#like classic sci fi but by a woman who was going under the name james tiptree if i remember correctly

[powerfulkicks]

ohhh another good one is that one the twilight zone episode was based on? the one with the kid with mind powers who terrorizes his whole town. that one's good as fuck and i think the short story is better than the twilight zone episode which is really fucking good by the way

it's a good life by jerome bixby is the name btw

[sounds-of-raine]

Much like the folk list earlier, this is a selection of filk artists I love! If other people have recommendations for songs/artists you love, feel free to reblog with additions! Now, on with the show below the read more.

Seanan McGuire: one of tumblr's resident authors also makes very good filk music! A lot of her songs, and recordings of some of her concerts and performances, are up on youtube. Lots of fandom inspired songs, lots of feminist themes, and some very fun lyrics. My Story is Not Done is a favorite to listen to.

SJ Tucker: has music up on spotify, bandcamp, and scattered performances on youtube. If I had to pick a favorite off of this list, hard as that would be, Tucker would be it. I listened to her music a ton growing up, she has a whole album based on a book series I loved as a kid, her stuff is just so fun. Personal recs would be Firebird's Child and the entirety of the Wonders album (Not the Villain if I had to pick one song).

Alexander James Adams: heir to Heather Alexander, he has music published under both names available on spotify, youtube, and scattered around the web, along with his own website. Primarily fantasy/mythological themes with some really good instrumentation. Dude can play the fiddle like nobody's business. He of the Sidhe is my favorite of his, and March of Cambreadth is my favorite of Heather's.

Tricky Pixie: have songs/performance recordings up on youtube and bandcamp. Tucker and Adams along with Betsy Tinney as an incredibly fun trio. Their shows have really good energy, and the songs are very fun. Fantasy/myth themed. Their version of Tam Lin is good, as is Creature of the Wood/Daughter of the Glade.

Julia Ecklar: has music up on youtube, spotify, and bandcamp. Has more of a sci-fi bent than the previous entries, along with various fandom specific songs. She's a great songwriter who does a very good job putting emotion into her songs. For fandom songs, I recommend Man of Red, for sadness I recommend Darkness, and for a combo of both my fave is Tin Soldier.

Talis Kimberley: has songs up on spotify, youtube, bandcamp, and her own website (which also has a near-complete songbook of her compositions with lyrics and chords). Talis writes from such a genuine place, and her songs are gorgeous. She has a lot of environmental and hopeful themes, alongside more fantasy/literary songs. I do not know how to fully express how much this woman is a positive presence in the world, truly. She created one of my favorite songs to sing to myself, Still Catch the Tide (which I found via a cover by Seanan McGuire), along with so many beautiful songs that I sing when things aren't quite going my way (Go Thou Well, A Different Ophelia). I think my favorite of hers overall is This Side of the Knife.

Leslie Fish: has music up on spotify, youtube, and bandcamp, and all around. Fish is such an immensely influential figure in filk, sci-fi fandom, LARPing, and the SCA. She is one of the foundational pillars of filk. I can't say for certain how many of the songs in my community's rotation of filk have her fingerprints on them, other than to say it's a lot. Carmen Miranda's Ghost is an absolutely classic album from her, and my personal faves of her overall work are Pict Song and The Sun is Also a Warrior.

Vixy and Tony: music is on spotify, youtube, bandcamp, and their website (website also has lyrics + the stories behind the songs). These guys are just so much fun. They're also a great testament to the connectedness of filk as a community, as you can catch cameos of many other people mentioned on this list as backing vocals, writers, or instrumentalists in their songs. I mainly love these guys because of how hopeful their music feels, and they have some fun sci-fi feels going on. Favorites include their cover of Dawson's Christian and Burn it Down. Special shout-out to the youtube video of a live performance of We Are Who We Are that succeeds at making me cry every time I watch it.

Heather Dale: found on spotify, bandcamp, and youtube. Dale's songs are all amazing, I'm going to struggle to pick favorites from her because of how much of her catalogue I love. She primarily works with mythological and historical themes, and has a focus on women. Her music never fails to pull me out of a funk. I think my recommendations would be One of Us, Black Fox, Joan, and Changeling Child as places to start.

And of course, all my love and appreciation to the SCA minstrels, LARP bards, fan parody artists, and devoted community singers who have poured so so much love, effort, and artistry into this scene.

[gender-snatched]

Hey so I want you to tell me every single thing I could possibly want to know about Star Trek

OK YEAH. under cut because. well. you know me.

So, in the 60s, Gene Roddenberry started a sci-fi series. This was Star Trek. It's about a starship named the USS Enterprise, which is part of Starfleet. Starfleet is the exploration branch of the Federation of Planets, which is basically the UN of the galaxy. The USS Enterprise is, at the time of the show, captained by James T Kirk, although it was previously captained by Christopher Pike. Kirk is an extremely traumatized nerd who is doing what he really wants to do. His First Officer (and Science Officer) is Mr. Spock, the only alien on the ship. Spock is (half) Vulcan, a species that values "logic" above all, yadda yadda. His Chief Medical Officer is his bestie, Leonard "Bones" McCoy.

He also has: Lieutenant Nyota Uhura (Communications Officer), Lt. Commander Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (Chief Engineer), Lt Hikaru Sulu (Navigator), Nurse Christine Chapel (Nurse), Ensign Pavel Chekov (pilot [?]), and Yeoman Janice Rand (Yeoman)

All these characters are MASSIVELY important for the time. Uhura was a black woman in a major position on the ship; Chapel, Uhura, and Rand were all strong women; Chekov was Russian during the Cold War; Spock was a metaphor for xenophobia and was also Jewish; Sulu was Asian in a time where anti-Asian racism was super high (and his actor, George Takei was Japanese and was raised in internment camps).

Importantly, Star Trek was so so amazing for a show from the sixties. It had one of the first interracial kisses on TV, and had multiple episodes with all sorts of metaphors. Yes, it had problems (misogyny and a fair bit of racism), but for the sixties? It was so incredible.

And the second season started with the episode "Amok Time", which was written by a queer man and focuses on the idea of Spock going into heat and going to die if he doesn't fuck. Somehow, writhing in the sand with Kirk cures this.

And that's the start of slash culture! Almost all slash culture is the fault of either Star Trek or X Files.

So Star Trek: The Original Series got 3 seasons and became a cult classic. And then in the 80s (?) it got the movies. The Motion Picture (bad, but tolerable), Wrath of Khan (pretty damn good), Search for Spock (bad and questionable), Voyage Home (aka The One With the Whales and fucking AWESOME), and then two others I didn't care about whatsoever.

And then, after the movies, The Next Generation came out. It takes place a bit later, with better cameras and effects. The spaceship is smoother, and it's also incredible. Its cast includes: Captain Jean Luc Picard, First Officer William Riker, Chief Medical Officer Beverly Crusher, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge, Lt Cmr Data (what is his role I can't remember), Security Officer Tash Yar, Worf (also can't remember his role), Dr. Pulaski (I don't like her), Guinan (bartender), and Wesley Crusher.

Terrible confession, but I only finished TOS. I still know TNG pretty well tho.

After TNG we got: Deep Space Nine (my BELOVED), Voyager (wish I had watched more), Enterprise (good if you ignore the misogyny), and then all the nuTrek I haven't been paying attention to because I can't watch it.

Deep Space Nine is the other one I never finished but know, and it focuses on a space station near the planet Bajor. Bajor just threw off the rule of Cardassia, an empire. The Federation, with questionable motives, is helping them rebuild. They send a captain there, and then a wormhole opens, making the space station super super important. Then a war happens but I didn't reach that.

It focuses on Captain Sisko, his son Jake, his first officer Major Kira Nerys, his CMO Julian Bashir, his science officer Jadzia Dax (trangender worm), his engineer Miles O'Brien, a cop Odo, a bartender Quark, a "simple tailor" (actually an exiled Cardassian spy) Garak, and later, Worf.

It's really good, because while TNG pulls a full utopia, DS9 contradicts it and also has just amazing characters. Shame I didn't finish it before Netflix lost it. It also has the first CANONICALLY bisexual character in Star Trek.

There's a LOT of Trek, and I can probably give vague overviews about all of them and also answer any and all questions about it. Please. Please have questions.

[kendrixtermina]

Sigh. Chibnall.

Jodie Whittaker and demographic realism

So I want to make clear that I have no problems whatsoever with Jodie Whittaker’s performance - the character seamlessly kept walking across the screen, she has great energy, love the steampunk goggles. 

Honestly I’ve always believed that giving existing characters a demographic change is not really as revolutionary or helpful as ppl think; New characters and stories (esp. told by writers of those samedemographics) solve the problem much better. Keeping specificity is often better than losing it, and the character still has a background (from an “advanced” civilization that used to do dirty deeds and is still kind of uppity attitudes, a character who’s decided to be against that attitude but still needs to be knocked own from the occasional uppity moment; It makes sense for them to look like a british dude, and they have the freedom to go wherever problems like sexism and racism don’t exist so... ), and will be linked to its origin.  But at worst something that will look dated in a few years like the 80s outfits, the show’s done dated and crowdpleasing before; There’s no hard reason not to do it and I expected no quality dip. 

It certainly worked as as attention grab, the premiere drew a lot of attention but that only lasted as long as it took for the reviews to go sour. But one of the main good things its proponents said could come of it was to help the lack of female anti heroes. So far she really didn’t get to anti hero much; It’s not Whittaker, it’s the scripts. 

I want to make this clear: Varied demograpics are good; 

This is why I kind of hate the term “diversity” is one of those vague euphemisms if you mean “demographic representation”, “social equity” or “demographic realism” just say that. 

In a way this is a good thing, it used to be only the best boldest writers who could get away, noadays it has become acceptable to have varied casts. And that’s how it should be artshouldn’t have to have to pass some arbitrary quality standard to simply reflect reality. But as the rebootverse and star trek discovery should’ve proved realistic demographics can’t replace good writing. Sometimes lack of realistic demographis is associated with bad writing because both come from play-it-safe more-of-the-same consummerism focussed sameyness, often someone who goes against the formulas has a solid vision which makes them good, and focussing on ignored topics and perspectives can yield new ideas (consider stuff like Wonder Woman, Get Out, Black Panther... which were just good, novel movies) but you could have a super interesting memorable story where everyone is a medieval european monk, but the characters are differentiated by personality, attitude, beliefs, or something where the cast ticks all sort of all demographic boxes but the characters are 1D and the story trite and predictable

On the one hand you get those gamergate adjacent fanboys who make “diversity” and “good writing” out to be enimical opposites and then you have the purists/antis who treat any critique of writing to be founded in having something against realistic demographics. You need both! 

Series 11

There were good things about it: An attempt at leastto do more of your classic thought provoking space operas or going back to the shows’ pulp fiction roots, covering some historic periods/topics other than the classic historical fiction tropes (they got a pakistani writer, had Yaz and Ryan discuss social topics among themselves etc.), the emotional story centered around this family coping with a loss, having Ryan sort of be the “main” companion and the one the rest of the team is protective of

But overall the reason I didn’t rush to watch s12 as soon as it came out is that it was a bit... bland. The team interacted mostly with each other; The Doctor had more charge with one shot characters like King James or the Solitract than she really did with the companions. Graham was such a missed opportunity. Remember how everyone loved the dynamic with Wilfred? No attempt to strike a bond over how they���re the older party members, or the professional xenophile trying to nudge the bilbo baggins like reluctant hero? We’re told the Doctor really likes Yaz, and I believe it cause she always liked people like that, but are we shown?

For all that Moffat and RTD were very different writers with different strenghts and weaknesses, both were very character-driven writers, and that was really missing here a bit. 

Some ppl said they didn’t give Yaz enough screentime or personality - but the thing is, they did try. They just failed. They let her make little remarks here and there about her homelife, they just never really assembled into a whole beyond buzzwords and inspirational platitudes and the Standard Companion Traits. I didn’t get a read on what she’s about or who she’s like until the pakisan episode where she unlike Barbara, Donna etc. immediately accepted that the past can’t be changed. Ah, I finally thought, she’s a very responsible dutiful person.

Everything lacks edges and defining moments. 

So far, I didn’t sweat it. I though, ok, not everything can be the high-concept character driven spec fic epic type of story that is my personal favorite. Every time there was some addition to the mythos in any way someone cried ruined forever. When the time lords first appeared. When the time war was introduced. 

The classics too were lower on the character driven ness; Still good pulp fiction content. (imho the character concepts themselves were often pretty good, just not used to the fullest and some of the actresses were treated crappy backstage)

I thought “okey, it wouldn’t be good to break with the tradition of making the sussequent incarnations contrasting”

I did think that there was much liberty with the additions which the others did do only towards the end when it feltmore earned, but, the addition of say, sisters, isn’t too disruptive

Series 12 and the Timeless Child Nonsense

The frustrating thing about this is that it COULD have been good. 

The Master teaming up with the cybermen to try and take over Gallifrey is precisely the sort of story the classics would’ve done. 

“Your society is founded on a shady secret and exploitation of the innocent” is a good plot twist especially in these times. The Master finding that secret and using it to his advantage - also very him. 

Imagine what it could have been like if it had been approached from the perspective of someone who, for all that they were a rebel, still sort of profited from being part of that society, someone who wants to take responsibility for that past and would maybe have to make some tough choice to let the exploitation victim go because it’s right even if it has cosequences for themselves and their civilization. 

but then you ruin that by immediately taking the protagonist out of that society. They and they alone are the victim. 

like this plot could have been good except for the twist that the Doctor and the timeless child are the same. 

Not connecting it to existing lore about the earlier war game days, everything with Omega and Rassilon, that bit about the Time Lord becoming what they were through exposure to the untempered schism... that might be forgiven. Even if it does stretch the suspension of disbelief that every single piece of sci fi scanning equipment in the show didn’t pick anything up; Not to mention that it destroys the stake on every heroic sacrifice or death prophecy plot, every time a companion or oneshot character took the bullet, the whole “out of regens” plot...

This is not me being mad about things being added or changed, but this being done in such a way that undermines the philosophy, the whole flavor... 

Yes, the MC is mysterious, the 7th Doctor arcs did a lot with this etc. but doesn’t spelling something out this clear not deplete rather than add to that? It#s a definite answer even if the final origin isn’t clear. 

But they’re so much else.

The trickster hero accomplishing great deeds with planning, guile, improvisation and duct tape, the implicit value that ressourcefulness trumps raw power. 

The rebel, different because they chose to be or made themselves to be such through their adventures, sticking to their own values in a close-minded society - who embodies & encourages thinking for yourself in every situation and universal plot, who battles enemies like the Daleks and Cybermen that represent comformity

Yeah they have many names yeah they take out gods... but all this was the result of their actions & path in pursuit of knowledge, and also, as Moffat once stated, the funny part is that behind all the fearsome reputation is wit and duct tape. 

The fish in a small pond who started out a misfit, failed their tardis driving exam... etc. and often made a point that they didn’t want immortality or endless godlike power. That’s meaningless if they had it to begin with. 

The explorer who wanted to see more than their corner of the world. 

The ANTI HERO that’s made alltogether too tragic here, too absolved from their uppity civilization

All that is wiped away if they were this special creature to begin with.

Where WAS the philosophy, rly? The big humanist speeches that made me love the show. 

Going Forward

So I think - I HOPE - that this in particular will be treated like the “half human” thing from the TV movie or the now josses additional origin stories from the audios, or be handwaved under the “you cant get it wrong cause everything is in flux” carpet

It’s the Master effing with her to pay her back for the half broken chameleon arch thing. 

It’s possible the Child actually existed, long dead or trapped somewhere - again, dirty mystery at the bottom of a stck-up society is a good twist. but this shouldn’t be more than another maybe in the multiple choice past not a definite answer. 

Also, i hate this line of thought but I can’t stave it off: Why is is now that the MC looks female that we get this vulnerable, passively victimized tomato surprise rather than something with an ugly but definite choice in it. 

I will probably ignore it - parts of me resents this cause “your civilization is based on a lie” could be such a good plot twist (then again the existing twists to that end from the classics and End of Time do enough rly) but if i have to choose between that and the basic meaning of the character....

[sigmaleph]

Book recs masterpost

y’all really came through here, thanks! Here’s a collected version, I will continue to update it if recs keep coming. Format will be a little inconsistent but I will try to keep books by the same author together and give the summary if it exists and who provided the rec.

Under a cut cause it gets long:

Gene Wolfe:

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Three interconnected novellas about life on an authoritarian twin planet system where humans have apparently wiped out the natives. Superbly well written and thoughtful imo

rec by @femmenietzsche

Book of the New Sun 

rec by @napoleonchingon

Octavia Butler:

Dawn, rec by @empresszo, @typicalacademic

Parable of the Sower, rec by @st-just

Kindred, rec by @squareallworthy

Angelica Gorodischer:

Kalpa Imperial

epic fantasy in the style of conan the barbarian, we see the stories of an old empire in some nondescript country, a nondescript amount of millenia ago. small vignettes of different time periods within the country. very light in fantasy, basically an entire book of nothing but lore for a D&D campaign

Trafalgar

comedy sci fi. the life stories of a sales man, a guy who goes door to door selling whatever he can, except IN SPACE. all the stories are framed as him in his little bar in rosario with his friends or drinking mate, telling his latests adventures through space.

La saga de los confines by  Liliana Bodoc

lord of the rings except instead of taking inspiration from nordic folk tales is based on the american conquest. see fantasy races and cultures based on the native american population from south america. lots of poetry, lots of cool classic fantasy with a fresh new flavor

(Already read)

la batalla del calentamiento by marcelo figueras

the fantasy here is very understated to the point of it being magical realism but still my top three favourite book of all time. it starts with a man who suffers gigantism receiving a message from heaven delivered by a wolf speaking in latin. the most colorful and endearing little town with the most wacky of habitants open their arms to the guy who is desperatly in search of redemption

homestuck (by Andrew Hussie)

there is really nothing i can say about this that you havent already heard, so im not even going to bother. just give the first arc (which is about a hundred pages long) a change and see where it goes from there

All of the above suggestions by @fipindustries

Ada Palmer. Terra Ignota series (starts with Too Like the Lightning) (seconded by @youzicha)

(read the first one, have the second one but haven’t read it yet)

Jo Walton, Thessaly series (starts with The Just City)

Yoon Ha Lee, Machinaries of Empire series (starts with Ninefox Gambit) (seconded by @terminallyuninspired)

Ann Leckie:

Imperial Radch series (Starts with Ancillary Justice) (seconded by @youzicha and @squareallworthy)

Raven Tower

N. K. Jemisin:

Broken Earth trilogy (starts with The Fifth Season) (seconded by @typicalacademic)

Dreamblood duology (starts with The Killing Moon)

Seth Dickinson, Masquerade series (starts with The Traitor Baru Cormorant)

(Good rec, already read the first one)

Jeff Vandermeer, Southern Reach series (starts with Annihilation)

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

M. R. Carey, The Girl With All The Gifts

All of the above by @st-just

Le guin:

The Dispossessed, rec by @st-just, @youzicha

The Left Hand of Darkness, rec by @youzicha and @typicalacademic

both also seconded by @squareallworthy

(I love Le Guin, read both of these)

Zelazny: Lord of Light, rec by @st-just

Charles Stross:

Missile Gap.

A Colder War.

Peter Watts, Blindsight

Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather. (I assume. There are multiple books named such)

All of the above by @youzicha

Fonda Lee, Jade City

Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

Shining Path, more thorough rec here.

all by @typicalacademic

Lois McMaster Bujold:

the Vorkosigan Saga

(rec by @omnidistance, seconded by @squareallworthy. Already read all of them, excellent choice)

The Curse of Chalion, rec by @theorem-sorry

Greg Egan:

Permutation City

Orthogonal

above two and “anything else” by him, rec by @saelf

Diaspora, rec by @squareallworthy

The Clockwork Rocket

Physicist discovers relativity in a Riemannian (as opposed to Minkovskian) universe. Also the world is ending.

rec by @jackhkeynes

Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Gaiman, American Gods

Gibson, Count Zero

Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Liu, The Three Body Problem

Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife

Niven and Pournelle, Footfall

North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Powers, The Anubis Gates

Wilson, Spin.

All of the above by @squareallworthy

Pratchett, Discworld books (going postal, thud!, unseen academicals, or the wee free men recommended by @acertainaccountofevents, Wyrd Sisters rec’d by @squareallworthy)

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon & D.O.D.O.

Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life and anything else by him

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (also suggesting this review)

 C.J. Cherryh – The Faded Sun Trilogy.

Honestly not sure there’s anything groundbreaking or unique about it but a solid scifi tale with aliens and politics and it really fleshed out and made me empathize with all the opposing and strikingly different factions.

Taiyao Fujii – Orbital Cloud

A space-related technothriller, quite fun! If you liked the first 2/3rds of Seveneves you’ll probably like this.

Gwynneth Jones – Life.

Story of a woman trying to be the best biologist she can despite a lot of setbacks, bascially. Barely counts as science fiction, really, but I just really like Anna and Spence as characters and their relationship. This a very feminist book, at times quite preachy–but personally it came across as characters being preachy not the author, and therefore much less annoying, but ymmv.

Katherine Addison – The Goblin Emperor.

Fantasy high politics but nice? Like also pretty level headed but not grimdark like fantasy high politics usually is. Also love the worldbuilding, the linguistics, and my precious cinnamon role Maia who deserves good things.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

the most tumblr print book I have ever read. TBH the cover blurb is better than the book but it’s a quick read and enjoyable.

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl.

Ian MacDonald – The Dervish House.

The twenty-minutes-into-the-future setting has aged weirdly since it was written back when Turkey was trying to join the EU, but I reread it recently and the plot and characters are still compelling.

All of the above by @businesstiramisu

"James S. A. Corey", The Expanse series (rec by @justjohn-jj)

Mariam Petrosyan’s The Grey House

kids and minders in a boarding school for the disabled, their relationships and their setting. Mostly a coming-of-age thing but with a lot of weirdness and some fantastic elements. Extremely readable

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky:

Hard to be a God

Inhabited Island

Roadside Picnic

Stanisław Lem:

Fiasco

Cyberiad

Karim Berrouka’s Fées, Weed & Guillotines

what it says on the tin. Pretty fun. I would suspect his other fantasy mystery novel comedies are good too.

The Invisible Planets anthology

extremely hit or miss, but definitely has its hits.

Bernard Weber’s Les Fourmis

All of the above by @napoleonchingon

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells

Sarcastic cyborg tries to avoid humans and watch entertainment media all day and perpetually ends up saving some. With all the snark.

rec by @rhetoricandlogic

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North

Guy is born in 1910s, dies at 80 or so… and is born again in the 1910s, and so on. Also the world is ending.

The End and Afterwards, Andy Cooke

A probe to Alpha Centauri, an idealist Nigerian biotechnician, a humdrum English family – and then the world ends.

Against Peace and Freedom, Mark Rosenfelder

50th century interstellar humanity is mostly doing okay. But socionomics doesn’t cover crises, such as the dictatorship that’s taken over Okura, or the unscrupulous tycoon who’s plotting something over on New Bharat. For that we have Diplomatic Agents. Like you.

all of the above by @jackhkeynes

Meta-recommendations:

worldswithoutend.com, their list of lists, and in particular, defining science fiction books of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

@squareallworthy

Jo Walton’s Revisiting the Hugos series. (by @businesstiramisu)

[theinquisitivej]

Ray Harryhausen’s Sympathetic Portrayal of the Stop-motion Creature: The Clash of Stop-motion Fantasy Against Live-action Reality

The following was adapted from a presentation I gave at 2019 Doctoral College Conference held by the University of Surrey. It is part of a broader project on the history of US stop-motion and acts as a brief window into a chapter in progress on Ray Harryhausen and his films. The presentation was 10 minutes long with questions, and was intended for audiences who would be interested in the subject matter, but not necessarily be experts in the field of stop-motion, special effects, or even animation or film studies. This is a deviation from the film reviews and articles I do on this blog, but adapting parts of my academic research into smaller, digestible pieces like this is something I’d like to do more of in the future. So read, enjoy, and, by all means, provide feedback!

The man you see in the image above is Ray Harryhausen. I expect that name will be familiar to at least some of you if you are fans of classic US fantasy adventure films like Jason and the Argonauts or Clash of the Titans, as Ray Harryhausen was the animator who provided the special effects for not only these films, but thirteen other fantasy and sci-fi films ranging from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The action sequences of these features showcased live-action actors interacting with beasts, statuesque golems, and an assortment of supernatural creatures which Harryhausen would render through the medium of stop-motion. This method of animation involves a physical model being photographed one frame at a time as the animator manipulates the model to create incremental movements which come together to form coherent movement when projected on screen, with a contemporary example being Wallace & Gromit. Harryhausen would intersplice his stop-motion animation with live-action footage using a ‘split-screen rear-projection process’. The live-action component of the sequence would be filmed first, then projected onto a rear screen and the stop-motion animation would be shot in front of this screen. Harryhausen’s legacy of stop-motion animation makes him a key figure in any study of the history of both special effects and stop-motion, but his reputation extends not only to practitioners of these disciplines, but to the filmgoing public and to directors like Peter Jackson, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro.

          Part of this can be attributed to the marketing of these films, which can be observed in these stills taken from the original trailer for the 1958 film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The trailer showcases sequences from the film which feature Harryhausen’s effects, repeatedly proclaiming ‘This is Dynamation!’, a term devised to distinguish Harryhausen’s stop-motion from more traditional forms of animation. The perception of these effects was important in the marketing for these films as features like this trailer indicate that this process of Dynamation wasn’t just implemented as a piece of technical trickery to be kept secret behind the curtain, but was proudly displayed as a means of drawing viewers in to watch these films. The Dynamation for these key action sequences is embedded in the perceived identity of these films. But if that is the case, what can be said about the identity of the stop-motion characters who are front and centre in these memorable sequences, Harryhausen’s assortment of Dynamation creatures? Having established how Harryhausen and his effects became so widely known, I propose that the status of these animated creatures as the main visual attraction for these films makes them not simply dangerous and repulsive monsters we want to see the heroes vanquish along their journeys, but rather presents them as fantastical creatures who audiences are encouraged to revel in the act of witnessing them; they are not repulsive, but attractive for viewers. Therefore, I’m going to suggest in my talk today that, for as dangerous as these creatures may be in the context of the narrative, there is an element at play in these films which allows for the possibility for audiences to become enamoured with these monsters, and even lament their passing when they are eventually defeated.

          An element of this tragic component can be traced back to one of the most important influences on Harryhausen’s career as a stop-motion animator – Willis O’Brien, the special effects artist for such films as 1925’s The Lost World, and, most famously the original 1933 King Kong, which Harryhausen has repeatedly cited as the film that sparked his interest in stop-motion, eventually leading to him working under Willis O’Brien as an assistant animator on Mighty Joe Young in 1949. Harryhausen would evoke particularly iconic moments from King Kong, the film that had such an effect on him, in his own work.

          In King Kong, there is a sequence in which the female lead, Ann, is captured by the native people of Skull Island and offered up to Kong as a sacrifice. Scenes with similar set-ups can be observed in Clash of the Titans and Sinbad and the Golden Voyage, in which the people of Joppa offer princess Andromeda to the Kraken and Margiana is presented as a sacrifice to the One-Eyed Centaur respectively. These scenes call to mind the recognisable imagery of the iconic first appearance of Kong in his original film, creating parallels between these creatures and Kong as each monster towers over a woman being offered to them as a sacrifice. This paints these monsters as imposing threats, but it also frames them as creatures who are revered within the narrative, encouraging the audience to also be taken aback by these creatures as they make their grand entrances.

          With these associations with Kong being made, each film builds on this connection with King Kong by having these creatures share Kong’s fate. At the end of King Kong, the ape meets a tragic end as the planes shoot him down from the Empire State Building. It’s a memorably tragic conclusion to Kong’s tale as humans bring him out of his natural environment and place him in a man-made city in which he is so incompatible that it results in the death of this unique creature. In Clash of the Titans, Perseus arrives on the scene of Andromeda’s sacrifice and presents the Kraken with the head of the Medusa, turning it to stone whereupon the Kraken collapses under its own weight. The Kraken may not be visibly conflicted over inflicting harm on human characters (as opposed to Kong and his protectiveness over Ann), but much like how Kong was brought to New York in chains, the film twice shows the audience that the Kraken is kept in a cage by the Gods of Olympus, let loose only when it suits their purposes. The Kraken, a Titan who once ruled over the Earth before the Gods took over, is reduced to a prisoner, just as Kong was a king on Skull Island, but is brought to New York to entertain crowds. The Kraken is framed as being much less than he once was, before he is destroyed by the live-action human characters in the film. 

          After the Centaur carries Margiana away in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, he appears in the film’s climax assisting the film’s villain before being brought down by Sinbad as he repeatedly stabs him in the back. Despite being explicitly labelled as a ‘Guardian of Evil’ by the film’s dialogue, the Centaur does not harm Margiana, just as Kong does not harm Ann. Additionally, the animation of the Centaur’s death throes continue for some time, lingering on the creature’s pain as it gasps for air and unsuccessfully struggles to remove Sinbad’s dagger from the back of his shoulder before finally dying. Through Harryhausen establishing parallels between these creatures and Kong’s status as a revered and imposing beast, these similarly violent ends at the hands of the human characters has the potential to be read as the loss of something unique, and perhaps even a creature that has been mistreated and misused by the sentient humans and human-like Gods around them.

           While the deaths of Harryhausen’s creatures should logically represent a victory for the live-action heroes of these films, there is nevertheless a heavy weight to the moment when these creatures cease to move, which encourages viewers to consider what has been lost. Now that I’ve established the connection between some of Harryhausen’s creatures and King Kong’s story, I’m going to examine how stop-motion contributes to the sense of loss in these scenes. The movement of stop-motion carries an inherent connection to the uncanny, a psychological phenomenon which is associated with that momentary unease we experience when we’re uncertain whether to register an object, person, or scenario as either familiar or unfamiliar, alive or dead. The physicality of stop-motion models gives them the appearance of puppets and dolls, and, as Paul Wells says, ‘the puppet is the embodiment of some degree of living spirit and energy but also inhuman and remote’. While the uncanny nature of stop-motion is an indication of a viewer being somewhat conscious of the puppet’s lifeless quality as an inanimate object in the real world, it simultaneously indicates the audience’s recognition of the life-like qualities of the puppet’s performance. However, in these moments where Harryhausen’s creatures cease to move, that tension between life and the absence of life ceases to be, marking a clear distinction from when the creature appeared to be active, albeit in an uncanny fashion, and its deathly inertness. Once they stop moving, the uncanniness dissipates, making the shift in how we perceive the character or creature being rendered in stop-motion that much more pronounced. The death scenes for each of Harryhausen’s creatures carry that much more impact because the uncanniness of stop-motion makes us aware of what life is being instilled in these physical models while they are alive in the context of the narrative.

          The final shot of 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms focuses not on the human characters, but on the death of the Rhedosaurus. As the silhouette of its body is cast against the flames, the film calls to mind the destruction caused by this creature, and yet its motionless body contrasts against the flickering flames, emphasising its lifelessness even further. Earlier in the film, a professor expresses wonder at seeing the Rhedosaurus. Even though his fascination with the creature results in his death, the acknowledgement of this perspective that the Rhedosaurus is a source of amazement recognises the fantastic spectacle of this creature – that the camera’s gaze in the film’s final moments rests not on the human characters but on the Rhedosaurus is an indication of how invested the audience is expected to be in this creature’s ultimate fate. The lingering shot of its inert body invites the possibility that its death is indeed lamentable.

           Harryhausen’s Dynamation creatures are embedded in the history of US special effects cinema, and yet in the discussion of the relationship between narrative and US stop-motion, they occupy a curious space. It could be argued that they merely serve as a vehicle for the action sequences for these films, and that they aren’t meaningfully characterised. But I hope I have successfully presented the possibility today that, as the main source of attraction and the most enduring element of these films, the Harryhausen creatures engender a sense of fantastical wonder to them which, when paired with allusions to the imposing and tragic qualities of King Kong’s character and story, as well as the impact of seeing a stop-motion model suddenly become inert and entirely lifeless, has the capacity to instil feelings of regret at the lamentable loss of these unique creatures in the world of these narratives.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Gene Autry's Horse

Peter David recently posted a short essay on the current brouhaha over Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola saying the Marvel movies aren’t real cinema, not genuine works of art, but just “thrill rides”.

Before going further, let me state my unabashed respect and admiration for Peter David.  He’s a creator who certainly earned his spurs, he has a massive body of work, he is an all around mensch, and his opinion is hard earned and well informed.

Except in this case, his conclusions are wrong.

To prove my point, let me ask Peter a question:

What was the name of Gene Autry’s horse?

Those of you wondering what Gene’s horse has to do with the Marvel cinematic universe (hence MCU), my explanation is this: The single largest genre of films made before 1960 were Westerns.

Add to that television programs, where Westerns remained a staple until the mid-1970s.

And radio shows.

And pulp novels.

And comic books.

They were the definitive American movie genre from 1903’s The Great Train Robbery until Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid drove a stake through the heart of the standard genre offering in 1969.

There are some who claim Blazing Saddles did the genre in, but Westerns had endured numerous comedy and parody versions in the past.

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid killed the Western as a popular genre by simply having Butch and Sundance do the most logical thing at the first sign of danger, the thing the real Butch and Sundance did in real life:  They ran away.

And thus a genre trope was forever slain…

This is not to say they’ve never made another film that falls into the broad category of “Western”, but there’s no audience clamor for more of the genre.

Westerns are now simply historical films set in the American west during the period from the fall of the Alamo (1836) to Arizona becoming a state (1912).

There are films that employ Western genre tropes that take place in the contemporary era (Road House and Extreme Prejudice to name two) or transplant the Western genre to other lands (Sukiyaki Western Django and Tampopo, f’r instance), but as a genre it is dead-dead-DEAD.

Yet at one time, Westerns were so popular that not only did everybody know the name of Gene Autry’s horse, but said horse starred in his own TV series!

So what happened?

Well, several things.

I could cite the changing audience in America, going from 80% rural prior to WWII to 80% urban / suburban after WWII (with a corresponding rise in detective and spy genres, as well as sci-fi), or I could cite a huge glut of material made even more accessible by television, but the truth is this:  The overwhelming bulk of American Westerns were nothing but product.

It was actually built into the genre.  I’ve been trying to locate the original essay, but a scholarly study some years back concluded only 8 basic plot conflicts drove Western stories, and only 17 stock characters carried said stories (they can be good, bad, or neutral characters, effectively tripling their number).

The essay went on to liken American Westerns to Japanese noh or kabuki dramas:  Far from familiarity of material being a problem, audiences came expecting certain tropes and stock characters, and gained their enjoyment from how well said tropes and characters were presented.

Sound familiar?

This is not to say there weren’t films that fell into the Western genre that also aspired to art, but you either had to be a Hollywood heavy hitter to get a chance at making a film like that or, at the tail end of the genre, flying so low under the radar that nobody recognized what you were doing until you did it.

Does that sound familiar?

But the overwhelming majority of Westerns, while possessing technical craftsmanship, were just product:  So many feet of gunfights. So many reels of stampedes.

Big budget A-picture or bare bones B-movie, they all fell into the same general patterns, and studios, large or small, promoted them the same way.

And audiences were fine with this.  Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans frequently wound up among the top 10 box office draws in Hollywood during their careers.

Where are those Westerns now?

I’m a big fan of old B-Westerns, having grown up with them on TV as a kid, and know a fair amount about the personalities and production companies involved, seeking out B-Westerns on Amazon Prime and YouTube and the multi-pack bargain bins at big box stores.

How many of today’s superhero fans could identify William Boyd or Red Barry or Rocky Lane or Buck Jones?

They might remember hearing the names of Roy Rogers or Gene Autry since those stars were involved in mainstream marketing such as fast food restaurants or baseball teams (and Autry donated a museum to Los Angeles that’s named after him), but how many have actually seen any of their movies?

We have two competing superhero universes today, DCU and MCU.

Where are the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents movies?  How come there’s no Dr. Solar or Brain Boy or Magnus, Robot Fighter films?

Answer:  No large corporation stand to make billions promoting those characters and licensing them to toys, video games, vitamin, and Underoos.

Corporations possess no sense of integrity to the original creators’ concepts.  They will change things in the blink of an eye if they think it will boost their profit margin.  They’ll promote the silliest and the most self-damaging ideas if they think it will make them a few extra bucks today.

Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman succeeded at DC bcause nobody there cared what the creators did so long as they turned their work in on time.

Product.

Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and Jim Steranko blazed exciting new trails at Marvel because Martin Goodman couldn’t have cared less what they were doing so long as they delivered on schedule and under budget.

Product.

They flew under the radar.  They worked in a fast and grungy fashion, knocking the books out as quickly as they could.

To amuse themselves they trafficked in big ideas, eccentric art, outre stories.

That it caught on and blazed a new trail proved a combination of talent and luck.

There was no similar boom for romance comics or nurse comics or Western comics during the same period.

Right now the MCU movies are riding high and they are made with a great deal of technical care and they are amusing and entertaining.

So were Westerns.

MCU movies aim at too specialized an audience.  They appeal to this generation, but there’s no guarantee they’ll appeal to the next.

Indeed, there’s a strong argument that the next generation will reject the previous generation’s entertainment simply because it’s…well…theirs.

The films of Coppola and Scorsese will be watched.

They’re not product.

Oh, there were financed to make money, sure enough, but they were financed to make money by expressing the director’s personal taste and vision.

Further, they tend to transcend genre.

Yeah, two generations from now people who really love gangster movies will probably look up The Godfather and GoodFellas.

But people who love film, people who love art will be watching them as well.

They’ll also watch Public Enemy and Little Caesar, but unless they’re film buffs with specialized tastes, they’re going to skip the dozens of “programmers” cranked out in the 1930s to satisfy fans of that genre.

And the reason?  The Godfather and GoodFellas and Public Enemy and Little Caesar transcend their genres.

They are about people, not thrills and chills.

Consider classic Universal horror films.

James Whale & co. snuck one bona fide brilliant work of art past Carl Laemmle with Bride Of Frankenstein but after that the brakes clamped down hard and fast.

Uncle Carl couldn’t have geniuses running around doing whatever they felt like, thus risking the audience for Universal’s product.

Consistent mediocrity is better than risky genius in the eyes of the corporations.

The classic Universal monsters?  Reduced to The Munsters now; familiar icons, to be sure, but empty jokes, shadows of their former selves.

Replaced by newer monsters who in turn have been replaced by newer monster who in turn have been replaced by newer monsters and who will be replaced by newer monsters still.

‘Twas ever thus.

I begrudge the enjoyment no nobody who enjoys MCU movies.

Have fun.  Knock yourselves out.

But never mistake popcorn for caviar.

    © Buzz Dixon

  Champion was the name of Gene Autry’s horse.

[harry-lloyd]

“It’s been a gentle start to the day,” Harry Lloyd says with a smile, speaking at a subdued volume while his six-month-old baby naps in the other room. We’re chatting on a Saturday afternoon, and Lloyd’s tousled hair is silhouetted against the sunlight streaming through the hotel room windows. It’s a warm day in Los Angeles, a stark contrast to the subzero chill that he braved for last month’s photo shoot in New York.

On screen, the English actor’s piercing gaze bespeaks a calculating persona, an agenda beneath the charm. Offscreen, there’s an unguarded, guileless ease to Lloyd’s manner—he’s thoughtful and genuinely engaged in the questions posed to him.

Lloyd is perhaps best-known for his portrayal of the unscrupulous, throne-obsessed Viserys Targaryen in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Since his character’s macabre demise, the 35-year-old has been plenty busy. Among other screen and stage projects, Lloyd played the classmate and confidante to Eddie Redmayne’s Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything; a brilliant (and womanizing) novelist in The Wife (Lloyd mentions that he’s thrilled for Glenn Close’s Oscar nomination); and an intelligence officer, opposite J.K. Simmons, in the Starz original series Counterpart. His latest undertaking—the reason he’s in LA—is the Marvel comics-based series, Legion. For the third and final season of the FX show, Lloyd will play the role of David Haller’s father and X-Men leader, Professor Charles Xavier. (In so doing, he joins the ranks of Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy, who portrayed Professor X in the film series.)

Our conversation starts with Counterpart, the sci-fi/espionage thriller. A Cold War experiment in East Germany has splintered the timeline, and two formerly identical worlds now exist in an uneasy and rapidly unraveling détente. Each character in the show has an “other” self—a counterpart on the other side—and crossovers between the two dimensions wreak geopolitical havoc. There are slick diplomats, hapless bureaucrats, a contract assassin—and at the center is Peter Quayle, the director of Strategy in the Office of Interchange, a sort of United Nations-meets-MI6 outfit.

The morally obtuse Quayle is not exactly a sympathetic figure, but Lloyd embodies the character with a subtlety that allows the vulnerability to seep through the cracks in the bravado. As Quayle’s carefully-calibrated life crumbles, you feel for him—a national security strategist who’s in way over his head, blind to the fact that his own wife is a mole. Those pale, elegant hands are not meant to be dirtied fumbling about dim halls and holding rooms—and that’s not even getting into the subplots within the plot twists.

Lloyd’s enthusiasm for the project is clear. He calls Counterpart one of the favorite things he’s ever worked on, and credits Justin Marks, the creator of the show: “The writing is excellent, which attracts really good actors.” Among the sterling cast is, of course, J.K. Simmons, who plays two Howard Silks—the placid paper-pusher, Howard “Alpha,” in dimension one; and the cocksure clandestine operative, Howard “Prime,” in dimension two.

“I was very scared of him originally,” Lloyd admits with a laugh when I ask about his experience working with Simmons, who garnered an Oscar for his portrayal of a ruthless music instructor in Whiplash. “But he [Simmons] has been so welcoming and makes you feel at ease. I’ve learned so much from him—and we have a lot of fun.”

The scenes with Quayle Alpha and Howard Prime are often tense, even claustrophobic, not just because they take place in dark cars and cramped rooms, but because we sense the stranglehold of identity—the underlying question of just how much of one’s self is the product of choice versus circumstance. If you put John le Carré and Jorge Luis Borges in the same room, they might come up with something like this—forking paths that diverge and converge, labyrinths of spies and alter egos.

Lloyd describes Quayle Alpha and Howard Prime as an “unhappy couple, both caught in this lie, who must rely on each other even though neither likes or respects the other.” On the flip side, Lloyd continues, “Quayle Prime and Howard Alpha have a completely different relationship” such that playing his character’s “other” feels “like a completely different job.”

There’s a cerebral, granular detail to Lloyd’s musings when I ask about the characters, fictional or real, that he draws from in portraying the two Quayles.

He explains that while on break between filming the Berlin and LA portions of season two, he and Justin Marks discussed the aesthetics of Alien 3. Marks envisioned Echo, the interrogation facility in dimension two, as a “penal colony, rather than a hospital or prison. The relationships between the inmates and officers draw on that” psychological dynamic.

In conveying Quayle’s “slightly unhinged” persona, Lloyd takes cues from other classics: Billy Bibbit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a “somewhat childish figure who looks up to McMurphy,” and Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now, who harbors a manic obsession with Marlon Brando’s Kurtz. Lloyd incorporates elements of these characters in Quayle Prime’s dynamic with Yanek, a warden at Echo—there’s an “evangelical fervor, where you sense [the character’s] loss of contact with reality.”

Season two of the show delves deeper into the deceit, paranoia, and existential quandaries inherent in navigating and manipulating two worlds. (It seems no coincidence that the writers chose Alexander Pope as the name of the character who trains sleeper agents—a little learning is a dangerous thing.) I ask Lloyd about the techniques he uses to keep his Alpha and Prime personas from getting jumbled.

“In terms of playing two parts for the first time, I’m lucky in that Quayle Prime exists solely in the Echo location, so we were able to do all that filming in a couple of weeks over the summer,” Lloyd tells me. “This season, we started filming in Berlin and ended in LA, so having a new location, new set,” helped keep the two characters separate.

Lloyd can’t discuss more details from season two without risking plot spoilers, so we pivot to other projects. I mention the internet speculation over whether Viserys Targaryen makes a comeback in the next season of Game of Thrones. “Really?” Lloyd replies with a mix of curiosity and incredulity. “That death seemed pretty final to me—I’m not sure how he comes back from that.”

I explain that the Reddit murmurings refer more to flashback scenes, and then ask Lloyd about filming his character’s grisly exit.

“That was pretty much the last scene I filmed on that show, and I remember that day very well,” Lloyd says—the amusement is pronounced in his voice. “It was freezing cold. We shot quite early in the morning, and I had to act drunk. Doing that so early in the day can go horribly wrong,” he explains, as you don’t want to overact it. But with a death scene like that, where the would-be king is “crowned” as molten gold is poured over his head, Lloyd could really let loose with the screaming—a finale that’s seared into fans’ minds.

Lloyd draws out nuances in his characters through deep-dives into their back stories. When filming the Game of Thrones pilot, he kept George R.R. Martin’s books under his chair for ease of consultation. As the filming continued, though, Lloyd wanted to get beyond Daenerys Targaryen’s narration of Viserys as the “brute—the petulant, unkind older brother.”

In Lloyd’s view, that perspective discounts the whole of Targaryen history: “This character feels the weight of his family on his shoulders. He’s had a terrible childhood; his parents are dead. He has no family apart from a little sister who doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation. He carries these scars, and by re-writing the narrative as the ‘Chronicles of Viserys Targaryen,’ we start to see how Viserys justifies his cruelty.”

Lloyd pauses briefly, mulling over this re-framing: “That’s the job of an actor—to give your character a mouthpiece” and guide the audience as to where our sympathies should lie.

“It’s a great time to be an actor,” Lloyd continues. “I’m lucky to be working with people I’ve admired for years, and to arrange projects [in a way that allows me] to explore different avenues. I hope it stays like this—there are so many more stories to tell.”

Our conversation drifts to more meta territory—how technological evolution continues to reshape the way we consume and relate to art and storytelling. Lloyd is democratic in his engagement with cultural mediums—he enjoys audio books and made-for-radio plays, and he’s fascinated by the future of VR. He loves the stage and recently played the lead role in The Good Canary, John Malkovich’s London directorial debut. Lloyd has also been on the other side of the camera, writing and directing “Supreme Tweeter.” The short web series, made in 2015, is premised on a cheeky concept that came to his co-creator (and now wife), Jayne Hong, in a dream: What if North Korea’s Kim Jong-un suddenly follows you on Twitter—what absurdity might ensue and what are the implications of treating your identity as a commodity, a “brand”? (I point out that this satirical take on social media as propaganda was an eerily prescient concept, given our current Tweeter-in-Chief—a topic that Lloyd diplomatically sidesteps.)

With streaming services supplanting cable and the proliferation of social media content, it’s a challenge, says Lloyd, “to hold erratic attention spans for more than a moment.” Among the tech-driven transformations that he references is how long-form television shows like Counterpart, with intricate plot lines and character arcs, are replacing the novel as a way of enjoying long-form stories. He also observes that interactive video games are looking more like films, with complex narratives and attention to visual detail and cinematic soundtracks, and vice versa—there are online films that contain a choose-your-own-adventure component with multiple plot lines. These various forms of entertainment may all be converging, Lloyd hypothesizes, as “new audiences have a desperate thirst for full immersion.”

For all these innovations, though, Lloyd jokingly refers to himself as a “fuddy-duddy” who loves to read books and has a record player back home in London. That doesn’t rule out throwback video games, though—for Christmas, Marks gave him a miniature version of the original Nintendo system, preloaded with all the old NES games. His favorite? “Super Mario 3, where Mario gets to wear the raccoon tail.” And continuing the theme of constant evolution, Lloyd points out that players now design new levels for these old games, which everyone can then upload to their own handheld consoles.

For now, though, there’s not much by way of free time. Lloyd is a new dad, and it’s entirely endearing how his tone and manner warm to the point of giddiness when discussing fatherhood. “Long story short, it’s phenomenal, beyond description,” he says. “There’s definitely a lot to learn,” but he’s enjoying the daily agenda, which includes “a lot of singing and chatting and mimicry” with the baby—spending time “staring at each other, making each other laugh, communicating in this pre-language way, just getting to know each other.”

As for audiences just getting to know Lloyd, the depth and versatility he brings to screen and stage promise many more dimensions beyond Quayle’s Alpha and Prime selves to be explored. Lloyd doesn’t rule out anything when it comes to collaborations and characters—as he puts it, “the more you give, the more you get out of the experience.” And more of Harry Lloyd is a very good thing.

[kenro199x]

*I’m going to cut and paste the entire thing here as to avoid being stuck in a paywall for future readers. 

Overlooked No More: Debra Hill, Producer Who Parlayed ‘Halloween’ Into a Cult Classic

Hill rose through Hollywood’s ranks, setting an example as a successful Hollywood producer at a time when there were few women in the industry.

May 22, 2019

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

By Melena Ryzik

Perhaps the most famous babysitter in all of moviedom, Laurie Strode, the teen heroine of “Halloween,” is stalked by a crazed predator and survives — repeatedly. Laurie was resourceful and kind, “quiet but defiant,” said Debra Hill, who helped create the character.

Once a babysitter herself, with a taste for 1950s B-horror flicks, Hill wrote and produced “Halloween” with the director John Carpenter. Laurie endured as a symbol of female resolve, fending off her attacker and rebuilding her life.

“Here was a woman who didn’t run from danger, but stepped up to it,” Hill later told the author David Konow for his book “Reel Terror.”

Hill, those who knew her said, was equally audacious.

“Being a woman in show business is a scary situation,” Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred as Laurie and befriended Hill, said in a phone interview. “It’s a boys’ club, and she established herself, very early on, as a very thorough and capable producer.”

At the time, Hill was a rare female producer who grew to be a mentor for a pivotal generation of women in Hollywood — “part den mother, part cheerleader,” as Stacey Sher, her former employee and now a producer in her own right (“Erin Brockovich,” “Django Unchained”), put it.

Hill nurtured talent wherever she found it — the filmmaker James Cameron was once her visual effects guy; a second assistant director, Jeffrey Chernov, became a producer of “Black Panther” — and had the confidence not to fear that others would leapfrog over her if she gave them a steppingstone.

She later grew frustrated, friends and colleagues said, that the system in which she excelled as a producer did not welcome more women as directors. But even that did not dim her passion for the industry, and she spent the last few years of her life — she died in 2005 — working on a romantic thriller that would be her directorial debut.

Hill considered herself, above all, a storyteller, starting with “Halloween,” which she and Carpenter, her boyfriend at the time, wrote in three weeks. It catapulted them into major careers.

Released in 1978, “Halloween” had a shoestring budget, about $320,000, and went on to earn $70 million globally (around $200 million in today’s dollars), a record for an independent movie. A slasher classic that revitalized the genre, it’s now in the National Film Registry. Hill also championed Curtis, then 19, for “Halloween,” her first feature, presenting a model of female camaraderie in a male-dominated field.

Hill worked or was credited on most of the “Halloween” sequels — last year’s blockbuster installment, also starring Curtis, and made long after Hill’s death, was the 11th in the franchise — and collaborated with Carpenter on other seminal horror and sci-fi thrillers, including “The Fog” and “Escape from New York,” after their romantic relationship ended.

She was an exacting producer. As she told The Los Angeles Times in 1982: “I discovered very early that there are two ways for a woman producer to go. You could be aggressive, or you can be very nice. So I arrive on the set, in my tight jeans, and people wonder. Then they see I’m nice. Then, finally, they see I mean business.”

Curtis recalled that Hill scrutinized every receipt, keeping track of how many spools of thread and rolls of gaffer tape were used — and yet, said Curtis, Hill was “beloved” by her overwhelmingly male crews.

“She brought the proof that a woman can do anything in successful filmmaking that men do,” said Jeanine Basinger, a film historian. “They can make top box office blockbusters, they can make action films and genre films and horror films. She brought originality.”

In the 1980s Hill teamed up with Lynda Obst, a former studio executive, in one of the first female producing partnerships. Their movies included “The Fisher King,” “Clue,” based on the board game, which was Hill’s idea to develop for the screen, and “Adventures in Babysitting,” the directorial debut of Chris Columbus (“Home Alone,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”).

“Debra knew how to do every job on a set,” from positioning cameras to fine-tuning lighting, Obst said. She remembered Hill standing “with her arms on her hips, like Peter Pan arriving in Neverland,” surveying every shot. “She just was able to solve a problem, imaginatively.”

On “The Fisher King” (1991), when the director Terry Gilliam suddenly decided during a location scout that he wanted to create an elaborate dance with 1,000 waltzing extras in Grand Central Terminal, Hill figured out how to pull it off. The sequence was among the most lauded in the film, which earned multiple Oscar nominations and won one (best supporting actress, Mercedes Ruehl).

Debra Gaye Hill was born on Nov. 10, 1950, in Philadelphia, to Frank and Jilda Hill. Her mother was a nurse and her father, who had been a Hollywood art director before her birth, eventually became a salesman, including on a car lot. The family, among them Hill’s younger brother, Franklin Robert Hill Jr., known as Bob, moved often.

Once, when house-hunting in Connecticut, their parents parked the children, then 10 and 11 or so, in a local movie theater. “I think Deb and I saw ‘Gone With the Wind’ four times a day,” said Bob Hill, a retired tugboat captain.

They later settled in Haddonfield, N. J., which Hill used as inspiration for the fictional Haddonfield, Ill., setting of “Halloween.” Horror, she observed, always struck in small, under-policed towns and sleepy suburbs, where it seemed, tantalizingly, like nothing could go wrong.

“The idea of pulling off the veneer and seeing what lies beneath has always intrigued me,” she told Konow, the author of “Reel Terror” (2012).

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Temple University, she became a flight attendant, then lingered in Jamaica, getting involved with a jazz musician.

That led to writing liner notes for albums, her brother said, which evolved into more writing gigs. She landed in California and, through her father’s connections, worked as a production assistant and a script supervisor, or “script girl,” as it was then called, on low-budget movies (including Carpenter’s first feature, “Assault on Precinct 13”) before moving her way up to producer.

Off the set, Hill liked to give dinner parties, cooking for up to 20 people. (She made a mean matzo ball soup, said her friend Diane Robin, an actress, and poached her salmon in the dishwasher.) Hill would gather guests around her piano to sing and coax them to dance. Sometimes, she pulled out a baton and did a majorette routine that she had learned as a teenager. Later, because of the cancer that would take her life, her legs were amputated; undeterred, she threw a disco-themed birthday party and danced along in her wheelchair.

Hill was 54 when she died on March 7, 2005. Her directorial debut never happened, but in a speech she gave in 2003 in accepting an award from the organization Women in Film, it was clear she knew her importance in the industry.

“I want every producer, studio executive and agent in this room to include me in their directors list,” she said, “along with the women who have come before me, and the women directors who will come after me. If you need me, you’ll find me — I’ll be sitting by my pool, reading scripts and waiting for your numerous offers.”

In 2005 the Producers Guild, where she was a board member, named a fellowship in her honor, for women and men “whose work, interests, professionalism and passion mirror that of Debra Hill.” A dozen people have been recipients thus far, furthering her reach within the industry.

“There weren’t a lot of women to emulate or follow or learn from when I came to Hollywood in 1975,” Hill said in 2003. “Women struggled to have their voices heard, but I refused to struggle along with them. I realized that a woman can be successful in a man’s world.”

[aion-rsa]

Aquaman 2 Will See Director James Wan Embracing His Horror Roots

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While production on recently titled DC sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom has been underway in the UK for about a month now, the plot of the Jason Momoa-starrer mostly remains obscured under deep water. However, returning director James Wan has provided an intriguing tidbit that somewhat clarifies the plot issue, citing—of all things—cult classic 1960s Italian horror film Planet of the Vampires as its main source of inspiration. While Wan came into the trident-towing hero’s first solo film having helmed drastically different modern horror classics, the reference nevertheless indicates his genre-hybrid intentions.

James Wan seems to be signaling that his once-unlikely comic book movie franchise, Aquaman, is getting an injection of genre themes that only a directorial maestro of movie scares such as himself can administer. Indeed, while little to nothing is known about the 2022-scheduled sequel outside of its titular reference to the Lost Kingdom (more on that in a moment), his name-drop, made in an interview with Total Film, evoking the seemingly-random Planet of the Vampires certainly feels like a wild, left-field tease, especially for a sequel that has been described in the past as having a more serious tone than its predecessor.

“Aquaman 2 is very heavily inspired by Planet of the Vampires,” says Wan. “You can take the boy out of horror but you can never take the horror out the boy.” While there’s a level of cheekiness to his statement, there are some concepts to which it can aptly apply.

Contextually, Planet of the Vampires was released in 1965, manifesting as a schlocky (even for its time) Italian space sci-fi product of director Mario Bava. The film centers on the ordeal of two exploratory spaceships, in which mysterious, unseen alien life on the surface of planet Aura possess the bodies of some crew members, even reanimating the corpses of those already dead. Thusly, the rapidly-dwindling population of unpossessed members are thrust into a desperate struggle for survival. The film was the kind of double-feature fodder typical of the time, glaringly showcasing its production’s limited resources, strictly-organic scene elements, lack of optical effects and creaky wooden spaceship sets.

Yet, the film has nevertheless become widely regarded as a cult classic. It is also frequently cited as a tonal and thematic influence for director Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, Alien. In fact, while Scott and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon initially claimed they hadn’t seen the film, O’Bannon later walked back the denial, and went so far as to admit that the famous giant remains of the “Space Jockey” found by the crew of the Nostromo was a concept copied from one of Planet of the Vampires’ signature scenes, in which their crew discover an oddly-oversized humanoid skeleton in the ruins of a presumably-ancient spacecraft.

Yet, the “horror” within himself that Wan mentioned earlier is a far cry from anything even closely resembling Planet of the Vampires, having successfully manifested in modern watershed classics in the genre, going back to his big break in 2004 with the original Saw, which laid the groundwork for the popular 2000s-era sub-genre that is derisively referred to as “torture porn.” However, he also branched off into supernatural-centric offerings like 2007’s Dead Silence, and, more notably, the sequel-spawning 2010 film Insidious and 2013’s The Conjuring, which spawned an entire shared universe of horror films—that notably bears its name—consisting of direct sequels and prequels, along with spinoffs such as the Annabelle movies and The Nun, with more to come. Consequently, the hiring of Wan for a DC tentpole the scope of Aquaman was initially seen as a rather curious development, arguably akin to a scenario in which Ilya and Alexander Salkind hired The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper to head Superman instead of Richard Donner.

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So, how would such a campy film become relevantly compared to Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom? The answer potentially lies in the open-ended nature of its title, namely its reference to the Lost Kingdom. As Willem DaFoe’s Vulko explained in an expository scene in the first film, the planet’s ancient sea-dwelling people once lived continentally unified on the surface as a grand, prosperous society who enjoyed technological advancement during a time in which most of the world’s outsiders still thought the world was flat—notwithstanding some who, curiously enough, still do. However, complacency led to a disaster known as the Great Fall, in which misuse of the powerful Trident of Atlan created a wave of destruction that left their land shattered and sunken into the sea. Yet, the same catastrophe also imbued those people with the power to breathe underwater, resulting in the once-unified civilization becoming segmented into separate kingdoms—Atlantis, Xebel, Fisherman, Trench, Brine, Deserters, with the seventh one, the isolated Lost Kingdom, remaining an unseen mystery to the rest. Consequently, Wan has an open book for a potential horror-movie-inspired ordeal in which Momoa’s Arthur Curry/Aquaman has to protect Atlantis against possessed and/or zombified people from the Lost Kingdom.

Outside the possibility that Wan is simply borrowing analogous concepts, the nature of how a sequel inspired by Planet of the Vampires will play out against things such as the confirmed returning threat of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s personal-vendetta-driven Black Manta remains a mystery. Yet, the increasingly-lost element of surprise could be Wan’s motivation behind his Vampires tease. “Well, the first movie took a lot of people by surprise, right?” continues Wan. “And that’s partially because they were not familiar with the comic book, which deals in this very lurid, strange world. People were taken aback that I didn’t throw all that stuff away and make a dark, heavy film. But I didn’t feel that would have been right for it. So, with the second film, I feel it will be easier for people to accept where we go because I’ve already laid the foundation.”

Wan certainly has experience overcoming expectations, with 2018’s Aquaman having proven that he has a clear and widely accessible vision for superhero cinema. Indeed, in a bit of trivia that still manages to surprise, the film stands as the highest-earning film in Warner’s entire DC Extended Universe continuity of films, having grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide—a take that tops the $822.8 million made by its widely-regarded crown jewel, 2017’s Wonder Woman, and the $657.9 million of its subsequent underperforming team-up megamovie, 2017’s Justice League. Consequently, while many may not view Aquaman as the DCEU’s most prominent hero, he currently stands as its clear breadwinner, which makes his solo sequel arguably the continuity’s most crucial entry. Can a Planet of the Vampires style motif match such purported importance?

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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is currently scheduled to hit theaters on Friday, December 16, 2022; a date safely distanced from the reach of the Delta variant and will hopefully remain unaffected by any other unwelcome pandemic developments.

The post Aquaman 2 Will See Director James Wan Embracing His Horror Roots appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[petty-crush]

“Alien: Covenant”

-I fucking loved this film, utterly and wholly because Ridley Scott let his freak flag fly

-this film is mythological in stature; combining Greek gods, Mary Shelley, Old Testament, haunted houses, the cosmos; goddamn delightful

-as the first shot implies, the android David is our protagonist

-in fact this film starkly makes me realize that he is kinda the whole key to the “Prometheus” saga (which makes it separate from “Alien” saga) +everyone else plays second fiddle /he is an id for Ridley

-this might be Fassbender’s greatest performance yet; he is given great leeway and pedestals for the character and hits all of them on the bullseye

-I think the little opening mini movie is marvelous; deftly setting up the idea of mortality and creation

-nice to Guy Pierce play Weyland young, allowing him to put his distinctive gravitas stamp on the character

-the shot of David at the piano is a scrumptious shot that exists inside the film and by itself

-the scope of the space station with the yellow sail, immediately tips us off this will be a grand adventure, far away from the tight corridors of “Alien” and very much its own thing, in the 50’s sci fi mold +I love it

-didn’t expect a person to burn to death in their cryo sleep chamber. A sharp note to unsettle our nerves

-Fassbender plays a second, pretty much identical looking android named Walter, and his very small adjustments become pronounced the more we see him interact, creating a separate identity

-he is much more docile and very tender to the grieving Daniels (the wife of the burned man)

-Daniels is played by Katherine Waterson, who has a moppet look but fierce convictions

-I find her scene mourning his loss and their shattered co life together very moving and well done +interesting to note a woman getting over a man’s death when often in films it’s very much the opposite

-what is up with both films in “Prometheus” saga making the pilot the most amusing character, and a name actor playing them? Ideas Elba before, Danny McBride killing it here

-I laughed out loud when the Daniel’s ex is revealed to be James Franco; face timing while rock climbing without a safety rope is exactly what his reputation would infer he would do

-I find the use of McBride humming along to the transmission to the tune of John Denver very amusing +again echoing Elba playing Stephen Stills’ “love the one you’re with” (and I suppose the disco in Scott’s “The Martian”). 70’s music in the 22nd century. Interesting motif

-I like how the film establishes billy crudup’s character as a total chickenshit, unable to handle the responsibility of leading the crew +interesting detail where it talks about him being super religious, referring to his fellow colonists as “my flock”, leaving him thought to be unsuitable to delegate and survive under pressure

-crudup of course ignores waterson’s perfectly good advice and reservations, which makes me wonder if the morale of the Universe is “He should have listened to her; the story of the cosmos”

-it is very strange to see so such forest and green land in this series

-I particularly like the line “do you hear that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing”

-the chemical warfare of “Prometheus” is very pronounced as the black substance makes its way into the victims ears noses; again, this directly clashes with the Ripley saga but it’s doing its own thing here and and is pretty consistent

-nice little moment as Walter tries to comfort Daniels’ reservations by simply stating “it would make a lovely spot for a cabin” then walks away; contrast to Crudup’s character overselling how great he finds it, and continues to rattle off how over worried he found Daniels, this smothering her and make her apprehensive +brevity is the soul of wit is set up here

-good god, there is a ton of blood here, a smattering of it

-I find the scene where the first infected strobes out and spurts blood out his back to be effectively creepy

-I’m considering the creature in this film (“neomorph”) a in between. Not as well designed as the giger perfection, but a huge step up from the black sea liquor from “Prometheus”. It is startling and very well directed

-a masterful little shot as a dead colonist is shown partially in frame, his wedding ring clearly in shot, another man cupping his head, and whispering to his mouth “I love you”; succinctly setting up their same sex love and marriage

-the neomorph is definitely far more animalistic in this film. It’s given unhuman like movements, that suggest more primal instincts

-I cannot do justice to the goosebumps I felt as the party was lead by its stranger savior and we see the charred bodies and landscapes

-the stranger savior is at this point revealed to be David (with iggy pop type hair at first) who then hijacks back the film, rightfully so

-immensely hilarious moment as David shoulder knocks Walter, and adds “Hello there, brother”

-David is giving me Dr. Pretorius (“Bride of Frankenstein”)/Dr. Moreau (“Island of Dr. Moreau”) vibes +ie creators who bent the structure of biology and didn’t care who got destroyed in the way

-there is a long, long scene where Walter and David take turns playing the flute that is frankly worthy of an entire essay in itself

-firstly, it’s a big fuck you to anyone who was dismayed by the flute segment in “Prometheus” +there it was five seconds, here it’s like 10 minutes and two identical people are doing it at the same time

-secondly, they are playing the fucking theme to “Prometheus” on said flute +those is self-reference in the scale of Mel Brooks (and makes me think Ridley was grinning during the Sean bean-“lord of the rings” scene in “The Martian”

-the line to Watler from David “just blow, I will take care of the fingering”

-it is revealed that David unnerved people by being so human like in temperament that future versions like Walter were “streamlined”/neutered, so that Walter can play but not compose +there’s going to be a whole genetic modification bit coming up, but now I realize how eugenics/forced sterilization this sounds

-the contrasting glee in David’s voice and unease in Walter’s eyes as David relates how he was around their creator when he died, and David notes “he was stupid and weak, like all humans”

-the whole scene the camera is robotically swerving around clearly adding to the tension the audience feels in witnessing this unorthodox meeting

-needless to say, the film takes a monumental leap and variance in tone hereafter

-David mentions that Shaw (From “Prometheus”, last seeing going with David as a decapicated head) died, but she was “so kind to me” and David loved her -“much the same way Walter looks at you” (Daniels disagrees) “oh, does he call it ‘duty’? I know the difference”

-Ridley is really digging into the horror elements of the film as the neomorph comes up the wall and severs a woman’s head, leaving it floating in a full sink +the neomorph is eating her shoulder, shoring carnivore habits for the time in this universe

-one of the strangest moments (and there will be plenty coming up) where David and the tall albino neomorph are communicating via breathing

-the most emotion David has is when crudup kills it and David screams “how could you?!? He trusted me!”

-crudup has a equally odd non sequitur where he threatens David to “tell me what is going on, or I will destroy your perfectly calm composure”

-this film is bizarre and exploitive in the extreme

-for those that are keeping track, the importance hierarchy is as follows David neomorphs/xenomorphs humans +we are fucked

- my favorite sequence in the entire film as we see (via David’s memories?) that he dropped the entire payload of black goo/chemical weapons upon an unsuspecting engineer population (who look totally different from ones we saw in “Prometheus” in facial structures and eyes) and they die as the goo descends upon them like locusts. +it seriously looks straight out of Exodus as God wrecked his vengeance upon Pharioh

-so yes, that was the charred bodies we saw before

-we see the lair of David as it is littered with graphs, illustrations, designs of his work in the goo into the neomorph and beyond + his response, dripping with sarcasm: “idle hands are the devil’s anything”

-we are officially one step closer to classic “Alien” universe as the first facehugger is introduced (to kill crudup)

-Daniels is trying to reach Tennessee (Danny McBride) as still others are getting slaughtered, the neomorphs are clearly the hounds to David’s Satan

-line of the film as crudup wakes up to see David, asks him what his religion is, and he responds “Creation”

-a early beta of the xenomorph is here (still not quite Giger 100), as he splits from Crudup’s chest after the question, and he dances, mimicking the moments of David +David looks like a puppet master pulling the strings

-more facehugger madness as others go after the remaining human sheep

-much like “Prometheus” this multi million dollar film has a strikingly low opinion of humanity + at this point, two films in, the expendable nature of the vast majority of people therein is a feature, not a bug

-positively bizarre sequence as David tempts Walter to his side, kissing him(self) on the lips, before ripping out his neck battery, depowering him

-I neglected to mention just before that my second favorite line of the film, after Walter cited a line then asks who did it, David answers Byron but Walter correctly notes “No, Shelley. If one section of the orchestra is off, it changes the entire symphony doesn’t it?”

-David has officially gone too far

-David coos “no one knows what it is like to dream and be perfect like myself”

-remember early when I said the importance scales? Well, since Ridley seems to see David as a propionate of creation, therefore a creator it would perhaps follow as such Artists Art People

-possibly subliminal moment where David corners Daniels and she’s asks what really happened to Shaw, and David says “this” then forces a kiss upon Daniels +so did this robot, who was too human for other humans, teach the neomorph to rape?

-Walter is back (they made a few safety measures since David) and this we get to see someone hitting his own face repeatedly +it is fucking weird to see this brawling action in a Ridley Scott film

-Tennessee is here to save the day, but now the brute pronto xenomorph is here, and this murder is getting more grisly by the second

-David asks Walter to decide whether to reign in hell or serve in heaven as he reaches for a knife

-the sequence where Daniels is held by a straight line as she keeps falling over the side of the ship, swings and shoots at the proto xeno is jaw dropping

-is Tennessee the giant claw dropper of doom as he uses an arm to crush the proto xeno? Seems like it

-you better believe I was eagle eyes to see if it was Walter or David helping Daniels

-aboard the main ship there is a unidentified life form aboard, but where are the co pilots?

-in a scene straight out of the sleaziest slasher from the 80’s (like prime “Friday the 13th”) the co pilots are having shower sex (to some r&b music) when the xenomorph puts his phallic tail between their genitals +then impale tongue’s the guy’s head. Sexploitation!

-every close up on Fassbender’s face is a mini master class in suspense

-I fucking cannot believe they brought back the xenomorph point of view, the first time since “Alien 3”

-this second proto xeno is slobbering like the cerberus he is

-my heart is pounding like a jackhammer the entire time Daniels is staying barely ahead of the creature

-“care to lend a lady a hand?” might be the mantra of this depraved series

-the subtle continuity of the cabin comes up as her face screams in terror as she realizes David is here, and there are no cabins in hell

-one final twist of the screw as David coughs up some proto xeno eggs and looks upon the vast laboratory of human frogs to dissect

-this film took everything I loved about “Prometheus” and kicked it up ten notches, while adding many many more layers of cosmic craziness. Oh, and blood. + I am fully confident the “Prometheus” saga will gain a cult following and be seen as one man’s tremendous exploitation of his own creation(like David?) and a particular, articulate and demented journey into space hell.

-I myself feel the flames get higher and higher, and wonder if I will be making repeat journeys to this particular corner again. I feel it to be so.

[davidmann95]

I hear you on Potter being deceptively hard to world-build and an eventual failure in the making. Seeing the franchise name become "Wizarding World" is a bad sign but WB seems to forget Potter was a story with a clear ending, so it CAN'T go on eternally like Star Wars or superhero-verses. I'm already feeling bad on how new Potter media reflects on the main seven books. Anything else to add onto Potter & franchise-building in general: how hard it is and the roadblocks corporations face doing so?

I’ll admit, I definitely dropped that in there on purpose, because the idea of How To Make A Shared Universe is one that was preoccupying me a bit recently, and why Harry Potter it turns out can’t do that at all. Even setting aside how good or bad it might have been, Cursed Child is clearly redundant: there was one villain that all other evil flowed from in a very direct sense, his defeat closed the narrative for the main character, that’s the end, no other stories cry out to be told in this world. Yes, you can make a quintilogy about the guy who wrote one of that main characters’ textbooks, but it’s beyond pointless.

At the same time, Harry Potter seems like it should be conducive to the shared universe approach: there’s so much mythology and history setting up the scaffolding of that world, it feels as if you could explore its corners forever. But all of it, from the spells to the characters to the locations, ultimately come down to how they impact Harry. That’s not a flaw of the work, and those characters do breathe on their own, but it’s not *really* an ensemble piece. Only the one guy’s got his name on the cover (well, Sirius and Snape had their nicknames on covers, but you know). Everything relevant feeds back to him and his development one way or another, and once his story is done, the world ends with him. It’s rich set dressing, but for a purpose that has been served.

Star Wars on the other hand, as the star of the day (or at least the day I received this ask) and therefore my primary positive example? Just going by that first movie, while there’s one character in particular whose narrative ends up driving everything, one of the first things we learn about Star Wars is that a lot of people’s very different stories are propelling this world forward, from comedic robot duos to gun-slinging space smugglers to princesses overseeing galaxy-spanning conflicts to wizard samurai to plucky teens in search of adventure. They’re all relevant, and because of that we as the audience are to understand that all the corners of that world they represent are themselves relevant.

Thinking about it, I ended up laying out some rules for how these mass universes (on the Star Wars/DC/Marvel scale) tend to work:

1. They can’t be set in what we’d comfortably call the real world. If it is, there’s no real shared conceits, beyond the ones us real schmucks already live by, and aside from that the characters could run into each other, the connection is immaterial. The Middle and The Office might exist in the same universe, but besides a theoretical crossover episode, what opportunities spring from that connection that justify making it in the first place, that’d make people go “wow, they exist in the same world, this changes everything about how they both work”? If two or more fantastical things coexist though, you’re multiplying the number of things you’re permitted to bring into each other’s narrative spaces, meaning crossovers can thereby make both worlds exponentially richer.

1a. Speaking of conceits, generally speaking there does need to be a shared one or two that’s specific beyond the very concept of “magic/time travel/etc. exists,” to show why all this stuff needs to be in the same world.

2. Closely tied with the above, there needs to be the opportunity to explore multiple genres in that world; if you want this place to feel rich, it has to be able to feel like all kinds of stuff is going on in there.

3. Closely related, the idea that there are multiple figures of significance worth following beyond their involvement in one or two other peoples’ stories in this world is crucial.

I talked about Star Wars and how it invites diverse genre possibilities a bit already, so let’s go with my own favorite shared universe in the DCU. While I tend to think it actually works best when the ties that bind them are fairly loose, let’s cover what the core Justice League alone bring in:

* With Superman and J’onn, it’s clear that aliens exist in this universe, that they may have fantastic abilities by our pitiful human standards (or may gain them under special circumstances), that both literal little green men from Mars beyond our ken and incredible Flash Gordon-style pulp sci-fi civilizations of near-humans number among them, faster-than-light-travel and teleportation are on the table to get them here, at least one brings an entire ghost dimension with him, and they may well wear elaborate uniforms and publicly devote their lives to protecting Earth, while also living among us as humans in “secret identities”. Their adventures in pursuit of this duty can take them from the depths of space to the inside of men’s minds.

* Batman shows that humans can also devote themselves to the same mission with the same basic methods of operation, that these weird costumed characters can fight flashy stylized murderers with elaborately themed Rube Goldberg-esque master plans, and that said human vigilante can in fact function and defeat them with access to a perfect physique, virtually every existing human skillet, a set of gadgets and vehicles that wouldn’t be out of place in James Bond, and a network of allies, i.e. superheroing is an option theoretically on the table for anyone and everyone in the right circumstances, and they can get so good at it as to earn a spot on the big table with people with superhuman powers.

* Wonder Woman and Aquaman demonstrate that magic, hidden civilizations that may emerge to impact humanity at any time, and literal gods are also on the table - and those of such realms may take classical heroic journeys to save our own world.

* Flash shows that just any old normal human can get powers like these under the right (if still improbable) circumstances, as well as bringing in time-travel and expeditions to other universes.

* Green Lantern shows that all these incredible forces can and will take notice of humanity directly, and declares that even our literal emotions can have a tangible, cosmos-shattering impact when the right super sci-fi tools are applied, and that we may take part in a universe-spanning mythology that extends from galactic military campaigns to beat cop work.

Even if you deleted the rest of DC Comics tomorrow, you could easily rebuild a world from those seven characters and the first principles they represent. There’s a ton going on. And at the same time it makes sense that they can and should all sit in a room together, because they share similar aesthetics and basic goals; that they’re the founders of their own genre all coexisting together in one world is itself a solid, unique central hook to justify building a universe around them.

I think those rules hold up pretty well. Take Kingdom Hearts: much as I love it, it isn’t well-suited to an expanded universe setup. While there’s a lot of crazy magic and super-science and alien races and mythology in there, it all only really comes down to the people with the keyblades, and they just go from world to world to beat a given bad guy or seal a keyhole; there’s only so much you can obviously justify doing if you stray away from that core premise. Star Trek on the other hand for instance, while centering around a singular organization, has such a broad mission statement - go Out There to find new life and new civilizations - in the context of multiple ensemble piece programs that you can do just about anything with those crews, from dealing with metaphors of race relations to getting thrown into the 1930s to meeting actual Greek gods, and as such a whole empire of TV shows and movies and novels and comics and audiobook dramas and whatnot makes total sense. That’s what it comes down to: if there’s a real feeling that this is a world that can plausibly have anything, then there’s no reason not to do do everything with that set-up.

In a corporate sense like you ask the basic principles don’t change, just the budgets depending on the medium and which characters you can wrangle if it’s an adaptation. I do admire though how the MCU and the DC TV shows have made it work in the public consciousness, particularly how they sidestepped the possible uncanny valley involved with the concept by slowly building up to their weirder elements. The MCU kicked off with a normal guy in an - admittedly extraordinary - exosuit he built fighting terrorists and other guys in exosuits, the next had a monster but one of science gone wrong in building a super-soldier, the next had a god but in another dimension, with most of his time spent on Earth being mortal, and the straight-up costumed superhero of the bunch was in a pulpy period setting, with only Avengers finally doing a straight-up superhero action movie where they all get together with some super-spies to fight aliens. The CW’s world started off with a single crimefighter without even Batman’s allowances for a strict moral code and a flamboyant theme, slowly introduced super-drugs, eventually allowed super-beings but in a limited context with a single well-defined source point, then time travel, and then magic, and then aliens but in another universe, and then finally they let it all sit together with all of these becoming normal elements regularly crossing over and teaming up with superheroes as an established part of that world. Not that it necessarily has to be that way - I have problems with the DCEU, but it isn’t that it kicked off with Superman and then immediately brought in the rest of the Justice League, even if the insistence on pseudo-realism seems odd in that context - but especially in the early stages of making this something that can work for the first time on TV (aside from Trek, but those didn’t often cross over on TV and didn’t branch out nearly as much) and in movies, I bet it helped.

[iampaulywalnuts]

Casting “Obstruction”, the Inevitable HBO Original Film on All This Shit

Perhaps it’s because reality has felt very much like a prestige drama recently that I have started wondering “who’s going to play these guys in the HBO version of these guys?” 

Methodology: VERY SCIENTIFIC!

First I chose who I believe are the ten most important players in the real life obstruction, between the time Trump won the election and his future indictments.

It was tempting to try to capture the whole 2016 election, and other GOP cowards, but then we’d be here all day, and the New York Times already did that sort of. So no Bannon. No Stephen Miller. No Jaime Foxx...I mean Ben Carson. I also didn’t include Sean Spicer or Sarah Sanders, because they might as well not even be there they know so little. 

I tried to select from actors that I knew offhand, but when that well dried up after about three minutes, I reached out to some trusted friends, Wikipedia, etc. I asked myself:

1) Does it look like their real life counterpart?

2) Could they pull off the role as a lead? 

So let’s get started! ACTION!

Group 1: The Obstructed

1) James Comey

The now former FBI director, once hated by every liberal in America, now holding the torch to guide America out of the darkness I guess. Election manipulating dickhead. 

Bryan Cranston

Rationale: Originally I was overthinking the height issue; for a while all I could come up with was Adrien Brody and I thought for a second “now I’ll never make it as a casting director”. Cranston is a boring selection but it’s the right one to play the careful, calculated Comey. Make him seem taller like in the other one. Can’t go wrong.

2) Sally Yates

Former deputy US Attorney General. Holdover from the Obama administration who informed the Trump White House that Michael Flynn was compromised before being fired for, basically, being a competent woman. 

Amy Sedaris

Rationale: I really think I nailed this one. The first time and pretty sure only time I have ever seen Amy Sedaris was in that scene in Louis CK’s Horace and Pete, and I was totally blown away like everyone else. She was a light in the darkness of that miserable place.. When I think of Yates my mind goes to how she handled Ted Cruz like a 6th grader who thinks he knows shit in that Senate meeting. I get that same feeling! She’s unflappable, so obviously smarter than you, a light in the darkness! Plus, Yates and Sedaris could be sisters. Genius!

3) Preet Bharara

Former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Led investigations into Trump finances before being removed from his position by Trump. Revered by his peers and those who worked for him. We don’t hear as much about him but in a movie called “Obstruction” you can’t leave him out.

Erick Avari

Rationale: Surprise! I don’t know many Indian actors :(  I do recognize this guy from everywhere, however. Avari’s mostly in sci-fi films and television, although he’s also been in classics like The Mummy, Independence Day, Mr. Deeds, and whatever’s on TNT right now. This is the best I could do sorry Indian people don’t hate me!

Group Two: The Complicit Enablers

4) Paul Ryan 

Speaker of the House and Representative from Wisconsin. Backed a monster because he wanted to cut taxes and take health insurance away from poor people. Embarrassment to Pauls everywhere. 

Jeremy Renner

Rationale: The key to a good Paul Ryan performance is capturing his enthusiasm for allowing people to die. Paul Ryan smiles when he talks, not because he wants to give Americans “more choice” on health insurance, but because he knows if you support what he says you will die, and is excited by the prospect. Anyway, Renner’s pretty good and they kinda look the same. 

5) Mitch McConnell

Senator from Kentucky, majority leader. Everything that is wrong with politics. Currently awaiting his stay in hell. 

Tim Robbins

Rationale: Recreating the ugliness, on the inside and out, of Mitch McConnell, requires the combined craftsmanship of a master actor and make up team (perhaps enlisting the experts on Game of Thrones would be wise). I know this casting is unduly generous to Mitch McConnell. I can’t imagine a bigger gulf between how much I enjoy looking at two different men. But Robbins does have the height, and could nail McConnell’s gravelly, unfeeling Kentucky accent. And Robbins is the definition of PRESTIGE. 

GROUP 3: The Spy

6) Sergey Lavrov

Russian foreign minister and spy. Fooled Trump into giving away highly sensitive information and compromising intelligence partnerships. A shark swimming with really dumb fish.

Boris Lee Krutonog

Rationale: I reached out to my only Russian friend about this casting. You look at Krutonog and think “oh he’s the bad guy in that one movie” (side note: “that one movie” is always The Italian Job), which is ultimately all we’re going to need for this story. I’d probably know of more Russian actors if I watched The Americans --he’s in the The Americans--but there are way too many shows. If he can say nice things in English followed by mean things in Russian in front of whoever is playing Trump for a scene we’ll be ok! 

Group 4: The Criminals 

7) Michael Flynn

Retired General and former National Security Adviser. Winner of Russian medals. Failed to register as a foreign agent after taking money from the foreign governments. Chanter of “Lock Her Up”. Soon to be locked up. 

Christopher Waltz

Rationale: Waltz seems to always play eccentrics, and Flynn certainly would qualify in a conspiracy theory peddling Islamaphobe kind of way. We of course have seen Waltz in military attire in Inglorious Basterds, and Nazi-garb aside it suits him. The key moment for Flynn will be as he’s listening to his sentence read aloud,  staring into the void, finally discovering that he was the bad guy all long. Can’t wait!

8) Jeff Sessions

Middle name is Beauregard, yeah ok. Attorney General. Lied to Congress about connections to Russia. Recused himself from Russian investigation only to be interviewing new FBI directors weeks later. So much awfulness outside of this scandal but we have to press on.

Chris Cooper

Rationale: We know Chris Cooper from many of his films and performances, the most memorable to me in American Beauty as a bitter man stuck in his ways, afraid of the future as the world progresses around him. Jeff Sessions plays that role in his normal life every day, the only differences being he has terrifying power, and we don’t know he’s a closeted homosexual. He could be!

9) Jared Kushner 

Senior (lol) Adviser. Delegated by Trump to perform all duties of the presidency. Likely suggested and encouraged the firing of James Comey. Failed to disclose financial ties to Russia before entering White House. Proof that nothing matters.  

Paul Dano

Rationale: In Little Miss Sunshine, Paul Dano played a kid who couldn’t become a fighter pilot because he was colorblind, and so took a vow of silence for some reason I forget. Maybe Jared Kushner has taken a vow of silence, because as it’s been noted elsewhere, I don’t think we’ve ever heard him actually speak! Don’t even give Dano any lines. He can just occasionally throw on a pair of black Ray Bans and look dumb. 

10) Donald Trump 

CEO of Trump Steaks. Vessel of ignorance and hatred. President of the United States.

Hologram of Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Rationale: PSH was too talented to play someone as widely parodied as Trump, but as the scandal rages on, and reports come out of Trump summoning his communications staff and going off on epic tantrums I think he’d be perfect.

Hoffman also played a misogynistic, lying con artist in The Master; specifically a cult leader in the vein of L. Ron Hubbard. One of my favorite scenes is when he’s confronted by a persistent skeptic during a session with a wealthy patron. This is the first time in the movie Hoffman’s character, The Master, is questioned at length, and you can see him slowly losing composure before blowing up in an angry “PIG FUCK”. It’s an awesome scene and demonstrates why, among many other reasons, Hoffman would have made a great Trump. We have plenty of “TV Trump” impressions; the catchphrases, bloviating, etc. I would want an actor could tap into his boundless anger and fear as he slowly wilts under the pressure of his own incompetence and senility. Hoffman could bring a level of nuance to such a shallow figure.

Great job, everyone! Less than six months into Donald Trump’s presidency and we already have AT LEAST one HBO-ready prestige scandal, so for that let’s give ourselves a round of applause, America. Our ratings are going to be SICK...and so is everyone with a pre-existing condition! 

No one knows what the future will bring, but we’ll be watching. Not TV. HBO.

[supercultshow]

Hello Supercult West! This is Supercult South Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (with double major BS’s in “Zombies” and “Paul W.S. Anderson” with minors in “Narrated Intros” and “Ending the World on Our Terms”) and I’m reaching out to you from across the country to help hype tonight’s screening of all six Resident Evil films! It’s the Resident Evil Butt-Numb-A-Thon!

  THAT’s your chief of security uniform? I mean…okay, fine, I get it. It’s that sort of movie

Real dogs, fake gore, and a staple in both the films and the games.

This thing is called a licker. There is no joke.

Get up Michelle Rodriguez! You can’t die here! Dom needs you in, like, 6 other films!

“Tatsumaki Senpukyaku!”

Let’s set the terms!

Tonight, we will attempt to sit through all of the Resident Evil films. That’s Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016). Hopefully we’ll get through them before James Wan, one of the major creative forces behind both the Saw and Insidious franchises, produces the reboot that was announced in 2017.

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TRIVIA! The Resident Evil game series began in 1996 and is credited for popularizing the survival horror genre of video games as well as re-popularizing zombies in mainstream pop culture from the late 90s onwards. Which is probably why the person brought on to spearhead the film adaptation was George A. Romero, the man who effectively redefined the term “zombie” with his indie horror series, beginning with Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead in the 60s and 70s. Can’t you feel the electricity? The merging of the classic and the contemporary into something wholly original? No, neither can I. This is Hollywood after all. No sooner was Romero brought in than his script was rejected by producers and Romero was replaced with Paul W.S. Anderson.

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Anderson is an English director, producer, and screenwriter who gained notoriety by directing one of the first successful video game films, Supercult Classic Mortal Kombat (1995). While Anderson has worked on many gore-tastic action/horror/sci-fi popcorn films like Death Race, Alien vs Predator, and Event Horizon, his main claim to fame is as the driving creative force behind the Resident Evil film franchise.

3D, aka, stuff flying at your face-o-vision!

So we’ve graduated from Desert Storm to Ninja Showdown, huh? Almighty then.

Widow’s peak hairlines and creepy eyes are all the rage in the zombie apocalypse.

That can’t be good.

During filming, Milla Jovovich accidentally shot out a $100,000 camera. That’s what you get when things get a little too “3D”.

Every Resident Evil film stars Milla Jovovich as Alice who you may recognize from her roles as Leeloo in The Fifth Element, Violet from Ultraviolet, and as Mugatu’s henchwoman Katinka Ingabogovinanana in the Zoolander films! All six Resident Evil films were written by Paul W.S. Anderson, and four of the six are directed by Anderson as well. Anderson and Jovovich liked working with each other so much that they got married in 2009, somewhere between RE3: Extinction and RE4: Afterlife.

The character Becky was not originally to be hearing-impaired, but after an outstanding audition, the role was given to Aryana Engineer, who is hearing-impaired in real life.

Bingbing Li, who played Ada Wong in the film, had her entire dialogue dubbed by Sally Cahill who voiced Ada Wong in the video games.

Widow’s peak hair and sunglasses are so last season. Now it’s all about the cleavage bugs!

Give us a kiss!

How many action ladies in tight clothes can we put on screen at one time? One…Two…

In spite of the series’ consistently awful critical reviews with Rotten tomatoes scores ranging from 37% for The Final Chapter to 22% for Afterlife, the franchise as a whole has raked in over $1.2 billion worldwide, making it the Guinness World Record holder for both the “Most Live-Action Film Adaptations of a Video Game” and “the most successful movie series to be based on a video game.” But, to say that the Resident Evil franchise is based on a video game is like saying that National Treasure is based on American History or that Tommy Wiseau is based on a normal human being.

There are 11 goddamn taglines for this film…

“The beginning of the end.” “Back to the Hive.” “The end of all the destruction.”

“Evil comes home.” “Evil will end.” “It ends where it began.” “The journey ends.”

“Fight to survive.” “Finish the fight.”

“My name is Alice. This is the end of my story.” “Everything has led to this.”

Anderson said from the beginning when directing 2000’s Resident Evil that the film would not include any tie-ins with the video game series as “under performing movie tie-ins are too common and Resident Evil, of all games, deserved a good celluloid representation.” The closest we get to the plot of the games are some stolen proper nouns and musical numbers and visual gags such as in the first film when, after returning to an area the characters find that all the dead bodies have vanished, which is a direct riff on the fact that in many of the games bodies disappear when you leave and re-enter a room. So, what does that interpretation look like? What exactly do we have to look forward to for the next…*checks watch*…nine hours and forty-six minutes?

Well, get ready for a lot of Milla Jovovich doing a lot of her own stunts including several legit wall-runs that took several months of practice to perfect. Keep an eye out for non-CG dogs that have loads of makeup and prosthetics on them that the crew had a really hard time keeping the dogs from eating. Prepare for filming across 9 different countries including Germany, Japan, and South Africa. Get ready for a lot of narration including the phrase “My name is Alice” and plenty of actor swapping for recurring characters. Be prepared for Milla’s Worst Actress Razzie Award nominated performance in Resident Evil: Retribution, in which she lost to Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman and Twilight: Breaking Dawn.

Brace yourselves for the RE films to blunder through the early 2010s 3D fad by throwing random items at the camera. Watch out for some particularly gnarly stunts that sent dozens of crew members to the hospital and forced one stunt woman to have her arm amputated. And besides the occasional zombie here and there, be sure to check out all the lasers, clones, wire-frames, flashbacks, bio-weapons, computer child holograms, evil monochromatic rooms, action ladies in skin-tight outfits, unnecessarily corkscrewy vials of McGuffin goo and…Oh yeah, blood. Lots and lots and LOTS of blood.

There’s a lot more to say about this series, but we’ve got a long way to go and not enough alcohol to get us there if we dally too long here. Suffice it to say, Resident Evil may never be considered a good film, or even a cult film (due to its financial success), but we can now all agree that every film in the franchise is Supercult worthy.

Hold onto your butts, if you can still feel them that is.

Supercult West is proud to present, The Resident Evil film series in all its glory for the Resident Evil Butt-Numb-A-Thon!

  Resident Evil Butt-Numb-A-Thon Hello Supercult West! This is Supercult South Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (with double major BS’s in “Zombies” and “Paul W.S.

[placetobenation]

Steve’s Box Office Report: December 2009

Top 10 Films for the Month of December:

1. Avatar – $749,766,139

2. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel – $219,614,612

3. Sherlock Holmes – $209,028,679

4. It’s Complicated – $112,735,375

5. The Princess and the Frog – $104,400,899

6. Up in the Air – $83,823,381

7. Invictus – $37,491,364

8. Did You Hear About the Morgans? – $29,580,087

9. Brothers – $28,544,157

10. Nine – $19,676,965

Honorable Mentions:

1. Armored – $15,988,876

2. The Young Victoria – $11,001,272

3. A Single Man – $9,176,000

4. Transylmania – $397,641

December Winners: Avatar, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Sherlock Holmes, It’s Complicated, and Up in the Air

We are now into the final month of the year as well as the final month of the decade of the 2000s, and 2009 has been a pretty solid year to close out the decade and all signs pointed to a strong finish to the year. Little did anyone know how well the month would end up doing with one film in particular having a performance that no one could’ve predicted. That film is the first film to be in this category and that is the sci-fi film Avatar, a film about humans trying to colonize a foreign planet while mining for a specific material while coming to conflict with the native species. With its unique premise and focus on being a 3-D event, the film would receive positive reviews from critics and go onto have a tremendous run that we will further document later in the review. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is the family film Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, a film where the chipmunks balance school and their career while facing a rivalry with a trio of singing female chipmunks. Following the success of the first film, you knew a sequel would come and despite the negative reviews from critics, the film would have a good run and finished ahead of the first film which all but guaranteed the franchise would become a trilogy. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is the mystery action film Sherlock Holmes, a film where the detective and his companion Watson try to save England from a mystic. The film would receive positive reviews from critics who felt it was a satisfying portrayal of the legendary character and it would make over $200 million even in a loaded month which would help fuel a potential sequel. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is the romance film It’s Complicated, a film about a woman who has an affair with her former husband while falling in love with another man. Despite the mixed reviews from critics, the film would go onto have a solid run even in such a crowded market and it would manage to finish with just over $110 million which was a major success for the film. The fifth and last film from this month that makes it into this category is the comedy drama Up in the Air, a film about a corporate “downsizer” and his travels as he takes a new hire under his wing. Based on the novel of the same name, the film would receive critical acclaim from critics who considered it one of the best of the year and it would have a solid run by making over $83 million. Given how loaded this month was, the fact that these five films were able to make as much money as they did is a testament to how well they did and helped push the month of December into the heights it was able to reach.

December Losers: Invictus, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Nine, and the Young Victoria

While we did have a lot of successes this month especially with the winners of the month, the month wasn’t without a few slip-ups as there were a few films that didn’t do well. Granted, the month was pretty loaded with some major films and no one expected Avatar to dominate like it did, but that is not a valid excuse for these films not to do as well as they ended up finishing. The first film from this month that makes it into this category is the sports drama film Invictus, based on the true story of South Africa hosting and winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup following the collapse of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as president. Despite the positive reviews from critics, the film failed to find a foothold amongst the bigger films released during the month and it will fall short of $40 million and was swallowed up in the end. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is the romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a film about a couple about to divorce being forced into a witness protection program after witnessing a murder. The film would receive negative reviews from critics and against the other comedies released this month, it would pretty much fall by the wayside and was left in the dust by barely missing the $30 million mark. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is the musical film Nine, based on the 1982 musical of the same name about film director Guido Contini and his numerous affairs. The film would receive mixed reviews from critics who enjoyed some of the performances though felt the film was uneven, and like the previous two it would be swallowed up by the bigger films and fell off fairly quickly. The fourth and final film from this month that makes it into this category is the period drama the Young Victoria, based on the early life and reign of Queen Victoria up to her marriage with Prince Albert. The film would receive positive reviews from critics who mainly praised Emily Blunt’s performance, but it also would be completely crushed under the weight of the bigger films and finished with just barely over $11 million. While these films weren’t bad enough to drag the month down coupled with the big films doing very well, they were still glaring enough that they are amongst the worst films of the year in terms of lack of money made.

The Surprise/Story of December 2009: Avatar soars high as it closes out 2009 on a dominant note

Coming into the month of December, the box office was once again on a high after a very solid November and with the films that were coming out this month, it was more than likely the month would end the year on a good note barring some sort of complete meltdown. There were still plenty of big films coming out this month along with the main award contenders, and you still had some of the holdovers from November still looking to make some more money in the tail end of their runs. In the end, Avatar ended up soaring over everyone and while most of its money was made during the first two months of 2010, it got off to a great start in December and would go on to have a tremendous run that no one ever expected. Coupled with strong performances by Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sherlock Holmes, and It’s Complicated, and the month ended up being one of the best of the year and closed out not just the year, but the decade itself on a strong note. It would be interesting to go back to January of 2000 and see how the years have progressed, but that’s a project for another time and it’s time to look forward towards the 2010s.

Overachiever of December 2009: Avatar

Going into the month of December, the one film that had perhaps the most eyeballs on it was Avatar as it was James Cameron’s first major film since Titanic back in 1997, and given how long it had taken to make this film there was a lot of question as to whether it could really succeed. Many were even predicting that the film would be a bit of a disappointment even with the 3-D premium ticket pricing included, but things did look up for the film when the reviews coming in were pretty positive from critics. In the end, the intrigue of the film was enough to debut with a strong showing though it did slightly miss the record opening set by I Am Legend just two years earlier. However, the film would go on to have strong legs as it would go onto dominate the first two months of 2010 and it finished with nearly $750 million, and an even bigger milestone was that it became the first film to make over $2 billion worldwide and took the top spot from Titanic. As a result, this ends up being one of the easiest choices to make in determining the overachiever of the month and it is clearly Avatar, and it will be interesting to see if anything can come close to matching these results as we dive into the 2010s.

Underachiever of December 2009: The Princess and the Frog

As we head into December, one thing that was lacking was a strong animated film as Planet 51 had pretty much flamed out by this point and aside from Alvin and the Chipmunks, there was not another major film aimed towards families. So Disney looked to fill the void with their newest release the Princess and the Frog, a loose re-imagining of the classic story where a girl is transformed into a frog after kissing a frog prince who mistakes her for a princess. It was Disney’s first film since 2004’s Home on the Range to be done in the traditional animated style and it would receive positive reviews from critics, and it was in limited release in November to gain some momentum towards a wide release. But despite debuting at number one in its wide release, it would soon lose a lot of momentum especially after the release of Alvin and the Chipmunks and it would become the latest in a string of disappointments for Disney. You can say that the decade as a whole was a disappointment for the Mouse House and we will see how the 2010s turn out for them, but in the end the Princess and the Frog ends up earning the title of the underachiever of the month.

December 2009 Awards Watch: Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, It’s Complicated, the Princess and the Frog, Up in the Air, Invictus, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Nine, the Young Victoria, and A Single Man

So as we towards the end of the year, this is the time where we get the majority of the award contenders coming out and looking to get their piece of the pie. After the last few months where we had only a handful of films being award contenders, this month we have an astounding 10 films manage to make it into this category while being spread amongst the big three. The first film from this month that makes it is Avatar which would win 3 Academy Awards (Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects) while being nominated for 6 more (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing). The film would also win 2 Golden Globe Awards (Best Picture – Drama and Best Director) while being nominated for 2 more (Best Original Score and Best Original Song), and this was a testament to the film for being included in so many major categories. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is Sherlock Holmes which was nominated for 2 Academy Awards (Best Original Score and Best Art Direction) though it wouldn’t win either, and it would win one Golden Globe Award (Best Actor – Musical or Comedy) which was a good showing for this film. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is It’s Complicated which was nominated for 3 Golden Globe Awards (Best Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Actress – Musical or Comedy, and Best Screenplay) though it wouldn’t win any, but it was still a solid outing for the film. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is the Princess and the Frog which was nominated for 2 Academy Awards (Best Animated Picture and Best Original Song for two songs) though it wouldn’t win either, and it would also be nominated for one Golden Globe Award (Best Animated Picture) though it wouldn’t win as the animated awards were mainly dominated by Up. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is Up in the Air which would be nominated for 5 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress twice, and Best Adapted Screenplay) though it wouldn’t win any of them. It would also win one Golden Globe Award (Best Screenplay) while being nominated for 4 more (Best Picture – Drama, Best Actor – Drama, Best Supporting Actress twice, and Best Director) which was a nice success for this film. The next film to make it into this category is Invictus which would be nominated for 2 Academy Awards (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor) though it wouldn’t win either, and it would also be nominated for 3 Golden Globe Awards (Best Actor – Drama, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Director) though it wouldn’t win any, but it was a good showing for a film that didn’t do well in the box office. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is Did You Hear About the Morgans? which was nominated for one Golden Raspberry Award (Worst Actress) though it wouldn’t win and it would be the only film from this month that was nominated for a Golden Raspberry. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is Nine which was nominated for 4 Academy Awards (Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Song, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design) though it wouldn’t win any. It would also be nominated for 5 Golden Globe Awards (Best Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Actor – Musical or Comedy, Best Actress – Musical or Comedy, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Song) though it wouldn’t win any of those awards either. The next film from this month that makes it into this category is the Young Victoria which would win one Academy Award (Best Costume Design) and was nominated for 2 more (Best Art Direction and Best Makeup). It would also be nominated for one Golden Globe Award (Best Actress – Drama) which it wouldn’t win, and it was a fine showing for a film that didn’t connect with the mainstream. The final film from this month that makes it into this category is the drama A Single Man, a film about a depressed gay university professor who comes to terms with the death of his partner while getting his life back on track. It would receive positive reviews from critics and was nominated for one Academy Award (Best Actor) which it wouldn’t win, and it was also nominated for 3 Golden Globe Awards (Best Actor – Drama, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Score) though it wouldn’t win any as well. While most of the films received multiple nominations without getting a lot of wins, it was still a successful month in terms of the number of films that were nominated for awards.

Overall Thoughts of December 2009:

Overall, the month of December ended up being a great month and was a good way to end the year and the decade on a major high note. As mentioned, the box office was on a slight high coming off a pretty solid November though again I don’t think anyone could’ve anticipated just how well it would end up doing. While most of the success of the month was mainly due to the overperforming of Avatar, a lot of the other films released this month did very well and obviously the holiday period gave them a boost in terms of the money they made. 2009 was a pretty solid year overall with not many low points and it was a good way to end the decade, which as a whole was solid as well though the second half of the decade was slightly better than the first. As we head into a new year and a brand new decade, we will see how the box office plays out and what films would be the breakouts of the decade. As for the month of December 2009, it was a great month and it ends the year and the decade very strongly.

Final Grade: A+

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Upcoming Horror Movies in October 2020: Theaters, Streaming, and VOD

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October is here, which means it’s the time of the season for getting scared. With Halloween gradually becoming a month-long celebration over the past few years — even if the coronavirus has put a damper on many activities such as trick-or-treating — one thing we can always look forward to during these 31 days is a deluge of horror movies old and new, whether via streaming, cable network marathons or even fleeting theatrical releases.

Horror is already a reliable genre both at the box office (under normal circumstances) and in the digital space, so it’s no surprise that even in these compromised times, scary movies are coming at us hard and fast in October. Below is a round-up of fresh horror releases arriving either at your local multiplex (and we urge you to keep the risks of going to the theater in mind) or right in your living room. Ironically, even in decidedly unnerving times, scary movies can still be a hell of a lot of fun.

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Shudder

Scare Me

Available on Shudder on October 1

The October genre onslaught gets underway right at the sound of the starting gun with this Shudder original. Josh Ruben writes, directs and stars as Fred, a frustrated copywriter who retreats to an isolated cabin to write a novel and meets a successful horror author named Fanny (Aya Cash) while out jogging. She challenges him to a scary storytelling contest, and the spooky games begin. Ruben makes his feature directorial debut on what is billed as a “metafictional horror comedy” with social underpinnings.

Magnet Releasing

12 Hour Shift

Out on VOD and in theaters on October 2 (US only, UK TBA)

We reviewed this dark-as-pitch comedy at September’s Fantasia Festival and enjoyed its macabre humor immensely. Angela Bettis (May) stars as a night nurse in a Texas hospital running a side business in organ harvesting with her supervisor and her dumb-as-rocks cousin. Grisly mayhem and gooey twists ensue, with Bettis delivering a fantastic deadpan performance at the center of it. Writer/director Brea Grant allows herself a few self-indulgent moments, but overall this is a lot of fun.

Neon

Possessor

Out in theaters on October 2 (US only, UK TBA)

Eight years after his debut, 2012’s Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg again proves why he could be a natural heir apparent to his father David’s body horror crown. Andrea Riseborough (Mandy) stars as Tasya Vos, an assassin who is employed to take out high-level corporate clients by implanting her mind in the brain of someone close to the target. But Tasya’s increasing instability might threaten her latest mission. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christopher Abbott co-star in this grisly tale of murder, vengeance and violation that does not pull any punches.

Saban Films

Death of Me

Out in theaters, on VOD and digital October 2 (US), VOD November 23 (UK)

Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II – IV) directs Maggie Q (Fantasy Island) and Luke Hemsworth (Westworld) as Christine and Neil, a couple who awaken hungover during an island vacation with no memory of the previous night. But things take a turn for the bizarre when footage on Neil’s camera apparently shows him murdering Christine. Bousman’s stint with the Saw franchise makes him perfect to helm this sort of horror mystery — which will no doubt take some mind-bending twists and turns before it’s over.

Epic Pictures

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw

Out in theaters October 2, on VOD and digital October 6 (US), VOD November 16 (UK)

Folk horror is one of our favorite subgenres, which is why The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw immediately caught our eye. Writer/director Thomas Robert Lee has apparently set out to capture that sweet spot of religious paranoia, occult folklore and supernatural terror as a young woman and her mother are suspected of witchcraft when an unknown pestilence descends on their remote Protestant town. The film world premiered to strong reviews earlier this month at Fantasia Fest 2020.

Amazon Prime

Welcome to the Blumhouse

Available on Amazon Prime on October 6/October 13

Leave it to terror factory Blumhouse to give you more horror than you can handle. The mini-studio is developing a slate of genre entries that it will premiere on Amazon Prime, with four of them making their debut this month. Black Box and The Lie launch on October 6, while Nocturne and Evil Eye turn up on October 13. All four look promising, so we’ll see if this is the start of a whole new anthology franchise for producer Jason Blum and his team.

Hulu

Books of Blood

Available on Hulu on October 7 (US Only, UK TBA)

Inspired by author Clive Barker’s groundbreaking 1984 collection of short stories, this anthology film from writer/director Brannon Braga (FlashForward) features three mostly original stories (one is loosely based on the tale that kicked off Barker’s collection, “Book of Blood”). All three tales weave in and out of each other, incorporating both human depravity and supernatural malignancy even if they’re not right out of Barker’s text. Britt Robertson (Tomorrowland) and Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies) lead the cast.

Saint Maud

Out in theaters on October 9 (UK only, US TBA)

This feature debut from Brit director Rose Glass is an absolute tour de force which ran the festival circuit in 2019 and was initially planned for release in the Spring. Morfydd Clark plays Maud, a pious young nurse who believes she talks directly to God and who thinks her mission is to save the soul of former dancer Amanda (Jennifer Elhe) who is dying. Body, mind and soul are in conflict in this haunting and terrifying elevated horror which boasts terrific performances and has picked up many plaudits on its long road to release. We’ve seen it and we loved it, check out our five star review.

Orion Classics

The Wolf of Snow Hollow

Out on VOD and in theaters on October 9 (US only, UK TBA)

Like Scare Me, this is mostly another one-man-band type of movie, this time from writer, director and star Jim Cummings (Thunder Road). He plays John Marshall, a small-town sheriff and recovering alcoholic who faces a series of gruesome murders that keep occurring on the full moon and seem to be the work of a werewolf. But werewolves don’t exist — or do they? The film is also notable for being the final screen appearance of the late, legendary Robert Forster (Jackie Brown).

Carmilla

Out in theaters on October 16 and VOD from October 19 (UK only)

This reimagining of the Sheridan de Fanu classic vampire story is a coming of age tale which sees a young girl (Hannah Rae) brought up in isolation and beginning to explore her sexuality become enchanted by the mysterious stranger (Devrim Lingnau) who enters her life after a carriage crash. From writer-director Emily Harris, this adaption strips back the supernatural elements and focuses more on a forbidden love made harder by Lara’s strict governess (Jessica Raine).

The Other Lamb

In theaters and on MUBI on October 16 (UK only)

An all female cult headed up by a solitary male leader is the setting for this horror starring Raffey Cassidy as a young woman raised from birth in this strange sect. All of the women in the group are either ‘wives’ or ‘daughters’ of Michiel Huisman’s Shepard and Selah (Cassidy) is about to transition between the two. A coming of age story set against a rural backdrop, this is the English language debut of Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska – released in America in the Spring it’s now coming to the UK via MUBI.

Paramount

Love and Monsters

Available on digital and VOD on October 16 (US only, UK TBA)

Originally titled Monster Problems, this project has been in development since freakin’ 2012, with Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) producing it all along. Dylan O’Brien (The Maze Runner) stars as Joel, who has been living underground with the rest of humanity for seven years after an event called the Monsterpocalypse. With giant creatures roaming the land, Joel starts out on an 80-mile quest to reunite with his high school girlfriend (Iron Fist’s Jessica Henwick). The movie bounced around several release dates this year before Paramount Pictures settled on a VOD arrival.

Netflix

Rebecca

Available on Netflix on October 21

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 version of the classic Daphne du Maurier novel won Best Picture. Can iconoclastic British filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s new vision of the material do the same? Um…maybe not, but we applaud Wheatley for putting his own stamp on this intensely Gothic story of jealousy and obsession. The cast is aces too, with Armie Hammer as Maxim de Winter, Lily James as the second Mrs. De Winter and, best of all, Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers.

Well Go USA

Synchronic

Out in theaters and on VOD on October 23 (US only, UK TBA)

The indie horror writing, directing and acting team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, creators of the striking Spring and The Endless, have come up with perhaps their most ambitious film yet in Synchronic. More sci-fi than horror, the movie still has plenty of unnerving touches as it unspools the story of new drug that causes its users to disappear — and sometimes come back dead or mutilated. Anthony Mackie is superb as a paramedic who literally races against time to stop the spread of the drug and save someone close to him. This one comes strongly recommended.

Hulu

Bad Hair

Available on Hulu on October 23 (US), in cinemas on November 27 2020 (UK)

Dear White People writer/director Justin Simien takes a wide left turn into the genre space with his second feature, a horror satire set in 1989. Elle Lorraine plays an ambitious young woman who learns that the hair weave she gets to succeed in the image-obsessed world of music television may have a mind of its own. This looks like bizarre fun, with a sparkling cast that includes Vanessa Williams, Lena Waithe, Laverne Cox, Jay Pharoah, Kelly Rowland, Blair Underwood, James Van Der Beek and Usher.

Blumhouse

The Craft: Legacy

Available on premium VOD on October 28 (US) and in cinemas October 28 (UK)

You can read more here about this long-awaited sequel to/remake of the formative 1996 teen witch movie, but the basics are that this is set in the universe of the first film while essentially retelling and expanding upon its original premise. Cailee Spaeny, Gideon Adlon, Lovie Simone and Zoey Luna star as the quartet of young women who find a book of spells and begin wielding its power. Originally slated for theatrical release, it’s premiering as a PVOD offering just in time for Halloween.

Netflix

His House

Available on Netflix on October 30

Remi Weekes directs this unsettling tale about two South Sudan refugees (Wunmi Mosaku and Sope Dirisu) who escape their war-torn nation but unwittingly bring a supernatural presence with them as they try to resettle in London. Matt Smith (Doctor Who) also stars in the film, which combines real-life and unreal horrors while tackling the continuing geopolitical and social plights of people unwittingly displaced from their homes.

Focus Features

Come Play

Out in theaters on October 30 (US only, UK TBA)

Gillian Jacobs (Community) and John Gallagher Jr. (Westworld) play the parents of a lonely young boy (Azhy Robertson) whose tablet and smartphone are the means by which a mysterious creature attempts to break into our world — unless the boy’s parents can stop it. Will writer/director Jacob Chase go for simple thrills or use the horror genre as a way to comment on young people’s ever-increasing addiction to their screens? And by the way, we’re done here, so get off your screen and go get some fresh air.

Relic

Out in theaters October 30 (UK only)

Dementia is at the heart of this very eerie chiller where three generations of women convene in an old family home which seems to be rotting from the inside. Robyn Nevin, Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote star in a slow build drama which delves into the horror of losing your sense of self, as Nevin’s matriarch goes missing for days and can’t remember what happened while her house is filled with odd notes, black mold and snippets of a life slipping away from her grasp. This is the feature debut of Australian-Japanese director Natalie Erika James and it’s a stylish, chilling and confident first feature with a final act that veers into full blown horror. Out already in the States on VOD it has a UK theatrical release in the UK.

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