#never has a movie been such a slog for such a great reward. also the edible hit at JUST the right time and i fucking transcended. ty stan

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 1/7/2025

in which we embark upon a progamme of reading for our edification

listening

this was the first song of the year-- felt a little melancholy and a lot sleepy after watching the first movie of the year and this fit the vibe.

-

reading

as a user, i think the magic link system is very annoying, but i also get that they don't want to fuck around with holding and protecting user data. they have been very firm but polite about various bells and whistles people want added to their site that do not contribute to their main goal of reporting various news beats. i DO really appreciate how they put in the time to create a private RSS feed for subscribers with the full text of all the articles so you don't have to log in with the magic link every time, or rather i will really appreciate this once i have a job and can subscribe.

i need to set myself a project and i keep forgetting i moved all this vintage gay and lesbian erotica from massachusetts down to texas with me, so we're going to read one a week until i get bored or we (heaven forbid) run out of gay or lesbian erotica.

the second purpose, and look, i hate the word normalized, but texas politicians are constantly working themselves into a screaming froth about protecting children from gay sex and gay books. i think we can look at various gay sex books each week in a calm and reasonable manner and ask the normal questions i try to ask of every work discussed in the tuesdayposts. since moving, my instinct is to be more stealth and less visibly gay, which is not the way i would like to live. this is the absolute babiest of baby steps since the tuesdayposts (to date) have never put me in any physical danger.

the main questions i will be trying to answer each week are:

is there anything cool about the physical object?

what's the author's deal?

did i like it/did it deliver on its premise?

the sex?

i don't know. chime in if there's some fifth thing you want regularly answered?

this is a 1997 british-printed perfect-bound paperback by The Gay Men's Press (a short history by one of the founders here). i'm not sure if this copy had ever been read, because i managed to break the spine in a very ugly way while trying to gently break the book in. this is either from a goodwill just over the border in ct or from bookends in florence (which you should go visit if you're ever in western ma, one of the few brick and mortar lesbian bookstores in the country).

not for me but i appreciate what it is and what it's trying to do. i have very rarely read something so clearly written by an author for an audience of themselves.

Growing up at a coaching inn on the Great North Road in the early 1700s, young Davy Gadd is enthralled by tales of the greatest of highwaymen, Claude Duval. Seeking his fortune in London, he is entangled in the machinations of Under City Marshal Charles Hitchin and the infamous Jonathan Wild, in their battle to divide up the spoils of the criminal underworld. At last, equipped with horse, pistols and velvet mask, he sets out as a Gentleman of the Road. But not before he has been loved by a Jacobite lord, dressed up by Lucinda and Aunty Mary, and been married at Mother Clap's Molly House. And at the end of the road, will he Pass into Legend, or does his fate lead to Tyburn tree, where so many glamorous adventurers have been hanged?

i think i would have enjoyed this book more if i were a gay man, really into daniel defoe, stuart restoration/early georgian england or very specific bits of historic london nightlife history. there are three hundred and sixty eight of god's own pages and we certainly do meander. it is a little bit of a slog in the dissatisfied middle portion of our hero Davy's young adulthood, but you are rewarded for sticking with it by all the important threads getting neatly tied off. it wraps up nicely if bittersweetly. the ending deals with community and vulnerability in a way that makes sense for a book written by a gay man in 1997. i wish i could explain my thoughts on this better. i think it is a perfectly fine ending that suits the book but again, overall, the book is not for me.

there is period-typical homophobia and gay bashing, but very little of it actually affects Davy. he is generally in fear for his life bc of some crime he committed unrelated to being gay. i think this is a pretty sensible way to make sure your historically accurate novel remains fairly historically accurate without being a fucking downer to write and read. on a related dealbreaker for many people, there is a good deal of phonetic dialect in this book, although it is mostly relegated to dialogue and slangy or shortened forms of words in dialogue spoken by people more connected to the criminal underclass.

i wrote all that and then i had to employ some stringent search techniques to find out anything about the author, who was not a very public person, and his feelings about homophobia vs historical accuracy. about three quarters of the way through this 1997 article about gay fiction from The Independent (interview conducted by letter!) we discover he also considers this a fine line to walk, and perhaps the only paragraph on the internet about his background

"The greatest influences on my writing to begin with were the swashbuckling films which I saw as a child in the Fifties," he says. "Errol Flynn and Stewart Grainger were particular heroes. Also around that time, John Buchan, whose Richard Hannay says, 'I have always had a boy's weakness for a yarn.' Later I acquired an English degree, and was influenced by medieval and Elizabethan literature, Thomas Hardy, Dickens, various historical novelists, Mary Renault and Daphne du Maurier."

"but kay, what about the sex?" my dear readers are probably crying out right now. i don't think this is a great book to jerk off to, even if you are a gay man and not a bisexual woman with the briefest passing familiarity about various periods of english history. davy fucks, a lot, don't get me wrong-- the fucks are not generally instrumental in driving the plot forward or delivering cool facts about london so they're all quite short, usually less than a page.

i don't know if including an example of a sex scene is interesting or useful information to anyone else but it feels strange Not to include it in a reading project about gay and lesbian erotica? gentle reader, i would love to hear your thoughts

-

watching

at about 11:30 PM on new year's eve i like to start a new-to-me black and white classic film to take me into the new year. this year's was Filibus (1915, dir. Roncoroni, widely available in various niceties of restoration)

summary from wiki:

Filibus is a 1915 Italian silent adventure film directed by Mario Roncoroni and written by the future science fiction author Giovanni Bertinetti (it). It features Valeria Creti (fr) as the title character, a mysterious sky pirate who makes daring heists with her technologically advanced airship. When an esteemed detective sets out on her trail, she begins an elaborate game of cat and mouse with him, slipping between various male and female identities to romance the detective's sister and stage a midnight theft of a pair of valuable diamonds.

i found out about this film through the @hotvintagepoll scrungly poll, and i think Valeria Creti should have gone all the fuckin way. girl hobbyist detective/nobleman by day, gadget-loving gentleman thief by night. i support women's wrongs, and she causes so so many of them on purpose. there are some things that carbon date a film, like russian antagonists or gland problems, and this film is carbon dated by sleepwalking as a serious psychological event. she comes very close to taking a detective completely out of the policing game by drugging him and staging elaborate series of events to plant evidence that he did all her crimes while sleepwalking.

she LOVES being in boy mode and she's very good at it! it's never treated as a joke! she stages a rescue of the detective's sister in order to gain access to his house, but then the actual building of the relationship and courtship is completely on her own merits and charm!

this is a charming (if poorly paced for viewing all in one sitting) early gay serial film. if i saw this in the cinema in 1915 i would have been institutionalized for imitating filibus

-

playing

genshin is not feeling as jazzy or fun lately. i think i have two issues. one is that Fontaine, the last major nation's main questline was a truly delightfully crafted (and fair! we had all the pieces just not all the context) murder mystery with a lot of lore. this nation, Natlan, is functionally a sports anime. not that one genre is better or more complex than the other, it's just. different. and recalibrating my expectations has been a little wonky.

the second kind of weird calibration thing is the rate of additions to the world map. genshin runs on a six-week update cycle, where every six weeks you get something major and new to progress the game story. usually there are nine patches, starting at X.0 and going up to X.8. you iterate up a full number with major patches introducing a new land, so with the introduction of Natlan we started the 5.X patch cycle and left Fontaine's 4.X cycle behind.

this is important bc there's usually there's new and fun and exciting stuff and puzzles to solve and new challenges only when they add to the map. in the 5.X patch cycle, there have only been two map expansions: one in 5.0 introducing the land, and one addition about doubling the map in 5.2. 5.3 dropped last week, where the main storyline of the nation typically wraps itself up in the last map update and then we get to fuck around in bonus areas or seasonal events. for example, in the last three nations, so from updates 2.0-4.2, there are typically three big map updates in a row that unlock the entire base map of whatever country we're in, no new map content for a patch, a new bonus area related to whatever area we're in, another break, and then a seasonal map, and then three more updates with no new maps but new events or new battle modes. for natlan, we're essentially "behind" unlocking a chunk of the map.

let's go to the maps: the last nation Fontaine's first introduction in 4.0 (these are all from IGN, they are not to scale with each other):

the second update in 4.1:

the third and final main map update in 4.2:

introduction of natlan in 5.0 on the right (these two screenshots i took are to scale with each other), no underwater regions or major underground areas in this one:

no map update in 5.1. second major map update in 5.2 on the left here, still no major underwater or underground regions. we are currently in 5.3 with no map update, with maybe the third and final map update in 5.4?

again, the problem with No New Map is that typically in genshin you go to new places to unlock more of the story. we're "behind" a map update, if you will. they've kind of shoehorned new story into existing map, and shoehorned new bosses into the existing map, which is very strange and makes the nation feel so much smaller and more limited than other nations.

it feels a lot like part of the map update we got in 4.2, ochkanatlan, an abandoned island city somewhat removed from the rest of the map, was supposed to be the bonus area map, but they didn't have enough ready? the 4.2 update also felt very medium sized- at this point in Fontaine we'd unlocked the Fortress and Institute, which really blow the dragon city right off the island with regards to complexity of exploration and length of quests. it's not really anywhere near the complexity or length of the first desert map expansion in Sumeru, which was honestly a really crazy thing to drop all at once. i will not be putting more nation map screenshots up here bc of the image limit but the desert in sumeru is ENORMOUS and it has an equally enormous underground labyrinth!

not my favorite nation so far! a little bit of it is recency bias bc Fontaine was SO good and is overall my favorite, but it feels off lately. i don't know if the really punishing every six weeks updates are finally catching up to the parent company, or if they're really deep in preproduction for the next land (it Feels like they're going to split the next land into two different X.0 update cycles. there's a lot of chatter in game from NPCs about how different and weird the next port is compared to the rest of the country. i could easily see them building that out to two major updates like natlan and then saving the bulk of the country for the next X.0 update in another year).

-

making

bathrobe surgery under the armhole.

ive had this red/black/blue tattersall plaid in light cotton since high school, best guesstimate based on the tag style is early to mid sixties?

this thing is Solid. it is perhaps the most nicely constructed garment i own. every seam is a narrow, tidy french seam. the underside of the collar is lightly quilted to give it some body and make it stay down, and it has a facing over the top to make it look not quilted from the front. it has The best waist tie arrangement i've ever seen, with a tiny strap on the underside of the tie to permanently hold it to the belt loops but still give you a little bit of play.

it is so beloved that it's starting to completely wear through on the shoulders, and i have to think about how to patch it without losing any of the light breathable qualities i love it so much for.

[fagrackham]

i keep thinking abt 2001 a space odyssey but also it hurts my brain to think abt it i just keep pacing around my room trying to form words

[helkingsley]

Motivation and Writing.

So it’s February and I told myself I'd have a novel by now. SURPRISE I do! It's not perfect and probably needs to be set on fire but it's there. I have the bones. I have the skeleton of something amazing and I am just kinda in shock.

The new goal for February is 2 novellas ( ~25,000K words) and editing of said novel. I've found that a novel a month is crazy ambitious and I am just not in a place to do that. But this new goal is a bit more manageable. Will I do it? I don't know but I feel so accomplished and so...blessed I guess that I actually took the time to write a novel. So I've comprised a list of things that kinda kept me motivated even when I felt like writing or my goals were silly ( and my god were there a lot of days)

1. WRITE ANYWAY.

Even when I felt like every word I typed was just trash, I wrote. Even when I felt like I couldn't make it in this career path, that everyone who had ever told me I would fail, meet rejection, never make it were right, I wrote or I edited or a plotted out things or worked on my platform. I did something that was a small step toward my goal. Toward my dream. 

It fucking sucked.

Every day I spent kind the beginning feeling silly about this dream I have, but then I'd complete a small little task like write 1500 words. And suddenly--well not suddenly but gradually over the day-- things would kinda click into place. I'd feel better about where I stood or my "talent" ( i hate saying I have talent because honestly, I have busted ass to get to this point in life, to be able to write how and why I do, talent has nothing to do with it.)

2. TAKE A BREAK. 

After I met my goals ( usually about 2-3) I would take a break. No more than 20 mins. And always doing something productive in other ways. Clean house, go for a walk, feed the dogs. Something to just give my mind a break from what I was working on. Of course this also happens after working my actual day job, but still, the principle applies. I would give myself some time away from whatever it was I was chipping away at so I didn't become overwhelmed and overworked. Something that, I personally, have learned I do quite often at work, or when I was in school.

3. DON'T SKIP SCENES/CHAPTERS

I'm so guilty of this. I bounce around a lot when I feel stuck. I write scenes and chapters that I'm more willing to write then try to slog through a scene just to get to one I want to write. This is good. And this is bad.

The Good part is I'm still writing when I do this. Still moving on toward my goal. The Bad. part is I still have to go back and slog through that scene. And It's tedious. And it's boring. And I normally write utter crap when I do it. But I do it because it has to get done.

I've found that recently if I just write the crap scene I can us the scene I'm so ready to write as motivation. Just '600 more words and you can write that scene' or  'finish this paragraph and you'll get to the good shit.' It's like...a mini reward for something I was already doing in the first place? 

4. TALK ABOUT IT

I find I get a lot of renewed motivation when I talk about my work with someone? But that's not always an option. So I talk about it with myself. I pitch myself the idea. A bit silly I know but for years I went on writing without a support system. Without someone there to tell me what I was doing was great, or to hear my ideas when I wanted to share them with others. I had my mother, who has always been as supportive as she can be? ( she doesn't quite understand it but she tries.) But that wasn't the same as having someone excited to see me excited. So I talked my self through the idea, pitching it to myself in a way that made it sound exciting. This is harder than it sounds, and yeah felt like: well duh I like this idea I'm writing it. But eventually, it was that mentality that got me writing. I like the idea, I'm passionate about this idea, no one could ever read this and I'd still be jazzed af. 

Now that I have a few, and I mean few as in like two, people who support me in this choice, I talk to them about it. I tell them, bits and pieces of the story or a scene that makes me excited and I get the same excitement return. I go to write with a new fever. It's a small thing but knowing someone is excited to hear/read my work makes me want to do it all the more. It keeps me from feeling bogged down or as if I'm wasting my time. I dream big, I know I can bite off a lot more than I can possibly chew by myself, but I do it anyway and to know that someone ( even if it's just me, with a lot of spite filling me up) believes in me is a great motivational tool.

5. REMEMBER WHY YOU’RE DOING IT

Whenever I felt so discouraged, I took a few minutes just to myself. I personally found that reflecting on my life and why I started writing in the first place, a little deep breathing exercise I learned in high school, would help a lot. This has been a dream of mine since I was 8? Maybe 9. I knew this was what I wanted to be, sure I had other options-- CSI ( can't handle dead bodies), Ballerina ( sadly I'm too tall ),  Baker, etc etc--I always came back to writing. It was the one thing that while I was going through difficult times in my life that helped. Writing stories that were, honestly quite awful if I look back on them, a device for me to escape. Even for just a while.

I love words. I love stringing them together in a way that in new, unfounded and flowy. I love chopping them up. Cropping them, clipping them. Breaking writing rules.  Everything about language and its patterns, its grammar. 

I love storytelling because it sparks the imagination. It's like a movie in your head. It's a chance to be someone or something you're not without ever really having to leave my bed and get dressed. 

Getting back to that feeling, ignoring my doubt of if this is going to sell or even do well in general, of what it felt like the first time I wrote. To remember I'm writing for myself. Not for others. It was a huge tool in keeping me motivated over the last month and even now 4 days into the second.

This might not be the case for you, perhaps you write for another reason. But remember that while you set off on your journey is a BIG thing. And can ultimately keep you going, provide a lot of motivation.

Not all of these will work for everyone, but these are just some things in my personal experience that work. That helped me get through a month of grueling writing and doubt and wondering if perhaps I'm not made for this at all. But here I am February and doing it all over again.

Good luck! and Happy Writing

[easyfoodnetwork]

Inside David Chang’s New Memoir

David Chang on “Ugly Delicious” | Courtesy of Netfix

10 telling quotes from “Eat a Peach”

David Chang is one of the most influential restaurateurs of this century, a position he regards with no small amount of trepidation. And in Eat a Peach, Chang’s first memoir, the chef wrestles with his success as he chronicles his rise to prominence and the fame he’s experienced since. The beats of the book will be familiar to those who have followed Chang’s career, and much of it reads as if Chang is responding directly to those same people, critics included.

Chang gives the behind-the-scenes play by play for each of his restaurant openings, from growing pains at his first restaurant, the East Village’s Noodle Bar, to the “art project” that was fast-food, fried chicken restaurant Fuku, to his regrets around Momofuku’s critically panned Italian restaurant Nishi. He addresses his reputation for anger in the kitchen, the fallout from the shuttering of beloved food magazine Lucky Peach, and that time he reduced Bay Area cuisine to figs on a plate. He also lays out his struggles with mental health, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and examines the ways in which this fact of his life is linked to his mistakes as well as his undeniable ascent in the restaurant world.

Here are some of the highlights:

Eat a Peach is available now on Amazon and Bookshop.

On his management style at Noodle Bar:

“I didn’t know how to teach or lead this team, but I was getting good results. My method, if you can even call it that, was a dangerous, shortsighted combination of fear and fury. My staff was at the mercy of my emotional swings. One second, we were on top of the world. The next, I would be screaming and banging my fists on the counter. I sought out and thrived on conflict. My arrogance was in conflict with my insecurity. Our restaurant was in conflict with the world.”

“I never resolved any conflicts between staff. On the contrary, if I heard that two cooks weren’t getting along, I’d see to it that they worked together more closely. That was one surefire method, I told myself, to ensure the place had a pulse. You could feel our anger the second you walked through the door, and that was exactly how I wanted it.”

On developing the Momofuku style:

“Roll your eyes all you want. God knows it sounds clichéd. But at that time most chefs in America were giving their customers different food than they were eating themselves. What we ate after service was uglier, spicier, louder. Stuff you want to devour as you pound beer and wine with your friends. It was the off bits that nobody else wanted and the little secret pieces you saved for yourself as a reward for slogging it out in a sweaty kitchen for sixteen hours. It’s the stuff we didn’t trust the dining public to order or understand: a crispy fritter made from pig’s head, garnished with pickled cherries; thin slices of country ham with a coffee-infused mayo inspired by Southern redeye gravy. My favorite breakthrough never made the cookbook: whipped tofu with tapioca folded in, topped with a fat pile of uni. So fresh, so cold, so clean, and so far outside of our own comfort zone. There were so many ideas on the menu that we’d never seen or tried before. The only unifying thread was that we were nervous about every single dish we served.”

On success:

“The only benefit to tying your identity, happiness, well-being and self-worth to your business is that you never stop thinking about it or worrying over what’s around the corner. If I have been quick to adapt to the changing restaurant landscape, it is because I have viewed it as a literal matter of survival. I have never allowed myself to coast or believed that I deserve for life to get easier with success. That’s where hubris comes from. The worst version of me was the one who, as a preteen, thought he had what it took to be a pro golfer. I believed my own hype and was a snotty little shit about it. The humiliation and pain of having it all slip through my fingers is something I’d rather never feel again. And so, I choose not to hear compliments or allow myself to bask in positive feedback. Instead, I spend every day imagining the many ways in which the wheels might fall off.”

On the demise of Lucky Peach:

“For anybody who thinks I didn’t feel a responsibility to the magazine, or that Lucky Peach wasn’t tied into the very heart of my own identity, let me explain something to you. To this day, it’s still something journalists ask me.

“You know what the name Momofuku means?

“It means ‘lucky peach.’”

On embracing his role as chef and restaurateur:

“All I ever wanted was to be normal, to think normal. I’m not a naturally loquacious person. I’m not outgoing or inclined to be a leader. I’m a wallflower. It’s been like that since I was a kid. For the majority of my life I was somewhere between ashamed and afraid of my Koreanness. I wanted not to be me, which is why drugs — both illicit and prescribed — appeal to me.

“The restaurants changed all of that. When I started Momofuku, I killed the version of me that didn’t want to stick his neck out or take chances. Even at its earliest larval stages, when it was more theory than restaurant, Momofuku was about carving out some sort of identity for myself. It would be my way of rejecting what the tea leaves said about me.

“Work made me a different person. Work saved my life.”

On rage and his diagnosis of bipolar disorder with “affective dysregulation” of emotions:

“Dr. Eliot describes it as a temporary state of psychosis. I can’t tell friend from foe. It’s as though I’m seeing the world in different colors and I can’t switch my vision back. It doesn’t only happen at work, either. I will lose it at home, which is horrifying. I lose all sense of what’s real and wish the worst on people I love most. My wife, Grace, tells me that when I’m angry, I seethe with such intensity that it can’t simply be emotional. It’s like I’m an animal registering dagner. There are times when Grace and I will be arguing and she’ll plead, ‘Hey, I’m on your side, I’m on your side.’ It will take hours for me to hear her.”

“I hate that the anger has become my calling card. With friends, family, my co-workers, and the media, my name has come to be synonymous with rage. I’ve never been proud of it, and I wish I could convey to you how hard I’ve tried to fight it. I’ve been entrenched in a war with my anger for many years.”

On his place in the world:

“‘What the hell is going on?’

“I call my friends and ask this all the time. They’ve heard me complain over and over that I have a problem accepting reality, because there’s no way I deserve the kind of good fortune I’ve had. I used to call it imposter syndrome, but now I understand it better as survivor’s guilt. All these people around me have died — literally and figuratively — and I’m still here. It truly feels like surviving a plane crash.”

On his first restaurant flop:

“I was on the verge of getting back on my feet after a very bad year, but the reviews of Nishi knocked me flat on my back again. I’m hesitant to admit this, but having to live through it a second time when The New Yorker published its profile of Wells put me in a bleak state of mind. I’m embarrassed that I let criticism affect me so intensely, but I felt closer to suicide in that periodthan I had in years.”

On being a part of the boys’ club:

“I’m literally one of the poster children for the kitchen patriarchy. In 2013, Time magazine put a photo of me, René Redzepi and Alex Atala wearing chef whites and satisfied smirks on the cover of their magazine and called us ‘The Gods of Food.’ I didn’t question whether any women would be included in the issue’s roundup of the most important chefs in the world because frankly it never occurred to me to ask. Even years before #MeToo started in earnest, the backlash to the all-male lineup was swift and deserved.

“At the time, I thought the point was about representation: there should be more women chefs covered by the food media, just as there should be more people of color. But no, we’re talking about something much more vicious. It’s not just about the glass ceiling or equal opportunity. It’s about people being threatened, undermined, abused, and ashamed in the workplace. It’s embarrassing to admit how long it took me to grasp that.”

On blindspots:

“Even this book, written with the benefit of greater knowledge and better perspective, is still riddled with problems. I’ve talked a great deal about the importance of failure as a learning tool, but it’s really a privilege to expect people to let us fail over and over again. There are too many dudes in my story in general, and you can still see my bro-ish excitement when I tell old war stories. Almost all the artists and writers I mention are men, and most of the movies I reference can be found in the DVD library of any frat house in America. It’s my truth, which is why I’m leaving them in here, but I wish that some of it were different.”

Disclosure: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2RaDQMs https://ift.tt/3hhFoPk

David Chang on “Ugly Delicious” | Courtesy of Netfix

10 telling quotes from “Eat a Peach”

David Chang is one of the most influential restaurateurs of this century, a position he regards with no small amount of trepidation. And in Eat a Peach, Chang’s first memoir, the chef wrestles with his success as he chronicles his rise to prominence and the fame he’s experienced since. The beats of the book will be familiar to those who have followed Chang’s career, and much of it reads as if Chang is responding directly to those same people, critics included.

Chang gives the behind-the-scenes play by play for each of his restaurant openings, from growing pains at his first restaurant, the East Village’s Noodle Bar, to the “art project” that was fast-food, fried chicken restaurant Fuku, to his regrets around Momofuku’s critically panned Italian restaurant Nishi. He addresses his reputation for anger in the kitchen, the fallout from the shuttering of beloved food magazine Lucky Peach, and that time he reduced Bay Area cuisine to figs on a plate. He also lays out his struggles with mental health, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and examines the ways in which this fact of his life is linked to his mistakes as well as his undeniable ascent in the restaurant world.

Here are some of the highlights:

Eat a Peach is available now on Amazon and Bookshop.

On his management style at Noodle Bar:

“I didn’t know how to teach or lead this team, but I was getting good results. My method, if you can even call it that, was a dangerous, shortsighted combination of fear and fury. My staff was at the mercy of my emotional swings. One second, we were on top of the world. The next, I would be screaming and banging my fists on the counter. I sought out and thrived on conflict. My arrogance was in conflict with my insecurity. Our restaurant was in conflict with the world.”

“I never resolved any conflicts between staff. On the contrary, if I heard that two cooks weren’t getting along, I’d see to it that they worked together more closely. That was one surefire method, I told myself, to ensure the place had a pulse. You could feel our anger the second you walked through the door, and that was exactly how I wanted it.”

On developing the Momofuku style:

“Roll your eyes all you want. God knows it sounds clichéd. But at that time most chefs in America were giving their customers different food than they were eating themselves. What we ate after service was uglier, spicier, louder. Stuff you want to devour as you pound beer and wine with your friends. It was the off bits that nobody else wanted and the little secret pieces you saved for yourself as a reward for slogging it out in a sweaty kitchen for sixteen hours. It’s the stuff we didn’t trust the dining public to order or understand: a crispy fritter made from pig’s head, garnished with pickled cherries; thin slices of country ham with a coffee-infused mayo inspired by Southern redeye gravy. My favorite breakthrough never made the cookbook: whipped tofu with tapioca folded in, topped with a fat pile of uni. So fresh, so cold, so clean, and so far outside of our own comfort zone. There were so many ideas on the menu that we’d never seen or tried before. The only unifying thread was that we were nervous about every single dish we served.”

On success:

“The only benefit to tying your identity, happiness, well-being and self-worth to your business is that you never stop thinking about it or worrying over what’s around the corner. If I have been quick to adapt to the changing restaurant landscape, it is because I have viewed it as a literal matter of survival. I have never allowed myself to coast or believed that I deserve for life to get easier with success. That’s where hubris comes from. The worst version of me was the one who, as a preteen, thought he had what it took to be a pro golfer. I believed my own hype and was a snotty little shit about it. The humiliation and pain of having it all slip through my fingers is something I’d rather never feel again. And so, I choose not to hear compliments or allow myself to bask in positive feedback. Instead, I spend every day imagining the many ways in which the wheels might fall off.”

On the demise of Lucky Peach:

“For anybody who thinks I didn’t feel a responsibility to the magazine, or that Lucky Peach wasn’t tied into the very heart of my own identity, let me explain something to you. To this day, it’s still something journalists ask me.

“You know what the name Momofuku means?

“It means ‘lucky peach.’”

On embracing his role as chef and restaurateur:

“All I ever wanted was to be normal, to think normal. I’m not a naturally loquacious person. I’m not outgoing or inclined to be a leader. I’m a wallflower. It’s been like that since I was a kid. For the majority of my life I was somewhere between ashamed and afraid of my Koreanness. I wanted not to be me, which is why drugs — both illicit and prescribed — appeal to me.

“The restaurants changed all of that. When I started Momofuku, I killed the version of me that didn’t want to stick his neck out or take chances. Even at its earliest larval stages, when it was more theory than restaurant, Momofuku was about carving out some sort of identity for myself. It would be my way of rejecting what the tea leaves said about me.

“Work made me a different person. Work saved my life.”

On rage and his diagnosis of bipolar disorder with “affective dysregulation” of emotions:

“Dr. Eliot describes it as a temporary state of psychosis. I can’t tell friend from foe. It’s as though I’m seeing the world in different colors and I can’t switch my vision back. It doesn’t only happen at work, either. I will lose it at home, which is horrifying. I lose all sense of what’s real and wish the worst on people I love most. My wife, Grace, tells me that when I’m angry, I seethe with such intensity that it can’t simply be emotional. It’s like I’m an animal registering dagner. There are times when Grace and I will be arguing and she’ll plead, ‘Hey, I’m on your side, I’m on your side.’ It will take hours for me to hear her.”

“I hate that the anger has become my calling card. With friends, family, my co-workers, and the media, my name has come to be synonymous with rage. I’ve never been proud of it, and I wish I could convey to you how hard I’ve tried to fight it. I’ve been entrenched in a war with my anger for many years.”

On his place in the world:

“‘What the hell is going on?’

“I call my friends and ask this all the time. They’ve heard me complain over and over that I have a problem accepting reality, because there’s no way I deserve the kind of good fortune I’ve had. I used to call it imposter syndrome, but now I understand it better as survivor’s guilt. All these people around me have died — literally and figuratively — and I’m still here. It truly feels like surviving a plane crash.”

On his first restaurant flop:

“I was on the verge of getting back on my feet after a very bad year, but the reviews of Nishi knocked me flat on my back again. I’m hesitant to admit this, but having to live through it a second time when The New Yorker published its profile of Wells put me in a bleak state of mind. I’m embarrassed that I let criticism affect me so intensely, but I felt closer to suicide in that periodthan I had in years.”

On being a part of the boys’ club:

“I’m literally one of the poster children for the kitchen patriarchy. In 2013, Time magazine put a photo of me, René Redzepi and Alex Atala wearing chef whites and satisfied smirks on the cover of their magazine and called us ‘The Gods of Food.’ I didn’t question whether any women would be included in the issue’s roundup of the most important chefs in the world because frankly it never occurred to me to ask. Even years before #MeToo started in earnest, the backlash to the all-male lineup was swift and deserved.

“At the time, I thought the point was about representation: there should be more women chefs covered by the food media, just as there should be more people of color. But no, we’re talking about something much more vicious. It’s not just about the glass ceiling or equal opportunity. It’s about people being threatened, undermined, abused, and ashamed in the workplace. It’s embarrassing to admit how long it took me to grasp that.”

On blindspots:

“Even this book, written with the benefit of greater knowledge and better perspective, is still riddled with problems. I’ve talked a great deal about the importance of failure as a learning tool, but it’s really a privilege to expect people to let us fail over and over again. There are too many dudes in my story in general, and you can still see my bro-ish excitement when I tell old war stories. Almost all the artists and writers I mention are men, and most of the movies I reference can be found in the DVD library of any frat house in America. It’s my truth, which is why I’m leaving them in here, but I wish that some of it were different.”

Disclosure: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2RaDQMs via Blogger https://ift.tt/3m9eNHM

[smokeybrandreviews]

Breaking Bad Actors

The myth of “Go Woke Go Broke” is hilarious to me. Everyone is out here reporting that, if you actually have a social conscious about your productions or business, you end of tanking your profits by alienating those who don’t “agree” with that position. This ain’t it, bud. Some of the most progressive shows on television, are some of the most revered. Avatar: The Last Airbender literally has no white people in it and no one cares. The show is good and respects the cultures it pulls from to build that world. Hell, even Korra has it’s moments, when it’s not up it’s own ass with the abrupt shift toward everything Avatar was against. Adventure Time was one of the best cartoons on television for it’s entire run. It grew up with the audience and never got preachy about it’s politics, even if the ending was a little forced. F*ck, man, Steven Universe exists. That sh*t ain’t my flavor but i get why it’s popular. Before anything, Steven Universe is a good show. It tells a decent story but the characters therein are what drive that show’s popularity. A stable of characters that are, effectively, all lesbian. “Woke” content can be great when the representation is integrated into the show organically. Owl House does a good job with this, or, at least it does so far. We’ll see if they start forcing things going forward. You start running into trouble when that sh*t is forced.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is how you don’t do diversity in your shows. Look, i love Catra as a character. She’s the best thing about that show. Scorpia and Entrapta re close but Catra is the only character with any semblance of an arc. I'm glad Catra got her happy ending but it was a f*cking slog getting there. The problem with the new She-Ra as a whole, is that it’s an exercise in virtue signaling. This is a bad show to begin with, bad writing, poor direction, rambling plot, but calling out the lack of quality earns you the title of sexist or anti-female or whatever else, because the diversity of the show has been weaponized by bad actors for the cause. It’s wild to me because it’s sister show, Voltron: Legendary Defender, does the exact same sh*t and is still beloved, even if the last two seasons were less than ideal. Why is there such a stark difference between the two shows? It comes down to the quality of the narrative, the focus of the production. Voltron had a story to tell. It's characters were developed and grew along with the narrative. There was a ton of diversity in that show, even a whole ass gay marriage at the end, and no one was wielding pitch forks about any of that because it was organic to the story the creators wanted to tell. She-Ra was a framework for the show runner to preach at an audience. It fell into the same trap that Star Wars under Kathleen Kennedy did and fans responded in kind. Hell, the Castlevania adaptation is one of the best shows airing now, and there was a legit bisexual love scene where Alucard was visibly bottomed and no one bat an eye, never mind the race bent characters turned fan favorites. Isaac, I'm looking directly at you. You don’t go broke when you go woke. you go broke when you get antagonistic about your sh*tty narrative being called out for what it is and use the diversity in your show as a shield from criticism. If your sh*t is bad, there isn't any amount of black dude or gay chicks that can cover that sh*t up, bro. F*cking make a better show.

I actually follow a lot of right-wing blogs and watch what could be considered toxic male YouTube channels specifically to understand that point of view. I don’t agree with anything they ever say, but I would prefer not to exist in an echo chamber. I need to have properly diverse opinions and takes to be well informed. I'll admit, though, it is exceptionally hard to see their logic, mostly because it’s racially charged nonsense, but i get why they're angry. A lot of it does have to do with entitlement and ignorance but, under all of that backwards nonsense, there is a valid point which should be considered; No one wants to be told what to think. Overtly. You can‘t put whatever message you want in anything you make, as long as it’s subtle and clever. Take Get Out for instance. That sh*t is a straight up accusation of white people and their predatory ass nature but they love that sh*t. Jordan Peele spent an hour and forty-four minutes, calling these motherf*cker out on their bullsh*t and they gave him an Oscar for it. Audiences rewarded his veiled sermon about the parasitic nature of white “culture” with fifty-seven times his budget, in profit for the studio, catapulting his directing career into the stratosphere. How the f*ck did he pulled that off when Brie Larson became the arch nemesis of every neck beard, toxic man-child, and MAGA cultists on the entire interwebs for just saying that we should have less stories about white dudes? Subtlety. Get Out is a masterclass on how to say something career-ending, while packaging it in an incredibly palatable way. Before anything that film is excellent. The writing is on point. The message is cleverly buried under layers of outstanding performances and deft direction. You’re too entertained to consciously realize you’re being directly accused of being sh*tty people. Cats aren’t looking to engage intellectually with their entertainment so you can technically say whatever you want, however you want, as long as you distract them enough to miss the sermon on a conscious level. Larson openly making her stance known to Hollywood, while commendable, is too easy. It's too direct. Sh*t makes you a target, not a hero.

Diversity matters. I think that sh*t should be in everything because the world, itself, is mad diverse. A lot of the culture here, in the states, is driven by people who look like me. Fashion, music, sports; The stuff that get the youth going is all manufactured by people with melanin. It’s mad disingenuous to present a “Hollywood so white” face to the world when the world looks so much more colorful than that. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that there is a very vocal minority that hates to see faces which don’t look like their own, prosper. Entire cities have burned because of it. Entire careers have been lost because of that. The answer isn’t to go the other way. The answer isn’t making “The Force Female.” The force was already female. Ahsoka Tano, Darth Talon, Mara Jade, and Darth Treia were all female but also great f*cking characters. Rey was a plot device that cheapened the already rich and diverse universe that Lucas allowed great creators to expand. The force was already female, and black, and Asian, and white, and blue, and green, and red, and orange, and whatever else because it was designed to be that way. Star Wars failed and sent Disney into a panic because they let a chick with an inferiority complex and massive ego, do whatever she wanted with a franchise that has existed for forty f*cking years, because Twatter has opinions and so does she. Kennedy forgot to make sure the plot around those opinions was good enough to distract you from her politics. She forgot to tell a good story and just decided to preach. No one wants that sermon in a movie, not even the most Woke motherf*cker in the world.

As a creator, myself, i get it. I’ve been on the other side of that Tumblr activism and, more than anything, it feels like if you don’t agree with whoever’s politics, you are automatically the problem. I mean, i got called racist for the way i speak by a black chick, while being black myself. It was surreal and stupid. This chick didn’t like the tone of two reviews i wrote, on a blog with eleven year’s worth of content. Like, for real? Okay. I type how i speak on that blog and i can’t help that i speak with an “urban” flair. I grew up in the ghetto. I speak to my friends like this because they grew up in the same neighborhoods. I actually have a firm grasp on grammar and syntax. I’m a proper writer by trade, working toward getting my first novel published and, guess what? It’s chock full of f*cking diversity. Not because I'm preachy, but because that’s a realistic portrayal of the whole ass world. Because i grew up in a neighborhood that had White people and Mexican people and Asian people and Indian people and Native people and Pacific Islanders and Fijians and whatever else. The world is, inherently, diverse and catering to one extreme or the other is f*cking ridiculous to me. Just tell good stories with strong characters. If the narrative is accessible, you can inject whatever the f*ck you want to say directly into the audience but you have to have a great story to start from. You have to make those colorful characters real. You have to package that bitter pill with a sugary coat so it goes down easy for those who would refuse the dose. If not, you’re just going to antagonize the audience and no one is going to give you the time of day. They're just going to tell you to get out.

[smokeybrand]

Breaking Bad Actors

The myth of “Go Woke Go Broke” is hilarious to me. Everyone is out here reporting that, if you actually have a social conscious about your productions or business, you end of tanking your profits by alienating those who don’t “agree” with that position. This ain’t it, bud. Some of the most progressive shows on television, are some of the most revered. Avatar: The Last Airbender literally has no white people in it and no one cares. The show is good and respects the cultures it pulls from to build that world. Hell, even Korra has it’s moments, when it’s not up it’s own ass with the abrupt shift toward everything Avatar was against. Adventure Time was one of the best cartoons on television for it’s entire run. It grew up with the audience and never got preachy about it’s politics, even if the ending was a little forced. F*ck, man, Steven Universe exists. That sh*t ain’t my flavor but i get why it’s popular. Before anything, Steven Universe is a good show. It tells a decent story but the characters therein are what drive that show’s popularity. A stable of characters that are, effectively, all lesbian. “Woke” content can be great when the representation is integrated into the show organically. Owl House does a good job with this, or, at least it does so far. We’ll see if they start forcing things going forward. You start running into trouble when that sh*t is forced.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is how you don’t do diversity in your shows. Look, i love Catra as a character. She’s the best thing about that show. Scorpia and Entrapta re close but Catra is the only character with any semblance of an arc. I'm glad Catra got her happy ending but it was a f*cking slog getting there. The problem with the new She-Ra as a whole, is that it’s an exercise in virtue signaling. This is a bad show to begin with, bad writing, poor direction, rambling plot, but calling out the lack of quality earns you the title of sexist or anti-female or whatever else, because the diversity of the show has been weaponized by bad actors for the cause. It’s wild to me because it’s sister show, Voltron: Legendary Defender, does the exact same sh*t and is still beloved, even if the last two seasons were less than ideal. Why is there such a stark difference between the two shows? It comes down to the quality of the narrative, the focus of the production. Voltron had a story to tell. It's characters were developed and grew along with the narrative. There was a ton of diversity in that show, even a whole ass gay marriage at the end, and no one was wielding pitch forks about any of that because it was organic to the story the creators wanted to tell. She-Ra was a framework for the show runner to preach at an audience. It fell into the same trap that Star Wars under Kathleen Kennedy did and fans responded in kind. Hell, the Castlevania adaptation is one of the best shows airing now, and there was a legit bisexual love scene where Alucard was visibly bottomed and no one bat an eye, never mind the race bent characters turned fan favorites. Isaac, I'm looking directly at you. You don’t go broke when you go woke. you go broke when you get antagonistic about your sh*tty narrative being called out for what it is and use the diversity in your show as a shield from criticism. If your sh*t is bad, there isn't any amount of black dude or gay chicks that can cover that sh*t up, bro. F*cking make a better show.

I actually follow a lot of right-wing blogs and watch what could be considered toxic male YouTube channels specifically to understand that point of view. I don’t agree with anything they ever say, but I would prefer not to exist in an echo chamber. I need to have properly diverse opinions and takes to be well informed. I'll admit, though, it is exceptionally hard to see their logic, mostly because it’s racially charged nonsense, but i get why they're angry. A lot of it does have to do with entitlement and ignorance but, under all of that backwards nonsense, there is a valid point which should be considered; No one wants to be told what to think. Overtly. You can‘t put whatever message you want in anything you make, as long as it’s subtle and clever. Take Get Out for instance. That sh*t is a straight up accusation of white people and their predatory ass nature but they love that sh*t. Jordan Peele spent an hour and forty-four minutes, calling these motherf*cker out on their bullsh*t and they gave him an Oscar for it. Audiences rewarded his veiled sermon about the parasitic nature of white “culture” with fifty-seven times his budget, in profit for the studio, catapulting his directing career into the stratosphere. How the f*ck did he pulled that off when Brie Larson became the arch nemesis of every neck beard, toxic man-child, and MAGA cultists on the entire interwebs for just saying that we should have less stories about white dudes? Subtlety. Get Out is a masterclass on how to say something career-ending, while packaging it in an incredibly palatable way. Before anything that film is excellent. The writing is on point. The message is cleverly buried under layers of outstanding performances and deft direction. You’re too entertained to consciously realize you’re being directly accused of being sh*tty people. Cats aren’t looking to engage intellectually with their entertainment so you can technically say whatever you want, however you want, as long as you distract them enough to miss the sermon on a conscious level. Larson openly making her stance known to Hollywood, while commendable, is too easy. It's too direct. Sh*t makes you a target, not a hero.

Diversity matters. I think that sh*t should be in everything because the world, itself, is mad diverse. A lot of the culture here, in the states, is driven by people who look like me. Fashion, music, sports; The stuff that get the youth going is all manufactured by people with melanin. It’s mad disingenuous to present a “Hollywood so white” face to the world when the world looks so much more colorful than that. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that there is a very vocal minority that hates to see faces which don’t look like their own, prosper. Entire cities have burned because of it. Entire careers have been lost because of that. The answer isn’t to go the other way. The answer isn’t making “The Force Female.” The force was already female. Ahsoka Tano, Darth Talon, Mara Jade, and Darth Treia were all female but also great f*cking characters. Rey was a plot device that cheapened the already rich and diverse universe that Lucas allowed great creators to expand. The force was already female, and black, and Asian, and white, and blue, and green, and red, and orange, and whatever else because it was designed to be that way. Star Wars failed and sent Disney into a panic because they let a chick with an inferiority complex and massive ego, do whatever she wanted with a franchise that has existed for forty f*cking years, because Twatter has opinions and so does she. Kennedy forgot to make sure the plot around those opinions was good enough to distract you from her politics. She forgot to tell a good story and just decided to preach. No one wants that sermon in a movie, not even the most Woke motherf*cker in the world.

As a creator, myself, i get it. I’ve been on the other side of that Tumblr activism and, more than anything, it feels like if you don’t agree with whoever’s politics, you are automatically the problem. I mean, i got called racist for the way i speak by a black chick, while being black myself. It was surreal and stupid. This chick didn’t like the tone of two reviews i wrote, on a blog with eleven year’s worth of content. Like, for real? Okay. I type how i speak on that blog and i can’t help that i speak with an “urban” flair. I grew up in the ghetto. I speak to my friends like this because they grew up in the same neighborhoods. I actually have a firm grasp on grammar and syntax. I’m a proper writer by trade, working toward getting my first novel published and, guess what? It’s chock full of f*cking diversity. Not because I'm preachy, but because that’s a realistic portrayal of the whole ass world. Because i grew up in a neighborhood that had White people and Mexican people and Asian people and Indian people and Native people and Pacific Islanders and Fijians and whatever else. The world is, inherently, diverse and catering to one extreme or the other is f*cking ridiculous to me. Just tell good stories with strong characters. If the narrative is accessible, you can inject whatever the f*ck you want to say directly into the audience but you have to have a great story to start from. You have to make those colorful characters real. You have to package that bitter pill with a sugary coat so it goes down easy for those who would refuse the dose. If not, you’re just going to antagonize the audience and no one is going to give you the time of day. They're just going to tell you to get out.

[filmgamer]

Although actual nominations won’t be in until Tuesday I added a mix of predicted favourites and personal choices of mine for wishful thinking purposes. Read to get some sort of context and personal filter on what to expect and hope for come January 23rd for the 90th Annual Academy Awards.

Best Picture

Blade Runner 2049 * – Broderick Johnson, Andrew A. Kosove, Bud Yorkin

Call Me By Your Name – Emilie Georges, Luca Guadagnino, James Ivory, Marco Morabito, Howard Rosenman, Peter Spears

Dunkirk – Emma Thomas

The Florida Project – Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch, Kevin Chinoy, Andrew Duncan, Alex Saks Francesca Silvestri, Shih-Ching Tsou

Get Out – Jason Blum, Edward H. Hamm Jr., Sean McKittrick, Jordan Peele

Lady Bird – Eli Bush, Evelyn O’Neill, Scott Rudin

Mudbound – Carl Effenson, Sally Jo Effenson, Cassian Elwes, Charles D. King, Christopher Lemole, Kim Roth, Tim Zajaros

The Shape of Water – J. Miles Dale, Guillermo del Toro

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri – Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin, Martin McDonagh

Wonder Woman – Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, Richard Suckle

Blade Runner 2049

Call Me By Your Name

Dunkirk

The Florida Project

Get Out

Lady Bird

Mudbound

The Shape of Water

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Wonder Woman

Blade Runner 2049 was my favourite movie of the year, Three Billboards was my second favourite, Lady Bird and Get Out were good too. I found Dunkirk to be overrated, confusing and far from Nolan’s best. I am the only person besides my mom that didn’t like Wonder Woman. Mudbound was very boring to me. I like the idea of The Florida Project which has landed on several best of lists winning because of its underclass nature & humble beginnings, a true underdog. I have not seen The Shape of Water but its awards attention has caught my interest and Call Me By Your Name has as much chance of winning as it does being interest to me.

Actress In A Leading Role

Jessica Chastain – Molly’s Game

Gal Gadot – Wonder Woman

Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water

Frances McDormand* – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird

Jessica Chastain

Gal Gadot

Sally Hawkins

Frances McDormand

Saoirse Ronan

This is a runaway for Frances McDormand who gives her best performance since Fargo. Gal Gadot is good but her nomination would be the story here. Sally Hawkins gives an impressive performance as a deaf-mute. I think Saoirse only gets acclaim because she has a flawless american accent. Jessica Chastain does good character work and deserved the Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty which Jennifer Lawrence won for Silver Linings Playbook (which I love but is not Best Actress worthy).

Actress in A Supporting Role

Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water

Holly Hunter – The Big Sick

Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird

Hong Chau – Downsizing

Allison Janney – I, Tonya

Octavia Spencer (Right)

Holly Hunter (Right)

Laurie Metcalf

Hong Chau

Allison Janney

Allison Janney all the way here. Holly Hunter is good in The Big Sick and Octavia Spencer always knows what she’s doing (still haven’t seen Shape of Water or it would fill up the supporting actor category). Hong Chau got raves out of Downsizing, additionally annoying and unfair because the Oscars have become so politicized in recent years this would be seen as a win for diversity after the 87th & 88th #OscarsSoWhite controversies. It’s ironic that her possible nomination would come from writer/director Alexander Payne indulging in his stereotypical racist tendencies. I guess Hollywood takes diversity where they can get it.

Actor In A Leading Role

Hugh Jackman * – Logan

Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out

James McAvoy – Split

Gary Oldman – The Darkest Hour

Denzel Washington – Roman J. Israel Esq.

Hugh Jackman

Daniel Kaluuya

James McAvoy

Gary Oldman

Denzel Washington

This race is Gary Oldman’s to lose. He has turned in a career full of good performances and this is icing on the cake. If anything would hamper him from winning it’d be that the choice is too obvious playing historical figure Winston Churchill. Denzel always makes a great oscar campaign push and he has been hungry for a third win despite being the weakest reviewed movie of the bunch. I didn’t include Timothy Chalamet from ‘Call Me’ because I think his praise is due to the fact that reviewers aren’t aware he’s playing himself in role better written than he is like all first time actor nominees. Hugh Jackman deserves it for Logan even though I’m not a huge fan of that movie he deserves recognition for what he brought to the character. Daniel Kaluuya gives a subtle understated performance that rewards repeat viewings. And James McAvoy has been close to forgotten for his memorable turn in Split as someone with multiple personality disorder I’d like him to get recognized.

Actor In A Supporting Role

Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project

Jamie Foxx – Baby Driver

Christopher Plummer – All the Money In the World

Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Patrick Stewart * – Logan

Willem Dafoe

Jamie Foxx (saying “that’s Oscar worthy”)

Christopher Plummer

Sam Rockwell

Patrick Stewart

At the beginning of the campaign I would have said this was an easy win for Willem Dafoe’s warm performance in The Florida Project but another career character actor Sam Rockwell has upstaged him for Three Billboards. Christopher Plummer is good I imagine many people are still amazed he’s in themovie after the Kevin Spacey debacle. I thought Jamie Foxx gave one of his best performances in Baby Driver, he even makes an Oscar reference. Patrick Stewart was so good in Logan that it’s impressive he makes you believe his senile swearing version of Professor X is the same person.

Directing

Martin McDonagh – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Jordan Peele – Get Out

M. Night Shyamalan – Split

Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water

Denis Villeneuve – Blade Runner 2049

Jordan Peele, Get Out

M. Night Shyamalan, Split

Martin McDonaugh, Three Billboards

Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049

Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

Denis Villeneuve made a sequel to a classic that was better than the original while making it his own thing. He received a BAFTA (British Oscars) nomination for this and might repeat all the categories for last year’s Arrival. Jordan Peele, Guilllermo del Toro, and Martin McDonaugh are shoe-ins for the nomination and Greta Gerwig is likely to actually be nominated for Lady Bird, a movie I liked a lot but has modest aims. I threw in a Shyamalan twist because not only has he been nominated for but Split is a legitimately good movie that is unique enough I feel another director couldn’t replicate, and being the best means you’re special.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Hampton Fancher and Michael Green – Blade Runner 2049

James Ivory – Call Me By Your Name

Aaron Sorkin – Molly’s Game

Stephen Chbosky and Steve Conrad and Jack Thorne – Wonder

Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber – The Disaster Artist

I think side by side with Three Billboards, Blade Runner is the best script this year and they happen to qualify for two different categories so yay! The Disaster Artist, Molly’s Game and Call Me are all favourites because it’s a weak year for this category which is why there will likely be a few surprises. I threw in Wonder because it’s high on the betting pool, commercially and critically successful, and it’s the movie every book lover expected to love and every movie lover expected to hate (but surprisingly didn’t) and The Perks of Being A Wallflower was pretty decent. Mudbound could score a nomination here to but I didn’t put it personally because its incremental pacing felt like a slog for me that just didn’t flow.

Adapted – Michael Green (who also wrote Alien Covenant, Logan, and Murder On The Orient Express all this year) rewrote Hampton Fancher’s screenplay (right)

Original – Greta Gerwig Writer/ Director of Lady Bird

Original – Martin McDonagh Writer/ Director of 3 Billboards

Original – Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon wrote The Big Sick together. In writing credits the use of an ‘&’ denotes simultaneous collaboration while the use of ‘and’ indicates someone rewrote someone else’s screenplay

Original – Vanessa Taylor (co-writer of The Shape of Water with Del Toro)

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird

Martin McDonagh – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani – The Big Sick

Jordan Peele – Get Out

Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor – The Shape of Water

If Lady Bird doesn’t end up getting completely shut out come Oscar night for being good enough to get noticed but not enough to take home (typical Lady Bird amirite?) it’ll win here as Get Out and Shape muscle in on their visual splendor. Of course I don’t think any movie this year takes as many risks as the unpredictable 3 Billboards does in its screenplay so it should win. The Big Sick was in my top list for this year but original? C’mon its based pretty much on the real life story of its writers, it should be adapted if anything however rules are rules.

Best Cinematography

Roger Deakins – Blade Runner 2049

The 68 year old is the closest thing to a sure thing this year and has been nominated 13 times before without winning and this is his best work which everyone has said from the beginning. Some of his previous nominations include: The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, A Beautiful Mind, No Country For Old Men, Skyfall & Sicario. He absolutely deserves this one.

Best Original Score

Hanz Zimmer – Dunkirk

I didn’t like this movie but I listened to the score countless times while putting together my harsh review of it. The rarely idle Hans does the devil’s work here. And his Inception score was much better than Trent Reznor’s The Social Network which won that year. #robbed

Best Visual Effects

War for the Planet of the Apes

Another much hyped movie on my website I was let down by. I have never seen a director so obviously confident behind the camera its annoying that this series now so well realized spends its last chapter doing a prison break riff. Good Visual Effects are all about enhancing the story and I’ve never seen effects pushed so hard in that regard. Surprisingly, this rebooted series with state of the art effects that take YEARS to render has yet to win but unless members of the academy decide to feel sorry for Blade Runner or reward the epic looking latest Transformers: The Last Knight this should be a steal.

A Perfect and Backlash-Free Choice Oscar Nomination List Although actual nominations won’t be in until Tuesday I added a mix of predicted favourites and personal choices of mine for wishful thinking purposes.

[claystripemovieblog]

Kingsman: The Golden Circle Review, a.k.a. The Ones You Love Hurt You the Worst

Kingsman: The Secret Service remains one of my favorite films of the last decade. That’s neither hyperbole nor an astericked claim with an assurance in the footnotes that I merely meant “favorite genre flick”, “most fun movie”, or “personal guilty pleasure.” Matthew Vaughn’s 2015 action comedy was, to me, a Tarantino film without delusions of high art. That intellectual honesty actually allowed the first Kingsman to deliver biting commentary on class and masculinity without ever getting preachy, all while telling a fun romp about super-spies in well-tailored suits. Add to it some pitch-perfect performances from Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Samuel L. Jackson, and new leading man Taron Egerton (who, two years later, still has yet to get the roles he really deserves), and you’ve got a movie I saw six times in the theater and countless times since.

You also got a movie that I never really wanted to see a sequel to. Not only did the original tell a completely self-contained story (and its ending would make continuing that story a convoluted undertaking at best), I knew deep down that I didn’t want this world and these characters to be ruined for me. In the modern age of cinematic universes, Star Wars prequels, and JK Rowling’s Twitter, I’ve learned too well that returning to the well inevitably taints the waters. Still, the stellar ensemble cast, the return of Vaughn at the helm, and the idea of wacky American cowboy spies mostly assuaged my fears. 

Sad to report that I should have stuck to my initial misgivings.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is not a bad movie. There are still impressively filmed sequences, a few clever ideas, and the actors are all as good as ever. But I have not been this annoyed, upset, and bored in a theater since Avengers: Age of Ultron two years ago, for much the same reasons as that film. Golden Circle squanders a great cast, world, and style on a story that is utterly divorced from any of the characters’ arcs and that clearly lacked an editor with the confidence to make cuts in service to the film. It is a slog to get through, as you find yourself willing the story to get to the next creative setpiece as much as you try to will yourself feel for characters that you loved in the last movie and to laugh at jokes that never quite seem to land.

If you wish to read more of my descent into despair as I try to dissect this picture and understand why it didn’t work for me, with spoilers aplenty, I’ve included my complete thoughts past the ‘Read More’. But here’s the best way I can sum up just how disappointed I was by Kingsman 2: It has a scene where Elton John dresses like a peacock and flying kicks a man in the face while winking at the camera, and I couldn’t even muster a chuckle. That might be the most depressing sentence I’ve ever written. 

The Themes

Normally, I would try to avoid judging this movie against its predecessor and try to assess it on its own merits, but since Golden Circle so shamelessly copies from the story and iconography of Secret Service, I feel like I must explain why that film worked so well for me while this one decidedly did not. It’s simple, really, so much so that I’m baffled that no one involved in the production, which was nearly identical for both films, understood it. The second movie tells a story with good characters, while the first tells the story of good characters.

The conflict of Secret Service was, on paper, stopping crazy Richmond Valentine from murdering all but the “best” people on Earth. But the heart of the story was young hero Eggsy becoming a “gentleman”, not by completely reshaping his identity to fit in with a bunch of upper-class pricks, but by becoming his best self and dedicating his life to saving others. His arc is central to the plot and themes of the film; his struggle to assert his worth as a Kingsman in spite of his origins makes his fight against the elitist Valentine personal and relatable. When Eggsy defeats Valentine without the help of his mentor and defeats those who thought themselves to be above the rest of humanity by merit of their wealth and power, it is emotionally satisfying, not just because the bad guy’s been stopped, but because it shows that Eggsy has become a great man on his own terms.

The conflict of Golden Circle is not, as the marketing might suggest, the culture clash between the US and UK (which would have been fun and mildly interesting). Instead, it’s the War on Drugs. That’s not done through metaphor or anything- Julianne Moore’s 50s housewife/cartel leader Poppy explicitly seeks to end the War on Drugs and become a legitimate businesswoman by holding millions of drug users hostage, while evil President Bruce Greenwood plans to kill all drug users and unburden society. While the original film benefited from keeping its themes general and personal, this choice for the conflict exposes the movie to a much more complicated world of politics than it seems ready to tackle. The problem does not lie merely in moral ambiguity- the first film made good use of the fact that Valentine was essentially right in diagnosing the Earth as overpopulated and doomed to environmental destruction. That added pathos to his character and made Eggsy and Merlin’s violent defeat of the one-percent hypocrites who were just as guilty of exploiting Earth’s resources all the more satisfying. However, while Vaughn and Jane Goldman’s first Kingsman script had a basic message- “class doesn’t matter”- this script has nothing to say.

Vaughn seems unwilling (or perhaps unable, given the film’s funding by 20th Century Fox and its extensive use of Fox News personalities for plot exposition) to actually acknowledge the causes and effects of the War on Drugs. Nobody in the film is seen doing any hard substances that might be harmful to themselves or others. We never see anyone overdose or be addicted to any of Poppy’s wares, implying that the only thing wrong with her exploitative business is her personal megalomania and sociopathy and that drug users are more-or-less guiltless of any wrongdoing. More troubling, the film fails to acknowledge that the main thing setting apart the film’s visuals of a military police force caging up dying drug addicts from the reality of the American prison system is how many of the prisoners are white. The president’s juvenile jubilation over “winning” the War on Drugs by killing all the “slackers” flies in the face of how drug laws are actually enforced in this country and how they actually do disenfranchise and ruin people as much or more than drugs themselves, particularly and disproportionately the poor and people of color. Perhaps honestly confronting a major social issue is beyond the reach of a mainstream American blockbuster, but then why feature it in your movie if you have nothing meaningful to say?

The biggest problem with Golden Circle’s themes is not its politics, however, but how they’re not tied to the main characters’ goals in any significant way. That’s not to say they don’t try to show how drug use affects Eggsy’s life. The film gives us no less than four morality pets whose lives are threatened by Poppy’s virus. But, again, they’ve only been threatened by this fantastical plot, not the affects of actual drug addiction. They need help, but they might as well be trapped in a burning building for all it adds to the story. It’s important that Eggsy saves their lives and the millions of others threatened by the disease, but that could not have anything less to do with the arc (or arcs) they try to give him (we’ll get to that later). Their peril is only a motivation to get the protagonists from setpiece to setpiece. Speaking of which...

The Plot

The movie begins with an action scene, showing clearly from the get-go where the film’s priorities are. No set-up, no reintroduction to the characters, no analysis of how the destruction of the one percent from the last movie did or did not change the world (which is all I wanted from a sequel to a movie where all the world leaders’ heads exploded). Just a thrilling brawl through the streets of London. It’s great stuff, but all it accomplishes amusing the audience for five minutes and setting up how the villain can later eliminate the other Kingsman. Contrast that with the opening to the first film, which succinctly establishes Harry’s character, motivation, and connection to Eggsy without excessive bombast, and you quickly see where this movie is going to fall short.

We get to catch up with Eggsy before everything goes down the shitter, and it’s the best part of the movie. He’s still hanging out with his friends in London, keeping him refreshingly grounded. He’s even dating Princess Tilde from the last movie, in a pretty refreshing turn. While the controversy over how Secret Service ended with Eggsy having anal sex with the princess of Sweden as a “reward” for saving the world honestly never bothered me too much (I saw it as a joke directed at the egregious male gaze of the original Bond movies and further knew that young people have sex for lesser reasons all the time), this film’s decision to give Tilde more of a presence beyond a sex object and to make Eggsy into an anti-Bond (a decent human being who actually tries to build a relationship and be a loving partner) is a good one, and one of the few parts of the film that seems really creative. I mean, it shouldn’t- just having your male escapist protagonists not be douchebags should be the norm, I’d think- but it’s still worth appreciating. That said, Tilde never gets to do anything beyond being Eggsy’s supportive girlfriend who wants to get married someday, which ends up making her subplot one of ten in this movie that could have been cut and barely changed anything.

This new relationship is not the only one neglected by the film. The early death of Roxy, a character who played a small but integral role in the first movie, removes the only active female protagonist from Golden Circle way too early, turning her into just another motivating factor for Eggsy’s actions. The destruction of Harry’s old house and the death of JB is sad, but feels unearned because the villain has no actual connection to the Kingsman. The subsequent scenes of mourning with Merlin are great, but then the fallen Kingsman are almost completely forgotten so the plot can get to introducing the Statesman.

The Statesman were central to the marketing of Golden Circle and offered a great opportunity for the film to distinguish itself from the original, but they’re barely in the movie. Channing Tatum has effectively one scene where he tussles with the protagonists before he is put into a coma, and he could easily been removed from the film. Jeff Bridges and Halle Berry are good in their roles but likewise contribute nothing to the progression of the story. Only Agent Whiskey ends up getting much screentime, but even he gets the shaft from a development standpoint, making the whole trip through America feel like a waste of time beyond providing an overly elaborate way to bring back Harry (who's role in the story we’ll get to later when we look at the characters).

A lot of this movie feels like a waste. You feel that 141 minute runtime. There’s another water room sequence, another “shoot the dog”, as if someone at Fox is requesting they “play the hits” even when they don’t impact the narrative at all. They recreate the iconic bar fight from the first movie for a third time. There’s at least three Fox News exposition montages. There’s two separate scenes of Poppy inducting a new member into her gang whose only contribution is being killed after doing drugs with Elton John. Oh, yeah, Elton John’s in this movie, playing himself. And not just in one cameo scene. He’s in the movie longer than Channing Tatum, seemingly just for the hilarious joke of him being Elton John in a Kingsman movie. Add all that to Harry... When you look at a film and know that you, a Joe Schmoe off the street, could cut out twenty minutes of it without changing anything, you know the director just had nobody who could tell him “No”.

Yet despite all of this padding, the movie also somehow manages to have a lot of scenes and arcs that come out of and go nowhere. The evil president is not introduced until late in Act 2, robbing his villainous turn of any impact. Agent Whiskey’s motivation comes straight out of his ass at the end of Act 3. Merlin’s death is especially jarring, as he dies saving Eggsy from a landmine he stepped on for no reason beyond uncharacteristic carelessness. It’s just lazy writing, diabolous ex machina. Merlin’s also given a random love for John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Road” totally absent from the first movie without any real explanation for how that love informs his character in any way, seemingly just to make his death a little more memorable. His death really struck me as a disservice to a great character.

Poppy’s plan is much more ludicrous and obviously preventable than Valentine’s (beyond the fact that she has nothing after the delivery of the antidote to ensure an army wouldn’t come looking for her, surely her consumer numbers would plummet when non-addicts realize their producer willingly gave them a horrific, deadly illness for business reasons). But I can forgive it, if only because Moore sells the crazy Bond villain thing very well. The final fight in her Cambodian temple/50s kitsch mashup base is one of the more enjoyable part of the film, but it’s also a victim of its own excess. The sight gags are funny, the camera tricks are fairly impressive, and I can even acknowledge the obvious CGI as serving a cartoonish style. But it only hits the same beats as the church scene and final battle of the first film without doing any of them quite as well, making the whole affair seem rather redundant and pointless.  

The movie ends with a whimper. Harry’s Galahad again, Channing Tatum becomes a Kingsman and gets a dumb hat after spending the whole movie in a coma, the president is impeached by someone who definitely doesn’t look like Hilary Clinton (GET IT?!?), and Eggsy steps down and gets married to Tilde. Wait, where did this come from? How old are they supposed to be? What year is this? Does Eggsy have any angst that three of his close friends are dead now that he’s got Harry back? Is this the only scene Eggsy’s mom and sister are in? Who cares, film’s over folks.

Oh, also, there’s a scene in there somewhere where Eggsy fingers a girl to put a tracker in her vagina. It’s deeply unnecessary, and I don’t want to talk about it beyond saying "gross”.

The Characters

That summary of the plot problems of this bloated film actually left out quite a lot of the story. Didn’t notice? That’s because I mostly ignored the role of a single character that shouldn’t have been in the movie in the first place. We’ve got to talk about Harry- specifically, why his presence in the film not only makes it worse, but makes the last movie worse, too. (Sorry, Colin Firth, you’re still great.)

Harry’s return was revealed with the announcement of the movie itself and was the first sign to me that things were in trouble. The loss of the mentor is important for every hero’s journey, because as long as they’re around, the hero’s accomplishments seem more achievable and less important. Imagine if Obi-Wan came back and helped Luke beat Darth Vader. Harry was a badass, yes, but he served the function of starting Eggsy on a path and then emphasizing how formidable Valentine was as an adversary with his death. We didn’t need to learn more about who he was before being a Kingsman, and that subplot doesn’t even go anywhere. The flashback scene early on with him teaching Eggsy dining etiquette was great, but only because it emphasized how meaningful their relationship was. There’s nowhere for the plot to put Harry when he returns, which means that much of the second act has to be wasted on a side-conflict to try to restore his memories in order to give him something to do. When Harry’s memory is restored, he’s then relegated to tagging along to help out Eggsy for no reason other than Eggsy wanting him to, with the plot swapping back and forth between hindering him to further extend the runtime or making him such a badass that he overshadows the story’s hero. I spent much of the film wondering how they were going to tie it all in, what lesson Eggsy would learn by getting his mentor/father figure back, whether the actual conflict of the drug war was going to tie into it in any way like the conflict of the first movie. It doesn’t go anywhere. Both characters are in the same place they were in the last movie, besides, you know, Harry not being dead.

Even though Eggsy functionally doesn’t grow at all, Egerton remains fantastic, and there’s some scenes where he emotes so much with those puppy dog eyes that he elevates the material. If only the movie had him smoke some of Poppy’s weed while hanging out with his friends, enhancing his personal connection to the plot by putting his own life in danger from the government’s neglect and making him less of an invincible superhero? And then maybe if the film had his mother (who, again, only has a brief background cameo) still struggling to overcome a crack or heroin addiction that also puts her life in danger, emphasizing that other drugs should never be sold and that those who sell them actually do put people’s lives at risk? So then, you know, you care about Eggsy’s role in this story? Just a thought.

The cast really is the saving grace of the movie, and they’re doing the best they can with a bad script. Julianne Moore is amazing as always, and she’s delightfully weird and threatening as Poppy, making it all the more frustrating that the film keeps her in her base the entire movie with barely any interaction with the other characters. Edward Holcroft can still play a great smarmy jerkass, and I was glad to see him come back with a cool robot arm. Pedro Pascal is super fun as a cowboy and gets some great fight scenes, but Whiskey doesn’t get any real chance to sink his teeth into being a morally ambiguous traitor, again because his motives are revealed only a minute before his death and because the script seems afraid to use the Statesmen for anything interesting. It’s all such a waste.

Conclusion

Again, this movie was not the worst flick I’ve ever seen by any stretch. There’s not much you can write about a truly awful, uninspired movie. It’s films like this- like The Lost World or Age of Ultron, films with endless potential that still end up being below average- that hurt the worst. And this movie hurt me, man, and not just because I spent nearly forty bucks to see it in a VIP theater on premiere night. There’s great performers here, creative visuals, a superb soundtrack. It’s a shame they ultimately were put to no good use.

There’s so many obvious ways to fix this movie. Tie the characters closer to each other and to the movie’s central themes. Allow the old characters to continue to grow. Give space for new characters and ideas. Make the movie about something more than fights and quips. Keep Harry dead. I know the people working on this movie know how to do this, because they did it two and a half years ago.

So, yeah. If you couldn’t tell, this movie really got under my skin, so much so that I decided to not just write a several page review and analysis, but that I finally got around to making a dedicated film Tumblr. I doubt anyone’s gonna read this full thing, but, hey, thanks if you made it this far.

[gamerszone2019-blog]

FIFA 20 Review

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fifa-20-review/

FIFA 20 Review

I’ve had to reassess the way I’ve played FIFA this year, which is something I haven’t had to do in many years through all the tweaks, changes and so called “game-changing mechanics”. FIFA 20

feels different to previous years; in some ways for the better, but in others not. Volta, a brand-new way to play FIFA that offers a breath of fresh air to the series – albeit not without its own faults – is here, but does it come at the expense of the game as a whole?

Every IGN FIFA Game Review Ever

Last year, many of FIFA 19’s gameplay innovations were based on the attacking game, from timed-finishes to the basics of how the ball could be nudged into space with a flick of the stick. FIFA 20 swings the pendulum back the other way and puts much more emphasis on the other side of the ball. The way you defend has been overhauled and has never felt more crucial. You can no longer heedlessly charge at a defender, hold down the tackle button, and hope for the best. You’re punished for not thinking about defensive play to the same extent you would building an attack, due to the high level of risk-reward when going in for a challenge; time it well and you’ll likely take the ball cleanly and win possession. Misjudge the timing, however, and you’re punished with a foul or left watching as your opponent skips over your trailing leg.

The way you defend has been overhauled and has never felt more crucial.

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This is due in part to a new weapon attackers now have in their arsenal in the form of strafe dribbling. You can square up to a defender by holding the left bumper and attempt to shimmy past, ultimately creating a yard of space needed for a cross or shot. It’s a useful tool that provides more options when in control of the ball. If successful, at the very least you’ll get fouled, giving you the chance to try out the new way set-pieces are taken. EA has seemingly taken inspiration from the now-dormant PGA Tour golf series when it comes to taking direct free kicks, because now you first place a target where you want to aim, then add spin with the right stick as the taker approaches the ball. This technique opens up new possibilities and can produce some great-looking finishes. It’s initially difficult to get to grips with but I found myself enjoying it greatly, especially in comparison the simplistic ways they’ve worked in previous games.

For more on specific gameplay changes, check out the video below:

Get past your man without being chopped down, however, and you’re in luck, as you’ll likely have the pace to ward them off and bear down on goal. This is thanks to a welcome adjustment of how player speed works in FIFA 20. A common FIFA 19 frustration was how easily slow defenders would often be able to catch up with much faster attackers; I’m happy to report that’s no longer the case here, and the sight of an aging Mats Hummels quickly closing in on a spritely Raheem Sterling is no longer a regular occurrence.

Add another new addition, the set-up touch, and a devastating combo is possible. By rolling the ball into space by holding the right bumper and flicking the right stick, you’re then able to hit a vicious shot on goal. This often creates some blockbuster moments and, when pulled off correctly, feels great. Sadly, FIFA 20 provides little opportunity to actually achieve this, because the set-up animation feels like it takes an age to complete, and often you’re crowded out by tenacious defenders before getting your effort on goal away.

FIFA 20 and VOLTA Mode

This loops back to the defensive overhaul implemented in FIFA 20. Defensive AI is far more intelligent and they’ll intercept passes and block shots much more often. Lofted through balls are no longer anywhere near as effective as they once were, as defenders are better at reading the game and provide more of a challenge than I’m used to when playing FIFA.

As a result I’ve found myself playing more on the counter-attack, which in turn has led to my biggest frustration with this year’s outing: it feels completely two paced. The players have returned to being lightning-quick, but that feels completely at odds with the speed at which the ball wants to move. New ball physics cause it to bobble and get slowed down grass more realistically, which admittedly looks great, but it also interrupts the flow of the game. It’s like listening to a song with someone sporadically pressing the half-speed button every time you hit a groove.

My biggest frustration with this year’s outing: it feels completely two paced.

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This, coupled with the more realistic ways players turn, both on and off the ball, slows down the pace considerably, and some players’ turning circles are unusually large. I’m all for creating as authentic a football experience as possible – and something that FIFA excels in its presentation – but I fundamentally want it to be fun first. For me, football games have often been at their best when they don’t take themselves too seriously and embrace the silly side of the game. Whether that be the long-lost penguin outfits in the golden era of PES or the pure slapstick, arcade fun of FIFA Street. Luckily, there is still room for plenty of that in FIFA 20, even if it’s hard to find in its core 90-minute match modes.

For more a full match of FIFA 20 in 4K, check out the video below:

The Marred Volta

Volta is the grandstand addition to FIFA 20 and is an amalgamation of FIFA Street and the more recent story-based Journey mode. In many ways it’s a successful combination: there’s a lot of variety and perhaps even enough to do to to warrant a standalone release without provoking too many gripes. That alone nullifies the argument that FIFA 20 is just a reskin of the previous year’s version.

There are three ways to play Volta: Tour, League and Story, each of which is appealing in different measure. Tour is where you go to play matches against the CPU, using squads pulled from the server that have been built by other players. Once you beat a squad you can recruit a player from that team to join yours, similar to Need for Speed’s pink slip system. It also allows you to choose which of the 17 worldwide locations and forms of street football you’d like to play. Each of these global arenas has been beautifully crafted and has its own unique atmosphere, while also offering a genuinely different gameplay experience – though some with greater success than others. I much preferred the larger pitches like Rio de Janeiro’s favela or the Berlin gymnasium rather than the claustrophobic cages of Tokyo’s sky-high rooftops.

To see all of the different Volta modes, check out the video below:

Matches on these smaller pitches often descend into chaos, with balls bouncing between knees, concrete and chain fences, and very little football actually taking place. Repeatedly hitting shoot to see where the bounces was often the most successful tactic, repeating until it finds the back of the net. But on more open pitches, Volta really comes into its own. There’s time and space to pass the ball around, with enough scope to add flourishes like tricks and flicks. That said, if you overplay flair you’ll be punished, because Volta is much more rooted in classic FIFA than the old Street games. There are no bonus points for skills moves, they’re just another way to help win the match. It feels good to achieve a balance of the two, even if in my heart I yearn for the days of getting Peter Crouch to panna every opponent in sight.

If you overplay flair you’ll be punished, because Volta is much more rooted in classic FIFA than the old Street games.

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There are subtle differences between the matches, some more engaging than others. Futsal is the pick of the bunch and the one most grounded in the traditional 11v11 game. The lack of walls to bounce the ball off provide an extra challenge and prevent matches descending into something akin to pinball. 4v4 and 5v5 play much like Futsal and are also enjoyable, with the major difference being manual shooting. This takes some getting used to, especially if you’re used to the assists the core game gives you, but it’s ultimately rewarding.

3v3 rush and 4v4 rush aren’t quite so enjoyable. It is essentially a three or four-aside match with one crucial difference – there are no goalkeepers. You therefore rely on defensive players to block incoming shots, something they’re often not that great at doing. Countless times I’d watch tame shots trundle towards a defender, only for them to let it roll past and straight into the goal. This happened regularly, with both AI and player-controlled defenders, leaving me infuriated when matches ended up 15-14. On the rare occasion a player blocked the ball, it would more often than not ping back to the attacker, who would then score anyway. This, coupled with the compact arenas, means you rarely ever feel in control of the outcome of a rush match, so it’s doubly frustrating a majority of Volta’s campaign mode is made up of these games.

To watch the first 11 minutes of Volta Story, check out the video below:

As for Volta’s story, it’s pure cheese and its cliché-laden plot will be familiar to anyone who has seen an underdog sports movie. The Journey’s branching storylines are gone, replaced by a rags to riches narrative that’s functional if forgettable. The acting is mixed, with one-dimensional robots sitting alongside more believable characters, like your loyal best friend, Syd. Although the cutscenes often feel repetitive, Volta is never the slog The Journey was, and is over in five to six hours. Progress is only halted if you lose a match, meaning you have to start the whole tournament again, which can mean replaying up to three or four matches. This can be frustrating, especially if it consists of the less appealing three or four aside rush ruleset.

Volta is never the slog The Journey was, and is over in five to six hours.

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Naturally, there’s a wealth of customisation available. Importantly, these vanity items – tops, shoes, hairstyles and so on – can be purchased only with Volta coins, a currency earned through playing matches within Volta, which is currently a microtransaction-free zone. While I spent time tailoring my player’s look at the beginning of the story mode, I soon settled on a style I liked and little attention to it afterwards. However, I can really see customisation coming into its own in the Volta League mode.

League is Volta’s online game and is where you’ll likely spend most of your time, especially after completing the story mode, which offers little replay value. The premise is simple: face off against other online opponents to climb the rankings, while at the same time showcasing your squad and vanity items. Its approach is similar to Seasons in the core game, opening up every match type and location.

Volta is also available in kickoff mode should you fancy a quick game, alongside the options to add house rules. Last year’s selection are still present, with survival mode a particular highlight, especially as Volta means you’re reduced to one player each.

Modes, Modes and More Modes

Outside Volta, there are numerous additions to other modes in FIFA 20. House Rules gets a couple of new options: King of the Hill is a possession-based mode I can see myself spending little time with, while Mystery Ball is pure madness. Every time the ball goes out of play a new appears on the pitch, with a different ‘perk’ altering its physics each time. These include dribbling, speed and shooting boosts, to one ball that has all three combined. Panic ensues every time this ball comes into play, because the player in possession can breeze past defenders before slapping the ball into the net. It’s the kind of silliness I want from FIFA and continues the trend of last year’s fun additions.

Mystery Ball is pure madness.

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Ultimate Team also benefits from House Rules modes this year, with a couple exclusive to FUT. Max Chemistry and Swaps modes are fun, but I can’t see them being a massive time suck for people already invested in FUT’s loop. They’re found in the new FUT Friendlies section, meaning you can take your assembled squad offline and play with a friend. It’s a quality-of-life improvement for those who don’t want to worry about player fitness or contracts running down.

For a full match of Mystery Ball, check out the video below:

For those going online, there are new Season Objectives. Much like a battle pass system, it sets challenges which rewards items only exclusive to this mode. Some are vanity items that express more of that welcome silliness in FIFA, introducing such things as a retro 16-bit ball and a dabbing unicorn tifo for your stadium. These are all positive changes that add a bit of personalisation to the FUT experience, which is much needed when a lot of squads are filled with the same handful of players, causing the whole thing to become a little homogenised.

Unsurprising Mechanics

One thing that hasn’t changed are the microtransactions. Card packs are still available and people will continue to buy them. EA has stated it has no plans to alter its approach to “surprise mechanics” unless laws are passed. As of yet, very little progress has been made on this front, but who knows, maybe by the time FIFA 21 comes around things might have changed. There have been baby steps made this year in regards to cards. Icons will now cost less on the transfer market, but the chances of obtaining one via a pack are still ludicrously low. In short, microtransactions still look to be an issue in FUT 20, with many fans vocal about their inclusion and inherent pay-to-win nature.

For more on changes to FUT in FIFA 20, check out the video below:

Another thing people have been hoping for is an overhauled career mode. For years now, it’s been overlooked. To be fair, in FIFA 20 some additions have been made, but none are big enough to make it an instantly more appealing game mode than it was last year or the year before that. Much as in Volta, you can now select to be male or female when choosing your playable manager, which is a step in the right direction. But apart from that, a largely ineffectual morale system and unimaginative press conference sequences are entirely underwhelming. It’s sad to see a mode that used to be my go-to in FIFA continue to formerly be my go-to in FIFA. Hey, there’s always next year.

Source : IGN

[humanoid-lovers]

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If you read rarely, or all the time, don't miss this! (It's easy to do) This is simply one of the best works of literature, allegory, and even poetry, ever put together. It took decades for Mikhail Bulgakov to write this actually, and over the past century, his Faustian flavored tale about the nature of people and the power religion vs. the state vs. the devil knows.... has become a cult classic in Russia. Note that this is pure Bulgakov (as author) and this listing names one of the 2 wonderful translators who collaborated on getting the flavor of the language just right. They make it clear that this was a total collaboration of expert translators. At the end they offer additional notes about some of the details and finer points of history or the Russian language. There are also some additional passages included for the first time, which the earlier translation omitted. Go to Amazon

This book is, in one word, brilliant, a unique diamond... I was only 14 years old when i first read The Master And Margarita for the first time, and, for I am German, in German. Go to Amazon

Please allow me to introduce myself .... The Devil and some friends visit Stalin's Russia - film at 11. So many great novels have come out of Russia. This one written in the midst of high Stalinism is one of the great books of he 20th Century. Go to Amazon

This is such a great text. To think that Bulgakov burned the original ... This is such a great text. To think that Bulgakov burned the original and wrote it again. I like to have literature students read a text that they have to work at, yet are rewarded for. My son, fluent in Russian, chose this translation. Go to Amazon

A pinnacle. Still not sure how to describe this. Go to Amazon

Wonderful read. It has been my favorite book for many years. For non-Russian speakers I'd recommend reading this book wile taking notes about the characters. In Russian language, person's name might be written in various forms (similar to Bill / William or Peggy / Margaret in English) not knowing this might make the book more confusing. Go to Amazon

A delightful surprise Four Stars great story Four Stars Love, Art, Longing, And Redemption The Devil goes down to Moscow nice to have A tedious slog Masterpiece!!! Great translation. Great book!

[easyfoodnetwork]

David Chang on “Ugly Delicious” | Courtesy of Netfix 10 telling quotes from “Eat a Peach” David Chang is one of the most influential restaurateurs of this century, a position he regards with no small amount of trepidation. And in Eat a Peach, Chang’s first memoir, the chef wrestles with his success as he chronicles his rise to prominence and the fame he’s experienced since. The beats of the book will be familiar to those who have followed Chang’s career, and much of it reads as if Chang is responding directly to those same people, critics included. Chang gives the behind-the-scenes play by play for each of his restaurant openings, from growing pains at his first restaurant, the East Village’s Noodle Bar, to the “art project” that was fast-food, fried chicken restaurant Fuku, to his regrets around Momofuku’s critically panned Italian restaurant Nishi. He addresses his reputation for anger in the kitchen, the fallout from the shuttering of beloved food magazine Lucky Peach, and that time he reduced Bay Area cuisine to figs on a plate. He also lays out his struggles with mental health, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and examines the ways in which this fact of his life is linked to his mistakes as well as his undeniable ascent in the restaurant world. Here are some of the highlights: Eat a Peach is available now on Amazon and Bookshop. On his management style at Noodle Bar: “I didn’t know how to teach or lead this team, but I was getting good results. My method, if you can even call it that, was a dangerous, shortsighted combination of fear and fury. My staff was at the mercy of my emotional swings. One second, we were on top of the world. The next, I would be screaming and banging my fists on the counter. I sought out and thrived on conflict. My arrogance was in conflict with my insecurity. Our restaurant was in conflict with the world.” “I never resolved any conflicts between staff. On the contrary, if I heard that two cooks weren’t getting along, I’d see to it that they worked together more closely. That was one surefire method, I told myself, to ensure the place had a pulse. You could feel our anger the second you walked through the door, and that was exactly how I wanted it.” On developing the Momofuku style: “Roll your eyes all you want. God knows it sounds clichéd. But at that time most chefs in America were giving their customers different food than they were eating themselves. What we ate after service was uglier, spicier, louder. Stuff you want to devour as you pound beer and wine with your friends. It was the off bits that nobody else wanted and the little secret pieces you saved for yourself as a reward for slogging it out in a sweaty kitchen for sixteen hours. It’s the stuff we didn’t trust the dining public to order or understand: a crispy fritter made from pig’s head, garnished with pickled cherries; thin slices of country ham with a coffee-infused mayo inspired by Southern redeye gravy. My favorite breakthrough never made the cookbook: whipped tofu with tapioca folded in, topped with a fat pile of uni. So fresh, so cold, so clean, and so far outside of our own comfort zone. There were so many ideas on the menu that we’d never seen or tried before. The only unifying thread was that we were nervous about every single dish we served.” On success: “The only benefit to tying your identity, happiness, well-being and self-worth to your business is that you never stop thinking about it or worrying over what’s around the corner. If I have been quick to adapt to the changing restaurant landscape, it is because I have viewed it as a literal matter of survival. I have never allowed myself to coast or believed that I deserve for life to get easier with success. That’s where hubris comes from. The worst version of me was the one who, as a preteen, thought he had what it took to be a pro golfer. I believed my own hype and was a snotty little shit about it. The humiliation and pain of having it all slip through my fingers is something I’d rather never feel again. And so, I choose not to hear compliments or allow myself to bask in positive feedback. Instead, I spend every day imagining the many ways in which the wheels might fall off.” On the demise of Lucky Peach: “For anybody who thinks I didn’t feel a responsibility to the magazine, or that Lucky Peach wasn’t tied into the very heart of my own identity, let me explain something to you. To this day, it’s still something journalists ask me. “You know what the name Momofuku means? “It means ‘lucky peach.’” On embracing his role as chef and restaurateur: “All I ever wanted was to be normal, to think normal. I’m not a naturally loquacious person. I’m not outgoing or inclined to be a leader. I’m a wallflower. It’s been like that since I was a kid. For the majority of my life I was somewhere between ashamed and afraid of my Koreanness. I wanted not to be me, which is why drugs — both illicit and prescribed — appeal to me. “The restaurants changed all of that. When I started Momofuku, I killed the version of me that didn’t want to stick his neck out or take chances. Even at its earliest larval stages, when it was more theory than restaurant, Momofuku was about carving out some sort of identity for myself. It would be my way of rejecting what the tea leaves said about me. “Work made me a different person. Work saved my life.” On rage and his diagnosis of bipolar disorder with “affective dysregulation” of emotions: “Dr. Eliot describes it as a temporary state of psychosis. I can’t tell friend from foe. It’s as though I’m seeing the world in different colors and I can’t switch my vision back. It doesn’t only happen at work, either. I will lose it at home, which is horrifying. I lose all sense of what’s real and wish the worst on people I love most. My wife, Grace, tells me that when I’m angry, I seethe with such intensity that it can’t simply be emotional. It’s like I’m an animal registering dagner. There are times when Grace and I will be arguing and she’ll plead, ‘Hey, I’m on your side, I’m on your side.’ It will take hours for me to hear her.” “I hate that the anger has become my calling card. With friends, family, my co-workers, and the media, my name has come to be synonymous with rage. I’ve never been proud of it, and I wish I could convey to you how hard I’ve tried to fight it. I’ve been entrenched in a war with my anger for many years.” On his place in the world: “‘What the hell is going on?’ “I call my friends and ask this all the time. They’ve heard me complain over and over that I have a problem accepting reality, because there’s no way I deserve the kind of good fortune I’ve had. I used to call it imposter syndrome, but now I understand it better as survivor’s guilt. All these people around me have died — literally and figuratively — and I’m still here. It truly feels like surviving a plane crash.” On his first restaurant flop: “I was on the verge of getting back on my feet after a very bad year, but the reviews of Nishi knocked me flat on my back again. I’m hesitant to admit this, but having to live through it a second time when The New Yorker published its profile of Wells put me in a bleak state of mind. I’m embarrassed that I let criticism affect me so intensely, but I felt closer to suicide in that periodthan I had in years.” On being a part of the boys’ club: “I’m literally one of the poster children for the kitchen patriarchy. In 2013, Time magazine put a photo of me, René Redzepi and Alex Atala wearing chef whites and satisfied smirks on the cover of their magazine and called us ‘The Gods of Food.’ I didn’t question whether any women would be included in the issue’s roundup of the most important chefs in the world because frankly it never occurred to me to ask. Even years before #MeToo started in earnest, the backlash to the all-male lineup was swift and deserved. “At the time, I thought the point was about representation: there should be more women chefs covered by the food media, just as there should be more people of color. But no, we’re talking about something much more vicious. It’s not just about the glass ceiling or equal opportunity. It’s about people being threatened, undermined, abused, and ashamed in the workplace. It’s embarrassing to admit how long it took me to grasp that.” On blindspots: “Even this book, written with the benefit of greater knowledge and better perspective, is still riddled with problems. I’ve talked a great deal about the importance of failure as a learning tool, but it’s really a privilege to expect people to let us fail over and over again. There are too many dudes in my story in general, and you can still see my bro-ish excitement when I tell old war stories. Almost all the artists and writers I mention are men, and most of the movies I reference can be found in the DVD library of any frat house in America. It’s my truth, which is why I’m leaving them in here, but I wish that some of it were different.” Disclosure: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2RaDQMs

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/09/inside-david-changs-new-memoir.html

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: "Berserk and the Band of the Hawk" Review

A disclaimer before we begin, this review will be 100% biased due to my love of, bordering on fanaticism toward, Berserk. If that doesn’t make how hopelessly slanted this review is going to be, know that I can consider Berserk to not only be the greatest work of fantasy in manga, but one of the greatest ever created, possessing the philosophical introspection of Conan The Barbarian superimposed upon a world with the historic weight and realism of A Song of Ice and Fire. To say that I’m eagerly anticipating the next season of Berserk is an understatement. Since the recent anime only gave us a taste of the Berserk since the original 1997 anime, any medium willing to take a deep dive into the later chapters of the story earns some major points. That is precisely what Berserk and the Band of the Hawk does, providing several years worth of anime with surprising fidelity for the player to personally cut through.

  Berserk and The Band of The Hawk is the latest project by Omega Force, who have spent the past several years adapting the Warriors formula across anime’s most storied shonen franchises. This should tell you a lot going into the game, if you never enjoyed or fell out of love with the Dynasty Warriors then this game might not be for you, despite the surprising ingenuity with which Omega Force has brought in new gameplay elements to give each of their titles a distinct personality the resonates with its source material. Visually, Berserk, especially The Golden Age’s large-scale medieval warfare, is particularly suited to the Warriors model, even elevating it by replacing the glamorous attire and iridescent particles of Romance of the Three Kingdoms with gallons and gallons of blood. This is easily one of the messiest games I’ve ever played. One swing of Guts’s sword in the middle of a group of enemies and he’s instantly drenched from head to toe in red. You can practically see the stuff dripping off his chin when the camera zooms in during his Berserk mode and Deathblow.

  For a story that moves between mass combat, duelings with hulking monsters, politics, and personal moments, Omega Force did an admirable job of adapting the plot to a gameplay system that primarily supports taking down armies. Berserk and The Band of the Hawk makes use of footage from the recent Berserk: The Golden Age movie trilogy for its more cinematic and personal moments to lend the proper gravity to each battle beyond its hack n’ slash mechanics. Expecting a slog through The Golden Age, which felt the most relevant to the Warriors formula, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the game paces well through the story. The only real hitch in the plot was an awkward expansion of Guts’s lonesome travels between his departure from the band and the Eclipse to include a non-canonical subplot about his one-man war against a small army of bandits. For those who are picking up the series with the 2016 anime, Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is a decent way of bringing yourself up to speed with the events leading up to the Conviction Arc, which is an accomplishment in itself.

What makes Berserk and The Band of The Hawk really feel like a love letter to Berserk fans, however, is its reach into the far corners of the story that are explored. While many diehard fans would be happy to simply see any media covering the post-Eclipse portion of Berserk, Omega Force went the extra mile by finding ways to incorporate all the little details that built up to create the epic. The minutiae of Guts’s personal struggles and the developing relationship and ultimate division between Guts, Griffith, and Casca is given plenty of screentime. Minor scenes and interactions that don’t make it into the main story mode are covered in a number of optional side missions and event cinematics, minor antagonists like Silat and Wyald make prominent appearances, and even noncombatants like Erica and the blacksmith Godo get their own 3D model despite relatively brief appearances.

  The gameplay is standard fare for a Warriors title, with progressively unlocked light and hard attack combos. Berserk and the Band of the Hawk ups the carnage factor by providing a two-step process to the its ultimate system. Combos and kills fill up your Berserk guage which is activated with a spray of blood, increasing your damage. During Berserk mode, killing enemies fills up yet another bar that allows you to use your Death Blow, a huge area of effect attack. Guts is notably stronger than every other human character except maybe Schierke, capable of easily delivering multiple deathblows in a single Berserk phase and hewing through groups of enemy officers which might give characters like Casca or Judeau trouble. Keeping true to the series, most humans don’t really give Guts much trouble. Later on Berserk Armor Guts, Femto, and Zodd also become playable, trivializing even monstrous troops. Apostle fights are a mixed bag of boss fights ranging from engaging battles to frustrating gimmick movesets, usually requiring dodging around slow haymaker attacks or trying to close against keep away enemies whose every attack throws you back out of reach.

  Like any Japanese title with RPG elements worth its salt, Berserk and the Band of the Hawk offers a ton of extras to ensure there's nothing to stop you from spending hundreds of hours in Midland. Story mode missions include optional objectives that offer Behelits for completion which allow you to slowly piece together artwork such as Guts and Griffith having a naked water fight. An Infinite Eclipse Mode is probably the biggest replayability enhancer, a survival mode in the depths of hell which hits you with a number of missions and boss fights while fighting off hordes of demons. Then, of course, there’s RNG item collection and crafting! I can’t say for sure just how long this trend has been going, but it’s not quite dead yet. You can supplement the already immense amount of time you can invest in the game by trying to optimize your build by perfectly distributing fairly invisible statistics across your accessories. This, of course, means spending a lot of time in fairly clunky menus accompanied by confusingly discordant music that makes the entire experience as unpleasant as it is lacking in tangible rewards.

While Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is by far the most Warriors-like title rolled out by Omega Force in recent history, it’s hard to argue that the series doesn’t fit the bill. The hyper-detailed models capture Miura’s aesthetic and the visceral visuals of the series lend themselves perfectly to the Warriors design. Berserk fans are likely to be more than satisfied with the story coverage and presentation, extending all the way to the conclusion of the Ganishka without skimping on any of its finer points. Look, feel, and story are where the titles strongest points lie. Although Infinite Eclipse mode is fun, it rapidly wears and becomes a numbers game along with the item creation system. At the end of the day, its greatest value is as a means of experiencing Miura's world in motion. Omega Force has shown a great intuition for identifying the strengths of a property and throwing their creative weight into exaggerating that aspect to fit their model and their emphasis on story in Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is no exception.

REVIEW ROUND-UP

+ Has the look, feel, and blood of Berserk

+ Covers a huge amount of the story

+ Plenty of replayability

- Frustrating boss movesets

- Clunky menus

- Equipment management

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Peter Fobian is an Associate Features Editor for Crunchyroll and author of Monthly Mangaka Spotlight. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com