#it would feel exploitative as a viewer having to watch one of the defining moments of flints life that tuned out so badly for him | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hualianff · 4 years ago

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Thinking about XL who used to be an heir to one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world, “Xianle Tech.” When his family’s business was still thriving, XL attended a lot of charity events to meet with clients and cultivate important connections he would have to uphold as future CEO.

Everything seemed to be going according to plan, XL developing a respectable name for himself as he began business school. Once he graduated, XL shadowed his father at work, learning the ropes of how to run a successful company that competed with the best in the world.

However, the success was never meant to last.

Only three years down the road, XianLe Tech suffered a major setback when reports spread that their new product line caused harmful explosions after little use. After paying millions in indemnification for the damage customers experienced, another scandal revealed XianLe Tech had been profiting off of unpaid labor.

Within one month, the world XL had grown up to know crumbled all around him. And he could do nothing about it. All the “friends” XL had disappeared within a blink of an eye. No one wanted to be associated with the family who had resorted to dirty practices for their advantage, which is incredibly ironic considering the business industry is all about networking and using others as stepping stones to achieve selfish goals.

Nevertheless, XL understood that it had been wrong, that he and his parents were wrong to disregard the roots of their manufacturing process. XL wasn’t aware of his privilege up until now, but he sure as hell would learn how to combat this systematic inequity, somehow salvaging what he had left along the way.

XL becomes a social worker who is a Youtuber on the side, educating his viewers about class injustices, homelessness, poverty, and the same exploitation of lower-class resources that led to XianLe Tech’s downfall. He also incites them to engage in random acts of kindness whenever they can. He doesn’t have a huge subscriber following, doesn’t make money off of his videos. XL is just glad that some people watch his videos. He hopes he can make a positive impact on their lives, no matter how small.

After all, XL is a firm believer that despite the world being a scary and lonely place, having at least one person let you know you are cared for is enough to make a difference–is enough to save a life.

***

“I am sorry, but we cannot serve you at this moment.”

“But we talked on the phone a few hours ago. I have a reservation,” XL says calmly. He holds up his phone with the confirmation page pulled up. The waiter doesn’t even glance at the screen, sniffing as if XL is nothing but a nuisance.

“Still, we don’t serve people like you,” he says, eyeing XL’s outfit with distaste.

Ah, so it was an appearance issue. XL quickly looks around at the seated guests, catching sight of wrists adorned with miraculous jewels and pricey wristwatches, bodies clothed with expensive fabrics no doubt imported from overseas. The same aura of practiced prestige and sophistication lingers in the air.

XL doesn’t even have to glance down at his ripped jeans, cream-colored sweater, and flimsy white jacket to know he sticks out like a sore thumb. He internally sighs, slightly regretting taking SQX up on their recommendation to try out The Red Thread. If XL knew he would’ve been barred from in-dining eating, he would not have placed a reservation in the first place.

But XL doesn’t want to give up just yet. He still has a lot to learn about class discrimination and prejudices; if XL were to walk away now with his tail between his legs, it would be giving power to those who claimed superiority and unjust treatment in the first place. Instead of allowing this waiter to brush him to the side like a pest, XL stands his ground, adjusting his beige handbag on his shoulder.

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Could you please elaborate?” XL asks in a breezy tone. A sense of amusement bubbles in his gut when the waiter looks visibly annoyed.

“Sir, we don’t mean to be unaccommodating. However, there are standards in place that were set by the CEO himself. We are simply abiding by his standards,” the waiter says, presenting the matter like he had no choice but to turn XL away.

“Is it a money problem? Because I assure you I can pay for my meal, if that’s what you’re worried about,” XL tries again. The waiter narrows his eyes, making XL gulp nervously. He unconsciously twists the hair not pulled back in his half-bun.

A few more waiters gather around them, ready to jump in if things get too heated.

“Oh, I’m certain the former heir to XianLe Tech can afford our service,” the main waiter sneers unkindly. XL’s breath catches in his throat upon being recognized. The probing eyes suffocate him, probably taking into account how renowned he was years ago and thinking how far he has fallen to come to a Michelin-starred restaurant dressed like this.

XL feels himself losing steam.

“But we are asking you to leave. It’s up to you whether or not force will be necessary.”

“It’s not right to refuse service when there is no valid reason in doing so,” XL says, more desperate this time.

“You do not pass the dress code,” another waiter pipes up. “You are not fit to be here.”

The main waiter now walks towards XL, a grim expression on his face.

“Wait, I’d like to speak to your manager, if they’re here–”

“I am the manager. Don’t make things harder for yourself,” the manager replies brusquely. He stands tall in front of XL, an intimidation tactic used to make XL back down. XL’s face heats up as he realizes he’s caught the attention of other customers as well. He’s like a trapped animal being told to scram in the presence of merciless predators.

It’s not a nice feeling, not at all.

Humiliation seeps into XL’s bones. It’s been a while since he was last scrutinized by the general public, and while this is only a handful of elite gathered in a medium-sized building, the burden weighing down on XL feels like that of the weight of the world. He needs to escape. He needs to breathe. Because only then can XL continue saving himself.

Right as XL decides it might be time to let the reins go, he hears the whooshing sound of the doors opening. He doesn’t turn to see who has entered, but the surrounding staff who were observing the exchange go deathly silent. Their faces automatically mold into a mask of obedience, posture tightening up.

***

He is one of the oldest orphans in the orphanage. His age alone makes him fit for this task, and if he does it right, he can earn money as well as the good graces of his caretakers. He can do it.

He must. He must survive.

But there are so many people. So many plates and tables and silverware. Everyone is so tall, so big, so important. It’s been three hours, and his feet have developed blisters. The bruises from a couple days ago still throb. When he smells all the rich aromas coming from the kitchen, from the plates he carries upon both hands, his stomach growls.

He feels light-headed. Too many people, he thinks. Too much talking and boisterous laughter. He wants to leave but he can’t. He won’t be paid until the end of the night, after clean-up.

He continues to work.

And then it happens. It’s too fast. He wasn’t looking where he was going, just staring at the floor as he rushed to the kitchen. But he has bumped into another person, and judging by the clothes he wears and his pleasant scent, this person is very important.

He can only stare at the mess he’s made. There are gasps of shock and horror around him. He can’t breathe. He wants to disappear. To die, just freaking die already. He will never make it out if he can’t even complete mundane work like this.

As he’s ushered into the kitchens by the older male, he prepares for the yelling, and possibly the hits. They never come. Instead, he’s cleaned up by the older male, who asks a couple questions.

He answers them willingly.

“What is your name?”

“It’s nice to meet you, Xiao Hong-er. I’m Xie Lian, you can call me gege, okay?”

“Everyone makes mistakes, Xiao Hong-er. But they will never define you. As long as you remain true to yourself, you can achieve anything you set your heart to. Do you understand?”

“I believe in you.”

When gege left through the kitchen doors, back to the adult world, back to being important, another older male walks in. The other male frowns, then says one word.

“Fired.”

***

“What is going on here?” An authoritative voice demands, sending powerful vibrations through the air. The hairs on the back of XL’s neck stand up as the new person comes up from behind him. This must be an important figure.

The manager answers that a customer–who isn’t even dressed according to the standards–has been causing trouble. Already beyond mortified at the turn of events but refusing to let it show, XL slowly meets the newcomer’s eyes as he is acknowledged.

The man is tall, at least a head taller than XL. He’s broader too, dressed to the nines just like the other waiters and customers in the restaurant. His skin is hauntingly pale, slivers of ink peeking out from underneath the dress shirt he wears, top three buttons open. XL does not allow his gaze to waver as he instantly labels this guy one of the most handsome men he’s laid eyes upon, and it makes his heart stutter.

XL shoves down these uncalled for thoughts and refrains from giving any of his emotions away.

The most peculiar thing is the eyepatch settled upon the other man’s right eye. XL makes it a point not to stare too much. The eye left uncovered regards XL with interest. XL feels shivers run down his spine at that, steeling himself for the harsh words that will be directed towards him once more.

So XL finally bows his head and lowers his eyes.

“Never mind. I was just leaving. Sorry to be a disturbance.”

An awkward silence follows. The staff doesn’t say anything, but their faces are victorious at the prospect that XL has finally caved in. On the other hand, the taller man’s eye widens, and he only regards XL for ten more seconds before anger becomes noticeable in his gaze.

XL feels his stomach drop.

He goes to make his exit, except a large hand on his shoulder prevents him from turning around. XL looks at the taller man with confusion. The eye-patched man says only one word, expression solemn.

“Stay.”

As XL processes this with raised eyebrows, the taller man now glares holes into the manager who had spoken in the first place. With a click of his tongue, loud and clear, all the staff rushes back to their places, getting back to work. This includes the manager, who ducks his head to avoid the hostile energy of who XL now assumes is his boss.

“Sir?” XL addresses quietly as all the eyes that were once staring at him go back to their own business. The taller man now fully turns to face XL, hand slipping off XL’s shoulder.

“Sorry about that. I didn’t realize such standards were put into place since my departure. I’ll ensure there are consequences for the staff that has disrespected you tonight,” he says firmly, never breaking eye contact. This makes XL’s skin crawl, makes him feel alive. The other man holds his hand out, seemingly shrinking himself to fit XL’s comfort. “I’m the owner of this establishment, by the way. You can call me San Lang.”

XL is utterly speechless for a second, automatically taking SL’s hand and shaking while simultaneously admiring his undeniable attractiveness.

“M-many thanks, San Lang. I didn’t mean to cause such a commotion...” XL feels himself blush as he takes note that their hands have been intertwined for an absurd amount of time considering they’re strangers.

“I tried telling them I had a reservation, but they wouldn’t seat me—“

“They rejected your reservation?” SL questions sharply, dropping XL’s hand and curling his own into a fist.

XL bites his lip, nodding. He can practically feel the waves of irritation rolling off of the owner. “But I suppose I didn’t realize how high-scale this restaurant is. I mean, I’ve heard many great things about the food...”

When SL doesn’t say anything, the corner of his lips turned downwards, XL quickly backtracks in panic, realizing what he said must’ve been offensive.

“I’m sure your restaurant still holds true to its reputation, haha! I suppose...maybe I should’ve thought to dress more formally so this wouldn’t have happened,” XL says.

However, SL is already shaking his head. When he speaks, his voice is hushed, words tumbling out in a smooth baritone voice that XL could listen to for hours.

“No. None of this is your fault. Please don’t take whatever my staff has said to heart. They are the ones mistaken and they will be held accountable. Forgive me for disappointing you...?” He trails off.

“Xie Lian,” XL offers helpfully, offering a small smile.

“Xie Lian...” SL says slowly, as if testing the name out and decidedly liking the way it sounds. He whispers something else under his breath that XL can’t quite make out. XL chuckles at that, now wondering how old SL is. He doesn’t look any older than XL himself, perhaps even younger. Just the mere fact that SL is this young and so successful, XL is the one in awe.

They stand at the entrance of the restaurant in a brief silence, just staring at each other. XL assumes it’s time for him to take his leave. His reservation doesn’t matter much anymore, not like he wanted to dine and be served by the same people who looked down on him because of his underdressed self.

But before he can, once again, announce his exit, SL steps a little closer, a curious look in his eye.

“Say, Xie Lian, seeing as this was such a disservice for your night, would you be interested in going somewhere else? I know a few places that have just as delicious food,” SL offers, tilting his head innocently. His long hair is tied into a low ponytail, but his side bangs fall gracefully across his face.

“Wouldn’t that be showing me your competition?” XL asks good-naturedly. SL smirks at that.

“Competition doesn’t matter when the food in question is high quality,” he answers, holding his hands up while shrugging. “You came here for a satisfactory meal, and I’m saying I know a place or two that will be just as pleasing. If you’re up to try it, just say the word,” SL continues casually, arms now crossed in a way that makes the fabric of his long-sleeved dress shirt bulge.

XL is flattered by such an offer. He looks one last time at the inside dining room, the fancy tablecloths and expensive-looking candles, and the lavishly dressed customers who sit with their backs rod-straight, fingers pointing here and there.

It’s honestly a no-brainer. XL allows himself to smile graciously, nodding. “I would greatly appreciate it. I’m merely looking for dinner. Anywhere is fine.”

SL returns the smile, one eye crinkling at the corner. He seems relieved at XL’s response, and promptly goes to grab his coat that he had thrown at a waiter upon entering.

XL’s eyes widen at the bold, maple-red long coat SL puts on, accentuating board shoulders and his slim figure. XL puts aside his self-conscious thoughts of his ratty, second-hand clothes. SL gestures for XL to walk out the doors first, typing away at his phone, most likely making a last-minute call for a reservation.

XL thinks that for once in his life, luck seems to be on his side. What could’ve been a night of total humiliation and shame turned into a nice meal with a new friend. XL pushes the doors open with a newfound sense of happiness, completely missing the way HC makes a neck-slicing motion at the staff on his way out.

(HC)

(How To Piss Off Your Boss)

#TGCF #heaven official's blessing #hualian #xielian #huacheng #shiqingxuan #muqing #cerdrabbles #hualianau #hua cheng was beaten then thrown out of the orphanage after coming back from the charity even with no money #he was taken in by an older restaurant owner who taught him a lot of the basics of cooking #hua cheng has many scars from abuse including the loss of his right eye #he covers his scars up with tattoos #you best bet hua cheng is like gordon ramsay #you best bet xie lian and hua cheng go on many dates

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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Doctor Who: Ranking the Master Stories – Which is the Best?

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Roger Delgado looms large over the character of the Master, being simultaneously influential and something of an anomaly: Delgado played the role with a debonair front, but since his death, the character has been less urbane and more desperate, manic and violent. In fact the actor who’s come closest to Delgado’s approach is Eric Roberts, who plays an American version of Delgado’s Master until his performance goes big towards the end of 1996’ ‘The TV Movie’.

Each actor brings different facets to the fore, but after the character’s successful launch in Season 8 we get the tricky balancing act of the returning villain: We know that the character returns because they’re popular (indeed, the reason for their existence was the question ‘What can we do to attract viewers for the season opener?’), but in story terms, this makes them seem increasingly ridiculous. The Master, among all Doctor Who villains, seems especially keen to involve the Doctor. Why do they keep coming back if they’re always defeated?

In recent stories, writers have attempted an explanation for the Master’s behaviour, be it an unspecified insanity or a damaged friendship where each party attempts to bring the other round to their way of thinking. Mostly, though, the Master appears in Doctor Who for a simple reason: a lot of viewers find it fun when the Master appears in Doctor Who, and the Master seems to find it fun when the Master appears in Doctor Who too.

Overall the character has a solid record in the show. Fewer classics than the Daleks, fewer duds than the Cybermen, but a lot of solidly entertaining stories mostly lifted by his presence. Here, then, is my ranking of – give or take – every Master story from the television series.

27. Time-Flight

I’m sure there are redemptive readings of ‘Time-Flight’, and its flaws are more understandable in the context of its production (with the money running out at the end of the series and a shopping list of items to include imposed on writer Peter Grimwade), but the end result is poor.

To contrast Anthony Ainley’s performance with Roger Delgado’s for a second: Delgado always played the Master with a calm veneer, as though his nonsensical schemes were perfectly sensible. As a result, he seemed in control. Ainley plays the role as if they’re not merely sensible but clearly brilliant plans even though they strain credulity. They’re smaller in scale and this makes Ainley’s Master seem tragicomic. He loses control more, there’s a kind of ‘She’s turned the weans against us’ desperation that’s much more apparent in this incarnation.

‘Time-Flight’ is, despite its faults, a poor example of this. While the Master disguises himself as a mystic for no clear reason, his end goal is simply freeing himself from prehistoric Earth. Once he’s discarded his disguise, Ainley’s performance is largely underplayed (especially in contrast with ‘Castrovalva’, earlier in the season). While there’s some camp value in the guest cast, it’s not enough to rescue this from being dull.

26. The Timeless Children

The most urgent problem with this story is not the retcon, it’s that it’s simply boring television. The Doctor is passive, trapped in a prison of exposition, and billions of children on Gallifrey are slaughtered because the Master is furious that he’s descended from the Doctor (the former childhood friend whose life is intertwined with his own, indeed who is frequently defined against). This, for me, doesn’t extend logically from what we know of the characters or indeed the situation and turns Doctor Who into a grimdark slog. Not only is it lacklustre, it feels like someone has cyber-converted the show itself.

Sacha Dhawan (saddled with a Master characterisation usually reserved for when they’re clinging on to life in animalistic desperation) brings out the aggressive and violent side of the character to reflect his rage and genocide, is satisfyingly disparaging of the Lone Cyberman, and is working hard to liven things up. There’s not a lot for him to work with, though. This Master is not a dark mirror of the Doctor, he’s just here to do what the plot needs him to. Sometimes that’s what the Master is there for, to be fair, but usually in stories with much lower stakes.

You realise that the Master is only back because the story needed a big villain to destroy Gallifrey and tell the Doctor about the Timeless Child, and it couldn’t be the Cybermen (because of their other function in the series finale) or the Daleks (been there, done that). Based on the character’s interactions with the Time Lords (most obviously Rassilon in ‘The End of Time’ and the chaos he sows in ‘Trial of a Time Lord’, but Borusa was presumably the Master’s teacher too, and uses him in ‘The Five Doctors’), it’s not completely implausible that the Master would resent them, but the reasons shown thus far inadequately explain the character deliberately committing genocide. Whenever the Master’s been reset previously there’s usually been a clear and coherent motivation. In ‘Deadly Assassin’ he’s dying and furious, in ‘Logopolis’ his pettiness unravels him, and in ‘The Sound of Drums’ he wants to be like the Tenth Doctor. Here though, his motivation just poses more questions.

Things could improve. This story is incomplete and – like a Scottish football fan watching their team in Europe – hope lingers that it might be alright in the end.

25. The King’s Demons

After disguising himself reasonably well in ‘Castrovalva’ and ‘Time-Flight’, here the French Knight with the outrageous accent and surname ‘Estram’ is clearly the Master. His goal is to use a shape-shifting android to stop the Magna Carta being signed. The result is less exciting than it sounds. It’s an amiable enough low-key runaround with some good character moments for the regulars, but you’d be forgiven for thinking this was the plateau of the Master’s descent. Ainley, deprived of a Concorde crew to camp things up, gamely takes on that mantle himself.

24. The Trial of a Time Lord

As with ‘Mark of the Rani’, here we find the show using the Ainley incarnation more knowingly. Here he turns up in the thirteenth of fourteen episodes to interrupt the Doctor’s trial. This is something of a relief, because if there’s a consensus on ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ it’s that the trial scenes are interminable. Then the Master arrives on an Eighties screensaver and just turns the whole thing on its head, casually dropping huge revelations that take a minute to sink in. His presence has a galvanising effect, bringing to a head everything that had been stirring thus far in the story. His satisfaction with Gallifrey falling into chaos also ties in nicely to ‘The Five Doctors’ and his later actions in the Time War. The final episode, written in an extremely turbulent situation, doesn’t pay off this thread well (originally the Master was intended to help the Doctor in the Matrix) but that it makes sense at all is impressive given the chaos behind the scenes.

23. Spyfall

The reveal at the end of Part One, in which mild mannered agent O is revealed to be the Master, was exciting on broadcast. It came as a surprise because there’d been so little build up to it, and at the time it seemed extremely unlikely that the Master would come back so soon after their last appearance. In the end, the contrivance that reveals the Master’s presence is indicative of this episode’s larger flaws: as with ‘The Timeless Children’ the character motivations and plotting feel like they’ve been worked backwards from an endpoint. This is not an intrinsically bad way of writing if you have the time and ability to make it work, but here the episode breezes along in the hope you won’t notice the artifice (small things, like the car chase that doesn’t go anywhere, to larger ones like the Master reveal drawing attention to his ludicrously convoluted scheme that involves getting hired and fired by MI6). As it does breeze it isn’t dull, at least, but the promise of Doctor Who doing a spy film with added surprise Master really isn’t fulfilled here.

22. Colony in Space

Possibly the most boring interesting story ever, and one where the Master’s appearance doesn’t lift things. If anything, it implies the Master spends his spare time as a legal official (and to be fair to ‘Spyfall’, it does maintain this tradition of the Master sticking out a day job). Aware that the character’s appearance in every Season 8 story might become predictable, the production team decided he should arrive late in this story. This makes it feel like the Master has simply been added to pad out an underrunning six-parter (and there is a lot of lethargic padding here).

There are some interesting ideas, especially the tension between Doctor Who’s revolutionary side and its conservative one; on the radical side the story clearly sides with the colonists of Uxarieus in the face of the Interplanetary Mining Corporation’s attempts to remove them by force, with initially sympathetic governor Ashe shown to be naïve, while gradually the more active Winton exerts more authority and is proven right when he insists on armed rebellion rather than plodding through legal processes that would inevitably take the IMC’s side (the IMC’s leader, Captain Dent, is a timeless villain – calmly causing and exploiting human misery without qualms).

On the conservative side, this is a story based on British settlers in America and their relationship with the indigenous population. Here we have some British colonists under attack by British intergalactic mining corporations, and throughout everyone refers to the natives of Uxarieus as primitives. It is ultimately revealed that they were once an advanced civilisation, but the Doctor continues using the term. Indeed, he warns the Master that one is about to attack him, knowing the Master will shoot them. This latter example is absolutely in character, and we’ll see in other stories how the Doctor’s blindspot towards the Master is explored in greater detail (indeed, this story also has the Master offering to share his power and use it for good, another thread in a Malcolm Hulke script picked up on later).Considering how padded this story is, though, having no sense of empathy towards or exploration of the Uxarieans’ point of view is a glaring omission.

21. The Time Monster

In many ways ‘The Time Monster’ is crap, with its Very Large performances and a man in a cloth bird costume squawking and flapping gamely. In many ways ‘The Time Monster’ is good, there’s some funny dialogue, great ideas, and a fantastic scene with the Doctor and Master mocking each other in their TARDISes. In many ways ‘The Time Monster’ is hypnotically insane, and you can’t help but admire the way it earnestly presents itself as entirely reasonable; ‘The Time Monster’ straddles the ‘Objectively Crap/Such a hoot’ divide, and is in fact the Master in microcosm with its blend of nonsense, camp, and occasional brutality.

Delgado has now been firmly established as someone who usually lifts a story with his presence, the Master’s routine now a regular and expected part of the programme’s appeal. It’s cosy enough to somehow be endearing despite this clearly being crap on many levels. This is Doctor Who that is extremely comfortable in its own skin; on one hand this involves establishing that the Doctor’s subconscious mind being a source of discomfort for him, and on the other it involves five characters gathering round to laugh at Sergeant Benton’s penis.

20. Castrovalva

‘Castrovalva’ suffers from similar structural problems to ‘Logopolis’, in that the first two episodes are a preamble, and while there’s no lack of good ideas it does feel like the regulars have to go on a long walk to actually arrive in the story. This means we have a lot of good moments (‘Three sir’, ‘With my eyes, no, but in my philosophy’, and the Master being set upon by the Castrovalvans in a nightmarish frieze, as if he’s about to be pulled apart) but there’s little emotional pull as we haven’t spent time with the characters. The idea of people being created by the Master for an elaborate trap and then gaining free will is great, but we’ve only known them for about half an hour so the impact is lessened. The ponderings around ‘if’ in the first half could be better connected with the concepts in the second.

In contrast to the cerebral tone, Ainley is at his hammiest here. Sensing perhaps that the Master improvising an even more elaborate plan than his previous two is stretching credulity, and stuck with Adric and his little pneumatic lift (not a euphemism), Ainley goes big and ends up yelling ‘MY WEB’ while standing like he’s forgotten how to bowl overarm (extremely unlikely given Ainley’s fondness for cricket). He’s also started dressing up again, which is actually done well here but the knowledge of what’s to come makes this foreboding.

‘Castrovalva’ also connects with John Simm’s Master’s misogyny, in that when Nyssa tells him he’s being an idiot he can’t think of a reply so pushes her away, and that he creates a world where the women’s role is to do the cleaning (although that might be partly explained by Christopher Bidmead following ‘Logopolis’ with another world of bearded old science dudes).

19. The Mark of the Rani

In some ways a low point for the Master, but also a relatively good-natured story for Season 22. Here the Master is first seen dressed as a scarecrow, and chuckles at the brilliance of his disguise, as if the Doctor should really expect to find him hiding in a field caked in mud. His plan is to accelerate the industrial revolution so he can use a teched-up Earth as a powerbase.

It’s not that this Master lacks ambition, it’s just that his plans all feel like first drafts. He also plays second fiddle to the title character, with the Rani clearly put out that he’s there at all. Ainley, who regarded a few of his scripts as less than impressive, wasn’t happy at being demoted, but this works for the character. This pettiness is part of the Master now, and so ‘Mark of the Rani’ can be celebrated for finding a tone and a role that makes sense for him, something that invites the audience to indulge him rather than take him too seriously.

Doctor Who: Ranking Every Single Companion Departure

By Andrew Blair

Doctor Who: Ranking the Dalek Stories – Which is the Best?

By Andrew Blair

18. The Mind of Evil

The Master is cemented here as an entertaining nonsense. He has a multi-phase plan to start World War III which involves converting a peace conference delegate into the avatar of an alien parasite which has been installed in A Clockwork Orange–style machine in a prison, after which he will take over the planet. Delgado, as ever, plays this as if it’s perfectly straightforward. As with his debut story the Master bites off more than he can chew in his allegiances, and you get the impression he’s not totally serious about global domination and just wants to hang out with the Doctor. Pertwee is at his peak here, rude and abrasive, righteous and enjoyably sarcastic, but also put through the wringer by the Keller Machine (which the Master has apparently invented using the alien parasite).

For all the good work ‘The Mind of Evil’ does with the Doctor and the Master (the idea that the Master’s greatest fear is the Doctor laughing at him ultimately comes to define the character), and with this being a mostly well-made story, it does devolve into an action-orientated (I say ‘devolve’, your mileage may vary) story where the Keller machine is now lethal and capable of teleporting, combined with a Bond movie plot where UNIT find themselves transporting a missile and guarding a peace conference (far from their stated goal of dealing with the odd and unexplained).

There’s a satisfying clash between the horror of the Keller Machine and the sight of prison guards shooting and screaming at what looks like a Nespresso prototype sitting on the floor. This is a good tonal summary of ‘The Mind of Evil’ – a lot of grimness (horrible deaths and genuinely nasty characters) rubbing up against something enjoyably silly.

17. The End of Time

As with ‘The TV Movie’ here the Master get some new and largely inexplicable powers, suddenly craving food and flesh. What John Simm’s stories add is the idea that the Master was driven mad by the constant sound of drums. Here it is revealed that the Time Lords planted it in the eight-year-old Master’s head as a means of escaping the Time War. As with The Timeless Child reveal, this Chosen One storyline lessens the characters for some viewers, limiting the character’s free will and making them less interesting. Russell T. Davies is smarter than that here though.

What works well are the references to the Doctor and Master’s childhood, the brief suggestion that that Master would like to travel with the Doctor without the drumming, the Master and Doctor choosing to save each other and return the Time Lords to their war; the Master rejecting his appointed role of saviour, refusing to have his entire life disrupted. Including the Master here is a good move beyond hype, offering a warped reflection of the departing hero (the fact that the Master’s big plan is grounded in vanity is telling).

It’s a strange mix, because there are clearly great scenes in this story, but the dominant impression of the Master is now being able to fly, shoot lasers from his hands, and occasionally have his flesh go see-through. The latter feels like a call-back to his emaciated state in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ but lacks the physicality.

It feels not dissimilar to ‘Twice Upon a Time’, in that it contains parts of what made the showrunner’s work so good, as well as being a clear sign that it was time to move on.

16. Logopolis

Maybe it’s because I didn’t have the context of its original broadcast, that sense of a Titan of my childhood finally saying goodbye, but – besides a memory of finding the opening episode unnerving on VHS – I have no real sense of this story from a child’s point-of-view. As it is, I can appreciate the ideas in it – a planet of spoken maths that can influence reality (riffing on Clarke’s Third Law), the sense of the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration being inevitable, the scale of the threat involved and that it results from the Master’s attempts at petty revenge rather than a deliberate plan – but I can’t honestly say they’re woven into compelling drama.

I have few objections to silliness in Doctor Who, but I find it hard to get on board with something so ludicrous that thinks it’s incredibly serious.

There are the recursive TARDISes that stop because the Doctor has to go outside for the cliff-hanger, Tegan spending her first story as someone with a child-like fixation on planes, the exciting drama of Adric and the Monitor checking an Excel sheet for errors, and the stunning scene where the Doctor explains that the Master knew he was going to measure a police box by the Barnet bypass because ‘He’s a Time Lord: in many ways we have the same mind’ immediately followed by the Doctor’s idea to get the Master out of his TARDIS by materialising underwater and opening the door. This story thinks itself clever, but judders forward through a series of nonsensical contrivances before cramming the actual story into two episodes.

The first half is stylish nonsense, building up to the reveal of the Master chuckling to himself about ‘cutting the Doctor down to size’ – it’s then you realise that everything he did in the first two episodes was for the sake of a joke that only he can hear, and this pun kills several trillion people. To be fair, this is a brilliant idea, it’s just a shame about the slog to get to this point. The final confrontation is then less ‘Reichenbach Falls’ and more ‘Argument at a Maplin’.

The Master is well played by Antony Ainley in his full debut, and as a child his mocking laughter was genuinely unsettling. As reality unravels, so does he. If he’d killed trillions deliberately, and they knew of his power before dying, he’d be fine, but doing it by mistake without people knowing seems to break him. Mostly there’s the feeling of lost momentum with the character, going from a powerful symbol of evil that corrupted paradise to a man broken by his own banter.

As with Nyssa witnessing the death of her planet, there’s a lot of potential for character drama here that the show wasn’t interested in exploring at the time.

15. The TV Movie

As written, the Master here is a devious, manipulative creature who is willing to destroy an entire planet just to survive. This is extremely solid characterisation, matching what’s gone before. You can also hear Delgado delivering this dialogue (though I’m not sure how he’d respond to ‘you’re also a CGI snake who can shoot multi-purpose venom’).

The shorthand for this Master is Eric Roberts’ big performance in the finale, which does tend to blot out the rest of his acting. Full of smarm and charm, Roberts is mostly downplaying his lines as an American version of Delgado (indeed his costume for the ‘dress for the occasion’ scene was going to be like Delgado’s Nehru jacket), and his line delivery obscures the fact that the final confrontation scene is very well written up until Chang Lee’s death. It’s quite a good summary of the character so far: cunning, persuasive, visually monstrous, driven by survival, then ultimately camp and desperate.

While the Master and Doctor’s rebirths are very well shot, the movie would have worked better without regeneration so we could get more screentime with the new cast, and the final confrontation is the only time the Doctor and Master get to actually talk, which means we only get a broad brushstrokes version of their relationship. Nonetheless the ‘What do you know of last chances?’ ‘More than you’ exchange is fantastic.

14. The Claws of Axos

Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s debut script for the show is busy and full of nightmare-fuel for the viewer, with the Master (who wasn’t in earlier drafts) put into uneasy alliances with UNIT and the Doctor. Briefly he fulfils the role of UNIT’s Chief Scientific Advisor, which is inspired, showing through his interactions with the Brigadier how alike he and the Doctor are.

The first story in which the Master is just grifting and trying to survive rather than being halfway through a devious plan. ‘The Claws of Axos’ wisely tries something different with the Master in the midst of an enjoyably garish romp (Doctor Who will never have this colour palette ever again). There’s some effective body horror, tinges of psychedelia, and a hokey American accent.

It’s all over the place this one, but barrels along with glee and feels like the Pertwee era has relaxed into a lighter mood, albeit one where people are still electrocuted and turned into orange beansprout monsters.

13. Terror of the Autons

We are immediately told that the Master is dangerous, but also not to take him too seriously: one of the first things he does in Doctor Who is kidnap a circus in order to raid a museum.

And so the rest of the story proves: a darkly comic (and famously terrifying) blast which sets out the character of the Master for the rest of the Pertwee era: the delicate balance between the ridiculous and the vicious. Delgado isn’t quite there yet in this story, not fully realising the comic potential in the character and playing things straighter than he would later. One thing he lands immediately is acting as if the Master’s plans are perfectly sensible, bridging the gap between animating murderous chairs/phone cables and suffocating people with plastic daffodils, so that they die uncomprehendingly as they claw at their face.

Therein lies the appeal of Doctor Who, with one of its central tensions being between the mundane and the ridiculous, the cosy and the suffocating. This is exemplified here by a plastic doll coming to life and trying to kill everyone because Captain Yates wanted to make some cocoa.

12. The Dæmons

In which the Master is good-humoured and ostensibly pleasant while trying to summon a demonic alien being, accompanied by a moving stone gargoyle who can vaporise people. The show is well aware of the Master’s impact, to the extent that one of the cliff-hangers features him in danger rather than the Doctor or UNIT.

What his debut season has established is that the Master himself is mostly fun (indeed, often more fun than the Doctor), but the monsters that he brings with him are terrifying. This is true from his first story, in which he brings a barrage of nightmarish ideas to life. Bok, the aforementioned gargoyle in this story, absolutely terrified me as a child. Most of the accompanying monsters in the Pertwee era did, but by tapping into the paranormal and demonic this story has an extra frisson of fear.

I have nothing new to say about ‘The Dæmons’: it’s the first Doctor Who story to mine the works of Erich van Daniken and it does it well, the Doctor is a dick in it, the resolution with Jo’s self-sacrifice is weak, it’s an episode too long, but also it’s got Nick Courtney effortlessly winning every scene he’s in, which helps a lot.

11. The Five Doctors

This is a story that plays to Ainley’s strengths, and he delivers. No other Master is as good at looking pleased with themselves, so when the Master is having a mission pitched to him by the High Council of Time Lords Ainley’s face is priceless. He’s present, and enjoying himself immensely, disdainful of the upper echelons of the society he escaped.

Then, when he attempts to persuade the Doctors that he’s there to help, the fact they all immediately assume he’s trying to trick them makes him entertainingly frustrated. Terrance Dicks’ script plays to the former friendship between the two characters, and the Master feels more like his old self before the Brigadier dispatches him with a cathartic biff. His brief alliance with and inevitable betrayal of the Cybermen is something you can imagine Delgado delivering, while also highlighting the difference in the two incarnations. Delgado would say ‘Your loyal servant’ with confidence, and find the ‘driving sheep across minefields’ line drily amusing. Ainley feels venal and nasty in these scenes, more like a childhood bully trying not to get hit. That he ultimately does is a lovely pay-off.

10. The Sea Devils

A somewhat padded Pertwee six-parter? With much of the padding being fight scenes with lots of guns and stuntmen flipping everywhere? With the Doctor being rude to everyone? And a meddling Civil Servant, Jo being plucky and resourceful, and the Master allying himself with a group that betrays him? With Malcolm ‘Mac’ ‘Incredible’ Hulke subtly undermining the entire thing? It’s like coming back to your old local and finding nothing has changed while you understand it better than ever.

Trenchard, in charge of the Master’s prison, is a relic of Empire and friends with Captain Hart – the highest ranking Naval officer we meet – who is clearly sad when he is killed. this story may have been made with the co-operation of the Navy but Hulke implies an old boys’ club which the Doctor breezes into and disrupts (but he is no longer averse to the military’s involvement as he was in ‘The Silurians’- it’s not clear whether it’s his relationship with UNIT or the Master that has changed his mind here – is he now used to having military support or does he deem it necessary due to the Master’s presence?).

Hulke, being one of the better writers of character the show had at this point, draws out his characters extremely well and deepens the Doctor and Master’s relationship by mentioning their past in more detail (a lot of what Steven Moffat developed in Series 8 – 10 was inspired by Hulke). Delgado briefly departs from the cosiness of this story by snapping in rage at a guard he’s attacking, letting the affable façade drop just for a second to show the fury beneath it all. It’s a small moment, but it’s something that will be built on for many years to come.

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9. Frontier in Space

In some ways, this is just a ridiculously long pre-credits sequence for ‘Planet of the Daleks’, but there’s just something incredibly endearing about Doctor Who attempting a space opera, complete with hyperdrives and space walks. The genius move is giving it to Malcolm Hulke, who fleshes out his characters more than most and manages to use genre cliches to achieve this. There’s a great gag where the Doctor tries to convince the Earth authorities that a war with the Draconians is being engineered, only to be captured by the Draconians who put him through the exact same rigmarole.

This is also Roger Delgado’s final story before his tragic death, and he arrives delightfully, walking into Jo’s prison cell and saying ‘Let me take you away from all this’. He’s also, after ‘Colony in Space’, taken another day job, this time as a commissioner from Sirius IV. Hulke is clearly determined to explain what the character gets up to on his days off, and the repetition both underlines how static the character has been (especially in contrast to Jo Grant) but also functions as something of a last hurrah.

The dialogue is absolutely superb throughout, which is ideal because not a lot actually happens in this story. However it doesn’t really matter because Jo, the Doctor and the Master are so established that it’s great fun watching them all riff off each other, with Jo resisting the Master’s hypnotism and going on a weary semi-ironic monologue about her day-to-day life at UNIT, the Doctor having a whale of time with political prisoners, and the Master dropping bon mots left, right and centre. There’s a lot of great lines here, so I don’t really mind the repeated capture/escape/capture padding because everyone’s having such fun that it’s just a joy spending time with them.

8. The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar

Opening a series with a character piece semi-sequel to a 1975 story shouldn’t work this well, however there’s definitely a sense of offering up shiny things to distract us from setting up other stories. The ending also happens in something of a rush. Nonetheless, I’m a big fan.

This story is interesting in terms of how inward looking it is. All the components involved have been established since 2005 and are explained in-story, but it’s still a demand that can limit the audience. So while I like this story, it does rather confirm that ultimately, making Doctor Who that’s right up my street isn’t a valid long-term strategy. However, if you are going to do a story steeped in lore, this is a good way of doing it: using the past as a foundation rather than trying to recreate it. Here Steven Moffat builds a lot: the Twelfth Doctor’s character softens based on his past few stories, Missy and Davros return and their relationships with the Doctor are explored, the actual experience of being a Dalek is expanded on (Rob Shearman’s ‘Dalek’ novelisation goes further if you’re into that), and the Hybrid arc is set up.

Previously in a ‘Ranking the Dalek Stories’ article I mentioned how ‘Into the Dalek’ felt like a story needed to establish that series’ themes, and didn’t do enough to integrate this with a good Dalek story. Here, though, the themes are woven more subtly in the episodes and less so in their titles. They’re also more interesting ones than ‘Fellas, is it bad to hate genocidal cyborgs?’

In the swirl of character building we have Missy essentially being the Doctor, exploring Skaro with her companion. Clara takes this role and has a terrible time as a result. As with the Doctor’s conversation with Davros, this highlights uncomfortable similarities: yes, Clara is literally pushed into danger while Missy has a secret plan for her, but it’s not like the Doctor hasn’t done similar over the years.

7. Planet of Fire

Considering all the tasks it has to do (introduce a new companion, write out two existing companions, using Lanzarote for location filming, and provide a potential exit for Anthony Ainley’s Master), ‘Planet of Fire’ is ultimately rather impressive. It suffers from an uneventful first episode (roughly 80% setup and 20% dodgy American accents), but once the Master arrives it livens up considerably.

With the Master controlling Kamelion, a shape-shifting android, remotely Ainley gives different performances for the actual Master and the Kamelion-Master, the latter more controlled. He’s also having fun here (his little smile after Peri responds to ‘I am the Master’ with ‘So what?’ is great) The Kamelion-Master, in a black suit and shirt combo (which suits him better than his usual outfit), seems more pragmatic and violent. It actually works for Ainley’s Master to be less threatening than a robot version of himself. Bent on survival, this Master has a better motivation than usual and the writing is layered: when he realises he’s in trouble in the final episode he switches instantly to pleading for his life and futile rage as the Doctor stares, either unable or unwilling to help him. There are emotional beats like this throughout the story which makes it fit well with post-2005 Doctor Who.

The rest of ‘Planet of Fire’ – as with writer Peter Grimwade’s previous script ‘Mawdryn Undead’ – has a knack for character lacking in many Fifth Doctor stories. As well as being a strong outing for the Master he writes Turlough out well and introduces Peri as a flawed but brave companion who clearly had a lot of potential. These arcs all intersect with each other, as well as the religious fundamentalism story (watered down in development), producing clear emotional journeys and an underrated gem.

6. Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords

Delgado’s Master was very specifically an inversion of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor: both of them were geniuses, one was grumpy and rude and the other suave and funny. The rude one tended to save the Earth, the funny one tried to subjugate or destroy it. John Simm’s Master isn’t an inversion of David Tennant’s Doctor so much as a warped reflection – they’re both quick-talking, charismatic and alluring figures, but while this Doctor is dangerous because he doesn’t notice the power he has over people, this Master is dangerous because he absolutely does.

It’s worth noting on the character’s reintroduction that Russell T. Davies dispensed with the kind of low-key plan that is clearly doomed to failure from the start, and instead showed the full realisation of the Master getting what he wanted coupled with the most cartoonish version of the character we’d seen: Simm went bigger than Tennant, and as Ten is a dangerous enough figure already it made sense to exaggerate this. While some fans wanted another Delgado, we got someone building on Ainley and Roberts’ over-the-topness while still feeling in control of his plans.

The character’s return was also tremendously exciting on broadcast. The impact that ‘Utopia’ had especially was huge, and Derek Jacobi left fans wanting more after his brief appearance as the Master (Hey, Big Finish Twitter person: here’s your angle if you want to retweet this). After the endearingly dated urban thriller stylings of the middle episode, ‘Last of the Time Lords’ is a really bleak episode that doesn’t quite stick the landing: the idea behind the floating Doctor offering forgiveness rather than vengeance is good, although I’m not sure it’s realised as well as it could be, and there’s an extra fight scene that adds nothing and loses momentum. The Simm Master is kept at a distance from the Tenth Doctor too, mostly speaking through phone or radio. The aged and shrunken Doctor is a misstep in terms of limiting their interactions, though the phone call we do get includes some fun nods to slash fic.

5. Survival

Rona Munro writes Ace and people her age with more verisimilitude than the surrounding stories, and she brings that same level of characterisation to the Master. Here he’s struggling against the animalistic power of a planet and plotting to escape. Ainley commits to the savagery and relishes the opportunities to be nasty.

What’s especially well written here is that this is still clearly the Master of ‘Time-Flight’, ‘The King’s Demons’ and ‘The Mark of the Rani’ – yes, he’s desperately trying to survive here and that shows him as more threatening than usual, but what’s equally important is when he says ‘It nearly beat me. Such a simple brutal power’, and then immediately takes the Doctor back to the planet, now engulfed in flames, and tries to kill him. It has beaten him. He’s lost to it. He even refuses to escape (‘We can’t go, not this time’) and is ready to die. This is the last we’ll see of Ainley in the role on TV (his last performance in the role, from a mid-Nineties computer game, can be found on this story’s DVD extras), going out with the acknowledgement that this Master is a tragic figure, he’s out of silly plans and costumes, now all that he has left is the violence that was latent within him – previously seen in…

4. The Deadly Assassin

Writer Robert Holmes hadn’t written for the Master since the character’s first story, and since then the character’s sadism had been downplayed. Here, after the death of Roger Delgado, Holmes elected to dispense with Delgado’s calm and suave persona, with the Master now a Grim-Reaper-like figure, still hypnotic but now without any pretence of reason: a creature of pure spite. That moment of jarring rage from ‘The Sea Devils’? That’s on the surface now. This, combined with his design for life, makes his plan seem more vicious than usual: simply to survive he will set off a chain of events that will destroy Gallifrey and hundreds of other planets. We’ve gone from the warped friendship of Delgado and Pertwee’s characters to explicitly stated hatred here.

The story does feature Holmes�� main weakness, in that after the fantastic world building, dialogue and horror, it all ends rather swiftly with the Doctor physically dominating the villain. What we do get here, though, is an almost casual rewriting of the lore of the series in a gripping and atypical story (that some fans hated at the time), and the successful recasting of the Master. What’s more, the character can now be revisited as this nightmarish figure or as another more Delgado-like figure, his scope has widened. What no one was expecting, though, was bringing the Master back as an almost primal force.

3. The Keeper of Traken

I know what you’re thinking. Putting this story ahead of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ is madness. Well, that’s subjective opinions for you. I think it’s fair to say that ‘The Deadly Assassin’ is a more solidly realised production than ‘The Keeper of Traken’, but I prefer the ideas in the latter and so it’s slightly ahead for me (and the ideas are still well realised).

We’ve seen from his debut onwards that the Master arrives in a location or organisation and brings it under his influence (the village in ‘The Dæmons’, the Matrix in ‘The Deadly Assassin’), but here we see him corrupt an entire civilisation. What’s more, it’s a fairy tale of a place, reputedly somewhere ‘evil just shrivelled up and died’ (to which the Doctor adds enigmatically ‘Maybe that’s why I never went there’).

I’m not 100% behind the more mythic versions of the Master (such as Joe Lidster’s Big Finish play ‘Master’, which is a great piece of work in itself but not one I keep in my headcanon). This could be one of them, with the Master a being of such purest evil that he infects and destroys the fairy tale kingdom.

Instead Johnny Byrne’s story shows Traken with a fairy tale’s darkness and decay, begging the the question of how much of Traken’s fall is down to the Master and how much of it is due to their own complacency (Traken’s Consuls are old and bickering. The youngest is clearly an idiot. They seem distant from their people). It seems the Master’s arrival exacerbates the collapse rather than causes it. This level of power likely comes from the original script without the Master, the character fulfilling a role created for something new, but it still fits with the ‘Deadly Assassin’ version who plays long games motivated purely by survival and spite.

And he capitalises on a very human fear, that of Kassia not wanting her new husband Tremas to take over as the titular keeper so that she will barely see him again. The main weak point of this story is that Doctor Who was not in a position to really commit to the heart-breaking ideas in this story (technobabble yes, but not as much pathos as there should be), especially the Master’s abrupt takeover of Tremas’ body.

As a child I found the final possession scene underwhelming, but the bit where the Master takes control of the Doctor is chilling. You understood that something extremely serious was happening. Tom Baker, it must be said, is exceptional here, especially when he shames Tremas (who doesn’t seem too fussed by the possession of his new wife) into helping him.

This story has a rich setup with good motivations for drama, and balances this with a more mythic quality. This is a significant development for the character, to become an evil so pervasive it manifests as rapid societal decay. Fortunately if there are two things Doctor Who fans are good at dealing with, it’s symbolism in storytelling and change.

2. Dark Water / Death in Heaven

Missy is something of a patchwork creation by necessity. In some respects she’s an evolution of John Simm’s Master, a manic figure concocting season finale-scale schemes and building on the Tenth Doctor’s frustration that they aren’t friends. She also evokes Peter Pratt’s Master in terms of sadism, killing a fair few of the guest cast, including some unexpected ones (and for a while it looks like she’s killed Kate Lethbridge-Stewart). She’s also reminiscent of Delgado, not necessarily in Michelle Gomez’ performance but in the sense that she’s largely in control and is written and cast as an inversion of the Doctor (Capaldi is irascible, seemingly heartless and mostly contained, whereas Gomez buzzes with childlike energy and revels in cruelty). From here, Moffat starts building towards the ends of Series 9 and 10.

Two things separate Missy from other incarnations: firstly there’s Michelle Gomez, a unique performer who varies the size of her performance in interesting ways, and secondly there’s explicit vocalisation of past suggestions that the Master does what they do as a warped gesture of friendship. This makes the character suddenly and deliberately tragic and strangely relatable: we’ve all been in difficult relationships where we try to get someone else’s attention, but none of us have been driven to an unspecified insanity by virtue of a constant drumming sound implanted by the resurrected founder of our entire society. As an explanation for all of the Master’s behaviour it’s rather neat, while also trying something different with the season finale: the grand plan isn’t to conquer the world (as with ‘Logopolis’ a colossal death toll is a side effect).

It’s Moffat’s grimmest finale – atypically no happy ending here – but if it hadn’t worked then there wouldn’t have been such solid foundations for what followed.

1. World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls

Series 10 is arguably one long Master story, as Series 1 is one long Dalek story, which is not only true but also a handy excuse for not wanting to watch ‘The Lie of the Land’. Missy’s story is initially told around the edges of the episodes, and as a result these short scenes are to the point and occasionally clunky while laying foundations for the finale. Fortunately the finale is superb.

We are shown the relationship between the Doctor and the Master as a tragedy spanning millennia: ‘She’s the only person that I’ve ever met who’s even remotely like me’, and so the Doctor’s hope that the Master can be the friend he remembers trumps Bill’s fears. And Bill is shot. It harks right back to the Doctor remarking – after all the death and carnage in ‘Terror of the Autons’ – that’s he’s rather looking forward to their rivalry. The Doctor has a blind spot where the Master is concerned, and it kills people.

It’s impossible to say how well the John Simm reveal would have worked if his presence hadn’t already been announced, but nonetheless he does great work as both Razor and a Master who represents pretty much all other incarnations except Delgado (not unlike the War Doctor standing in for all the original run’s Doctors in ‘The Day of the Doctor’). Steven Moffat builds on the way Simm’s Master delights in pure nastiness but continues to be cruel when there’s no joy in it for him. His is a Master abandoned by his people and his friend, very much feeling it is him against the universe.

In contrast, Moffat had been re-establishing the sense of friendship present between Delgado and Pertwee’s characters with Missy and 12. Delgado’s planned final story was planned to reveal the Doctor and the Master as two aspects of the same person, with the Master ultimately dying in an explosion that saved the Doctor’s life (with it remaining ambiguous whether this was a deliberate sacrifice). It feels like Moffat took inspiration from this, with the resulting story of a broken friendship and the cost of restoring it: Bill’s conversion to a Cyberman, the Doctor’s words – for once – cutting through to the Master, who tries and fails to escape her past. Part of her would rather die than be friends with the Doctor (as Simm’s Master also did in Series 3).

It’s spoilt slightly by Simm commenting that this is their perfect ending, which feels like it’s obvious without being spelled out, but on the other hand he does have a point. If you were going to kill off the Master, it’s hard to see past this as their ideal conclusion.

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protectwoc · 5 years ago

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thots on little women (2019)

or, y’all are giving greta gerwig too much credit, part one

(Before y’all say anything, I know)

I have a lot of thoughts about the new Little Women movie.

I should probably start by saying that I loved the new movie. I thought most of the acting performances were good (Emma Watson’s accent notwithstanding), and it was a pretty faithful adaptation of the book; a lot of the quotes were lifted verbatim from the novel, and I often found myself mouthing along with the actors. I don’t usually like book-to-screen adaptation changes, but I actually didn’t mind most of the changes here. The two biggest things that were changed were the decision to start the story in the middle and jump back and forth, and the positioning Jo as the writer of Little Women who was forced to write in the “Jo marries Bhaer and gets a happy (married) ending” bit. I actually really liked both of those choices and thought they were good additions to the story, making this probably the only time I’ve ever liked any book-to-screen adaptation changes. Also, I am and have been since childhood an Amy March stan, and I liked that her character was more fleshed out and relatable to other viewers. I also think Florence Pugh did a superb acting job. Overall I liked it a lot, and I fully intend on rewatching it again.

I should also say that I read Little Women when I was very young, probably nine or ten, and I loved it, and it has been one of my favorite books since. Regardless of these facts, I never saw any of the live action versions, so the only version I have to compare the 2019 one with is the movie inside my head. With that said, as previously mentioned, I have a lot of thoughts.

Look, the movie was really good. I thought so, my family thought so, and clearly critics thought so too. But when I started reading the reviews after I had seen the movie, something about them kept rubbing me the wrong way. Something kept nagging at me, but it wasn’t until I read this particular review that I realized what it was: “here’s the thing about greta gerwig’s little women. it’s really not just about jo anymore...she showed the struggle and sacrifice and love that meg has. she gives beth one of the most beautiful story arcs ever. she lets beth exist in the movie and grow on us before her death.” But… she didn’t, I remember thinking. And that is the crux of my issue with the movie, or at least, the conversation around the movie. It feels like a lot of people are giving Gerwig credit for things she didn’t actually do, like fully fleshing out the non-Jo characters, or exploring Jo’s sexuality. And that is what I am going to discuss in this essay.

I imagine the Venn Diagram of people who read my first Descendants meta and people who will be interested in this is virtually nonexistent (probably just me, honestly) but just in case, this essay will be set up similarly to my last one. It will probably come in at least two parts, since I can already feel this getting away from me, and I will start with an unnecessarily long list of prefaces:

This meta is not, for the most part, about race. I do believe Greta Gerwig is a White Feminist™, which shows up in a lot of her work, up to and including this one. Obviously the racial diversity of Little Women is virtually nonexistent, but coming from a Greta Gerwig adaptation of Little Women, I’m not sure what y’all were expecting. Since I didn’t go into the movie anticipating any sort of racial diversity, I wasn’t disappointed, and for that reason I will be leaving racial dynamics and Gerwig’s fraught history with racial diversity out of this meta almost entirely.

As previously mentioned, I read Little Women when I was pretty young and loved it. I read it way before I knew anything about the internet or media discussion, so I formed my opinions on the story writ large independently of basically everyone else. With that said, it wasn’t until way later, like about 14 or 15, that I actually started reading online discourse about Little Women and discovered that my opinions ran contrary to just about everyone else’s.

For example, I have always loved Amy March. She was always my favorite character, her chapters of the book were always my favorite to reread, and I was ecstatic when she married Laurie and thought it made perfect sense.

Conversely, I have never been a huge fan of Jo. I know, in the book community that’s basically blasphemy, but whatever. This sense of apathy is probably due to the fact that Jo and I have virtually the same personality, and I get on my own nerves quite often, and also that even as a child I was never a huge fan of Jo’s “not like other girls” personality.

I am what some people would call hyper-romantic. Consequently, my favorite section of the book has always been the last half, with all of the romances and drama. I also didn’t have a huge problem with Jo’s marriage to Bhaer; I didn’t love it or anything, but given that I was never super attached to Jo’s character, I wasn’t super broken up when she married him, also partly because…

I never read Jo as queer. I know, I know, but as a bi woman, I never picked up on whatever subtext everybody else seemed to. I grew up around a lot of white women in the country, and they all acted exactly like Jo did, so maybe that’s why. Of course, it’s a perfectly valid interpretation/headcanon, I’m just telling y’all that I personally never saw it. With that said, I was excited to watch an interpretation where she was more explicitly queer, as all the reviews seemed to say she was, and boy, was I… disappointed.

To clarify, I’m not saying all of my opinions because I want to change anyone’s mind, or convince them that they’ve been reading the book wrong all these years. But I think it’s important to let y’all know where I’m coming from, since I’m sure it’s going to color the way that I view the movie, and the problems within it. In the same way, if my personal opinions about the book change the way you are going to read this essay, I suggest stopping now.

With all that said, I present: Thoughts on Little Women (2019). Also, spoilers, obviously.

Part One: The Sisters

A lot of the praise given to Gerwig’s Little Women centers around one thing: Jo’s sisters. Specifically, how the three sisters are given a much more prominent role in the storyline than in previous adaptations, almost to the level of Jo herself. Now, as previously mentioned, I have never seen another adaptation of Little Women, but I can speak for this adaptation and say that I feel supremely let down.

Let’s start with the obvious: Beth. The review that I cited claimed that Gerwig “gave Beth one of the most beautiful story arcs ever” and “let viewers get to know her so that you really feel her loss.” While of course this reviewer is entitled to their opinion on this movie; all media is up for interpretation, I can’t say that I agree with these statements, or even know where this interpretation came from.

Beth basically only has five major scenes in the film. Obviously she’s a part of many of the other girls’ scenes, but when I’m discussing her “major” scenes, I’m referring to ones where the main focus of the directing is on Beth and her feelings/behaviors. Anyone who read Little Women can tell you that the most memorable thing about Beth is her death. Unfortunately, in the movie, the scenes that deal with her sickness/death are more focused on Jo’s feelings than Beth’s. In the past, Jo mourns her hair with more concern than she shows for Beth, and in the present, the focus continues to be more on Jo’s emotions. Beth’s only actual major scenes are:

Beth is too nervous to talk to Mr. Laurence and hides behind Marmee

Beth is the only one of the March sisters to go visit and take care of the Hummels; she contracts scarlet fever

Beth overcomes her fear of Mr. Laurence and goes to play the piano in his house.

Mr. Laurence gifts Beth a beautiful grand piano; she goes to thank him.

Jo takes Beth to the beach where Beth confesses she is ready to die.

The problem with these scenes is that they tell us basically nothing about Beth’s characteristics. From those five scenes, we can glean that she is selfless, shy, until she isn’t anymore, and that she is a musician, which, contrary to what many musicians believe, is not a personality trait. In actuality, we cannot even concretely say that she is shy, since we only see this behavior through her interactions with Mr. Laurence. She seems to have no problem engaging with the Hummels, and it could just as well be that she is more nervous interacting with a rich older unmarried man, which would not be uncommon for a woman of her situation in her time period.

The only personality trait that differentiates Beth from her sisters is her selflessness, since all three of the other sisters have moments of selfishness that define their characters. But the only time this is ever contrasted with them is when she goes to visit the Hummels, (and then she contracts scarlet fever as a punishment?) One occurrence does not a personality trait make. We know virtually nothing about who Beth is. When viewers see Beth’s sickness and eventual death, they feel sympathy for Jo instead of mourning Beth’s character.

In fairness to Gerwig, much of this is the result of the source material instead of a directing choice. Beth was never given as much focus on Alcott’s Little Women as her sisters. For context, each of the sisters were given “chapters” that focused on their adventures and exploits. Meg has eight, Jo has fourteen, and Amy has ten. Beth has a grand total of five chapters actually centered around her point of view. So it seems obvious that in an adaptation of the source material, Beth would not have been given nearly as much precedence in the narrative.

BUT, and this is a huge but, we knew that Gerwig has no problem changing huge parts of the story she’s telling. This is not a bad thing; as I’ve already mentioned, I think it works to her advantage in many parts of this movie, namely the ending change. So it would not have been out of her scope of abilities or desires to change parts of the source material to flesh out Beth’s character in the same way she fleshed out Jo’s. The fact that she elected not to do that shows that she simply didn’t want to.

Again, this is not a bad thing. Even though it is always presented as a story of four sisters, it is no secret that Jo is the main character of both the book and basically every adaptation. It is no surprise that she is the most developed character because she is essentially the protagonist.

HOWEVER, with all of that knowledge, the thing that irks me about this movie is how the conversations around it has been giving Gerwig so much credit for how developed all of the sisters are when this just isn't true. As it turns out, it is untrue across the cases of all of the sisters.

The next most obvious is Meg. Meg’s case is arguably more egregious than Beth’s, because arc-wise, she is the one who lost the most in the book to screen adaptation. As before, let’s take a look at Meg’s major scenes:

Meg is invited to spend several weeks with her rich friends and she allows them to parade her around and turn her into someone she’s not (even if she wants to be.)

After Laurie sees her in at the party with her friends he judges her, then apologizes, and then they dance and he treats her like a lady.

When the sisters go with Laurie and company to the beach, John Brooke flirts with her, which she reciprocates.

Later on, John volunteers to go with Marmee to take care of Mr. March, and Meg kisses him on the cheek.

Before her wedding to John, Jo asks Meg to run away with her, and Meg responds that “Just because my dreams aren’t as big as yours doesn’t mean they aren’t important.”

Meg’s rich friend Sally convinces her to buy a length of expensive silk to have a dress made.

After purchasing the silk, we see Meg regretful outside her home, and she hugs her twin children.

Meg and John have a conversation about the silk, in which she tells him that she “is so tired of being poor.” When John looks hurt, she apologizes.

John comes to the March household to tell Meg that she should have her dress made. She tells him that she’s already sold it to Sally, and they make up.

Meg definitely has more focused scenes in this movie than Beth does, which makes sense, as she is clearly a more prominent character than Beth is. In the book, Meg has a total of eight focused chapters, to Beth’s five. However, proportionately, the ratio of Meg’s focused scenes to Beth’s is considerably less than the ratio of Meg’s focused chapter’s to Beth’s. This is because for whatever reason, many of the scenes that dealt heavily with Meg’s character, particularly in the second half of the book, were done away with in the movie. Meg’s lifelong dream in both the novel and the movie was to be a wife and mother, and she has an entire arc in the book that centers around that. In the movie, however, it was entirely cut out.

Look. I’m not here to pass judgements on the merits of Meg’s lifelong goal from a feminist perspective. Meg is allowed to have her dream just as Jo is. In the movie, Meg has a wonderful line right before her wedding, when Jo suggests that they run away together. “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t mean they’re less important.” This is a lovely, sentimental, and even feminist take on Meg’s hopes. Desiring to be mother to a man and mother to children is not necessarily a feminist dream, but she is entitled to it just the same. Following that same logic, if you are going to go out of your way to include a line about how Meg and Jo’s dreams are equally important, they should be treated so in the narrative. At the bare minimum, Meg’s arc should be on par with the source material, but it simply isn’t.

In the second half of Little Women, Meg has several focused chapters where she learns to manage a household, comes to terms with being the wife of a poor man, and how to balance having children with having a husband. She has several important discussions with Marmee and with John that are entirely cut from the movie, and we only see her children, Daisy and Demi, twice.

To reiterate, none of this is bad filmmaking, per se. If Greta Gerwig set out to make an adaptation of Little Women that is more focused on centering Jo as the protagonist than the novel, that is perfectly fine. The problem is that Gerwig seems to think she made a more balanced adaptation than the source material, and so does everybody else.

#raetalks #little women #little women (2019)#greta gerwig #meta #saorise ronan #timothee chalamet #emma watson #florence pugh #jo march #amy march #beth march #meg march #eliza scanlen

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letterboxd · 5 years ago

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Human Resources.

Kitty Green talks to our London correspondent Ella Kemp about “putting the audience in the shoes of the youngest woman in a toxic work environment” in her new film, The Assistant.

The long-undervalued job of a Hollywood assistant has come into stark relief thanks to recent events, and the stories that are being told of assistants’ experiences, working conditions and pay rates are jaw-dropping. (Episode 422 of the Scriptnotes podcast is well worth a listen.)

Filmmaker Kitty Green was well ahead of the conversation; her first narrative feature, The Assistant, quietly premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last August (and the Berlinale in February). Dubbed by many as ‘the first post-#MeToo movie’, it is a remarkable portrait of a young woman navigating just another day in the office. Except this is not just another office, and so many things are wrong about this day.

Starring Julia Garner (Grandma, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Electrick Children) as Jane, the assistant to the predatory head of a New York-based film studio, the story zooms in on the details of her routine—the tedious tasks, the belittlement from her colleagues, the oppression from her mostly faceless boss—with such laser-sharp vision that by the end we feel we know Jane deep in our bones.

Green has previously directed the documentary features Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013) and Casting JonBenét (2017), the latter a meta-documentary that also hones in on the neglect and exploitation of young women, albeit under a different light (it is now streaming on Netflix). While Green’s documentary experience bears fruit in her attention to detail, the narrative form of The Assistant allows for a focus on mundane tasks and micro-reactions that documentary might not have access to.

Various Letterboxd reviews mention the anxiety-inducing way The Assistant allows us to watch Jane “probe her place in the established, tacit system of complacency… knowing that everyone around her is motivated by self-interest to pretend it doesn’t exist” (Josh Lewis). “Green encourages her viewers to pay close attention to what’s really going on beneath the surface,” (KristineJean) in “a horror movie of soul-sickening ambience” (Scott Tobias).

Though The Assistant’s film festival run was cut short, and the closure of cinemas around the world hurts for a lot of us, there’s something about the claustrophobia of social distancing and the intimacy of the small screen that maybe suits this picture. Nevertheless, seeing the film in a cinema in ‘the before time’ highlighted for Alyssa Heflin the ocean of different opinions that can come from misunderstood subtext: “Watching this in a room where you can hear people snickering at the girl and asking what the point of all this is adds a certain extra… incendiary level to an already deeply angry viewing experience.” Indeed, discomfort and crossed wires seem to define the messages at the core of The Assistant.

Kitty Green talks to Ella Kemp about the influence of Chantal Akerman, the infinite watchability of Julia Garner, and the oddness of growing up with a Nazi-free edit of The Sound of Music.

Jane (Julia Garner) takes another call from the boss in ‘The Assistant’.

The Assistant is your first fiction feature. The subject matter feels so immediate—what made you choose to not make a documentary of this, given your track record in that realm? Kitty Green: I went to fiction film school, and I made fiction short films. I then found work in documentary, so I made two feature-length docs. With this one, I was looking at exploring the micro-aggressions, the tiny moments, gestures, looks, glances, behaviors that often go overlooked when covering the #MeToo movement. We often talk about the bad men and the misconduct, but this is more about a cultural, structural problem. So I was hoping to amplify the more quietly insidious behavior that we need to address if we really want things to improve. A fiction film allowed me to hone in on details—close up—and the way you can take an annoyance through the emotional experience, putting the audience in the shoes of the youngest woman in a toxic work environment.

How did you decide to keep the timeframe to just one day in Jane’s life rather than fleshing it out over a longer period? The lead character is in such a complicated position. It’s such a difficult set of circumstances, the machinery that this predator has created around himself. I wanted to untick that, to discuss how difficult it is to be a young woman in that environment. So the day, the routine, was really important. What she was experiencing, how she was experiencing it; every task she did I gave equal weight to. Whether she was photocopying, binding something suspicious, you experience it as you would if you were in her shoes. That was important to me.

I had my fists clenched the whole time, when she’d be eating cereal, or washing up mugs, waiting for something awful to happen. Totally. It’s exploring misconduct, but it’s also looking at a whole spectrum, from gendered work environments, toxic work environments, through all these environments that support predatory behavior. I was interested in what the entry points are, without conflating those issues and being able to explore all the cultural systemic things we need to unpick to move forward.

The film is so focused on Jane, played by Julia Garner. How did you choose her? The script is pretty bare when it describes who she is, she’s just Jane. I didn’t have anyone in mind, really. I told my casting agent that we’re watching this character do the most mundane tasks, so it was important that she was striking. I said I needed someone infinitely watchable. I had seen Julia in The Americans and I remembered being struck by her, so I immediately wanted to meet her. She really understood the script, it worked out beautifully. We got to create the character together, we had a month of rehearsals where we really went through where she was emotionally at any given point, and Julia is wonderful so it was great.

Matthew Macfadyen and Kitty Green discuss a scene in ‘The Assistant’. / Photo: Ty Johnson

And Matthew Macfadyen—his character feels so crucial and his performance so pivotal, even in just one scene. What were you looking for when casting him? I’ve been a fan of his for forever, but I hadn’t seen Succession. Apparently the character has some similarities? I’ve only watched Succession in the past week… Somebody had to send me a clip to prove he could do an American accent! Matthew really brought something to that character and took it to another level. It’s so insidious what he does. He and Julia worked so beautifully together, it just got better and better every time.

How did you feel watching Succession now and seeing Matthew as Tom Wambsgans? Tom still feels different somehow. But I’ve had a good time watching it, he’s so great. There are parallels for sure!

The language you use in the film is so careful, so much is in the subtext. How do you build tension from these empty spaces? We had a great visual team who were lighting it in an interesting way. There was a lot of oppressive fluorescent lights. The sound was also very important—we had an amazing sound designer, Leslie Schatz, who does a lot of Todd Haynes’ stuff and Gus Van Sant’s. He’d done Elephant, which I thought was phenomenally sound designed. He sent out a team to record every kind of buzz, hum, whir, and we created a lot of tension in that soundscape. It heightens these moments when you can really feel the hum of the fluorescent lights or the alarm of the copier. Things like that are authentic to the world, so it doesn’t feel like you’re manipulating an audience, but they do add a dramatic tension.

During The Assistant’s various film festival screenings so far, audience reactions have been quite varied. Some people find it uncomfortable, some have found it funny. What would you hope an audience member would take from it? Who found it funny…? That’s a strange reaction, and a little terrifying. I think it makes some men uncomfortable and maybe their reaction is to laugh as a way to hide that discomfort. I get a lot of men come up to me afterwards and say, “There are things in that film that maybe I have done.” Those conversations are really important. There’s a scene where the men lean over Jane’s chair and correct her email, little things like that which can be quite patronising even if a lot of men think are helpful. But there’s a point where they cross a line, where maybe it isn’t helpful anymore and it’s a little insulting. I’ve had a few people who are bosses with their own assistants who have watched the film and have said they’re going to treat them a little better, and that maybe they’re wrestling with their own guilt. I think those conversations are great.

Julia Garner prepares for a take on the set of ‘The Assistant’. / Photo: Ty Johnson

What is your favorite one-woman-show performance, where one female actor entirely carries the film? A big influence on The Assistant was Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It’s just one woman going about her housework. I remember seeing that in film school and being bowled over by it, I’d never seen anything like it.

Do you have a favorite scene that has ever taken place in an office environment? Offices… I mean, I love The Office? I watched it in preparation for this, even though there’s seemingly nothing in common except for the ways of the photocopier…

It’s important to inhale that kind of comedy while working on something more intense, right? For sure, that helps.

What is your favorite on-screen argument? I watched a lot of them to prepare for the HR scene, as it’s a confrontation between two characters. There’s a scene in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which is a seventeen-minute dialogue. It’s an incredible scene. It’s not an argument but still some sort of confrontation. I was interested in scenes like that which are really long and stand out from the rest of the movie. James Schamus, one of my producers, made a film called Indignation, which has a confrontation between two characters, which also influenced the structure of what I was doing. I also just watched the latest episode of Better Call Saul in which there’s a sixteen-minute confrontation, which I thought was pretty remarkable.

What was the first film that made you want to be a filmmaker? To be honest I’m not sure. I got a video camera when I was eleven, and I started playing with it in our backyard, making little movies. It wasn’t that I saw a film and tried to replicate it necessarily. But I do have a strange story…

I had a copy of The Sound of Music in which my father had edited out the Nazis, because he was worried I’d be scared of them as a kid. So I have this strange 40-minute version of the film that ends at the wedding scene… And I always thought that was The Sound of Music, and then in high school I figured out there’s this whole other storyline I never knew existed. I guess that taught me the power of editing! I had to go back and rewatch what I’d seen, and it definitely made me think of the craft more as a viewer.

‘The Assistant’ is available to watch on VOD platforms (including Hulu) as of late July.

#kitty green #the assistant #directed by women #female director #independent film #telluride film festival #virtual screening #virtual release #metoo #payuphollywood #hollywood assistant #timesup #juliagarner #matthewmacfadyen #patrickwilson #succession #bettercallsaul #chantel akerman #letterboxd

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arecomicsevengood · 5 years ago

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Movies Watched During Self-Isolation, Part One: Mostly Just Paul Schrader Stuff

I’ve been watching movies during this period of not leaving the house, which goes back a bit further than just when we are all told to stop leaving the house. The streaming services I have access to at the moment are just Kanopy and The Criterion Channel, so I have been watching different things than people who have Netflix or Hulu have been, most likely. These things are generally older, and possess a different set of aesthetic values than things seem to in our era of codified genres and niche marketing. Even the things I end up not being particularly into feel refreshing, in aggregate. There is a real sense of “they don’t make movies like this anymore!” which means, in a lot of ways, movies that seem keyed into being movies, that seem to understand the role of actors as charismatic, mysterious, or sexy, that then dictates the stories that get told. Let me break it down into some specifics, which will then function as recommendations.

The Comfort Of Strangers, 1990, dir. Paul Schrader. One thing I’ve been watching is a lot of Paul Schrader movies. This one comes from the era of the “erotic thriller” and was maybe marketed as such, but it feels like a post-Peter-Greenaway thing, maybe because of the presence of Helen Mirren. Mirren plays one half of weird and creepy older couple with Christopher Walken. Walken’s voice opens the movie with a disembodied narration that sets a tone of creepiness right from the jump, but the disembodied nature of it, heard as the camera roams through a residence, also recalls Last Year At Marienbad. The movie is largely about a younger couple, played by Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson, who are vacationing in Venice, and end up being stalked and sort of seduced by Walken and Mirren. The lens of sexuality is a huge part of this movie, but it’s this sort of mysterious force, like the gaze of the camera is itself a malevolent thing, because whoever’s behind it can be an uncaring pervert. Movies’ particular relationship to sex, and sex’s example of a compulsive behavior with capability of destruction, feels like it plays a large role in a bunch of the Paul Schrader movies I watched. I often chose to watch them because of this, their understanding of compulsion made them compulsively watchable, which I appreciated when I felt distracted or inattentive.

In The Cut, 2003, dir. Jane Campion. This has a similar thing going for it. In many of the film’s earliest shots, the camera follows the lead (Meg Ryan) from a distance, with bodies we don’t see the entirety of in the foreground, giving the impression she’s being stalked or in imminent danger, although mostly she isn’t. She plays a writing teacher who lives in an apartment where the head of a murder victim is found in the garden. Mark Ruffalo plays a detective investigating, they end up fucking, even as she becomes paranoid about all the men around her, especially after her sister (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) is also killed. The interest in this lies in the fact that it’s directed by a woman and has both an oppositional relationship to the male gaze and an interest in depicting female desire. It feels pretty sordid and a little rushed at the end. However, the ending seems rushed because the person that ends up being the killer is a person Meg Ryan’s character had no romantic or sexual interest in, and so largely ignored or didn’t think about. It’s not a bad movie but to whatever extent a movie stands on the strength of how interesting its actors are, this one doesn’t deliver. There’s a cameo by Patrice O’Neal though, as like the gay doorman at a stripclub Jennifer Jason Leigh lives above? If I understood correctly.

Patty Hearst, 1988, dir. Paul Schrader. This one’s really interesting, and I’ve kept thinking about it for a number of reasons. One is the interest of the Patty Hearst story itself, which I guess I hadn’t heard the entirety of or thought much about. For one thing, I don’t think I really understood the concept that she was brainwashed or had stockholm syndrome? Which is one of the things that makes the movie good, or what makes Natasha Richardson, playing Patty Hearst, so amazing to watch: She’s really compelling playing someone who has no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing at any given moment, because when you’re brainwashed, you don’t know you’re brainwashed, which is both perfectly obvious to me thinking about now, but that I also need to remind myself of when I think about MSNBC viewers positive feelings towards Joe Biden, for instance. The movie begins with her sudden kidnapping. There are shots that show her, in flashbacks to her life before that point, in a blindfold, that I wasn’t too into when I thought they were going to be sort of the entirety of the movie, but is I guess just intended as a visual metaphor for this sort of trauma as a deconditioning thing that removes whatever sense of a historical self she would’ve previously had. I also didn’t realize the Symbionese Liberation Army was basically just a sex cult with very few members, that robbed banks essentially just to fund themselves. Ving Rhames plays the leader of a group otherwise made up of a bunch of neurotic and ineffective white people. A lot of stuff happens, it’s all pretty interesting, and it doesn’t feel anything like a biopic, it always feels like a story is being told, but it’s always destabilized, and always heading towards doom. After arrest, Patty Hearst’s lawyer makes the argument that, even though she’s clearly brainwashed and undergone great trauma, and that is why she joined in bank robberies and the spouting of revolutionary rhetoric, it will be impossible for her to get a fair trial making that argument as so many parents felt their children went away to college in the 1960s and came back brainwashed as different people, though they did it of their own free will.

Hardcore, 1979, dir. Paul Schrader. This one’s about George C. Scott as midwesterner whose daughter gets kidnapped on a Church trip to California and ends up in porno. I guess has some parallels with Patty Hearst in terms of preying on parental fears, but also has this sort of sordid exploitation-y vibe in its basic summary. Peter Boyle plays a private detective whose debauched nature really bothers George C. Scott, whose beliefs the film takes pretty seriously. The end of the movie revelation that the daughter basically did run away and hates her dad sort of comes from nowhere, but the daughter is largely absent from the entire movie, and the disconnect between her and her father plays out so much from the father’s perspective it’s not really unearned. It also makes sense considered in the context of Patty Hearst, which is both a deepr work, but also a historical one, sort of about the creation of the moment and cultural context in which Hardcore would’ve been made and received. I wish Schrader’s first movie, Blue Collar, was available on a service I had access to.

Auto Focus, 2002, dir. Paul Schrader. This was the first Paul Schrader movie I was aware of, it was sort of critically-acclaimed. I avoided it because it seemed somewhat exploitative and grossly voyeuristic, being about Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane, here played by Greg Kinnear, and his interest in filming himself having sex with random women lured in by his celebrity. The film is characterized by a certain glib irony, but it’s also defined by the presence of Willem Dafoe, who’s great in it, as a completely loathsome person, taking advantage of Bob Crane’s celebrity to participate in the sex he otherwise would not have access to, and hastening his downfall by transforming him into a totally debauched sex addict, before finally killing him. The contrast between Bob Crane’s wholesome exterior and his descent into depravity is mirrored by a contrast between the the sort of jokey mockery of that contrast and a lived-in sense of squalor in the depiction of two men in a basement jerking off as they watch porn together.

Light Sleeper, 1992, Paul Schrader. Dafoe stars in this one, alongside Susan Sarandon, much hated by some for her adamant refusal to support Hillary Cilnton. This makes Sarandon admirable to me, but I don’t know how much I’ve seen her in. She’s in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, also on the Criterion Channel, a movie I thought was great when I saw it but have forgotten almost everything about in the years since. Dafoe plays a mid-level drug dealer, who’s been off drugs for a few years, and Sarandon is his higher-level contact, who’s looking to get out of selling entirely and enter the cosmetics business. Dana Delaney plays Dafoe’s ex-wife, from his addict days, back in town because her mother is dying in the hospital. The compulsion towards sex that’s present in a bunch of other Schrader movies is replaced here with drug addiction as this force to fight against, or exist in tension with, and also love, which is very present in this movie and very tender. The movie also boasts early-career cameos by Sam Rockwell and David Spade, and the great Jane Adams plays Dana Delaney’s sister. Delaney’s character ends up relapsing and dying, probably due to the shock of her mother’s death, probably not helped by the unplanned reminder of DaFoe’s character. It seems very rare for a movie to have roles as strong for women as this movie does. Even the psychic who Dafoe sees in two scenes, played by Mary Beth Hurt, who I don’t know from anything else, is great.

La Truite, 1982, dir. Joseph Losey. A friend of mine highly recommended Joseph Losey’s film Mr. Klein, but that one’s hard to track down. This stars a young Isabelle Huppert as a young woman who gets flown out to Japan by a rich businessman. He doesn’t have sex with her, just sort of enjoys the money being lavished on her, but her husband, who she also does not seem to have sex with, gets pretty pissed about it.

Eva, 1962, dir. Joseph Losey. This is a really similar movie from Joseph Losey in a lot of ways. It stars Jeanne Moreau, who also has a smaller part in La Truite, and it’s also about a woman whose whole deal is getting money from rich dudes and not having sex with them. In La Truite, Huppert’s life gets kind of ruined, in this movie, Moreau does the ruining, of an author/hack who is married to an actress from one of his work’s movie adaptations who doesn’t know what the he confesses to Moreau, which is that he stole the book from his dead brother and didn’t write a word of it. I wasn’t that into either of these movies but I feel like the sort of archetype, of like a young beautiful woman who doesn’t want sex and sort of just busts men’s balls “works” in a film, how film’s objective or ambivalent view makes their motivations opaque in a way that allows them to be compelling to male and female audiences alike, if for different reasons. Vera Chytilova’s Daisies plays on this sort of youthful feminine brattiness too, to a more anarchic effect. None of these characters have as much depth as Patty Hearst or any of the women in Light Sleeper but they nonetheless suggest the possession of such, kept far away from the camera’s eye.

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secretcinema3 · 7 years ago

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Ten Thoughts Inspired By: A Bout de Souffle

1. Before I ever saw the film I saw this poster. As soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I had to see the film. It radiated cool energy. And that title. At once a declaration of the film’s style and the viewer’s response to it. A promise and a boast. Stylish. Sexy. Breathless. But its original title, A Bout de Souffle, translates as Out Of Breath. That’s a B-movie title, slang for death, like Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Consider if they’d used that as the English title instead. Would the film have attained such a cool reputation? Just imagine it on the poster. Stylish. Sexy. Out Of Breath. Suddenly it’s not so much an intimation of awed wonder as middle-aged decline. My younger self probably wouldn’t have been so impressed, but so what? Does it matter? A title’s just a title, after all, a way of identifying one film from another. Sure, mostly, but it’s not always that simple. Consider these titles for example: Stranger Than Paradise. Some Like It Hot. White Heat. Touch of Evil. Now each of these could, at a push, describe what happens in their respective films, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on when we read them. They’re not merely labels, they’re suggestive, free-floating, haikus of compressed mood. Yes, a good title can define a film, capture its essence, but it can also add to it, deepen it, complicate it. It’s a chemical reaction. Just think of the mysterious, symbiotic relationship we have with names and they have with us. Do they shape us, do we grow into them? If you don’t believe this then consider these possible alternative titles for the films above; Losers. TransAmerica. Mother Love. The Mexican. Does it make a difference? It’s hard to say, but this much is clear, the anonymous translator tasked with finding an English version for A Bout de Souffle clearly thought so.

2. The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. – Francois Truffaut

The famous dedication is to Monogram Pictures. Monogram were a poverty row studio specialising in cheap genre flicks, serials and westerns. So what was the attraction for serious French cinephiles like Truffaut and Godard? Well, for starters, because they were largely ignored they were an undiscovered continent, ripe for reappraisal. They often relied on genre conventions, offering rich ground for theorising, for detecting encoded meanings, hidden ideas, themes build up across a body of work. Also because they had less to lose they could show the seemier side of existence more freely than bigger studio productions, the kind of exploitation subjects considered beneath proper art. Some French critics saw passed all that bourgeois respectability, understood that the life of a petty thief could be as worthy of great art as the noblest king, that an absence of craft or style might represent a film’s psychological meaning, its hard indifference to the lies of romance. They understood serious artists could exist outside the mainstream, might find the fertile confines of genre more to their liking, might prefer playful indifference to highbrow pretension. But even the worst of these films taught them about innocent enjoyment, the pleasure of transformation, how much easier it was to bring the moves, clothes and dialogue into your life when they were ritualised, repeated, how cliches spoke to the yearnings inside ordinary people. By dedicating his film to Monogram Godard was sticking two fingers up at the industry, rejecting its middlebrow concerns with craft and rules, aligning himself with the outsiders, the dreamers, with those great American values of outrage, adventure and play. This is a game, he’s telling us. We’re playing here. So can you.

3. The famous opening line is: I’m an asshole, a provocation from the start, followed by a close up of a scantily clad girl on the front of a newspaper, lowered to reveal our hero, Michel, hat over his eyes, puffing on an enormous cigarette. He’s cool, but posing too, a kid playing dress-up. Then he runs the side of his thumb across his lips. It’s a signal. To us. Thumb across lips. That’s all it takes. Your Bogie. Your life is a movie. It’s hard to appreciate now the impact of this message. A Bout de Souffle was one of the first films to acknowledge people’s desire for movie grace in their lives, wanting their everyday existence transfigured by it, blessed with purpose and shape, ordinary personas imbued with unified glamour. You don’t need to be famous, a star. The magic isn’t out there somewhere, owned by producers, studios, agents, fans. It’s in you now, once you’ve seen the film, it’s yours, a gift, not a privilege. This is what cinema is, the democratisation of play. It’s an evolutionary tool, teaching poor regional kids moves and gestures to help them escape impoverished lives, to face the twin terrors of adolescence and neighbourhood streets. After all, when you live in a non-verbal environment knowing how to stand on corners with cool indifference is a vital art. This is another thing the film is already telling us. The street is a movie set too.

4. We first see Patricia ambling down the Champ-Elysees in her flat shoes, sweetly calling ‘New York Herald Tribune!‘ She’s played by Jean Seberg, proof that nationality is a notional concept at best. She’s supposed to be the American chick but comes across, in her clothes, her manner, her cropped hair, as ineffably French. It’s hard to imagine any other contemporary American actress playing the part, actually American but spiritually in tune with the Frenchness of the whole enterprise. (The film too is at once American in its conventions and French in its style and ideas.) It was that way from the start. Her screen debut was as Saint Joan (1957), hand-picked from 18,000 hopefuls by Otto Preminger. It was Preminger again who brought her to France the following year to play the spoiled Celine in Bonjour Tristesse. The same year she married film director Francois Moreuil. By the time of A Bout de Souffle they were divorced and she’d taken up with French author Romain Gary, marrying him in 1962. Was it fate or inclination that drew her to the French and them to her? Or was it the hair? The gamine prettiness? Whatever it was, it went on, until her tragic, mysterious death in 1979, found dead in her car on the same Parisienne streets she’d watched Belmondo play dead on all those years before, back when they were all young enough to think of death as a romantic game, something to be bargained with.

5. Leaving Patricia behind Michel passes a poster for a film called Ten Seconds To Hell (1959), its tagline proclaiming ‘Live dangerously till the end!’ It’s a lovely moment, not just for the renegade cheek of using the poster without permission, but for the serendipity of it being there in the first place, articulating the film’s key theme – defying death. (You know you’re in the zone when the world starts to speak to you like this, send you secret messages, when you see connections everywhere, when you start to believe there’s no such thing as a coincidence, that luck, in fact, is just fate in disguise).

6. Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. – Ernest Hemingway, ‘Death in the Afternoon’

‘It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained,’ Hegel wrote, somehow defining the essence of A Bout de Souffle over a century before it was made. The spirit of the film may be its exhilarating sense of freedom, it’s jazzy liberation from social, artistic and cinematic conventions, but it’s also obsessed with death, from its title to its conclusion. Or rather, with invoking it in order to feel more alive. If the taking of life could, as Hemingway suggests, ward off your own death, than so could acting it out. In this sense, the film is as ritualistic as a bullfight, a bloodless rebellion against death. Just as ancient Greek rites evolved into formalised drama, the death of a tragic hero offered to the gods rather than the sacrifice of a goat, so too with cinema. It may be a game, Godard suggests, but it isn’t frivolous. It’s as serious as any religion, as vital to our happiness as freedom itself. It was a message that hit the new decade like a Molotov cocktail, starting a creative blaze that lasted twenty years and engulfed the old Hollywood studio system in its wake.

7. ‘What is your greatest ambition?’ Patricia asks the novelist (played by director Jean-Pierre Melville) at the kind of pretentious press conference only the French would have. ‘To become immortal‘, he replies, looking straight into the camera, ‘and then to die‘. It’s a joke, a contradiction. He might as well have said his ambition was ‘to wake and then to dream’. It’s an impossibility, mutually exclusive states, waking/dreaming, immortality/death. Except, of course, there is one place where the impossible can happen. When we watch a film, especially in the dark of a cinema, what else are we doing but dreaming while still awake? And when we watch the great stars of the silver screen like James Cagney, Bette Davis or Steve McQueen, what else are we doing but watching the dead walk again, forever alive in their films, made immortal by them?

8. Which is what Bogart represents in the film, not just a role model but an icon of immortality. Dead only three years when A Bout de Souffle was made, already he’s becoming a cult, his moves, clothes and dialogue remembered, repeated and fetishised. But why Bogie? What was it about him that so obsessed the French? Maybe he was, in some way, more French than other Hollywood stars, more ironic, fatalistic, ugly? Maybe the characters he played, men with secrets, with shadowy pasts, were more in keeping with a nation haunted by defeat, collaboration and existential dread? Whatever it was it went deep, just think of the hats and coats in Melville’s own films like Le Samourai.

Of course, the Bogart of The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The Big Sleep was also the coolest man on the planet, a dream of tough grace under pressure. He crystallised the essence of cool long before Brando and Dean turned up, a man’s cool, not a grumpy adolescent’s, someone who’s lived, seen things, been betrayed by events, by his own heart, hides his honour like a dirty secret. But we know it’s there, we know he does care, does know which side is right, he just won’t be played for a sap any more. Being a man, he seems to say, is a moral act. If you don’t know how to read people, if you don’t know when to keep quiet, if you don’t understand that sometimes cynicism is just the truth no one wants to hear, then you deserve what you get, you leave yourself wide open, cannon fodder for con men, Nazis and certain kinds of women.

9. Then there’s the lovely extended scene in Patricia’s apartment. She arrives home to find Michel in her bed. What follows is spontaneity, calculation and natural light, cultural allusions everywhere. She poses before a poster of Renoir’s Mlle Irene Cahen d’Anvers and asks who’s the prettier. He caresses her bum and asks can he piss in her sink. She washes her feet and tell him she’s pregnant. He sits beneath a Picasso figure wearing a mask. She quotes from The Wild Palms by William Faulkner: ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’ Michel says he’d choose nothing. ‘Grief‘, he adds, ‘is a compromise‘. They talk, flirt, test each other and eventually make love, fumbling under the covers like kids, not sure what their parents really do under there. The claim that capturing Seberg’s beauty on film matches Renoir’s achievement on canvass is hardly worth noting now. But it’s a reminder of a time before the triumph of popular culture when film was considered an upstart medium, devoid of true craft, a nickelodeon distraction for immigrant hordes and over-excited housewives, not something to be taken seriously as high art. This was the fight Godard, Truffaut and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics were waging in the late 50s, rescuing great artists like Hitchcock and Hawks from the neglect this pompous snobbery had consigned them to.

And what about Michel’s claim that grief is a compromise? Is it an existential statement, like Beckett’s ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness‘, or is he just trying to sound cool. Is he suggesting that emotions are a refuge, a refusal to accept the truth? It’s an interesting idea in an age when personal grief has become everyday currency. Would Bogie give in to grief, cry and wail, take to his bed, sell his story to the tabloids? No, he wouldn’t. He’d take it inside him, order a drink, light a cigarette, another lesson learned, another test passed. The cigarette is vital of course. Just consider how important they were in all this. Michel smokes non-stop throughout the film. Even his dying breath is a puff of smoke. Can you imagine a time when smoking was this cool? When things weren’t ghosted by consequences, by health warnings, when people drank at work and smoked in cinemas, weren’t constantly fretting about their health, short-changing their youth for a few extra years at the end? When looking cool now was more important than being alive then? It’s all about how you look, y’see, masks, uniforms, encoded signs, the transformative power of objects and faces. ‘The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible,’ as Oscar Wilde rightly pointed out. Open your eyes (and dream). We’re being movie stars here. They’re immortal. They never die of cancer or liver failure.

10. ‘The film of tomorrow will be an act of love...’ – Truffaut

Above all it’s a film about love, love of cinema, love of life through cinema. There really was no difference to these young men. Cinema was life. Watching a beautiful woman and capturing her on film was the same thing to them. It was very chauvinistic, of course, but very romantic too (essentially the same thing). Romance has no time for feminist aspirations. It wants to be taken out of this crappy world, wants to idealise, heighten, improve. It’s foolish, a youthful folly, but where would we be without it? For a few brief years, as the world woke up from it’s post-war slumber, a handful of young men believed that cinema was the new language of happiness and truth. A Bout de Souffle bottled that moment. It’s a time machine. The spirit and energy of that moment can be revisited every time you watch it. You could even say it’s immortal. Or to put it another way: Devil in the Flesh. Rififi. And God Created Woman. Scarface. A Bout de Souffle. The best film around.

#A Bout De Souffle #breathless #jean-luc godard #1960s #essays #10 thoughts inspired by #Nouvelle Vague

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leadgeneration54-blog · 6 years ago

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10 Efficient Lead Generation Tactics You Should Implement

learn how to make 6 figures fast

It is a well known fact that without clients there is no business, but every day it becomes more difficult to obtain and retain them. Why? Customers are changing their consumption habits and are no longer easily influenced by traditional lead generation techniques.

learn how to make 6 figures fast However, many businesses are still obsessed with the old tactics and blindly trust them although they find it difficult to measure their effectiveness, but since they are actions that they can see and touch, they continue to apply them. On the other hand, there are businesses that are applying improved and efficient lead generation tactics which are gaining the maximum advantage of the internet, to achieve incredible results, reinventing the rules of the game. Like many marketers, you may be wondering, which of the most possible lead generation strategies is most effective. But marketing is constantly evolving, which means that new tactics are constantly emerging. Trends are continually changing, which is also true for buyer behavior. By regularly keeping you up-to-date on the latest innovations and technologies, you can optimize your sales tunnel to generate more leads. However, beware: Many marketing professionals spend a great deal of time and resources developing tactics that ultimately turn out to be inappropriate. It is therefore important to bet from the start on a winning strategy, that is to say adapted to your target audience and which will help you to aim higher and higher! Here are efficient lead generation tactics to help you

1. Establish the profile of your target audience User behavior is evolving at the same rate as technological innovations. That's why it's best to study your target audience and create effective personas to learn how to better exploit the weak points as the strengths of your potential buyers.

About these, ask yourself:

• What are their goals? • What issues are they facing? • What are they willing to invest to solve them? • What are their needs in terms of quality and quantity? The secret of a successful lead generation strategy? Do not just answer these questions once and for all. On the contrary, ask them regularly: you will see that the answers will evolve over time and that the time may have come to offer innovative products or special promotions to your customers forever.

2. Blogging While some argue that blogs do not add value but that is not true. It is safe to say that a company and / or organization that does not have a blog, is certainly dead. When you use the blog appropriately and combine it with a social media and SEO strategy, each blog post becomes a perpetual asset generating traffic and leads.

But the most important thing is that the blog allows you to position yourself as the experts in your business. When a potential client starts to explore an inbound path, your blog will provide the answers to their questions and give them the context to address it better.

3. Build a social community With Facebook having billions of registered users, it would be absurd not to take advantage of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Simply having a presence on these sites and interaction with followers can have a very positive impact on the business. However building a community, does not mean just to win fans, it is something much further; called "engagement", that is, people share and comment, in other words, participate. Definitely, building a healthy community of enthusiastic consumers and fans of your brand does not happen overnight. This requires a serious strategy that is created more than anything by listening to customers, rather than imposing things. Here are 4 tips to motivate your community to share positive experiences on social networks:

• Listen carefully to what they talk about your brand. • Find that shared passion and build a dialogue around. • Create content that leads to an experience that keeps them engaged, participate and make them come back for more. • Build trust: Address issues and controversies openly and transparently.

4. Use Influencer An influencer is a person who has the ability to influence their community.

But, why use them?

• They can help you get your message with greater credibility. • Use it with a link between your brand and the community. • Generate a much richer brand experience. • Promote more credible recommendations. Using this technique is recommended especially for launching products or services, launching a brand, promoting a product or service, and events. There are even technological platforms like Fluvip , which automate the process of connecting brands with the most relevant influencers in the world in multiple channels.

5. Video Content According to eMarketer, the average time spent watching digital videos increased from 6 minutes in 2010 to 55 minutes in 2014 in the United States, revealing a growing preference of consumers for content in video format. This is because the video offers the opportunity to create moments that entertain and educate, increasing its authenticity for the viewer. In fact, a report by Unruly found that enjoying a video increases the purchase intention by 97% and the association with the brand by 139% .

The king of content is YouTube. If your plan is to incorporate video content marketing into your lead generation tactics, it is important that you make sure that you are following the following guidelines to achieve optimal success:

• Identify the objectives Whatever you want to achieve from your videos, take the time to define the objectives. It is only through defining the objectives that you can accurately measure if your content marketing strategy in video format has been successful. It is necessary to determine how you will know if you have really succeeded. For example, are you going to define success by the number of times the video is viewed? Or, are you going to measure success based on the number of actions the video receives?

• Define the relevant audience To make sure the video is successful; develop the marketing strategy thinking about the audience you want to call attention to.

• Includes "Calls to action" There are lots of videos with many views, but they fail to produce the desired results because they do not include a call to action. Think about what people want to do when they finish watching the video. In order to achieve the greatest impact, a call to action must be included in both a visual and audible form.

• Distribute the video intelligently Promote your videos through multiple channels, and make sure your videos are optimized for mobile viewing, as more and more users now watch videos from their mobile devices. Video consumption in the coming years will represent 69% of Internet traffic. If this opportunity is used to provide consumers with more information without being invasive, it has an enormous possibility to engage.

6. Join SMS and emails in your campaigns What is emailing for? Not only to keep in touch with your audience, but also to build a relationship with your leads. And while it is true that not all users frequently check their emails but all users read their SMS. Indeed, 95% of messages sent by SMS are read less than three minutes after being sent. Feel free to use this channel for your campaigns.

7. Expand your marketing campaigns For your marketing campaigns, test different strategies. Unify and develop your tactics through different lead generation channels. However, even if you take multiple ways to make yourself heard, remember: • to affirm the unique personality of your brand; • Make consistent choices, consistent with your brand philosophy. In other words, multiply the ways to make yourself known, but while providing a consistent picture of your business ... It is essential to build the trust of your audience!

8. Create quality content Today, on the internet, everything is history of contents. Try to be consistent in your publications. Not only will you gain credibility as an expert, but your rank will grow in the search engines and you will gain more credibility. Be careful though: do not create content just to create content. Strive to provide valuable texts to your target audience. By publishing valuable content that informs, educates and entertain, you will gain the loyalty of your leads. But it will be easier to convert once you have gained their trust.

9. Refine your SEO strategy How, your website is not yet in the first pages of Google? Only 10% of users go beyond the very first pages of results during an online search, hence the importance for your site to access the first ranks.

Today, SEO is both a matter of relevance and authority. To climb the ladder, increasing your traffic will not be enough. You will also need to tell more about your company and products to assert your authority in your field.

10. Think mobile first Nowadays, mobile devices are always faster and more efficient. That's why Smartphone and tablets have become the PCs of most users. It is high time that you adapt to this new state of affairs, by launching a version of your site for mobile. If it's already done, make sure:

• your pages have a suitable design • they promote immediate action by the user. • Participate in offline events

Being visible online is not enough. Your customers see you on the web, of course, but they must also see you physically! Participating in offline events such as trade shows or fairs can help you generate leads from areas of interest hitherto unheard of for you. Some companies, especially older and larger ones, should not be content with the web to get in touch with their partners and customers. They need to be able to associate a face with a name and trust a "real" person.

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wazafam · 4 years ago

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The depiction of the Royal Family on Netflix's The Crown has been hotly debated for years, as some people claim it to be highly dramatized for audiences, and some believe that it presents facts little known to the public. What can't be denied is that the portrayal of every character is nuanced and delicate; there is no defined black and white, which makes The Crown a show to mull over, savor, and enjoy.

RELATED: The Crown: The Main Characters From Season 4, Ranked From Worst To Best

For a family so glamorous, it has its fair share of tragedy in every season. Generational secrets, trauma, rules, and prejudices give rise to terrible trials which the audience feels with each character. Here is a list of some of the most sorrowful moments.

10 Elizabeth's Loss And Her Sudden Coronation

Queen Elizabeth was not one who wanted the limelight. She was thrust into the role of Queen after the untimely passing of her father, whom she loved dearly. The loss of her parent made her the most important woman of her country, overnight, a responsibility which she would have gladly passed if she had the choice.

Being stoic and unhumorous, she lacked the natural charm that she was expected to have, which made her insecure and the butt of jokes by the likes of Jackie Kennedy. Her growing pains lasted long and watching her struggle was sad.

9 Diana's Eating Disorder

Princess Diana was young and under immense pressure, which unfortunately led to a crippling eating disorder. Her bulimia acted up and made her extremely sick physically, which made her pregnancy difficult and impacted her relationship too.

RELATED: The Crown: What Season 4 Gets Wrong & Right About Diana's History

Add to that the lack of support from the Crown and a general lack of awareness surrounding eating disorders, and Diana's condition was painfully sad to watch.

8 Margaret's Doomed Love Story With Peter Townsend

The Queen's younger sister already took a big hit when she was denied the Crown, and thus placed second forever and only found any solace in the lovely Peter Townsend, a Royal Air Force officer and trusted by the Palace.

Townsend treated Margaret with respect and loved her immensely, but the Queen could not allow their marriage to happen as he was a divorcee. The unfair control of Margaret's love life and her consequent downward spiral from that moment onwards made for a gloomy watch.

7 The Queen's Reaction To Charles' Investiture Speech

Prince Charles went from a character audiences sympathized with to a much abhorred one pretty quickly over seasons three and four. However, his unheard cries for help in season three definitely made viewers feel pity for him. Before turning into a nasty husband, Charles was a misunderstood, unheard child, like most royal children.

RELATED: The Crown: Diana's 10 Best Outfits, Ranked

His one attempt at doing something right was to edit his investiture speech as Prince of Wales and speak it in Wels, which was appreciated by all but his own mother. Her rejection of her son and her cold fury towards him was unnecessary and cruel.

6 Nerissa and Katherine's Fates

Princess Margaret's maternal cousins Nerissa and Katherine, too, suffered under the archaic and appearance-obsessed monarchy. Differently-abled, they were officially recorded dead but secretly sent off to a facility to spend their lives in isolation far away from the glitz and sheen of what the Crown was supposed to look like.

It was heartbreaking to watch how they had been shunned by their own kin and the only one who cared even a little bit about them was Margaret. The Queen Mother was complicit in their erasure from history.

5 Philip's Disillusionment With His Life

Being husband to one of the most powerful women in the world did not come easily to Prince Philip. In seasons one and two, he pushed back for authority and position to counter his feeling of being nobody, but, in seasons three and four, he calmed down to accept that Elizabeth would always come first.

This did not erase his disillusionment about his life. In season three, he was deeply concerned that he had led a life without purpose and accomplishment, and he chased answers by talking to the Apollo 11 crew.

4 Princess Alice's Troubled Life

Prince Philip's mother was a remarkable woman. She had several hereditary mental illnesses, which were misunderstood due to the times and a lack of knowledge. Princess Alice of Battenberg was unfairly thrown into exploitative treatments under Sigmund Freud for years.

Instead of emerging bitter and wronged, she helped refugees during war after her own trauma. She sold royal jewels, protected people, and even gave the Crown a fresh lease of life with her story, which Prince Philip wrongly tried to keep under wraps. Her story, while inspirational, was also extremely unhappy.

3 Margaret Thatcher's Clear Preference For Her Son

Powerful people like Margaret Thatcher tended to play favorites in their own home. The Prime Minister gave birth to twins but openly preferred to spend time with her son who was usually up to no good. She fawned over him and neglected her ministerial duties when he was lost during the Paris-Dakar rally.

She also criminally neglected her talented and sweet daughter Carol because of the love she had for her son. Parental neglect seemed to be a running theme in most of The Crown.

2 The Mining Accident

The Aberfan coal disaster was extremely disheartening. The collapse of tons of coal slurry into the village and its junior school led to the untimely death of hundreds of children and adults alike.

What made the tragedy even worse was the way it was handled by the royal family. The Queen didn't deem it worth of her time till days later, and her frigidity and coldness to the suffering of her own people was quite repulsive.

1 The Ill-Treatment Of Diana By The Family

Diana breathed fresh air into the monarchy. She was adored by the public, which was used against her by her own husband and Princess Anne, as well as others from the family. They hated her for being loved, which was no fault of hers. Charles was a philandering husband who didn't even attempt to hide his affair from his wife, and Diana's efforts to revive their marriage was mocked by him.

The Princess's repeated calls for help were ignored by the Queen, she was threatened and intimidated behind the scenes, and her love for her children was seen as something strange in a loveless family. The true tragedy of The Crown was the othering of a woman from all directions for no real reason.

NEXT: The Crown: 10 Most Heartbreaking Scenes In Season 4

The Crown: Saddest Things That Happened On The Show | ScreenRant from https://ift.tt/3xwSm54

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dailynewswebsite · 4 years ago

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Has Donald Trump had his Joe McCarthy moment?

The second Lester Holt of NBC Information reduce into a press release from President Donald Trump. NBC Information by way of YouTube

When CBS, NBC and ABC reduce away from President Donald Trump’s information convention on the White Home on the night of Nov. 5, they took pains to clarify why they have been shutting off the nation’s commander-in-chief.

It was a second that for me, as a journalism historian, carried echoes of the 1954 takedown of one other flamboyant populist demagogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Making false accusations

The important thing cause, the networks defined, was that Trump had made false claims in regards to the integrity of Tuesday’s presidential election. As poll counting signaled the rising probability that he would lose to former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump accused the Democrats of attempting to steal the election from him.

“They’re attempting to rig an election, and we will’t let that occur,” Trump mentioned.

The networks’ anchors criticized the president for peddling false claims to assist his vanishing hopes for retaining the presidency. So did a few of Trump’s staunchest allies.

President Donald Trump addresses the press on Nov. 5, 2020.

An echo from historical past

Others have earlier drawn parallels between Trump and McCarthy, together with journalist Peter Beinart, who wrote in The Atlantic that “McCarthy constructed his political profession on demagoguery, intimidation, and a cult of persona – not tangible achievements or coherent concepts.”

McCarthy rose to fame and recognition by exploiting People’ worry of communism. He smeared his political opponents with accusations that they have been communists.

Because the information media later did with Trump, they helped create the spectacle of “McCarthyism” by offering McCarthy the means to make baseless expenses in opposition to political opponents.

McCarthy exploited a key weak point within the mannequin of so-called “goal” journalism: the observe of journalists to report what politicians say, with out questioning whether or not what they’re saying is factual.

McCarthy “lied with such boldness that he distracted a nation and shot it filled with mistrust,” one author mentioned.

In 1954, the senator’s excesses have been uncovered. The U.S. Military accused McCarthy of searching for preferential remedy for one in every of his aides. Throughout the televised Senate hearings, he charged that one in every of Military lawyer Joseph Welch’s associates had ties to a communist group.

The well-known change between communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Military lawyer Joseph Welch.

An emotional Welch then responded by saying, “Till this second, Senator, I feel I by no means actually gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

Welch went on to famously scold McCarthy: “You’ve got accomplished sufficient. Have you ever no sense of decency, sir, in the end? Have you ever left no sense of decency?”

The media turns

It was that second from 1954 that I regarded as the information broadcasts reduce away from President Trump.

“We now have to interrupt right here, as a result of the president made a lot of false statements, together with the notion that there was fraudulent voting,” mentioned Lester Holt, the anchor of “NBC Nightly Information,” as his broadcast reduce away from the president’s speech. He added, “There was no proof of that.”

David Muir, anchor of “ABC World Information Tonight,” was much more direct: “We’re not witnessing anybody stealing something tonight.”

CNN and Fox Information continued to broadcast the information convention however later reported that Trump offered no proof for his claims of vote fraud.

Longtime allies shift

A few of Trump’s loyal defenders, together with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, criticized the president for his baseless expenses.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

After Welch’s rebuke of McCarthy’s baseless claims, thousands and thousands of viewers watching the hearings lastly had sufficient of the senator. His immense nationwide recognition disappeared. He was censured by Senate colleagues, ostracized by the GOP and – lastly – ignored by the press. He died three years later, an alcoholic and a damaged man, at age 48.

It’s too quickly, after all, to know whether or not Trump meets the identical destiny as McCarthy.

Chris Lamb doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/has-donald-trump-had-his-joe-mccarthy-moment/ via https://growthnews.in

#Growth News

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the-morgan · 4 years ago

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Tyson Fury vs Anthony Joshua must happen in the UK

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Tyson Fury vs Anthony Joshua must happen in the UK

For once, sports fans can believe the hype. If – when? – Tyson Fury fights Anthony Joshua in 2021, it will be the biggest event in British sport since the biggest event of them all.

“Come the week of this fight, it will be like England in the World Cup in 1966, that’s how big it will be,” Fury’s co-promoter Frank Warren told BT Sport. “Two British fighters with a tremendous rivalry between them. This is huge. This is a huge, huge fight.”

There are multiple obstacles to be overcome before the Gypsy King stares across the ring at AJ, including rival promoters, rival broadcasters and – not least – rival boxers, who will do their best to render our heroes unconscious before they get a chance to make sporting history. Both Fury and Joshua have brutally hard fights to negotiate before they can meet, and in heavyweight boxing the unscripted ending is never more than one big punch away. The good news is that there seems a genuine will in both camps to make this biggest of fights happen and how the money gets divided – what Warren calls “the financial element” – is reported to have been agreed. The not-so-good news is that the greatest fight in British boxing history seems likely to take place a very long way from Britain.

“People will say, ‘Why isn’t this happening in the UK?’” Warren told BT Sport. “I want it to be. I’d love it to be at Wembley. It’s where it should be. But a fight of this magnitude, and with what is on the line for both boxers, it’s a massive opportunity to capitalise [financially].”

“Boxing News understands that Macau, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and another country in the Middle East are under consideration,” reported the most authoritative voice in British boxing.

Fury vs Joshua will be essential viewing wherever it happens. But to rank alongside England’s only World Cup win, it needs to happen in front of 90,000 screaming locals, going bonkers. The fight would be different in London or Manchester or Cardiff than it would be in Singapore or Macau or Riyadh (the location of Joshua’s rematch with American fighter Andy Ruiz Jr, “The Clash On The Dunes”).

Because what we learned about sport in 2020 was this: fans matter. More than this, fans are crucial. Even – especially – if you are watching the blood-pumping drama unfurl on your HD TV, you need a stadium full of supporters who care to set the day ablaze. Even Arsenal vs Chelsea in the FA Cup final was not the same in a Wembley where everyone present was on first-name terms.

THERE MIGHT BE MORE MONEY FIGHTING IN THE MIDDLE EAST, BUT SPORTS FANS WOULD BE THE POORER FOR IT

When the Premier League returned in June after three months of lockdown, it tried to compensate for those weirdly empty stadia with “crowd enhancement”, football’s equivalent of canned laughter. At first, I cringed at the very idea. What could be phonier than pre-recorded excitement? But I soon found myself opting for “crowd enhancement” rather than the sound of silence. Better an ersatz atmosphere than no atmosphere at all.

“They have been saying that football is back, but it isn’t really,” wrote sports journalist Oliver Holt of the Premier League’s new normal. “What’s the point of staging a drama if it plays to empty theatres? I’m sorry, but I have been to a few matches behind closed doors and it has been interesting to watch the games and see moments of skill and expression, but let’s stop pretending football is back. What we have is a pale imitation of football.”

Fury and Joshua will not fight in an empty stadium, of course. But if their fight is in Riyadh or Macau, I suggest it might feel like it. When I was first taken to football matches as a child, the fans were treated like cattle. Now, we are treated like consumers. But what 2020 made clear is that it is those cynically exploited fans who dust our national sport – and all sport – with magic.

Without “the atmosphere” – the heady cocktail of agony and ecstasy, unalloyed joy and seething rage – sport struggles to rise above the level of light entertainment.

“The sights and the sounds of those empty stadiums has reminded us that fans are the game’s life-blood,” Holt insisted. “Broadcasters forced the Premier League to pay them a £330 million rebate for the portion of the season played behind closed doors because the absence of the fans and the atmosphere they create devalued the viewer experience… The clubs should be paying them to come to matches rather than the other way round. Season tickets should be free.”

In every corner of the planet, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua are reigning world champions. But in their home country they are loved and any fight between them will always mean much more here than it ever will in the Middle East or Asia.

Boxers have every right to maximise their earning potential in a sport where a career can end in one catastrophic moment. But Tyson vs Joshua is already sure to smash all previous pay-per-view records.

As Frank Warren correctly points out, there is nothing new in elite fighters having their career-defining fights in foreign parts. Indeed, the greatest boxer of all fought the greatest fights of his career under foreign skies: Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 and vs Joe Frazier in the Philippines in 1975. But there will be a different kind of glory up for grabs if Fury and Joshua meet at Wembley than if they fight in some hushed hall in Saudi Arabia. Fury and Joshua might make more money fighting in the Middle East than in London but sports fans would be the poorer for it. And perhaps these two great champions – and they are both great champions – would be the poorer for it too.

Nothing can stop Fury vs Joshua being the biggest fight in the history of British boxing. Wherever it happens, it will be the sporting event of 2021. But if it doesn’t happen here, it will not be 1966.

#Fight #Fury #Joshua

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avoutput · 7 years ago

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Forced Perspective || The Last Jedi

The Last Jedi had a profound effect on me by the time the curtain closed. Rian Johnson had forced me to reach deep inside and ask a question I had never really thought about when it came to Star Wars. And once that first question had passed through my mind, it turned out to be merely a cork holding back more. Star Wars has always been something I have taken for granted. I was born shortly after Return of the Jedi, and since then I have always known it to be a safe space for all who dare to learn of science fiction. It’s shallow waters, the wading pool, calm, warm, and relaxing. Anyone can enjoy it and did. You can safely discuss it at a mixed party because even if no one has seen it, they are aware of it. Almost like using the force, as it connects and binds us together, you can find a friend just by mentioning its name. But now, out of the shallow waters, I come ashore, bothered by the question that weighs heavy on my mind. I sit on my own Nerd Island, alone but for the internet that connects us all, and I am forced to ponder still, “Do I like Star Wars?”

I am older now, but I grew up with the Skywalkers. It was the kind of series that was almost like a baby blanket; you carry it around with you everywhere, pacifying your insecurities and passing the endless afternoons lost in its embrace. In my tweens, episodes 1 through 3 had arrived, but I was still a bit too young to tear them down or pull them apart or really do anything but watch. I knew it felt off, but so too did the Special Editions. At the time, I thought maybe I just didn’t like change or that I was jaded. When The Force Awakens landed, I was impressed. Mostly because I had come to terms with the prequels in some way and Episode VII returned Star Wars to its roots with a modern visual twist. Now, The Last Jedi, has come to basically tell fans everything they wanted to hear. “You were right. Practical effects don’t need to replaced. All your favorite characters are the legends you have always built them up to be. You deserve to be rewarded for your faith. Star Wars is everything YOU want it to be.” We can look at this film as the Star Wars cannon that exploits everything about its universe for the good of the viewer. But that line of thought all derives from the fan in me. The fan I am now questioning. Because now, this fan is not only an adult, but an amateur film critic.

I had trouble digesting this film. The Last Jedi pushes Star Wars in directions I don’t think anyone thought the cinematic cannon would allow. It is a daring film in its own universe, far more so then its mirror film The Empire Strikes Back. But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized how many choices were made for the sake progressing the story. To be clear, without giving anything away, there are many unexplained transitions. People returning to or ending up in places inexplicably. Though at points glaringly obvious, they deftly move past this, showing us cannon defining consequences for the characters, possibly as a way to divert your attention from their laziness. You can’t help feel that it's all too convenient. The narrative is tenuously held together. Were the audience given much of a chance, they might start asking questions, and the more questions you ask, the more you realize you have been rationalizing the plot for the writers. “How did Rey get there? Oh, she must have…” This seemed to me to have been the bane of science fiction/fantasy stories, especially those that are advanced completely by the characters like Star Wars. Unlike most films in this category, the characters are the focus point and the world revolves around them. Unexplained transition is by far the largest flaw in the film. The original trilogy by comparison had a solid narrative, possibly due to the technology at the time or the sentiments of film and storytelling. A New Hope explained each coincidence or choice along the way, and not always verbally, but visually as well.

Recognizing The Last Jedi’s narrative issues, it was still able to do something films aren’t always able to do. It connects with you emotionally. I had goosebumps, my palms were sweaty, I felt sad, happy, and excited. At this point, I realize I am having trouble viewing this as an outsider. Star Wars is too close to me. Objectively, I would argue that the value of an emotional connection in a story is higher than any flaw found with its execution. It also has the added benefit of being a serialized story, building with each entry. But, if you are able to connect with your audience, through visuals, music, acting, and direction, than you have effectively made a “good” film, even if much of the emotional connection relies on previous entries. Still, this can be a hard torch to pass, it isn’t without its difficulty. Visually, you couldn’t ask for a more satisfying Star Wars. It is ripe with an amazing color palette, physical props, some of the best CGI in the game, and more than enough background fun for fans. The music is a bit more bombastic than in previous outings and at times feels a bit out of place, but it still ranks as some of the most iconic in cinema. The softer songs are so inspired, I can see myself listening to them often in the future. And finally, Mark Hamill gets to be the man we always wanted him to be. Cool. Mark Hamill is finally cool. A brooding old Jedi Master, Hamill brings to life a version of Luke that Hayden Christensen should have been able to manifest in Anakin. It has become my favorite performance by Hamill to date. Oscar worthy? Not by Earth standards, but Star Wars fans might never find better. The late Carrie Fisher was much more comfortable playing Leia than her stilted performance in The Force Awakens. She was commanding, nurturing, funny, and natural. The rest of the cast, Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe), and Domhnall Gleeson (Gen. Hux) all play up their characters for bigger laughs and deeper emotional connections this time. Newcomer Kelly Marie Tran (Rose) instantly fell into the ranks without any trouble at all.

This brings me back to director Rian Johnson. I own all of his major releases, Brick (2005), The Brothers Bloom (2008), and Looper (2012). (I only realized this having just looked at his IMDB page.) He has a special eye for detail, the kind of quality that breathes life into anything he points a camera at. The backdrops and surroundings are just as important as the people standing in them, and he has his own spin on this, using clean lines and hyper detail. He also seemed to have a hard on for Anime, like Cowboy Bebop or Macross. All of his talents are at their peak in The Last Jedi. However, there are moments of in this film that seem a bit compromised. Mostly, it’s the forced, unnatural comedy. The film opens a bit like Thor, with a dull, moronic, misplaced joke that might satiate the masses, but it felt so out of place for Star Wars. It’s not that it disturbed the natural order of a sci-fi/fantasy, but it definitely reminds you that you are in a theater, on planet earth, in the year 2017, which is something I am trying to escape from. And these jokes are found throughout the film, quite possibly meant to balance correct the mood of a “Disney” film, but they could have found more natural ways to go about it. In The Force Awakens, the comedy comes from a natural shtick, bumping into things, miscommunication, and dramatic character interactions. Still, Johnson always drew me back in with his love of the characters at the heart of the Skywalker saga. He took care to make sure that every moment on screen advances who they are and conflicts with who they want to be. He drew out an originality in Star Wars I haven’t seen since The Empire Strikes Back.

Having spent the better part of the day thinking about my initial question, I have come to a conclusion. Star Wars means more to me symbolically than any flaw you can find in it as a film. And while my ability to look at the film objectively has caused me to philosophically question my devotion to both film and Star Wars, I have come out the other side able to recognize that some projects, over time, become a part of you. They transcend your ability to be critical of their flaws, because like family, they can be forgiven. I forgave the prequels of all their misgivings because they still gave me more than they took away. I still had hope for them. I still had hope for Star Wars. That being said, The Last Jedi may have problems gluing together its parts, but the parts it is trying to stick together are still powerful and impressive cinema, whether that be the actors, script, set, effects, music, or story. It still sits on the pillars of everything Star Wars was built upon and stands for. It still brings people together both on screen and in the theater. So, do I like Star Wars? Yes. Do I like The Last Jedi? Absolutely. Is it a good film? It depends on who you ask, it has its problems, but from where I’m sitting, it seems the force is strong with this one.

May the force be with you, always.

~* 8/10 *~

(Secret Star Wars Score: 9/10)

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flightyrock · 7 years ago

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Ectober Day 6: Ghost Hunger

I owe everyone a bit of an explanation before we dive into this fever dream. Yes, I know exactly what ghost hunger refers to, but it just isn’t my thing. It’s a neat concept, but I don’t really find it fun to write for, or even read, except in the rarest of cases. I can stand it if it advances an innovative plotline, but just for its own sake…meh.

So I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do for day 6. I considered skipping it, but that felt like admitting defeat. With this in the back of my mind, I was scrolling through tumblr, as one does, and found this lovely piece by @schnivel.

One of my favorite things about schnivel’s style is the dynamic quality all of his characters have. I don’t know how to explain it, but it draws the viewer in, and sells that these characters are real. Complex emotions are portrayed and conveyed with such ease, I get that creative itch every time. I love everything in your art tag, it makes me so happy. Thank you for sharing!

But anyway. In this particular piece, I love the angle of the external light and the ambient light radiating from the suspiciously viscous fluid clinging to his hands. I think it was the combination of the fluid consistency, color choice, and blood connection that did it.

So as my mind tends to do when I’m tired and see something emotionally charged, it took a running nosedive off the deep end into absurdist territory.

So here is a fic inspired by color choice, texture, and my traumatic experiences with product promotion as a child of the 90s and early 2000s. I am so sorry but also kind of not. Please forgive me, schnivel. Thank you so much for letting me ruin the mood. And seriously, check out schnivel’s blog!

(Sorry for all the notes. Commentary at the end.)

Summary: When a popular variety of novelty ketchup is discontinued, the ghost population of Amity Park clashes over who will claim the last box.

Warnings: Customer service feels, light innuendo

Word Count: ~1700

“You do realize that’s disgusting,” Sam deadpanned, looking on with a mixture of mild horror and disgust as Danny smothered his hotdog in a quantity of green slime that could only be defined as excessive. Somehow it was impossible to turn away. Tucker didn’t seem to share the sentiment, busying himself with his PDA.

Spurred on by the attention, Danny looked Sam dead in the eyes, staring unflinchingly into their icy, amethyst depths while cramming as much of the sandwich into his mouth as possible.

Only to aim a tad low, bumping into his lower lip. Time seemed to slow down as blue eyes widened comically in surprise, hand contracting around the bun reflexively, coaxing gobs of the novelty ketchup to ooze out the back and coat the front of his favorite t-shirt, soaking into white fabric with karmatic vengeance.

Sam and Tucker witnessed the following shift from shock to sudden horror at the state of his shirt became clear. They glanced at each other, unprompted, then lost it completely, howling with laughter as Danny dropped his ‘dog to scrub frantically at his chest with a wad of the worse-than-useless paper napkins the school provided that screamed government subsidy. His response time was impressive, but the damage was done: a prominent, verdant dribble trail clearly illustrated the tragedy that unfolded at lunch that day.

“Are you kidding me? I still have half the day to go,” Danny moaned, hands running anxiously through already messy hair.

“Just phase it off!” Tucker pointed out helpfully, returning to his PDA as chuckles died down into amused sympathy.

“Tuck, intangibility doesn’t remove stains. It’s set too far in the fabric. Otherwise laundry would be so much easier. Hmm.” Danny took a moment to consider the potential, wondering if that was how Vlad managed to keep his ghostwear so pristine. Maybe if he could concentrate his focus…

“You had it coming. I don’t understand why you insist on consuming that promotional garbage.” Sam rolled her eyes derisively.

“Because it’s the best!” Danny insisted. Sam and Tucker shared a look, resigned to their friend’s strange obsession.

Danny didn’t know what it was, but ever since that popular condiment brand out of Pittsburgh developed a line of novelty ketchup, he was hooked. It came in all sorts of unappetizing colors, like green and purple, and the cringe-worthy ad campaign made Danny wonder if the whole thing was an elaborate prank. But it eventually showed up at the discount food distributer his family frequented, and he bought it himself, despite Jazz’s teasing. Funny. He swears he’s caught her using it more than once when she thought he wasn’t around.

While Jazz was exasperated by the blatant exploitation of the mindset of the lower middle working class, Sam objected to the artificial dyes and preservatives, and Tucker insisted it was nothing less than an insult to the integrity of meat, whatever that was supposed to mean. Maybe the dye makes it taste a bit different. Maybe he just gets a kick out of eating food in weird colors and watching his friends squirm. Heck, maybe he’s just been desensitized by enough mutant, home-cooked meals that something so harmless but strange fills him with nostalgia. Whatever the case, Danny couldn’t seem to get enough of the stuff. He even started taking it to school with him as a fun way to avoid looking too closely at what was on his tray.

“Uh oh, dude,” Tucker chuckled, bringing up a specific news article on his PDA. “Looks like your days of ruining hot dogs are numbered.”

“You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding,” Danny begged.

“Afraid not,” Tucker grinned, sliding his tech across the table to deliver the news firsthand.

Blue eyes widened in horror, before the teenager collapsed onto the table dramatically with a moan. “Why is it that as soon as I discover something awesome, it’s gone?”

“Honestly, that’s probably why it appeared on the shelves at Hubert’s in the first place,” Sam remarked flippantly, preferring to pick at chipping nail polish than acknowledge the lump of pouting teenager currently occupying half the table.

“Yeah, brand names are always too good to be true in places like that,” Tucker nodded sagely, patting Danny on the shoulder in mock sympathy.

Danny hauled himself upright with a sigh. “Nothing else for it. I’ll just have to go after school and stockpile all the bottles I can. They can’t be out yet.”

“How are you out?! It was just here less than a week ago!”

But the dramatics of a ketchup-crazed teenager were no match for the practiced apathy projected by the young but seasoned customer service guru manning the register, six hours into a ten hour shift.

“Look, man, I just work here. There’s plenty of purple,” she sighed, glazed eyes carelessly roaming to glace at the condiments section, poking at her monitor screen.

“It doesn’t taste the same,” Danny moaned, prompting a significant look to pass between the duo accompanying him. They had no idea why they thought it would be a good to tag along on this juvenile side quest. This was just embarrassing.

“Huh,” the cashier remarked offhandedly. “Looks like we might have one more box in the back. I’ll go check, if you want…” she trailed off unenthusiastically, distracted by the hopefully bobbing shock of black hair that wouldn’t leave her alone unless she made a show of effort. With a long-suffering sigh, the underpaid civil servant shuffled off to the back, teenagers at her heels until she ducked behind a wildly swinging door, a scuffed sheet of plastic shoved haphazardly into the gateway in a pathetic effort to separate customer-friendly space from the chaos of the warehouse.

The friends waited attentively, then with growing annoyance, Sam scuffing the chipping tile with heavy boots as the minutes ticked by. Around fifteen minutes in, Tucker decided to call it.

“I think she just blew you off, dude.”

“No way,” Danny insisted. “She’s just being thorough.”

At that moment, a familiar figure slouched out from behind the off-white mockery of a barrier. Danny drooped visibly at the lack of bottles in her arms.

“Welp, I found it.” Danny perked up. “Where is it?”

“In the back.” She continued to amble through the aisles, not even bothering to glance at the irritating customer as she returned to the front. Danny followed her, confused.

“And?” he ventured.

“What?” she asked, uncapping a company pen to doodle on a scrap of receipt paper, pointedly ignoring the nuisance in the vain hope it would leave her in peace.

Danny barely restrained himself in time to prevent throwing his arms up in exasperation. “Can I have some?” he dared to ask. The girl acted like she didn’t hear him, outlining a cartoonish face with care, allowing him to stew for a while.

She finally raised hazel orbs full of resignation to meet his. “You somehow manage to get it down, you can just have it.” The just leave me alone was implied. Heavily.

Danny lit up. “Really?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she waved him away, returning to her receipt sketch.

“Thanks!” Danny called over his shoulder, already on his way to claim his prize.

“That was kind of weird,” Sam observed.

“Oh, come on Sam, why do you have to be so pessimistic all the time? She probably couldn’t reach it. All Danny has to do is float up to the shelf, and we’re out of here,” Tucker said, confidently leading the way into the dark space, the main light coming from a desk equipped with a dated microwave and littered with the remains of hurried lunches.

It was kind of weird being behind the scenes. The air felt heavy, stale. It was difficult to shake the uneasy feeling that they dismissed, at first, with being in a restricted area, but that quickly faded into the background.

A puff of cold air suddenly expanded, forcing its way up a certain ghostly throat and expelling in a bluish cloud as it forced vapor in the surrounding air to condense.

“Nice going, Tuck,” Sam punched him lightly in the shoulder.

Danny ignored the exchange, quickly “going ghost” and floating up to investigate. And was not at all surprised to find the Lunch Lady and the Box Ghost playing a less-than-friendly game of tug-of-war with the box of sauce. Okay, maybe he was surprised; he didn’t know either of them had a subtle bone in their bodies…if they had bones. Or bodies. Gah.

He was honestly kind of impressed that they had avoided detection for so long, and wondered if the cashier’s composure spoke to her merit, or to the horrors of customer service. Danny resolved to be nicer to customer service associates.

From there, it was “doom” this and “beware” that. Danny threw some ectoblasts, repelled some processed meat products, brushed off some boxes. It was amazing how much more annoying the two of them were working together. But, still, not even really a challenge, so the half ghost made short work of the duo, while trying not to think too hard about the implications of this team up. A certain young ghost from an alternate future came to mind…

Danny chased the pair off, trying not to think about the two of them sharing a thermos. He was all too glad to claim his prize and head home. It had been an interesting afternoon.

Despite the strange start, the pair of friends thought that the day was pretty successful. As a result, neither Tucker nor Sam were expecting the caricature of despair that greeted them on the front steps of Fenton Works come morning.

“Dare we ask?” Sam muttered.

Tucker sighed, shaking his head. “He’ll let us know soon enough.”

Somewhere in Wisconsin, a certain blue-skinned half ghost emerged from his portal, shiftily checking the entrance before ducking through with his prize.

What am I doing? I live alone.

Still, one could never be too careful. It wouldn’t do to have Daniel catch wind of this. He certainly would never admit it, but he couldn’t help the strange nostalgia it inspired; the off-putting color instilled him with a strange longing for cheap meals of questionable quality cooked with a certain pair of paranormal science students. He still had his dignity after all.

A/N: Anyone who’s ever worked retail knows the best way to get rid of a persistent customer and score an extra break in the process is to “check” the back. Seriously, most places know what they have in the back due to the magic of inventory, but for some reason, that middle-aged woman with too much makeup will not leave us alone, insisting we check the back because she thinks we’re idiots (you know the type). And how dare we come back without checking thoroughly. The cashier probably found the ketchup in less than a minute, determined retrieval was impossible, then spent the rest of the time on her phone. Of course, like 10% of the time, there really is extra in the back so I can’t exactly fault them, but we could do without the condescension.

So…yeah. I think my mind kind of mashed together the fact that the show took place in the 2000s with the fact that ketchup looks vaguely like blood, and the drawing used the two major colors of Heinz’s horrendous EZ Squirt line. As a child who begged for this ketchup, then refused to eat it, I can understand the initial appeal, but it got gross fast, and I didn’t finish the bottle. What can I say, it tasted off to me. I feel like I read about some human instinct regarding food safety contributing to that at some point. But I still remember this product, especially the commercials, with horror.

Thank you so much to @schnivel for the inspiration! Hope everyone enjoyed it!

#danny phantom fanfiction #flightyfiction #schnivel #danny phantom #danny fenton #ooc #maybe

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go-addison · 6 years ago

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Learn Lead Generation

Learn Lead Generation It is a well known fact that without clients there is no business, but every day it becomes more difficult to obtain and retain them. Why? Customers are changing their consumption habits and are no longer easily influenced by traditional lead generation techniques. However, many businesses are still obsessed with the old tactics and blindly trust them although they find it difficult to measure their effectiveness, but since they are actions that they can see and touch, they continue to apply them. On the other hand, there are businesses that are applying improved and efficient lead generation tactics which are gaining the maximum advantage of the internet, to achieve incredible results, reinventing the rules of the game. Like many marketers, you may be wondering, which of the most possible lead generation strategies is most effective. But marketing is constantly evolving, which means that new tactics are constantly emerging. Trends are continually changing, which is also true for buyer behavior. By regularly keeping you up-to-date on the latest innovations and technologies, you can optimize your sales tunnel to generate more leads. However, beware: Many marketing professionals spend a great deal of time and resources developing tactics that ultimately turn out to be inappropriate. It is therefore important to bet from the start on a winning strategy, that is to say adapted to your target audience and which will help you to aim higher and higher! Here are efficient lead generation tactics to help you • Establish the profile of your target audience User behavior is evolving at the same rate as technological innovations. That's why it's best to study your target audience and create effective personas to learn how to better exploit the weak points as the strengths of your potential buyers. About these, ask yourself: • What are their goals? • What issues are they facing? • What are they willing to invest to solve them? • What are their needs in terms of quality and quantity? The secret of a successful lead generation strategy? Do not just answer these questions once and for all. On the contrary, ask them regularly: you will see that the answers will evolve over time and that the time may have come to offer innovative products or special promotions to your customers forever. • Blogging While some argue that blogs do not add value but that is not true. It is safe to say that a company and / or organization that does not have a blog, is certainly dead. When you use the blog appropriately and combine it with a social media and SEO strategy, each blog post becomes a perpetual asset generating traffic and leads. But the most important thing is that the blog allows you to position yourself as the experts in your business. When a potential client starts to explore an inbound path, your blog will provide the answers to their questions and give them the context to address it better. • Build a social community With Facebook having billions of registered users, it would be absurd not to take advantage of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Simply having a presence on these sites and interaction with followers can have a very positive impact on the business. However, building a community, does not mean just to win fans, it is something much further; called "engagement", that is, people share and comment, in other words, participate. Definitely, building a healthy community of enthusiastic consumers and fans of your brand does not happen overnight. This requires a serious strategy that is created more than anything by listening to customers, rather than imposing things. Here are 4 tips to motivate your community to share positive experiences on social networks: • Listen carefully to what they talk about your brand. • Find that shared passion and build a dialogue around. • Create content that leads to an experience that keeps them engaged, participate and make them come back for more. • Build trust: Address issues and controversies openly and transparently. • Use Influencer An influencer is a person who has the ability to influence their community. But, why use them? • They can help you get your message with greater credibility. • Use it with a link between your brand and the community. • Generate a much richer brand experience. • Promote more credible recommendations. Using this technique is recommended especially for launching products or services, launching a brand, promoting a product or service, and events. There are even technological platforms like Fluvip , which automate the process of connecting brands with the most relevant influencers in the world in multiple channels. • Video Content According to eMarketer, the average time spent watching digital videos increased from 6 minutes in 2010 to 55 minutes in 2014 in the United States, revealing a growing preference of consumers for content in video format. This is because the video offers the opportunity to create moments that entertain and educate, increasing its authenticity for the viewer. In fact, a report by Unruly found that enjoying a video increases the purchase intention by 97% and the association with the brand by 139% . The king of content is YouTube. If your plan is to incorporate video content marketing into your lead generation tactics, it is important that you make sure that you are following the following guidelines to achieve optimal success: • Identify the objectives Whatever you want to achieve from your videos, take the time to define the objectives. It is only through defining the objectives that you can accurately measure if your content marketing strategy in video format has been successful. It is necessary to determine how you will know if you have really succeeded. For example, are you going to define success by the number of times the video is viewed? Or, are you going to measure success based on the number of actions the video receives? • Define the relevant audience To make sure the video is successful; develop the marketing strategy thinking about the audience you want to call attention to. • Includes "Calls to action" There are lots of videos with many views, but they fail to produce the desired results because they do not include a call to action. Think about what people want to do when they finish watching the video. In order to achieve the greatest impact, a call to action must be included in both a visual and audible form. • Distribute the video intelligently Promote your videos through multiple channels, and make sure your videos are optimized for mobile viewing, as more and more users now watch videos from their mobile devices. Video consumption in the coming years will represent 69% of Internet traffic. If this opportunity is used to provide consumers with more information without being invasive, it has an enormous possibility to engage. • Join SMS and emails in your campaigns What is emailing for? Not only to keep in touch with your audience, but also to build a relationship with your leads. And while it is true that not all users frequently check their emails but all users read their SMS. Indeed, 95% of messages sent by SMS are read less than three minutes after being sent. Feel free to use this channel for your campaigns. • Expand your marketing campaigns For your marketing campaigns, test different strategies. Unify and develop your tactics through different lead generation channels. However, even if you take multiple ways to make yourself heard, remember: • to affirm the unique personality of your brand; • Make consistent choices, consistent with your brand philosophy. In other words, multiply the ways to make yourself known, but while providing a consistent picture of your business ... It is essential to build the trust of your audience! • Create quality content Today, on the internet, everything is history of contents. Try to be consistent in your publications. Not only will you gain credibility as an expert, but your rank will grow in the search engines and you will gain more credibility. Be careful though: do not create content just to create content. Strive to provide valuable texts to your target audience. By publishing valuable content that informs, educates and entertain, you will gain the loyalty of your leads. But it will be easier to convert once you have gained their trust. • Refine your SEO strategy How, your website is not yet in the first pages of Google? Only 10% of users go beyond the very first pages of results during an online search, hence the importance for your site to access the first ranks. Today, SEO is both a matter of relevance and authority. To climb the ladder, increasing your traffic will not be enough. You will also need to tell more about your company and products to assert your authority in your field. • Think mobile first Nowadays, mobile devices are always faster and more efficient. That's why Smartphone and tablets have become the PCs of most users. It is high time that you adapt to this new state of affairs, by launching a version of your site for mobile. If it's already done, make sure: • your pages have a suitable design • they promote immediate action by the user. • Participate in offline events Being visible online is not enough. Your customers see you on the web, of course, but they must also see you physically! Participating in offline events such as trade shows or fairs can help you generate leads from areas of interest hitherto unheard of for you. Some companies, especially older and larger ones, should not be content with the web to get in touch with their partners and customers. They need to be able to associate a face with a name and trust a "real" person.

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estellacalvert · 6 years ago

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The Potential of Film as a Medium FMP - blogpost

Film as an extension of photography

To begin with, I regarded film as an extension of photography. When watching commercial movies, what excited me most were the held frames. One that notably sticks in my memory is (I believe) from Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969,) although I must admit to only watching it in part while my dad had it on the TV, and if you asked me what it was about I would scarcely be able to tell you more than its genre. I am not even sure if my memory of the scene is correct, but the frame I recall was of a white building, with the camera set far away so that you could see clearly the blue sky and the horizon line that fell behind the building. The foreground was that dusty stone that seems almost terracotta in stark contrast to the blue, and the landform formed a frame around this building. This shot was held with no movement of the camera, and small black, ant-like figures walked around the area of the building. I just remember thinking ‘this would be a beautiful photograph, but it's more than a photograph – it's alive.' I think this more than anything is what drew me to the medium of film. More and more I found myself feeling that moments were inadequately captured in a photograph. Film made it easier for me to get at what I was trying to say – whether that was ‘look, how this line follows, how it looks like a drawing' or … Film, especially when observing things, gives me the power to record what I regard as a visual sentence. In my "sketches" each shot is one sentence: a change of frame in a continuous shot may relate to some kind of punctuation.

Post-production

Not only does film allow me to document my train of thought when looking at something, but through editing I can make connections between different clips that could have been considered as having no relevance to each other. The seams (when one shot changes to another) of a film are critical to the fluidity and continuity of the film as a whole, as it is not natural to have such immediate jump to another space, time, point of view etc. This is not how we experience our own reality, and so when viewing a film if there is no necessity or logic in the transition from one shot to another it can feel disjointed and jarring, and viewer engagement is easily lost. In editing footage, it's interesting to discover what shots complement each other hinged together. It allows for me to have control over what the viewer is likely to be thinking; I can guide their train of thought as if I were delivering to them a dictation – just as they would follow my words, they follow my image.

When watching films, I always take note of the seams. One of my favourite cinematic techniques I see used is when a frame is held for just a split second too long. For example, in John Crawly's Brooklyn, there is a scene where Saoirse Ronan is sat on a bench if I recall correctly, waiting for a ferry, and that basically sums up the entire shot. The difference being, and I remember this scene because it was the first sign this was drawn to my attention, is that the frame was held for longer than I expected. I realised I was almost counting down in my head when the shot was due to change. I think that it is true when it comes to cinema that we sense a general pattern din seams: we are used to seeing a character looking after another who has just walked out of frame for about 3 seconds; maybe a shot of a character deep in thought for about 5 seconds before the shot changes to show a close up of their face, so we may better understand just how deep in thought they actually are. I have been accustomed to expect these changes, and why I remember Brooklyn is because the change did not happen when I expected it to. The effect of this "second too long" was an almost tangible tension and sudden anxiety as a viewer – I felt as if I had been looking at the wrong thing, perhaps that's why my expectation was unfulfilled. I was left not just looking at the leading lady waiting for the scene to change but spurred into searching throughout the entire frame to try and assess what I might have missed. This meant when the scene did cut, soon after this (what I can only describe as a) little anxiety shock, the film had won my full attention. Amazed at the effect this technique had had on me, I always keep it in mind when constructing my own films. The balance is in knowing when a single shot has been held for too long to the point where it has lost its tension and the ability to cause that moment of slight stress at potentially mislead expectation.

Alain Fleischer makes the statement that "something is lost for the film to continue" when it moves from one shot to another (Film Cuts, 1995.) I think his implication that there is greater value in the subject matter of the film than in the actual film itself is not necessarily true. He assumes that "something is lost" when the shot changes, and in one sense I can understand since when editing my own footage there is often a sense of reluctance in having discard footage for the sake of the film as a whole. However, I hope I have argued that there is something to be gained in these abstract interruptions through the medium of film.

Relationship to light and space

One property of film that broadens its potential as a medium is its intrinsic relationship to light and space. The very first moving images were created using firelight and material form to create shadows on stone walls, making the immediate world an image. With advances in technology, there are different ways in which light can be used to permit the experience of film. We are very familiar with screens; film seems to exist within them, and if we wanted to we can go right up to the film and touch it, and it will stay under our fingertips. In this way it is very controlled, contained. Even the shape of our screens resembles a frame, and I feel like choosing to display a film work on a screen on the wall invites the viewer to consider the work in a very similar way to displaying any other rectangular composition on the wall whether it be a painting, print or photograph.

I think the medium of film has greater potential through the means of projection. Light is both a wave and a particle; When an object is projected, be it moving image or photograph, it inherits both the material and incorporeal properties of light. You can feel the energy of the projected image (moving or still) and know that it is not contained to the boundaries of a screen but takes on the space around it. If you were to go up to try and touched a projected film, you would find yourself left with your shadow: you cannot touch the object under your fingers; its existence is not defined to a given space, and if you raise your hand in front of the light, you in effect alter that objects existence for as long as you choose to keep it there. Tacita Dean in her exhibition Portrait at the National Portraits Gallery in 2018 used semi-opaque lightweight board as the surface upon which to project her works. You could walk round the suspended film and view it from both sides, and the space in the darkened room surrounding fell away. The floating films seemed to transcend, the energy of the projected light being so focused and concentrated onto their designated space.

(I recently took a different approach to projection. In a group crit I chose to project a film across a large spread of wall, which meant that the film functioned more in creating an atmosphere and altering the viewing experience of other pieces of work rather than being considered in a one to one dialogue with the viewer.)

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While I am aware that this may sound very lofty, I genuinely believe it to be true. There is so much more energy contained within a film when it is projected; when it doesn't depend on a wall, a canvas, or any other set surface. It could exist anywhere.

This also is what helped film so accessible to the public in history, as it was able to be delivered to audiences anywhere so long as there was a means of projection and a wall. Working with projection, therefore, offers a great deal of flexibility: a film can be distorted by exploiting the surface it's projected onto, made to take up a greater or lesser amount of space. In the future, I think the idea of projecting onto public buildings could be really interesting – since the image created has no permanence, the duration I would be allowed to continue what I would be doing before being asked to stop, especially with films that are about exploring different media.

The moving image and the temporality of film

Film is a fascinating medium to be working with now as our relationship with time is changing. Everything is becoming faster, and with that comes the expectation that we become faster as well. Film can be difficult to engage with sometimes purely because it demands time from the viewer. While it is true that any artwork which aims to be considered demands time, the way in which film demands time is different because time exists within the film. A film's request of a viewer's time seems a lot more formal than the request of a painting, because the film's time request is specific, whereas the request of the painting is indefinite and ambiguous. When using film as a medium, there is an extent to which the filmmaker has complete control over the length of the conversation between itself and the viewer (to hark back to my previous analogy of a film as a sentence.) But this can make the relationship between the object of film and the viewer dictatorial. The exchange completely breaks down if the viewer decides to cut the exchange short by removing themselves, and the choice to do this feels a lot more detrimental than when the same choice is made in front of a painting. There is no concept of "start" or "finish" with other mediums. Consequently, someone can disengage at any time without causing any real offense. However, film cannot shake itself of this concept of "start" and "finish." Even if a film is played on a loop, the fact it cannot be its whole self all at once still demands this linear definition; the object of film exists in time, not materiality.

The fact that a film cannot be its entire self all at once is an intrinsic characteristic of moving image. After all, all film is numerous still images shown in quick succession so as to feign movement. No one image is any less a part of the film, but none of them alone can make it up. It is not even enough for them to exist together, they must exist in running succession, otherwise, the object in question is not a moving image. This calls into question when the moving image actually is, what is it and how can it simultaneously be one thing and a plurality of things? The question of the movement of film challenges its wholeness and integrity, and I think this element of film has incredible philosophical potential worth exploring.

People on film

People or persons as the subject of film draws the medium out of philosophical abstraction. It grounds it in something we consider real, and that we can immediately relate to our everyday experience of the world. The fact that film is able to use real images (‘real' here used in a sentimental, not scientific sense) that directly relate to our experienced reality gives the medium unparalleled potential to construct characters. The consideration of characters pulls film into a different playing field – it is at this point that I feel the distinction between the terms "film" and "movie" becomes blurred. When I think of the potential of film with regards to character, a number of what I would consider "movies" come to mind; I think that part of the difference is made by the fact that the object of film is being used to ends entirely separate from the medium itself: in movies, film is the medium of storytelling, but storytelling is not a prerequisite of film as a medium.

One of the movies that come to mind is Peter Farrelly's Green Book. The subject of the movie is, in fact, the relationship between two unlikely companions, and each scene is geared towards the telling of their shared story. Other subjects of the film tackled issues of race and prejudice, but in reality, these were by-products of the primary subject, questions that were raised due to the nature of their relationship. It is undeniable that a focus on character has the ability to have a significant impact on a viewer, and in the case of Green Book I left the cinema with a feeling of something between happiness and joy – I had fallen in love with Tony and witnessing the loving relationship between him and Dr Shirley left me unable to stop smiling for the next 45 minutes.

Another movie which had a similar effect was Naomi Kawase's An. The plot of this film is incredibly simple, and if asked what it is about the tempting answer to give is "bean paste." While this is not entirely wrong, it is misleading. The movie forms the character of Tokue, an eccentric old lady with leprosy, with incredible sensitivity and managed to move me to tears within the first 10 minutes. Although this is perhaps more telling of me as a viewer than the movie, I think it is true to say that when the subject of film is human, emotions come into play – although this is more the potential of persons as subject as opposed to the potential of film as a medium. I think this is an important distinction relevant to my art practice: I am concerned primarily with the properties of the object of the medium in question, not the subject.

To come back to the focus of this inquiry, I think Han Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still is a good example of a work that almost calls for the title "movie," but not quite. It is interesting that in all the descriptions of this work I have read, it is referred to as a "feature-length film." Bo uses character as a tool to talk about the harsh society of impoverished urban China. His effective use of character accompanied by his skilled use of his chosen medium meant that he was able to hold my attention to his dictation for just under 4 hours. The way he builds character is not through dialogue, a critical tool for character building used in the previous two movies I have mentioned, but through image (his choice of shot, from the length of time it is held to how close to the character the viewer is allowed) and action (how the characters act and interact with their environment in the film – the choices they choose to make.)

Film and abstraction

While reading The Cinema Effect by Sean Cubitt, I found it fascinating that after reading for a good hour, only once had the camera been referenced in a mention of the shutter. That was it. This was strange to me since in doing film, the camera is indispensable. As an extension of the filmmaker, it is the means of creating film. Film cannot happen without the camera (or perhaps it can…this may be something I return to for later inquiry.) This being said, it is true that when experiencing cinema, one is not thinking about the camera; it departs from its means of creation. This distancing effect, the ability film has to transcend the material yet retain the façade of being of our world and retaining features that we recognise as belonging to our own reality, gives film the potential to abstract subject matter, while making it feel less abstract. I will attempt to illustrate this point further: in personalising an individual through film, giving insight into their private world, their private thoughts, makes the viewer feel closer to them, and feel as if they are less abstract due to their enhanced understanding of the individual. However, to personalise the individual is to abstract them from the social world. Even the individuals closest to us, our friends and family members, are not to us personalised in this way. Other people are object – we can refer to them by name, we can describe them with language. The personalisation of individuals and even places through film lifts them out of the object realm of language and into the subject realm of experience, the experience of the individual becomes the defining element, and so the individual has been abstracted.

The film Lost Highway (David Lynch) has no moral, its plot is incoherent, you do not warm to any of the characters, it does not have any profound emotional or intellectual impact. I found that you can take nothing of value away from this film – all of its value is completely contained within the experience of watching it. This is why I think it is a good example of film's potential to be abstract, in the same way, a painting might be, but obviously with their necessary distinctions.

The expectant relationship we have to film

Our present relationship to film originates in the shortening of the working week in the late 1800s across Europe and North America, which gave people a lot more surplus time, and led to the commodifying of film. This is what has framed our standards and expectations of being entertained by film – this was displayed very clearly when the feedback cards from the 2018 Turner Prize exhibition, which consisted of 4 films, contained comments like "would have been better with comfy chairs and popcorn." I don't think I have ever gone to a gallery with the intention of viewing art expecting there to be snacks to enhance my experience, nor have I left thinking "that would have been better with biscuits." Film's intrinsic relationship to cinema cannot be ignored when presenting work to a public audience.

The question stands as to whether this association of film and cinema is a limitation of film as an artistic medium, or offers the artistic medium potential. Undoubtedly, film's connection to cinema can bring the subjects of art to more people. Film is accessible and does not have the same class boundaries historically that art does, hence its potential capacity to bridge the high-low art gap. Film has the potential to reference itself without undermining it: you can make a film about film without undermining film. "Art" does not have this capacity: you cannot make art about art without undermining art.

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