#pulp fiction is bonkers

[callahanscorner]

So I’ve been reading a giant collection of pulp crime fiction to get into the vibe and headspace I need to write Concrete Midnights, and I can’t stop thinking about this passage from the foreword.

IMAGINE THIS BEING PRINTED ABOUT YOU

YOU INVENTED A GENRE AND A BOOK DISSECTING THE HISTORY OF THAT NOW FLOURISHED AND SUCCESSFUL GENRE HAS ONLY THIS TO SAY

It’d be over for me. I’d end it. Hang it up. Call it a day. Throw in the towel. It’s over.

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - Actually a pretty fab line up right now

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

NOV 2024 Week 5

Ongoing Series - Thai

Love Sick 2024 (Sun iQIYI) ep 11 of 15 - This is where the teen awkward comes to grab me by the throat. No other Thai BL does this better than Love Sick (except maybe Make it Right). And it’s always a challenge to watch because Phun is so ready to come out and Noh is so not. I love what cramming 3 eps into one (and better side BL couples) did for the tension and pacing in this particular part of this story. The new version really is excellent. I'm chronicling my experience with 2024 as compared to 2014 here. 

Your Sky (Sun iQIYI) ep 2 of 12 - They are so awkward and I love them so much for it. They are terrible at faking romance, yet Fah want’s Rak so bad. This is moving so slowly but that’s part of it’s charm. I'm not frustrated instead I’m getting Oxygen vibes from it. Or perhaps it’s is more just I feel the way I felt when I was first watching Oxygen. Which is to say, I’m totally addicted and I keep re-watching new episodes. 

Spare Me Your Mercy (Thurs iQIYI) ep 1 of 8 - Gah! JJ grew up so pretty. I love these leads. (No one is shocked.) I love the lawful good paired against (we’re not sure yet but possibly) neutral evil. I love our very sus very flirty very gay doctor. A lot happened in this first episode. I’m getting Manner of Death flashbacks but there’s nothing wrong with that. Bring on the chili. 

Incidentally, if you're interested in true crime, here's the IRL version of this story. How a Nuclear Lab Helped Catch a Serial Killer from the Science Vs podcast.

Jack & Joker (Mon IQIYI) ep 10-12 end - I got the go ahead on a safe ending, and thus I watched the last 3 eps all as one. I love how defiantly verse these two were. I also really enjoyed the final episode. I do like a finale that ends on a bang (yes, both kinds). 

Final thoughts

I enjoyed this show a lot. A caper BL starring two of Thailand's best and focusing on class struggles, corruption, and poverty, was always gonna appeal to me. But I’m not sure, ultimately, whether I liked it because it was good in it’s own right, or because YinWar were so good in it. I do wish it had been a little more Leverage and little less chaos, Dr Evils, and "watch War cry." It was a great vehicle for YinWar, and for them to prove that BL can defy its own tropes. To that end, this goes comfortably into the Manner of Death category more than anything else I’ve encountered befor (although slightly less unhinged). It's good, but it loses the plot, the side couples, and it's own mind a couple of times, and YinWar were definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Thus I feel an 8/10 is fair, especially considering I'm unlikely to rewatch.

The Heart Killers (Weds Gaga) ep 2 of 12 - Dunk is illegally pretty in this show. I gotta say I covet his skin care routine. (I love YinWar as much as the next person, but THIS boy should be the spokes-BL-rep for Laneige.)

Manwhile..... FirstKhao might be GMMTV’s best flirters. It’s a pleasure to watch them just inhabit these characters and bounce off each other. I do keep saying “what tf are they doing?!“ with this show. In this instance, it was the dancing in the bowling alley. What is going on? is it meant to be a Pulp Fiction reference?

Also this gd soundtrack is bonkers. I *can’t!* with the 70s orgy porn music and the very bad not quite metal intro music. And then, I remember, brain must be turned off! (That’s really hard for me OK?)

All that said, both the sauna and the jerk-off scenes were much appreciated. It’s nice to see this kind of visceral physical attraction depicted in a BL, we get it so rarely.  

On a side note, I entirely support Thailand’s one country agenda to put all the cute boys in crop tops. Keep it up. And up. And up. 

Fourever You (Thurs YT) ep 9 of 16 - I just don’t get the (new) main couple. They don’t work for me. I like the surprise gamer boys side crumbs though. They are v cute.

Side quest: Genius move anytime Hill comes on screen to basically have Pond make love to the camera. He v good at it. Break down everyone’s fourth wall, baby. Take no prisoners. 

Caged Again (Fri Gaga) ep 3 of 10 - That exchange! “Are you worried about me” (attempted flirtation) vrs Junior’s response “yes I am.” Just utter frankness. It’s very sweet. All in all this show is very sweet. Somewhat incomprehensible world building, but sweet. And the head lift into the lap was next level adorable. Sun’s shy smile is everything. 

Perfect 10 Liners (Sun YT?) ep 5 of 24 - This show is very silly. I love the sides so much I can’t EVEN. But I think it was a big mistake putting Tay into this show. Never let an OG out of the bottle like that. He gets all our attention because we think he’s gonna grant all our wishes. By which I mean, all I could think the whole time he was on screen was WHY IS HE SO FINE?

I’m not joking, I had to watch his scenes 3x because I kept getting distracted and losing the plot. Not that there is much plot to lose. Just Tay’s mouth. I’ll stop now, but seriously tho LOOK AT HIM!!! 

Every You Every Me (Mon Gaga) ep 8 end - Honestly I’d like to see this pair handed something much more meaty. Like a Japanese adaptation? Tokyo in April is… for example. I think they do a great job with something like that.

Conclusion

This was supposed to be a linked series about reincarnated soulmates, but ended up being more like a Y-Destiny grab bag BL with no rebirth through line, just the same acting pair. The leads were excellent. And I must praise this show for representing things I always want in my BL (and rarely get), switch, verse, communication, and safe sex. It’s just that this format with the same actors but no unifying theme (despite the pitch/packaging) made for a disappointing viewing experience. Some of the installments I enjoyed, and the visuals are on point, but I was ultimately let down by style and execution, if not acting. 6/10 

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Our Youth AKA Miseinen: Mijukuna Oretachi wa Bukiyo ni Shinkochu (Japan Tues Gaga) ep 4 of 11 - “I won’t fall in love with you” is an easy promise to make if you’ve already fallen. I love this show SO MUCH. “Infect me just a little.” Holy fuck. This BOY. Also, so much for “not kissing.” This BL is fantastic. I’m so worried about where it’s going. Japan could very much hurt me with this. I didn’t expect to fall in love so hard.

Man, JBL...... when it gets you it really gets you (then it locks you in a basement and gets kinky). We are not safe but we must sit back and suffer enjoy it. I hate this. I love this. What a rush. 

See Your Love (Taiwan Weds Gaga) ep 7 of 13 - I think this show has a “crash into me” trope in every single ep. This ep alone had 3, plus a flash back to the first one. Still, their damn date was so flipping adorbs!!!

Teenager Judge (Vietnam Sat YT) ep 10 of ? - I couldn’t be less interested in the stuff with the mean girls. I’m annoyed we spent so much of this episode on them. Fewer bullies more smooches.

Love in the Air: Koi no Yokan (Japan Sat Gaga) ep 5 of 10 - Arashi as the doting bf was cute if sudden, also holy musical montage BLman.  Kai is my favorite character (as was Sky) but I'm still not wild about the blackmail sex start to this relationship. It does seem a little bit more like Kai went after a one night stand, also bit more switchy, which is better...... I guess. But not by much because the chemistry with these two isn't as good as the original.

I remain suspicious.

It's airing but......

Love is Like a Poison AKA Doku Koi: Doku mo Sugireba Koi to Naru (Japan Tues ????) 11 of 12 eps - My source hasn’t yet uploaded 11. So…… I wait. 

Secret Love (? YT?) 13-?? of 81 eps - I don't know what's going on either.

Blue Canvas of Youthful Days (China Sun Viki) paused at eps 9-10 of 12 - I got the "stop" on this one as it's gone (no surprise) dark. Being China can not be relied upon to HEA. So I'm on pause until I'm told it's safe. If it ends sad/bad I will dnf. But for now I wait......

Winter Is Not The Death of Summer (Thai Weds YT) ?? eps - Criminals who meet in prison fall in love. I did find it on YouTube, initially unsubbed, then subs happened by which time I got distracted. The first episode seems to be only six minutes long. It is very pulp. But it is intriguing. For now its to the wayside until someone tells me what it whats to be and if it's headed in a safe direction. Occasionally Thai pulps want to be edgy and it's not a good look on them.

Bad Guy My Boss (Thai Sun Gaga) 10 eps - I DNF'd at ep 7, I couldn't make it. I'm weak. Life is hard enough right now, this show made it harder. It’s not what I want from my entertainment. Ends tomorrow.

Bad to Bed (Taiwan Sat YT) 10 eps - This is a little too low production value even for me + just very very odd. DNF

In Case You Missed it - GMMTV 2025 Line Up

There have been a ton of hot takes already, including mine.

Here are the titles and links to MDL for you (confirmed full BLs only), these are organized in order of the ones I'm anticipating the most at the top.

Dare You to Death - trailer

Boys in Love - trailer

Memoir of Rati - trailer

My Magic Prophecy - trailer

Me and Thee - trailer

A Dog and A Plane - trailer

Cat for Cash - trailer

That Summer - trailer

My Romance Scammer - trailer

Head 2 Head - trailer

Ticket To Heaven - trailer

Burnout Syndrome - trailer

Melody of Secrets - trailer

Only Friends Dream On - trailer

Love You Teacher - trailer

Next Week Looks Like This:

End of year drops:

12/4 0.5D (Japan ????) 10 eps - Sales ace, Sada, has a secret that only his junior, Daiki, knows. He has pretended to have a gf for years, resulting in him being a virgin. But now Sada has fallen in love. Confused, Sada seeks advice from his junior. I sense another queer Cyrano De Bergerac. Info here.

12/6 Be Moon - Falling for my enemy's son (China ????) movie from HBD Studio - Not much on this one just a trailer, looks intriguing...... if it's from/through Taiwan, but if it's all China, I'm wary.

12/13 ThamePo Heart that Skips a Beat (Fri YT) 12eps - A boy band member and his documentarian start a forbidden relationship. I LOVE Est and am delighted to see him at GMMTV. This was my #1 pick for 2024. I've been waiting for a Blinding Lights style idol romance and this looks like it might be it (Korea and Japan have systemically disappointed me). Bring it, boys.

12/14 & 12/21 The Renovation (Thai mini One31) 2 eps - Writer turns his blossoming romance with holiday resort owner into a novel.

12/29 Sangmin Dinneaw (Thai ????) ??eps - trailer Childhood friends (Thai & Korean) reunite after being apart for ten years. As the boys reconnect, their bond matures and feelings of romance begin to develop, in Thai.

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

His smile. (Caged Again)

Look at them!

Look, I don't mean to tell you your business, but THIS? This is peak Thai BL. This is it. This is What They Do Best. Sure they dabble with silly kinky crimey-whiney fashizzal, but Thailand's true BL power is right here, in the sweet awkward school-set first love arghhhhh. Yes I said, school. Bite me. (Love Sick... damn it, 10 years later and it still has me in a choke hold.)

Hey all you idiots who thought (or think) there is ever a green flag in any Mame ever, this character if for you. This boy, THIS ONE. This is what a walking talking ACTING green flag energy actually looks like. You wanna date a dude? Find you one like him. Okay, peaches? sheesh

Meanwhile, this, this is not a green flag. This is GMMTV thinking they are being clever by calling out Thai BLs' worst behavior to make a character who has 'slightly less than worst behavior' look better. Sigh. When meta is used for ill gotten gains.

This, on the other hand is meta being cleverly deployed.

And this is language play. P'ABL's favorite.

So endeth this lesson.

(last week)

The tag BLigade: @doorajar @solitaryandwandering @my-rose-tinted-glasses @babymbbatinygirl @babymbbatinygirl @isisanna-blog @mmastertheone @pickletrip @aliceisathome @urikawa-miyuki @tokillamonger @sunflower-positiiivity @rocketturtle4 @blglplus @anythinggoesintheshire @everlightly @renafire @mestizashinrin @bl-bam-beyond @small-dark-and-delicious @saezurumurmurs

[vintagerpg]

Once Little Soldier and Phoenix went belly up in 1981, Lou Zocchi’s Gamescience bought the “Book of” series. I believe either dead stock or reprints of Monsters and Demons came out with Gamescience branding. Later, all six were collected in this, The Fantasy Gamer’s Compendium (1983).

I have seen the digest versions of three of these in the wild (for frankly bonkers prices): Book of Shamans, Book of Treasure and Book of Sorcery. Shamans is a whole new class, complete with a custom spell list, that is framed around accessing the spirit world in a way that reflects I guess broad assumptions about tribal magical systems. Its OK! Treasure is what you’d expect, a collection of magic items pulled from myth and legend in the first part and from genre fiction in the second. It is pretty good! Sorcery is an interesting, if slightly unwieldy reconfiguration of the magic user class, explicitly arranged around demonology and pulp notions of Western occult traditions. Basically, it’s intended to provide mechanics that allow a class to summon all the folks listed out in Book of Demons. It also has a collection of occult-themed magic items, like the Hand of Glory, that I find delightful. That’s probably the most useful thing for me, personally, in the whole “Book of” series.

The last Book collected here is the Book of Mystery, which I am not sure ever saw print as a standalone Little Soldier product. It presents a new class (Lord of Mystery), the new skill system those characters use, and an organization they belong to, which safeguards high science for a time when humanity is ready for it (the Lords of Mystery are descended from the original humans, who crashed here [wherever that is] in a colony ship millennia ago). Many of the classes skills are trained and require quests. They seem to get access to a lot of abilities. It seems like a pain in the butt, but an interesting one, almost like a more monastic version of Dave Hargrave’s Techno class from Arduin.

[honourablejester]

One thing I truly love about the Ninth World setting for Numenera is how absolutely bonkers it is. The premise alone is just spectacular. Instead of your standard medieval-esque fantasy where this is the first go around for this planet, the Ninth World is the ninth world, the ninth civilisation on the planet. So while it is, indeed, medieval-esque, it’s built on eight other civilisations, all of whom where from the far end of batshit science-so-futuristic-it’s-basically-magic science fiction.

Which lends to a setting that has completely slipped the reins of traditional fantasy and gone fully weird and batshit. This is a world (and solar system) that has been terraformed within an inch of its life, has been littered with ungodly ancient tech that can warp reality, and that is home to societies that have developed medieval-level understanding of technology while surrounded by a billion-years-worth of discarded hypertech that could level planets if anyone pushes the wrong button in their blissful ignorance. There are storms of ancient insane nanobots that locals call Iron Winds that blow around disassembling (and sometimes reassembling) people. The prophet who started the local theocratic empire vanished when he entered a massive amber floating monolith that he said teleports you to a space station, although since he did that, no one else has been able to access it. There is a mass of land that has been reduced to primordial soup and that warps reality around it. There’s no such thing as ‘bonkers’ on the Ninth World. The setting explicitly tells you ‘just go nuts’. It’s all good here.

I just love that merging of traditional fantasy rpg with the far end of insane pulp science fiction technology.

Because. Look. One of the things I really, really wanted from fantasy as a kid was something fantastical. The crystal plains Atreya rides past in The Neverending Story. The Escher Room from The Labyrinth. Flying cities and weird landscapes and things that don’t get bogged down in real world sense because this is fantasy and in fantasy we get to have fucking fun.

And Numenera … It really gives me that. Instead of a fantasy merchant city bogged down in the pseudo-reality of simulating the medieval iron trade, Numenera has shit like a city built out over the ocean on what may well be the remnants of an ancient titanic mining installation, or a town that’s built at the base of what’s clearly an orbital elevator with five giant boulders hovering over its head, or an area called the cloudcrystal skyfields because the skies are full of flying crystals and an animated corpse city crawls around the desert underneath it, or a jungle town where the hills behind it are slowly getting hoovered up chunk by chunk into an invisible anomaly in the sky and they get rid of their criminals by stranding them on chunks that are about to go, or a city built 300ft up some prior-world towers where the ‘streets’ are invisible force field canals above the lake 300ft below. There is a massive flying city out there that is completely composed of nano-particles that can deconstruct itself at will and reform later. There is a 200 mile by 200 mile square of landscape that is segmented atop titanic subterranean metal plates that move over across each other, basically making a 40,000 sq mile puzzle floor masquerading as a savannah. Like. It’s bonkers. It’s all the fantastic insanity that kid!me wanted out of fantasy.

The Ninth World is very much what you get when you smash fantasy and pulp science fiction together at a decent fraction of the speed of light, and then start building lego castles out of the shards. And I love it. Such a setting, you know?

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

medialog june 2k24

watched

wordplay - rewatched this documentary about crosswords and particularly about the annual crossword tournament put on by will shortz while waiting for the anesthesia from my wisdom tooth extraction to wear off and found it about as charming as i remembered... i love a doc about a subculture made up of endearing nerds. i first saw it when it came out and on revisit it also has some intensely 2004 vibes - in particular jon stewart shows up as one of their crossword-fans talking heads and it really brought home for me how influential he was on the development of internet tone (like to this day the reason so many people on reddit sound Like That is because they're trying to be jon stewart and failing...)

the bourne ultimatum - movie go zoom zoom! still not convinced matt damon can act

artists and models - i had never seen a dean martin/jerry lewis film before and i don't really want to again but i'm glad i saw this one (this is how i feel about the two (2) wes anderson movies i've seen, and also pulp fiction & tarantino). some great colors & costumes, a plot that goes surprisingly bonkers in a final third turn that reminds you it was the cold war (between that and all the stuff about comics & violence this one also functions as a real time capsule), and (my main reason for watching) shirley maclaine the love of my life is so adorable and funny as a daffy sweetheart in a role that really lets her (a former dancer) show off her gift for physical comedy.

the secret garden - the cast in this movie is so good, including the children in the starring roles, and while it doesn't even attempt to do anything with the book's deranged relationship with things like the british empire and the concept of disability, watching it really did bring me back to why the book has been so beloved - the fantasy at its heart is ultimately about hard humble work paying off and about friends teaching each other to be nicer, which are i think deeply appealing narratives for children in a way that people sometimes forget. it's so funny that part of what cures mary and colin of their bad personalities is meeting another unhappy rich child for the very first time!

humanist vampire seeking consenting suicidal person - this was slight but sweet, a darkly funny romcom with some style and heart. also i had never seen a french-canadian movie before i don't think and it was a fun surprise to hear them talking like "frenchfrenchfrenchfrenchRRRRfrenchfrenchRRRR." not an accent with which i have much familiarity!

jurassic park - my somewhat inexplicable, even to me, aversion to raiders of the lost ark had me avoiding action spielberg for basically my whole life but i gave this a shot thinking maybe i would appreciate it if not enjoy it and was absolutely GLUED to the screen from about five minutes in. i understand why other directors are like that about spielberg now, and also what jj abrams is trying to do all the time and failing because he doesn't understand how it actually works. this is like the most famous movie in the world basically and i've seen so many clips from it over the years and yet even waiting for them and expecting them to come i was ON THE EDGE OF MY SEAT! like WOW! truly a movie that feels like a theme park ride more than any other i've seen except maybe fury road. anyway as you statistically speaking probably already know this movie absolutely rocks, and not just for (1) laura dern and (2) jeff goldblum with his tits out.

citizen kane - spent the last weekend in june at two different marches & closed it out sunday night with a screening of the movie that made me bisexual <3 one day i'll figure out a way to articulate how this movie did what it did to me but for now i will just say that it is great and its reputation is deserved and orson welles is one of the most entertaining screen presences of all time and it looks so cool and beautiful all the way through and it is so so so so gay

interview with a vampire season 2 - my opinion on this is at this point well established lol finally some good fucking food!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

read

megan abbott, the turnout - this & the zadie smith book are further steps in me catching up with authors i lost track of during some bad reading years! when i heard that megan abbott was coming out with a book about sisters who run a ballet school i was like LOL because that's like the peak ultimate megan abbott premise (girls and the nastiness of both feelings and bodies and ambition and hunger and an atmosphere of nightmares and filth and the insane dynamics of a tightly knit but deeply dysfunctional world, all to the nth power), and guess what as a megan abbott fan i loved it :) all the bad reviews on goodreads for this are like "why is this book so gross? why is she sexualizing the nutracker? there were scenes in this book that made me feel dirty reading them. way too much focus on the wet leotard crotches of little girls" and i was sickos dot jpg the whole time. but actually i think the reason that this wound up being my favorite abbott since dare me is that at its core it's a book about a woman with an unbelievably fucked up childhood due to her incredibly fucked up dead parents and the suspense that gives the book its tension and its form is less about what's going to happen with the plot and more about whether she is at any point going to put it together that the things that happened to her when she was young were actually bad; the further the book goes, the more deeply you understand the walls of denial and distortion around her entire life. it rules.

david j. skaal, something in the blood: the untold story of bram stoker, the man who wrote dracula - as previously mentioned, i have some real qualms with some of his dracula readings, but overall i found this an addictively pleasurable tome - 600 pages and he kept them turning the whole time. i love a biography that starts off with some background on medieval ireland, you know? skaal is a good writer with an engaging but learned style, and the book is clearly both exhaustively researched and intended for popular audiences (albeit popular audiences who have definitely read dracula, but, i mean, who else is reading 600 pages about this guy?); reading it often feels something like having a drink with a professor who knows his stuff and is NOT afraid to gossip. dracula qualms aside i may investigate some of his other books, particularly his book on dracula screen adaptations, since i'm curious about those but don't necessarily want to, like, watch most of them, lol

bonnie jo campbell, the waters - book club book that was objectively certainly not terrible and which had some things i did like or appreciate, like an 11 year old girl obsessed with math (representation matters...) but which i found just about the most boring thing i have read in my life. like i would definitely say campbell is a better writer than, say, taylor jenkins reid (to name another book club book) or whatsherface who wrote the book of fried green tomatoes which we also read las year... but i found those books much more aggravating but also easier to get through than this book, which really requires you to have some level investment in, like, the natural world of rural michigan, but mostly made me feel so glad i don't live in a small town where all the men have guns.

zadie smith, swing time - it's funny because when i started this i was spending a lot of time thinking about how maybe plot and structure have become underrated, but then this was like a very long book written in the style of someone just kind of talking at you about their life, with plot events technically happening but never feeling like the driving force of the book, and i was totally riveted, which was a good reminder that you can get away with anything if you're a genius! smith is just such a keen observer of people and how they operate, and so allergic to relying on any kind of obvious assumptions about the relationships between demographics & personality or beliefs, even as demographic realities are such a key part of the fabric of the book... i was a little worried i would be disappointed by the fact that she abandoned the modernist-leaning experimentation of NW for a more straightforward, even chatty, style, but "you can get away with it if you're a genius" applies to that too. this book is also an absolute masterclass in the universal through the specific - i cannot emphasize how much literally not one thing the protagonist experiences has ever happened to me, how much our lives and backgrounds and personalities overlap not at all, and yet constantly i found myself aching with resonance over things like "it's so true that's what it's like when you have a mom" or "that really is what it feels like when you are young and sort of smart but also sort of stupid" (which if i were to define it briefly is i think more or less what the book is about).

listened

charli xcx, brat - i remain after all these years a true romance truther and continue unfairly to measure all her subsequent work, much of which is frankly too sophisticated and experimental for my listening taste even if i recognize she's Doing Something, but this album sounds great and has some bops. as a straight-through listen it was too rich for my blood, but i find myself enjoying the songs on shuffle mixed in with whatever else i've been into more than i would have expected from that first exposure, and also 360 has been stuck in my head more waking hours than not for like a month and a half now and i'm still not sick of it (although i think my favorite song on the album is 365, and not just because i think it's really funny that she ended the album with "the opening track coming out of the bathroom after doing cocaine"). plus as someone who HAS been listening to charli since whenever the video for "you're the one" dropped it is nice to see The Culture finally rally around her even if i remain a little puzzled over why now, the all-star remixes getting rolled out have been pretty delightful (LORDE!!!!!!!!), and it's nice to have the zeitgeist coalesce for a moment over something i too think is fun (especially since the other thing gay people love this summer is chappell roan on whom i have yet to be converted sorry to everyone i'm sincerely glad you're having a good time)

[skeleton-richard]

I actually have only experienced (openly, not counting certain anime drenched in the themes) Faust through Frau Faust... What's the best place to start with plays/novels/etc? 👀

Ahhhh welcome to Faustklub!

The best place to start would probably be Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, it's an Early Modern English play from around Shakespeare's time and it's pretty easily accessible. The 2012 version by the Globe Theatre is really good and can be seen on DVD or streaming (I actually made @fade-steppin watch it last night for our Halloween party, it's a good spooky thing for this time of year). The relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles has a lot in common with FF, especially with Meph having a very tortured personality.

Frau Faust is largely based on Goethe's version, originally in German. Goethe's is... weird because it's technically drama but it's very wordy and poetic in a way that makes it hard to perform. There are plenty of translations online for free. I'm not sure which is the best since I'm new to Goethe, I'm sure @tuttocenere or someone else from Goetheblr can help me here. Goethe is also the background for the operas by Gounod, Berlioz (THE BEST ONE), and Boito, as well as the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica.*

For the operas, @shredsandpatches and I just watched the Royal Opera House version of Gounod's Faust, which was fantastic, especially their Mephistopheles, though that opera isn't very focused on Faust himself. It still has some amazing parts that are worth it. That version can be seen on DVD too. I've also listened to Berlioz's Damnation de Faust, which is a weird opera because it's not exactly staged like a play, rather just sung, but if you have a translation of it to read along with it's really fun. It's way more sympathetic to Faust than Gounod is, and in fact has a part in the relationship between Faust and Marguerite that's a lot like in the manga!

I still have yet to see the F. W. Murnau film version, I've heard it's really cool and I do love his other four movie Nosferatu, so I'll be able to give an actual review when I see it ;) Just skip the 2011 Faust, it's not very good.

There's also the Faustbuch, the original German chapbook (kind of an early novel/pulp fiction thing) that's the earliest printings of the Faust legend. It's absolutely bonkers and more episodic than other versions but it's interesting to see where it started.

Anyway. I think the best place to start would be Marlowe's Faustus, then trying Goethe or one of his derivatives. It kind of depends on what kind of media you want.

I'm sure my friends @shredsandpatches and @fata-vocant can give some suggestions too!

*which I guess you already know ;) Blue Exorcist and Shaman King also have a lot of references to Faust.

[tavina-writes]

about loch-are there really no good available translations? it's a shame. 2017 is really good, are any of the other adaptations worth looking at? does 1983 have subtitles?

Hi Nonny! Oh boy, this is going to be long, so answers to this under the cut.

Regarding LOCH, which I love dearly but find myself frustrated with consistently regarding translation style and quality, there is an official English translation, which I cannot in good faith recommend given that uh, there are whole sentences and passages that Jin Yong never wrote in there. There are character names translated literally and others left in their original format. There's just, mmmm stuff I could never in good faith recommend to people as someone who dearly loves this book. The translator took it upon themselves to also make major writing related edits which as someone who has a long history in fan translation myself, I could never in good conscience recommend. It's kind of like how we have routine "why didn't the mdzs translators do x?" about some things people mention as differences between the Chinese edition and the English edition, except, the edits were absolutely on purpose and uh, not an improvement! Imagine a translation of MDZS where Lan Wangji's name gets translated as "Blue." His name is just Blue now. Wei Ying calls him Blue. Lots of other beloved characters will now get weird English translated names that flatten their nuances. Lan the Teacher. Separation Jiang. Jade Meng. Mulberry Nie. That's. The severity of the problems with the official English translation, and it kind of breaks my heart that it's like that. Why would you read that and why would I suggest that you read that? The sheer condescension towards both the original text and the abilities of the English language readers just drips from these name changes alone.

The fan translated version of LOCH that I know of is here. It's quite rough in some parts grammar wise, and due to the sheer number of translators that worked on this, not always entirely consistent in formating/spelling/etc, but I have spent a lot of time on the spcnet forums, and wholeheartedly appreciate the efforts of the translators there. I think the issues with translating Jin Yong is a matter of both scope and depth. Jin Yong's books are extremely long. Most of his major novels are close to if not over a million Chinese characters each, and DGSD famously features over 200+ named characters. The spcnet translation of DGSD, for example, took 12 years and countless translators to complete and burned out so many of us. It is a major work to translate a Jin Yong book on length and time input alone.

Further complicating matters, Jin Yong wrote wuxia with the insistence that it could be literature instead of merely genre pulp fiction, and his books are deeply rooted in references to Chinese history and literature. I distinctly remember at least four poems and one song as well as an extended discussion of the Jingkang Incident, (also if you've seen the Temple of the Iron Spear sequence in 2017, you can start to understand the scope of the "Jin Yong writes in a way that is rooted in his book being in Chinese for the wordplay alone and it sounds SO WONKY outside of that Chinese context") among lots of other things I probably didn't catch in LOCH alone, which also makes the task of translating his books harder, especially when you have to not only get the plot across, but somehow make accessible all of his wordplay and references as well as the poetry he interjects at various points to heighten certain scenes and their emotionality.

So yeah, it's a task. I'd recommend checking out the fan translation I've linked above if you want to read it though instead of paying money for a book where the Love Interest gets translated to Lotus Huang because the translator....could? Like bonkers English naming conventions aside, I'm not a great recommender of Blue Lan and I'm not a recommender of Huang Rong being turned into Lotus Huang either.

REGARDING THE ADAPTATIONS:

1983 is my beloved childhood adaptation but please remember it is also. It is. It was made by TVB in the 1980s. The accessibility of this to people who do not speak Chinese is rather...low, given the lack of desire from subtitlers to subtitle things made by TVB in the 1980s. (It's also more readily available in Canto though there WAS a Mandarin Dub, that I watched because I don't speak Cantonese.) I think the first third of the series is available on Youtube with the English autotranslate feature? I can dig up this link for you if you would like to see it because 83 is dear to my heart, but I would not make anyone who isn't a LOCH fanatic sit through this merely for my sake, yknow.

1994 I am unfortunately not really that impressed with 1994, and 94 is kind of like the ignored middle child of LOCH adaptations so there is also no english subtitling anywhere and it's also more widely available in Cantonese. This was a 90s TVB production. I am not sure you want to watch this one.

2003 is one of my favorite adaptations! when it's going well. When it's not going well [lolsob] truly the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, the hands down best in some areas and the "I fear you did not realize this CGI would not be cool" in others. Find the first 41 episodes here and the last episode here. This is LOCH for LOCH/Jin Yong nerds, the pacing is incredibly tight for the first 3/4ths and the expansions were made with the book in hand and the themes in mind. I would say though that 8 episodes of Mongolia is likely not where one wants to begin when watching LOCH 😔.

2008 .....I am a professional 08 LOCH hater. 😔It decided a sex pest needed nuance when the original rightfully gives him NOTHING. NO INTERIORITY. THE MALE EQUIVALENT OF A SEXY LAMP. I cannot explain to you how much I hate the Ouyang Ke - Mu Nianci - Yang Kang love triangle in 08 because my homeboy (evil trash son) Yang Kang does NOT have enough good qualities for you to subtract some so a 30+ year old sex pest can share. The storyline edits were at times just "I see you did this for drama, but tell me why???" 😔 It does have Hu Ge in it though, though I would say that this was not Hu Ge's best work given that he was coming off of a really bad car crash.

2017 I think this one is the most accessible and most book faithful adaptation for LOCH and also the one that I'd most recommend people to see, since it both has good English Subtitles (and is on Youtube and IQiYi if you look for Legend of the Condor Heroes 2017). Also great fight scenes. 2017 loves its fight scenes. And is also a remake of 1983.

2023/2024/the Yao Ke LOCH - This one isn't out yet! The trailer looks absolutely BANGING though. This one is uhhh apparently a more deconstructed LOCH version where we get extra backstory details so I have no idea what we're getting into here but the production quality looks insane. Anyway who knows when the censorship board will have mercy on us and lolsob when this will appear or if it'll get lost in Tencent's giant cdrama vault to haunt me from now until the end of time. You'll hear me scream if it comes out.

https://m.weibo.cn/status/N5ZMnAMmw?refer_flag=1001030103_

Thanks for the ask Nonny! Uh! I'm not sure if all this was helpful but maybe it was? I love LOCH very much so if you have more questions and or thoughts come back to my inbox and tell me! (also who's your favorite character from 2017 so far?)

[quitetheketch-moved]

I think my biggest problem with the unironic use of film bro is its evolution into a critique of the films and not the bros themselves and their misunderstanding of the pieces and idolization of the violent men being critiqued in said films.

[spidermilkshake]

Ancardian Pantheon Series

Lol'eth

Lol’eth is the Goddess of Death, Decay, and the Spirit itself, and so commands a very powerful niche among the Divines as well as acting as a psychopomp for Ancardia’s world. She is sometimes referred to as Lol-Eth (Hobgoblins), Lolth (Ancient Stone Giant as well as Trolls), the Queen of Spiders (Koboldi), Demonhunter (Gnolls and Orcs) and other euphemisms and differing forms of her name.

    She is frequently mischaracterized on the Surface by those with no experience or knowledge of true Night God worship, and peculiar misconceptions include the idea she is a domineering and cruel Goddess who enforces her worship amongst the Draulfyn people by imposing a brutal and matriarchal hierarchy, where oligarchs are encouraged to mistreat the lower classes, undertake bizarre rituals involving blood, sex, and torture, and even capture slaves (despite slavery in general being fully outlawed by the Draulfyn collective communes and cities as early as the 6th Age). The obsessive fixation on a particularly sadistic form of sex and the insistence that Dark Elves who follow Lol’eth are highly misandrist and ruled exclusively by women are likely connected, and indeed come very much from ancient Surface-dwellers’ projection and revulsion upon seeing women in Dark Elven leadership and military positions (and incorrect—the idea that Dark Elves are even matriarchal rather than equal-opportunity seems to arise from the awareness of the very feminine Lol’eth as their primary Deity, and from witnessing some women or assumed women casually occupying positions of importance among them).

Lol’eth is said to be the sister of Dhamsar and Thurigyl, and has a particular closeness to each of those two. She can take the form of a colossal spider of a black and indigo hue, though sometimes adopts a slightly smaller version of this incarnation which has a somewhat more humanoid centaur-like torso (though with very obvious spider-like features still very much present). Offerings amongst the various cultures who worship her tend to include either bones or seeds depending on the purpose for the offering, and the bone effigies and type of seed varies by culture and region. Her symbols are the scythe, the web of thread and bones, and the spider.

Final deity! And yes, this Goddess is essentially "Llolth, but as a good entity" since I like to rehabilitate the "Always Evil" malarky present in normal DnD. Of course prejudice exists and so do false beliefs about Gods more popular among the people in question--the bonkers ideas for how Dark Elf civilization and culture work contribute to some wack-a-doodle ideas about Lol'eth that reflect the skeevy, pulp-fiction-y origins. Doesn't mean she can't be seriously intimidating! She's essentially a Battle Grandma.

[earlgraytay]

*drops this into your inbox*

[ID: box of Deluxe fair trade earl grey tea with fifty tea bags]

Please elaborate on how Twilight and JoJo have similar strengths and weaknesses. I really want to hear what you have to say about both of them regarding their similarities.

Thank you for the tea!

So... okay. Nota bene that I'm still only on Battle Tendency/Part 2 of JoJo, and that I haven't properly read Twilight in... a while now. But.

The thing that these series have in common, more than anything else, is that they're the product of one person's very specific creative obsessions, baaaaasically unedited.

Since both writers were working in less-than-prestigious markets when they started out (80s manga/early 00s YA), they could write Weird Dumb Shit without anyone stopping them. And then when JJBA and Twilight started printing money, any editing that either might have had went out the window, because clearly this person is doing something right, right?

Araki and Meyer are both very good at worldbuilding, for specific given values thereof; they're both good at coming up with bonkers-but-halfway plausible ideas. They both created a weirdly compelling take on basically-unkillable vampires, and manage to keep tension going despite the vampires being unkillable. In some ways they even managed to create foundational works for their genre- if you want to understand how shonen adventure anime got started you kinda need to watch JoJo, and if you want to understand why YA is Like That you need to read Twilight.

They both struggle with some pretty major parts of writing- Araki, bless him, has yet to create a heroic character with more than two personality traits, and Meyer at the time of writing Twilight could not pace a plot to save her life. And yet- somehow- the stories they created are compelling enough to keep you on the hook for a while.

Twilight and JJBA are, unfortunately, both sexist and racist in ways that say... Things... about their authors.

In JJBA's case, Araki is clearly taking inspiration from 19th century adventure stories and pulp fiction- and using that inspiration completely uncritically. You've got racist stock characters that you wouldn't even see in Western fiction in the 90s, because everyone agreed we don't do that shit anymore. And... look, I am not going to say anything about Araki's sexuality, but... he's clearly uninterested in writing women, yeah? It comes off as really homoerotic, even though it's totally unintentional.

In Twilight's case.... well... look, if I say "Stephanie Meyer is Mormon and was most likely raised that way", I think that covers it. Just about everything that's fucked up about Twilight boils down to "Meyer's Mormonism makes her think things that are Very Much Not Okay are a normal part of the fabric of [hetero] relationships" and "Mormons grow up believing Weird Ass Shit about Native Americans anyway, the weird bullshit in Twilight is respectful by comparison". Both of which are pretty fucking major flaws with the writing!

On a more neutral note: both Meyer and Araki have some very niche interests that turn up everywhere in their writing.

If you know anything about JJBA, you know that random characters and powers are named after 80s music for No Fucking Reason. as early as part 1 you've got characters named Dire and Straits, and in part 2 you've got Cars, Wham, and AC/DC. (oh, scuse me- Kars, Wammu, and Esidesi. COPYRIGHT, WE'RE NOT VIOLATING IT). And of course Roundabout has become an iconic part of JoJo to the point it's a meme just because it's what Araki was listening to while writing...

Similarly, in Twilight, one of the first things you know about any character is the make and model of car they drive. The characters spend a hell of a lot of time having conversations while they're driving around, for no real reason. For heaven's sake, Meyer's favourite character is a mechanic! It's a part of the world that's tonally unfitting with everything else she's trying to build, it's definitely the author's interest peeking through, and it's really endearing.

There's no good TLDR here, it's just an infodump, but ... yeah, the similarities are there, and I'm enjoying the mashup on the merits, if nothing else.

[runawaymarbles]

i haven’t watched spn since the pulp fiction episode but based on tumblr dot com and a brief foray into youtube these are my predictions for how the show will and will not end

image description under the cut

image description: a grid. The Y axis options are “shitty” “whatever” and “bonkers.” X axis is “plausible” “less likely” and “least likely”.

Shitty-Plausible: Sam and Dean both die and go to Heaven where they get to hang out with all their dead friends except Cas who is still in mega Hell

Shitty-Less Likely: Sam and Dean kill God with a knife, Dean dies and goes to Hell, Sam gets a dog, Cas stays in Super Hell and once a year they all sit on a bench

Shitty-Least Likely: Everyone on earth dies except Sam, Dean, Jack and Charlie who are uploaded to a computer system that looks like Cas but isn’t while God has a orgy

Whatever-Plausible: They save the world. Cas comes back from superhell as a human and drives off to learn Who He Really Is. Dean becomes a Bobby-like figure to young hunters. Sam gets a dog.

Whatever-Less Likely: they save the world and Dean decides the next mission is to rescue Cas. The snow ends on a “we’ve got work to do” shot. Dean’s feelings for Cas are ambiguous. 

Whatever-Least Likely: They find a way to rid the world of all demonic, angelic and magical influences. The souls of all the dead are permanently destroyed so Cas is no longer technically in superhell.. Dean dies. Sam gets a dog. 

Bonkers-Plausible: Sam and Dean kill God and thus become God themselves. They have to leave Cas in Super Hell or the world will be destroyed. They cry manfully but decide that leaving Cas behind is what He Would Have Wanted.

Bonkers-Less Likely: Cas kills the Empty and becomes the Empty. Dean becomes the king of hell. They make out. Sam thinks he’s going back to law school but he’s really in heaven.  

Bonkers-Least Likely: Sam, Dean, Cas and Chuck died at the end of season four and it’s revealed that everything since then has been a human Chuck’s hallucinations 

[stylesnews]

Like most good stories, Harry Styles’ video for “Treat People With Kindness” starts with Fleabag, specifically with a meeting at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit London theatre run, which became the launchpad for the joyous black and white video, released on New Year’s Day.

Working with a team now synonymous with Styles' videos (choreographer Paul Roberts and stylist Harry Lambert, to name a few), it was directed by brothers Gabe and Ben Turner (part of the production company Fulwell 73), whose work has spanned One Direction videos ("Steal My Girl", “History”) and Styles' solo track “Golden” and who produced the documentaries I Am Bolt (2016) and Hitsville: The Making Of Motown (2019).

Here, Gabe and Ben tell us the story of when Harry met Phoebe and how “Treat People With Kindness” came together.

Gabe, you tweeted that the video was shot at the beginning of last year. How did it come together?

Gabe Turner: Harry and I went to watch Phoebe do her live Fleabag show in London. We met Phoebe and she was the kindest, most delightful person ever. The next day I was watching dance videos randomly and one of them was this Nicholas Brothers video from the 1920s. It was two brothers dancing. I said to Harry, “You and Phoebe, question mark.” And he messaged back saying, “Treat People With Kindness”. Then he called Phoebe and was like, “I've got this song. I want to do a video. What about me and you doing this dance routine?” And she was like, “Great." And then the two of them called Paul Roberts, the choreographer.

Ben Turner: This isn't always how our life is. This isn't the regular process. But once the touchpaper got lit, it just went off. Every now and then something comes along where all the dominoes fall perfectly.

GT: Harry and Phoebe worked with [choreographers] Paul Roberts and Jared Hageman. The four of them rehearsed all the time, remotely, wherever they were. Whatever projects they were doing, the choreographers would go with them and work on their steps. We would get sent video updates for them as they were rehearsing and learning. We were like, “This is amazing.” We had been to the Troxy for the Bugsy Malone Secret Cinema, so we were like, “That would be a great place to do this.”

You make it sound easy.

BT: That momentum that Gabe's describing, that's what made it easy. It was plenty of hard work, but once it started, it just came together.

What was the turnaround like for the video? BT: We just did it fast, in the space of a few months.

GT: There is a process for how music videos get made. Directors pitch for them, they come up with their creative, present it and there’s a process to go through. This one was already happening before any of that process. It was pure art from Harry and Phoebe, going, “We're going to connect and make this amazing thing and it will come out when it comes out.” As a creative to work in that way is totally joyous. You're just facilitating greatness.

What was it like to shoot?

BT: This is also easy, in a way, because the choreography means that [Harry's] going to be here at this point and there at that [point]. You knew exactly where they were going to be in the room. We went back and forward a bit on how to weave the story into the choreography so it wasn't just a dance routine. By the time we got onto set, that was quite well planned. The nice thing is being more prepared, you can try to feed in a bit of latitude to things. I know because we've worked with Harry for a long time that the camera doesn't just love him. The camera wants to marry him and run off with him and probably never come back. So we know to give a little bit of space for that to happen. Obviously to have Phoebe there with him as well is totally bonkers. And, again, the camera loves her. It was exciting for us to talk about how to execute things with someone who we admire so much.

GT: When you go to the Troxy there's a hidden stage at the top. Ben had an idea of coming down from the hidden stage to reveal Harry, then setting a scene up of [Phoebe] at the top. She was brilliantly collaborative in discussing what kind of role she was going to play.

What notes did you talk through with Phoebe about her character? BT: This song's called "Treat People With Kindness”, so it feels like there's a distance to cover in the narrative. You start on the Marsellus Wallace shot, out of Pulp Fiction. We wanted to get a sense that this was a kind of tough guy and there was the opposite of people being treated with kindness around the place. But the conversation went from [Phoebe] being a character that stood up to him to, actually, if you look at it, [she] wipes a tear off of his eye, which is so beautiful.

GT: Ben was just obsessed with casting the back of people's heads for the first shot.

What makes a good back of the head?

BT: I'm talking about how many folds of skin at the top, the optimum shape. Someone [said] that Bruce Willis had a fantastic shaped dome of a head and it really turned me on to the shape of a bald head, because it can be really beautiful.

GT: I find a lot of the music videos that we do, there'll always be a shot from a film that inspires something.

Aside from breaking the fourth wall at the end, the Pulp Fiction shot and the Nicholas Brothers, what other reference points or Easter eggs did you include?

BT: We love the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye and those physical comedians. I love Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. We’re also obsessed by Bugsy Malone. Busby Berkeley... I don't think there was much Busby Berkeley in this. GT: At the end there's a tiny bit, but Busby Berkeley has actually been used as a reference in quite a few music videos. We love that stuff. But we didn't want to go too into that symmetry and the choreography, because it didn't feel as fresh. What have you learned from Harry, after working together for so long?

BT: He's on a really interesting journey and we are lucky to be a bit of that journey with him. It's really rewarding to dip into that and try to facilitate some of that as we go along. There's a lot that he's in touch with that I'm not. I'm quite a lot older than him. I'm not as cool as him.

[strakhaz]

Thanks so much @animatenebrae for the tag! 🖤 This was really fun and the results were amazing. I might do the extensive version tomorrow. The idea is to do the quiz and then list the top ten characters you most resemble according to the test. Mine are:

1- John Wick (John Wick) 88%

2- Morpheus (The Matrix) 87%

3- Sun Bak (Sense8) 87%

4- Paul Atreides (Dune) 86% *Shit plz no*

5- Michael Scofield (Prison Break) 86% *Never watched this one*

6- Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) 85%

7- Trinity (The Matrix) 85%

8- Jules Winnfield (Pulp Fiction) 85%

9- Thomas Shelby (Peaky Blinders) 85%

10- Aunt Polly (Peaky Blinders) 85%

And the rest of the list is really fun to read. Wont deny, it was pleasing to see many of my fav characters ranking so high.

Any mutual is more than welcome to do this in their spare time. Plz tag me so I can check out your results and if anyone wants to go bonkers on their whole list, Im here for you mates.

However right off the top of my head I have these peeps in mind, I'm curious of your results: @hallsofvalhalla @killmesl0wly @xy-isjaki @mortania @rouxney and if you're still around, also: @morikuro @comfortablyymiserable

[hldailyupdate]

How the joyous ‘Treat People With Kindness’ video came together

Directors Gabe and Ben Turner on how Fleabag became the launchpad for Harry Styles' ‘Treat People With Kindness’ music video

Like most good stories, Harry Styles’ video for “Treat People With Kindness” starts with Fleabag, specifically with a meeting at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit London theatre run, which became the launchpad for the joyous black and white video, released on New Year’s Day.

Working with a team now synonymous with Styles' videos (choreographer Paul Roberts and stylist Harry Lambert, to name a few), it was directed by brothers Gabe and Ben Turner (part of the production company Fulwell 73), whose work has spanned One Direction videos ("Steal My Girl", “History”) and Styles' solo track “Golden” and who produced the documentaries I Am Bolt (2016) and Hitsville: The Making Of Motown (2019).

Here, Gabe and Ben tell us the story of when Harry met Phoebe and how “Treat People With Kindness” came together.

Gabe, you tweeted that the video was shot at the beginning of last year. How did it come together?

Gabe Turner: Harry and I went to watch Phoebe do her live Fleabag show in London. We met Phoebe and she was the kindest, most delightful person ever. The next day I was watching dance videos randomly and one of them was this Nicholas Brothers video from the 1920s. It was two brothers dancing. I said to Harry, “You and Phoebe, question mark.” And he messaged back saying, “Treat People With Kindness”. Then he called Phoebe and was like, “I've got this song. I want to do a video. What about me and you doing this dance routine?” And she was like, “Great." And then the two of them called Paul Roberts, the choreographer.

Ben Turner: This isn't always how our life is. This isn't the regular process. But once the touchpaper got lit, it just went off. Every now and then something comes along where all the dominoes fall perfectly.

GT: Harry and Phoebe worked with [choreographers] Paul Roberts and Jared Hageman. The four of them rehearsed all the time, remotely, wherever they were. Whatever projects they were doing, the choreographers would go with them and work on their steps. We would get sent video updates for them as they were rehearsing and learning. We were like, “This is amazing.” We had been to the Troxy for the Bugsy Malone Secret Cinema, so we were like, “That would be a great place to do this.”

You make it sound easy.

BT: That momentum that Gabe's describing, that's what made it easy. It was plenty of hard work, but once it started, it just came together.

What was the turnaround like for the video?

BT: We just did it fast, in the space of a few months.

GT: There is a process for how music videos get made. Directors pitch for them, they come up with their creative, present it and there’s a process to go through. This one was already happening before any of that process. It was pure art from Harry and Phoebe, going, “We're going to connect and make this amazing thing and it will come out when it comes out.” As a creative to work in that way is totally joyous. You're just facilitating greatness.

What was it like to shoot?

BT: This is also easy, in a way, because the choreography means that [Harry's] going to be here at this point and there at that [point]. You knew exactly where they were going to be in the room. We went back and forward a bit on how to weave the story into the choreography so it wasn't just a dance routine. By the time we got onto set, that was quite well planned. The nice thing is being more prepared, you can try to feed in a bit of latitude to things. I know because we've worked with Harry for a long time that the camera doesn't just love him. The camera wants to marry him and run off with him and probably never come back. So we know to give a little bit of space for that to happen. Obviously to have Phoebe there with him as well is totally bonkers. And, again, the camera loves her. It was exciting for us to talk about how to execute things with someone who we admire so much.

GT: When you go to the Troxy there's a hidden stage at the top. Ben had an idea of coming down from the hidden stage to reveal Harry, then setting a scene up of [Phoebe] at the top. She was brilliantly collaborative in discussing what kind of role she was going to play.

What notes did you talk through with Phoebe about her character?

BT: This song's called "Treat People With Kindness”, so it feels like there's a distance to cover in the narrative. You start on the Marsellus Wallace shot, out of Pulp Fiction. We wanted to get a sense that this was a kind of tough guy and there was the opposite of people being treated with kindness around the place. But the conversation went from [Phoebe] being a character that stood up to him to, actually, if you look at it, [she] wipes a tear off of his eye, which is so beautiful.

GT: Ben was just obsessed with casting the back of people's heads for the first shot.

What makes a good back of the head?

BT: I'm talking about how many folds of skin at the top, the optimum shape. Someone [said] that Bruce Willis had a fantastic shaped dome of a head and it really turned me on to the shape of a bald head, because it can be really beautiful.

GT: I find a lot of the music videos that we do, there'll always be a shot from a film that inspires something.

Aside from breaking the fourth wall at the end, the Pulp Fiction shot and the Nicholas Brothers, what other reference points or Easter eggs did you include?

BT: We love the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye and those physical comedians. I love Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. We’re also obsessed by Bugsy Malone. Busby Berkeley... I don't think there was much Busby Berkeley in this.

GT: At the end there's a tiny bit, but Busby Berkeley has actually been used as a reference in quite a few music videos. We love that stuff. But we didn't want to go too into that symmetry and the choreography, because it didn't feel as fresh

What have you learned from Harry, after working together for so long?

BT: He's on a really interesting journey and we are lucky to be a bit of that journey with him. It's really rewarding to dip into that and try to facilitate some of that as we go along. There's a lot that he's in touch with that I'm not. I'm quite a lot older than him. I'm not as cool as him.

(12 January 2021)

[recentanimenews]

OPINION: My Favorite Anime of 2020 Are All Music Videos

Image via ZUTOMAYO

  Despite the enormous pressures of COVID-19, 2020 has had its share of anime classics. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is a stone-cold classic to the degree it now feels as if it’s always existed. Decadence channeled the creative spirit of 2000s-era Madhouse into an off-kilter riff on dystopian science fiction and Pixar movies. Akudama Drive, now in its second half, continues to translate the bonkers, heartfelt pulp style of Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka to TV anime. There have been big successes in film, as well — Demon Slayer Mugen Train scored the highest opening weekend box office in Japanese history, while folks I follow on Twitter are excited for the new Bones film Josee, the Tiger and the Fish.

  One of my favorite anime projects this year was something completely different. It’s "Gotcha!," a short Pokemon-themed music video directed by Rie Matsumoto and her friends at Bones. A sequence that takes all of Matsumoto’s strengths — her attention to detail, the way she depicts exciting and supernatural things bursting out of the walls of our ordinary world, and her obsession with cramming every layer of the screen with stuff — and turns them with the precision of a laser toward celebrating the series’s near 25-year history. As encyclopedic as a Pokedex despite being only three minutes long, it’s a glorious celebration of a series loved and made by passionate fans. 

  Image via Pokemon Official YouTube Channel

  But "Gotcha!" wasn’t even the only fantastic music video made by former employees from the historic studio Toei. Earlier this year, animator Koudai Watanabe collaborated with the talented Naoki Yoshibe — director of the opening sequences for Gatchaman Crowds — to create a music video for ZUTOMAYO titled “STUDY ME.” It’s a rich purple-and-green media landscape of TV screens, glitches, Undertale references, and desperately reaching hands, packed with enough wild ideas and visual iconography to fuel an entire season of anime. But it wraps up in just under five minutes.  You’re left watching the video over and over again in a daze, trying in vain to catch every little detail.

  The animated music videos being made right now represent the most slept-on creative success in modern anime production among English language fans. (That’s music videos that are animated, not AMVs! You could write an entirely separate article on those.) I need to qualify “slept on,” since hardcore animation nerds like Yuyucow and Catsuka have been stumping for these works over the past several years. There are viral successes like "Gotcha!" and the inevitable crossover that happens when an artist doing the theme song for an anime leads others to check out their back catalog of past videos. But on websites and in magazines, I see stories about Netflix’s aggressive production of new TV series, the renaissance of Japanese anime films after Your Name, and bemused reactions to the shocking popularity of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. Talk about the newest music videos online is a lot rarer. Not to mention older videos. "Gotcha!" may have broken out as a celebration of a popular game series, but its predecessor — a Lotte chocolate commercial produced by much of the same staff — is just as good!

  Image via ZUTOMAYO

  "Gotcha!" isn’t 2020’s only spiritual successor to excellent early work, either. In 2013, Yoko Kuno produced the video "Airy Me" as part of a graduate assignment. Set to a song by Cuushe, it’s a hallucinatory epic that’s both starkly horrifying and bittersweet. In the years since, Yoko Kuno’s made a name for herself across several mediums — winning the New Face Award for her manga work at Japan Media Arts Festival, serving as a pinch hitter on Orange’s production of Land of the Lustrous and contributing a memorable sequence to Beastars. She returned this year with filmmaker Tao Tajima to produce another sequence scored to Cuushe’s music, Magic. Riffing on Airy Me's themes of bodily transformation and human ennui, it sets the action against real photographic landscapes. It's another haunting masterwork by one of anime’s most multitalented young artists and has been on repeat for me since it came up on my Twitter feed.  

  Image via FLAU

  Meanwhile, the Japanese vocalist Eve continues to commission new and excellent animated work based on his songs. This May saw the release of "How to Eat Life," a video by indie animator Mariyasu which repurposes Eve’s unique symbology of surly adolescents and freaky puppet monsters into a stylish and spooky carnival of carnivorism. It’s an excellent piece that stands tall among the work collected under Eve’s banner, many of which are stone-cold classics themselves. But "Promise," released at the end of this October, threatens to outdo them all. Directed by Ken Yamamoto and produced at Cloverworks, it plays as another greatest hits compilation of Eve’s works — broken promises, collapsing cityscapes, creatures powered by feeling that shake the earth with their footsteps. There’s a real visceral punch to it that beats out even its excellent predecessors. When the protagonist folds over himself in anguish, you feel it in your gut. When he steps deep into the water and the entire world around him is shredded into pieces, anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows exactly how that feels. When his friend reaches in and pulls him out of that water, that’s real joy rising like bubbles through your veins.

  Image via Eve

  Ken Yamamoto’s a bit more mainstream than Mariyasu — just last year he contributed some face-melting action sequences to Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia. But it says something to me that "Promise" — maybe his best work yet — was released as a music video rather than a new TV series. He’s not alone, either.  This August, the animator China (storyboarder for Encouragement of Climb’s third season) together with character designer Mooang (storyboarder for Sarazanmai) produced the music video "Sore wo Ai to Yobu dake." Like the reverse of Yamamoto’s "Promise," it’s the story not of a pair of teenage boys and their separation that devastates a cityscape — but of a pair of teenage girls who reach across time to recover the bond they shared in their high school days. A potent combination of FLCL-style faded nostalgia, careful attention to body language, and pure patented kids-falling-through-the-sky-while-frantically-reaching-for-each-other anime magic, it’s one of the best-animated sequences of this year. I’ve linked it to friends just to plead “Watch this thing!” And it ends in less than four minutes long.

  Image via Mafumafu

  I can’t help but think: Where is China and Moaang’s movie project? Where is Ken Yamamoto’s TV series? Why is it that Rie Matsumoto has produced two excellent music videos over the past two years that commemorate big franchises, but her rumored film project has yet to lift off? Perhaps the truth is that there isn’t room anymore in the TV anime industry for work like this. Many original projects seem to be tied to cellphone games or stage productions. Projects like Decadence are few and far between, and even those that exist play within a space already laid out by past successes. It’s not all bad, of course — Eizouken this year was a great example of an adaptation working in harmony with its source material. And we’ve seen studios like Orange employ weirder anime creators like Yoko Kuno or the stop-motion team dwarf to great effect in their projects. But perhaps animated music videos represent the future for artists like Matsumoto — a medium that pays well, rewards experimentation, and lets strong artists play around without having to dilute their style. A bite-sized format just outside of the soul-draining churn that defines the industry.

  Maybe this is fine, though. Short-form work is just as worthy of admiration as long-form work. I’d love feature-length projects from Ken Yamamoto or China, and I’d love for the world to see another Rie Matsumoto story told on a grand scale. But I can’t deny that Matsumoto rocks at putting together fantastic music videos and that I might even prefer the concise flow of "Gotcha!" to her TV series output. Either way, in this historically difficult year, I’m grateful to these folks for turning in career-best work and giving me hope for the future.

  Do you have a favorite animated music video? At the risk of getting off track, do you have a favorite anime music video? Do you still watch different fan edits of Hatsune Miku and wowaka's "Rolling Girl" on rotation, like I do? Let me know in the comments!

      Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn't rewatching his favorite anime OPs over and over, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at: @wendeego

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Adam Wescott

[daleisgreat]

Hell Comes to Frogtown, Grunt: The Wrestling Movie, I Like to Hurt People

It has been a spell since I logged an ‘intentionally bad gifted movie’ entry. For newer readers here, my buddy Matt and I have a long tradition of gifting each other bad movies for Christmas and birthdays, and it least gives me something to rag on here about. Past entries here meeting this bad gift criteria consist of my coverage for Bounty Hunters, Hercules: Reborn and The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2. We have eased up on it this past year or two, but I still have a few sitting in the backlog box and will be covering a video today that is a three-for-one on a disc special titled ‘Wrestling Superstars Triple Feature’. Now we all may be familiar with WWE pushing wrestlers in its movie division going back 16 years, but wrestlers have been in bad straight-to-video films long before that and this disc features 1988’s Hell Comes to Frogtown (trailer), 1985’s I Like to Hurt People (trailer), and 1985’s Grunt: The Wrestling Movie (trailer). I originally watched Hell Comes to Frogtown with Matt on one of our ritual bad movie nights several years ago. It stars Roddy Piper as Sam Hell, fresh off his success in John Carpenter’s They Live. This is a cracked out post-apocalyptic movie where nuclear fallout radiation makes Hell one of the last few non-sterile males. The government discovers him and makes him a deal against his will to contract him to…..traverse the nuclear wastes and impregnate as many women as possible in order to restore the dwindling human population….seriously. The movie tries to not make Hell come off as a creepy serial rapist by having Piper deliver some meek attempts at sympathy and breaking prisoners out of a gang’s Road Warrior-esque facility. This is ridiculously bad, but in a 80s campy-fun sort of way so if you are into so-bad-they-are-good movies, especially two brew-skis in, then Hell Comes to Frogtown will not disappoint.

I Like to Hurt People is a unique beast. It barely comes off as a motion picture and feels more like something I would make if I was a young proactive filmmaker in my teens and decided to make a movie about wrestling and had no idea about assembling a cohesive plot whatsoever. That is essentially I Like to Hurt People which shows several condensed matches interspersed with backstage interviews, TV production staff losing it while trying to keep the wrestlers in check and fans being interviewed outside the ring who are all hyped up for a night at the wrasslin’ matches. I love the geriatric 80s rock soundtrack that plays nearly nonstop throughout the film that brought back fond memories of Miami Connection’s mesmerizing score. 80s NWA/Crockett fans will get a thrill with the nonstop cameos featuring stars like Terry Funk, Dusty Rhodes, The Sheik, Dick the Bruiser, Abdullah the Butcher and Andre the Giant. A controversial non-finish in the main event between Dick the Bruiser and The Sheik is followed up with an interview in the car with Sheik and his manager the Grand Wizard, where Wizard promises revenge in a cage match....and then I Like to Hurt People promptly ends. Again, this does not feel like a complete movie and is difficult to properly judge as a whole, but that aside it was fun to take in and get a dose of the fervor of southern mid-80s wrestling fandom that I Like to Hurt People encapsulates to a T.

While I Like to Hurt People feels like what my first wrestling movie would be like with barely any filmmaking under my belt, Grunt: The Wrestling Movie feels like what my third or fourth wrestling-adjacent film would be like if I got full of myself and would conjure up a silly Disaster Artist-esque plot over a weekend I thought would be a masterpiece, but instead was nonstop bonkers. There is a crazy 1979 flashback backstory in the opening minutes explaining why controversial wrestler ‘Mad Dog Joe’ was thought to have committed suicide after decapitating an opponent in a title defense. Fast forward six years later when the promotion’s management finally decide to vacate Joe’s title and hold a battle royal to crown a new champion. The film then follows a documentary crew who are obsessed that Joe is still alive and will return at the battle royal. Lots of shenanigans ensue as the documentary crew interviews multiple people who harass them and turn them away, with a standout scene transpiring at a hot-button, public access political talk show. Eventually everything culminates at the battle royal, but nothing can save this train wreck. Grunt: The Wrestling Movie takes itself way too seriously, and is not even campy-cheesy-bad, but instead the undesirable straight-up-bad. Avoid this one in the DVD bargain bin at all costs. As a whole, Wrestling Superstars Triple Feature is a semi-decent package, which is glowing praise when compared to this DVD’s cover art! Hell Comes to Frogtown is prime cheesy bad movie night material and I Like to Hurt People is something I would throw in to have on in the background with fellow wrestling fans. Grunt is a complete waste, but as the old adage goes, two out of three isn’t bad! Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs 3 12 Angry Men (1957) 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown 21 Jump Street The Accountant Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie Atari: Game Over The Avengers: Age of Ultron The Avengers: Infinity War Batman: The Dark Knight Rises Batman: The Killing Joke Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Bounty Hunters Cabin in the Woods Captain America: Civil War Captain America: The First Avenger Captain America: The Winter Soldier Christmas Eve Clash of the Titans (1981) Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special The Condemned 2 Countdown Creed Deck the Halls Detroit Rock City Die Hard Dredd The Eliminators The Equalizer Dirty Work Faster Fast and Furious I-VIII Field of Dreams Fight Club The Fighter For Love of the Game Good Will Hunting Gravity Guardians of the Galaxy Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 Hercules: Reborn Hitman Indiana Jones 1-4 Ink The Interrogation Interstellar Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Jobs Joy Ride 1-3 Major League Man of Steel Man on the Moon Man vs Snake Marine 3-6 Merry Friggin Christmas Metallica: Some Kind of Monster Mortal Kombat National Treasure National Treasure: Book of Secrets Not for Resale Pulp Fiction The Replacements Reservoir Dogs Rocky I-VII Running Films Part 1 Running Films Part 2 San Andreas ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Shoot em Up Slacker Skyscraper Small Town Santa Steve Jobs Source Code Star Trek I-XIII Sully Take Me Home Tonight TMNT The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2 UHF Veronica Mars Vision Quest The War Wild Wonder Woman The Wrestler (2008) X-Men: Apocalypse X-Men: Days of Future Past