#i'm gonna go watch a violent movie now! people KILLING EACH OTHER. does that make me a MURDERER???

[smowkie]

this is actually hilarious to me. this person ignored the whole post and ONLY commented on the tags, which, i mean.

the tags don't show up on their reblog so they sorta look deranged talking about things not in the post.

but also, they were a side note, something unimportant, something i wanted to whine a bit about but not make a post about, so i just mentioned it in the tags.

me shipping a ship that isn't "problematic" and wanting to talk to others about that ship but not being allowed to because i don't think other people should be judged by what they ship is... yeah, it's an annoyance at most, it's not a big deal. that's why it's not in the actual post.

i do get why they went after that though, easiest target.

but, @ why am i here tumbled, since you don't know: being a proshipper does not mean "people who ship incest".

being a proshipper means being anti harassment.

being a proshipper means i don't think you're automatically a bad person because you ship something i don't, or something i find icky. there are lots of ships i find icky, so i ignore them.

yeah, i'm a proshipper and i ship an incest ship and some other "problematic" shit, but that's not what makes me a proshipper.

i'm a proshipper because i'm not an anti, or an antishipper - someone who determines people's value and morals by what ships they like.

i'm a proshipper because i'm anti harassment.

i'm a proshipper because i believe in ship and let ship, don't like don't read, kinktomato, etc.

it has nothing to do with what i actually ship. there are plenty of proshippers out there who only have super wholesome and healthy ships.

and being excluded because i am anti harassment? yeah i'm okay with that. i wouldn't have wanted to be there anyway if they think it's okay to bash people based on ships.

i am so tired of people equating proshippers with people who think pedophilia and incest is okay. we don't, actually.

i know this may come as a shock to some people, but we actually can differentiate from fiction and reality, and just because we think something is fun in fiction doesn't mean we think it's fun in reality.

fuck, i constantly wrote Sterek as the clingiest fuckers alive and i hate that personally, i cannot fucking sleep if someone is clinging to me, but i LOVE the thought of Sterek not being able to sleep unless they're practically glued together.

so why should i think incest is okay because i ship Wincest? why should i think pedophilia is okay because i enjoy reading some fucked up shit from time to time?

[blue-myrmeca]

I have once again embarked on the epic quest of watching as many Bollywood movies as I can stomach and I keep wanting to annoy my friends with the reviews so now I'm going to come here to get my thoughts out of my silly little head.

If anyone also follows @romanceyourdemons please lower your expectations immediately I will not be as insightful and succinct and awesome and intelligent as they are I'm just gonna gush.

Anyway Here's Agneepath (2012). Massive Spoiler Alert.

I was not expecting to like this movie as much as I did. I'm a big fan of Hrithik Roshan so I have been aware of Agneepath for a long time, he was super stoked to be a part of it etc, but the story didn't seem like one that I would really vibe with. 'Boy watches father violently murdered, decides to devote rest of his life to revenge, more at six' isn't really my bread and butter but BOY howdy was I wrong!!

Assorted things I loved:

Hrithik Roshan's beautiful face. It has been too long, my love, I'm so sorry I've been obsessed with Aamir Khan recently.

Priyanka Chopra *not* playing a Mary Sue. When she plays a character, she does SUCH a good job and I love to see it. She's so freaking pretty and good at dancing come back to India plz maam.

Katrina Kaif was there for literally one dance number???? She went off, but lordy that's an expensive dance number. I kept thinking she was going to come back, but no.

This is a dark movie with dark themes, much violence and swearing. Hrithik and Priyanka are clearly living together as an unmarried couple in the slums where Priyanka's mom is a prostitute. Do they kiss? Don't be ridiculous, staring at each other intently is all we can do. Never change Bollywood ily.

Hrithik Roshan's Angry Head Shake. Viju (his character) is So Mad all the time and has to keep it in and I LOVE how tortured he can make his eyes while the rest of his face stays calm. It's incredible.

Okay actual story things. I thought it was so interesting the nuance this film managed. Viju is not a good guy. He kills a man-sorry-police officer (AS A CHILD) to cover up the fact that he didn't identify the local Big Crime Boss in a lineup for a murder that he witnessed. He does a lot of bad things, ends up as that crime boss's first lieutenant, etc, but gosh dang it you root for him bc everyone he's moving against is worse.

Like, you know from the beginning that he's doing all of this so that he can gain the power he needs to put himself on level footing with the man who killed his father. And that guy is Super Extremely Bad, so you want Viju to succeed. You know that he aligned himself with this other crime boss bc he witnessed him say that he hated the man who killed his father. And you know that, even though he supports Crime Boss's activities, he gives all his money to charity and still lives in the slum that took him in as a child when his mom abandoned him (after he murdered a cop).

ALSO, he is playing all of the ends against the middle. Informing on Crime Boss to the cops, informing Crime Boss about the cops movements, stopping Father Killer from encroaching on Crime Boss's territory, promising Father Killer a foothold in Crime Boss's territory--Viju is everywhere and in everything.

He is full of contradictions, and that's what makes the story work. He is a brutal man because he loves so deeply and radically. He has a heart of gold that cannot allow injustice to stand, so he kills and lies and helps move drugs bc he sees it all as a means to an inevitable and inescapable end. He will kill the man who killed his father, he will free his hometown from that man's influence and he will do whatever he needs to do to get him to that point.

The film doesn't ask you to agree with Viju. It's pretty clear about the fact that he has 'fallen from grace' and landed on a path that only brings more death and violence and hurts the people he loves. It doesn't ask you to think that Viju is correct. But it does ask you to understand how this man could find himself in this position. How he could decide that this was what needed to be done.

It shows how partially effective the police are, how he's willing to work with them, but doesn't trust them to accomplish what he needs to get done. It shows how he does what's necessary to gain respect and power in the underworld but when given the opportunity, he rejects the morals of it (he frees a bunch of girls that were going to be sold at auction). It shows his mother railing against who he's become for the whole film, but in the end, recognizing that he did manage to do a good thing.

Gosh it's so heartbreaking, he finally kills the man who killed his father (in the exact same way his father was killed, love that symmetry), frees his home from his reign of terror and is dying in his mother's arms-- and this scourge of the underworld looks up at his momma with the saddest sweetest eyes and asks her if he did the right thing. She has disagreed with his choices every step of the way, but the result was, in fact, the right thing. He finally gets his mothers' acceptance.

Anyway its a well done film that asks a lot of interesting questions and doesn't force answers to them down your throat, just lets you sit in the questions. And that's a quality I like in a movie. Action sequences were great, characters were consistent and built well. Fricken loved it.

Okay that's it. If you got to the end, thanks I guess? I told you this was going to be a mess so i have nothing to apologize for. The end.

[ideks-on-mars]

hello i am back here again with a mildy specific request

reonsemishira favorite movies/tv shows, individually and what they like to watch together (even though i'm p sure you already touched on what they watch together just uh expand on it ig)

Ah yes, I love this request 😪 I'm gonna add video games too, hope you don't mind 🤭

REONSEMISHIRA MOVIE/TV SHOWS + VIDEO GAMES HCS LET'S GO!!!

- WE'LL START WITH SEMI

- Semi likes classic movies. Specifically 80s

- 'The Breakfast Club', 'The Outsiders', 'Stand By Me', 'Dirty Dancing', 'Beetlejuice', and 'Top Gun' are just some of his favorites

- He's just old skool

- He also loves Leonardo DiCaprio

- LOVES horror also. Slasher movies are good. But paranormal shit? HE LOVES IT

- Hasn't seen it yet but he wants to watch "The Black Phone"

- With video games, he likes Call of Duty the most probably

- He played the first Black Ops because Tendō had it and he immediately fell in love

- He's basic, ikik

- He also really liked 'Five Nights at Freddy's', 'PaRappa the Rapper', 'Crash Bandicoot', and the WWE games

- When it comes to shows, he doesn't watch a whole lot because he prefers movies. If he watches series then he'll forget all about them.

- However, he DOES like the anime 'Black Clover' tho, he likes the 3rd intro, 'Black Rover', a LOT

- NEXT IS SHIRABU

- Likes mystery a WHOLE lot. If there's no mystery for him to figure out then he won't be interested

- Hates miscommunication arcs. He wants to stab the characters

- Probably likes 'Stranger Things', doesn't gaf about the other characters tho, he just wants Max and Lucas to get back together

- Movies are ehh to him.

- Really likes 'Mulan' tho

- Video game taste is pretty much the same as movie/show taste

- His favorite video game of ALL TIME is 'At Dead Of Night', he loves it SO much

- The horror, mixed with the mystery, and it's just so exciting for him 🤭

- Plays Roblox with his youngest brother, not that he likes it, he just wants to beat him in the tycoons

- LAST BUT NOT LEAST OUR SWEET REON

- Reon loves romcoms 🤭 his favorite is 'Moonstruck'

- Also likes 'She's The Man'. He watched that for the first time with Semi.

- He also really REALLY likes 'Toradora!', the characters remind him of his boyfriends 💀 they all watch it together

- Reon was most DEFINITELY a Minecraft kid

- But hey, me too

- He played it ALL the time

- Homeboy was building mansions by the second day the game had been out

- He plays it with his little brother one time, and he just had a TRUCKLOAD of nostalgia dumped on him

- Minecraft was so goated, I swear

- He'd adopt 3772 dogs. Dyed their collars and everything 😙

- Now when it comes to stuff they watch/play together. It's kind of hard to agree on something when they have such range 💀

- Semi tried to teach them how to play CoD.

- Reon kept just walking around the map, saying how good the graphics were. Probably had a heart attack when he would get killed 😭

- Shirabu just started laughing a little TOO hard when he killed people

- They keep violent games away from Shirabu 💀

- Now you may be thinking "So how do they agree on something?"

- Well one thing they do have in common, they're all competitive

- Wii Sports and Mario Kart, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH

- By the end they're ready to kill each other

- Maybe they should calm down 😭

- They definitely prefer multi-player games cuz they all wanna play together...

- Cue the Minecraft lobby music

- Semi is PvP MASTER

- He's a 10 but he makes his houses out of dirt and a door ✋️💀

- Shirabu's really good with bow and arrows 👀 he usually just steals a house from a village and claims it

- Now Reon, he's a master builder. His houses are works of ART

- Shirabu probably adopts a bunch of dogs just to hit Semi and have them all attack him

- Where's he gonna hide? In his dirt block? Three punches and he is DONE

- Reon likes little turtles, he has a little beach where he keeps his pet turtles

- Semi just likes going sicko mode on the horses

- They all end up living in Reon's house, they share a room and have it decorated with paintings, carpet, flowers, everything 😪

- They put their beds together <3 (even if they're all different colors)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

August 21: Mission: Impossible II

(previous notes: Mission: Impossible)

Not gonna lie, this is without question the Mission: Impossible movie that is remembered most unfavorably by me and, I'm pretty sure, everyone else. My recollection is that they tried SO SO SO SO HARD to make an action movie for Today's Kids; I'm typing this with the title screen of the 4K Blu-ray blasting its turn-of-the-millennium neo-metal version of the classic theme with Tom Cruise running in front of a wall of flame and it's just like come on. Is there even must fun spycraft in this? The first one promised lots of gravely furtive glancing, world-class makeup disguises, and dazzling gadgetry. Did this movie's director John Woo replace those with just way way way too much shooting and chasing and sexy vehicles? That's how I remember it but it's been a couple of decades.

I should probably address this series' exciting approach to director selection. The first one was directed by the legendary Brian De Palma, who brought us Carrie, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way. Whether or not this one worked out, the trend here seemed to be to choose a respected director with a certain cred that could be imported into the franchise. More on that as this series unfolds. I am now to press play.

Opening scene is about a scientist who injects himself with something while a voiceover teases us with I-already-forget-what.

Oh, he's pals with Ethan; they're on a plane together out of Sydney when some bad-guy shenanigans totally thwart the whole fly-to-the-destination-safely thing. But! It wasn't even Ethan! It was good-ol' makeup fake-outery! It was a heist to take the warn leather pouch that the scientist had.

This I remember - during the opening credits, the REAL Ethan Hunt is climbing somewhere impressive, all freestyle like. All the related supplemental marketing materials never fail to talk up Tom Cruise's penchant for doing his own stunts, but these don't look real.

He then receives a fancy techno-message in a very, very dramatic and action-movie-ish fashion, which is that someone flies a helicopter by his climbing mountain and fires a rocket near him containing message-glasses tech! The voice in the message glasses sounds like Anthony Hopkins. Is it Anthony Hopkins?

Anyway now he has to go to Spain to recruit Thandie Newton and here is where it's already starting to get way too the-style-of-John-Woo. There is a flamenco show and Ethan and TN spot each other across the room. There is SLO MOTION and SPANISH STOMPING and ACOUSTIC GUITAR, and THOSE TWO GAZING AT EACH OTHER. I tell you I do not care for it.

What happens next is TN proceeds to use fancy technology and lockpicking skills to steal a well-concealed necklace. Ethan tags along flirtatiously. She still tries to steal the necklace even though this Lothario, this smarmy but irresistible cad, is trying to distract her with his testosterone.

Ugh, I was very right to remember not liking stuff about this movie. Ethan fails to recruit her at the jewel heist, so he car-chases at her the next day! He calls her during the car chase to irritate/seduce her, and she's all "you'll have to catch me ha ha", and it ends in a nearly fatal crash and then they KISS. The director worked very hard to ensure the kissing was HAWT, and Ethan has now successfully recruited TN for both spy work and boinkage.

Anthony Hopkins! He is in the next scene! That really was him! How did I forget that he is in this movie. This scene where he meets with Ethan and fills him in on everything is effectively expository. But then after he knows what he's gotta do, he walks with INTENSITY and it is in SLOW MOTION next to a BURNING EFFIGY THING with ELECTRIC GUITAR MUSIC GOING ON.

0:33:40 - Oh now it's a little more what I like, with a montage about using spy tech to get Ambrose, the bad guy who was pretending to be Ethan on the plane in the beginning, to track TN. And to further assure us that there is techie-fun to be had, Ving Rhames returns to be that guy for Ethan's team. But there is also time in this sequence for shots of TN walking slowly and looking super pretty. You know, so she can seduce Ambrose. A flowing scarf figures prominently in this imagery. A John Woo Film.

I like that they tricked Ambrose into thinking he is so damn smart for tracking her down. I also like Ambrose's compound on Sydney Harbour, it is a bitchin property.

Scene just happened where Ambrose seriously menaces his friend and uses a cigar-clipper on his finger. Ambrose is a bad friend.

But then they're all at the horse race game, even Ambrose's injured friend, who we learn is named Stemp and who is spying on TN, and Ethan and VR are spying on them all. There are shots of TN doing sleight of hand to steal a tape from Ambrose's pocket and it's pretty good spy-shot stuff.

I guess I should mention that there's one more guy on Ethan's team of four, an Australian guy. I haven't caught his name, so he is Australian Guy now, and he is pretending to be an employee of the horse race game venue. He gets bullied by Stemp! We don't like Stemp!

The tape she stole, they watch it right away and it shows footage of what the virus (there's a virus problem at the center of this) does. It is effective, and a little shocking.

But then, this is surprisingly actually kind of well-conveyed - they made it VERY clear that the tape was originally in Ambrose's left jacket pocket, and they showed very clearly that TN returned it to the wrong jacket pocket, AND it's obvious a moment later that Ambrose knows it has been replaced in the wrong jacket pocket. Don't know why, but at least it's keeping us on top of this situation.

Also not-too-shabby is how they're doing the consequences of Ethan and TN fancying each other, except then she has to go and seduce Ambrose and that's uncomfortable and drama-making. In Ethan's defense, as well as Ambrose's, I am also in love with TN right now.

1:02:12 - Ethan disguised himself as Scientist, the dead one from the beginning, and I'm just saying I'm glad this movie is embracing the disguise-craft theme that was established in the first movie. Ooh, is the show like that too?

And then just as I've typed that, it turns out that Ambrose did an Ethan disguise (it was established by Anthony Hopkins that Ambrose was an IMF agent so he can do that stuff too) to trick TN into outing her intentions. They make it very clear that there is voice-fake tech with their disguises that involves a wire mesh thing stuck to the throat.

Next up is a heist scheme to break into a skyscraper where they're growing stuff about the virus, and it's a little bit of that style I liked so much in the last movie, with the added twist that Ambrose is somewhere else anticipating what Ethan's planning, and, I think, plotting a separate, way-better heist. They're still talking about it and the heist is happening and it is suspenseful! I totally like this more than I remember.

1:13:30 - Ethan is at the part of the heist where he's at fancy lab facilities with robot arms and AI voices and oddly no people. VR and Australian Guy are observing everything that's happening using technology and Australian Guy's helicopter, making it more suspenseful, but I also don't know exactly what's going on? We appear to be where Scientist originally injected himself, and Ethan is I think killing the virus while also somehow visualizing Scientist injecting himself.

But then that all goes away because a platoon of thugs in black burst in and are shooting at Ethan. It all quickly became an action movie with blazing guns and VR's tech van getting bombed.

In the fracas it's clear that one of the injector guns contains the last of the virus, and also gunplay might shatter it and make them all infected, so that's decent suspense. But also, the lighting in this bio-lab is like a nightclub, with inexplicably roving spotlights and neon accents that pop in 4K.

TN is in the mix, and she decides to inject the last of the virus into herself, and there's a dumb moment where it's like ETHAN YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO SHOOT ME WITH YOUR GUN and Ethan, Man of Ethics, does not do that. Instead there is more gunplay and Ethan jumps out a hole he made in the wall.

1:28:45 - We've moved to new location, a new compound, and it's on a guard-patrolled island and Ethan sneaks up on a guard and does a totally unnecessary body-flip martial arts move to take him out. I think he needs to steal the antidote from this compound so that he can save TN, who is somewhere else. He is visually passionate about this mission.

Ethan got caught sneaking in to this new compound by Stemp, and he did a whole grenade blowup thing but he still got caught. It's a trick, right? Yup, he put an Ethan mask on Stemp and a Stemp mask on himself and got Ambrose to kill Stemp. He realizes he just killed Stemp because of the finger injury, good job with that.

I am reminded that this movie is from the director of Face/Off, so I needn't have feared that the mask/disguise conceit would be forsaken.

But did he get the antidote? He must have. Sometimes when I'm typing notes I miss stuff, but he's now motorcycling away while VR and Australian Guy are providing support from their chopper.

This is now the vehicle-chase opera that I remember ending the movie so terribly extendedly. Much gunplay. Vehicles pirouette with violent elegance. Ethan can do such exquisite dances with his motorcycle and firearm. This climaxes in the ridiculous feat of Ethan and Ambrose riding their cycles at each other and jumping at off them at each other to finish the job sans vehicle. It ends as a tussle on the beach, and Ambrose has a knife that almost gets in Ethan's eye. The visual on that is striking. But it's no good, Ethan is too Tom Cruise for him. He gets the knife from him and DISCARDS THE KNIFE, and punch-kick-fights him a lot instead. Ethics.

Turns out Ambrose has a gun after all oh no. But then it turns out Ethan is standing by a sand-obscured gun somehow also oh good. He does a thoroughly storyboarded sand-kick-body-twirl gun recovery that ends like you'd guess.

So although there are some dumb things about this movie, I think it's better than I remembered. And having just watched the first one, I think it actually did a good job of having a story where you don't have to ignore a lot of stupidness. It's not like it's an especially good plot, but it didn't try to make you forget its holes like the first one. I still like the first one better, though.

(next: Mission: Impossible III)