context, and say there is nothing wrong with same sex relationships. Even if we hold onto this Levitical law as necessary for today, it should be acknowledged that it is a rule specifically for God’s people - and therefore it shouldn't bother Christians if gay non-Christians want to get married!

Romans 1 seems to be the most damming passage against all same-sex practices (and possibly the only mention of lesbianism in the bible), yet it's actually anything but. Paul uses it to illicit disgust in his Jewish audience, who he knows feels morally superior to the Romans living around them (much like many Christians today), only to turn it back on them in Romans 2 by reprimanding them. He tells the Jews they are far worse than the Romans for judging them. This should not be used as a justification to condemn the LGBT community, it should be used as a reprimand for anyone who thinks themselves morally superior to others!

But more than that, Romans 1 shows a logical progression. People knew God. They refused to worship him. They turned away from him. They replaced worship of God with worship of natural things. God gave them over to their lusts, and they degraded each other with their bodies.

I don't know about you, but I don't know any LGBT folk who have followed this progression. In fact, many are committed Christians, although a lot no longer attend church due to the awful experiences that've had there.

This passage makes much more sense in relation to the Roman mystery cults of the day, who literally praised idols and held group orgies as forms of worship. As with the leviticus passage, it is dubious at best to say that this text which deals with cult orgies should be applied to monogamous relationships.

Fresco from the Sala di Grande Dipinto, Scenes in the Villa de Misteri (Pompeii).

Finally we have 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10. The problem with these passages is we don’t know the meaning of the words used! Entire books have been written trying to understand the meaning of the two Greek words often translated as ‘homosexuality’ in these two passages. What does seem clear is that they refer to some sort of male to male sexual act. Yet many ‘Christian Marriage’ supporters argue that these words definitely mean all homosexuality is a sin, and base their entire sexuality theology on this ‘fact’. That isn’t just isn’t just taking a passage out of context, it’s deliberately changing the bible to suit your own point of view - exactly what many same-sex marriage supporters are accused of doing. 

So to be clear, we can't prove that same sex relationships are either right or wrong using the bible in context. But what about marriage? The main argument of the ‘no’ campaign is to advocate for ‘biblical marriage’ after all...

...but that's not actually what they’re advocating for...

For starters, the idea of ‘biblical marriage’ is inherently flawed.

There are hundreds of marriages mentioned in the bible, and the overwhelming majority of them were made up of one man and multiple women. So if you want to fight for ‘biblical marriage’, you need to start by ‘redefining’ marriage as ‘one man and one or more wives’.

This is perhaps too simple. By the new testament era most Jews had adopted monogamy as the standard form of marriage, probably from the Roman influences of the time. But the bible never forbids polygamy! In fact passages in the Torah, including the levitical passage on homosexuality, prescribe polygamy as law! 

As for the new testament, all mentions of marriage I can think of could easily be applied to polygamy or monogamy, barring one possible exception: “...I asked you to choose church leaders in every city. Their lives must be so that no one can talk against them. They must have only one wife.” (Titus 1:5b-6, NLV) - and even this wording is only present in certain translations.

So clearly, using a straightforward reading of scripture, a biblical definition of marriage must recommend polygamy, unless you aspire to be a church leader. 

Over the last 2000 years we've changed the definition of marriage to be ‘one man and one women’, despite having no biblical support for this position!

So a fight for ‘biblical marriage’ is a fight for polygamy! Let’s lobby government to allow multiple wives for all men! (Sorry ladies, as with much of history you get the short end of the stick with this one).

On top of that, throughout the bible, and most of history, marriages were almost exclusively arranged by the couple’s family. A husband and wife sometimes wouldn't even meet until their wedding! Marriages were not commitments of love, they were a business contract. The couple might eventually come to love each other, but it wasn't guaranteed.

So let’s abolish love, and go back to ‘biblical marriage’, by selling off our daughters to the highest paying man, even if he already has 6 other wives...

Source: christiansforequality.com.au

...Or we could stop with this crazy assumption that marriage has always been between one man and one woman, and realise that it is a constantly changing social construct that continually evolves with our culture. That's a good thing. A vote for same-sex marriage is not a vote against heterosexual marriage. It is a vote against ‘biblical marriage’, but I don't see ‘biblical marriage’ as anything to aspire too.

Do you?

[willmeiertext]

Dmitri Obergfell: Death of the Cool

via One Good Eye (Denver)

INTRO:

This is the first of a series of experimental writings about, and in collaboration with, select Denver artists. Having no specific agenda other than an interest in these artists’ work, the plan is to have a conversation with them in their studio about whatever happens to come up. There’s no Q&A, no topics to necessarily cover, and honestly, if there’s one thing I want from these experiments, it’s for them to feel different than your typical artist interview. A conversation that is true to the work and the personalities of the artists and myself.

I hope to document the personality of the conversation itself. So keeping the process organic beyond their studio and back into my own, the writing produced will inherit the thematic trajectory of the dialogue directly, with my role as writer being to subsume both peoples’ viewpoints, conclusions, questions, answers, misdirections, etc., into a single, weirdly tangential perspective.

DMITRI OBERGFELL: THE DEATH OF THE COOL

Dmitri Obergfell’s process fills the entire main space of Leisure Gallery, his current studio, in preparation for his show, Man is a Bubble and Time Is a Place, opening at Gildar Gallery March 23. Rap music from Macbook speakers echoes around our conversation. The entire time I was in there, he never paused from making molds. I started in at the natural place: What’s this show about?

Basically, it’s a meditation on “Deep Time” — an idea sampled from 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book), in which one of the most defining moments was the first time a proto-human got bored. Thus began the search for meaning, leading to the creation of symbols, the original “victory over time” that allowed information to be passed to future generations. But this sounds romantic, which isn’t the point. Dmitri is mainly just curious about what might possibly in the future be considered an artifact representative of our current era of massive overproduction.

Really, though, think about what this might be in our current, pop culture-obsessed world. The commodity of what we might call Cool? It’s certainly what’s being produced in rap and pop music, and just about every other corner of cultural industry other than art (as artists would love you to think — but really, their Cool is a commodity too, just more codified).

This has always resonated in Obergfell’s art for me, even at surface value, reflected in the chameleon paint signature to his style. The “flip paint,” as it’s sometimes known, which changes color under varying light conditions, embodies the theme of change and originally came from his fascination with car modification culture, where people have this eerily invested relationship with objects. Weirdly similar to Egyptian funerary art — some of the most extraordinary artworks ever produced, with express intent to be immediately put in the ground. I’ve personally felt for most of my life that the purpose of capital-A-Art is easiest to grasp in a sarcophagus. And I know it isn’t just Obergfell and myself who are on this wavelength: it was one of the most beautiful themes in Matthew Barney’s largely grueling film-opera, River of Fundament, screened in town as an arrival present from DAM curator Becky Hart not too long ago.

But really, for the majority of history, most art arguably had to do with some spiritual notion of death, all the way up until it made a departure from Christianity and began a slow descent into a sort of crisis as it began to become increasingly about only itself. Some might even say that modernism was a result of art becoming aware of its own mortality, with abstraction and minimalism and postmodern schools of self-referentiality becoming obsessively anxious about their encroaching deaths.

That’s a bit pessimistic, though, which is a sort of inapplicable frame for pieces like Dmitri’s recent installation featured in DAM’s Mi Tierra, which reads as not only profoundly Cool, in its chrome-plated, flip-painted, nails-did, speaker-boxed, narco-saint-swearing, tequila-shot-taking visual vocabulary, but also heartfelt, detail-oriented, and really very fresh and futuristic. Obergfell brings up Robert Smithson saying something like, “installation isn’t about filling up a room, it’s about taking things out.” This aside, though, perhaps one of the greatest strengths of this piece is that it isn’t art-about-art. It feels like it’s made for non-artists to enjoy — a product of the MTV / internet age, not just in its references, but in its attenuation to short attention spans with dozens of layered, individual moments for viewers to explore with reward at their leisure. To thumb through like the window shoppers we all are, until the museum revokes the public’s entry privileges because we can’t stop ourselves from doing so (true story).

The fact that Dmitri’s works can be understood and appreciated by both artists and those who know nothing about art cannot be emphasized enough. His artworks’ brand of Cool is that of common symbology, things cool to regular people, in some ways analogous to really exceptionally-produced radio-rap. There’s a persistent legibility, even if you don’t know the prerequisite slang (artSpeak) to understand everything being said. And this is really important to him, mainly because art is in a really dangerous place in our current political climate. Much of the public may come to (if they don’t already) view being an artist as some sort of con, and regardless of any individual cases of subjective truth to that effect, it’s a fact that art is at least threatened by more forms of recreation and entertainment than ever before, constantly competing for increasingly shorter attention spans.

It’s true, sadly. The magic that often lived in art — in Stonehenge, in representational painting, in philosophical minimalism — where is it now? Because mystery, wonder, and “how the hell?” often feel like they now belong to software. And while art has always progressed in tandem with technology, is it a given that, as just one of many incarnations of information, it’s exempt from an expiration date?

This all leads me to the place where I don’t think what might be an “average” perspective on art misses the point at all. If art has this anxiety about its own death, which it compensates for by incessantly semantically proving it’s existential value in this core way, perpetuated by an industry where accumulating generations of post-Duchampian, self-proclaimed Artists successively come-of-age wanting to believe that the fortune they spent on their art-school education was worthwhile — okay, it’s a big ‘if’, but if that’s true — it kinda makes sense that artists wouldn’t want to just make “some shit that’s cool”. But whether tastes are fabricated by capitalism or not, whether that matters or not, “some cool shit” is what anyone who isn’t plagued by these anxieties wants art to be. And even just within the context of a museum visit, focusing on anything in the 21st century is like speed-dating.

Art shouldn’t be superficial. It honestly probably isn’t even art if it doesn’t get deeper and better the longer you spend with it. But it should be gratifying and appreciative of its viewership now more than ever. In a political time when it could be said that people are increasingly scared of being challenged, in all areas of their lives, whether thanks to Facebook algorithms or just some greater zeitgeist, what I’m getting at is a dangerous line of thought, for sure. But I think taking seriously people’s willingness to engage information will only benefit the future of art’s wider efficacy, and maybe ensure it even has that future in the first place. It’s important to connect to the culture you’re a part of, not just simply detach from or criticize it. Then influence is possible. Enjoyment will always be capitalized upon. That doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted.

Returning to 2001 (the movie) — which anecdotally is my personal favorite work of art — no one understood this better than Stanley Kubrick. His movies are immaculately shot. Basically perfect. But if you really think about it, what he did was almost like what people now call “edutainment,” a sort of high-art sacrilege. And yet, there’s no doubt that the way he works with the “material” of film, using something shiny to draw people into his world of ideas, is tactically smart, to say the least. I personally don’t mind admitting that I love to be edutained.

I wanted to talk about Obergfell’s sculpture at BMOCA, Go Home Bacchus, which seemed much farther down the continuum toward “critical” art, and learned that I kinda missed the mark in my interpretation. It’s not institutional critique, it’s again, a meditation. On monuments. They’re everywhere — huge, politically charged objects made by bureaucracies to celebrate victory, a kind of weird idea in the post-9/11 world, you might think, but apparently these sorts of idealistic, fascist colossuses are still a major export of North Korea for dictators worldwide. When New Orleans takes down their confederate monuments, as in current news, then how best to do that? Will they literally topple them? What an indulgent symbol…

And yet, for all this power these things are supposed to hold in the public spaces they reign over, its almost like the only way for people to react is to take a selfie in front of them, or else commit petty vandalism. It’s almost like instinctual in our culture, like it’s funny to vandalize a giant statue whether you care about the politics behind it or not.

Obergfell’s main piece of research for this project was the scene in Tim Burton’s Batman when Jack Nicholson’s Joker brings his gang in to supervillianize the art museum. “A really fucking cool scene,” representative of popular culture. But then also around that time ISIS began making headlines for destroying vast amounts of historical artifacts — horrifically seeming to say “we’re erasing your history in its most prized form, it’s gone, we own you.” So it turns out there is power in the act…

But Bacchus is about graffiti, not aesthetic genocide. But maybe not even graffiti, because that word is loaded and this has nothing to do with geometric, gradient murals. So a more slippery concept — slippery to the extent that Obergfell *might* not even be upset if someone was to tag the piece. Something racist: no-go. Some self-important graffiti writer trying to claim the piece and “get up” — get out. Junior WestSideMafia alternative school student? Go for it. The person who keeps writing “Kill Trump” on electrical boxes around Denver, please. Do your thing (endorsement is mine, not necessarily the artist’s).

Not to get redundant, but there’s something really charmingly normal about the shit-headed vibe of these sentiments, likened by Dmitri to a teenager stealing fire extinguishers to blow at cars in the parking lot for fun. And while that’s so juvenile and condemnable by the ultra-ethical art world, I know – is it not also kind of the most raw manifestation of The Artist’s Instinct, if such a thing exists? To just say “fuck it I’m gonna do this thing and see what happens”.

Why? “I just thought it’d be cool.”