#i have the original script for the video but everything about the music was kind of in one folder and IT WENT UNDER

[nine-aetharia]

when someone asks for the wkm musical script but so much of it was lost in the 'Great Laptop Dying'-ing

[jennilah]

hi there!

please do share your thoughts on canon vs non canon (TO YOU) scenes from saw if you feel like it

this seems like a fun topic to explore 👁

i was thinking about this all day im gonna hella ramble too much

to reiterate and expand on what i kinda said in that post's tags: im genuinely cautious when it comes to the canonicity of deleted scenes and script changes for most things because, well, things dont get included in the final product for a reason sometimes.

trust me i know about deleted scenes. ive had months of work erased from existence because of deleted scenes. and sometimes it really was for the best

and im equally if not more skeptical of things like.. lore coming from outside sources. if its not in the original media, its questionable. film novelizations, game adaptions, spin-off comics, all that stuff is usually written by some third party with little to no input from the real writers. unless it gets some serious seal of approval and that shit actually gets referenced in the next film, then im like "ok im listening." Otherwise, i shrug it all off as maybe-canon side adventures until contradicted

THAT SAID

sometimessss those nuggets of lore or characterization from deleted scenes/iffy canon off-shoot material are sick af so we just kind of adopt it anyway!!! we all do it!!!

ALSO

FUCKIN. The goddamn Saw franchise makes me insane with the different cuts of each film so we basically choose our favorite canon already. so. its a bit loosey goosey here sometimes

ok first of all i KNOW im gonna forget things so imma just kind of list and describe what i can remember off the top of my head. i dont actually have things like the scripts memorized i only know some moments that get passed around between us little freaks like drugs

like this one

i dont care if this doesnt happen on-screen in Saw IV, it happens in my heart

and this little bit of characterization from all 3 goofballs here despite us not really seeing much of it in the film:

Strahm being a butthead just interrupting Perez and Hoffman having a nice little talk because he hates his ass so much

Hoffman being more of the annoying little flirt that i know he is in my heart

Perez being charmed by him, the two of them having a cute little bonding moment as acquaintances for a moment there, and then STRAHM AGAIN being a butthead

i love them. i LOVE THEM

its very important to me that Perez kind of liked Hoffman. it makes his betrayal hurt so much more

this whole moment. i love this. ough. as much as i loved this scene already, in my head i pretend the scene played out like this....

falls onto his ass

angel of death

my fucking goodness

also, i cant list off everything because theres so much its a little depressing, but there's a lot going on in the Saw 3D script that is tragically cool. they really leaned into Hoffman going off the deep end and i enjoyed that. and how grisly his scar was originally supposed to be, and the symbolism with his declining mental state. and his interactions with Lawrence being a little more fleshed out. its just kind of neat. i think the film would have been a bit stronger if they stuck closer to a few of their earlier ideas

edit: OH MY GOD HOW CAN I FORGET ABOUT DELETED FILMED SCENES LIKE THE ROCKSTAR MOMENT. THAT HAPPENED OK U CANNOT TELL ME OTHERWISE. and amanda is 100% haunted by what she did to Adam

and as for spin-offs that are absolutely not canon, this description of Hoffman from the video game from Tapp's POV is intriguing.

i love annoying and weird colleague Hoffman but i also really enjoy the idea of shy and weird colleague Hoffman.

also, boring cop Hoffman who wont bend the rules? that is so much more interesting than the hashtag brutality moment.

too bad this game is like. well. yknow. not very good. i dont think thats a controversial statement

but you know what IS good?

Saw the Musical

thats canon to me. no notes

[b-skarsgard]

Credits and a very big thank you to @/TheCrowUpdates on IG&Twitter for sharing!

Someone was going to revisit The Crow.

We just didn't know who. Since 2008, fans of Alex Proyas' 1994 dark superhero movie - about a murdered rock musician back from the dead to seek revenge - have watched reports roll in about who was going to do it.

Names of possible stars were attached and detached before it was ever confirmed they were true: Bradley Cooper, Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg (twice), Jason Momoa (that one got as far as leaked test footage). Potential directors included Blade's Stephen Norrington, 28 Weeks Later's Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Corin Hardy, and more.

At one point in 2010, hopes were raised when there were rumours that Nick Cave was doing some form of script revision - The Crow is a graphic novel and a film that held music close to its goth black heart. For a while, everything went quiet. And then: someone actually revisited The Crow.

When Empire asks director Rupert Sanders why, after all these years, it was him, he laughs and says, "Tenacity." He adds, "Sometimes these things just have their time.

They work when they're supposed to work. I just feel that this was probably the right iteration." He also thinks it's a case of how it was made, not why: outside the studio system, for a fraction of the budget of current superhero movies, and far less than Sanders himself has worked with in the past (his first film, Snow White & The Huntsman, cost $180 million). "People are calling it a Hollywood remake and it's really not.

There's nothing to do with Hollywood in this movie at all — it's a very scrappy indie movie," he says. "[And] because of that, we were able to remain close to the centre and the darkness and the violence that's in the graphic novel. The only reason we could do that is because it's not a studio movie."

Given how fervently the fanbase protects the first movie, some might also add another word in addition to tenacity: bravery. This was the film in which Brandon Lee, playing Eric Draven, tragically lost his life in an accident on set with a prop gun at the age of 28. This was the film that wasn't just a film; it remains a hallowed target of worship. If you are of a certain age, you will remember how posters for The Crow hung for a weirdly long time in the video shop, how you wore out the soundtrack on your Walkman, how on more than one occasion someone told you that the set was cursed, actually. For some, the idea of revisiting The Crow is as impossible as waking the dead.

In order for Sanders to get it made, he had to sweep aside all of the cult-film baggage that came with the job. He ignored the "probably hundreds" of versions of the script that were floating around. He had to go right to the beginning and hatch his own bird.

James O'Barr's original telling (the character's self-titled miniseries ran February-May 1989), The Crow is a comic about revenge. Eric and his fiancée, Shelly, are assaulted by a gang of thugs after their car breaks down. Paralysed by a gunshot wound, Eric can only watch as she is raped and murdered in front of him, before later dying himself in hospital. When he is resurrected by a crow — those supernatural beings who can bring people back to put the wrong things right - he wreaks vengeance on those who hurt her. The idea all stemmed from an event in O'Barr's life: when he was 18, his fiancée was killed by a drunk driver.

He put the hate and other feelings on the page. O'Barr later said on stage at Comic-Con that the comic, to him, was a Cure song—Sanders was there at the time and heard him. It was an idea that stayed with him throughout the process. "[The Crow] has that kind of comfort of melancholy," he says. "There's something about listening to a Cure song that makes you feel that it's okay to feel how you're feeling."

Sanders didn't rewatch the 1994 film; he reread the graphic novel, once, and then let the ideas permeate. (Sanders is an art-school comic-book guy — he's been trying to to turn Charles Burns' Black Hole, a story about sexually transmitted, grotesque physical mutations in teenagers that renders them social outcasts, into a movie for 20 years.) He even made a Black Hole short film, and says it's the closest DNA in his work to The Crow - you can watch it on his website). He researched the spiritual history of crows across cultures: how they are believed to exist between worlds as messengers between the living and the dead, how they are both symbols of change and harbingers of death. But above all, what Sanders saw in The Crow was not a revenge story at all: he saw a tragic love story.

"We've all lost someone in life, or we all will lose someone in life, and we're all going to die. It was really about losing someone and being selfless in trying to get someone back."

For a love story to work, Sanders needed to find a man who could believably be both "tender and terrifying" — he couldn't cast the monster and work backwards. Having almost worked with Bill Skarsgård on another project that fell through (an adaptation of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam-war book, The Things They Carried), Skarsgård was already on Sanders' radar. When he mentioned the idea to the actor, Skarsgård needed very little convincing. But before he did his self-tape for the casting process, Skarsgard wanted to spend a week with Sanders exploring the character.

"That kind of dating phase was what I needed, to know that I really wanted to do the movie," says the actor. They swapped films, music, and YouTube videos, and worked together to get a sense of who this character is. Sanders suggested Skarsgärd watch Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne's 1990 film about a Vietnam-war veteran suffering from horrifying hallucinations; Skarsgård loved it), a documentary on the SoundCloud rapper Lil Peep ("I wasn't really familiar with that world at all; it came after my teenage-rebellion years"), and a lot of documentaries about drug use and homelessness. It was all in aid of figuring out Eric's journey up until the point we meet him in the movie, when the suicidal man sees his salvation in the love of Shelly. We won't even see this backstory on screen.

In Stockholm, where he was born and still lives, in the depths of pandemic times, Skarsgård made his self-tape in a studio with some friends. There was no script yet, just a couple of scenes. For the final one, he performed it in traditional Crow make-up.

Did he apply it himself, as Brandon Lee does in the broken mirror? "Definitely not!" he laughs. "I had someone help me do it —a professional. I've been down that hole before where I've tried to do my own make-up. It turns out that my skill doesn't translate that well into that."

Skarsgård has also been here before with the white make-up, the cult favourite character, the weight of decades of history —he went through all of this playing Pennywise the clown in It. When asked if he felt the pressure of stepping into a role with so much noise around it, he speaks with the clarity of someone who has been bruised before but is now prepared (and knows to ignore the internet). "I think I would have been more hesitant if it felt really close to the original—but the fact that it felt so different from it, the separation of it [made it feel like I could] make this my own thing, as opposed to trying but failing at something that's already been done."

As soon as he took the job, Skarsgård "never thought about this as The Crow". He was interested in the psychology of the character of Eric — in his journey from suicidal, to saved, to nihilism. "That became very important to me — that it's not just a guy putting on make-up and thinking he's badass and saying catchy one-liners. This is someone who has lost everything, and the only thing that he has left is his hate. And hate is destructive. When he becomes this sort of superhero, he's become a monster that he doesn't want to be." Skarsgård buried himself in the psyche of the character, as he routinely does with every role, possibly to his detriment.

"Honestly, I don't know any other way of doing it," he says. "You have to go there. You do get a little bit consumed with that state of mind. I was kind of burned out at the end of it, for physical reasons, mental reasons, all of it. It was a lot."

But he says it was all worth it: all the hours of tattoo application, the nights submerged in a tank of syrup made to look like oil, and the time-consuming effort of trying to get the continuity of black tar blood-splatter just right. There is only one thing he would change if he could: his... entire body. When he came onto The Crow, Skarsgärd had just finished filming Boy Kills World, an action movie where he plays a martial-arts expert.

He was in insane shape. He was eating raw meat and training six days a week. "I felt very strange being in great shape for Eric as the person Eric, he says, after detailing the extreme training schedule and diet he kept over the nine months that spanned both films. "I wanted him to be really skinny!" he laughs. "He was not a person that worked out, ever. In a perfect world he would have been a lot less fit in the first half of the movie."

In the 1994 version of The Crow, Shelly is dead before the opening credits. The film opens with her, bloodied on a gurney in the rain (it can't rain all the time, but it does in this movie), being loaded into the back of an ambulance. In Shelly-POV flashbacks we see the faces of her violent, laughing rapists.

Shelly is not so much a character as a reason for The Crow to exist: a plot device to give our male hero something to avenge. This is something Sanders wanted to correct in his telling of the story. To him, Shelly was the "emotional engine" of the whole film. It needed a woman so "magical" that we would miss her like a vital organ when she was gone.

"Without us falling in love with her as he does, we can't go on that journey with him," he said. "We can't be complicit with what he does to gain her back." Sanders had only one person in mind for the role, someone otherworldly and haunting enough to carry it: the genreamorphous, avant-garde musician FKA Twigs.

"I felt honoured," says Twigs, on being asked to make such an impression in her first-ever starring role (prior to this, her only feature credit was in Alma Har'el's Honey Boy) and being given only a third of the film to do it in. "But at the same time, I really did know that I could do it."

She and Skarsgård met on a balcony in the hotel in Prague where Casanova used to stay.

They read lines, became friends, and soon Twigs was so invested in the story of Eric and Shelly that she was standing at the monitor on set, watching herself die, sad that their characters were being so cosmically ripped apart.

"[Sanders] would always look at me and be like 'Oh, I know, Twigs! They can't be together!' And I'd be like, 'But I want them to be together!'" she laughs. "He knows I have a real, genuine interest in their love and what love means to a lot of people in the world. I believe that we need more stories like this.

Where two people can love each other so wholly and so beautifully amidst so much darkness and uncertainty. That, to me, echoes almost what we're going through now."

Meanwhile, Danny Huston plays the bad guy in all of this - but he goes to great lengths to explain that unlike other battles between good and evil, the lines here aren't so clearly drawn. "It's messy, it's human, it's inky," he says, remaining mysterious about his character's true desire and identity. (Says Sanders: "The devilish people in your life are the most seductive, the most charming, and the most flattering. There's something about Danny that just really personifies that.")

Huston says the film reminds him most of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter Of Life And Death — "That would be the, uh, gentle version of our film," adds Sanders - in which love is tested in the hinterland between the living and the dead.

The character is fascinated by love in the manner of a demigod who is above it. "Love can be flawed. And it can be childish. It can be saccharin. It can mislead you," Huston says. "But yet, it's what makes mortals tick.

It's what makes them sacrifice. Is that enviable? I suppose it is, when you have never felt it."

Rupert Sanders' take on The Crow reportedly cost around $50 million. Not peanuts, but less money than is spent on your usual superhero outings. And a lower budget, like love, can come with sacrifice.

But the cast and crew were tenacious and brave enough to, in the words of Skarsgård, go there, wherever "there" was.

"It wasn't an easy journey, that's for sure," says Skarsgard. While the role took physical and mental tolls on its male lead, Twigs was willing to face her greatest fear to make it work: deep water. She spent days in the tank, with a nose peg on, trying to control her beating heart. Elsewhere, Sanders was inverting severed heads into plastic dummies to get two effects for the price of one, drawing in Eric's sketchbooks, throwing blood around the set, never sitting still. And when the crew's numbers dwindled in the final days of filming, it ended up being just Sanders with a camera, a light, and a guy with a crow on a leather glove. (The director says that crows - in spite of all their dark mythology — are good companions and lovely to work with.)

Later, when it was all over and Twigs saw the trailer, she was surprised. "When we were making the movie I didn't really have a sense of how magnificent the scale is," she says.

"Maybe it's because it's one of my first films, but it's hard to tell when you're in it. It's a huge, wild, big-scale, giant film! But when I was doing it, it just felt like we were in this little family, running around Prague for three months."

Sanders hopes this could help form a new model in how cinema might counter shrinking audiences - not just for comic-book movies, but for films in general.

"You have to be more adept at making things more effciently, that are emotionally resonant, and not just spectacle," he says. "I really hope we're in for another kind of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls period of having to make these more down-and-dirty films that still feel like big epic movies [but] are weirder and stranger."

Inevitably, there will be opinions about the new version of The Crow. Sanders isn't worried. "You can never please everyone when you're working with existing material—but I look at it as Kenneth Branagh doing a Shakespeare play that Gielgud did [before him]," he says. "That was a seminal performance, but it doesn't mean that's it and everything stops." It's been 30 years since the last film, and he hopes that in the same way the film excited 17-year-olds back then, his version will do the same for kids who are 17 years old now.

"This is for this generation. Probably 30 years from now they will be berating anyone who tries to make another version of it because this was the version they grew up on," he predicts. "It's cyclical." At least this time around, fewer cassette tapes will be harmed in the replaying of the soundtrack.

THE CROW IS IN CINEMAS FROM 23 AUGUST

[repurposedmeatlocker]

🔥🔥🔥 abt beavising butthead...share as many hot takes as you want i'd looooove to hear your thoughts and feelings :3

OH BOY OH BOY *cracks knuckles*

Obsession with which character has the "highest moral ground" is tired and unnecessary. Especially for a program like Beavis and Butt-Head. I've noticed a lot in cartoon fandoms there seems to be a focus some people have on which character is "evil and bad" and which is "pure and good". I don't know where this concern stems from, but it doesn't interest or make sense to me. Real people, and therefore fictional characters, are more complex than that. The fact that this argument surrounds young/child characters is even weirder for me, because I find that age is rife with bad behavior. Back to Beavis and Butt-Head though, while I do think a lot of fans are unfairly harsh in their perspective of him. I don't think Beavis is "morally higher" by any standard. They are both horrible teenage boys that find beating the shit out of each other entertaining because there is nothing else to do.

(speaking about the original series here, since I haven't completed the 2011 and 2022 revival yet) While I think the writing got way better and funnier in the later seasons, I kind of miss the "natural edginess" of the earlier "crude era". It has this messiness that I find super endearing. I can really see how the show got popular with teenagers/young adults back in the day since it really did feel like the script was written by some degenerate boys rather than adults trying to figure out how high schoolers act. There is a lot of horrible topics in the earlier season related to intoxication, animal abuse, and general illegal activity. A lot of it is 100% shock value. I'm glad it moved away from that, but also I admire the...grungey realism, I guess.

A lot of older fans complain about Beavis and Butt-Head reacting to clips of TV shows in the 2011 season and Youtube videos in the 2022 revival. I personally love it. I think they should react to everything possible. Some of their best lines come from their impressions of this stuff. I don't care if it is just being used as a way to "promote" that content. The music video reactions are doing the same thing. It is all promotion. Just very creative and based on hating which is inherently more entertaining. On that note, I've also seen the complaint by OG fans going around about how Beavis and Butt-Head feel like they aren't "metal-heads" anymore? Or it is just not as overt in their characters anymore since they don't react to metal music as much as they did in the original run. Personally, I...don't think they are any less metal-heads now than they were before. Maybe they aren't exclusively defined by it like they were in the first episodes. I think the question of "why is there less metal music in the show" has more to do with music culture when the show airs than it does with the actual writing. Which is kind of interesting. Generally, metal and rock doesn't make up popular music spheres the same way it did in the 80s and 90s. There is still rock music, but I don't find a lot of popular stuff being extremely "heavy" starting around the mid 2000s when the 2011 series was airing. If you'll allow me to get deep for a sec. The choices of what Beavis and Butt-Head react to during the show's entire run is a pretty interesting picture of popular US culture, actually. Anyway...I do think they could hit a bit heavier and varied in their music choices in the new season. Have them listen to hyperpop or something. I think they would love 100 gecs.

[barbaralunar]

twice's brief chart reading

so i made a video (in portuguese) interpreting a few points on twice's debut chart and decided to transform the script in a proper text here.

a quick look at twice's history and you will discover that they became viral a few months after they debuted and since that the group has huge numbers in plays, awards, popularity, profit and everything. it's even considered the sucessors of SNSD.

with no surprise we see, then, Venus, Jupiter and Mars all in Virgo in the 2nd house. althought, Venus and Jupiter are in debility, they're still benefics and are conjuct and applying to Mars, giving it strenght and expanding its action in the map.

2nd house is everything money related, profit being one of them. for a k-pop group being popular = making money, especially if the company behind them do a good management. and that is the case of twice.

Venus in this placement reinforces the gaining from arts and women, and it rules (by exaltation) the 8th in pisces, also ruled by Jupiter. so we can see another indication of profit gaining whereas the 8th also represents money that came from others.

the applying conjuction of Jupiter to Mars by only a degree of diference expande Mars action, the money making. it rules the 4th in scorpio and the mid heaven in the 9th in aries. 4th represents your roots and your home, converting in the popularity of the group at its origin country.

3 of the members are japanese, and it contributed heavely in the sucess of the group in japan. they have full albums in japonese, media strategies and content all aimed to the japonese audience. the 9th can signify foreing matters and the the mid heaven there reinforce the popularity and money making in other countries.

(note: next 10/20 the group will enter their 9h profection and seems the company is planning on invest in the foreing market, besides japan. also, i know its commum for kpop groups to dedicate themselves to japanese music maket, but the thing is twice is really huge there.)

Venus is the ruler the 10th in taurus and the 3rd house in libra. in libra we have the Sun and Mercury. Venus and Mercury are in a mutual reception, and it mitigates a bit of Venus fall in virgo. but it also translates the popularity throught their talents, voice and looks, let us be honest here.

and they all sing well, for real! truth be told, that's a rare thing in a group, we all know this. Mercury is one the represents of voice and its being supported by Venus sign, 3rd is a house of comunication also and media (shy shy shy viral). 10th is a house of sucess also.

but not everything is flowers. the group's Moon is also debilitated in the the 6th house in capricorn. the 6th is fucking hard work as hell, health and rotine. and the Moon trines all the planets in the 2nd. so they work very very much and very very hard: an album per year, mv's, ententerneiment content, media content, tours, side and solo projects, singles, ost's, promotion and more, everything at the same time, non stoping.

all this work contributes on making money? yes! but also contributes to health questions. few years back, 2 members had to be in a hiatus because of mental and physical issues. this 6th house moon rules the 12th where we can see the struggle with mental issues and may be the reason of the collapse of the group if not continued to be cared off over time.

we know for a company to allowing a member to take a hiatus like this and be open about why is kind excepcional. and it seems the group is being taken cared of and i hope it's for real, you know?

so i hope you guys like it! sorry for any mistakes and nonsense sentences, english it's not my first language. feel free to add more interpretations as this is a deeper text derived from a short script. if you are a fan, i'd love your feedback too. thanks a lot!

[emailsfromanactor]

The Cast of Hamlet (1964) in Musicals: Part 6

At last, we come to our boy William Redfield (Guildenstern). But not only him! Why does he have to share a post? You'll see.

Redfield did five musicals on Broadway, starting at age ten with Virginia, or, as you might remember it from the letters, the one with the horse who had an "accident" onstage and had to be replaced by a wooden one. Ten years later, he - Redfield, not the horse - starred in Barefoot Boy With Cheek. That unfortunately went unrecorded, but here's Redfield on the Playbill cover with Nancy Walker:

Next he replaced the lead in Miss Liberty, which was recorded with the original actor. (If IBDB is to be believed, Miss Liberty is the last time Refield was billed as "Billy" rather than "William," at least on Broadway.) And then came Out of This World, Cole Porter's less-successful followup to Kiss Me, Kate. Redfield played Mercury, as in the god. And this time he did get to record his performance! Before we get to the album, here's a tiny photograph (Redfield's the shirtless one on the left):

And here's a newspaper caricature of the cast (Redfield's the one in the tree):

And here's one of his songs! (Just one, this post is already long and will get longer, but you can hear the rest here.)

In 1967, Redfield played Spintho, a non-singing role, in Androcles and the Lion, a TV musical adaptation of the Shaw play of the same name. A video of it survives, but unfortunately it looks like this:

John Cullum was also in that! He did get to sing.

And then in 1972 there was Redfield's last Broadway show of any kind, Dude. Hold that thought.

Gerome Ragni (ensemble, Horatio understudy) co-wrote the book and lyrics of Hair. You're probably familiar with Hair. It was kind of a big deal. And you may recall that one song took its lyrics from Hamlet:

I wonder if John Gielgud ever heard that song. And what he thought of the tortured scansion. "Majes-tickle," yikes. Not to mention leaving the "a" out of the title line. But it does pronounce "express" Gielgud's way! There's another Hamlet reference (along with some Romeo and Juliet) in "The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)."

Ragni also originated the role of Berger. Here you can see him singing the title song with his co-librettist James Rado on The Dick Cavett Show (he's the brown-haired one who starts on the floor) (and the one who starts singing the wrong part later in the song):

Oooo, I was scrolling through the comments and Adam Redfield, son of William Redfield, was among them, saying that his dad was a guest on the same episode! I guess this post pairing is even more relevant than I thought! Redfield's segment doesn't appear to be on the internet, alas.

And speaking of that relevance... as you may have guessed, Ragni was involved with Dude. He wrote the book and lyrics, without Rado this time, but again to Galt MacDermot's music. Dude... did not do as well as Hair. In fact, it was a pretty spectacular flop, running only 16 previews and 16 performances. It did get an album, but unfortunately it wasn't really a cast album, and Redfield isn't on it. There is an audio bootleg with him, but it's not tracked and, well, I don't really want to listen to that whole mess to find his parts. Maybe someday.

Anyway, The New York Times wrote an article about Dude - and quoted Redfield. That's right, we get to hear from Bill again! I've pasted his quotes below the cut, and you can read the whole article here. Everything about this show sounds wild.

“The songs were great but the script remained a mass of undoable nonsense,” said actor William Redfield, one of “Dude's” stars. “I'm very fond of Ragni but the truth must be told.”

...

During most of the rehearsals, choreographer Falco concentrated on movement. “It was like the Decathlon,” Redfield said. “We sprinted, we climbed, we tumbled, we ran. God, how we ran! I thought I was going to have a heart attack. We also rehearsed a lot of the musical numbers but the show was never completely blocked. And we didn't dare discuss the script. How could we? There was none.”

...

Once inside the Broadway Theater, technical problems arose. At the first runthrough, the stage, filled with two tons of top soil, filthied the actors and dumped dirt on everybody sitting in the first ten rows. People sneezed from the dust fumes; clouds of dirt rose into the air, making it difficult to see. At the second runthrough, the stage was watered down. Naturally, the dirt turned into mud. “Actors will do anything to get ahead, but this was too much,” Redfield said. “We phoned Equity and threatened insurrection.” Eventually the stage was filled with thousands of brown felt scraps to simulate dirt. But the felt went, too, to be replaced by plastic. Then Bufano called a company meeting which turned into a therapy session. “We became hysterical,” Redfield continued, “and released all our hostilities about the show, our fears. ‘When was Gerry going to write some new dialogue?’ we screamed. Later we began yelling about our careers and what the theater meant to us and what life on earth meant to us … “

...

At the first preview on September 11, “the audience wanted to kill,” according to Bill Redfield. “They kept yelling ‘rip‐off!’ Worst of all, they could neither hear nor understand us.”

...

They decided to go to Ragni in a body and give him an ultimatum: Either he rewrite certain key scenes or the show would close. “Gerry creates best under this kind of pressure,” Adela Holzer said. “I think he realized we meant what we said.” Even so, Redfield and Rae Allen (who played Adam and Eve) were forced to write some of their own dialogue. “We had to. It was either write it or stand mute in the confusion.”

Oh, for a sequel to Letters from an Actor!

[8bitgarden-sys]

Anyone else think in the last great american dynasty, Bill MIGHT have been the bad guy? Like yeah everyone else, but like… “women with madness,” self hate and internalized ableism, “their men and bad habits” —- UM HOLD ON

“The DOCTOR had TOLD HIM. to SETTLE. DOWN.” But it must’ve been her fault his heart gave out.

Like he, correct me if I’m wrong, knew what his town was like. They knew they’d all blame her when he died and he didn’t care (right? I’m willing to hear other sides! Bc its very possible that he had some kind of addiction or disorder that made things way more complicated than the song had room for! So maybe bad guy isn’t exactly what I’m saying)

But yeah we have an alter, Benji, who (tw for this stanza of abuse (non graphically mentioned) holds most of our what we call “roommate trauma” which was just a specific longish form traumatic event that happened in our life before we even knew we had DID, but HE—Benji—was the host. So he was the one experiencing like pretty much all of the gaslighting and predatory and stuff.

When he listens to this song, he cries. It’s his #1 swiftie song (tied for him specifically w all too well 10 mins if u’ve been following me for even 24 hrs u probably know that) bc of the end. “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.” We say more about that in a swiftie eras themed video essay we did which I’ll link here if ur interested—warning i SERIOUSLY messed up the backing music and it does get very loud at some times. If u think u can handle that and still hear what I’m saying, give it a shot! If u can’t and are still interested in what we said, dm us and we’ll send u the script we read from! But anyway the thing that resonates w us, and Benji the most, the most, is this:

Our “first” experience w tlgad was we were finally in the mood to listen to new music (any other neurodivergents feel me?) and we wanted to try folklore. I didn’t like it at first—and before we continue, I LOVE it now. I have a personal problem I’m working on, if i think something will be very one way and it’s just not it completely turns me off no matter how good it is and I need time to be ready to accept that it wasn’t what I thought, and it will be beautiful.

I listened, two years ago, to tlgad and turned it off at the line “it must’ve been her fault his heart gave out.” (Real life and major character death when it’s not an essential part of a story trigger me, and I wasn’t ready. No one’s fault)

I did ever pick it up again until…

The Eras Tour was added to Disney+. And we just were lucky enough to have it.

And she starts playing it, and i think I remember being like “oh god oh gos oh god its this oje irk it i can do this” but 1) i am SO grateful that this was my first REAL experience w it bc while i love the original one just the same the eras tour one hits different and 2) we cried so many happy tears hearing the end for the first time, and the performance??? How every actress and actor and taylor herself and EVERYONE did so well to make a very vivid story line that I finally got it, I got it, I got it, and it was beautiful.

And finally.

The way Taylor yells it.

“There goes the LOUDEST WOMEN THIS TOWN HAS EVER SEEN!!!!! 😍🥰💘☀️💃💪

So healing.

Ok i thought this was gonna be a 1-3 stanza paragraph but here it is. Ig what i personally want abt this post is to hear what ppl are personally thinking about (at any detail ur comfortable with, with proper trigger warnings) the song, what it means to help, if it’s helped them?

Anyway, I’ll reblog if i’ve forgotten smth.

[scientested]

music commentary #11: repressed memories

REPRESSED MEMORY (COOL AWESOME DIVERGING TIMELINES M1X!!!!)

so the main thing to know about this song... is that it's a remix!! it's a remix of a much older song of mine called "repressed memory" that was one of the first ones i made/finished i believe! this isn't my first time remixing an older song (see kitty dreams of dying cell) but damn...... this remix goes hard.... i think this song really slaps and i also think that it's cool that it's 5 minutes long. it feels really good to make a song that's longer than i usually make them

i never uploaded the original version of this and i feel like it's too old to put on the channel at this point but i will definitely put it here

the reason i chose this song specifically to remix is because i actually made a script for an animatic with rochester + ruther forever ago that had the song in it... i don't think i have the video file for that on this computer but i know that it's around somewhere, probably on my old laptop

so the story of this song and the meaning of the title... the song is about both versions of rochester rutherford (ruther and rochester) remembering the moment that really defined who they are now... this is the moment right before their timelines diverge, where the past version of rochester rutherford activates the two robots (not shown in this video, but they are PG-01 (pangloss) and CD-02 (candide)) that are the world's first examples of sentient AI. for both timelines, this goes the same way— very well! he is very well received, and he quickly becomes highly respected... but for ruther, those two robots soon become jealous and overthrow him and the whole World. for rochester that Doesn't happen.

their expressions in the main drawing for the song are meant to reflect their feelings about that moment; for ruther, he remembers it negatively, because those two robots are the ones that caused everything to go wrong. for rochester, he remembers it fondly, because those two robots were the beginning of everything going incredibly Right:

and these drawings are before and after activating the robots, respectively:

in the song, the second drawing has glitchy effects, because it's closer to the moment that their timelines diverge

i also think both of their reasons for repressing this memory are different: for ruther, he represses it because it's negative for him... he doesn't like remembering the moment just before everything went wrong... for rochester, he represses it because he's a busy dude and he has so many Cooler inventions now that he doesn't really have the time to stop and think about the old ones/his past self. for rochester it's a little less like he's repressing it and more like he just Forgets about it though

oh yeah... kind of unrelated but this song is going to be apart of an album that i've decided i'm making now. since i already have THREE other songs about rochester rutherford i figured i could probably just make one! i have two more songs planned for it currently: asphyxia requiem (another old song!) and reconstruction and repair! i think i am gonna call the album "a tale of two r's" because i think it's a clever and funny title

What I don't like: i don't even wanna put anything in this section because i like this song that much.... BUT... there is one little thing... i think the choir instrument could be better, it doesn't sit 100% well with me. that's literally it though

What I like: HOLY FUCKKKK THIS SONG SLAPS AND THE TIMING ON THE VIDEO ISN'T OFF!! THE TIMING ISN'T OFF AT ALL ohhh my god the timing on the visuals is perfect and crisp for once.... you have no idea how satisfying it is for me to see something cut out or cut in exactly when it's supposed to... god this song slaps so fucking much it's so hype. this is such a banger. one of my bangers of all time. perhaps THE banger of all time

[lokiondisneyplus]

Natalie Holt's timeline was turned upside down last fall when she landed the highly-coveted composer gig for Marvel Studios' Loki series on Disney+.

"My agent got a general call-out looking for a composer on a Marvel project," she tells SYFY WIRE during a conversation over Zoom. "So, I didn’t know what it was. It was [described as] spacey and quite epic ... I sent in my show reel and then got an interview and got sent the script and then I realized what it was for. I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ It was amazing ... Loki was already one of my favorite characters, so I was really stoked to get to give him a theme and flesh him out in this way."

***WARNING! The following contains certain plot spoilers for the first four episodes of Loki!***

Imbued with glorious purpose, Holt knew the score had to match the show's gonzo premise about the Time Variance Authority, an organization that secretly watches over and manages every single timeline across the Marvel multiverse. The proposition of such an out-there sci-fi concept inspired the composer to bring in uniquely strange sounds, courtesy of synthesizers and a theremin.

"I got my friend, Charlie Draper, to play the theremin on my pitch that I had to do," she recalls. "They gave me a scene to score, which I’m sure they gave to loads of other composers. It was the Time Theater sequence in Episode 1. The bit from where he goes up the elevator and then into the Time Theater ... I just went to town on it and I wanted to impress them and win the job and put as many unusual sounds in there and make it as unique as possible."

The end result was a weird, borderline unnatural sound that wouldn't have felt out of place in a 1950s sci-fi B-movie about big-headed alien invaders. Rather than being turned off by Holt's avant garde ideas, Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige embraced them, only giving the composer a single piece of feedback: "Push it further."

Holt admits that she was slightly influenced by Thor: Ragnarok ("I loved the score for it and everything"), which wasn't afraid to lean into the wild, Jack Kirby-created ideas floating around Marvel's cosmic locales. Director Taika Waititi's colorful and bombastic set pieces were perfectly complimented by an '80s-inspired score concocted by Devo co-founder, Mark Mothersbaugh.

"To be honest, I tried not to listen to it on its own," Holt says of the Ragnarok soundtrack. "I didn’t want to be too influenced by it. I watched the film a couple of times a few years ago, so yeah, I don’t think I was heavily referencing it. But I definitely had a memory of it in my mind."

After boarding Loki last September, Holt spent the next six months (mostly in lockdown) crafting a soundtrack that would perfectly reflect the titular god of mischief played by Tom Hiddleston. One of the first things she came up with was the project's main theme — a slightly foreboding cue that pays homage to the temporal nature of the TVA, as well as the main character's flair for the dramatic. "He always does things with a lot of panache and flair, and he’s very classical in his delivery."

She describes it as an "over-the-top grand theme with these ornate flourishes" that plays nicely with Loki's Shakespearean aura. "I wanted those ornaments and grand gestures in what I was doing. Then I also wanted to reflect that slightly analog world of the TVA where everything has lots of knobs and buttons ... [I wanted to] give it that slightly grainy, faded [and] vintage-y sci-fi sound as well."

"I just wanted it to feel like it had this might and weight — like there was something almost like a requiem about it," Holt continues. "These chords that are really powerful and strident and then they’ve got this blinking [sound] over the top. I just came up with that when I was walking down the street and I hummed it into my phone. There’s a video where you can just see up my nose and I’m humming [the theme]. I came home and I played it."

As a classically-trained musician, Holt drew on her love of Mahler, Dvořák, Beethoven, Mozart, and most importantly, Wagner. A rather fitting decision, given that an actual Valkyrie (played by Tessa Thompson) exists within the confines of the MCU.

"I would say those flourishes over the top of the Loki theme are very much Wagner," Holt says. "They’re like 'Ride of the Valkyries.’ I wanted people to kind of recall those big, classical, bombastic pieces and I wanted to give that weight to Loki’s character. That was very much a conscious decision to root it in classical harmony and classical writing ... There’s a touch of the divine to the TVA. It’s in charge of everything, so that’s why those big powerful chords [are there]. I wanted people almost to be knocked off their socks when they heard it."

With the main theme in place, Holt could then play around with it in different styles, depending on the show's different narrative needs. Two prime examples are on display in the very first episode during Miss Minutes' introductory video and the flashback that reveals Loki to be the elusive D.B. Cooper.

"What was really fun was [with] each episode, I got to pull it away and do a samba version of the theme or do a kind of ‘50s sci-fi version of the theme," she explains. "I can’t say other versions of the theme because they’re in Episode 5 and 6…or like when Mobius is pruned, I did this really heartfelt and very emotional [take on the theme] when you see Loki tearing up as he’s going down in slow motion down that corridor. It was cool to have the opportunity to try out so many different styles and genres. And it was big enough to take it all. It was a big enough story."

The other side of the story speaks to the old world grandeur of Loki's royal upbringing on Asgard, a city amongst the stars that eventually found its way into Norse mythology.

"I went to a concert in London three years ago and I heard these Norwegian musicians playing in this group called the Lodestar Trio," Holt recalls. "They do a take on Bach, where they’re kind of giving it a folk-y twist … [They use] a nyckelharpa and a Hardanger fiddle — they’re two historic Norwegian folk instruments. I just remembered that sound and I was like, ‘Oh, I have to use those guys in our score.’ It seemed like the perfect thing. I was like, ‘Yes, the North/Norwegian folk instruments.’ It just felt like it was the perfect thing for his mother and Asgard and his origins."

That folk-inspired sound also helped shape the music for Sylvie (played by Sophia Di Martino), a female variant of Loki with a rather tragic past. "Obviously, we’ve seen in Episode 4 what happened to her as a child," Holt says. "I just feel like she’s so dark. She’s basically grown up living in apocalypses, so she has that Norwegian folk violin sound, but her theme is incredibly dark and menacing and also, you don’t see her. She’s just this dark figure who’s murdering people for a while."

And then there were all the core members of the TVA to contend with. As Holt mentioned above, fans recently lost Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), may he rest in prune. We mean peace. What? Too soon? During a recent interview with SYFY WIRE, Loki head writer Michael Waldron said that he based Mobius off of Tom Hanks's dogged FBI agent Carl Hanratty in 2002's Catch Me If You Can.

"There’s this thing that he loves jet ski magazines," Holt says. "I had this character in my head and then when I saw Owen Wilson’s performance, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s actually a lot lighter and he plays it in a different way from how I’d imagined.’ But I was listening to Bon Jovi and those slightly rock-y anthemic things. ‘90s rock music for some reason was my Mobius sound palette."

Mobius is pruned on the orders of his longtime friend, Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), after learning that everyone who works for the TVA is a variant who was unceremoniously plucked out of their original timelines. A high-ranking member of the quantum-based agency, Renslayer has a theme that "is quite tied in with Mobius and it’s like a high organ," Holt adds. "It doesn’t quite know where it’s going yet. But yeah, we’ll have to see what happens with that one."

Wilson's character isn't the only person fed up with the TVA's lies. Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) also became disillusioned with the place and allowed Sylvie to escape in the most recent episode

"Hunter B-15 has this moment in Episode 4 where Sylvie shows her her past, her memories. I thought that was a really powerful moment for her," Holt says. I feel like she’s such a fighter and when she comes into the Time-Keepers and she makes that decision, like, ‘I’m switching sides,’ so her theme is more like a drum rhythm. I actually kind of sampled my voice and you can hear that with the drums. I did loads of layers of it, just like this horrible sliding sound with this driving rhythm underneath it. So, that was B-15 and then her softer side when she has her memory given back to her."

Speaking of the Time-Keepers, we finally got to meet the creators of the Sacred Timeline...or at least we thought we did. Loki and Sylvie are shocked to learn that the red-eyed guardians of reality are nothing but a trio of high-end animatronics (ones that could probably be taken out by a raging Nicolas Cage). Even before Sylvie manages to behead one of them, something definitely feels off with the Time-Keepers, which meant Holt could underscore the uncanny valley feeling in the score.

"When they walked in for their audience with the Time-Keepers, it was like this huge gravitas," she says. "But you look up and there’s something a bit wrong about them. I don’t know if you felt that or if you just totally believed. You were like, ‘Oh, this is so strange.’ I just felt like there was something a little bit off and musically, it was fun to play around with that."

Holt is only the second solo female composer to work on an MCU project, following in the footsteps of Captain Marvel's Pinar Toprak. Her involvement with Loki represents the studio's growing commitment to diversity, both in front of and behind the camera. This Friday will see the wide release of Black Widow, the first Marvel film to be helmed solely by a woman (Cate Shortland). Four months after that, Chloé Zhao's Eternals will introduce the MCU's first openly gay character into the MCU.

"I just feel like it’s an honor and a privilege to have had that chance to be the second woman to score a thing in the MCU and to be in the same league as those incredible composers like Mothersbaugh and Alan Silvestri. They're just legends," Holt says. "Another distinctive thing about [the show] is that all the heads of department are pretty much women. Marvel are showing themselves to be really progressive and supportive and encouraging. I applaud [them]. Whatever they’re doing seems to be working and people seem to be liking it as well, so that’s awesome."

Holt's score for Vol. 1 of Loki (aka Episodes 1-3) are now streaming on every music-based platform you could think of. Episodes 1-4 are available to watch on Disney+ for subscribers. Episode 5 (the show's penultimate installment) debuts on the platform this coming Wednesday, July 7.

Natalie isn't able to give up any plot spoilers for the next two episodes (no surprise there), but does tease "the use of a big choir" in one of them. "Episode 6, I’m excited for people to hear it," she concludes. "That’s all I can say."

[thoughts-on-bangtan]

Hi! I hope you’ll answer this question bc it bothers me quite a lot.. https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-now-that-BTS-are-partial-owners-of-Big-Hit-Entertainment do you think it is true what the second person (Christine Herman) said? After reading this, i started to wonder…what if BTS does really have only profit in mind while doing new projects these days? Maybe they don’t really care anymore about creative and meaningful lyrics and sound? With Butter and PTD…all this generic music sung in English. Of course they say “we wanted to make fans feel good”, “butter and ptd represent who we are” and all these things fans want to hear but.. do you really think it’s true? moreover, don’t get me wrong, i don’t find product placement in their reality shows as something terrible, i believe this is a normal thing, however, nowadays the members really film ads and do marketing a lot. so yeah, for some reason i began to question their integrity dhsjjss i hope you will understand from where my concerns come from and won’t find this ask stupid sjdjjdjd

After reading that persons answer I can immediately tell you that I basically don't agree with an overwhelming majority of what she said (even more so since a lot of it just makes her sound like a manti that hates the company and basically would want them to make music for free or something). Generally I don’t agree with most of the opinions this person holds, and also Quora really isn’t a good source for info or good opinions, most of it is written by mantis, haters, and toxic shippers with an agenda so most ARMY will tell you to stay as far away from that website as possible.

Anyway, her focus in that answer was on money, since BTS are shareholders (and how that’s a conflict of interest despite other artists doing the exact thing but no one really cares or ever thinks about it), but what she failed to consider and note was that Big Hit Music, so BTS' label, isn't part of HYBE in the sense that shareholding has no baring on it since BHM is private. So while BTS profit off of HYBE doing well, and have a small percentage of a voice as shareholders, that has nothing to do with BHM in the classical sense, even if BHM's earnings reflect well on HYBE numbers and the shareholder money. 

BHM was made private to ensure their artistry would remain untouched, that was the whole point of that.

Even if they weren't HYBE shareholders, take Namjoon as example. He has more than 170 KOMCA credits, is among the top 3 Korean artists with the most credits and is also the youngest of them all. It is said that his earnings from that alone can sustain his family for 3 generations over. Look at Hobi and Chicken Noodle Soup, that song was a hit and he paid the original creator of that song 2 million dollars upfront and earned a lot back due to how successful it was. Same goes for Hope World which, again, was and is still immensely successful. Look at Yoongi and his work both as prod. SUGA, featuring artist SUGA, and as Agust D, as well as the credits he holds for his work on BTS songs (giving him as well a total of over 100 KOMCA credits, just like Hobi). Bangtan have worked and continue to work extremely hard for their music, put their heart and souls into it, and it shows even if their style changed as they grew older and more mature.

Yes, money is a major motivator, but looking at the above paragraph, do you really peg the members as these corrupt money hungry sellouts with no music related integrity? Who would need to sign major deals and would throw away their passion to just release empty shells of music for the sole reason of money? Am I naive enough to believe that they don't care about money? Of course not, we live in a capitalist society and even if BTS wouldn't care about money anymore at this point, HYBE very much does, and yet still I can't find it in me to agree with any of what was said in that answer that person wrote.

More below the cut:

And that point about how Hyundai cars were sold out because of BTS, isn't that the point why literally any company ever hires celebrities to advertise and endorse their product? And sure, again, I'm certain they earned a lot on these deals, they aren't the first or last or only ones in the history of ever to do so. Besides, look at JK and what he's done for small companies, or Tae who wore a brooch made my a small creator at the airport which catapulted that creator into the eyes of millions of ARMYs enough so that they could move to a proper studio and earn money with their work. Or the modern hanboks JK wore which led to the brand being able to move into actual stores in malls because of their sudden new popularity and demand. Or him wearing a bracelet that helps whales with a percentage of the money from the sales of said bracelet. And for all of that JK and Tae didn't earn any money at all. JK himself said that he's more conscious of the brand he wears now because he wants to help smaller businesses in these trying times, not because they pay him to do so (especially since they would never be able to afford that), but because he's aware of the influence he has and how he can use it to help others. Sound very much like a capitalistic villain, right?

As for the product placement bit, have you been on YouTube recently? Have you noticed that many, if not most, YouTube videos by “bigger” creators (and by that I mean even people who are around the 100k subscriber mark) begin with them thanking whoever sponsored that particular video and give you a scripted minute to two minute long ad before getting into the actual topic of the video? And In The SOOP featuring Chilsung Cider, FILA clothes and the random mention of how good Samsung phones are isn’t much different from it, though really, if you’re not someone interested in fashion much, would you really notice or care that they wore FILA? It’s just...clothes? If it weren’t a BTS related show, would you even notice it much? And it’s not even like they mentioned those brands every five minutes or anything, just a few times, which sure sounded a bit out of place at times, but personally I thought it was easy to look past. That’s just how things work nowadays and it’s odd for people to behave like somehow BTS are the first and only ones to use product placements despite literally every movie and show doing it in subtle and less so manners.

The answer by that person you sent also mentioned the Hyundai song for their car IONIQ and, unsurprisingly, that person wrote it off as just some commercial jingle but I’d actually disagree with that. Not to sound like a Hyundai and Samsung stan, which I am neither of, but I actually think those two knew best how to utilize the artist they have spent millions on signing a deal with. Hyundai didn’t just write them off as pretty faces with a millions strong fan army behind them and that’s it, they remembered that they are musicians so they gave them a song and made a whole music video for it as well. And say what you will, it is a good song. Then, just a few days ago, Samsung stepped up their game and we were given Over The Horizon Prod by SUGA of BTS. For those who aren’t Samsung users, Over The Horizon is their signature ringtone and basically their company sound, and over the years different artists were asked to make their own version of it. And this time they reached out to Yoongi and asked if he’d like to do it as well. It’s kind of a big deal. Sure, Butter is used in one of their commercials much the way Dynamite was last year, but that’s beside the point. Would that person make the same claim about Imagine Dragons whose song Believer is also part of the ads for the new Samsung phones? I have my doubts.

Furthermore, and I don't want this to come across as mean toward you but, I think it is uncalled for to question their artistic integrity based on a total of 3 (three) English songs when last year alone we received 50+ songs, most of which were in Korean, among them the entirety of BE which was, according to the members, the album they were most involved in ever when it comes to both music and everything around it.

You can dislike their English songs, that’s more than fine, they have a very extensive discography you can listen to instead, but questioning their integrity based on them doing something that most, if not every, artist on their level does (as in sign ad deals with brands etc) is a bit much if you ask me. Does that mean indie artists whose songs get picked up for commercials (or for Netflix shows or movies) and thus it catapults them into the mainstream are also just money hungry people with no integrity and ones who don’t care about their music? Or is that, again, just a standard Bangtan is held to (as in that their integrity is questioned based on everything, even the most trivial/normal things) that only applies to them and no one else?

In the recent Weverse Magazine article about how Permission to Dance came to be there is a lot of talk about not only that song but also Butter and Dynamite, among the things being discussed and talked about they mentioned how the original lyrics for Butter were much more materialistic but that the members didn't like that so they asked for that to be changed. Likewise the original lyrics for Permission to Dance, as you'd expect from the penmanship of Ed Sheeran, were much more romantic, almost proposal like, which wasn't what the members wanted either so it was, again, adjusted in a way that would fit what they, as well as the A&R team, wanted. While you may not like these songs, they still had a say in them to a certain degree, could say yes or no and ask for adjustments. Why else would PTD take eight months?

While they might outsource their English songs, their main focus, so their Korean (as well as Japanese) discography is still centered around them, their lyrics, their songs, their sound. Of course you’ll also find outside producers and some lyricists on those as well, because that’s how music works these days, as in collaboratively, that doesn’t change anything at large. Their integrity is still very much there, their hearts are still in it, what other reason would any of them have to say that they want to continue for a long time, for Yoongi to say they want to figure out how to make their career last as long as possible, for JK to say that he wants to sing forever?

Admin 2 also wanted me to add that in their opinion, to a certain degree (though not fully of course), their English songs are like a way to laugh at and expose how shallow the English-centric music industry is. As in, while they made music in Korean with deep and meaningful lyrics, the US industry didn’t care but once they switched to easy to listen to sound with easy to understand English lyrics, they suddenly paid attention, are played on the radio, and even received a Grammy nomination which they wouldn’t have gotten for a Korean song ( A1: regardless how much Black Swan or Spring Day really would’ve deserved it...). 

[jacketpotatoo]

Dear Evan Hansen Movie: Review (spoilers)

It says review but trust me, it’s more of a well worded rant than anything. Taken from my Letterboxd

Where do I even begin.

Okay, I enjoy the original musical. I have listened to the soundtrack more times than I can count and I've watched a bootleg of the original Broadway run, as well as many, many animatics. I was one of the people who saw the trailer and went oh crap - Kaitlyn Dever from 'Booksmart'? Amy Adams? From the people who brought you 'Perks of Being a Wallflower' and 'The Greatest Showman'? This must be in good hands, Ben Platt looking way too old for the role aside.

Haha.

Something that makes the musical actually work is the fact that it acknowledges the morally squicky situation and constantly calls Evan out on his bs. They allow you to sympathise with him while making it clear that hey, Evan is in the wrong here.

THE FILM CLEARLY DOESN'T GET THAT.

Instead, Evan is portrayed as the victim and they spend little to no time dealing with the moral and ethical complexities that makes the source interesting in the first place, even when that would be totally something that could be done with more emphasis on film than on the stage. They cut out 'Does Anybody Have a Map' - a song that sets up (arguably) the emotional core of the musical which is the mothers and their relationship with their sons and family. They cut out 'Good For You' which is (and I don't know how to emphasize this enough) SUCH A CORNERSTONE IN THE PLAY. It's the song where Evan has to face the consequences of his actions head on. But noooooooo. All we get is zero fricking resolution with the side characters that the film wrote pointless songs for to accommodate and Evan and his mum NOT talking things out realistically and lashing out like humans. I cried while watching that 240p bootleg of 'So Big So Small'. I felt nothing here. Instead, all the emotion the stage offered is put up in a blender of terrible sound mixing and hilariously bad VEVO music transitions.

Speaking of that, my gosh was the editing awful in this movie. The stupid, stupid quick-cuts during 'Waving Through A Window', the asinine repeated shot of Evan falling down the tree, THE ENTIRE 'Sincerely Me' I MEAN WHAT WAS THAT?? The whole film visuals felt like the Nexus ad in WandaVision. Y'know. The dreary antidepressant advertisment. Except one was ironic and the other was completely genuine. 

The thing with adapting Dear Evan Hansen into a movie in the first place is that it's a low-key kind of musical. Most scenes are confined to 4 walls and include very few people just conversing with each other. It works fine on stage but when you're shooting 50% of your film in the same location and all the shots are either framed similarly or are straight up comical, it's going to be a problem. It was visually, either uninteresting or plain bad.

I didn't think the performances were terrible, aside from Ben Platt (oh we will get there). I liked Kaitlyn as Zoe (I will admit, I am biased), the others were... alright. They were passable. I blame it on the direction and script because they're clearly good performers.

And now we get to Evan Hansen himself. The 'too old' thing has been talked about to death but it genuinely takes you out of the film as you can't suspend your disbelief that he's playing a teenager, especially when his peers actually do look like teens. Ben is also overacting so much. When in theatre, the exaggerated slouches and ticks work because he's on the stage. Most people are far away. But on film when everything is close up, his stuttering and shaking come off as so forced. I genuinely don't understand. I've heard great things about him in The Politician and he's fine in the Pitch Perfects so what went wrong?

The only thing I sort of maybe liked was them getting closure with the video of Connor playing the guitar. But then, they went and got Jared to look sad for Connor when he literally has been doing everything to propel his social status and has no emotional stake with Connor, only with Evan for using him. WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN CLEAR IF THEY INCLUDED 'Good For You'.

I have calmed down since writing this and all I feel now is numb. I listened to songs from the original Broadway Soundtrack after the movie as it auto played on youtube and felt. Now I’m just upset that people would probably never give the stage version a shot anymore. Thanks movie. *sigh*

[ofcowardiceandkings]

I think you mentioned listening to podcasts? Do you have any favorites to reccommend? I've run out of content :(

that i do !

im not entirely sure what kind of podcast you'd be interested in but i'll throw out a few of the goodies in my huge library of stuff , i'll miss out a few of the HUGE podcasts that have been all over tumblr though

a LOT of it is true crime or human interest stuff , or history because im nerd ,, and a few of these dont have nearly enough attention so [shrug] i'll try to keep this short i guess lol this isnt EVERYTHING ive got in my library or listened series' by any measure

i AM gonna pop a shout to both Stuff You Missed in History Class and Stuff You Should Know from iHeartRadio because their HUGE archives have kept me from losing my mind many times over , and they cover a wide range of both important and wacky topics

BomBARDed (ongoing) this is the only fiction podcast i have happening right now really but its DAMN GOOD ONE .... it's an actual-play D&D 5E podcast in the DMs own musically-inspired world, focussed on a group of multiclass bards going to music school !! and all players (+DM) are members of the Texas band Lindby !! and they actually use and play music in the show with one original song an episode !! Kyle's worldbuilding and storycraft are truly incredible, and (Nick) Goodrich, (also Nick) Spurrier, and Ali's characters are in depth and interesting as well as an absolute powerhouse :') i actually made a piece for its first fanzine, Bardic Dreaming, which published earlier this year and is free to view now, all the players and the community are super wholesome its just very good overall 💙

History & Humans;

Fall of Civilisations (ongoing) legit one of my favourite podcast finds, im so glad my youtube autoplayed one of these ... it took me like 2 hours to realise it was 1) not the same as what was playing before and 2) had been on for 2 hours and wasnt near finished lmao. anyway, this is a series by historical fiction writer Paul Cooper, and is honest to all thats good one of the best documentary series ive encountered in years - and ive consumed a LOT of documentaries. it covered the downfall of various civilisations through history, and the episodes run from an hour to FOUR hours depending on the topic. its so chill to listen to and just get done, but over the pandemic all of the episodes have been given full movie-quality video versions too on youtube if youre more of a visual person.

Casting Lots: A Survival Cannibalism Podcast (on series break) yeah that says that lol ... its a SUPER niche topic but its very interesting and treated very well despite being kind of comical at times, the hosts are just naturally funny lol ... it delves around from the history of cannibalism in whole regions to specific incidents as recently as the 1970s, and of course the first episode is about the Donner Party, and it covers things ive never heard of despite being kind of important ?? anyway Alix and Carmella are good eggs

Sawbones (ongoing) i probably dont need to mention much here other than say that Justin and Sydnee saved me from being SO BORED sooo often, the history of medicine is wacky as hell and its what most of my history GCSE was on so [shrugs]

Cautionary Tales (on series break) this was a wild-card find lol ... it's by Tim Harford "the undercover economist" who writes for the Financial Times, and its topics kind of weave modern topics and science with how to learn from historical errors ... its a bit weird but well worth a go, also each series has a few celebrity guest voice actors which is pretty awesome

Ephemeral (ongoing) this is a very strange but thought provoking series about sounds and other things just barely saved. topics include the last castrato, the hello girls, hand-stamped records, the spread of kīkā kila music, and acoustic fossils of wild places.

Neat! The Boozecast (ongoing) history and bartending whats not to like lol ... hosted by Teylor Smirl and now their dad Tommy, they're just digging around in how important booze is to human culture

True Crime (white collar and weirdness);

Swindled (ongoing) this is an amazing show full stop. A Concerned Citizen details some of the most impactful and unruly things to happen in white collar and corporate crime. very factually accurate but given the sheer bullshit of the topics the deadpan snarking is [chefs kiss] absolutely warranted ..

American Scandal (on series break) this one is a series within a series type, and spends a few episodes at a time poking holes in some of America's biggest scandals, from a dramatised but fact-based point of view. such as what the hell was going on with Enron, how big tobacco was forced to own up to covering its own ass, how Iran-Contra happened, etc. it also now has a sister show called British Scandal, which does the same thing for British cases but with a slightly different format.

Missing in Alaska (finished) this was a fascinating series, a deep dive into what happened to two US government officials who disappeared on a small chartered flight in Alaska in 1972. it goes some really strange places, but it actually turned up a lot of previously unknown information through the audience. John Walczak's new series in a new feed is Missing on 9/11 which looks into what happened to Dr Sneha Philip.

Pretend (ongoing) Host Javier Leiva holds interviews with anyone living a lie, or who have been touched by them. con artists, snake oil salesmen, former cult members, catfishing victims, anyone and everyone.

Power: The Maxwells (finished) hosted by journalist Tara Palmeri, the story of media tycoon Robert Maxwell from nothing to empire to mysterious death and the scandals uncovered after he was gone.

Lets Talk About Sects (ongoing) Sarah Steele covering cults from around the world, in particular those in Australia - where she is from. She often has former members on the show to share their stories, and share knowledge of how they left. each story has the relevant content warnings at the start of each episode.

Brainwashed (finished) investigation of the CIA's covert mind control experiments, centred on the experiments performed at a hospital in Montreal, and its cultural impact.

Dr Death (2 series finished) two series investigating huge cases of fraud and medical malpractice, and how they were brought to a stop. series 1 covers Dr Duntsch and his horribly butchered neurosurgery, series 2 covers Dr Fata and his fraudulent cancer clinic

The Immaculate Deception (finished) untangling the weird and disturbing fertility fraud of Dr Jan Karbaat, who fathered children himself through his fertility clinic, and the impact of his deception. later episodes also touch on other similar cases.

True Crime (Violent/General);

The Casual Criminalist (ongoing) Simon Whistler of-the-many-youtube-channels cold reads a script about the case of the day, with some of his daft commentary thrown in.

Southern Fried True Crime (ongoing) Crimes from the American South hosted by Erica Kelley, she puts all the facts out there but refreshingly for true crime she doesnt hesitate to tell you if she thinks someone is human garbage lol

They Walk Among Us (ongoing) probably one of the most popular UK crime podcasts, very measured and well put together, not weird or annoying about it either.

All Crime No Cattle (ongoing, feed slowed down for now) specifically about crimes from Texas, hosted by Erin and Shay, they're very sensitive hosts and a lot of the cases they cover shed light on why the Texas criminal system is how it is or show an impact at a national level

Canadian True Crime (ongoing) Canadian crime from an Aussie who's lived there for a decade, Kristi is again a sensitive and measured host covering some important topics

True Crime (Violent/Deep Dive);

Hitman (finished) journalist Jasmyn Morris digs around in the sticky tangle around a book published by fringe publisher Paladin Press, and its apparent use as a blueprint in the killing of a mother, her friend and her 8 year old boy for financial gain.

Camp Hell: Anneewakee (ongoing) this series is exploring how a wilderness camp "correctional facility" was endorsed by the Georgia care and juvenile reform system, despite widespread abuses and shady practices the whole time. warning for csa and child cruelty throughout.

True Crime Bullshit (on series break) this one is a huge huge rabbithole but a very interesting one where the host Josh Hallmark has spent years digging into the life and potential crimes of Israel Keyes. Keyes is often mentioned as a serial killer with no pattern, but in picking it apart thats not quite true, and has sparked some re-evaluations of missing persons cases and stumbling upon information the FBI has redacted organically. there's also a series in the middle looking into the crimes of Kelly Cochran

Forgotten: Women of Juárez (finished) this series looks into the huge numbers of missing women of Ciudad Juárez, the strange circumstances surrounding them, and the potential cover-ups and corruptions on both sides of the border, trying to give a voice to all of the forgotten women and girls and their families without answers. the series itself is finished, but a spanish language edition is being released every week now.

aaaaaand i'll call it there before i list everything lol, i hope you find something to plug your boredom hole with !!

[adultswim2021]

Ephemera Week (2002)

Mission Hill (originally aired on WB, 1999-2000)

Mission Hill was a perfectly good animated series from former Simpsons show-runners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein. It was a sitcom about cool young people in a cool young people city. Andy French is an aspiring cartoonist, intended to be a Matt Groening type who would (over the course of many many seasons) eventually find success and get his own super-successful animated series called THE SIMPSONS: SEASONS 1-8.

The premise of the show was that Andy’s parents retire and sell the childhood home, displacing his nerdy high-school aged younger brother Kevin. Kevin moves in with Andy and learns how to be a cool city style guy, you know, the kind that’s always “walkin here!” and sucking off Bob Balaban in the men’s room and whatnot.

The show is at least better than the bad seasons of the Simpsons, and has a cool alt-comics style that suits the show really well. Not to damn it with faint praise, it’s a good show. There are a handful of GREAT episodes and plenty of strong jokes. There's news of a revival in the works focusing on Gus and Wally, the older gay couple in the show. It's supposed to take place in the same era the show originally aired in, which is just great.

Like Baby Blues and Home Movies before it, I did catch this show randomly on it's network of origin. I saw one or two of the final episodes to air on WB. I liked it! I was glad to see it get revived for a run on Adult Swim. I've wanted more episodes ever since.

I don't think the show is available for streaming anywhere, which is too bad. It came out on DVD with special features. That DVD set was reissued on DVD-R without special features, so... buyer? be wary. There's also a number of music replacements that ruin some of the scenes. At one point I had a bootleg set where somebody took the DVD video and replaced the audio with the as-broadcast version of of the show. Good luck finding it.

Here's an episode guide showing their debuts on Adult Swim. Bold episodes were originally unaired, making their debut on the channel. Also note: episodes had an innocuous title and a spicier in-house title in parentheses. It’s real Police Squad! shit.

12AM Monday Morning:

May 20: Pilot (or The Douchebag Aspect) May 27: Andy Joins the PTA (or Great Sexpectations) June 3: Kevin's Problem (or Porno for Pyro) June 10: Andy vs. The Real World (or The Big-Ass Viacom Lawsuit) June 17: Andy and Kevin Make a Friend (or One Bang for Two Brothers) June 24: Andy Gets a Promotion (or How to Get Head in Business Without Really Trying) July 1: Kevin vs. the SAT (or Nocturnal Admissions) July 8: Unemployment Part 1 (or Brother's Big Boner) July 15: Unemployment Part 2 (or Theory of the Leisure Ass) July 22: Kevin Finds Love (or Hot for Weirdie) July 29: Stories of Hope and Forgiveness (or Day of the Jackass)

11PM Sunday Night:

August 4: Happy Birthday, Kevin (or Happy Birthday, Douchebag) August 11: Plan 9 from Mission Hill (or I Married a Gay Man from Outer Space)

ALSO NOTE: There are about five episodes that were in early-stages of production and if you poke around you can find scripts for these episodes ( here as of this writing). A full animatic and table read for “Crap Gets In Your Eyes” exists if you search for it. 

MAIL BAG

London Arbuckle ASKS! or, states! sorry I’m writing this lead-in without having read the whole message yet.

Another confusing Baffler Meal thing: the deleted cold open that's on the DVD. It gets called back to in the actual episode ("Between two steamed buns", "Nine dollars!? For what?") and provides crucial context, BUT it also gets contradicted in the actual episode (SG sells out for "one serious speaker" instead of owing a restaurant money). Also I remember all the ads for this episode used a clip from the cold open! It always kinda bothered me that they cut it but boys (matt & dave) will be boys!

I do think the cold open is nice and I always make a point to watch it with the episode. In my mind they are as essential as watching that boring Terry Gilliam short before Meaning of Life. The next step is pointlessly editing them together using Nero. Yeah, that’s the ticket

Here’s ANONYMOUS, baby!

It's summertime and we are talking about Adult Swim and I gotta ask when's the last time you've been to a pool. Have you ever in your adult life enjoyed the benefits of an adult swim. Tell us just how much you like splash around. Yes, that would be quite illuminating I'm sure (rolleyes).

Man, when was the last time I went into a pool? It’s been literally years. I think the last time I swam I did a bad job. I am definitely am getting “bad job” vibes off my hazy memories. Man, my memories used to be precious. Damn!

do you think theyll ever work with george lowe again in any major capacity or do you think he's just bad news.

I was about to say “isn’t he on American Dad” based on him name-checking American Dad as one of his many credits but I just looked it up and he was only in one episode. Damn. Somebody give George work he seems nice.

beakman's world, anyone? The wild and wacky world of Paul Zaloom? Hmm? Anyone?

lol you wish...

Baby Blues really was my everything back in the early 2000s, it may not have head the punk rock cred you clearly seem to crave it was a soothing balm for myself as a new father in a scary world (9/11 and all that, terrible stuff).

you raise a good point, that you’re a huge dork “with child” and I’m cool and laughed at 9/11 because it was funny to me, actually

Just read your Baby Blues "take down" and I gotta say: In the immortal words of Mike Francesca, "You're a fool. ho-kay? A total fool."

Uh huh. Yeah okay. Mike Francesca hordes pot bellied pigs in his apartment and lives in filth. He stinks, and so do youd

Baby Blue is like every animation nerd's wet dream. What if they made the rugrats with only the parents part. And here it is. Be careful what you wish for, chunky.

Yeah and it’s too bad because judging from the previous mail bags my audience is primarily made up of BABIES.

[swiftgronmasterpost]

Late Stage Swiftgron Part 1

Update from November 2021 - I really don’t believe much of this is meaningful at all.  I don’t think they’re sitting around referencing one another on social media or anything but some of Dianna’s interactions with Karlie are interesting Dianna shows up explicitly in Taylor’s life a couple more times so I’m leaving these sections here.;

From here on out everything but the 2014 AMAs and Dianna’s somewhat shocking appearance at Taylor’s 2019 SNL performance are just odd social media shenanigans (or subtweets) between the two, and Taylor appearing to release at least one more song about Dianna (Babe in 2018) (and let’s be honest you can make a strong argument for The 1 being about Dianna as well other post 1989 songs.)

Some of this might be complete crack or coincidence but as you all know I want this to be the most thorough Swiftgron document possible.  

If anything it proves they both certainly still have similar interests and they really do seem to be in touch.

There are some interactions claimed by others to be Swiftgron related that I’m not going to include because they’re just a bit too reachy for me (though I completely support the theorizing!) but in general, if I personally can see the hint of a Swiftgron connection, I’m going to include it here. Draw your own conclusions and take everything, particularly the alleged subtweets/social media shenanigans, with a grain of salt.

And yes there’s tons of Kaylor and other Gaylor/Gaygron content that will be left out of this segment because this masterpost is focused on Swiftgron.  Someday it would be cool to make a giant masterpost/timeline that documents all of it, but for now it’s just going to be Swiftgron stuff. August 26, 2014 - Dianna tweets, and then deletes “Withdrawals, clearly…we had fun.” 

There’s no screen shot of this tweet but some retweets/responses of it remain:

If Dianna is indeed referencing the song Clean (in which their relationship is compared to an addiction hence, “withdrawals” from it) then Taylor would have had to give her advanced knowledge of the song since 1989 did not come out until October 2014.

Taylor did claim she ran 1989 by the muse that inspired it and they were both in LA in late August 2014. Maybe this is when.

November 1, 2014 - Taylor posts about Clean

November 19, 2014 - The 2014 AMAs Kaylorgron Explosion Extravaganza:

Taylor, Karlie, and Dianna are at the event.  Taylor and Karlie are clearly on a date and Dianna is there to present Sam Smith’s performance of I’m not the only one.  Dianna seems a bit out of her element/gloomy when interviewed on the red carpet and Taylor flexes Karlie hard, dancing with her throughout the night and even sitting on her lap during an interview.

Click here for photos, video, gifs, and a live L chat reaction to the night.

December 28, 2014 - The writer for the tv show The Originals, Carina Mackenzie, tweeted that 1989 was about Dianna:

It’s of course notable that someone in the industry is “confirming” Swiftgron on main (particularly before gaylor went mainstream with Kaylor being so obvious in 2015/2016) however what’s even more interesting and notable about this tweet is that an actor named Michael Trevino was on the show The Originals and he dated Jenna Ushkowitz from 2011-2014.

Not only that but Michael was at Dianna’s 26th birthday when Taylor was in attendance as well.

It’s possible that Michael witnessed Swiftgron in real life and spilled a bit to the writer of the TV show he was on.

January 5, 2015 - Taylor likes a Swiftgron related post on Tumblr of Dianna saying she’d go on the road with Taylor and carry her bags at the Giffoni Film Festival in 2012:

February 9, 2015 - Style is released as a single

February 13, 2015 - The Kaylor “Best Friends” on a road trip Vogue Spread comes out.  You’re probably familiar with it but if you aren’t google it.  It’s incredibly romantic and pda filled.

The Style music video is released on this day as well.

We don’t have to go through the whole video but one egg I just have to note is the cave pictured in the MV is in Morocco the same country Dianna seemed to flee to after Swiftgron was outed:

February 14, 2015 - Dianna tweets 143 remember those days (for some reason it has not been deleted) seemingly in response to the Kaylor vogue shoot:

143 is a code that means “I love you” that originated from Mister Rogers.  Both Taylor and Dianna have publicly shown that they are fans of his.  Taylor has even made certain songs 3 minutes and 41 seconds long seemingly referring to this number and wore a Mister Rogers pin on a jacket for a photoshoot once.

Here’s a bit more in depth analysis on the significance of the 143 post.

This tweet is how we know that it is 100% in Dianna’s character to occasionally subtweet Taylor and why a lot of this social media analysis has been done.  

February 16, 2015 - Just two days later Dianna attends a fashion show in which Karlie walks and is noted to “have kept a smirk on her face” during.  Dianna doesn’t clap at the end of the show and looks miserable in photos of the event:

February 17, 2015 - Taylor releases Wonderland

I’m going to pause here and discuss the song Wonderland for a brief moment because it is some of the most incredibly airtight evidence for Swiftgron available.

Dianna’s favorite book of all time is Alice in Wonderland.  She brought it up in interviews all the time, tweeted about it, auctioned off a signed copy of it for charity, her private Tumblr and instagram account are called whosirmesir which is a reference to it, her private Tumblr is filled with reblogs about Alice, and her public Tumblr was called fell down the rabbit hole.

So the fact that Taylor writes an entire song describing a relationship through the lens of and packing full of references to Alice in Wonderland is incredibly interesting.

Let’s take a look at some of these lyrics:

Flashing lights and we, took a wrong turn and we Fell down the rabbit hole (literally Dianna’s tumblr name and url)

Didn't you flash your green eyes at me (Dianna is famous for her beautiful almost hypnotic green eyes and yes they are green)

Haven't you heard what becomes of curious minds (queer coded)

Too in love to think straight (queer coded)

But there were strangers watching And whispers turned to talking And talking turned to screams (seems to reference when they were outed) You searched the world for something else (Dianna very publicly went travelling around the world right after April 2013 when they seem to break up)

Taylor literally put Dianna’s Tumblr URL in the song.  Frankly I’m kind of shocked she released this song at all it is so obviously and clearly about Dianna.  Truly a Swiftgron anthem!

Back to the timeline...

March 8, 2015 - Taylor posts Flamingos for her dad’s birthday:

The caption was “Happy Birthday, Dad. Thanks for all the unconditional love, sarcastic comments, and interesting Christmas presents.”

May 1, 2015 - Dianna posts a flamingo for her birthday (post is now deleted):

The caption was “This is 29. Spoiled rotten. Funny enough, at work they were painting the hallways white and the roses (hallway doors) red, then I actually went to Wonderland (@AliceUnderLdn) and came home to a surprise flamingo. Here we go. Another year around the sun…feeling lucky and loved and loved and lucky.”

Taylor also gave Emily, another rumored ex, a flamingo bandana for her birthday.  i also think it’s odd that Dianna mentions Wonderland specifically in the post.

January 15, 2016 - Dianna’s engagement to Winston is announced and Kaylors notice Taylor is liking sad posts on Tumblr including several posts related to Clean:

November 7, 2016 - Lorde’s birthday party where Kaylor is together in public for the last time for 20 months.

January 5, 2017 - Claire (who is still very close with Taylor) comments on one of Dianna’s Instagram posts):

March 2, 2017 - Dianna posts her James Dean inStyle UK photo to Instagram:

This is actually the second time she has posted this as a throwback photo.  She also posted it on February 4, 2016 with simply the caption “TBT” and did not include the “rebel without a clue” bit which is a reference to James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause). She’s never posted the same TBT photo twice before or after this (as of the writing of this post in October 2020).

It I may be permitted to go real far out on a limb here it’s almost as if she wanted people to connect that photo of her in the UK InStyle magazine to James Dean.  James Dean is of course the way Taylor describes her lover in the song Style.  

At any rate it’s very odd that it’s the only photo she’s posted twice whether it’s related to Taylor or not.

April 25, 2017 - Fans notice Dianna is having her script tattoo removed:

This is significant because a part of the tattoo was dedicated to Alice in Wonderland - it said “We’re all mad here” 

Tattoo removal is a years long process:

So it’s possible she started getting it removed around the time that Wonderland came out.

It’s also possible part of the tattoo was dedicated to Lea (the part that said “here I am”) so this whole removal situation is very interesting.

In 2019 she was still getting it removed and commented this at a Cafe Carlyle session:

"i was like i don't know i wanna explain all my tattoos or the one that i'm getting removed on my side...you know you're like...WHATEVER we're stopping we're moving on"

February 13, 2018 - Dianna attends the Carolina Herrera fashion show, so does Karlie. Dianna is introduced to Karlie by Derek Blasberg and very audibly calls Karlie “gorgeoouusss” as they meet. 

Kayda play “Gorgeous” by Taylor Swift.

Click here to keep reading!

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

What do you think about TheBangtankaijuu Director's outlook on the GCF? Thebangtankaijuu had interesting ideas about JM and JK's relationship but deleted tumblr.

I went and looked for those posts, I found the analysis on GCF Tokyo and GCF Osaka (this one). There a few things which I would like to mention about the credentials of this director, in particular this part:

''One of his films won twenty-three international awards at the Cannes film festival''

Cannes in itself is an international festival, it does not have a separate section for international production. Second of all, there are indeed over 20 categories, but for a film to win in the same edition, 23 awards is impossible. Anyone who checks the Cannes list will see why. It's not like at the Oscars where a film wins even 10-13 awards in different categories. No Indian film has won even remotely that many awards at Cannes during a single edition. Here is a list of films that were presented there and won some awards over the years. It's also mentioned that the director is a scriptwriter as well and he wrote the script for the first 3D Indian film. Again, I did some research and this is what I found: The film is titled My Dear Kuttichathan (1984) and the script was written by Raghunath Paleri. He directed 2 films and wrote the script for the film Vanaprastham which indeed premiered at Cannes in 1999, in the section Une Certain Regard and won other awards at various film festivals. If this is the guy and my research is correct, then it seems some information has been distorted in the original post. I don't know why, maybe to give more legitimacy to what he says about GCF but I don't really see the point in it.

I read what he said about both films, it's obvious from his comments that he knows the craft and his judgments are pertinent. But to me, it's kind of pointless, although I do agree with some of what he said. GCF don't need a director's explanation because everything is so obvious and easy to understand. There's no hidden symbolism difficult to identify and to understand. The first GCF is taken during a trip in Tokyo, but it's not only about the city, as it focuses more on the subject (Jimin), how the subject feels and how the director (Jungkook) himself wants to show his subject. Of course the music is not random, it has a point, especially in a video that is supposed to reflect a personal, more intimate trip. The Osaka one is not a travel vlog either, it focuses on friendship and it's more goofy, as it has Taehyung and Jimin and it changes the mood. I'll leave a link to what I also wrote about GCFT in order not to repeat myself.

https://bangtan-media-thoughts.tumblr.com/post/657783602418991104/gcf-in-tokyo-and-the-validity-of-interpretation 

[twh-news]

Loki' composer on how her MCU score reflects the main character's flair for the dramatic

By Josh Weiss

Natalie Holt's timeline was turned upside down last fall when she landed the highly-coveted composer gig for Marvel Studios' Loki series on Disney+.

"My agent got a general call-out looking for a composer on a Marvel project," she tells SYFY WIRE during a conversation over Zoom. "So, I didn’t know what it was. It was [described as] spacey and quite epic ... I sent in my show reel and then got an interview and got sent the script and then I realized what it was for. I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ It was amazing ... Loki was already one of my favorite characters, so I was really stoked to get to give him a theme and flesh him out in this way."

***WARNING! The following contains certain plot spoilers for the first four episodes of Loki!***

Imbued with glorious purpose, Holt knew the score had to match the show's gonzo premise about the Time Variance Authority, an organization that secretly watches over and manages every single timeline across the Marvel multiverse. The proposition of such an out-there sci-fi concept inspired the composer to bring in uniquely strange sounds, courtesy of synthesizers and a theremin.

"I got my friend, Charlie Draper, to play the theremin on my pitch that I had to do," she recalls. "They gave me a scene to score, which I’m sure they gave to loads of other composers. It was the Time Theater sequence in Episode 1. The bit from where he goes up the elevator and then into the Time Theater ... I just went to town on it and I wanted to impress them and win the job and put as many unusual sounds in there and make it as unique as possible."

The end result was a weird, borderline unnatural sound that wouldn't have felt out of place in a 1950s sci-fi B-movie about big-headed alien invaders. Rather than being turned off by Holt's avant garde ideas, Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige embraced them, only giving the composer a single piece of feedback: "Push it further."

Holt admits that she was slightly influenced by Thor: Ragnarok ("I loved the score for it and everything"), which wasn't afraid to lean into the wild, Jack Kirby-created ideas floating around Marvel's cosmic locales. Director Taika Waititi's colorful and bombastic set pieces were perfectly complimented by an '80s-inspired score concocted by Devo co-founder, Mark Mothersbaugh.

"To be honest, I tried not to listen to it on its own," Holt says of the Ragnarok soundtrack. "I didn’t want to be too influenced by it. I watched the film a couple of times a few years ago, so yeah, I don’t think I was heavily referencing it. But I definitely had a memory of it in my mind."

After boarding Loki last September, Holt spent the next six months (mostly in lockdown) crafting a soundtrack that would perfectly reflect the titular god of mischief played by Tom Hiddleston. One of the first things she came up with was the project's main theme — a slightly foreboding cue that pays homage to the temporal nature of the TVA, as well as the main character's flair for the dramatic. "He always does things with a lot of panache and flair, and he’s very classical in his delivery."

She describes it as an "over-the-top grand theme with these ornate flourishes" that plays nicely with Loki's Shakespearean aura. "I wanted those ornaments and grand gestures in what I was doing. Then I also wanted to reflect that slightly analog world of the TVA where everything has lots of knobs and buttons ... [I wanted to] give it that slightly grainy, faded [and] vintage-y sci-fi sound as well."

"I just wanted it to feel like it had this might and weight — like there was something almost like a requiem about it," Holt continues. "These chords that are really powerful and strident and then they’ve got this blinking [sound] over the top. I just came up with that when I was walking down the street and I hummed it into my phone. There’s a video where you can just see up my nose and I’m humming [the theme]. I came home and I played it."

As a classically-trained musician, Holt drew on her love of Mahler, Dvořák, Beethoven, Mozart, and most importantly, Wagner. A rather fitting decision, given that an actual Valkyrie (played by Tessa Thompson) exists within the confines of the MCU.

"I would say those flourishes over the top of the Loki theme are very much Wagner," Holt says. "They’re like 'Ride of the Valkyries.’ I wanted people to kind of recall those big, classical, bombastic pieces and I wanted to give that weight to Loki’s character. That was very much a conscious decision to root it in classical harmony and classical writing ... There’s a touch of the divine to the TVA. It’s in charge of everything, so that’s why those big powerful chords [are there]. I wanted people almost to be knocked off their socks when they heard it."

With the main theme in place, Holt could then play around with it in different styles, depending on the show's different narrative needs. Two prime examples are on display in the very first episode during Miss Minutes' introductory video and the flashback that reveals Loki to be the elusive D.B. Cooper.

"What was really fun was [with] each episode, I got to pull it away and do a samba version of the theme or do a kind of ‘50s sci-fi version of the theme," she explains. "I can’t say other versions of the theme because they’re in Episode 5 and 6…or like when Mobius is pruned, I did this really heartfelt and very emotional [take on the theme] when you see Loki tearing up as he’s going down in slow motion down that corridor. It was cool to have the opportunity to try out so many different styles and genres. And it was big enough to take it all. It was a big enough story."

The other side of the story speaks to the old world grandeur of Loki's royal upbringing on Asgard, a city amongst the stars that eventually found its way into Norse mythology.

"I went to a concert in London three years ago and I heard these Norwegian musicians playing in this group called the Lodestar Trio," Holt recalls. "They do a take on Bach, where they’re kind of giving it a folk-y twist … [They use] a nyckelharpa and a Hardanger fiddle — they’re two historic Norwegian folk instruments. I just remembered that sound and I was like, ‘Oh, I have to use those guys in our score.’ It seemed like the perfect thing. I was like, ‘Yes, the North/Norwegian folk instruments.’ It just felt like it was the perfect thing for his mother and Asgard and his origins."

That folk-inspired sound also helped shape the music for Sylvie (played by Sophia Di Martino), a female variant of Loki with a rather tragic past. "Obviously, we’ve seen in Episode 4 what happened to her as a child," Holt says. "I just feel like she’s so dark. She’s basically grown up living in apocalypses, so she has that Norwegian folk violin sound, but her theme is incredibly dark and menacing and also, you don’t see her. She’s just this dark figure who’s murdering people for a while."

And then there were all the core members of the TVA to contend with. As Holt mentioned above, fans recently lost Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), may he rest in prune. We mean peace. What? Too soon? During a recent interview with SYFY WIRE, Loki head writer Michael Waldron said that he based Mobius off of Tom Hanks's dogged FBI agent Carl Hanratty in 2002's Catch Me If You Can.

"There’s this thing that he loves jet ski magazines," Holt says. "I had this character in my head and then when I saw Owen Wilson’s performance, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s actually a lot lighter and he plays it in a different way from how I’d imagined.’ But I was listening to Bon Jovi and those slightly rock-y anthemic things. ‘90s rock music for some reason was my Mobius sound palette."

Mobius is pruned on the orders of his longtime friend, Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), after learning that everyone who works for the TVA is a variant who was unceremoniously plucked out of their original timelines. A high-ranking member of the quantum-based agency, Renslayer has a theme that "is quite tied in with Mobius and it’s like a high organ," Holt adds. "It doesn’t quite know where it’s going yet. But yeah, we’ll have to see what happens with that one."

Wilson's character isn't the only person fed up with the TVA's lies. Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) also became disillusioned with the place and allowed Sylvie to escape in the most recent episode

"Hunter B-15 has this moment in Episode 4 where Sylvie shows her her past, her memories. I thought that was a really powerful moment for her," Holt says. I feel like she’s such a fighter and when she comes into the Time-Keepers and she makes that decision, like, ‘I’m switching sides,’ so her theme is more like a drum rhythm. I actually kind of sampled my voice and you can hear that with the drums. I did loads of layers of it, just like this horrible sliding sound with this driving rhythm underneath it. So, that was B-15 and then her softer side when she has her memory given back to her."

Speaking of the Time-Keepers, we finally got to meet the creators of the Sacred Timeline...or at least we thought we did. Loki and Sylvie are shocked to learn that the red-eyed guardians of reality are nothing but a trio of high-end animatronics (ones that could probably be taken out by a raging Nicolas Cage). Even before Sylvie manages to behead one of them, something definitely feels off with the Time-Keepers, which meant Holt could underscore the uncanny valley feeling in the score.

"When they walked in for their audience with the Time-Keepers, it was like this huge gravitas," she says. "But you look up and there’s something a bit wrong about them. I don’t know if you felt that or if you just totally believed. You were like, ‘Oh, this is so strange.’ I just felt like there was something a little bit off and musically, it was fun to play around with that."

Holt is only the second solo female composer to work on an MCU project, following in the footsteps of Captain Marvel's Pinar Toprak. Her involvement with Loki represents the studio's growing commitment to diversity, both in front of and behind the camera. This Friday will see the wide release of Black Widow, the first Marvel film to be helmed solely by a woman (Cate Shortland). Four months after that, Chloé Zhao's Eternals will introduce the MCU's first openly gay character into the MCU.

"I just feel like it’s an honor and a privilege to have had that chance to be the second woman to score a thing in the MCU and to be in the same league as those incredible composers like Mothersbaugh and Alan Silvestri. They're just legends," Holt says. "Another distinctive thing about [the show] is that all the heads of department are pretty much women. Marvel are showing themselves to be really progressive and supportive and encouraging. I applaud [them]. Whatever they’re doing seems to be working and people seem to be liking it as well, so that’s awesome."

Holt's score for Vol. 1 of Loki (aka Episodes 1-3) are now streaming on every music-based platform you could think of. Episodes 1-4 are available to watch on Disney+ for subscribers. Episode 5 (the show's penultimate installment) debuts on the platform this coming Wednesday, July 7.

Natalie isn't able to give up any plot spoilers for the next two episodes (no surprise there), but does tease "the use of a big choir" in one of them. "Episode 6, I’m excited for people to hear it," she concludes. "That’s all I can say."